I chuckled, Sir, to learn that you held the chart horizontally, because of its length! And E is none of those high sounding "extravagant" words. If you had just looked about you for a moment, lifting your eyes from the correspondence, you would have discovered that E stands for nothing but a simple evening. Clear?

No. What has evening to do with it? Evening star? "Twinkle, twinkle, evening star! How I wonder what your temperatures are?" But I suppose Sir James Jeans knows and doesn't wonder. But anyhow E for Evening sounds both irrelevant and poetic.

March 25, 1936

No, Sir, it is not at all irrelevant, though poetic. I swear it is evening. You know they take these pulse and respiration rates Morning and Evening of which M and E are short- hands, and one of which I suppose you will make mad and the other one of the three you have divined! But what is this "Jones — knows and doesn't wonder"?

Jeans, Jeans, Jeans — not Jones!

Sir James Jeans, sir, who knows all about the temperatures, weights and other family details of the stars, including E.

March 26, 1936

Friend C again, with his woeful tale!

What a fellow! He blunders through life stumbling over every possible or impossible stone of offence with a conscientious thoroughness that is unimaginable and inimitable.

He has sent a rupee to buy something for you. But your needs are so few and you are so strict about hygiene. At times I wonder why the Divine is so meticulously particular as regards contagion, infection. Is he vulnerable to the viruses, bacilli, microbes, etc. ?

And why on earth should you expect the Divine to feed himself

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on germs and bacilli and poisons of all kinds? Singular theology yours!

So what shall I buy

To suit the Divine taste ?

But aren't all same to him — paste

Or pudding, butter, cheese or mutton-pie?

Good Lord! I hope you are not plotting to send any such things here! Of butter and cheese I have more than I want and pudding and mutton-pie are banished from my menu.

I hear from all quarters that you are buried in letters. . . I don't know how you are ever going to keep your head above the mud of the letters, for your bhaktas, admirers are increasing by leaps and bounds. In the near future they will be millions, and millions of letters heaped upon your supramental segregation, if you don't relinquish it and come out boldly!

Come out and have millions and millions of admirers heaped upon my promiscuity? Thank you for nothing! The letters can be thrown into the W.P.B.¹ more easily than the admirers can be thrown out of the window.

March 27, 1936

By the way, I think fountain-pen ink would be the thing I can buy for you, with C's one rupee.

No. Mother says we have f.p. ink in plenty — I won't say gallons and seas, but still. Besides the same ink has to be used always for the pen, otherwise it gets spoiled.

March 28, 1936

Your letter to D has done us a lot of good, for you have cited the example of workers there. We people need such illustrations but not of your illustrious person or the Mother's.

¹ Waste-paper basket.

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You people are funny people!

I have resorted to prayer. Well, if a prayer means a call to the Above, why doesn't the Above have the kindness to respond?

But just answer! If it responded to everybody in all circumstances, there would by this time be 100 million poets writing away for all they were worth, let us say 1000 pages of poetry a day each and publishing them. Wouldn't it be a disaster? Wouldn't such kindness be a cruelty to all the rest of the creation?

Throughout the history of my writing, you know that the Above has been stingily charitable to me so that all my works — very few though — have been corroded with the marks of my labour and hence fallen short of poetic excellence. . .

Not correct — they look quite innocent as if you had written them off with ease.

My hard labour and effort deprive me of the joy of creation and discourage me with a dread of the work. You say this is because I am an "efforter" and a "hower". All very well, Sir, but have you shown me the Grand Trunk Road of non- effort — not to speak of leading the way?

There are two ways of arriving at the Grand Trunk Road. One is to climb and struggle and effortise, (like the pilgrim who traverses India prostrating and measuring the way with his body, — that's the way of effort). One day you suddenly find yourself on the G .T. R. when you least expect it. The other is to quiet the mind to such a point that a greater Mind of mind can speak through it. (I am not here talking of the supramental). You will do neither. Your mind refuses to be quiet — your vital kicks at the necessity of effort. One too active, the other too lazy. How can I show you the G. T. R. when you refuse either way of reaching it?

Or would you say that a beginner can't, at a leap, settle on the top?

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Of course not!

But even a beginner should be lured by more glimpses than has been done in my case.

System of lollipops? You won't travel to London unless you are given frequent glimpses of London before even you reach Bombay? Otherwise you will say Oh what a bother and give up?

Look at D — you yourself admitted that he had a very easy flow as soon as he started writing.

[Sri Aurobindo underlined "you yourself admitted". ]

Never in my life I admitted that.

Look at N K. Do you know he writes 200-300 lines a day!

Not at all if you refer to his poetry — As soon as he started writing here, yes. That is because he caught instanter the tail of the Horse — or the Force. You seem to read what I write in a queer way and put on it very strange [constructions].

I wonder if it is possible to make prodigious and unusual poets like N K.

Was N K a prodigious and unusual poet before he came here? You seem to be so obsessed by the present development that you assume it was always there and he did it all of himself from the beginning.

Lastly about your inspiration. Amal and I have been wondering why you should have to write and rewrite your poetry — for instance, Savitri ten or twelve times. You will say the rewriting is also done by inspiration. True, but why rewrite at all?

That is very simple. I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular — if part seemed to me to come from any lower level, I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible

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of the same mint. In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. I did not rewrite Rose of God or the sonnets except for two or three verbal alterations made at the moment.

If X could receive his inspiration without any necessity for rewriting, why not you ?

So could I if I wrote every day and had nothing else to do and did not care what the level of inspiration was so long as I produced something exciting.

Fault in the instrument, obstruction between the instrument and the plane of inspiration. ..?

The only obstruction is that I have no time to put myself constantly into the poetic creative posture and if I write at all have to get out something in the intervals of quite another concentration.

With your silence, consciousness, overmental, partly supramental, etc.,etc., it should be possible to draw from the highest plane, at the slightest pull, and it should tumble down. Sir, but it doesn't. Why not? We wonder and wonder! Could you send Alice to Wonderland and ask her to discover and divulge the secret to us — not in hints, but at length?

The highest planes are not so accommodating as all that. If they were so, why should it be so difficult to bring down and organise the supermind in the physical consciousness? What happy-go- lucky fancy-web-spinning ignoramuses you all are. You speak of silence, consciousness, overmental, supramental, etc. as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to press and there you are. It may be one day but meanwhile I have to discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct roads of connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of a single lifetime. And I have to do it while my blessed disciples are firing off

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their gay or gloomy a priori reasonings at me from a position of entire irresponsibility and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints but at length. Lord God in omnibus!

March 29, 1936

I was not at all speaking of the whole world, neither am I concerned with it. I was asking why my prayers were not answered by the Above as in others' cases.

Good Lord! you are not part of the world? Then you must be a Jivanmukta and no need of prayer.

Specially when that Above lives opposite my house¹ and encourages my writing.

The Above may encourage your writing, but it does not follow that he will deal with you in the same way as with D. ²

I admit that my vital is lazy, because it is afraid of too much labouring, 4 lines in 40 hours!

Yes, but if the vital were not lazy you would not have to labour like that. It is lazy in labouring but it is also lazy in responding — it is a slow-mover.

Not only that, but also my mind does not know precisely how to silence itself. This second point applies to D too. How then does he manage to receive from Above?

The difference is that as his mind has opened to the Above, the Above can turn its activity into an activity of the Inspiration — its quickness, energy, activity enable it to transcribe quickly, actively, energetically what comes into it from the Above. Of course if one day it becomes silent also, it may probably become the channel of a still higher Inspiration.

¹ I lived in the Dispensary nearly opposite Sri Aurobindo's room.

² ye yathā mām prapadyante: As people approach me (so I accept them). (Gita, IV.11)

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Did D's vital become active and magnificent because somehow he could more easily draw in the Inspiration?

No — that is inborn in D. It was the first thing Mother said about D (long before he came here for Yoga) when she saw him through the blinds of the door "What a powerful vital!"

I can tell you that my own vital has done that feat when a , flow was felt.

Yes, but D's vital strength is inborn, though it may not have at first been open to the poetic inspiration. When it did it could leap at once with full energy and gave itself entirely to the flow — It was not the flow that made it "magnificent".

I find that D didn't have to struggle as much as I — his magnificent vital magnificently and easily worked away as the Inspiration was not jerky and halting as in my case. My lazy vital is perforce lazy because the stream of Inspiration descends by drops. At the same time I confess that I am by nature rather indolent.

As usual, you are putting the thing upside down —Your last admission does away with the whole two pages of special pleading.

Is silencing the mind to be done only at the time of writing or at other times too, or one can't be done without the other?

Silencing the mind at the time of writing should be sufficient — even not silencing it, but its falling quiet to receive.

Suppose I find two lines:

Forgive me. Master, if I doubt thy Light

Guiding my destiny, through a long trail,

without any pre-formed idea of the poem, I think what can

rhyme with light or trail — bright, height, sail, fail, etc.,

and try to fit in an idea with the rhymes. . .

Just the thing you should not do. Let the rhyme come, don't begin

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dragging all sorts of rhymes in to see if they fit.

Do you want to say that if I have discovered some lines I must not think of the next lines, but try instead to keep absolutely silent so that with a leap I find the greater Mind has simply dropped the necessary rhymed lines, like a good fellow, and I finish off excellently without a drop of black sweat on my wide forehead?

That is the ideal way; but usually there is always an activity of the mind jumping up and trying to catch the inspiration. Sometimes the inspiration, the right one, comes in the midst of this futile jumping, sometimes it sweeps it aside and brings in the right thing, sometimes it inserts itself between two blunders, sometimes it waits till the noise quiets down. But even this jumping need not be a mental effort — it is often only a series of suggestions, the mind of itself seizing on one or eliminating another, not by laborious thinking and choice, but by a quiet series of perceptions. This is method no. 2. No. 3 is your Herculean way, quite the slowest and worst.

From the very start N K has been a prodigious writer. He and Jasimuddin — now a renowned poet — used to sit together to write poetry. N K would finish 3 or 4 poems and go to bed, get up in the morning to find his friend still struggling with a few lines.

While one person breaks his head over a few lines, another composes three or four poems.

That is fluency, not necessarily inspiration. Southey used to write like that, I believe, but you don't call Southey an inspired poet, do you?

I cite all this to show that it is not primarily the silencing of the mind or the dynamic vital, but cases born. with a wide opening somewhere. . .

The activity of the vital is there in N as well as in Dilip.

I don't see why you brought in "the organisation of the

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Supermind in the physical consciousness” into the talk about your poetic inspiration. The first is collective, the second individual.

Excuse me, it was you who brought in overmind etc. in connection with my poetry and asked why having these things I had to rewrite Savitri many times instead of pouring out 24,000 lines a day.

L wants her little growth in the cheek to be excised. She forgets to apply medicine, regularly. A simple operation is the only alternative.

Mother considers it better to go on with the medicine.

March 31, 1936