Letters on Himself
and the Ashram

Early Experiences

An Experience in England

Someone told me that it is written somewhere that you had a realisation in 1890 when you were 18. Is this true?

A realisation in 1890? It does not seem possible. There was something, though I was not doing Yoga and knew nothing about it in the year of my departure from England; I don't remember which it was but probably 1892-3 which would make 20 years, not 18. I don't remember anything special in 1890. Where did he see this written?

22 August 1936

First Experience of the Self

For, as to this "Grace", we describe it in that way because we feel in the infinite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines—that is what we speak of as the Divine,—not a separate Person, but the one Being of whom our individual self is a portion or a vessel. But it is not necessary for everybody to regard it in that way. Supposing it is the impersonal Self of all only, yet the Upanishad says of the Self and its realisation, "This understanding is not to be gained by reasoning nor by tapasya nor by much learning, but whom this Self chooses, to him it reveals its own body." Well, that is the same thing as what we call the Divine Grace,—it is an action from above or from within independent of mental causes which decides its own movement. We can call it the Divine Grace; we can call it the Self within choosing its own hour and way to manifest to the mental instrument on the surface; we can call it the flowering of the inner being or inner nature into self realisation and self-knowledge. As something in us approaches it or as it presents itself to us, so the mind sees it. But in reality,

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it is the same thing and the same process of the being in the Nature.

I could illustrate my meaning more concretely from my own first experience of the Self, long before I knew even what Yoga was or that there was such a thing, at a time when I had no religious feeling, no wish for spiritual knowledge, no aspiration beyond the mind, only a contented agnosticism and the impulse towards poetry and politics. But it would be too long a story, so I do not tell it here.

29 October 1935

I have seen your letter to X [the letter of 29 October 1935 published immediately above]. When I finished reading it, I let out a sigh and exclaimed "How cruel!"—after raising our hopes you mercilessly cut them off because the letter would be too long! Nothing is too long for us, especially such personal examples which are more valuable for the likes of us than any promises and possibilities.

Good Lord! I never said it was too long for you to read, I meant it was too long for me to write now. And I can't write such things by themselves as an autobiographical essay—it is only if they turn up in the course of something that I can do so. Last night I had no blessed time to illustrate. I thought of writing it because it seemed very appropriate, but when I couldn't, I just mentioned it in order to hint that what I had written was not mere theory, but provable by solid experience. No fell intention to tantalise.

30 October 1935

But it is unthinkable and almost unbelievable to have any experience of the Self in the circumstances you have described [in the letter of 29 October 1935].

I can't help that. It happened. The mind's canons of the rational and the possible do not govern spiritual life and experience.

But can you not tell us what the experience was like? Was it by any chance like the one you speak of in your Uttarpara

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Speech—Vasudeva everywhere?

Great Jumble-Mumble! What has Vasudeva to do with it? Vasudeva is a name of Krishna, and in the Uttarpara Speech I was speaking of Krishna, if you please.

But how can that be? Didn't you begin Yoga later on in Gujarat?

Yes. But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough?

By the Self, I suppose, you mean the individual Self!

Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankara self. Atman, Atman! A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn't understand either.

31 October 1935

This-Worldliness and Other-Worldliness

One thing I feel I must say in connection with your remark about the soul of India and X's observation about "this stress on this-worldliness to the exclusion of other-worldliness". I do not quite understand in what connection his remark was made or what he meant by this-worldliness, but I feel it necessary to state my own position in the matter. My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and intimate bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical

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worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is the Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere. Everyone has the right to throw away this-worldliness and choose other-worldliness only and if he finds peace by that choice he is greatly blessed. I, personally, have not found it necessary to do this in order to have peace. In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview, the spiritual and the material, and to try to establish the divine Consciousness and the divine Power in men's hearts and in earthly life, not for personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity of an entire other-worldliness excluding any kind of this-worldliness altogether, but that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible. My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds, the plane of the supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and their possible effects upon our life and material world; but it will be quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the supreme Being or Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of ourselves and our works or else the universal Sachchidananda, and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write The Life Divine and Savitri. The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti,

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to serve him with one's works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.

28 April 1949

An Experience in Kashmir

Kashmir is a magnificent place, its rivers unforgettable and on one of its mountains with a shrine of Shankaracharya on it I got my second realisation of the Infinite (long before I started Yoga).

June 1934

Signs of Yogic Opening

Your bells etc. mentioned by you as recent experiences were already enumerated as long ago as the time of the Upanishads as signs accompanying the opening to the larger consciousness, brahmaṇyabhivyaktikarāṇi yoge. If I remember right your sparks come in the same list. The fact has been recorded again and again in yogic literature. I had the same experience hundreds of times in the earlier part of my sadhana. So you see you are in very honourable company in this matter and need not trouble yourself about the objections of physical science.

13 March 1931

I remember, when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-image—"these are only after-image!" I asked him whether after-image remained before the eye for two minutes at a time—he said, "no", to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-image of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values—he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the

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actual phenomena they pretend to decipher.

19 February 1932

It is only at the beginning that concentration is necessary to see these colours, afterwards it comes of itself. There was a long time when I used to see colours spontaneously or wherever I cast my eyes, just as you do now, and at every time of concentrated meditation they used to fill the room. Many, indeed, begin to see them spontaneously without any concentration at all, first with closed eyes, afterwards with the eyes open. Seeing them with the eyes closed happens often enough to people who have never practised or even heard of Yoga; but in such cases it proves that there is some kind of occult vision there very near to the surface.

25 February 1932

If seeing the Divine depended on the developed occult faculty, how do you explain people's seeing Ram, Krishna, Shiva, etc. in you at Darshan?—I mean by people who have apparently no such faculty. We've heard about Krishna presenting himself before small boys, taking them to school, etc.—fables?

With many people the faculty of this kind of occult vision is the first to develop when they begin sadhana. With others it is there naturally or comes on occasions without any practice of Yoga. But with people who live mainly in the intellect (a few excepted) this faculty is not usually there by nature and most have much difficulty in developing it. It was so even with me.

What I understand of the matter is that if you intend that somebody should see the Divine in you—be it a blind man—he is able to see. No faculty is required.

It would be something of a miracle to see things without the faculty of seeing. We don't deal much in miracles of that kind.

30 July 1935

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Practice of Pranayama

You yourself had to concentrate for 4 or 5 hours a day for so many years, after which everything flowed in a river ...

By the way what is this story about my four or five hours' concentration a day for several years before anything came down? Such a thing never happened, if by concentration you mean laborious meditation. What I did was four or five hours a day pranayam—which is quite another matter. And what flow do you speak of? The flow of poetry came down while I was doing pranayam, not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the pranayam for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed. And it came as a result not of years of pranayam or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a temporary guru (but it wasn't that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and Krishna. So don't try to turn me into an argument against the Divine; that attempt will be perfectly ineffective.

20 January 1936

You have often inveighed against my using you as an argument against the Divine. But what is the history of your sadhana in your own words—a Herculean practice of Pranayam, concentration and what not and then after years and years of waiting the Grace of Brahman.

What a wooden head! What is the use of saying things if you deliberately misinterpret what I write? I said clearly that the pranayam brought me nothing of any kind of spiritual realisation. I had stopped it long before. The Brahman experience came when I was groping for some way, doing no sadhana at all, making no effort because I didn't know what effort to make, all having failed. Then in three days I got an experience which most Yogis get only at the end of a long Yoga, got it without wanting or trying for it, got it to the surprise of Lele who was

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trying to get me something quite different. But I don't suppose you are able to understand—so I say no more. I can only look mournfully at your ununderstanding pate.

24 January 1936

Beginning of the Practice of Yoga

I wonder if any interesting incident took place in the Mother's or Sri Aurobindo's Yoga or life in the year 1905.

I think it was the year in which I began my Yoga—that is, the practice of Yoga—for I had had experiences before without knowing what they were.

17 January 1934

How did your intellect become so powerful even before you started Yoga?

It was not any such thing before I started the Yoga. I started the Yoga in 1904 and all my work except some poetry was done afterwards. Moreover my intelligence was inborn and so far as it grew before the Yoga it was not by training but by a wide haphazard activity developing ideas from all things read, seen or experienced. That is not training, it is natural growth.

13 November 1936

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