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 !

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

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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 !'

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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