Adore and what you adore attempt to be.

SRI AUROBINDO

The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda. .... Sri Aurobindo.

EDITORIAL

THE GOLDEN RULE

(A Talk to the Children of the Ashram)

TODAY I shall speak to you of the golden rule. When we were children we were taught, specially at school, at home too, certain golden rules. If you observe these rules you become good, good boys and good girls, you are loved and appreciated by all. These rules are simple and very commonplace; you know them all and must have tried them. For example such things as "speak the truth, do not tell a lie, obey your parents, respect your teachers, do not hurt anybody" etc., etc. That was the basis on which one was to build one's character, mould one's nature, prepare for a pure stainless noble life.

They are good, these rules, so far as they go: but to say the truth, they do not go very far. They do not touch you intimately. They enter, as it is said, your head through one ear and pass out through the other. They do not quicken your heart and involve your soul,

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You follow if you are very earnest one rule or another for a few days and then you forget.

The other day I spoke to you of Yajnavalkya; he gave a better rule that was nearer to the golden rule. What he said in effect was that instead of following these outward rules or formulas you must leave them aside, go within yourself and find your self. Yajnavalkya said: you love your neighbour, not because he is your neighbour or brother, but because you find yourself in him. Find the self, that is the golden rule. Find the self that is in you, you will find that very self in your neighbour, in all.

Here however you must take care not to confuse yourself with your self. When it is said that you find your self it is not your personal self that you find in another as if you grasp it as your own, exclusively your own possession. This self is not the ego, it is beyond ego, it is not the kind of self-hood that Shakespeare depicts in Richard where the King, deprived of everything, left all alone in the whole world, exclaims: "Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I"; for it is not a separative I-ness: the other I's are dissolved as well as the one I that I am, and all become one person or self. It is all one self, one soul although they may appear different, as different I-s.

Here I will tell you a story narrated by the Mother to our children. When she was in France, there used to be every evening a meeting where seekers and enquirers after the spiritual life assembled and conversed or meditated on the subject. There used also to come to that meeting a remarkable woman who had true realisations and was ready to help others on the path. Once the talk turned on souls and their re-birth and she was telling how after the death of the body souls pass out into another world, and when the time comes each one returns to the earth and takes a human body. Now there was one in the audience who felt a little puzzled about this matter of birth and wanted clarification. She put a question: (it was a she): You say that souls come down and take birth, that is to say, assume a human body. But people are increasing in number upon earth, every year the human population becoming larger and larger. Now the question is: the additional number of people born every year, where were they before? Were they there all along since the creation, waiting? Do they appear gradually as time passes and bide their hour?

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We in the modern age may suggest an analogy. Is it like the stars or galaxies that are gradually coming into our ken, phenomenally distant stars whose lights are taking time to reach the present day earth? The questioner asked: is there a fixed number of souls, can they be counted? The speaker answered, "Yes, they are limited and they can be counted." With great curiosity and eagerness the questioner asked: "How many? how many?" Quietly the one who was speaking extended her hand and put out one single index-finger, and said: only One.

So, that is the truth. All these many bodies, many persons you see, it is only appearance, there is only one soul and every one is that. If you realise this truth, you can love every one equally, not merely love but be one with all, because you are all and all are you. That universal self, your own true self you have to find, you have to know, you have to become. That is the golden rule as the ideal.

How to attain, how to realise it?

The Mother in this matter has given us a golden rule, a truly golden rule and very simple. Generally we are confused as to our duty — what to do, what not to do, how to do, how not to do. The Mother says to her children: "Do not do what you will hesitate to do or be ashamed of doing in my presence. Do not say anything which you will hesitate to say or be ashamed of saying in my presence. Do not think even what you will find it awkward to think in my presence." Well, try this way and you will find what a golden rule and a simple rule it is. Sri Aurobindo confirmed and said the same thing. He says — you all know the well-known phrase — "Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." You need not imagine that she is there; for she is actually always there whether you imagine or not; you do not know, for you are blind but she is always there, seeing you, observing you, guiding you, protecting you. She not only sees what you do, but even what you feel inside you, even your most secret thoughts. A child asked the Mother in his simplicity: "How do you know, Mother, what we do, what we think, what we feel, how do you know it?" The Mother smiled and answered, "My child, because you are within me, within my embrace always. Therefore I know. I know what is happening in me, isn't it? That is why

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I see what is happening in you. You are not outside me, you are part of myself, I am you."

Now if you follow this simple rule sincerely and persistently you will see the change miraculously happening in you, you will become the golden child of the golden Mother. You will find your thoughts, your words, your feelings, your impulses putting on a new colour, even your body will take a new glow of health and beauty. Normally our brain is made of mud, our thoughts are unclean — we have wrong thoughts, dark thoughts, our tongue is made of mud or clay, we speak wrong things, impure things, our heart too is made of the same substance, giving out wrong feelings and unclean feelings; lower down in our nature in the vital region our impulses are also wrong and muddy and unclean, finally, the body is mud itself, it is made of diseases and weaknesses and incapacities. We are, as it were, a container containing this ugly and unclean mixture. What we have to do is to pour into it the golden liquid, molten gold that will wash away all that impurity and filth, clean the vessel and fill it with its own radiant substance, the molten gold which is the Mother's presence.

This process has been beautifully described by Sri Aurobindo in one of his poems. I conclude by reading out those magnificent lines:

The Golden Light

Thy golden Light came down into my brain

And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became

A bright reply to wisdom's occult plane,

A calm illumination and a flame.

 

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,

And all my speech is now a tune divine,

A paean-song of thee my single note;

My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

 

Thy golden Light came down into my heart

Smiting my life with Thy eternity;

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Now has it grown a temple where Thou art

And all its passions point towards only Thee.

Thy golden Light came down into my feet

My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat.

26th October 1972

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

The perfect man is a divine child.

SRI AUROBINDO

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A FRAGMENT

IF these things do not satisfy me, what then do I seek? I seek a light that shall be new, yet old, the oldest indeed of all lights. I seek an authority that accepting, illuminating and reconciling all human truth, shall yet reject and get rid of by explaining it all mere human error. I seek a text and a Shastra that is not subject to interpolation, modification and replacement, that moth and white ant cannot destroy, that the earth cannot bury nor Time mutilate. I seek an asceticism that shall give me purity and deliverance from self and from ignorance without stultifying God and His universe. I seek a scepticism that shall question everything but shall have the patience to deny nothing that may possibly be true. I seek a ration-lism not proceeding on the untenable supposition that all the centuries of man's history were centuries of folly and superstition except the nineteenth, but bent on discovering truth instead of limiting inquiry by a new dogmatism, obscurantism and furious intolerance which it chooses to call commonsense and enlightenment; I seek a materialism that shall recognise matter and use it without being its slave. I seek an occultism that shall bring out all its processes and proofs into the light of day, without mystery, without jugglery, without the old stupid call to humanity, "Be blind, O man, and see!" In short, I seek not science, not religion, not Theosophy, but Veda — the truth about Brahman not only about His essentiality, but about His manifestation, not a lamp on the way to the forest, but a light and a guide to joy and action in the world, the truth which is beyond opinion, the knowledge which all thought strives after —yasmin vijñāte sar-vam vijñātam. believe it to be the concealed divinity within Hinduism, but a veil has to be drawn aside, a curtain has to be lifted. I believe it to be knowable and discoverable. I believe the future of India and the world to depend on its discovery and on its application, not to the renunciation of life, but to life in the world and among men.

SRI AUROBINDO

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HIEROGLYPHS OF THE DAWN

A CRITICAL reconstruction of the Play is possible from a study of an opening scene of the Shakesperean Drama which reads like a prologue with its veiled hints suggestive of the nature and the trend of the forces to be unleashed; the epical compass being wider embracing the whole cosmos, it may be doubted, whether any such rush-light can be served in the beginning; but in the opening canto of Savitri, the thematic content, its many hued significant ce and the fulfillment of the long-cherished aspiration of humanity, are all contained in seed-form. The Supernal Beam speaks an eloquent language of hieroglyphs which unfolds the epiphany of man's sublimation to the Divine, involved in the head-long plunge of the Superconscient into the Inconscient and his aeonic effort at self-discovery by full emergence from involution to self-manifestation. The Dawn may be discussed in its fourfold aspect and its nuances relating to the literal and the mystical, the allegoric and the symbolic may be brought out.

A projection of the scientific attitude and a purely literary reading may prove destructive; it may be argued that the sun shines, if not in this, at least in the other hemisphere and that the Gods therefore are ever awake; this obviously does not reveal any interest in knowing the intention of the author; even so the argument may be countered by a few illustrations: a person who has lost his way in the forest, derives little consolation, much less any help, by recalling the wide and asphalted roads he was accustomed to in the city; nor does a man overtaken by a Cimmerian darkness derive any comfort by memories of the flood-lights in the town he hails from; the description is meant for a particular purpose and it would be ludicrous to stretch it beyond; the darkness has a limited application and the part of the universe sunk in the 'opaque impenetrable' does not think of the other part and the reader has no business to make a mincemeat of the imagery by thinking of the phenomenon beyond the purview of the picture presented. Sri Aurobindo answers the objection. T am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial temporary darkness of the soul and nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that

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which is sought in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is night and the earth is a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness'.¹

With the intellectual objection thus liquidated — and too much of intellect in general may be an intrusion in the field of poetry and a vanity as the assiduous attempt of a critic to geographically locate Prospero's Island — the verbal picture of the Dawn may be traced with the help of the graph provided to us by the sage himself. 'Rapid transitions from one image to another are a constant feature in Savitri as in most mystic poetry. I am not here building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single continuous image or variations of the same image.'²

'There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch'. The canto opens with the symbol Night, a Vedic night where darkness is hidden by darkness; there is a vast ocean of inconscience, a sea of nescience; the all-pervasive Night is very much like an un-bodied figure stretched asleep, 'immobile upon silence marge'; in the abysm of the un bodied infinite, in the placidity, there is a stir, a ripple, a slight disequilibrium, an up-rise of a longing desirous of shaping itself and in search for an appropriate instrumentation.

'Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance'

The sleeping mother, the Void, though first indifferent, becomes aware in a supine fashion to provide for the needs of the child, the unfilled want by the persistent touch of the child and the Vasts of the Night assent to the birth of the Dawn, the light being essential to life.

'The first beauty and wonder leading to the magical gate and the lucent corner' is the transition in which the black quietude is persuaded; an errant marvel with a hesitating hue, as if coming to an alien world appears in a far rim; the miraculous gesture of dim light flits across the sky describing as with a hand varying colours and creates a gold panel and opalescent hinge, a gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

¹ Sri Aurobindo's Letters, p. 733

² Ibid., p. 734

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Next the rift widens; 'then comes the failing of darkness, the simile used a (falling cloak) suggesting the rapidity of the change, you can look at the rift as a slit in the cloak which becomes a big tear'; the rift widens to a window in a lucent corner and the dawn appears outpouring the flame and disclosing to view the immensity of the world.

The final transition is 'all changes into a brief perpetual sign, the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura'; an instant's visitor, the Dawn looks a messenger from the unknown; stays for a while and departs, leaving a message in mystic code on the sky page and kindling an aspiration. Then the dawn dissolves into the light of the common day; 'the people's of the soil and the tree spring to their unvarying daily acts'; but Savitri 'a mighty stranger in the field takes no part in this small happiness'; the Dawn opens on the fateful day when Satyavan has to meet the doom of death.

The above is a gallop sketch, a literal account, shall we say, the dry bones of the finest description ever given of Dawn with a view to fixing the broad outline on the mind; the spiritual depth may indeed be beyond our depth—at least a few parts of the description —, nevertheless an endeavour while it may fall short of doing full justice, may still be an adventure, leaving a thrill, an exhilaration on the mind.

'Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance'

There under the oestrus of the spirit is born in the abysm of the un bodied infinite, the fathomless zero, a movement; it goads the Inconscience to wake Ignorance; it may be recollected here that Inconscience is the nethermost stage where consciousness is latent and unmanifest as for example in a stone and the next stage of ignorance comes only when consciousness has intervened. There traverses an un extinguished pulse of a desire looking out for a discarded self it once animated, but not finding the same, it remains dislodged and uncased; the desire survives though the body perishes; even after the dissolution of the body, the vāsanās, the soul longings persist, yearning for re-incarnation; though the past is slain, it is reborn like a Phoenix re-animated by its yearnings; and the

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spirit manifests its unquenchable aspiration to renew 'the effort and the pang' of reconstruction from the scratch because of its 'vanished memory'.

The indifferent mother night is reminded of its child, the newborn aspiration to renew its activity, by its finger laid on her cheek; she wakes up with maternal love to cater to its need and nurture. The stir of the maternal instinct produces a rent in the universal darkness; the eye of the deity, the life-force pierces through the dense structure of the universe; the ray seems an advance scout sent to submit its report and it meets with 'the torpor of a sick and weary world' to embark on a-fresh adventure of evolution.

'It compelled renewed consent to see and feel'; the unresponsive hush of the universe and its positive reluctance to be re-yoked into the fresh travail of furthering the course of evolution is overcome by nature's compulsion; a consciousness comes to life in the depths of the darkness; a dead soul is galvanised with a tabula-rasa having to labour afresh for the reconstruction of the edifice brick by brick.

'But all can be done if the God-touch is there'; there is no room for despair; man grows in stature in proportion to the challenge accepted, the crisis faced; man is but a pale reflection of the Divine and in moments of crisis, he can dive to the source and draw out of it the Divine puissance for which nothing is impossible.

Driven out of its own home, a part of the indivisible and the integral and for that reason feeling temporarily orphaned, an errant marvel of a ray, with the hesitancy of an alien and the step of a timid vagrant, makes its feeble appearance in a far off nook cf heaven.

It looks as though an invisible hand has moved across the sky with the deft artistry of a Divine architect for anon, the sky is lit up with an enchanting opalescence; there is revealed not only the immensity of the world since all is vivified with a new element of light and life, but also 'a gate of dreams ajar of mystery's verge'. The spot where the Goddess Aurora appears is so fascinating that it excites the imagination; kindles the human aspiration and makes man hunger for the ever-fresh, the eternal and the beatific represented by her; the gate is only kept ajar and not barred for admission of those who have attained self-realisation.

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'Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues

And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours

An instant's visitor the Godhead shone'

Though the Dawn has a periodicity of its own, the duration is of a fitful nature; though a perpetual recurrent sign, it is always brief; it is not the length of time but the intensity that matters; and during the short spell of its visit, it holds out with the* magnificence of its subdued light, beauty and colour, a promise of the glory awaiting a fuller manifestation when the earth nature is in a state of better receptivity. What happens with reference to the physical Dawn where the first feeble light is the trailer for the sun, applies to the spiritual Dawn for man also has sometimes a glimmer of the Beyond which is enough to bring about a transformation, sometimes gradual, sometimes a sea-change.

'It wrote the lines of a significant myth

Telling of the greatness of the spiritual dawns'

It gives a pre-vision of the greater effulgence in store; communicates a tidings, paints the message, the beauty and the delight of the Supernal in appropriate colours.

'Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed'

The Dawn projecting forward her illumination, places herself in communion with the rest that are to follow and perhaps because of a foreknowledge it gives a prescience of the saga of the spirit that is to be unfolded; the oil-painting that is left by aurora on the sky is highly eloquent with its expressive language of hieroglyphs of the not distant future when humanity may affranchise itself from the determinism of nature; a broadside of splendour is fired from the source transcendent on the 'opaque inane'; there is a descent of the divine ray in answer to the human aspiration and the omniscient Goddess with her light bridges time and timeless eternity; for 'time is not necessarily cancelled out of existence by timeless eternity, their relation is only verbally a relation of contradictions, in fact it is

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more likely to be a relation of dependence'.¹

'Earth felt the imperishable's passage close

Scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile

Kindled to fire the silences of the worlds

All grew a consecration and a rite.'

The footfalls of the eternal are heard by the earth; it is as though under its basking incubating touch, the world is filled with a sprout of life and a hum of activity; the wind plays the role of the priest muttering a hymn of prayer at the altar of the hills and the boughs of the trees with bent heads look the devotees in prayer, under a sky revelatory of a further evolutionary advance to be staged.

'Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt'

Clogged by limitations, with a mind only half-lit and a prey to uncertainty, contradictions and vacillations, man pursues an un extinguished and unending quest after truth; sometimes rises up but more often stumbles on his weary and toilsome path, the Almighty spirit watching the meanwhile in an apparently indifferent manner since it is more concerned with the broad lines of development in which the individual and his effort may have no more than a local significance;

'Lit into miracles the common meaningless shapes'

and even what is considered trivial and insignificant, receives an envied attention since they too have a role to play in the cosmic plan and economy.

'The divine afflatus spent, withdrew

Only a little the God light can stay'

We can not have too much of a good thing since the system

¹ Life Divine, p. 410

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breaks; too much of light blinds; even the impact of the divine may be devastating; the container can receive only that much it can contain, otherwise it may be submerged; the illumination therefore can stay for a short spell; it has to withdraw seeing man unready, poorly equipped to receive the light; it conceals itself in matter and the fleeting hours: 'but unless one can live on the highest height reached, there can not be the complete or more integral change. If the psychic mutation has not taken place, if there has been a premature pulling down of the higher forces, their contact may be too strong for the flawed and impure material of nature and its immediate fate may be that of the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine soma wine.'¹

'As when a soul draws near the sill of birth

A spark of deity lost in matter's crypt

Lines with its passion and mystery matter's mask'

'Matter is the formed body of the spirit and would never have been created if it could not be made the basis for the self-expression of the spirit.'²

'Each thing we call finite is a representative figure, a form-front, a silhouette shadowing out something of the infinite, all that defines itself in the universe, all its objects, happenings, are in their turn each a clue and a symbol.'³

Just as the soul about to reincarnate loses its native brilliance by entering into the crypt, the dark pit of matter, so too the auroral fire diffuses itself into the expanding common light of the day; however, it leaves behind traces of a 'Presence and a Power' in its imperceptible and vague linings on matter; the inadequacies, the limitations and the imperfections of the earthly instrumentation shun 'the hue and the marvel of the supernal beam' and it exits chilled and repelled by the inhospitality and the hostility of the earth; but

'And leader here with his uncertain mind

¹ The Life Divine, p. 813

² Ibid., 5. p. 572

³ Ibid.., p. 576

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Alone who stares at the future's covered face

Man lifted up the burden of his fate'

man being the latest though not the last fruit or summit of evolution, gifted with a greater consciousness though burdened with an uncertain mind, driven by half-lights, driven by impulse and given to deliberation, the one who can stand erect and stare at the stars, carries on his shoulders, though fragile, the burden of achieving his and the universal emancipation from the determinism of nature.

The whole description suddenly comes to a halt, it culminates in a swerve, a shift of the spotlight on a lone figure, who now takes the place of the dawn, the supernal beam; the allegory commences with a reference to her calamity, a private sign of the universal; though human enough to feel

'The call that wakes the leap of the human mind'

there is no responsive chord in her; she feels like the supernal beam, 'solicited in an alien world'; she harbours the anguish of the Gods in her heart; in spirit she dwells apart like a star; she broods over how the immortal within has to bow to the decay and the dissolution of the fragile casement of the body; how the journey to a wider consciousness has to be frequently punctuated with many breakups in the form of an invasion by death; how the dividing walls of ego make us strangers to the inner self uniting all in a single consciousness; how in preference to the stimulus within, the external is preferred and how the sombre flowers of inconscience are courted and those who bring in the undying rapture's boon are rejected.

'Hard is it to persuade the earth nature's change

Mortality bears ill the eternal touch'

The daughter of infinity, 'akin to eternity whence she came' a vaster nature's joy has been hers; like many a prior manifestation, a messenger of heaven, she too wants to plant a higher nature on earth, but she too gets in return for her gift of love, its enlarging and all conquering influence, the crown of thorns; mortality is like the

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prisoner of Chillon who hugs the chains or the prisoner of Bastile who shuns the light; it can not be persuaded to deny itself the daily ration of dualities: pleasure and pain; light is considered an intrusion, immaculate consciousness an affront; it lashes furiously at those who come to help or liberate and tars them with the same brush.

'A few have caught the flame and rise to greater life'

The work of the saviours should not be considered nugatory or classed as vain; they leave a mark, a following who try to perpetuate the flame and make it their mission to live for the ideal.

'The mortal's lot became the immortal's share

The Godhead greater by a human fate

A dark foreknowledge separated her

From all of whom she was the star and stay

In her torn depths she kept the grief to come'.

According to Sri M. P. Pandit 'the Gods have their splendours but also their limitations. For they are typal beings, fixed in their nature beyond which they can not rise. If they want to change they are obliged to come to this earth, the field of evolution and progress.'¹ It is therefore the sole prerogative of the human to evolve into the divine; Savitri for abandoning the supreme felicity that is hers and donning the mortal's role and sharing his lot, becomes all the greater for her sacrifice particularly because it is not for an individual but universal salvation that she has imposed on herself the ordeal. She reveals a rare self mastery and self-possession by not afflicting others with her agony and keeping the unpleasant foreknowledge to herself.

'Nature walks upon her mighty way

Leaving the slain behind, she travels on'

That is the fatal day marked for Satyavan's death; nature in her own callous manner, with its supreme indifference to the mortal's lot goes her usual way; what does a death here, a pang or a tear there matter for her?; in its largeness and immensity, they are but flea-bites,

¹ Readings in Savitri. I. p. 59

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wee-bits, little effecting her plan and perhaps they are incidental and unavoidable too, in the furtherance of her plan.

'Her nature felt all nature as her own

Apart, living within, all lives she bore

Aloof she carried in herself the world

Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights'

It is said that Shakespeare wrought a tragedy with the greatest economy of plot from the casual drop of the handkerchief; it may be said here, that Savitri becomes a world-redeemer from a casualty that is of common occurrence in nature; not because this particular mortal is her husband, but only because he is a mortal revealing to her as to Buddha how the particular is not an isolated, unrelated event but representative of the general and the universal affliction to which earth nature is inexorably subject, that she becomes the redeemer not for herself but for the entire world. To put it better in the words of Sri Iyengar, 'it is much more than a distressing conjugal problem, more than even a recurring human problem, it is a cosmic problem, it is a crisis in earth's evolutionary history'.¹ Satyavan is the soul of the world and it should be salvaged; 'by herself she lives, but not for herself'²; she identifies herself with the world; shares its age-long dread for death and grimly prepares to meet the challenge by drawing on her own inner strength of the concealed divine; she wants to make the earth the home of the Divine by fighting and routing the grisly monster death and his army of suffering, disease etc.

'At first life grieved not in her burdened breast

Prone it reposed, unconscious on mind's verge

Then a slow faint remembrance shadow-like moved

And recognised the close and lingering ache

But knew not why it was there and whence it came

The unassisted brain found not its past.'

The above lines throw us back on the echoes of the dawn; this shows a wonderful symmetry in the canto; it begins with a description

¹ Iyengar 1209    ^{2 Pandit p . 65}

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of the dawn and is rounded off with a reversion to the tints of the dawn in the description of Savitri's awakening to the realities of her situation and preparing to usher in a higher dawn; we may recollect how a throb, a pulse has emerged in the sea of nescience; similarly in the above lines Savitri is represented as being in a state of absolute repose in the inconscience of complete unawareness: as tranquil as a stone; but a lone hesitating hue, to recall the expression used earlier in the poem, the 'slain and buried past 'revives'; a lingering ache is experienced without her yet knowing whence and why it has come; this reminds us of 'something that wished to be but knew not how to be' the earlier line; this is so because 'her brain lay un harnessed'; but anon memory's casements open and the whole tragedy in store becomes clear as in a flood-light, namely, the dawn of her complete wakefulness; this again brings back to mind the line, 'forced the world's bright immensity to sight' and here we should read, the world's immensity of grief represented in the impending tragedy, her personal calamity to take place, symbolising mortality in general. She finds seated in the very centre of her 'flaming heart', the umpire of the tourney, the guardian and the sentry of inconscience, the stony and pitiless PAIN collecting the libation of tears across the aeons; and this has to continue un-interrupted so long as the earth-nature continues in its fragmented individuation. The entrants in the lists are, first, the earth erected on the base of inconscience, second, the inevitable automatism, the remorseless determinism of nature and pitted against the two contestants, stands the lone and unassisted Love. Evolutionary history provides us with instances of heroic spirits who cheerfully accepted suffering, even martyrdom for the promotion of the spiritual advancement; 'the green smiling dangerous world' may have its lures for the feeble but not for the high-souled; Savitri draws the strength and the inspiration for herself in the present crisis by a dependence on her soul; the body, a creation of nature, is subject to its determinism, but soul is not of its make; it has its source in the divine; is indestructible and unconquerable; and diving into the immobility, the status or the stability of the inner depths, she builds up the soul-force before which the mightiest: must be reduced to ashes. 'The fight against Death is going on — Death with its negations, corruptions, perversions, and the battle has been joined and it

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is now being waged before our eyes and we could see it had we eyes to see or if we didn't turn them away in fear or disgust, — Truth or the abyss? The Life Divine or Annihilation. The issue is joined indeed and the struggle and the possibility are projected before us. Will Satyavan — the soul of the world that is Satyavan — be redeemed at last or will the world be made safe for the future man'.¹

In an epic with a cosmic sweep like Savitri, there is bound to be a streak of subjective element, pronounced though veiled; all the experiences that have been lived by him are woven into the texture of the poem; he has an experience of the inconscience, known what suffering is; and has breathed in the Ananda. Several times in his life a mass of darkness and calm have come rapidly towards him: one night while asleep at Darjeeling, again in England and once more on landing at Apollo Bunder, Bombay; in Alipore jail-life he has a vision of Vāsudavah sarvam; while walking on the ridge of Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar, Kashmir, he has a glimpse of the vacant infinite enveloping and absorbing everything; he says

'Around me was a formless solitude:

All had become one strange unnamable,

........Topless and fathomless, forever still.';²

on another occasion in the shrine of Kali on the banks of the Narmada, he has seen the living presence of the Mother; another time he sees the vision of the Godhead saving him when his carriage is on the point of being wrecked in an accident; he has endured penury in England when his father has been unable to send him the remittances and he knows what persecution is, in his revolutionary activities as a freedom fighter. We may quote from the Mother 'He walked in the darkness of the inconscience, even in the neighbour hood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition and emerged from the mud, the earth's misery, to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda'.³ This accounts for his pictures of inconscience, misery, Ananda and God, being so pregnant with a touch of direct knowledge; with due

¹ Iyengar 1196

² Sri Aurobindo's sonnet on Advaita

³ Iyengar 1247

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deference to the Miltonians, what is widely believed may be repeated here that the author of Paradise Lost has not seen God as clearly as Satan; but Savitri is a product, an offspring of the author's envisioning the Supreme.

We may conclude with a note on the symbolism of the Dawn; there are two emanations from the Supreme Mother; the first comprising Truth, Consciousness and Bliss, lost in the dark inconscience, giving rise to the opposite trinity mind, life and body; the second emanation is for the redemption, the recovery, the re-ascension along the same track to Superconscience; the God-touch is always there; since the dawn of the world, Avatar after Avatar is engaged in the task of divinising the earth; they may be likened to ray after ray visiting the earth and suffering a rejection; but there may come a day when all these may have a cumulative effect; that is the day which has dawned when this ray Savitri may effect the long awaited redemption and the argument is the involvement of the soul of the world, Satyavan, in the mire of inconscience and the battle is for his rescue and for his liberation. The Mother says 'It is a symbolic work, not the telling of a story that has happened; it is the illustration in a condensed and imaged form of this effort of the Divine to divinise the material creation. The death of Satyavan becomes the symbol of the misery of the earth's creation, of its fate, and through Savitri of its liberation. She faces the doom in order to give the solution!¹ The Divine zenith, the Inconscient Nadir, the realm between, the way down, the way up, the whole stairway; the linking up of the extremities, the one consciousness dividing only to unite again, the misery and the miracle of creation, the Fall, the Ascension, all are shown in action, in this unique and wonderful poem'.²

Milton speaks of man's first disobedience and seeks to justify the ways of God to man; but in sooth the ways of God cannot be justified from the de-limited consciousness that comes of man's individuation; it can be possible when he attains self-realisation; then he knows himself to be the supreme; then there is no aloof God indifferent to human suffering, condemning peccant humanity by a moral code not applicable to himself; such a moral God is too horrifying

¹ Iyengar 1242             ² Ibid., 1243

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and hence in Sri Aurobindo's concept, God himself is the chief participant; it is He in the form of man that goes through the baptism of suffering, the ordeal of misery; this becomes clear to us when we see God as simultaneously present in mobility and immobility, status and dynamis, oneness and the many. We may quote extensively from The Life Divine: 'One difficulty remains; it is the arbitrary nature of the creation, the incomprehensibility of its purpose, the crude meaninglessness of its law of ignorance, strife and suffering, its ending without a denouement or issue. A play? But why this stamp of so many undivine elements in the play of one whose nature must be supposed to be divine? To the suggestion that what we see worked out in the world is the thought of God, the retort could be made that God could well have had better thoughts and the best thought of all would have been to refrain from the creation of an unhappy and unintelligible universe. All the theistic explanations starting from an extra-cosmic deity stumble over this difficulty and can only evade it; it would disappear only if the creator were, even though exceeding the creation, yet immanent in it, himself in some sort the player and the play, an infinite casting the infinite possibilities into the set form of an evolutionary cosmic order.'¹

If it is no heresay, we may say that the theme of Paradise Lost is the fall of man, his first transgression; Adam loves Eve too well, even uxoriously but not wisely; but there is no original sin of which man is guilty or to which his suffering can be attributed, in Savitri; the original sin lies in the Supreme entering into Matter and wearing its mask and the travail is one of re-emergence into his own. Dante has to pass through the three worlds of Inferno, Purgatario and Paradiso ere he could find a solution to the fear gnawing at his heart and -then only arrive at the oneness, the principle of a single consciousness, the cementing force of Love; but in Savitri, the outcome is not of a theological or intellectual dialectic but the offspring of direct vision and experience; there is from the beginning the play of Love in its pristine purity; Savitri is its visible entity seeking to bring down the Parijata Kusuma, the blossom of beatitude to the earth, and to plant the Sanjeevi of immortality on the misery-laden earth.

Y. S. R. CHANDRAN

¹ The Life Divine, p. 276

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SRI AUROBINDO AND THE BHAGAVAD GITA

VI Meditation: The Sacrifice

NEITHER in the Gita nor in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo is meditation largely emphasized, or considered an indispensable means to enlightenment and rebirth in the Spirit. But neither is it neglected, nor considered unimportant. It is not the sole or even the principal method, as so many schools would have it, and those who are not drawn to it may progress by other means and methods more suited to them, to great achievement. But for those who are drawn to meditation, and can do it, it can be an extremely powerful instrument of spiritual progress; and used in conjunction with other practices and disciplines that reach all parts of the nature, can be a high if not sovereign influence for the full perfection that is the goal of the consummate, the integral yogin who does his yoga not for liberation alone, but for complete knowledge and mastery.

There are many forms of meditation, the tightly codified Raja Yoga of Patanjali, with its eight stages, being but one of them. Here as in all processes may be recognized many degrees and stages; but here a too rigid or too rigidly apprehended codification is misleading, for the stages intermingle, and one does not have to wait, and in patience hardly can wait, for the certain perfection of one stage before he can begin the next. If he did he could not start at all, for the cultivation of the higher stages helps to perfect the lower; then again, some stages may be dispensed with altogether, and their good gotten by the higher means. In the system of Patanjali the first two stages are really one stage, and are preparatory: they are ethical and moral, and not meditative at all. The necessary balance and tranquillity of the ethical nature, the high-mindedness, detachment and self-control, must be firmly established in one before he can begin really to meditate at all. But by the meditation itself one becomes more detached and disciplined, and better conducted in the world and toward his fellows. The process is one of increasing inwardness, concentration and elevation, increased equality and lessened sense of ego, stability, calm and disengagement from the Ignorance and all its workings. This is the fundamental character of all systems and

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methods of meditation, however they may be conducted and codified.

A first emphasis on morality and especially on high ethical standards is something that should not be overlooked or neglected. For a genuine human being at the least must be respectful of the codes of conduct that make communal and civilized living possible; and as he grows in consciousness he will seek higher codes and standards, based on some universal principle of ethics. It is only by thus restraining himself, and being willing to restrain himself, that a man can begin to live a truly human life, and follow the nisus of the evolution. It is the first curbing of the ego-sense, and recognition of larger possibilities. Only on such a foundation is the more strenuous climbing, and the eventual transcending, possible. To a man this is not a painful suppression, a harshness, a heavy yoke, it is not just the externally imposed discipline that is not the real thing; it is a means of rising to a greater life, in which he cooperates. There is a will to being a better man, a kind of "categorical imperative" as Kant called it, within us, that will not let a highly developed human being rest, until he has done what is right. Standards vary, with place and time and the development of the individual, and there is not one sufficient codified "imperative" that is binding on all men, in every case. But the "moral sense" so eloquently written of by Shaftsbury is there in the true man, and can help him rise until he is able to go beyond it into full Knowledge. This is also an aesthetic sense, and morality is also beauty: the man seeks a life that is a harmony, an unfailing perfection of conduct and deportment that is at once good and beautiful. The aesthetic sense is the more inclusive, but the purely moral sense cannot be neglected: the sense that without the sense of beauty becomes pharisaical, harsh, crabbed and hard. To be at once good and beautiful is also to be true, and the full Truth is the good of the true man, who is morally and aesthetically awakened. To Schiller, a great poet and a noble philosopher, to be moral, that is to keep high standards of conduct, was not a hard restraint but a positive joy, a beautiful harmony of the nature turned toward Truth. It is of such real men, embodiments of "pure humanity", that the greater things must come.

Meditation itself is not truth, not beauty, not morality or good:

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it is a means of over coming the tendencies of the lower nature and terms. It can help to the supreme Truth that is supreme Beauty and Good, but only in conjunction with other means. By itself, exclusively followed, it leads most directly to the realization of the Atman and liberation in the Transcendence, the pure Being without qualities or aspects; thus a withdrawal from the evolutionary world. What has been called the Royal Yoga is primarily a mental discipline, for the release into the impersonal tranquillity of the higher mind, at one with the Truth that is eternally Beyond.

There are schools however that rely primarily on meditation without being so completely exclusive or uncompromising. One is the Zen or Dhyana school of Buddhism. There the emphasis indeed is on the practice of a formal sitting for inward collection, an intense one-pointed awareness in the suprarational part of the mind, the dhyāna that is the penultimate stage of Patanjali's system: from which one eventually bursts into the prajñā, the suprarational Knowledge. But this is combined with a very vigorous active life (in which there is constant strenuous endeavour to break down the old logical way of things - no t in the "anti-intellectual" service of sub rationality, but for the realization of something higher and surer); and the aesthetic nature is by no means neglected: indeed some of the greatest art and literature of China and Japan has been inspired and cultivated by Buddhists of this school. So too is the intellectual nature cultivated, refined and lifted; and some of the greatest scholars in these countries have been Ch'an (Zen) men. Indeed the Mahayana ideal of world-salvation requires full development of the nature, however dimly this may be seen.

Meditation taken as a part of the full means of development can help to perfect the yoga of work: making one's awareness more subtle, inclusive and discerning, increasing the sureness and firmness of one's grasp, increasing in all one's activities the fundamental detachment necessary, and increasing, by detachment and clarity, the strength, the aptness and the skill required. Meditation is "daily life": in Zen one must become so established in the meditative poise and rhythm that it goes on constantly, in all his activities, situations and endeavours: until all the work is done by his helpers, his hands and feet and his other instruments, and he is always free.

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Often indeed the decisive breakthrough to the Zen enlightenment, the active Nirvana of the "center of Ughtning" in the sky peaceful beyond the clouds, comes not in the formal meditative sitting itself but in the performance of some daily task, perhaps triggered, as it were, by the most trivial and common of happenings. So too the meditation carried over increases the insight and the power for artistic work, and intellectual study, the subtle awareness, the firm sensitivity of knowledge and grasp, the flexibility that is not laxness but life. But still meditation works most directly upon the mind alone, in its essence, and is a further intensification of the path of Knowledge, above word and thought.

For this after a certain stage it becomes almost necessary for everyone, at least for a time. As one rises and expands in his mental nature, controlling, subtlizing and refining his mental processes and increasing his range and power of awareness, he begins to look more and more above, and not below: and thus he becomes able and ready to receive the superior Light, and continually increases his capacity to receive it. He withdraws progressively from the lower hemisphere of the Ignorance, to give himself to the upper hemisphere of the Knowledge. He has never been alone, though bound in his ego-sense he has considered himself the doer and the sufferer of actions; his turning on the wheel by the natural forces is never the whole truth, and becomes less and less the truth as he advances. The Divine is always with and above him, and the divine influence is always upon him; as he grows quieter, subtler, larger, stronger, he begins to become aware of it, and becomes more aware as he proceeds. He becomes alive, turns above and opens himself to the influence and the light: he rises high in consciousness, and in his tranquil mind above ego the divine splendor dawns.

The Gita mentions briefly — as in its immensely comprehensive character it mentions so much, and nothing more than briefly — the Gita mentions meditation, and gives some sketch of the common way of it at that time. Great emphasis is placed on position, that is posture', āsana, the "seat" of meditation. This may seem unnecessary and even foolish to those without experience; a hard and difficult imposition where there is already sufficient difficulty. In the Western world at least it is likely to be taken as just " posturing"

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(if not embraced superstitiously, with a feeble ignorant "mystique"); and Western man finds it especially difficult to get into the "lotus" position, because his body is not flexible enough: owing partly at least to lack of practice, and perhaps to his habitual diet that is not that of the yogi; which is likely to deter him from any serious attempt at the outset. But this really is the best way to sit for the meditation that is primarily a mind-quieting and mind-collecting exercise, because it sets and locks the body firmly into an upright position, and keeps it trim, vibrant and aware. Here the currents flow right, and everything becomes directed to an up-down axis, to go, as it were, below the earth and above the heavens. Sitting in a chair is too lax, and also (not "paradoxically") too tense, because not sufficiently stable; and lying down invites sleep rather than meditation. Indeed sleep is a danger in the best conditions, because that is the only way in which one has been accustomed to go inward at all; and Zen meditation is done with the eyes open: not fully open and engaged with the outer nature, but half open, as in the pictures and statues of the Buddha. By such means powerful results are obtained. For meditation is a. power, not a "relaxing" into a kind of weak and tepid quiescent revery; it intensifies the fire of tapas necessary to all yoga, it is a very exacting and strenuous endeavour, that gives the true relaxation, peace and tranquillity in the concentrating and heightening of all the nature It reverses the flow of the energies and denies the habitual dispersal, making one-pointed for a flight to the Supreme. In the prescribed and tested formal position one can come to this most quickly and surely. Nevertheless, if he cannot take the position he should not be deterred from meditation, if he is drawn to it. He should try, make the effort seriously, in any way that he can: even walking it can be done, keeping the attention perhaps on the tops of trees against the sky: striving and turning always against the old sloth that is always there and ready to drag him down, and the old confused, passionate activity that takes him from himself, and binds him to the wheel.

¹ The customary English translation of tapas, "penance", is inaccurate. A yogi is not a Christian trying to atone for his sins; he is not concerned with being "saved" from that unspiritual conception of an everlasting hell by following a moral law, and he thinks less of "sin" than of error and ignorance.

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Fundamental to meditation is breath-control; by one means or another the breath is deepened and quieted, which deepens and quiets the whole being. The physical body held compact, erect and still, one rides the horse of the vital nature, controlling and directing it well that he may rise to the anther upon it. The reins and bit are the control of breathing. One may not believe the great efficacy of breath-control, if he has not experienced it; but even deep-breathing exercises, not done as yoga, may help one to calm his nature and increase and concentrate his energy ; and this one may demonstrate for himself. The "life breath" indeed is more than a vague and inexact term, or a metaphor. By the quieting and controlling of the breath and the consolidated energy it gives one can rise upon it, away from the hold of the lower, the unregenerate life. The mind becomes quiet, detached from all its perturbations and the idle thoughts of its intellectual part; whatever crosses it does not affect it; it knows that the thoughts and images and all the modifications are not really its own, not of its substance, being or creation, and are not important. A great iron wall, as it were, is built against intrusion, and the mind becomes utterly compact of light and calm. It mounts and expands; it becomes a wave less, immaculate, shore less ocean of peace, over which the divine sun rises. The mediator can see his Self in all beings and all beings in his Self, utterly detached and free. But this too is not all, and the horse, with wings, may be ridden to a greater glory, a mount and fire of the nature of the Spirit. As the Gita says, life-breath is poured into life-breath, prāna, as an offering, a sacrifice; and this is not merely for a rising to the Transcendence.

The pregnant, the indeed limitless concept of the Sacrifice has been familiar in India from at least Vedic times. How fully it has been understood is of course another question: how completely and adequately the society has risen to one of its profoundest insights and greatest moving forces for elevation and harmony, freedom and the increasingly splendid manifestation of the Divine. For in the long progress of Indian society much has gone into abeyance, many great things that could not be pursued or worked out at the time, which was given to lesser but still necessary concerns. Thus the full idea and conception of the Sacrifice was lost, and it became largely an external ritualism, with little spiritual meaning. But the things in

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abeyance are not lost, and come forth again at their proper moment. So the embracing, the integrating and synthesizing comprehension of the Sacrifice has now come with Sri Aurobindo, master of Vedic and Upanishadic lore and of the inner truth and real grasp and vision of the gnomic utterance of the Gita.

The true Sacrifice is not a bartering, or a bargaining with God. It is not a desperate bowing to necessity with an anguished hope cf relief, a looking upward only because all other hope has failed, with a "giving" of the self that one does not have, or cannot give where he would prefer to give it: though an answer and a return may come, one has offered little, and that not in the true spirit. Even less is the Sacrifice a self-injury, a torturing or maiming of oneself from some idea that God demands it or is pleased by it, that it is necessary for "salvation". And neither is the true thing an offering of something desired in exchange for something even more desired, a giving up of something considered valuable for something considered even more valuable. It is rot the offering of a victim on the altar, to be rewarded by wealth on earth and joys in heaven; not the suppression or the denial of some part of one's nature in the expectation of a future return. All this is too egoistic, too human a conception. The true sacrifice is a "making sacred", a giving freely of the whole nature to the Divine that is a returning of it to itself, its truth, freedom and glory.

All is Brahman, all the world is a sacrifice of Brahman to himself. Existence is a mutual interchange. The Brahman contracts himself in his fire of Chit-Tapas, the Consciousness and Force of the Shakti that is the manifestation, and makes the offering of himself that that manifestation is: thus he offers himself back to himself in a progressive development, an ever increasing largeness and growing perfection of the instruments, expressions, aspects and possibilities, a making sacred, a divinizing. One must continually give in the world, and continually receive; there is nothing here that does not change constantly, with an outward and inward movement. The sun gives to the earth and the earth makes its offerings to the sun: the ocean gives the rain that fructifies, and is returned to the ocean. All the elements of the human nature give to the surrounding nature and receive from it; in every relationship a man both gives and receives,

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whether he knows it or not, and cannot do otherwise. But with humanity perversion comes, ego-grasping, and the sacrifice may be aborted. To take the free gifts of the Divine and the bounties of existence in a selfish spirit, not to wish to make return—to despoil the earth and give it nothing in exchange, to expect always more of others and of life than one is willing to give — this spoils the sacrifice, which means that it thwarts evolutionary development and endangers life itself. One is here to co-operate in making the world sacred.

Of course there is no exact mathematical correspondence here, and one cannot calculate just how much he gives in relation to just how much he receives. Nor would it be desirable and the right way if he could. One may receive much from some sources to which he apparently returns little; nevertheless there is a cosmic balancing, for the giver as well as the receiver, and the return, the interaction may be otherwise than one understands. A calculating spirit is wrong in
' all relationships, it turns one from the mutuality of the spiritual life: it is part of the ego-movement that must be overcome. What is to be cultivated is a spirit of free giving, a constant offering of oneself and all that one has. This does not mean to "sacrifice" oneself to the ego of others, or to pride oneself on "doing good": it does net mean an indiscriminate showering of "gifts" on people: it is to have the spirit of true, non-egoistic giving, and recognize that all is given ultimately to the Divine. This true giving is not an ascetic thing: one is not offering to the Divine if one must tear something from oneself, as it were, giving away something that one is attached to and considers desirable. To do this may be a helpful discipline, or may not: in any case, so long as one considers anything not divine to be desirable he is not giving truly; he is ego-bound, and resisting divinization.

Of course there are stages and degrees of sacrifice, for the true and full thing cannot be had quickly and easily in an evolutionary development; this very development by its nature precludes a quick and easy achievement of any kind, and cannot proceed simply by the fiat of God, saying "I am!" A progressive and struggling development is essential to this manifestation. So the Divine accepts every turning toward him, and himself makes sacred every sincere offering.

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Even the dullest, most ignorant and sinful of men can turn, and the Divine accepts them; and however small or however feeble may be the offering, it is the spirit that is important.

Leaf or flower, fruit or water,

Whatsoever one devoted

Proffers me, that I accept, the

Humble offering of the pure heart.¹

So says Krishna; and the humble offering of the pure heart, though small, is preferable to the largest and most ostentatious giving of the ego-nature, that expects and even demands a return, a reward. The only reward of the true giver is in the gift itself: he gives because that is what one does, whose heart is open and turned toward God. The man is accepted in accordance with his nature and receives in accordance with his capacity and desire; and one always spills more than he assimilates, and the full gift would be wasted on the unready: indeed too full a gift of divinity would be his destruction. He must develop along his own lines, in his own time. A lesser, a darker worship is still a worship, and indeed all gods are portions, expressions, personalities, focuses, facets of the one God. Those who offer to some lesser godhead for worldly or heavenly benefit or blessedness are not closed out from the Supreme: he accepts them as they are, and gives them their desire: or he does not, but the withholding is still a blessing, and what the man truly needs, to progress and grow. The growth is to ever larger conceptions and fuller awakening, until all is offered freely to the Supreme, and the return is his unsought Bliss and Beatitude forever.

Meditation is a sacrifice: the senses become flames that consume the objects and attachment to them and purify for the true vision and perception, the heart the flame in which desire is purified and consumed, the mind a sky in which the smoke of the unregeneracy ascends and disperses. One kindles the divine fire in himself, that consumes the falseness of the world. The vital breaths are poured into one another as a libation, giving to one another to a balance and equilibrium that rises in a great offering to the Supreme. So is all Yoga the

¹ Bhagavad Gita, 9:26

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Sacrifice, and all life, every possible activity and thought and feeling: all in its most natural course is an offering to the Divine, of the Divine to Himself. In every thought and every action, every exercise and movement of the mind and the will, the body and the vital nature, one is to remember his true dignity and render Divinity its true claim — with spiritual aspiration dissociate oneself from ego, and offer everything to the one Supreme that is everything. This must become continual and as natural to one as his breathing and the beating of his heart; it is a part of the great cosmic rhythm that sustains and moves and brings to perfection.

The work of the Karma Yogin is thus a sacrifice, his will, his actions and their effects, fruits and consequences are offered to the Divine and accepted, he is consciously that One: Without need of action, either of doing or receiving, he carries on the Sacrifice of the Divine in the world, doing whatever work is required, utterly free, "made sacred". So too the Knowledge of the Jnana Yogin is an offering, and in the offering comes to its true nature and character, to enlighten the world. It is by the Sacrifice that God is more than transcendent, and the world more than a meaningless appearance and an unaccountable great somnambulism. It is the Sacrifice that quickens and awakens, and the fullest fullness and completest completion of the Sacrifice and of the enlightened aspiring nature comes alone in devotion to the Supreme in the nonegoisitic Love that is itself divine: the adoration, the deepest and most intimate self-mraing to the Lord, the One. This is the consummate meaning and nature of Yoga, and of all existence.

JESSE ROARKE

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THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA (An Outline)

Part I, Chapter I

The Four Aids

"PERFECTION through yoga can be best attained by the combined working of four instruments: knowledge, śāstra, personal effort, utsāha, the Teacher, guru, and time kala.

Śāstra: the supreme Shastra cf the Integral Yoga is the eternal knowledge present like a lotus bud in the heart of all men which progressively opens as one turns towards the Divine. This inner knowledge can be brought forward by the Word from the soul or Lord within the heart, but more usually it is by the Word of a scripture or living teacher or both together. In the Integral Yoga, the sadhaka may be guided by one or more scriptures but he does not allow himself to be limited by the written word. There must be absolute liberty of experience and formulation of knowledge and manner of seeking. Each man must be free to follow his own path.

Utsāha: It is the intensity of the personal effort, aspiration, concentration in mind, heart and will which for a long time determines the extent and rapidity of progress along the path. In this turning there are three stages. First, the sadhak's personal effort, struggle and wilful rejection of all lower movements is necessary to purify the mind, heart, vital and physical parts and forge an initial and firm contact with the Divine. As this is established, there begins a conscious reception of the transcendent into himself and a submission to its force. Gradually his own will and force merge into the Divine Will-Force which carries on his transformation. He becomes a divine centre in the world.

Guru: The supreme Guide and Teacher is the inner Guide, the World-Teacher secret within us. His method is perfectly adapted to fit each individual nature. Every aspect of life small and great is brought under his influence. The very intensity of our egoistic effort and preoccupation for a time often veils the inner Guide. Gradually

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we begin to recognise His working in all our experiences past and present. We feel Him present as Friend, Lover, Teacher, and perceive that the One called by many names and of many forms is the Master of our Yoga.

Man more readily responds to an external image of God. This need is met by the Ishta Devata, the chosen deity, a name and form of the Godhead acceptable to the mind. The Divine also incarnates in human form as the Avatar, the Divine Man, or in lesser manifestation as the Prophet, the World-Teacher, and the Guru. The Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga will make use of all these aids.

The Teacher of the Integral Yoga, like the Master within, will lead according to the disciple's own nature by teaching, the example of his life and the influence of his Presence. He will not seek to impose himself and his opinions or to instruct but to foster natural growth and expansion.

Kala; Time may seem to the struggling ego an enemy or friend, or a resistance presenting the obstruction of forces in conflict with itself, but to the soul it is always an instrument of progress. The ideal attitude is to have an endless patience yet work intensely for immediate realisation.

Chapter II

Self-Consecration

Yoga can begin only when man awakens to the necessity of a larger spiritual existence. In response to the soul's call there must be a decision of the mind, heart and will to seek the Divine resulting in a complete self-consecration, an entire self-giving. There has to be a wholesale conversion of every energy and activity from its ordinary movement to this higher pursuit. Opposed by the fixed habits and resistances of individual and universal nature there is the temptation to separate the worldly and inner life and concentrate exclusively on the latter. But an Integral Yoga which views the world as an evolving manifestation of the Spirit must accept the whole of life in order to transform it.

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Man is composed of many personalities, each part of his being with its own complex individuality in conflict with the others. Each is to be fully developed, perfected and harmonised with the rest. There must be a wide massive opening of the whole being and an all-inclusive concentration of thought, emotion and will on the One Divine in ourselves, in the world and beyond. As an aid we can first centre our consciousness in the highest pure regions of the mind or on the psychic being in the depths of the heart, for these two points in man are most open to the Divine.

The conception of Divinity on which we concentrate should be as integral as possible, embracing both the impersonal aspects of a supreme Existence, Consciousness and Bliss which forms the foundation and the substance of all manifestation, and the image of One infinite Divine Being, Lover and Master of all worlds. We begin seeking by this faith which leads to realisation and knowledge.

All the impulsions and falsehoods of the lower nature must be rejected. The passionate egoistic seeking of the desire-soul has to be concentrated on the Divine, taught to act for the sake of the Divine and according to its guiding Will. This results in an entire self-consecration and integral self-surrender of the whole being. As egoism and desire are thus transformed, personal effort is replaced by the working of the higher Divine Nature, Shakti, who moulds the individual into a fit temple and instrument of the Divine in the world.

Chapter III

Self-Surrender in Works — The Way of the Gita

The purpose of man's existence is to transcend his ego and develop in consciousness beyond the present stage of mind, to discover his true Self and grow into a divine consciousness, a supra-mental status.

Yoga is an attempt to replace the long and slow process of natural evolution with a swift and consciously initiated movement so that the reign of our outward-looking ego driven by desire, guided by a limited and ignorant mind, impelled by a small-motived will and feeble surface emotions may give way to the reign of the inner

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Divine, living the pure delight of existence, knowing by a faculty beyond mind, moved by the Divine-Will-Force, feeling the divine Love and Ananda of the inner psychic heart. The key to this transformation is an entire giving of ourselves to the Supreme.

An integral perfection has to be based on a harmony between the inner and outer life, union with the Divine in will and action as well as in knowledge and feeling. By a Yoga of Works we can consecrate and surrender all our actions and outer movements to the Divine and be transformed into a pure channel for that greater Will and Energy to work out its all-wise purpose. One may proceed initially by the path of knowledge or god ward emotion but these tend to be highly subjective, isolated, divorced from the outer life and body, reluctant or incapable of outward application. Unless a consecration of works is taken up from the beginning it may be found difficult later for our inner attainments to find expression in the material world. The ideal approach would be a many-sided, simultaneous and harmonised development of our entire being, an Integral Yoga.

A complete system of Karma Yoga based on the principle of a dynamic surrender to the Divine leading to a dynamic identity is laid down in the Bhagavad Gita. Nature as she appears on the surface is Prakriti, unconscious mechanical executive Force which works out in action what is sanctioned by the Will of the Divine Being, Purusha, Ishwara, who is seated passively behind and within her. The egoistic human mind and will are themselves part of Nature's mechanism, never truly free, dependent on and determined by the one free divine Will. True freedom comes by their surrender to the concealed Lord of Nature.

When the soul identifies itself with Prakriti it is subject to the-interaction of the three Gunas, Tamas — inertia, Rajas — passion, Sattwa — light, and is unconscious of its true status as the master, knower and enjoyer of Nature. The soul must awaken from the consciousness of ego struggling ineffectively between the dualities of success and failure, pleasure and pain, good and evil etc. and attain the poise of equality, freedom, mastery and delight which are its true divine character.

There are two knots which have to be eliminated to free man from this subjection to ignorant and divided Nature: the experience

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of desire which is rooted in the emotions, sensations, instincts and from there affects thought and volition, and the ego-sense which is based in the thinking mind and will. To loosen these knots we must renounce the vital self's attachment to the fruit of our action, and replace this struggling and craving egoism with a poise in the wide equal oneness of the spirit. We should do the work that is to be done without any desire for the fruit of our action. The sign of this liberation is an absolute equality of the mind, heart and nervous parts to all results, a complete absence of reaction to all happenings. We may begin by a detachment of the inner soul from the reacting surface nature and gradually extend the inner quietude and freedom throughout the whole being. In place of the motive force of desire and egoistic self-seeking, all our actions must become a sacrifice and a surrender, an offering of service and love to the Divine.

Equality, renunciation and sacrifice are the basis of the Gita's way of Karma Yoga.

GARRY JACOBS

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DHAMMAPADA

— XXIV — On Desire (In continuation)

(15)

Abandon all that is in front, abandon all that is behind, abandon all that is in the middle; go beyond earth's shores.

Thus the mind freed in all ways, you will suffer neither birth nor age.

(16)

Creatures have a mind in turmoil, they are full of fears, passions, they seek pleasures only:

And this serves only to increase their desires and so to strengthen their bondage.

(17)

One who strives to quieten his mind, who is ever discriminating and spots out the unclean:

He, indeed, is the person who cuts away the bonds of the enemy, cuts away to the very last.

(18)

Firm in faith, fearless, desireless, stainless, he pulls out the world as though a spear lodged in him: For him this is the last' incarnation.

(19)

Freed from desire, unattached, he knows the words and their

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meanings, he knows the collocation of the letters and their sequence: For the last time he has put on the body and is called the great Wise.

(20)

Almighty, all-wise am I; I am attached to no mode of conduct; I have renounced all:

With no desire, I am free. Whom should I then approach for the sake of knowledge?

(21)

He has passed beyond all giving, even the giving of dharma; he has passed beyond all enjoyment, even the enjoyment of dharma. He has gone beyond all delights, even the delight of dharma: Desire exhausted, he has passed beyond all grieving.

(22)

Sense-enjoyments kill the deluded who does not seek the other shore.

In his craving for enjoyment the deluded kills himself even as he may kill his neighbour.

(23)

In a field, the weed is the evil, in a human creature attachment is the evil.

Make your gift to one free from attachment: that is a truly fruitful act.

(24)

In a field, the weed is the evil, in a human creature hatred is the evil:

Make your gift to one free from hatred, that is a truly fruitful act.

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(25)

In a field, the weed is the evil, in a human creature infatuation is the evil:

Let your giving be to one free from infatuation: that is a truly fruitful giving.

(26)

In a field, the weed is the evil, in a human creature the wishful-ness is the evil:

Let your giving be to one free from wishful ness: that is a truly fruitful giving.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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DIALOGUES AND PERSPECTIVES

OM

HE is a student of our Centre of Education, working on a project on music. He called on me last evening asking if I would help him to know more about OM in which he had got interested of late. I was happy to meet him and see how keen was his interest. He showed me his notes which were mostly jottings from the writings of Swami Rama Tirth on the subject. There was only one entry from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita. I suggested to him to look up Sri Aurobindo's translation of the Mandukya Upanishad in which the Syllable OM is equated with Brahman the Supreme Reality and its several components analysed and interpreted in terms of the manifesting Self. So also Sri Aurobindo's Notes on the Chhandogya which begins with a laudation of the rising chant of OM from Earth Heavenward. Next recommended was the chapter on Concentration in the Synthesis of Yoga (part II) wherein Sri Aurobindo speaks of the spiritual efficacy of OM as the object of concentration and meditation. Last I asked him to look up the passages on OM in Savitri, taking the help of Gems from Sri Aurobindo (II Series). He was also referred to the entries on AUM in the Key to Vedic Symbolism, the Guide to the Upanishads and the explanation of OM in the course of the exposition of Sri Aurobindo's Mantra, OM ānandamayi, caitanyamayi, satyamayi, parame, in The Mother of Love (Vol. I).

He noted down all the details with enthusiasm and looked up for immediate elucidation. And I told him what I had to say as simply as possible.

OM is the nearest equivalent in human speech of the primordial Sound that vibrates on the highest plane of Existence when the Reality moves into its creative poise. When the Parasiva, the Absolute, is moved to manifest, there is a stir, spanda, which vibrates as supernal Sound, nāda. This supreme sound passes through several stages and modifications before it reaches the plane of human speech, audible to the human ears and when it is grasped on the physical level, that sound is OM. This syllable OM is regarded as the symbol of Brahman. It is the sound-body of Brahman, the creative

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Spirit. The ancients regarded it as the creative Word, for in their conception, all creation proceeds out of the Word, Logos and OM is the sound-symbol of that potent Word.

As you know there are what are called bījaksaras, seed-syllables, in the Tantras. Now these syllables represent the sound equivalents of the vibrations that accompany the manifestation of particular Deities. If these sound vibrations are reproduced by repeating the seed-syllables, the Science of Mantra declares, a magnetic field is created evoking the presence of the concerned Deities. And of all these bijaksaras, OM is the pre-eminent for it stands for Brahman, the Supreme Reality itself.

Q: Why did the Rishis chant OM in their ceremonies?

A: To evoke the indwelling Godhead in themselves, to stir up the soul to rise in full-throated invocation to the Gods above and the Supreme transcendent of all. OM to the Rishis is the means of ascent to the realms of the Spirit, the Word of Call to the Gods to come down and participate in the yajna

Q: So OM is the goal?

A: It is rather the Source of all. All the letters of the alphabet by which expression is rendered possible proceed out of OM. All the states of Consciousness, the planes of manifestation are contained in the all-embracing OM. All harmonies and rhythms of creation are traced to the womb of OM. The ancients sought the secret of harmonies, the Divine Being itself, through nāda upāsanā, adoration and sadhana of Sound, of which OM is the key. They sought the Divine through this Sound-Form, pursued and reached Him through nāda which is His Sound-Body. Take for instance the symbol word OM. One starts repeating it at the physical level. Gradually as the concentration gathers and the consciousness is put in tune with its vibrations, even when the physical repetition ceases, the sound goes on repeating itself. And through these vibrations of subtle sound, one enters into the OM sound-rhythms that pervade the whole universe. From subtle to subtler and thence to still subtler, till the subtlest

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vibration of OM leads to what is behind it — the Reality.

Q: How to incorporate this truth in music? My active interest started from a vision that I had. There was a chariot of OM and harnessed to it were several horses. What does it all mean?

A: The chariot represents a dynamic — not static — Reality; it is a Reality that is on the move i.e. in manifestation. The horses are the Powers of that Reality effecting the movement of manifestation. And they are seven in number, exactly corresponding to the seven Principles of Creation in the Vedic thought.

Q: We have seven swaras, notes, in music.

A: Exactly. These svaras answer to the sevenfold manifestation of the Cosmos. Everything proceeds in septuples: seven Planes, seven Rays, seven Rivers, seven Earths and so on.

Q: But then there are other groupings like Twenty-one etc.

A: They are all sub-divisions, varied combinations effected to work out the multiplicity. The main Notes are Seven. In the vision, the seven horses are the seven Harmonies that issue from the Mother-Word and weave the whole universe in their combined rhythms. Music is a powerful means to arrive at the Divine. Only one should not get lost in the outer frame of music, give too much importance to the technical side of it to the exclusion of the spirit, the soul that is to be felt, experienced and expressed in its rhythms.

You may usefully read chapter 14 in the Conversations of the Mother on Art and Music. That will give you the right perspective. The emphasis should be on discovering the inner rhythms first; the science and practice of OM, the Pranaoa, is a powerful means thereto. Once the inner rhythms are discovered or created and stabilised, they are to be rendered in external sound-harmonies so that music is a means of spiritual growth both for oneself and for others. Music becomes a veritable Yoga-Sadhana, a practice leading to union with the Divine.

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As part of Yoga, the potentialities of OM are amazing. It is a magazine of Power that goes on unrolling itself. Vibrations of fear, restlessness, depression are quickly dispelled by the slow chanting of OM. It brings a fresh accession of strength, detachment, a sense of liberation.

¹3-4-73 

M. P. PANDIT

P.S.

There was an interesting sequel to the above discussion. As we were talking, there were a number of interruptions all of which the youngster sat patiently through. One person who stood there for a couple of minutes and went out on work, found herself enveloped by waves of OM, OM, OM. Obviously the nāda-brahman was present.

Later in the evening — at about 9.30 p.m. — my sister who knew nothing at all of this discussion in our office, woke up to a crescendo of Omkar, a continuous and growing nāda in the house. When she mentioned it to me in the early hours of the morning, it was clear to me: nāda-brahman had bestowed His Grace.

M.

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SRI AUROBINDO'S INTEGRAL PHILOSOPHY

SRI Aurobindo arrived at what may be called the Absolute, after exercising his mind over all the categories of existence, as also by meditating on the truth of life. Normally, man is baffled by the dualities and the pluralities he comes across, both in his daily experience and the thought processes through which his intellect, reasoning and logic take him. Spirit and matter, the one and the many, the black and the white, the good and the evil are all true to human experience. But man's mind is not satisfied with this experience of duality and always wants to find out a unity which it conceives as the basic truth.

Sri Aurobindo eliminates this duality and asserts that spirit is matter in intension, and matter is spirit in extension. The Absolute is beyond this duality but is that which has the capacity to be both without losing its own absoluteness.

Physics which approaches matter without any theological or spiritual or philosophical perspective to hamper it, has already come to the conclusion that what exists in essence is Energy, and all that is experienced is but the varied formations of one single indivisible energy in its infinite and eternal manifestation. Sri Aurobindo would say that this ENERGY cannot be mechanical in its process of manifestation since infinite variety without mechanical repetition is the characteristic of this manifestation. This indeterminateness and variety is exactly attributable to the "will" of the Absolute which cannot further be explained. That is where the Purushottama, the Supreme Person of Sri Aurobindo, comes in. The manifestation is the Divine Play in which the player, the play, and the witness of the play are all from the Absolute, in the Absolute and not beyond or behind or above the Absolute.

Here the Shanti Mantra of the Ishavasya Upanishad, "Pūrna-madah pūrnamidam pūrnāt pūrnamudocyate; pūrnasya pūrnamādāya pūrnamavāvaśisyate", can be profitably quoted. "From what is whole and complete and perfect eternally and infinitely, emerges this cosmos which too is whole, complete and perfect at each moment of its existence. The whole and complete and perfect when subtracted from that which is whole and complete and perfect,

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that which is whole and complete and perfect remains the same fore-ever without losing anything." Mathematics also teaches us that infinity subtracted from infinity remains infinity! So, while duality and plurality and what not, are truths of our experience on account of the limitations of relativity, everything at every moment of its life is whole and perfect, seen from the point of view of the Absolute and of total reality.

Sri Aurobindo poetically describes the whole process as follows: "World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva (Absolute) which multiplies the body of God numberlessly to the view; it leaves that 'white existence' (Absolute) precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of dancing" (The Life Divine). The involution therefore starts, if what is eternal can have a start, as a matter of the will of the Absolute; we call it "will" because we have no other word to use. In fact, it is neither will nor non-will as it is beyond categories and dualities. However, since the "why" of it is beyond the power of man to know, we start with involution and try to get to know the how of the evolution which follows involution.

The order of involution is conceived by Sri Aurobindo as follows: Existence (sat), Consciousness-force (chit), Bliss (ananda), Supermind, Mind, Psyche (soul), Life, Matter. Evolution would be naturally in the reverse order. His view is that at the present stage, matter, life, mind have been evolving and the next step would be that of reaching the Supermind which will lead to Bliss or Life Divine. Here Sri Aurobindo has introduced a new idea and that is the conscious participation of man in the present and the coming stages of evolution. The cosmic process is bound to go on and evolution is on, without let or hindrance. The dawn of the Supermind is already on the horizon; but since man has now become self-conscious and is capable of understanding the process of evolution, it is possible and also necessary for him to hasten the process by his efforts and keep himself ready for the stage of the dominance of the Supermind in the place of the mind. Man, which may mean the advance guard of humanity, has transcended the geospheric and the biosphere existence and is already in the psycho sphere. But the next step is of supreme importance since the psycho sphere is full

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of limitations and weaknesses of many types. Man is subject to and limited by egoistic urges; his mind is not capable of knowing truth directly; his joy is often and almost always mixed with sorrow; the promising thing however is his urge for pure joy, his appreciation of selfless love, and his ambition for transcendence.

All that can follow, and his urge will be fulfilled, when the Supermind gains predominance. It is capable of truth-consciousness, of joy abounding, and of love without the curse of desire, libido or self. But unlike other theories, Sri Aurobindo's conception is that this is not a transcendence by leaving behind mind, life and matter as they are, and going beyond them, and assuming new garbs; but in the process, there has to be a transformation or even a transmutation of mind, life and matter. He conceives that even earthly immortality is a possibility since matter and life can be transformed by the power of the Supermind to yield richer dividends by becoming purer, subtler or capable of sustaining life in the material body indefinitely.

Evolution therefore does not mean for Sri Aurobindo merely a higher stage only of the mind and the whole of consciousness but the simultaneous transformation of matter itself. This leads us to the conclusion that heaven or higher levels of existence do not mean merely escape of the soul to higher regions but the transformation of gross matter and our limbs and faculties into nobler instruments of the life divine. This, Sri Aurobindo says, is the duty and function of man now awakened to the possibility of the Supermind taking possession of the whole of terrestrial life pertaining to man and sublimating it.

This idea of Sri Aurobindo regarding evolution gives no quarter to any positive existence of evil or ignorance or darkness: they are all negative and of temporary nature. What is happening is, what is involved is being evolved and as higher stages are reached, the lower ones are eliminated without any trace being left behind, because the whole process of evolution is not merely going beyond, leaving behind something in its own place, but transcending all by transformation and transmutation of every thing on the way.

It is not that a soul goes through bodies of flesh and blood keeping them where they were, but in the course of evolution the gross

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would be transformed into the subtle in order to be adequate instruments for higher ascension. This higher ascension, while it is in the very scheme of things, calls upon humanity to expedite it by conscious effort, which means the discipline called yoga. In this view, the yoga has to be integral and whole in order that the ascension is total, of body, mind and life. There is not to be a yoga of the body and mind only or the vital powers only. Man consists of all these together, matter, life and mind at the present stage. He is to evolve in his psyche or soul, no doubt, but he is to ascend by invoking the supermind for transforming the instruments as well, so that there is a total transformation. There might be an alternative path which is current, that of escape of individuals; but for Sri Aurobindo the ideal is not of escape from matter into spirit nor of individual salvation to the exclusion of humanity. It is a total transcendence by transformation, and not of one but of all. The Absolute which is whole and integral cannot consist at the same time of bits and pieces, individuals who can save themselves alone. This is the meaning of Integral Philosophy and of Integral Yoga. To spiritualise matter must be the aim of evolution and not escape from matter.

The Absolute is no doubt the fundamental reality but dynamism, movement, energy is as much a reality. Two fundamental facts, seemingly contradictory, '"being" and "becoming" are there, but both these aspects are synthesised in the Absolute, which is beyond both. Man must realise that escape from "becoming" is but a partial way. Egoless, passionless detached existence in "becoming", which is ever evolving in a spiral, without losing sight of "being" which is the ground of all ''becoming", is the perception which is real spiritual perception, and spontaneous "being-becoming" is the final philosophy.

Sri Aurobindo's perception of the Absolute, of which being-becoming are the relative aspects, and which are there on account of the pure bliss or Ananda which is the basic characteristic of the Absolute, is confirmed by the Upanishadic text, "ānandāt hi eva khalu imāni bhūtāni jāyante, ānandena jātāni jīvanti, ānande prayānti abhisamviśanti; yadi ākāśe ānando na syāt ko vā anyāt ko prānyāt".

One would however say, that this is not true to experience;

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there is evil, there is sorrow, there is imperfection; the soul of man hankering after pure good, after unmixed joys, after perfection is hampered by the contradictories of evil, sorrow, and imperfection. Here again, rising above the dualities is the way of perceiving the truth. Matter is not all matter, spirit is still in matter, and it is that spirit which will transform matter into subtler forms. So too, evil, sorrow, imperfection are not totally so, finally so. They are negatively so in the course of involution. They have no positive existence. Our evolution, the evolution of the human psyche is exactly the remedy which will make us realise the temporariness and the negative nature of evil, sorrow, and imperfection. Sri Aurobindo is one with other idealists in this matter. The highest condition of the human psyche is beyond "good and evil". So is the highest joy, beyond joy and sorrow. It is while man is in the lower rungs of the ladder of evolution that pleasure and pain are experienced as they are; but widening and deepening of consciousness will carry man to a height where pleasure and pain would be equally enjoyable as aspects of 'essential being'. Man has already gone beyond the stage of animals; he knows and experiences evil, sorrow, imperfection in quite a different way and from a higher standpoint. His nervous system, his brain-power too are capable of experiencing far greater and subtler forms of these things and their contradictions. At the same time, man has the perception that he can go beyond the dualities, and hence his conscious attempt at total bliss which can transcend the dualities and partake of the Ananda of the Absolute.

It is obvious that our finite mind and our present stage of evolution are responsible for our experience of evil, sorrow, imperfection. Which then is the force other than our faltering, blundering mind using always the trial and error method, which can bridge the gulf between the negative aspects such as evil, sorrow and imperfection of the truth of existence, and the positive aspects of good, joy and perfection? Involved we are, evolve we must. But who and what force is taking us out of this rut? Sri Aurobindo answers: the Supermind. It is the truth-conscious force of the evolutionary urge which is inherent. Being Truth-Conscious, it is naturally good-conscious, joy-conscious, and perfection-conscious. While man is carrying with him all the negative forces and the burdens of involution

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in his sub consciousness and thus clogged in his path of evolution, it is the Supermind in the super-conscious region which is carrying man beyond the dualities to the new world of goodness, of joyfulness, and of perfection.

We have already seen that self-consciousness or the conscious self is but a small part of man's consciousness. In fact, man cannot be said to be all conscious of himself even during the whole of his waking day; what to speak of his hours of sleep and dream and when indulging in the luxury of imagination! His conscious self is sandwiched between his sub-consciousness, and what is called unconsciousness on the one hand and the superconsciousness on the other. Nature seems to have brought together in juxtaposition or in confrontation the forces of involution and evolution in man, since man alone among animals is conscious both of involution and evolution. It is man's privilege to know both and consciously participate in the epic adventure of evolution towards higher levels of nobler living in truth-consciousness.

Since Supermind is somewhat a new idea, it has to be distinguished and characterised. So far as mind is concerned, it is described by Sri Aurobindo as that power of consciousness which tries to interpret the truth of universal existence for the practical uses of a certain order of things. It is not the power which either guides existence nor the power which created or manifested existence. Supermind however is the Real-Idea, the Rita-chit of Rigveda. It is "a power of conscious Force expressive of real being, and partaking of its nature, and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fiction. It is conscious Reality throwing itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance" (Life Divine Vol. I). In substance, Supermind can be said to be the Creative force and power and the will to evolve through involution to higher and higher levels. Mind is essentially a power to analyse and think only in terms of parts and almost always with a view to action. It is beyond its depth in the realm of conceiving things in their totality. Even when it thinks of a totality, the totality is an aggregate and not an integral whole.

The communication between Supermind and the mind is sometimes through intuition. Sri Aurobindo calls it a communication from "above". He says, "Intuition brings to man those brilliant

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messages which are the beginnings of his higher knowledge". But in the course of communication to the mind, intuition often gets weakened on account of the mental process of reasoning.

With the conception of the Supermind as the vital link between involution and evolution, the outlines of the basic structure of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy may be said to be there. It cannot be called pure philosophy or metaphysics as the normal meanings go. What he has stated and explained through volumes is the thought and structure of existence as it presented itself to him. He has begun with himself as a conscious human being with all the Umitation imposed by nature at the present stage of evolution. He takes man's inner aspiration, which is universal, to joy, to harmony, to perfection in knowledge as well as in action, to immortality, as the basic urges of evolution from the involution which has taken place. Since man is conscious of all these, since he has his conscience which points to the higher levels of existence as distinct from the lower ones, Sri Aurobindo asks man to participate consciously in the evolutionary march in the present cycle. The eternal spiral of ascent is there but what is relevant and immediate is the present cycle.

To sum up, the Absolute is self-existent eternal, infinite. It is the nature of Sat (Reality-Truth-Existence), Chit (Consciousness-Force), Ananda (Bliss-Joy abounding). Out of Joy and Ananda and for joy there is creation which is necessarily an involution, a kind of seeming lessening of reality or extension of conscious force. In the process, Existence, Consciousness Force, Bliss, Supermind, Mind, Psyche, Life, Matter is the descending involuntary order. In evolution, the ascending order has to be in the ascending order since the cycle has to be complete before the next and higher cycle is to begin. While ascending, the Supermind which is the creative Force, is to provide the power of ascension. But the evolution, in Sri Aurobindo's view, is not the abandoning of the lower orders of existence but the transformation and transmutation of all the lower orders as evolution proceeds. Man's soul or Psyche when evolving and ascending to a higher level, is also transforming life and matter to a higher level, thus making them better instruments of ascension. Here Sri Aurobindo gives a call to humanity to participate in the evolution that is already on, consciously by yoga, that is, conscious

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evolution. Yoga is the science and art of purifying and developing all the energies of man with a view to canalising them as instruments of illumination and evolution. Since man is self-conscious and has developed the power to know the good and eschew the evil, he has the responsibility of helping his own evolution to higher levels. When doing so, he is to transform his mind, life and matter, and also take the whole of humanity with him. Evolution is not escape only of the individual soul to higher levels but a transformation of all the instruments and the totality of human beings.

It is no doubt a new chapter which Sri Aurobindo had added to the current ideas, both of Vedanta and Yoga. To that extent it is a call for thought and new evaluation.

R. R. DIWAKAR

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FUTURE OF INDIA:

The Question of Leadership

''WE are convinced, of course," wrote Sri Aurobindo in the first decade of the century, "that India is destined to rise again... but... we must prepare the atmosphere, purify it by our own deeds of love, strength and humanitarian self-sacrifice. The educated classes are now the repositories of the hope of resurgence; it is in them that the spirit has entered, to them the masses look for guidance. Their duty is to be worthy of their mission, to bring hope, strength and light into the lives of their down-trodden countrymen."¹

What kind of leadership are the educated classes going to provide that the masses may rise again and carry India to the fulfilment of her mission? What must be their qualities of head and heart, what their training and background? These are questions of some moment to which Sri Aurobindo has provided adequate answers in his old writings. Let us consider some of them.

First, the question of age, a question bristling with difficulties in a country like India where age has always enjoyed the automatic privilege of being obeyed. On this point, Sri Aurobindo's answer is categoric.

Regeneration, he has said in no uncertain terms is not the work of the aged, the cautious, the hesitant. One may wonder why he should have been so hard on the older generation. The answer is not far to seek. The regeneration that we seek is no to be had with a few changes of detail and tinkerings with the superficialities of our national life. What is needed is a radical change, a thorough overhaul of our ways of being and thinking and acting, so as to make us fit as a nation to meet the challenge of the modern world and the glorious future that awaits us.

"From the beginning of the national movement, in spite of its enthusiasm, force, innate greatness, a defect has made itself

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apparent," wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1910, "a fatality of insufficient effectiveness has pursued it, which showed that there was a serious flaw somewhere in this brilliant opening of a new era.... The great flaw was the attempt to combine the new with the old, to subject the conduct of the resurgence of India to the aged, the cautious, the hesitating, men out of sympathy with the spirit of the new age, unable to grasp the needs of the future, afraid to apply the bold and radical methods which could alone transform the nation, sweep out the rottenness in our former corrupt nature and, by purifying Bengal, purify India."²

When, a little earlier, Sri Aurobindo had declared:

"The future belongs to the young. It is a young and new world which is now under process of development and it is the young who must create it,³"

he was not indulging in rhetoric. He was merely drawing on recent experience.

"From the very beginning of the Swadeshi movement, our boys have been its very soul. It is their hearts that have been stirred in every chord by the new national sentiment. They have set it afoot where it was non-existent, they have given pace to it where it was languid. They have fought the apathy, conservatism, scepticism and the timidity of the elders to make it a success. They have been abused, censured, exiled, persecuted. But still they have held out.... They only feel while others act on a stage. They only serve the country while others serve themselves. They are the leaders, they are the followers. The boys only are the hopes of the country in this her critical time. They have done much and they will do a great deal more.... They are the chosen instruments of God."⁴

A question arose then, and it is likely to be repeated in the future. Does all this mean that there will be no respect for authority? Shall we drop the men who have so far led us, merely because they have

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grown old? A very pertinent question that demands a clear answer.

"It is asked of us whether we are going to upset all authority, disregard discipline and overthrow the natural pre-eminence of men who have long worked for their country. This question is the expression of an inevitable feeling of personal pique forced from them by the sense of exasperation which the loss of prestige and power cannot fail to create. If we answer this question at all, it is because it takes its stand on points of general importance instead of appearing in its native character of personal feeling. The authority of a political leader depends on his capacity to feel and express the sentiments of the people who follow him; it does not reside in himself. He holds his position because he is a representative man, not because he is such and such an individual........If he has fallen behind the times, his only course is to stand aside; but to demand that because he is there and wishes to remain, the march of the world shall wait upon his fears and hesitations is to make a claim against which the reason and conscience of humanity rebels."⁵

After all, why do we follow a leader, what is his necessity?

"The people follow a leader because he best interprets their ideas, aims and feelings or because he shows himself the best fitted to organise and lead the popular forces to the realisation of popular aspirations and ideals, and the moment their confidence is shaken, the moment they begin to think he does not represent their best ideas and aspirations, or that his methods of leadership are mistaken, the authority begins to depart out of him. There can be no other kind of authority in democratic politics, nor can popular leadership be self-constituted."⁶

This brings us to the question of leadership qualities.

This question has to be considered in its two aspects, the general

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and the particular. There are certain qualities that are demanded of leadership in all countries, under practically every circumstance. There are others that will be needed for the specific task of India's regeneration. The first question first:

"Whoever does not delight", opines Sri Aurobindo, "in being one of the multitude and has no desire to share their joys and sorrows can hardly do any good to mankind. He may be a genius. But his genius only proves to be a curse to his race and smothers their possibilities.......The great men of the world who were born to bring about the real advancement of mankind had a marked democratic tendency. They were more anxious to raise than to rise........Though they were themselves highly gifted, they never showed any contempt for the common run of people, but on the contrary, they freely mixed with them, worked for them and as one of them.... They must mix with all, consult and use their exceptional capacities to do their will."⁷

And the leader must know exactly where he belongs, the particular task and no other that he is called upon to perform.

"If the work is to be well done, each man must recognise his proper work and do it. The clash of conflicting egoisms, the desire to monopolise, the pride of success must disappear from our midst, and be replaced by... an enthusiasm of sacrifice, an exalted conception of the high Power at work and the constant sense that we are only His instruments.... If anyone tries to out step his sphere and appropriate the work of others, there will be confusion, disturbance of harmony and temporary failure. The only way to avoid it is for all to realise that the work is not theirs, that their right is only to a portion, that no man is indispensable and only so long as he acts within his own province and on the lines laid down for him by his capacities, his inspiration and circumstances, is he even useful."⁸

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Next as to the specific qualities needed for the task of leadership in India, at the present moment of crisis in her destiny.

Sri Aurobindo was never tired of insisting that the present moment is fraught with particular importance, because there is a Divine Power at work to raise India from the dust, that all we do whether it be a failure or a success from the outward point of view is being turned by a Supreme Artificer to serve His ends, to help in the regeneration of India that she may assist a general upward movement towards the Spirit in the rest of mankind.

"The fiat of God has gone out to the Indian nation, "Unite, be free, be one, be great." he declared in his great speech at Howrah⁹. "We say", he repeats in the Karmayogin, "that just now India is being raised up and everything tends to God's purpose in raising her up, even calamity, even evil, even error....We said 'just now, because it is not true that God has always raised up India and always there has been an upward trend.... "¹⁰

The very first prerequisite of successful leadership in the India of today is therefore this faith in the Divine Purpose, a faith that nothing must be allowed to shake. That is why Sri Aurobindo has always said that the worker for India's regeneration must realise first and above all that it is no personal work in which he is engaged, it is God's work and that the measure of his success would depend on the strength of this faith in him. That is why he says in his stirring address to the youth of the nation:

"God does not want falterers and flinchers for his work, nor does he want unstable enthusiasts who cannot maintain the energy of their first movements... let them do nothing in a light even if fervent enthusiasm, moving forward without due consideration and then showing a weakness unworthy of the nation to which they belong and the work to which they have been called."¹¹

Another point which is apt to be missed often is that the regeneration of a nation like ours must of necessity be a many-sided affair,

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and must therefore need a vast catholicity and many-sidedness in its leadership.

"The nation must develop military and political greatness and activity, intellectual and aesthetic greatness and activity, commercial greatness and activity, moral sanity and vigour; it cannot sacrifice any of these functions of the organism without making itself unfit for the struggle for life and finally succumbing and perishing under the pressure of more highly-organised nations."¹² "The men who would lead India must be catholic and many-sided. When the Avatar comes, we like to believe that he will be not only the religious guide, but the political leader, the great educationist, the regenerator of society, the captain of co-operative industry, with the soul of the poet, scholar and artist. He will be in short the summary and grand type of the future Indian nation which is rising to reshape and lead the world."¹³

What it may be asked, will be the role of wealth in the leadership of future India? On this point, Sri Aurobindo's answer may seem to be harsh. To avoid any misunderstanding of his position, it may well be prudent to state at the outset that he does not advocate a general poverty and contempt for wealth as the ideal to be set before the nation; he wants and he has stated in no uncertain terms that India must get wealth first before she can hope to achieve anything. But that is not to say that the getting of wealth should dominate all our thoughts, or that we should bow down to the leadership of men who possess wealth in substantial quantity and have no other claim to leadership. Far from it, for he makes it quite plain that the wealthy classes are to be respected in free India for what they are and not for what they have. The apotheosis of wealth is a Western vice which we must shun; for wealth without culture adds to grossness, ministers to the body and not the mind, obscures the vision.

"Modern India, if she is a chip of the old block will never acknowledge the lead of wealth.... Rags which are the reproach of

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poverty have never been held in contempt where they have wrapped up intellect and character...."¹⁴

The plutocrat imagines that wealth gives him a natural right to lead. By some perversity of human logic, the rich are supposed to have a real stake in the future of the land, as if the rest of the people do not, or rather need not care what the future might bring. This is entirely incongruous in the Indian context,

"Where the kings have bowed their heads to intellect and character, where they have depended on the unerring guidance of the spiritually great for the safe conduct of the affairs if the state.. ."¹⁵

In a word, autocracy in any form cannot be tolerated. "Let there be only one dictator — the People."¹⁶

But, we may conclude with Sri Aurobindo, "The highest qualities of head and heart cannot keep the lead for men who have not the saving grace of openness to this passion for India as she was, is and will be. On the other hand, men perhaps of inferior calibre are likely to do better work for the country, who have the power to respond...¹⁷"

Why should this be so? Because "The root of the past is the source from which the future draws its sap..."¹⁸

"Every nation has certain sources of vitality which have made it what it is and can always, if drawn upon in time, protect it from disintegration. The secret of its life is to be found in the recesses of its own being."¹⁹

But there is a deeper reason, which applies with particular force to the problem of India's resurgence. The push to this resurgence came from the central idea underlying the beginning of the national movement, the ideal of "becoming ourselves".

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"The return to ourselves is the cardinal feature of the national movement. It is national not only in the sense of political self-assertion against the domination of foreigners, but in the sense of a return upon our old national individuality. It is significant that... those who keep in its forefront are being more and more suffused with the spirit of "Indianity" and overcome with the spell of India, the magic of her thought and civilisation..."²⁰

For, in the final analysis, no nation can survive unless there develops a sense of national honour. It is this want of a true sense of national honour that has repeatedly brought India under foreign subjection and has stood in the way of unity, and the story may well be repeated in the future if we do not take this lesson to heart. The British rulers of India committed their great mistake when they misjudged the possibility of India ever becoming "honour-conscious". The Bengal Partition of 1905 was the first of a series of capital errors. The leaders of the Swadeshi Movement immediately seized on the blunder and appealing eloquently to the national self-respect of India created for the first time in recent history a national patriotism and a demand for complete freedom. It was precisely because our self-respect was again hurt by the Rowlett Act and the imposition of the Simon Commission and the Viceroy's unilateral Declaration of War that the subsequent Movements could be successfully launched and India carried to victory. It is this sense of national honour that we must at any cost seek to preserve if we are to keep our freedom and unity.

What is this sense of national honour or self-respect? Sri Aurobindo put it like this in the Bandemataram:

"The sense of self-respect, if it has any meaning, means a consciousness of the potentiality of each individual self; and ambition and aspiration are ever at work to facilitate and complete this work of self-realisation either on the part of an individual or a nation. The present unrest in India [he was here referring to the Swadeshi era] only indicates an attempt at self-assertion — it is all the work of the awakened self-respect of the nation."²¹

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He emphasised once again the same point, while discussing the future of democracy in India with Lala Lajpat Rai when the latter came to see him in 1925.

"The lust for power will always be there. You cannot get over it by shutting out all positions of power; our workers must get accustomed to it. They must learn to hold the positions for the nation

What you have to do is to bring about that discipline and that sense of national honour in our people."²²

A sense of national honour is primarily a matter of pride in our national worth, and like all things that pertain to the emotions, has a certain element of unreason about it. But it has its utility; and even if it sounds like obscurantism, even if we look offensive to foreign eyes, we cannot afford to neglect this salutary attitude of mind, at least for a certain period of our development as a new nation. Every nation small or great has had to pass through this adolescent phase and many have not got over it completely yet. And be it noted that this is not an entirely irrational attitude. The pride in our past and a strong faith in the future must evidently be based on solid fact, or else they would evaporate at the first touch of reality. It will therefore be one of our first duties to teach the rising generation and the adults too if possible that India has achieved something truly worthwhile in her millennial past and that a still more glorious destiny is the promise of the future.

To know oneself, to become identified with one's true being is no easy task, and it cannot be done in a day, either for the individual or for the nation. This is first of all a question of faith; but the faith must be backed by knowledge, and the knowledge has to be acquired by a careful study of the meaning of our past. This is the task to which the leadership of the future has to devote itself. In this it will be aided by a fact of great importance to the future; that is the faith

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ingrained in the most illiterate of our countrymen by a long series of religious men who had the faith in themselves.

"The work of the Nationalist is to bring the message of his faith to every Indian. There is one circumstance which specially invests that work with the promise of success. It is the belief that every Indian instinctively cherishes in the greatness of his country. Ask the Indian of the obscurest village, 'Which is the greatest country in the world?' and he will unhesitatingly answer, 'India'. Press him for a reason and he will tell you, 'It is because this country has produced the world's finest men, the Rishis of old....' It is this deep-rooted faith of a people in its ancient greatness that is the surest guarantee of its future."²³

But there is one thing that cannot be allowed to be forgotten. The Deity who presides over the destinies of India is no other than the Divine Mother, the supreme Mahashakti who is now incarnate on earth and has been worshipped by the patriots as Mother India. She it is who will give us everything we need, but she will not give it for nothing. We have to be ready to sacrifice our little ego at her altar. That is after all the meaning of spirituality, and an essential condition of success in a work that God leads.

"As Chaitanya ceased to be Nimai Pandit and became Krishna, became Radha, became Balarama, so every one of us must cease to cherish his separate life and live in the nation. The hope of national regeneration must absorb our minds as the idea of salvation absorbs the minds of the mumuksu. Our tyāga must be as complete as the tyāga of the nameless ascetic. Our passion to see the face of our free and glorified Mother must be as devouring a madness as the passion of Chaitanya to see the face of Sri Krishna. Our sacrifice for the country must be as enthusiastic and complete as that of jagai and Madhai who left the rule of a kingdom to follow the Samkirtan of Gauranga. Our offerings on the altar must be as wildly liberal, as remorselessly

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complete as that of Carthagenian parents who passed their children through the fire to Moloch....

We are still hesitating between ourselves and the country; we would give one anna to the service of the Mother and keep fifteen for ourselves, our wives, our children, our property, our fame and reputation, our safety, our ease. The Mother asks all before she will give herself. Not until Surath Raja offered the blood of his veins did the Mother appear to him and asked him to choose his boon. Not until Shivaji was ready to offer his head at the feet of the Mother, did Bhavani in visible form stay his hand and give him the command to free his people.

Those who have freed nations have first passed through the agony of utter renunciation before their efforts were crowned with success, and those who aspire to free India will first have to pay the price which the Mother demands....

She asks of us, "How many will live for me? How many will die for me" and awaits our answer."²⁴

India is free. But the demand of the Mother remains.

SANAT K. BANERJI

References

1. Bandemataram, 31.3.08, "The Next Step".

2. Karmayogin, 1.1.10, "National Education".

3. Ibid., 7.8.09.,"Youth and the Bureaucracy".

4. Bandemataram, 12.4.07., "The Chosen Instruments of God".

5. Ibid., 9.2.08., "Revolutions and Leadership".

6. Ibid., 15.12.07., "About Unmistakable Terms".

7. Ibid., 5.11.07., "Sri Krishna and Autocracy".

8. Ibid., 27.3.08., "Tomorrow's Meeting".

9. Speeches, "The Right of Association".

10. Karmayogin, 17.7.09., "Our Inconsistency".

11. Ibid., 7.8.09., "Youth and the Bureaucracy".

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12. Bandemataram, 29.4.07., "National Development and Foreign Rule".

13. Karmayogin, 25.9.09. "The Past and the Future".

14. Bandemataram, 1.9.07., "Does Wealth ever Lead".

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 10.4.07., "Pherozshahi at Surat".

17. Ibid., 14.4.08., "Indian Resurgence and Europe".

18. Ibid., 25.4.08., "The One Thing Needful".

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 14.4.08., "Indian Resurgence and Europe".

21. Ibid., 27.7.07. "The Meaning of the Unrest".

22. Purani, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, First Series, p 65.

23. Bandemataram, 3.9.07., "The Nationalist's Faith and Hope".

24. Ibid., 12.4.08. "The Demand of the Mother."

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REVIEW

Studies in Indo-Anglian Poetry by V. K. Gokak. Publishers Sai Ratan Agency, pp. 212.

THIS is a stimulating and livery supplement to the author's earlier compilation, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry (18251965) which is the first comprehensive anthology of English verse written by Indians. Prof. V. K. Gokak combines in himself the fine taste of a critic, the capacity for dispassionate appraisal of a research scholar and an academician and the vibrant critical impressionism of a creative writer. His Golden Treasury contains quite a few poems which will delight and awaken responses to ' new areas and dimensions of the Muse.

British domination of India began at a period in Indian history when she was afflicted with spiritual stagnation and psychic sterility. British influence swamped us with new ideas in every field of our lives, — cultural, social and political. English language, made compulsory and the medium of instruction—became the opening wedge of this Renaissance. English became the window to all European thought and activity. In the field of literature also it acted as a potent rod and awakened our sensibilities to hitherto undisovered realms of gold. India woke up from her age-long torpor and lifted the bow of the English language and launched an equally all-sweeping counter-offensive on the Occident and smote it astir to new spiritual horizons.

The book under review and the anthology afford us a period-by-period canter across a brief but crowded panorama covering a century and a half of Indo-Anglian poetry.

The early pioneers in this field trailed in the wake of the trends and movements prevailing in England—Romantic, Victorian, post-Victorian decadent and symbolist. As Prof. Gokak rightly observes, "There are cosmopolitan humanists to whom the fact that they five in India is but a geographical accident. On the other hand, there are the 'pure' artists to whom the sights and sounds and the colours and tones of the Indian scene are 'paradise enow'. To experience them and to bring out their significance is, for these artists, a satisfying task and a real fulfilment, without getting involved in their

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metaphysical implications. There are also the others who are primarily seekers of truth and who find themselves evolving a synthesis of eastern and western values in degrees that vary according to their vision of truth". There are others I should add, who aim at reflecting the urgencies and actualities of the contemporary scene and sometimes lapse into the fatal error of affecting a rakish up-to-dateness and sniff at any poetry that might carry a universal appeal.

The author charts two lines of development that the Indo-Anglian muse has traced. To begin with the Indo-Anglian poets walked in the footsteps of the English poets. Poets like Derozzio wrote in the romantic strains of Scott and Byron. But, I must say, Derozzio's poetry glows with genuine warmth of feeling and imaginative vision. They were succeeded by the Victorians and then in the last decade of the nineteenth century — the golden period of Indo-Anglian poetry according to the author — we witnessed the jewelled verses of Sarojini Naidu, Manmohan Ghose and Sri Aurobindo's 'Songs to Myrtilla'. The poems of the fin de siècle are modelled on the vogue set by the Decadents in England. Here I cannot fully concur with Prof. Gokak. In 'Songs to Myrtilla' there are no doubt a few poems which echo the wistful, languid and melancholy cadences of the Decadents but there are many, the Irish poems for instance, which are full of vigour and robust vitality and the verse-texture is taut and sinuous and strikes with a metallic resonance.

The second fine of development enshrines with more and more power and originality both in diction and imagery the true Indian spirit and turn of the mind and bodies forth the most intimate spiritual ardours and visions of the poets. It can be said that the Indian writers in all genres turned outward to Europe and inward to their own spiritual heritage. This is evident in the other sister arts of music, painting and sculpture.

The second chapter provides us with a rich fare of translations into English by such competent hands as Dr. N. V. Thadani, Prema Nandakumar and Sri Aurobindo. "Translation" as a critic remarked in The Times Literary Supplement ''in case of modern languages has become an essential part of our eclectic and polyglot culture, which flourishes as the world's distances and boundaries shrink." Translation

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of poetry from one language to another makes heavy demands on the translator; for, he has to capture and transplant all the delicate shades of tone, rhythm, imagery and diction into another language and one recalls the lines by Browning:

Oh the little more and how much it is,

And the little less and worlds away!

The most felicitous renderings are by Prof. Gokak himself of the Karnatak doyen of poets Bendre's poem ^'O Narayan'. Lines like the following kindle the imagination and haunt the memory:

...Make my hapless soul pure gold.

Be Thou the white-hot fire and enfold

My body in Thy arms. All liquefied

Soul-essence, am I then Thy chosen bride.

Like thousand suns with scorching lustre blaze

And burn away the alloy of my days.

And these lines blazing with the white-heat of spiritual passion:

My heart is buried under the snows of peace.

Lash me with lightnings; sun me into release.

The above lines carry the ardour of Donne and the perfect skill of Pope. Similarly Lila Ray's rendering of A. Shankar Ray's Birthday is an exquisite and charming lyric redolent of the best Jacobean songs.

In the third chapter the author serves us with specimens of 'The Failures of Indo-Anglian Poetry'. This spells a tedious wading through the morass of thirty pages of verse better-forgotten and after plodding through this sour-faced chapter the reviewer reaches for his decanter and asks, "Might not the tact and taste of the critic have intervened to check the corrective zeal of the grammarian?" But it goes to his credit that he analyzes the causes of this incompetence with more sympathy than scorn knowing fully the formidable

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difficulties that beset the Indian writer when he decides to write in English.

In the fourth chapter he explores the substance of Indo-Anglian poetry which breaks up into four recurrent themes viz., Nature, Love, Man and the Human Heritage. The best Indian poetry in English is metaphysical, ecstatic, mystical and spiritual. This chapter contains some of the finest lines in world-poetry such as the following by Harindranath's 'Ecstasy':

Who knows in what vast sorrow thou dost make

So much eternal beauty for our sake?

Or the following from Sarojini Naidu's 'Caprice' giving a 'touching idea of the trials and tribulations that love has to face':

You held a wine-cup in your finger-tips

Lightly you drank and flung away the bowl...

Alas! it was my soul.

Two most rewarding chapters are devoted to Manmohan Ghose and Sarojini Naidu. Here, the writer displays fully his fine taste and a wide catholicity in appreciating poets of different temperament and sensibility. The style also acquires a springy eloquence that invigorates his appraisal of their works. Sarojini Naidu, as Mr. K. D. Sethna has characterized her in a felicitous phrase, was 'a happy visionary'.

The poet who tops the rostrum is Sri Aurobindo whose literary, intellectual and spiritual contribution is a largesse that staggers the merely mortal and Prof. Gokak devotes many pages of his book to the different aspects of his poetry — especially the two epics llion and Savitri.

Now the reviewer may be allowed to put in a few words of cavil. A casual remark on page 8 of the book is likely to create some misunderstanding among those unacquainted with Sri Aurobindo's brilliant career in England. Prof. Gokak writes, "Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, who belonged to this generation, represent the topmost achievement in Indian poetry, the one in Bengali and the other in

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Indo-Anglian". Is Indo-Anglian a language by itself? If so, then Sri Aurobindo wrote in English pure and undefiled. Sri Aurobindo spent fourteen most formative years of his life in England and was educated like Milton in St. Paul's and at Cambridge, and he ranks as an epic poet in the tradition of Milton and Wordsworth. One is everywhere struck by his sensitivity to rhythm and texture, his ability to build cumulative phrases as he rolls along in a large overarching crescendo and since he wrote vocally his poetry carries an unfailing appeal to our auditory imagination no less than to the visionary faculty. Here is a line from Savitri that presents in a superbly concentrated symbolic vision his concept of true poetry:

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

Which ears will not be roused by the gathering momentum of such lines?

In a crash of values, in a huge doom-crack,

In the sputter and scatter of her breaking work

She lost her clear conserved constructed world.

(Savitri, Bk. II, Canto X)

Sri Aurobindo's recognition is growing fast and he has by now created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. After reading his major poetry one recalls what Dylan Thomas observed, "A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him." Many books have been written expounding Sri Aurobindo's poems but all neglect the greatness of his art, the structural and thematic unity of his epics, the interlocking rhythms, the enhancing aura of suggestions in the use of metaphors and similes, the richly-textured fabric and the noble architectural conception. They usually quote lines that demonstrate their philosophical argument but are otherwise less striking. In this field a most laudable pioneering work has been done by Mr. K. D. Sethna,

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Prof. Gokak quotes many passages from 'The Book of Love' but leaves out those that are magnificent in their imaginative appeal. Here is a simile charged with endless expansive overtones:

 Prof. Gokak remarks about Savitri, "Lines and whole pas sages which have the white heat of passion in them are scattered in profusion all over the epic. This is how Hate appears in the World of Falsehood:

Hate was the black archangel of that realm;

It glowed, a sombre jewel in the heart

Burning the soul with its malignant rays,

And wallowed in its fell abysm of might.

But then to complete the picture he could have quoted the passage in which Sri Aurobindo shows us how Hate appears in the World of Truth. Here is the passage:

There was no more the dark pretence of hate,

The cruel ictus on Love's altered face.

Hate was the grip of a dreadful amour's strife;

A ruthless love intent only to possess

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Has here replaced the sweet original god;

Forgetting the Will-to-love that gave it birth

The passion to lock itself in and to unite,

It would swallow all into one lonely self,

Devouring the soul that it had made its own,

By suffering and annihilation's pain

Punishing the unwillingness to be one,

Angry with the refusals of the world,

Passionate to take but knowing not how to give.

(Savitri, Book XI, Canto I)

The book has many printing errors and we look forward to a better second edition.

R. N. KHANNA

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The Future Vision of Sri Aurobindo: Edited by Sri Swatantra. Publishers : Srijan Chetana Prakashan, Sthirpali, Pilani, Rajasthan. Pp. 225. Price: Rs . 12/-

THIS is a comprehensive souvenir brought out on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary, focussing attention on the many-sided contribution to World-Thought by Sri Aurobindo. Writings from various scholars, sadhaks and philosophers have been brought together with a happy effect. The editor himself has written in documented detail about the advent of the New Age and added appendices showing how other philosophers and seers have worked in their own way to hasten the building of a new order of society.

Among the interesting items in this volume is the one on Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. "Once the great poet Tagore went to see Sri Aurobindo. While he was entering the room there was a smile on his face. But when he came out there were tears in his eyes. Someone asked, 'Why the tears?'

"Tagore replied, "Aurobindo was a friend of mine. During the agitation against the partition of Bengal we worked together. So while going in, I had the joy of looking forward to meeting a friend. But when I entered and had his darshan I perceived the light of his tapasya, observed on his brow the grandeur of self-dedication, saw a golden divine glow all over his body. Could a human being develop himself to such an extent? Seeing his state tears of joy rushed out my eyes." " (P. 199)

M. P. PANDIT

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