Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Tranquil Symphonies !



SiRiyaatthaan (சிறியாத்தான்) was a unique teacher in the consequent period of Sri Ramanuja. He was principles personified. The idea 'A devotee of Thirumaal, whoever he may be, educated or ignorant, irrespective of any social divisions or satus, commands one's highest adoration' was not just a piece of eloquence or a status message to be displayed in one's FB. He meant it every word by his action. When he was passing by in the streets of Srirangam, no prapanna or Vaishnavaite devotee was able to be at ease. For no body knew how, he will be the first person to salute prostratingly, unmindful of dirtying his own clothes and not only that he will rise up and stand in full pride, as if he had achieved great laurels of endevour. Periyavaachaanpillai more than once cites him as the exemplar. And SiRiyaatthaan's favourite was Sri Krishna. How the Supreme Soul, Paramaatma, was just like that loitering in the streets of Brindavan, doing pranks like a kid! It was an inexhaustable source of wonder for him. To understand his wonder we must first become aware that the highest understanding of philosophical contemplation, the Metaphysical Being Absolute. Then we must slowly bring to our minds the altercation that happens. Such a Being Absolue Metaphysical assumes a human embodiment, is born, grows up as a kid doing all sorts of pranks and lo! it is there running visible across streets and cars, crying 'Heyyyee !' Really it is the wonder of wonders !

*


Savitri of Aurobindo is extending the English language deep into the inward reaches and inner pulsating resonances. The language made explicitly introvert.

***


In Savitri there comes a passage -

All that the Gods have learned is there self-known.
There is a hidden chamber closed and mute
And kept the record graphs of the cosmic scribe,
And there the tables of the sacred Law


And so even Gods are having a learning curve it seems ! What they have learnt is self-known in a hidden chamber. In that chamber are the library of the cosmic scribe. There are hung the calculation tables of sacred Law - such a corner closed and mute! Why closed? closed from whom or what? mute means no sound? silent for what ears, perhaps ears unhearing.

Once somebody told Thiruloka Sitaram, quoting Sivavaakkiyar, 'natta kallum pEsumO?'.

Thirulokam retorted saying, 'when the stone stopped talking? It is always talking voraciously. Do you have the ears to hear it?'

The other person asked back 'what do you mean?'

Thirulokam replied, 'yea! when the stones stopped talking? they are always in discourse. Perhaps sometimes a sculptor happens to hear its talk and lo! you get a beautiful Image! Sometimes an engineer happens to hear the talk of stones. And you get a wonderful bridge or building! The stones are never-stop talkers. Only we are stone-deaf !'

*

Say it is easy to talk glibly about the long period of matter-sleep and the uprise of will and praxeologic movements. But to mentally arrive at that point of realisation, to stand exactly in such a spot in awareness full and bare, the shock and shudders are steep and striking. Exactly standing at that very point can you mint the experience in words?

In the glow of the Spirit's room of memories
He could recover the luminous marginal notes
Dotting with light the crabbed ambiguous scroll,
Rescue the preamble and the saving clause
Of the dark Agreement by which all is ruled
That rises from material Nature's sleep
To clothe the Everlasting in new shapes.


(Savitri, Book One Canto Five)

***


You need some attentive inwardness and spiritual gaze powered by intuition as per Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri. Otherwise all is screened, mystical, a voyage from the unknown to the unknown.

"But all is screened, subliminal, mystical;
It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,
It needs the power of a spiritual gaze.
Else to our waking mind's small moment look
A goalless voyage seems our dubious course
Some Chance has settled or hazarded some Will,
Or a Necessity without aim or cause
Unwillingly compelled to emerge and be.
In this dense field where nothing is plain or sure,
Our very being seems to us questionable,
Our life a vague experiment, the soul
A flickering light in a strange ignorant world,
The earth a brute mechanic accident,
A net of death in which by chance we live.
All we have learned appears a doubtful guess,
The achievement done a passage or a phase
Whose farther end is hidden from our sight,
A chance happening or a fortuitous fate.
Out of the unknown we move to the unknown."


(Savitri, Book One Canto Four, pp 57)

***


What is there in the Ultimate, a signal happens even in the undoubting sceptic life sometimes visible to the discerning chance vision. When we stop look and stop imagining and before we start to think the rigmarole begins to run again. And we hastily run from the moment of stop.

"Even in our sceptic mind of ignorance
A foresight comes of some immense release,
Our will lifts towards it slow and shaping hands."


(Savitri, Book Two, Canto Five)

***


Sri Aurobindo's poetry rises upon mystical-empirical. Hence at the first encounter is twice-bound distanced. To explain it I can say, it is poetry rising on poetry.

***


I do not know whether to laugh or weep for this. But the mystery of it has a broad smile over it!

"Mukti or liberation is our nature. It is another name for us. Our wanting mukti is a very funny thing. It is like a man who is in the shade, voluntarily leaving the shade, going into the sun, feeling the severity of the heat there, making great efforts to get back into the shade and then rejoicing, 'How sweet is the shade! I have after all reached the shade!' We are all doing exactly the same. We are not different from the reality. We imagine we are different, i.e., we create the bheda-bhava (the feeling of difference) and then undergo great sadhana to get rid of the bheda-bhava and realise the oneness. Why imagine or create bheda-bhava and then destroy it?"
(Day by Day with Bhagavan, pp 172)


Funny? mysterious? riddle? - whatever you call it, it s the existential predicament and the mystical impasse that one comes around to understand, may be earlier or may be later.

***

Life looks different in different times. That too in transition times of life it really begins to look a lot different. Perhaps I am changing over from middle age. Life reveals differently. First it is a bit shocking. But slowly you begin to like it. And I always carry a learner's readiness in my mind, I begin to find this interesting. It happened so when I shifted from teens to man, young man to middle age. And now this. Perhaps the whole life is a continuous academy, we going from class to class, year to year, graduated all the while.

***

Sometimes our own lives write a commentary for poetry or is it the poetry writing a commentary of our life. It is sometimes hard to tell ---

"In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force
To struggling consciousness and transient breath
A mighty Supernature waits on Time.
The world is other than we now think and see,
Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;
Our minds are starters in the race to God,
Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.
Across the cosmic field through narrow lanes
Asking a scanty dole from Fortune's hands
And garbed in beggar's robes there walks the One.
Even in the theatre of these small lives
Behind the act a secret sweetness breathes,
An urge of miniature divinity.
A mystic passion from the wells of God
Flows through the guarded spaces of the soul;
A force that helps supports the suffering earth,
An unseen nearness and a hidden joy. "


(Savitri, Book Two, Canto Five)

And Sri Aurobindo rocks in the felt inner scalings of my trepid soul in its onward journey.!

***

Nobody twists the fibre of language so passionately extracting the full valency of it like Sri Aurobindo -

The world quivers with a God-light at its core,
In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live,
Life's borders crumble and join infinity.


(Savitri, Book Two Canto Five)

The first line talks about an immanent light holding the wold in swing.

Before we recover from the shock of sense instilled through, Sri A throws missile-like another

In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live

That means Time is teleological and not just a blind vector speeding from behind to before. When we try to match the two lines and try to draw a composite meaning, the third missile has already arrived -

Life's borders crumble

superb!

and join infinity.

pHah!

***

In one place Swami Vivekananda is expressing an idea that the world does not change and only that we change by making changes in the world. Yea, reading it was different. But coming to see it in life makes the picture clear and obvious. But when we come to see things as they are is something unpredictable. All the while we are with it but when it chooses to get fixed by our understanding is something we realise only after understanding it. Till that time we go on thinking that it is something well-known to us.

***

If one understands the story of Udanga Maharishi, then all lessons are instilled in that one story.

Udanga wanted to do meditation with no disturbance of thirst in the forests. He asked a boon of water whenever he thirsted for it to come to him of its own accord.

Krishna said yes and graced him so.


But Udanga found nothing happened really or perhaps he thought so.

why not? he asked Krishna furiously.

But Krishna smiled him off saying, 'it should have, great sage! Think twice.'

A vague remembrance came to Udanga, but was it not some hunter offering water from the dogskin? and was he not attended by ferocious dogs?

But sense dawned on him and lo he was much ashamed to have refused Amrta itself offered out of the hands of Indra, attended by the Vedas.

Yea Divine answers in its own ways. But are we ready? Or perhaps we are stipulating conditions!

Beware Udanga! think twice not afterwards but before.

***


There are three most important tasks for the Modern India, says the great World Teacher Sri Aurobindo -

"The recovery of the old spiritual knowledge and experience in all its splendour, depth and fullness is its first, most essential work;

the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge is the second;


an original dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit and the endeavour to formulate a greater synthesis of a spiritualised society is the third and most difficult.

Its success on these three lines will be the measure of its help to the future of humanity.”

I find in this an ultimate formulation and expression of the Great Agenda that is going on visibly in the past three centuries among us, in us, through us and also into the future. This great agenda bugled forth by the great-child of the tamarind tree, Nammalvaar!

***

Sunday, May 07, 2017

Creative Madness

Creative madness makes life beautiful
but why and why this frenzy
of cremating madness of all values
deep drilled into the holes of utility;
please please stop and look 
you are deep-frying your infancy;
childlike innocence makes life
divine or at least superbly effulgent;
but why why this fever
of dismembering and sale of parts
for the sake of heavy bucks;
let the creative madness linger long
leave it; all things are not merchandise;
profit margins make you puerile
leave something out as elements natural;
do you ask me what is the use
of literature?, of values?, of art ?
of philosophy? of the creative laziness?
what is the use of you
when already dead while breathing
suffocating airs from carcasses of calculation?
leave something undisturbed
let the creative madness linger somewhere
somehow in some ways
even if it be in blind rituals or stones carved
or erudite meanderings of theologies past.
but why do you run away
and hide somewhere
values will not chase you
when the nemesis does overtake you.
***

Space

It is space all over
spilled space onto space
onlooked by again space
spaces stand on spaces
walk on spaces 
drive spaces across spaces structured
spaces growing
spaces changing shapes
spaces playing all
relative micro macro games
but all put in the long shot
or into the deep micro shot
it is one space
spilled over as many
biting bound fitting
what these very many actions
who do where
space unto space?
but who does look?
or looks are plural
and looker one?
will space look?
or nothing looks through space
and look at space?
all in cascading micro macro games.
where stand who on what
except in the absolute relative
it is one changing monolith of space.
***

To walk with God

To walk with God
to walk after God
to walk in God
to walk towards God -
Is it what is meant by 
brahma charya
So when they started
the Big End-to-begin
walking after Ranga
who follows the Tamil
Divine songs of Our-Alwar,
who the Vedas follow after,
and chasing all when I go after
Is it walking with God
or walking towards God
or walking after God
or go in search of the meanings
in Tamil and Vedas
when the meaning goes in search of
Our-Alwar's songs;
who goes after whom
when it is a travel to the inner
or is it the giving up
of the very going-after
and be still where you began
going after everything
and see that you house the universe
and the universe everywhere
you are at home;
to walk with God
what is it
to come around
in the streets of Chitra
beginning at the beginning
of the Big End-to-begin
when on the big swan
Ranga is jostling forth
to keep pace
with the meaning or the text
what is it
to walk with God.
***

Singularities

Great men are always
singularities.
Traditions preserve
but their own versions of them.
Great men carry away 
their own versions with them
may perchance preserved
in someone's memories rare.
Singularities are hard to deal with
they are not smooth
you can't take them for granted.
It is so down the time
across the world.
When you go more and more
into yourself
you find you as a singularity
not like any
perhaps not liked by many
so what
then you understand
that there runs a tradition
of singularities
unrecorded and unknown
and inconvenient for easy-goers;
but again singularities
scarcely need any tradition
they are too much busy
with themselves
to tow behind any.
***

Is blossoming just fame?

Men of old
men of bold
men of conviction
thousand-fold
have gone 
and gone forever
men of arms
men of norms
men of sway
multi-formed
have gone
and gone forever
men of icy
conspiracy
men assuming
role of nemesis
have gone
and gone forever
down the passage of time
drowned in the gutters of the past
run over by the gushing
forth from the future
but the flower in woods
in lonely moods
smiling at the dawning rays
winks back at the setting Sun
au revoir till coming morn
Is it the flower same?
or is blossoming just fame?
who cares? the flower smiles
rarely so, saying, the Time flies.
***

You are ever the Spirit free !

It is a very narrow region
in between
very hard to decide
highly tempting to decide
on the side of matter 
yea from birth through growth
when one is with matter and forms of matter
what then?
decide one is matter
matter alone
all talks of spirit
just false and imaginary
keep it over the ale
in some camp-fire
it is like walking
through the sheets of ice
on the mountains cold
when the chilling feet
tempt you to sit and
have a rest
but the only way to escape
sweet cooling death
is to shake shake
shudder out oneself
and pulling oneself out
of the open icy grave;
it is like that
matter tempting
that you are none other than matter
shake shake and shudder
and pull yourself out
brutally snatch thyself
out of the identity-death
you are the free Spirit
ever and ever free
and knowing
and knowingly free
boldly say that
you are not matter
but spirit free
of the form of knowing
you are never the object
but the Eternal Subject
free and knowing';
may be it sounds now
as a distant rumble;
but hold on hold on
never give up
your rugged freedom
to the cozy sweet chill
and cold grave of matter
wake up and know thyself
see the false Delphi to the face
and say, say and pronounce
You are free
and the Soul.
***