Sri Aurobindo's letters between 1927 and 1950 on his life, his path of yoga and the practice of yoga in his ashram.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
Sri Aurobindo's letters between 1927 and 1950 on his life, his path of yoga and the practice of yoga in his ashram. In these letters, Sri Aurobindo writes about his life as a student in England, a teacher in Baroda, a political leader in Bengal, and a writer and yogi in Pondicherry. He also comments on his formative spiritual experiences and the development of his yoga. In the latter part of the volume, he discusses the life and discipline followed in his ashram and offers advice to the disciples living and working in it. Sri Aurobindo wrote these letters between 1927 and 1950 - most of them in the 1930s.
THEME/S
It is a traditional belief that satsanga has great effect—the nearness or the personal contact of a spiritual person is supposed to produce great benefit to those who are in his company. How is it then that your earliest companions here did not derive any benefit from your company?
I don't know that the theory of satsanga can be taken so rigorously as that. Company always has an effect, but it may be less or more or even for the most part nullified by things in the person's own consciousness or nature or by other atmospheres. X and the others were greatly influenced by company with me in the old days but it was more in the direction of mental and vital development than spiritually, for at that time I was doing my own sadhana and not putting out any spiritual influence on others—only if anybody asked me, I told him what to do, the result of his effort was his own affair.
17 August 1936
I wrote something on the subject of peace, which I showed to X. He said there were many errors in it, particularly where I wrote about philosophers and the silence.
There was no error. Ordinary human minds, Europeans especially, are accustomed to regard thought as indispensable and as the highest thing—so they are alarmed at silence. V. V. S. Aiyar when he was here asked for Yoga. I told him how to make his mind silent and it became silent. He immediately got frightened and said "I am becoming a fool, I can't think",—so I took what I had given away from him. That is how the average mind regards silence.
11 December 1935
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Certainly, it is your full right to believe that I am not infallible. But I must also say that when you are convinced that you know the truth of things and can judge better than myself and are more eager for right and justice, that creates an attitude which makes it difficult for me to help you or for you to receive my help. If you have no reliance on me as guide but rather on your own enlightened consciousness, then surely it is the dictates of your enlightened consciousness that you should follow. As long as there is this, I am drawn back from intervening in any personal way in your life or sadhana. I hope that by following your inner light or by whatever guidance you will attain the realisation you desire.
circa 1928
I do not believe in human judgments because I have always found them fallible—also perhaps because I have myself been so blackened by human judgments that I do not care to be guided by them with regard to others. All this however I write to explain my own point of view; I am not insisting on it as a law for others. I have never been in the habit of insisting that everybody must think as I do—any more than I insist on everybody following me and my yoga.
December 1934
You hardly take the initiative and ask people to do this or not to do that. It is your principle to give them a long rope either to hang themselves or have a taste of the bitter cup.
I am to put everybody into leading strings and walk about with them—or should it be the rope in their nose? Supermen cannot be made like that—the long rope is needed.
5 January 1935
Why do you never write to me about my problems—unless I specifically ask?
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I never do that to anybody unless he gives me the occasion. A sadhak must become conscious and lay himself before the light, see and reject and change. It is not the right method for us to interfere and lecture and point out this and point out that. That is the schoolmaster method—it does not work in the spiritual change.
10 May 1936
I do not know what kind of help you want from me. There are two kinds of help in the spiritual field; the invisible help (which you can get for yourself if you know how to do it) and that which a spiritual guide gives to his disciples. The latter I give only to those whom I have accepted for my own path of Yoga.
15 November 1928
The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciples or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you. The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it—the vital brings in the suggestions of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difficulty that cannot be effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a self created difficulty—a self-formed sanskara or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.
As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes
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usually only when the being is ready. You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or sanskara, and so the adverse force finds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the sanskara of doubt—to annul the force of its recurrence. I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they came. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother's) will be there. It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success—one's own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.
I will do what is necessary to give the help you must receive. To say you cannot would not be true, for you have received times without number and it has helped you to recover.
26 January 1934
I am not aware of refusing help; but to receive the help is also necessary. When you are in this condition, you seem at once to shut yourself up against those from whom you seek help by a spirit of bitterness and anger. That is not an attitude which makes it easy to receive or be conscious and it is not easy either for the help to be effective. All I can do is to send you the Force that if received would help you to change your condition; it is what I have always done. But it cannot act effectively—or at least not at once—if the doors are shut against it.
23 May 1936
But is it really impossible to give X some experience of peace, silence or meditation? That would mean that the Divine is not omnipotent.
Page 440
My dear sir, what has the omnipotence of the Divine to do with it? In this world there are conditions for everything—if a man refuses to fulfil the conditions for Yoga, what is the use of appealing to the Divine's omnipotence? He does not believe that the Divine is here. He regards us as Gurus. Yes, but he begins by disputing all my way of Yoga. He does not understand and does not care to understand my processes. He has ideas of his own, does not want peace or equality or surrender or anything else, wants only Krishna and bhakti. He has read things in Ramakrishna and elsewhere as to how to do it, insists on following that. Rejects all suggestions I can make as unpracticable. Erects a sadhana of violent meditation, japa, prayer—for these are the traditional things, has no idea that there are conditions without which they cannot be effective. Meditates, japs, prays himself into pits of dullness and disappears. Also tries in spite of my objections a wrestling tapasya which puts his vital into revolt. Then by a stroke of good luck I succeed unexpectedly in making a sort of psychic opening. Decides to try surrender, purification of the heart, rejection of ego, true humility etc.—tries a little of it and is really progressing. After two months finds that Krishna is not appearing—gets disgusted and drops the beastly thing. And after all that he is always telling me "What an impotent Guru you are! You are evidently able to do nothing for me." Evidently! That's X.
28 May 1936
(1)
But after all, without putting forth eighteen visible arms (perhaps, since it is a symbol, by putting them forth internally) I hope to become one day so divine even in the body consciousness that I shall be able to satisfy everybody! But you can't hurry a transformation like that. I must ask for time.
Why do you always insist on cherishing the idea that I refuse all human love? I have surely written to you to the contrary. I don't reject it, neither human nor vital love. But I want that
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behind the vital there shall be the constant support of the psychic human love (not all at once the divine), because that alone can prevent the movements which make you restless, obscured and miserable. In asking this I am surely not asking anything excessive or beyond your power.
circa 1931
I meant that even before I met you for the first time, I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives and followed your career (all that I could hear about it) with a close sympathy and interest. It is a feeling which is never mistaken and gives the impression of one not only close to one but part of one's existence. The Mother had not heard of you before you came here for the first time, but even on that occasion on seeing you—though without any actual meeting—she had a sympathetic contact. The relation that is so indicated always turns out to be that of those who have been together in the past and were predestined to join again (though the past circumstances may not be known) drawn together by old ties. It was the same inward recognition in you (apart even from the deepest spiritual connection) that brought you. If the outer consciousness does not yet fully realise, it is the crust always created by a new physical birth that prevents it. But the soul knows all the while.
Your poem is very beautiful.
I am aware of the terribly trying period that is upon you as upon us just now, but you must try to stand firmly until we may come through into the sunshine hereafter.
27 February 1935
I have not time to write a long letter. I can write only this. You are not to leave Pondicherry by this morning's train or at all. You have to come and see the Mother at 9.30 and speak to her heart to heart. Both the Mother and myself have lavished much love and care on you and you are certainly not going to make a return like this—it is impossible. Do not believe all you hear or allow yourself to be driven off your balance by falsehoods of
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the kind that have been retailed to you. You do not belong to yourself and have not the right to do what you propose to do: you belong to the Divine and to myself and the Mother. I have cherished you like a friend and a son and have poured on you my force to develop your powers—until the time should come for you to make an equal development in the Yoga. We claim the right to keep you as our own here with us. Throw away this despair—rise above the provocations of others—turn back to the Mother.
16 May 1937
(2)
I want to love and love completely and lose myself in love. If one can think of losing oneself for mortal love, why not for the love of the Divine?
Well, why not? But it must be done in the divine way, not in the mortal. Otherwise—
Let me then say definitely that I love you and you love me a little and let us meet somewhere in this matter. You may remark, "This man has gone mad, otherwise why all these asthmatic gaspings?" Yes, I am mad, Sir, and impatient too.
Ummm! don't you think there are enough people in that condition already here without the Asram doctor adding himself to the collection?
Who can be and remain otherwise unless and until one is divine oneself?
Unfortunately, experience seems to show that one must be divine oneself before one can bear the pressure of divine love.
8 April 1935
The Divine loves all equally but there seem to be some who are dearer to Him. You seem to say some such thing in Essays on the Gita—that Arjuna was dearer to Krishna because he
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came nearer to the Divine and those who do that will always be dearer to Him.
I don't say; it is the Gita that says it—or rather there are two separate slokas; one says that the Divine makes no difference, the other says that Arjuna is specially dear to him.
It seems to me that if X and myself, for example, were to transgress some vital rules of the Asram, I would get a thunderbolt from you while he would get nothing. In my saner moments I have tried to look at it more rationally.
That does not stand. Sometimes you might get nothing except perhaps an invisible stare; sometimes I might say "Now look here, Y, don't make an immortal ass of yourself—that is not the transformation wanted." Still another time I might shout "Now! now! What the hell! what the blazes!" So it would depend on the occasion, not only on the person.
There are many instances to show that some persons are dearer to the Divine than others. Besides Krishna and Arjuna, we have the instance of Buddha and Ananda.
There is also St. John, the beloved disciple.
Then again, Vivekananda was dearer to Ramakrishna than other disciples. Chaitanya showered his grace on Madhai and Jagai, but were they closer to him than Nitai?
But he had love for them (তাই বলে কি প্রেম দিব না ?).
Some say that because through one person, chances of manifestation are greater, or because he is more open, or is a Vibhuti, he will be nearer to the Divine. That, I think, can be swept aside since degrees of manifestation can never be a criterion. What is it that determines this? I really don't know.
Of course you don't—nor does anybody. Is love a creation of the reason? or dealt out by this or that scale? Or does the Divine calculate "This fellow has so much of this or that quality. I will give him just so much more love than to that other"?
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This question is not only of theoretical interest to us, but also of practical importance, since in our stumblings and gropings the Divine here may have a soft corner for some, and not perhaps for others to the same extent.
All that is rather beside the point. There is a universal divine love that is given equally to all—but also there is a special relation with each man—it is not a question of more or less, though it may appear so. But even that less or more cannot be judged by human standards. The man who gets a blow may, if he has a certain relation, feel it as a divine caress; he may even say, erecting his own standard, "She loves me more than others, because to others she would not give that blow, to me she felt she could give it," and it would be quite as good a standard as the kind treatment one—as standards go. But no standards apply. For in each case it is according to the relation. The cause of the relation? It differs in each case. Cast your plummet into the deep and perhaps you shall find it—or perhaps you will hit something that has nothing at all to do with it.
9 June 1935
The worst suggestion of the hostile forces is that you are partial in your dealings. When this is accepted a wall comes between you and the sadhak and there is a revolt and then there may be an end of the sadhana!
Yes, that is their aim—for it is their one short cut to success, to separate the sadhak from his soul.
3 May 1935
Why is the flower symbolising your compassion so delicate and why does it wither away so soon?
No, the compassion does not wither with its symbol—flowers are the moment's representations of things that are in themselves eternal.
9 August 1936
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The outward touch is helpful; but the inward is still more helpful when one is accustomed to receive it with a certain concreteness—and the outward touch is not always fully possible, while the inward can be there all the time.
The outer guidance is meant only as an aid to the inner working, especially for the correction of any erroneous movement and sometimes in order to point out the right road. It is not meant except at a very early stage to satisfy mental questionings or to stimulate a mental activity.
26 March 1935
Once I asked you to give some advice as regards the treatment of a patient. You replied: "I have no medico in me, not even a latent medico."1
Of course not. If it were there, I would develop it and run the Dispensary myself. What would be the need of X or Y or Z?
The other day, in regard to that baby, you wrote that Mother has no intuition for infants.
No intuition for stuffing infants with heterogeneous medicines.
Well then, if you have no latent medico and Mother has no intuition for infants, can you tell me how by the force of devotion, faith, surrender, etc., is one going to get guidance from you?
What logic! Because Mother and myself are not engineers, there fore A can't develop the right intuition in engineering? or because neither I nor Mother are experts in Gujarati prosody, therefore B can't develop the inspiration for his poems?
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If the divine can't guide me externally, which is much easier, how can he guide me internally?
Oh Lord! what a question! To guide internally is a million times easier than to guide externally. Let us suppose I want General Miaja to beat Franco's fellows back at Guadalajara (please pronounce properly), I put the right force on him and he wakes up and, with his military knowledge and capacity, does the right thing and it's done. But if I, having no latent or patent military genius or knowledge in me, write to him saying "do this, do that", he won't do it and I would not be able to do it either. It is operations of two quite different spheres of consciousness. You absolutely refuse to make the necessary distinction between the two fields and their processes and then you jumble the two together and call it logic.
If the medico can be revealed from within, why could it not be revealed from without and tell me what to do?
Damn it, man! Intuition and revelation are inner things—they don't belong to the outer mind.
If you or Mother can't guide me concretely, how will the guidance come later on, I wonder?
Do you imagine that I tell you inwardly or outwardly what expressions to use in your Bengali poems when you are writing? Still you write from an inspiration which I have set going.
6 April 1937
I must point out to you that the value of your staying here does not depend on my writing to you or not, but on whether you have the true inner relation with us, whether you are able to receive anything from us and whether you can profit spiritually
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by what you receive. All that depends in the last resort on you.
12 September 1932
My touch is always there; but you must learn to feel it not only with the outward contact as a medium—a touch of the pen—but in its direct action on the mind and heart and vital and body. There would then be very much less difficulty—or no difficulty at all.
27 March 1933
Letters and answering of letters are not indispensable for the sadhana; the sadhak's reception of silent help is much more important; the written word is only a minor means, and to expect answers because others have them is quite a wrong idea. The only necessity in this sadhana is to open yourself to the Divine Force; if one is open the necessary understanding or knowledge will come of itself through spiritual experience.
23 May 1933
Sometimes I think it would be better not to ask you questions about my difficulties, but simply to state them. But I find that if I can't put things in the form of questions, I hardly write anything.
Out of one thousand mental questions and answers there are only one or two here and there that are really of any dynamic assistance—while a single inner response or a little growth of consciousness will do what those thousand questions and answers could not do. The Yoga does not proceed by upadeśa but by inner influence. To state your condition, experiences etc. and open to the help is far more important than question-asking—especially the questions about why and how which your physical mind so persistently puts.
I have realised that if we surrender ourselves to you once and open inwardly, you pour into us as much knowledge as we can hold.
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What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people do not really understand what I write—they put their own constructions on it. The inner help is quite different and there can be no comparison with it, for it recreates the substance of the consciousness, not the mind only.
4 June 1936
You said, "What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people do not really understand what I write." Is this because you are writing from too high a plane for us to understand?
It is because the mind by itself cannot understand things that are beyond it. It constructs its own idea out of something that it catches or thinks it has caught and puts that down as the whole meaning of what has been written. Each mind puts its own ideas in place of the Truth.
6 June 1936
For some time I have not written to you, but whether you think of this child or not, every minute I think of you.
No, I don't forget you if you don't write. I think of you and concentrate for you every day.
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