Uma* 0 thou inspired by a far effulgence, Adored of some distant Sun gold-bright, 0 luminous face on the edge of darkness Agleam with strange and viewless light! A spark from thy vision's scintillations Has kindled the earth to passionate dreams, And the gloom of ages sinks defeated By the revel and splendour of thy beams. In this little courtyard Earth thy rivers Have made to bloom heaven's many-rayed flowers, And, throned on thy lion meditation, Thou slayest with a sign the Titan powers. Thou art rapt in unsleeping adoration And a thousand thorn-wounds are forgot; Thy hunger is for the unseizable, And for thee the n

CHAPTER FIVE urjoona “Thou declarest the renunciation of works, O Krishna, and again thou declares! Yoga in works. Which one alone of these twain is the better, this tell me clearly, leaving no doubt behind.” krishna “Renunciation of works, or Yoga in works, both of them make for the soul’s highest welfare, but of these two Yoga in works is distinguished above renunciation of works. Know him for the perpetual Sannyasin, who neither hates nor desires aught, for the mind that rises above the dualities, O strong-armed, is easily and happily released from its bondage. It is children who talk of Sankhya and Yoga as distinct and different, and not the learned; he who cl

ON PRIDE AND HEROISM Lion-Heart The maned lion, first of kingly names, Magnanimous and famed, though worn with age, Wasted with hunger, blunted his keen edge – And low the splendid spirit in him flames, Not therefore will with wretched grass assuage His famished pangs as graze the deer and bull. Rather his dying breath collects desire, Leaping once more from shattered brows to pull Of the great tusked elephants mad with ire His sovereign banquet fierce and masterful. The Way of the Lion The dog with a poor bone is satisfied, Meatless, with bits of fat and sinew greased, Nor is his hunger with such r

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

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

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

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

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

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

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