7       You have written: "Am I right in thinking that given the defects of timidity, vanity, jealousy, shyness, possessiveness 1 am supposed to represent the exact opposite of these in my spiritual life? If it is so, I can draw some solace from the fact." I suppose by "solace" you mean not being in the dumps, overwhelmed by one's defects. It must never imply complacence, saying: "I have a great saintly future to be reached despite these shortcomings. Let me not mind them too much." What is required is the refusal to be upset by them. Look at them steadily, without moaning and groaning -rather seeing through their thick hides the future glory which exemplifies the conquest

      LIFE- POETRY-YOGA         Life - Poetry -Yoga PERSONAL LETTERS by AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA) Vol.3                 The Integral Life Foundation P.O. Box 239 Waterford CT. 06385 USA   First published 1997 (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, pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA

26       I am always glad to hear from you but feet sad that all the news is not happy. There are two components here: one is the actual weakness, trivial thoughts, lack of sleep - the other is the worry about these things. Take them for brute facts without thinking: "How long will they last? Will they be there for ever? What other troubles will come in their wake?" When you write, "My equipoise is gone", you touch the real mishap. But this is not an irrevocable affair. Call for Sri Aurobindo's peace which is invisibly there all the time above you and around you and deep within you. Once he has accepted you as his own, he never leaves you. The same with the Mother's sweet g

19 On November 25,1993, my eighty-ninth birthday, I visited Sri Aurobindo's room after nearly fourteen years. My physical disability had deterred me from becoming a burden to friends who would have had to carry me in a chair. They said it would be a pleasure, but I had no heart to impose on them such pleasure. Now my young friend Saurav, who is one of a small group of youngsters most willing to help me and who often goes out of his way to make life easy and interesting for me, pleaded that I should go to the Room of rooms. I just could not disappoint him. So he took me in my wheelchair to the Ashram's ground-floor-space outside Nolini's room. Then he and others helped

14       I found your letter very enjoyable. I am never tired of reading whatever expresses sincere deeply-felt convictions - especially when the writer realises that feeling should never be gush and that one must be deep without being ponderous. You have put many things eloquently - but you have imagined me standing up for ideas and attitudes which are not truly mine. Having stayed for years in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and known intimately the ways of the Mother and the mind of the Master, how could I ever make a fetish of the cleavage some yogis drive between the normal consciousness and the aloof Atman?   The intransigent leap into the Atman is not Sri Aurobind

18 Two letters of yours have been lying before me, constantly crying to be answered. They carry something of your magical presence and have tried hard to lift the heavy hand of indolence that has recently been weighing down the "man of letters" in me. I say "magical" about your presence because that is what I have always felt in all the years I have known you. One aspect of you seemed always to be looking out of "magic casements", so that there is an expression in your eyes at once of reverie and wonder as if they reached forth from a strange inwardness to some enchanted secret behind the commonplaces and familiarities of the outward world. And what is that secret? Her

25       You have asked me only two questions, but they have set up quite a world of cerebral coruscation. You will have to be patient and tolerant with me, for I am answering in the manner of a wind which "bloweth where it listeth".   Your first question is: "How should one react to circumstances until the Psychic Being takes over? Should we live entirely within and ignore events, or observe all without evaluating?"   We certainly can't ignore events altogether. One may shut out some aspects of the outer world, but one shouldn't take the attitude of that line of Keats's - "Standing apart in giant ignorance". I for one actually stood thus in the early days of

13       I am always very pleased to read of your meditative experience: "At will 1 am able to step back and offer myself to the Mother and consequently I feel a kind of presence around my head." You also write apropos of your Physics examination: "This time while taking the test I feel as if all this is happening outside me." In tune with these words are the later ones: "I seem to be always a bit lost. All the activities appear to be happening outside me. I don't feel interested in anything; everywhere around I find things so obstinate, rigid. The sole solace I get is to watch the gentle sway of tall trees in the breeze, to watch the movements of small leaves as if gig

5       Please forgive my inordinate delay in replying to your earnest letter asking for my interpretation of two verbal problems in Sri Aurobindo's early poetry. In the lines (p. 7 of Collected Poems) -   Perfect thy motion ever within me, Master of mind -   it is possible to take "Perfect" as either a semi-exclamatory frontally projected adjective or as a verb in the imperative mood. The choice has to be guided by the suggestion, if any, in the succeeding lines. What follows is:   Grey of the brain, flash of the lightning. Brilliant and blind, These thou linkest, the world to mould, Writing the thought in a scroll of gold, V

11       I am very happy that you have taken yourself thoroughly in hand and are doing your best to combine normal natural behaviour with the Yogic aspiration. What often stands in the way of both is what I have called "too much preoccupation with oneself". A relaxation away from the ego is indicated in an outward direction by cordial and friendly and co-operative relations with those among whom one lives or works: the same is indicated in an inward direction by getting in touch with the deeper layer of the mind which looks up to a light beyond the mere thinker and with the depth behind the mere "feeler" to a love for some ideality of existence towards which our sense of the