6       I have been much interested by your comment:   "Apropos your 'Life - Poetry - Yoga' in the May Mother India, where you have quoted St. Augustine's well-known sentence 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee', I remember to have read it originally in German which runs thus:   " 'Du hast uns zu Dir hin geschaffen, und ruhelos ist unser Herz bis es Ruhe findet in Dir.'   "Here the words 'zu Dir hin' meaning 'towards Thee' ('hin' conveys movement) make the statement profounder still, as they indicate the Divine's intention in creating us. The whole meaning then reads: 'Thou hast created us towards Thyself

34       You have asked how lines 5 and 6 are to be interpreted in the following passage in Savitri, pp. 34-35:   This too the supreme Diplomat can use, He makes our fall a means for greater rise. For into the ignorant nature's gusty field, Into the half-ordered chaos of mortal life The formless Power, the Self of eternal light Follow in the shadow of the spirit's descent; The twin duality for ever one Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense. You have quoted Madhav Pandit's Readings in "Savitri" as saying:   "In the very process of its descent from the heights of the Spirit, the Divine has followed and involv

2       Your letter suggests to me that somewhere in your being there is a born "Pilgrim of Pondicherry" as well as "Initiate of Poetry" - and perhaps the former will fully emerge through the development of the latter. It is remarkable that the reading of my sonnet "Mukti" should have left so deep an impression on you. The fact that not just the sense but also the sound of it means so much proves to me that my second description of the potential you is quite correct. For, contrary to the general notion, it is the sound that is the soul of poetry and it is the sense that is the body. By "sound" I mean the inner subtle life-throb of the vision or experience that articulates it

20 The Gods and Goddesses are emanations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. So their connections in some way or other with the work of our Gurus, according to the choice of our Gurus, are natural. But the question is whether the disciples are encouraged to have connections with the Gods and Goddesses. Here, as elsewhere in the Integral Yoga, there are no hard-and-fast rules and several things are not objected to if they serve as temperamental aids. Yet the general stand is clear. Has not the Mother emphatically said that those who want to worship Gods and Goddesses may do so but such worship has nothing to do with the Supramental Yoga of Sri Aurobindo?   You make mu

10       I have brought out from my drawer a regular heap of letters from you calling out for answers. All are vibrant with affectionate warmth and each has its own particular spark of inner light, showing that my friend has really been living with a sense of Sri Aurobindo tingling in his mind and a feeling of the Mother a-throb in his heart and, along with these Divine Ones, a few humans are also at home in his sincere aspiring life. I am sure nobody can say about you what my late friend Anil Kumar once told me people were saying about him. His words have stuck in my memory because of both their quaint imagery and their Anil-Kumarish English: "People think Anil Kumar has n

15 You have asked me: "How to reach my heart-centre? Any practical method for concentration, etc.?"   I have rarely concentrated on any point in the body. There is the advice to concentrate in the middle of the chest or the middle of the brows or on the top of the head. I have known Yogic work carried on inside my head but 1 have had no awareness of any particular point. In the early days I was told to imagine an open book inside my chest to encourage and promote a heart-opening. But as I wanted to get away from my old bookish life I did not fancy the advice very much. It must be in consideration of that life that the Mother suggested this practice when I,

3       Perhaps the most momentous utterance of the Mother in my memory is one which was no more than a brief passing whisper - a short unfinished phrase, spoken as if to herself and caught almost accidentally by me to make what I could of it.   The occasion was one of those afternoons when I was the only disciple left at the end of her morning's meeting first with the secretaries and then a few others who somehow had happened to be upstairs between the time she came down from her second-floor rooms and the time she sat down for her lunch with Pranab on the first floor behind a screen. At about 12 everyone went home. Only I was left behind, sitting in the small passa

28       One of Amrita's nieces informed me that 1995 would mark his birth-centenary. This piece of news has prodded my memory. Here are some reminiscences of him, a little rambling, I am afraid, but as true to fact as I can make them. They are not selective with an eye to presenting him solely in a rosy light. He was a frank unpretentious friend and what I am writing is faithful to his own temper. Most of this sketch is based on his own report of things. Here and there that report has entailed some digressive but relevant passages on others.   I am starting with the day I reached Pondicherry: December 16,1927 - in my twenty-third year. When the metre-gauge train