On Himself

Overhead Inspiration - A Few Examples

Q: To help me distinguish the planes of inspiration, would you just indicate where the following lines from various poems of mine have their sources?

1)     What visionary urge
Has stolen from horizons watched alone
Into thy being with ethereal guile?

2) A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth
In branchèd vastnesses of leafy rapture.

3) The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.

4) A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown.

5) Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,
Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze.

6)     Born nomad of the infinite heart!
Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!
Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart
    Across the terrible night
Of death to conquer immortality!

7) ...And to the earth-self suddenly
Came, through remote entrancèd marvelling

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Of adoration ever-widening,
A spacious sense of immortality.

8) Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense.

9) The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind
That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity.

10) An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I
Where time flows inward to eternal shores.

A: 1) Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence.

2) Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind.

3) Intuitive with Overmind touch.

4) Intuitive.

5) Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch.

6) Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.

7) Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch.

8) Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.

9) Ditto.

10) Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together.

I have analysed but very imperfectly—because these influences are so mixed together that the descriptions are not exhaustive.

Also remember that I speak of a touch, of the mental Overmind touch and that when there is the touch it is not always complete—it may be more apparent from something either in the language or substance or rhythm than in all three together.

Even so, perhaps some of my descriptions are overhasty and denote the impression of the moment. Also the poetical value of the poetry exists independent of its source.

13-2-1934

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Q: I should like to know whether you intend any important distinction when you speak of "Overmind touch" and "mental Overmind touch."

A: Yes—the Overmind proper has some gnostic light in it which is absent in the mental Overmind.

2-3-1934

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Q: Once the consciousness is aware of a certain vibration and poetic quality, it is possible to reach out towards its source of inspiration. As poetry for us here must be a way of Yoga, I suppose this reaching out is a helpful attempt; but it would become easier if there were some constant vibration present in the consciousness which we know to have descended from the higher ranges. Very often the creative spark comes to me from the poems I read. I shall be obliged if you will indicate the origin of the few examples below—only the first of which is from my own work.

1) Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep.

2) The diamond dimness of the domèd air.

3) Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer.

4) This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.

5) Million d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future vigueur!

6) Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.

7) I saw them walking in an air of glory.

8)     Solitary thinkings such as dodge

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Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.

9) But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots off everlastingness.

10) I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
    All calm, as it was bright.

A: 1) Illumined Mind.

2) Illumined Mind.

3) Intuition.

4) Illumined Mind with an intuitive element and a strong Overmind touch.

5) Illumined Mind.

6) Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also.

7) It is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression.

8) Higher Mind combined with Illumined.

9) Illumined Mind with something from Intuition.

10) Illumined Mind with something from Overmind.

7-3-1934

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Q: A long time ago, you wrote to me that the Overmind has two levels—the intuitive and the gnostic. There are surely several passages in your own poetry as well as in the Upanishads and the Gita that sustain an inspiration from the former; but has no poetry ever come from the Overmind proper which is turned towards the full supramental Gnosis? Do you remember anything either in Sanskrit or in your own work which derives from there? If not, is it possible to give some idea as to what quality of rhythm, language and substance would constitute the difference between the expression of the Overmind

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Intuition and the Overmind Gnosis? Those four lines I quoted to you from yourself the other day—where do they hail from?—

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
    Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
    Force one with unimaginable rest.¹

A: It is really very difficult for me to say anything in this respect about my own poetry; there is too complex a working of the Consciousness for it to be possible for me to classify and define. As for the Overmind Gnosis, I cannot yet say anything—I am familiar with its workings, but they are not easily definable or describable and, as for poetry I have not yet observed sufficiently to say whether it enters in anywhere or not. I should expect its intervention to be extremely rare even as a touch; but I refer at present all higher Overmind intervention to the Overmind Intuition in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process of overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower movements and the intuitive mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The Overmind "touch" on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave in the M.O.; but estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my estimates later on a little, though not perhaps very appreciably, when I am able to look at things in a more leisurely way and fix the misty lines which often tend to fade away, being an indefinable border.

3-5-1937

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Q: I said to X and Y that it has been a habit with me to reread and repeat and hum lines which I have felt or known to have come from very high sources. I mentioned your recent poems as my aid to drawing inspiration from the Overhead planes. I quoted also the famous lines from other poets which have derived from the highest levels. Y begged me to type for her all the lines of this character from your poems. I have chosen the following:

1) O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the
    unbarred lids that look beyond all space...

2) Lost the titan winging of the thought.

3) Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
    Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
    Force one with unimaginable rest.

4) My consciousness climbed like a topless hill...

5) He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,
    Unrolls the form and sign of being,
        Seated above in the omniscient Silence.

6) Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast
    Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes...

7) A silent unnamed emptiness content
    Either to fade in the Unknowable
        Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

8) Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned...

9) I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine.

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10) My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight...

11) Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.

I shan't ask you to tell me in detail the sources of all these lines—but what do you think in general of my choice? Only for one quotation I must crave the favour of your closer attention. Please do try to tell me something about it, for I like it so much that I cannot remain without knowing all that can be known: it is, of course, Number 3 here. I consider these lines the most satisfying I have ever read: poetically as well as spiritually, you have written others as great—but what I mean to say is that the whole essence of the truth of life is given by them and every cry in the being seems answered. So be kind enough to take a little trouble and give me an intimate knowledge of them. I'll be very happy to know their sources and the sort of enthousiasmos you had when writing them. How exactly did they come into being?

A: The choice is excellent. I am afraid I couldn't tell you in detail the sources, though I suppose they all belong to the Overhead inspiration. In all I simply remained silent and allowed the lines to come down shaped or shaping themselves on the way—I don't know that I know anything else about it. All depends on the stress of the enthousiasmos, the force of the creative thrill and largeness of the wave of its Ananda, but how is that describable or definable? What is prominent in No. 3 is a certain calm, deep and intense spiritual emotion taken up by the spiritual vision that sees exactly the state or experience and gives it its exact revelatory words. It is an Overmind vision and experience

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and condition that is given a full power of expression by the word and the rhythm—there is a success in "embodying" them or at least the sight and emotion of them which gives the lines their force.

4-5-1937

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Q: It is a bit of a surprise to me that Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

is now considered by you "an almost direct descent from the Overmind consciousness".² I was under the impression that, like that other line of his—

O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem

it was a perfect mixture of the Higher Mind with the Psychic; and the impression was based on something you had yourself written to me in the past. Similarly I remember you definitely declaring Wordsworth's

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep

to be lacking precisely in the Overmind note and having only the note of Intuition in an intense form.³ What you write now means a big change of opinion in both the instances—but how and why the change?

A: Yes, certainly, my ideas and reactions to some of the lines and passages about which you had asked me long ago, have developed and changed and could not but change. For at that time I was new to the overhead regions or at least to the highest of them—for the higher thought and the illumination were already old friends—and could not be sure or complete in my

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perception of many things concerning them. I hesitated therefore to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order. Besides, the intellect took still too large a part in my reactions to poetry; for instance, I judged Virgil's line too much from what seemed to be its surface intellectual import and too little from its deeper meaning and vision and its reverberations of the Overhead. So also with Wordsworth's line about the "fields of sleep": I have since then moved in those fields of sleep and felt the breath which is carried from them by the winds that came to the poet, so I can better appreciate the depth of vision in Wordsworth's line. I could also see more clearly the impact of the Overhead on the work of poets who wrote usually from a mental, a psychic, an emotional or other vital inspiration, even when it gave only a tinge.

20-11-1946