Our Many Selves

The Shadow

You have said: “Everyone possesses… two opposite tendencies of character,… which are like the light and the shadow of the same thing.”³⁹ Why are things made in this way? Can’t one have only the light?

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 3 February 1954

Yes, if one eliminates the shadow. But it must be eliminated. That does not happen by itself. The world as it is is a mixed world. You cannot have an object which gets the light from one side without its casting a shadow on the other. It is like that, and indeed it is the shadows which make you see the lights. The world is like that, and to have only the light one must definitely go through the entire discipline necessary for eliminating the shadow. This is what I have explained a little farther; I have said that this shadow was like a sign of what you had to conquer in your nature in order to be able to realise what you have come to do. If you have a part to play, a mission to fulfil, you will always carry in yourself the main difficulty preventing you from realizing it, so that you have within your reach the victory you must win. If you had to fight against a difficulty which is everywhere on earth, it would be very difficult (you would need to have a very vast consciousness and a very great power), while if you carry in your own nature just the shadow or defect you must conquer, well, it is there, within your reach: you see all the time the effects of this thing and can fight it directly, immediately. It is a very practical organization.

You haven’t seen in the Bulletin that letter of Sri Aurobindo’s: the “Evil Persona”⁴⁰? It is in the Bulletin. The thing is very well explained there.

Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga - IV: The Difficulties of Human Nature

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 3 February 1954