2 TO DILIP KUMAR ROY The terms "saint" and "saintly" are used very loosely in English, just as "spiritual" and "mystical" are applied to anybody who believes in and thinks about supernormal and supernatural things and experiences. But we must take the English language in hand and chisel the meaning of its great words to represent precisely the inner life. I suppose French is worse stilt: spirituel means in it "mentally sparkling" - even an atheist and materialist and sensualist can be spirituel! The Protestant Reformation had much to do with befogging the English language in regard to the inner life. The Roman Catholics had more or less accurate notions about the difference

31 I am glad you are reading my series "Life-Poetry-Yoga" with interest. The personal vein in which it is cast gives me a lot of liberty to express myself. And it seems to help people in their inner and outer problems. I receive encouraging words from several sadhaks when I go and sit my hour and a half at the Samadhi every afternoon. Generally it's the only outing I have and even the walk from the Ashram gate to the chair under the clock and the return "Marathon" plod gateward are trying. It is so fine of you to ask me to consider your Bombay flat my home, and to tell me that 1 should come there if ever I need to visit my native city. But my legs refuse to get along with that kind

30 Thank you very much for holding me so deep in your heart and so high in your mind. To be given such value might lead the common man in me to a swollen head, but as I have sought to serve the Divine it spurs me to look for all the defects that prevent me from deserving the compliment you are-paying me. Your profoundly appreciative attitude sets me on the alert to shoot whatever "Clear Ray" ("Amal Kiran") Sri Aurobindo has put in me to mark out and pierce the multitude of defects still lurking in my nature. Reading your letter led me at once to feel extreme gratitude and to be aware of so much that is necessary to realise in order to be worthy of your affectionate praise. Sudde

19 Your letter with the two poems came a few days back. "A Heart's Call" will usher in the New Year or should I say the New Ear? Indeed the old habit of audition, bent towards outer voices, has to change and what more likely to bring this about than a call of the heart? But this summoning has to be repeated before the tympanum turns its vibratory response inward and grows intent on discovering the true needs of the being instead of letting the being get moulded by the demands of the world around. The Upanishads have spoken of the Ear behind the ear. This has to be awakened. How? Of course, the regular spiritual discipline is the full answer. But short of it the best answer is: poetr

15 You write that you owe me "many a debt". I think the commerce has been two-sided as it was bound to be in a genuine friendship. But perhaps one of the gifts I in particular have tried to force home is the artistic conscience. And I hope that in the pleasure of being a devotee you haven't forgotten the duty of being an artist. Poetry is a precious medium, not to be chosen without a sanctification of the lips. And this sanctification does not come merely of a noble subject and its adequate treatment. For, even though you breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, you serve Him ill if your verse itself is not Godlike. What do I mean by "Godlike"? As an ext

21 Your account of your various experiences is a clear sign to me that you have a fine inner life. The darshans of gods and goddesses must have brought great joy to you. Even to read about them brings a sparkling smile to my thought. I was specially interested in your experiment with a flower. I The ugly things you see at times belong to the vital or the subtle-physical plane. I have marked many such scenes and figures - more deformed, more desiccated than anything on earth, just as on the opposite side there are beauties far transcending anything in our world. For instance, the subtle counterpart of the Pondicherry sea is a magically sinuous, many-colour-crested mass of liqu

14 I feel very happy and proud that my photo is in front of your typewriter. To be close to you in any way adds value to myself. The place you have chosen is most appropriate, for I am so often near my own typewriter with the aspiration that from a worker with types I may rise to be a worker with archetypes and create Platonic perfections - images of Words that live not save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots. What you say of my appearance is quite encouraging. But impressions can differ. Twelve years ago a Sannyasin came to see me. After a while he asked me: "What is your age?" I said: "70". He looked a little surprised and said: "You don't look it." With a shy

LIFE-POETRY-YOGA Life - Poetry -Yoga PERSONAL LETTERS by AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA) Vol. 1 The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA First published 1994 (Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino) © Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) Published by The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A. Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicheny PRINTED IN INDIA

5 TWO LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND I've received two Sister Americas as against your receipt of one Mother India. This is a rather idiotically ingenious way of saying that you have written me two letters while I have sent you one copy of our periodical. But today I am in a somewhat ingeniously idiotic mood and this very frame of mind eggs me on to hair-split between being idiotically ingenious and being ingeniously idiotic! Perhaps I may best illustrate the former by the "famous" lines of Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.... Here the stress falls upon ingenuity and the idiot-e

17 I feel proud to have my photo so loved and honoured. Most photos that have an appeal are better than the actual persons in the sense that a good side of them is caught there whereas they themselves are changeable and subject to various moods. I am sure I also fall short of what my picture suggests to you, but I have always tried not to be a creature of moods. One of the first requisites of the Yogic life is a certain equableness of disposition - not to be on top of Mount Everest one moment and at the bottom of the Pacific the next or at least not swinging too much from gay sunshine to glum shadow. Of course it would be ideal if one were always in the light, bringing home to peopl