Letters on Himself
and the Ashram

On Himself as a Writer

Yoga and Intellectual Development

Can it be that in course of the sadhana, one may have certain intellectual or other training by the direct power of yoga? How did your own wide development come?

It came not by "training", but by the spontaneous opening and widening and perfecting of the consciousness in the sadhana.

4 November 1936

Yoga and Literary Expression

Suppose you had not studied English literature; would it be still possible for you to say something about it by Yogic experience?

Only by cultivating a special siddhi, which would be much too bothersome to go after. But I suppose if I had got the Yogic knowledge (in your hypothetical case) it should be quite easy to add the outer one.

29 December 1934

When one hears that you had to plod through a lot, one wonders whether the story of Valmiki's sudden opening of poetic faculties is true—whether such a miracle is really possible.

Plod about what? For some things I had to plod—other things came in a moment or in two or three days like Nirvana or the power to appreciate painting. The "latent" philosopher failed to come out at the first shot (when I was in Calcutta)—after some years of incubation (?) it burst out like a volcano as soon as I started writing the Arya. There is no damned single rule for these things. Valmiki's poetic faculty might open suddenly like a

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champagne bottle, but it does not follow that everybody's will do like that.

1 April 1935

Avoidance of Certain Subjects

If I write about these questions from the Yogic point of view, even though on a logical basis, there is bound to be much that is in conflict with your own settled and perhaps cherished opinions, e.g. about "miracles", persons, the limits of judgment by sense data etc. I have avoided as much as possible writing about these subjects because I would have to propound things that cannot be understood except by reference to other data than those of the physical senses or of reason founded on these alone. I might have to speak of laws and forces not recognised by physical reason or science. In my public writings and my writings to sadhaks I have not dwelt on these because they go out of the range of ordinary knowledge and the understanding founded on it. These things are known to some, but they do not usually speak about it, while the public view of such of them as are known is either credulous or incredulous, but in both cases without experience or knowledge. So if the views founded on them are likely to upset, shock or bewilder, the better way is silence.

December 1935

On His Philosophy in General

I do not mind if you find inconsistencies in my statements. What people call consistency is usually a rigid or narrow-minded inability to see more than one side of the truth or more than their own narrow personal view or experience of things. Truth has many aspects and unless you look on all with a calm and equal eye, you will never have the real or the integral knowledge.

22 December 1934

One Kishorlal G. Mashriwala has written a book in which he says that your "language" has been responsible for creating confusion, etc. X seems to have written to him about this and

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got a reply that Kishorlal has not been satisfied with your philosophy nor with any of your disciples whom he has seen, but that he may change his views if he gets a quarter of an hour's talk with you.

Well, there seems evidently to be a confusion in his ideas about my philosophy,—though what has been responsible for creating it?—well, it is perhaps the goodness of his thinking! I fear the pleasure and honour of having a quarter of an hour's talk with the Yogi Kishorlal is too high a thing for me to wish to attain to it in this life. I must try to obtain puṇya first and strive to be born again in order to deserve it.

13 April 1935

I am thinking of writing a book on your teachings in a systematic Western form in three main sections: (1) Metaphysics, (2) Psychology, (3) Ethics. But to make it presentable in the academic fashion would require a large reading of some past and present Western philosophers and psychologists. And where is the time for it?

I am afraid it would be a rather too colossal affair. But why ethics? I don't think that there is any ethics; because ethics depends upon fixed principles and rules of conduct, whereas here any such thing can only be for sadhana purposes as conditions for getting the spiritual or higher consciousness and afterwards everything is freely determined by that consciousness and its movements and dictates.

26 July 1936

You wrote to X that though people call you a philosopher you have never learnt philosophy.¹ Well, what you have written in the Arya is so philosophical that the greatest philosopher of the world can never expect to write it. I don't mean here the bringing down of the new Truth, but the power of expression, the art of reasoning and arguing with intellect and logic.

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There is very little argument in my philosophy—the elaborate metaphysical reasoning full of abstract words with which the metaphysician tries to establish his conclusions is not there. What is there is a harmonising of the different parts of a many-sided knowledge so that all unites logically together. But it is not by force of logical argument that it is done, but by a clear vision of the relations and sequences of the knowledge.

4 November 1936

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