Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 526

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

December 10, 1934

Yesterday afternoon Nirod read out your letter re. Poetry, etc. Then we wondered and wondered and wandered – till I said that I had all along thought so and that poetry, karma, etc. were not the thing – the thing was to seek pūrṇa śaraṇ [complete surrender] in dhyān [meditation] in the orthodox way – nānya panthāḥ vidyate [no other path exists] etc. You know I have always been deeply uneasy about dhyān and it has always been a thorn in my side. Your letter therefore I supported wholeheartedly but interpreted it (because of this malaise-complex which has always made me dubious of my poetical activities as you know to your cost) as meaning that after all it was not much good all these things – as these were suffered more or less as concessions by the Divine who wanted only complete surrender and not such karma as poetry or music or well any other kind of work. Anilkumar + Nishikanta contradicted me. Anilkumar said: “If all such action were at bottom meaningless and merely fettered us, why on earth did Sri Aurobindo and Mother repeatedly lay such stress on work and approved of workers offering their work by way of sadhana?” Nishikanta said: “If poetry etc., were so useless why does Sri Aurobindo take so much interest in poetry and besides at least a part of our consciousness is turned upwards, as I have felt always, when we write poetry.” I said, “Yes, but a very small part, the bulk takes to poetry because it feels the delight of chhanda bhāva [feeling of rhythm], expression, etc.” etc., etc. Nishikanta was a little dismayed by my cogent arguments, and I clinched the matter by holding up dhyān as the summit of sadhana.

Then at night I felt very uneasy. I felt I was somehow fundamentally wrong. “Why indeed” I said to myself, “all this Herculean effort to master chhanda, etc. so much pains and meticulous attention to perfection of karma in detail, such order, precision, smoothness, etc., etc., etc., if karma is at bottom suspect in its very nature?” And then Sri Aurobindo has repeatedly said that he is not Mayavadi. If it be so then how can I say that karma is far less desirable that dhyān? True poetry, etc. should all be dedicated – but because we have not been able to dedicate it as we would like to I had no right to dismay Nishikanta and my own poetry-loving self that such love is all self-love. All I could say was that the motive of poetry in Yoga should be progressively changed from the human egoist artistic level to the Divine level in that it has to be dedicated as everything else so why say that dhyān alone is the way of wisdom and karma, art, etc. that of folly? Well I am illogical since this is the position of mayavad not of adhyātmayoga [spiritual Yoga] of Sri Aurobindo.

This morning I told Anilkumar I was wrong and I will tell Nishikanta also. Poor man! He is writing such lovely poetry which I cannot help delighting in – and yet I dismayed him so! He is dismayed enough surely by Mother’s smilelessness (as Sahana was telling me so yesterday) without my pooh-poohing such lovely poetry whose gorgeousness and expression is at times simply dazzling to me and others too (Saurin, Nirod, Kanai, Sahana, all are marvelling at his poetry nowadays – though formerly they didn’t – even Moni who never praises anybody sought him out and lavished encomiums on his exquisite poems published lately in different journals!) And I was so chilling (bad – wicked, that!).

In sheer repentance I wrote a poem – and the inspiration welled up with all the more gusto by virtue of the remorse. Please read it, and tell me if my attitude is not righted now eventually. Not that I did not realise at all while I pooh-poohed poetry (my own most – as I said I loved poetry because it gave me ecstasy of expression not because it made me a bhakta) but my kshova [grudge] complex because of my inability to concentrate (dhyān) came up topmost and I belittled all karma out of sheer impetuosity. Wrong. But the comfort is that I saw the wrong angle of my outlook. So that’s that.

Apropos, I have often felt though that dhyān was a better way than karma, poetry, etc. to reach the Divine – a shorter cut I mean. Am I right?

Meditation is one means of the approach to the Divine and a great way, but it cannot be called short-cut – for most it is a most long and difficult though a very high ascent. It can by no means be short unless it brings a descent – and even then it is only the foundation that is quickly laid – afterwards meditation has to build laboriously a big superstructure on that foundation. It is very indispensable, but there is nothing of the short cut about it.

Karma is a much simpler road – provided one’s mind is not fixed on the Karma to the exclusion of the Divine. The aim must be the Divine and the work can only be a means. The use of poetry, etc. is to keep one in contact with one’s inner being and that helps to prepare for the direct contact with the inmost, but one must not stop with that, one must go on to the real thing. If one thinks of being a “literary man” or a poet or a painter as things worthwhile for their own sake, then it is no longer the yogic spirit. That is why I have sometimes to say that our business is to be yogis, not merely poets, painters, etc.

Love, bhakti, surrender, the psychic opening are the only short-cut to the Divine – or can be; for if the love and bhakti are too vital, then there is likely to be a seesaw between ecstatic expectation and viraha, abhimān [hurt love], despair, etc., which make it not a short cut but a long one, a zigzag, not a straight flight, a whirling round one’s own ego instead of a running towards the Divine.