26 Reading your letter I find a great affinity with you. I am reminded of the occasions when the Mother asked for a definition of Yoga from those Ashramites who had the good fortune to form a happy semi-circle in front of her every evening just before the Soup Distribution which was a part of the Ashram's daily life for a few years in its early period. My definition was : "To feel always a warmth and a glow in my heart in my relation with the Mother." One may have expected from a supposed "intellectual" a more brainy attitude - a definition bringing in "a heat and a light in my head". But, as I said in one of my talks to the students here, I had lost my head over Sri Aurobindo and t

1 Your letter has saddened me a great deal. But I don't feel that, you have reached the rock-bottom of hopelessness. To lose your health - getting spells of dizziness and weakness, not feeling like eating, etc. - is not what the Mother expects of you. Our central joy is that we are deeply and inalienably related to her. Whether we always experience the relation or not is a secondary matter: the primary truth of our lives is that the Mother has accepted us and that, sooner or later, we shall know her living presence in us at all times. We have to learn to seek our raison d'etre in this glorious act of grace. It is an irrevocable act and nothing should make us despair or enter a physi

8 Your whole Holland-experience - a varied bitter-sweet -strikes me as an inevitable phase in your development, carefully planned in all its kaleidoscopic complexity by the Divine. 1 don't think anybody could have prevented it. You have grown considerably - numerous eyes have been opened. Some of them forcibly, others flowerily: you appear to be like a little Argus, half interested in the hundred directions suddenly shining into view, half bewildered by their seemingly different calls. What is to be felt with a clarifying keenness is that all these varied vistas are really radiating from a single centre in the depths of your heart and that each of them leads to the same wide circumf

7 Quite a number of notes you have struck in your recent letters. But three in particular are felt as tones and undertones and overtones. There are light and joy on the surface — that is the poet responding to the magic and mystery of the world, the touch of bright nearnesses, the call of hazy distances. All these are what I name "tones", the varied spectrum of waking life. But at one end of the spectrum is the infra-red and at the other the ultra-violet. The former I point to as "undertones", the hidden cries and gropings, the restlessness of a dream-life which glimpses elusive idealities. You have caught a sense of it with impressive originality in the poem entitled "Lonel

3 FROM LETTERS TO FLORENCE RUSSELL Your gift for June [1976] cheered up both the 27-year old Mother India and its 72-year young editor "Amal Kiran" (according to Sri Aurobindo's renaming of K.D. Sethna), "the Clear Ray", who, while appreciating Anatole France's advice to writers, "Clarity first, clarity again and clarity always", has in his role as poet preferred in consonance with Sri Aurobindo's own insight the injunction of Havelock Ellis: "Be clear, be clear, be not too clear." For, in poetry there must be around a core of distinct brightness a halo of radiant mystery extending far into the depths of the ineffable. To play a variation on the metaphor: one must be like

23 You have inquired about the life here. I'll touch on what appears new to me. The call from the Beyond which is also the Within has been growing more and more intense in a particular point for a year or so. It is as if we were drawn to plunge not only our mind and heart but also our sense of being a body into that alchemic crucible which is the soul. This means — in addition to offering our body in service to the Divine - the attempt to remove, from our outermost being, all push of desire, all pull of attachment, and make every component clod of it rhyme with God. So far the body used to be a devoted channel for the inner being to flow in the direction of Sri Aurobindo and the

25 What is this talk of depression and weeping? Let me tell you a small true story. You must have heard of Martin Luther, the German priest who initiated the Reformation and started Protestantism as opposed to the Roman Catholic Church. Once he got into a mood of great depression. For days he would not smile and would hardly talk. One day his wife, fed up with his "blues", dressed herself in total black as if for mourning and appeared before him. Luther was surprised and asked why she had worn such clothes. She exclaimed: "God is dead!" Luther angrily retorted: "God can never die!" Then his wife quietly said: "If that is so, what is there in the world to depress anyone?" Luther

10 I wonder what disturbed you so much. Earthquakes should be out of place in your life now unless they can bring up a Himalaya out of nowhere. Perhaps the meeting with a sadhak who can leave everything to the Mother was a Himalayan discovery. But can one really call this chap's condition Mount Everest? "Total reliance" on the Divine can be assessed only if an Ever-rest is felt towering within one while a veritable Kanchenjunga of calamity looms in front of one's nose. In the common run of events a naturally optimistic temperament, when turned to Yoga, can become optimystic with no great difficulty. The true test arrives when everything goes crashing about one's ears. Can one in suc

27 You say you are preparing for the birthday of Sri Aurobindo, August 15. May I put down a few thoughts that occur to me? They would, no doubt, apply to all Darshan days and not only to the one that is just ahead of us. On a Darshan day now we have not only to think of Sri Aurobindo but also to visualise him, with the Divine Mother sitting on his right. Visualisation is important, for he and she are the Lord and his Executive Power in a physical shape and unless the physicality of them goes home to us in a vivid way we may fail to receive the full impact of the Light and Love they sought to transmit through a materially concrete channel to us who are so sadly caught in the dens

20 Recently two Russian scholars from Moscow were brought by Balkrishna of SABDA to have a talk with me. They said the Russians had replaced tradidonal religion by a much worse one - the worship of Stalin - from which they were now free. I gave them an example of the absurd length to which this substitute had once gone. They were amused by it. I recounted how the poet Lermontov came to be celebrated for his work. A huge statue was built of Stalin holding in one hand the book of Lermontov's poems! When the subject of Gorbachev came up I tried to explain the Indian vision of the Avatar and the Vibhuti. The Avatar is the Divine Himself incarnate with full knowledge of His being. Th