33     ' It gratifies me indeed that you have given so fine a response to my poetry at even the first reading.   Poetry of the sort I write - seeking to be in tune with the Aurobindonian Muse - is not always easy to enjoy immediately: one has to live with it for a while, listen to it intently with the inner ear, brood on it with a hushed mind, before it yields fully both its meaning and its vision. One must do these things in reading it because I have done them in writing it. Not that it has not flowed through, spontaneously and rapidly - some of it has come with a rapturous rush while some came slowly, bit by ecstatic bit, but even when there was a rush I have

35       I welcome your warning against what you think to be "a growing trend of Mother India to devote more and more pages and attention to its Editor". I endorse your remark: "Self-praise is a slow poison that can kill a soul. Please shake up yourself and free yourself from this slow poison." Yet I must echo the old cry of Themistocles: "Strike, but hear!"   Your expression - "self-praise" - has to be understood, I suppose, in a special sense. Surely you cannot mean that there is any article by me praising myself? Perhaps you intend the expression to signify that I have let admiration of me by my friends find a place in the very journal I edit? Well, I have edited

27       Before I launch on the main issues raised in your letter, I should like to- say a word on what you have advised about guarding "against interference with the inspirational substance" of people's writings. 1 hold that we cannot have a proper sense of inspiration unless we are ready again and again to accept interference either by others or by oneself with what seems to be inspired. The common criterion of inspiration is: "It all came just like that in a rush!" There are numerous levels of being from which things can rush forth in one shape or another and there are also numerous connecting passages where various kinds of intrusions and interventions in what is rushin

4     What you write about Sri Aurobindo's poem, "The Death of a God" (p. 598 of Collected Poems), calls for serious consideration. You say:   "Am I allowed to ask from you a 'Clear Ray' {'Amal Kiran') to bring some light into a dull corner of my heart? See, every time I read 'The Death of a God' I cannot avoid the feeling of listening to the voice of someone who is not only recognising his own defeat but even his own giving up the fight. Of course, I know that all this is by nature strange to Sri Aurobindo, but I fail to find in the poem something deeper, even something different. When did Sri Aurobindo write this piece full of pain and greyness in which one misses so

24       What you have written about "International Spiritualism" is correct in essence. By the way I should like you to speak not of Spiritualism but of Spirituality. The former term has now popularly acquired a special meaning, referring to communication with the spirits of the dead through mediums. As for certain experiences being not exclusively Indian, the lines you have quoted from Wordsworth clearly show the truth of your contention. But Wordsworth's Prelude and other mystical poems are not typical of Western spirituality. The West is Christian, and to the bulk of Christians the universe is not something emanating from the Divine and ultimately God-stuff, with a "with

INTRODUCTION       The "personal letters" which started appearing sixteen years ago in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, published from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, have proved to be a popular feature. A large number of readers from all over the country and even some from abroad have expressed their gratitude for helpful treatment of a lot of problems which aspirants to the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother meet on their way. Repeated suggestions have also come to collect the series of "Life-Poetry-Yoga" in book-form so that it may be easily available for consultation.   These suggestions have now been taken up and the project is to divi

9       I have quite a pile of your letters - with quite a host of questions. I shall try to answer them not in a chronological order but as they come up in the order in which the pile has put them.   The first to hand reminds me of the Biblical war-horse neighing "Ha! Ha!" as its nostrils breathe the smell of the battlefield. You are in a regular frenzy facing the field of human knowledge as laid out by encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Here comes your aspiration to be a polymath, master of a hundred disciplines. Ever since my middle teens I have thrilled to the same lure. Except for mathematics, which don't daunt you, I have felt competent to tackle all the ranges

31       You have quoted from Savitri (Centenary Ed., p. 61) the lines - The universe is an endless masquerade: For nothing here is utterly what it seems, It is a dream-fact vision of a truth Which but for the dream would not be wholly true, You have asked: "Do lines 3 and 4  mean:   'It is a vision of a veridical fact seen as in a dream, which but for the dream would not be quite true'   or:   'it is a vision of a veridical fact such as happens in a dream'   or:   'it is a vision of a dream-happening that appears as a true fact'?"   Here is my answer:   The meaning seems to me rather complex, a

21       Now we are nearing the birthday of the Mother: 21 February. There will be a special force at work on and around that date. 1 take it to be a force that may surprise us by saying:   "Why do you worry whether you are strong enough or worthy enough to do Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga? Just keep visualising me constantly. Those of you who have seen me should try to revive memories of me as you saw my face and form in one activity or another. Whoever has not seen me in person has still my various photographs to go by. The photographs of either Sri Aurobindo or me are not mere pictures. They automatically carry by their very representations of us our consciousness

16 I was greatly impressed by your "Golden Vision". It reveals the Mother in her full reality - not only the Universal Form of her but also the Individual Being. People often say that now that the Mother has left her body she is a Universal Form - as if the bodily shape alone constituted her individuality. What you saw shows not only the cosmic power set to greater use by her departure from the Body. It shows also how closely and organically the Universal and the Individual in her were related and how naturally they interplay.   It would seem that her individuality no less than her universality can now come home more vividly. Her individual aspect acted on you i