This second volume of correspondence spans the years 1934-1935. Sri Aurobindo’s immense love and patience guides Dilip through his difficulties and nurtures his latent talents with tender care.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
THEME/S
1935?
I dreamed rather a nice sort of a dream, if you know what I mean, don't you know? I dreamed as though I was swimming like an Annette Kellermain, only somewhat blindly. The result? found myself suddenly in deep waters , and below some vicious dark-looking crags jutting out but beyond my reach—tantalisingly so! In. a sort of heart-sinking for it was no joke then—I prayed, when, lo, there s. was an iron rod stretching from the crags to the shore. I plumped for the rod like a shot of course and tried to reach the shore with its help. But alas, again! it was far , from easy to reach the shore sliding along a slippery rod. I despaired, when, lo, again, Guru,' what do you think happened, eh? ! bet you will be at the end of your resources to guess: the rod came to life as it were, and swam along towards the shore—fancy that!!' What do you think happened then ? Well, now you will guess, I guess, what? f simply landed instead of being, you know what I mean, stranded! Curious, though, that such a rod should come to lend a helping rod-hand to such a fellow in such a fashion, what?
It was of course a symbolic dream, that is, not a dream at I all. And nothing curious about the rod taking it into its head I to help you like that: it was there for that purpose, if you I know what I mean, to help you—once you could take hold of it.
Mother, I want to place with Ardhendii81 an order for a tambura82
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with six wires. The one I use is with four wires. I want this as an innovation. I have long wanted it from a suggestion of the greatest theorist of Bengali music, one K. Bannerji but could not get a mechanic clever enough to do it as I want;. I have at last found in him the Godsend (or Supra-mental if you will). He has undertaken to do it with Rs.50 (fifty). Will you be so kind as to sanction it ? I trust you will—bull won't mind if you don't, it is not a demand but a request: since my gramophone song too has become a success (incredible, yet irrefutable!). I feel Mother can spare it—1 mean i will be able to replenish this Rs.50 from the gramophone funds. Will you allow? You will hear my music will be?] much improved by this innovation. You see I have always had this vein for innovation and Ardhendu is enthused over my idea! So—?
Yes, of course.
P.S. Mother, I saw a nice dream at about 4.30 a.m. this morning. I saw a violet light (in dream) very beautiful and in everybody and everything the ambiance of Krishna, the trees, dust, men, etc. I was thrilled and said in dream to myself, "I must now believe that I begin to see Krishna's grace." It was very vivid and beautiful when I woke up at about 5, I think I woke in great joy. The effect lingered.
How do you call that a dream? It was a realisation by the inner consciousness in some kind of swapna samadhi. Very often a realisation comes like that as the inner being wakes in what seems to be sleep. Violet is indeed the colour of light of Divine Compassion, as also of Krishna's grace.
January 1935
The Mother did not tell Nolini to ask you to come for a little time, so I do not see why you shall make the Mother
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responsible for his phrase and refuse to come on Monday morning. The Mother limits the time like that for many, but She has done it for you only when her mornings were heavy and full ; ordinarily she has not done so and has even asked ; yon to slay longer when you made haste to go.
it seems to me that you have very strange ideas about the psychic. I do not know why you Think the psychic is unable to offer or give or that the Mother is or ought to be incapable of appreciating gifts. The whole Ashram ought Lo know to the contrary, I suppose. It is the very first impulse of the psychic to give. Also if the vital gives generously, freely and of itself, that has always been appreciated by the Mother.
I have always said that the vital is indispensable for the I: divine or spiritual action—without it there can be no complete expression, no realisation of life—hardly even any realisation in sadhana. When I speak of the vital resistance or of the S obstructions, revolts etc. of the vital it is the unregenerated outer vital Full of desire and ego and the lower passions of which I speak. I could say the same against the mind and the physical when they obstruct or oppose, but precisely because . the vital is so powerful and indispensable, its obstruction, K: opposition or refusal of co-operation is more strikingly effective and its wrong mixtures are more dangerous to the sadhana. That is why I have always insisted on the dangers of the unregenerated vital and the necessity of mastery and purification there. It is not because I hold, like the Sannyasis, the vital and its life powers Lo be a thing Lo be condemned and rejected in its very nature.
Affection, love, tenderness are in their nature psychic; the vital has them because the psychic is trying to express itself ' through the vital. It is through the emotional being that the ' psychic most easily expresses, for it stands just behind it in " the heart centre. But it wants these things to be pure. Not that , it rejects the outward expression through the vital and the Physical, but as the psychic being is the form of the soul, it naturally feels the attraction of soul to soul, the nearness of soul to soul, the union of soul with soul are the things that are
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to it most abiding and concrete- Mind, vital, body are means of expression and very precious means of expression, but the inner life is for it the first thing, the deepest reality and these have to be subordinated to it and conditioned by it its expression, its instruments and channel. I do not think that in my emphasis on the inner things, on the psychic and spiritual, I am saying anything new, strange or unintelligible. These things have always been stressed from the beginning and the more the human being is evolved, the more they take an importance. I do not. see how Yoga can be possible without this premier stress on the inner life, on the soul and the spirit. The emphasis on the mastery of the vital, its subordination and subjection to the spiritual and the psychic is also nothing new, strange or exorbitant. It has been insisted on always for any kind of spiritual life; even the Yogas which seek most to use the vital/ like certain forms of Vaishnavism,, yet insist on the purification and the total offering of it to, the Divine—and the relations with the Divine arc an inner realisation, the soul offering itself through the emotional being. The soul or psychic being is not something unheard of or incomprehensible.
I may say that I am not responsible for your loss of zest in the vital. This Vairagya or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainty, I have not encouraged you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only hold up the [?] of turning it towards the Divine and away from the ego. To keep the vital full of life and energy and to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness for a change, using the will too but for self-mastery, not for suppression, but for subordination of the lower to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn to Vairagya, to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part of the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion of something less grim and strenuous as an easy going absence of aspiration, etc. I do not say that Vairagya
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and tapasya are not ways lo reach the Divine, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one lakes them. one must be determined and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for the other to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation, I have never said that for my Yoga the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner sur- render and opening of oneself to receive—not absolute but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before perfect purification and from experience to experience one comes to realisation and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, of small success; its motto seems to be all or nothing.
If one wants Krishna, one gets Krishna—hut he is a sufficiently trying Deity and does not come at once, though he may come suddenly at any time. But usually one has to want him so badly and obstinately that one is prepared to pay any price. One has to know how to wait as well as to want—to go on insisting and insisting without taking heed of even the longest denial. The psychic can do that—but the mind and the vital have to learn how to do it also.
Since you have been so kind as to go through my letter of yesterday please achieve this also. I happened to chance upon a book83 of this very Dr. Stanley Jones and one of his most popular ones (to judge by its numerous editions indicated on the fly leaf) and could not refrain from quoting a few passages, therefrom. Yes, he is liberal—but of this superficial type and more dangerous because of his
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liberalism it seems to me. He is sure however (complimenting India, naturally, for it all) that "India is becoming saturated with Christ's thoughts and ideals and is heavy to the point of precipitation into Christian forms and expression ." Qu'en dites-vous, since he considers your .saying if you put Supramental for Christ in the sentence quoted which is wrong? The Supramentalist or the Christist? Puzzling, what? Please correct also wherever needed, never mind the Supra whatever it is.
Precipitation indeed' The wish is father to this very precipitate thought. Well, I don't think I would put the Supramental into competition on that basis with Christ. If there is any truth to be taken up in the Stanley Jones Christ it will be taken up, but surely not in Christian form or expression.
January 1935 ?
At first sight your metre seemed to me impossible in English, especially because of the four short syllables at the end of two lines and the five short syllables in two others- English rhythm hardly allows of that—quantitatively it can be managed, but five unaccented unstressed syllables altogether even if it can be done once in a way causes an extreme difficulty when it is made a regular feature of the metre. But it seems that there is hardly anything impossible in the realm of metre and I succeeded after all subject to one change, the substitution of a long for a short syllabic at the end of the fourth and fifth lines. I suppose I could have avoided even this concession if I had fallen back on the device of unrhymed verse, but I wanted to use rhyme. However after finishing I found my stanza right enough as metre, but poor in rhythmic opulence, something bald and lame. So I had to make yet another concession; I took the option, used in all but one line'
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to prefix a naturally superfluous syllable to each or any line. I give you the finished stanza below; if you want to get it such as I originally wrote it, you have only to strike off the first ;syllable or word in each line except the fifth; but it is better
rhythm and better poetry as it is.
84O pall of black Night sainted with thy gold stars,
Hang, hang thy folds close, closer upon earth's bars,
O dim Night!
Then sleep shall come parting the unseen
Gates and, far guarded by a screen
Of strange Light,
Free, safe, my soul charioted in a swift dream
From earth escape stepping into the unknown Gleam
The Ray white.
I hope you will rind this satisfactory in spite of the two departures from your model.
P.S. In Horace's line upon the eloquence and order, I have found that I dropped a word and truncated the hexameter. I have restored the full line.
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January 7, 1935
Much more heartened I send you the queried portions marked in red pencil to compare with original (the booklet enclosed), page marks given in the margin.
Also two and half pages more today. I have done it with a lighter heart now that you have so kindly, etc.
Saurin is daily doing the typing in the morning—it is his typing I send. He is doing it all as a work of offering—and I thank the Supramental for it as it has made my work much less heavy in that side so that I can devote more time and energy to the improvement of my English. Still it is hard work I find. Because the humour is so Bengali!
A perusal of the original is rather discouraging. How can Indian style be rendered into English? and without the style all the spirit escapes and there is only a corpse. For the moment my suggestions are tentative. It seems [to?] me that after the translation is completed and one can get a whole view and impression, a revision will be imperative. You spoke to Mother I think of the [Nobel Prize?]—no hope of that unless one can render something of the style.
In your translation you use stock phrases too freely—by the way. They are good to know but not to use except very sparingly—as they give a sense of poverty and make up to [the?] language.
January 12, 1935
A little more of "Riddance. "My reply to Girija has been published. Seen? Have you time? If so I'll send. If not, I won't.
No, I have not seen it. I should like to.
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I am groaning under remorse for having given you no chance to be rid Riddance. One word I could not read.
Yes a short question, qua faire? [what to do?] I will put it as briefly as possible.
Is it true that the atmosphere of Nalina's new rooms are far better than that of her old ones? I find it difficult to believe that Mother gives better-atmosphered rooms to some and less to others. Mother had said once that all the houses were sanctified by her presence and there were no houses more favoured than others. This appeals to me. For if ii were otherwise J would like, of course, to try all the time to get into some room within the Ashram precincts as people say often that there the atmosphere is ever so much better. I can't believe that Nalina's old rooms were so poor in atmosphere since beside her Bula lived ever so happily and with remarkable cheerfulness without once complaining that the atmosphere there was not conducive to sadhana. ! can quite believe that Nalina feels better in the new atmosphere other new rooms. But that is because something inside her responds in the right attitude to her new rooms, for she never liked her old rooms as you know. My point in asking this question is that I have always believed, if I was not much mistaken, that you laid the chief stress on the inner attitude and were against laying too much stress on outer things—accidental things, inconveniences in the nature of things. It is those we have to master, not to yield to believing that such house is better the other inferior and things of that kind. I feel my attitude is here right. Am I mistaken ? I ask you frankly and wanting to know, not to argue.
The atmosphere of the houses as houses is pretty much the same in all the Ashram. But people make their own atmosphere as well; a number of people living together may create one that is agreeable to this person and disagreeable to bother. A single man also may leave a vital atmosphere in a house which is felt by others who follow him or, even if he
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does not feel it, be influenced by it for a time—that I have observed often enough. The surroundings also have sometimes an effect But all that is very secondary—one ought to create one's own atmosphere (of course of the right kind) and keep it, the other vibrations will fall away from it.
What are the Ashram precincts? Every house in which the sadhaks of the Ashram live is in the Ashram precincts. People have a queer way of talking of the houses in this compound as the Ashram—it has no meaning- Or do they think the Mother's influence or mine is shut up in a compound?
January 13, 1935
I send you four of your pages corrected- My progress is slow but I am taking more pains to save time hereafter.
I have read the article and Girija's comic flight from an answer. Everything is beside the question except the main point which, I gather seems to be that nobody can sincerely find Dilip's poetry readable except one "guarded" admirer— who is he and why is his praise alone allowed to be akrtrim [sincere]—all other praise must be insincere?
By the way what are the two parts of minati [supplication]? 1 don't know the etymology of the word. And are sābda [sound], mandir [temple] etc. made up of parts that can be separated as Tagore has done? Queer!
January 15.1935
I send you only two pages more as you have three pages with you still.
My poems "Poet and Rishi" and "Bidayotsabi" and
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Nishikanta's third book of poems are still with you. Can you now return them ?
I shall fish them out and send them. The translation has been interrupted because people have gone letter-mad again- One sadhak sends me four letters in two days covering pages and pages of foolscap and ail saying the same thing.
O Tautology, what are the charms
Thai writers have found in thy face?
I see only letters on letters
[Written at?] a terrible pace.
(Confidential by the way. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings or pride of authorship. This is only a private groan.)
I send all the poetry I have yet found. But I have not yet found Bidayotsabi.
January 17, 1935
Why does the illusion of sex not disappear?
Too many roots in the human vital. Sex has a terrible tenacity. Besides, universal physical nature has such a need of it that even when man pushes it away, she throws it upon him as long as possible.
January 18, 1935
(From Mother)
Quelle belle couverture vous m´avez envoyée ce matin! Ellest tmagnifique etm'a fait doubiementplaisir, surtoutparce que
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c´est la premiere fois que vous me faites un cadeau personnel.
Soyez?. sur que j´y suis très sensible; j´y vois in excellent augure pour not relations durant l´année qui va commencer pour vous le 22 prochain.
[What a nice coverlet you sent me this morning! It is splendid and it gave me double pleasure, especially because it is the first time that you give me a personal gift.
Be sure that I am very appreciative of it; I see in it an excellent omen for our relationship during the year which is starting for you on the .coming 22nd]
January 21, 1935
Sarat Chatterji's letter is not a glory of the vital al all, even though it may have come through the vital—but not from it: it is psychic throughout, in every sentence. If I were asked how does the psychic work in the human being, 1 could very well point to the letter and say "like that". The ordinary vital is another guess thing! The psychic is the soul, the divine spark animating matter and life and mind and as it grows it takes form and expresses itself through these three touching them to beauty and fineness—-it works even before humanity in the lower creation leading it up towards the human, in humanity it works more freely though still under a mass of ignorance and weakness and coarseness and hardness lead- ing it up towards the Divine. In Yoga it becomes conscious of its aim and turns inward to the Divine. It sees behind and above it—that is the difference. The psychic is not responsible for my aloofness or retirement—it. is the mass of opposition that I have to face which is responsible for that. It is only when I have overcome by the aid of the psychic and (excuse me!) your other betenoire, the supermind, that the retirement can cease.
Of course all prayer is not heard—the world would be a still more disastrous affair than it is, if everybody's prayers were
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heard, however sincere. Even the Godward prayer is not always heard—at once, even as faith is not always jus Lined at once. Both prayer and faith are powers towards realisation which have been given to man to aid him in his struggle— without them, without aspiration and will and faith ¦for aspi- ration is a prayer) it would be difficult for hi into get anywhere. But all these things are merely means for setting the Divine Force in action—and it sometimes takes long, very long even, before the forces come into action or at least before they are seen to be in action or bear their result. The ecstasist is not altogether wrong even when he overstates his case. Even the overstatements sometimes help to convince the Cosmic Power, so that it says "Oh well, if it is like that, all right— tathāstu."
February 1935
I don't find it a noble voice at all, it is the voice of the usual defeatist suggester using any and every reasoning to instil weakness, flight and self-destruction. There is no strong reasoning either, it is the usual round of sophistries always the same and repeated to every sadhak in turn. "Give up, give up, give up! run, run, run! die, die, say die, say die." That is always the substance of it, the rest is only skin and shell to give it a good presentation. I don't reason with the creature: you may reason like Socrates and be as convincing as the Buddha, but after a little it will soon come back and sing the same song over again. It pretends to reason, but does not care a damn or utter truth or reason—1 know too well the ways of the fellow—I have paid heavily to know. In my own sadhana I have heard his chant of death a million times and several hundreds of times from this or that sadhak. So I simply refuse to listen to him and I advise you to do the same.
Neurasthenia"" in the sense it is now given is not nervous debility—that is an antiquated definition. Nervous debility is a special thing, an illness of the physical nervous;—neurasthenia
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proper is a weakness of the vital nervous. One may be as strong as a bull and hardy as an evergreen, yet have neurasthenia. Its mark is depression, gloom, reiteration of melancholy slogans, broodings on darkness, death, despair. The bull indulges in a sorrowful lowing: the evergreen moans "Sun- shine? sunshine? it is a fable—there is only cloud, mist, rain and tears!" That's neurasthenia! Of course there are other and more exaggerated forms, but those are not in question, One can get rid of this kind, IF the will is determined to do so.
All this insistence on grandeur and majesty makes me remember Shakespeare's remarks—the greatness that is thrust on one, I am unaware, as of grimness, so of any stiff majesty or pompous grandeur—the state of peace, wideness, universality I feel is perfectly easy, simple, natural, dégagé, more like a robe of ease than any imperial purple. Between Nirod's palpitaling testimony to my grandeur and your melancholy testimony to my majesty—it appears I sit like the Himalayas and am as remote as the stratosphere—I begin to wonder whether it is so and how the devil I manage to do the trick. Unconscious hypnotism? No, for I begin to feel not like the juggler but like the little boy who has to climb his rope and perch there in a perilous and uncomfortable elevation and it seems to be rather a self-hypnotism by the spectators of the show. All the same it was a relief to Find someone writing of a beautiful and "loving" darshan and others who describe it in a similar tone. From which I conclude that the quality of the object lies in the eye of the seer—nānā munir nānā mat [many sages, many views).
Evidently what you need is a dose of supramental sunshine. I hope to have the article one day in a liquid and portable form with which to anoint you. Till then you must wait, I suppose, and instead of listening to Strong Reasoner and Co. write poems like the last ones and dream in your meditations of Krishna's dance and flute. That is the best way to bring him near you.
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The mistake was an old obstinate suggestion returning so as to bring about the old reactions which have Lo be got over. It is your old error of the greatness and "grimness" of God, Supramental, etc. which was used to bring back the wrong ideas and the gloom. All [his talk about grimness and sternness is sheer rot—you will excuse me for the expression, but there is no other that is adequate. The only truth about it is that I am not demonstrative or expansive in public—but I never was. Nevinson seeing me presiding at the Surat Nationalist Conference—which was not a joke and other people were as serious as myself—spoke of me as that most. politically dangerous of men, "the man who never smiles" which made people who knew me smile very much. You seem to have somewhere in you a Nevinson impression of me. Or perhaps you agree with Shanta86 who wrote demanding of me why I smiled only with the lips and complained that it was not a satisfactory smile like the Mother's. All the same, what- ever 1 may have said to Jyotirmayi or Jyotirmayi may have said to you, I have always given a large place Lo mirth and laughter and my letters in. that style are only the natural out- flow of my personality-1 have never been "grim" in my life— that is the Stalin-Mussolini style, it is not mine: the only trait I share with the "grim" people is obstinacy in following out my aim in life but! do it quietly and simply and have always done. Don't set upon me gloomy imaginations and take them for the real Aurobindo.
By the way, if you get such imaginations like the Narasimha Hiranyakashipu87 one, I shall begin to think [hat the Over- mind has got hold of you also. I don't know the gentleman (Narasimha) personally but only by hearsay: if he was there I certainly did not recognise him, I always thought of him as a symbol—or perhaps a divinised Neanderthal man who Went for Hiranyakashipu (whoever H. was) and cut him open in the true Neanderthal way! For myself I was sitting there
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very quiet and as pacific as anybody at Geneva Us ell'—more so in fact and receiving the stream of people with much inner amiability and outwardly, a frequent "lip-smile"—so where the deuce was room for Narasimha there? Besides it seems to me that 1 have long over passed the man-beast stage of evolution—perhaps I flatter myself?—so again why Narasimha At the most there may have been some Power behind me guarding against the stream of "grim" difficulties—really grim these—which had been cropping up down to the Darshan eve. If so, it was not part of myself nor was I identified with it. So exit Narasimha.
I hope the sex-thoughts will take their exit too. As for gestures, etc., I have told you repeatedly that I—and, 1 may add the Overmind—are not responsible for what any sadhak may do in that line. It is their own method or fancy or whatever you like Lo call it—any more than I am responsible for Meher Baba´s 88 state or Mahatma Gandhi's Monday silence. These are aids to silence which I do not use myself—if anybody wants to use them, why not, let him do so! Nobody is obliged to imitate. It is no result of the Overmind. The Mother has the Overmind as much as anybody—she has never been obliged by it to stop all speaking. In the over mental state one can speak or be silent at will—there is no such "grim" obligation as you fondly imagine. I assure you the Overmind can quite accommodate with speech and laughter.
February 1935?
All that you say only amounts—on the general issue—to the fact that this is a world of slow evolution in which man has emerged out of the beast and is still not out of it, light out of darkness, a higher consciousness out of first a dead and then a struggling and troubled unconsciousness. A spiritual consciousness is emerging and it is through this spiritual
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piousness that one can meet the Divine. Religions, full of mental and vital, mixed, troubled and ignorant stuff, can only net glimpses of the Divine; positivist reason with its questioning based upon things as they are and refusing to believe in anything that may or will be cannot get any vision of it at all. The spiritual is a new consciousness that has to evolve and has been evolving. It is quite natural that at first and for a long time only a few should get the full light, while a greater number but still only a few compared with the mass of humanity should get it partially. But what has been gained by the few can at a stage of the evolution be completed and more generalised and that is the attempt which we make. But if this greater consciousness of light, peace and joy is to be gained, it cannot be by questioning and scepticism which can only fall back on what is and say: "It is impossible, impossible— what has not been in the past cannot be in the future; what is so imperfectly realised as yet, can never be better realised in the future." A faith, a will, or at least a persistent demand and aspiration are needed—a feeling that with this and this alone 1 can be satisfied and a push towards it that will not cease tilt it is done. That is why a spirit of denial and scepticism stands in the way, because they stand against the creation of the conditions under which spiritual experience can unroll itself. In the absence of faith and firm will to achieve the Divine has to manifest in conditions which are the most adverse , to that manifestation. It can be done, but you cannot expect to be easily done.
I did not at all mean that Krishnaprem himself was used by the hostile forces. These forces can use anything for their Purpose by combining it with others to make part of a total suggestion. They can use what is in itself quite harmless or
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true for a contrary purpose—they can use something the Mother or myself do or say to disturb somebody by putting a certain explanation or interpretation upon it—they can use a spiritual truth like that of surrender to persuade somebody to surrender to themselves as happened in the case of Nalin behari and others and so on ad infinitum, Krishnaprem's criticism would have been nothing in itself—it way only a part of a host of small details which put together amounted to a radical questioning or denial of the whole bases of my work in this field- The suggestion was a sort of climax, "Well, here is a mystic, a man of clear vision also, and he finds in spite of his sympathy that the work you find so good is inferior and thin, the work of an Indian trying to write English." As for his praise of your poetry or music it can be intellectually explained away as the result of a greater sympathy with the substance making him blind to the defects of the poetic form and manner. Others, it would be said, who are genuine literary critics see clearer as to all these "Ashram" poets—and here they would begin to cite all the hostile criticisms or non-appreciation of Anāmi and my own poetry and Arjava's. That is the way they make a case—and very often a pretty strong case too.
The hostile forces exist and have been known to yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldea and the Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times. These things, of course, cannot be felt or known so long as one lives in the ordinary mind and its ideas and perceptions; for there, there are only two categories of influences recognisable, the ideas and feelings and actions of oneself and others and the play of environment and physical forces. But once one begins to get [he inner view of things, it is different. One begins to experience that all is an action of forces, forces of Prakriti psychological as well as physical, which play upon our nature—and these arc conscious forces or are supported by a consciousness or consciousnesses behind. One is in the midst of a big universal working and it is impossible any longer to explain everything as the result of one's own sole and independent personality.
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You yourself have at one time written that your crises of despair etc. came upon you as if thrown on you and worked themselves out without your being able to determine or put an end to them. That means an action of universal forces and not merely an independent action of your own personality, though it is something in your nature of which they make use. But you are not conscious, and others also, of this intervention and pressure at its source for the reason I state. Those in the Ashram who have developed the inner view of things on the vital plane have plenty of experience of the hostile forces. However, you need not personally concern yourself with them so long as they remain incognito.
Yes, I gave force to Nishikanta, but as I wrote I did not include him because he is new and emergent.
I am glad of your resolution—it is absolutely essential to keep it so that you may win through this long established difficulty and barrier.
February 2, 1935
I have received Rs.240 rent for the other house (I don't know why he insured for Rs.270). I deposit the same as well [as ?] Rs.300 from the bank with Amrita.
The bank balance ;'s low. And this tenant sends an estimate for Rs.570 for repairs! How to reduce it? If it can't be reduced, well, it will be difficult to offer Rs.300 even
—
(Sri Aurobindo's note :) One may have the experiences on the mental plane without this knowledge coming—for there Mind and Idea Predominate and one does not feel the play of Forces—it is only in the vital that that becomes clear. In the mind plane they manifest at most as mental suggestions and not as concrete Powers, Also, if one looks at things with the Mind only (even though it be the inner Mind), one "lay see the subtle play of Nature-forces but without recognising the conscious intention which we call hostile.
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next two months—which I hope Mother will excuse since it is not my "fault". However Set Mother see the estimate and suggest how to reduce it This is a very good [several words missing] very honest and he offers to do the repairs as we order him to do it.
I don't send you any more translation now as I didn't get any corrected from you this morning. If I get some back by tomorrow morning I will send a page more, if you want that is. Otherwise I will leave you in comparative peace—except asking you to send me some force: I was working hard—but in compunction 1 tried a lot of meditation for the past two days and slept so much that I feel a sinner. No more sins if you please. That is why! ask you to send me a little stimulant force—not soporific I pray, what I dislike most is sleep—though it is said the yogi's steep is as good as non-yogi's wakefulness, yā niśā sarvabhūtānām tasyām jagarti samyamT, etc. [What is night to all beings there is awake the self-controlled (Gita 2.69)]. At least I don't want my yogic days to be equal to the nights of the non-yogis. Truly, it is a great problem you know (joking apart!) how to meditate when it is so uninteresting and sleep-productive ?
It is impossible to suggest anything about the repairs. It is only Chandulal89 who could do it, but he does not know, naturally, the price of materials, etc. in Calcutta or the exact nature of the repairs [hat are necessary—without which knowledge no alternative estimate is feasible.
I seem somehow to have forgotten to give the Mother the envelope containing the corrected typescripts this morning, I send it now.
The Yogic sleep is good only when it is Yogic enough to contain something, to be an inner consciousness or an experience of other planes. They art? is important—to be conscious ]n the sleep, an inner waking. But when the mind is not accustomed, it tends to respond to the impulse towards this "going side" into an inner consciousness caused by meditation by
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simply falling into the usual sleep to which it is accustomed. Nidra [sleep] is one of the recognised difficulties of Yoga— nidra refusing to turn into samādhi, whether svapna samādhi or susupti. So the force is necessary and I will try to send it. I only wish people would give me more time for this inner work both for myself and them! But that seems past hoping for.
February 4, 1935
Voila, je m´en réjouis [There, I am delighted]. See back!! Tagore promises. I had written to him a thundering letter:
'"Your life or the preface" sort of browbeating—the bluff worked. He is terrified into prefacing.
Truly I am very glad. I wired to Tagore and Saratchandra to-day exultantly. I have been receiving some firm letters of encomium on my novel, poetry, etc.—from strangers and yesterday from a notable connoisseur savant. A short postcard from a rising (truly good) poet I enclose. Also the well known poet Jatin Bagchi as well as Prabodh Sen write to me that there was no chhandapatan [break in rhythm] in jagto nā pipāsā [if the thirst had not awakened in you] which is a triumph. Everywhere except in Krishna-quest. But attendons [let us wait]—He may have something up his sleeve. Qui sait? [who knows?] What?
Very good indeed. As for Krishna, I don't know whether he wears sleeves, but I am sure he has much up them or else up somewhere waiting for you.
But sorry no chance for translation tonight. [Corpus holed?] under paper. Yadi[?] correspondence) jagto na pipāsā!
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February 6, 1935
You are truly very kind to suggest no stoppage even while the correspondence is stopped. Believe me I am truly grateful for such kindnesses on your part which have done not a little to endear you to me. I repeat also—taking this occasion—that I am very eager to be more grateful to you and the Divine force—only not in pure blindness if you please. (Don't trouble to reply though to me, I am very unwilling to make you spend your time over such things. You have done enough for me in that direction.) But this Nalineshwar has been on my mind considerably of late, so 1 had better tell you my trouble in this connection, which will illustrate incidentally my scepticism of the Divine Force doing wonders on the body. (By the way Sahana says repeatedly her health has got from bad to worse during the last two years, Venkata's eyes ditto, my neck ditto—the pain is truly troublesome, do send some force if you can. I don't like to trouble you about my body, you having enough to do with my mind, but apropos my eyes too are worse—the spectacles don't fit and are giving an appreciable trouble or rather beginning to give. Can you send any force ? I am willing to try to believe a la Dayakar,90 remain passive—I am not so foolish and irrational as not to avail myself of any kindly force because of my mental reservations. But then Mother's own eyesight is not perfect—she has to put on spectacles which has fortified not a little my scepticism of the Divine Force acting on the eye. If she with her supramental receptivity can't cure her eyesight, what chance have we ? that is the line of our despair.) But to Nalineshwar: here is a fellow who stayed here about eight years. 1 knew him well once. Talked decently. Now he has distinctly deteriorated conversationally anyway: talks (demonstrably) foolishly. But his auguries were perfect: 1) he had lately become anti-social, 2) anti-eating, took very little, 3) yogically delicate as a
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result, is so weak that he can't raise a small suitcase, Kanai told me.
What an ass!
4) is anti-women, anti-sex—capital!
Humbug, you mean!
Rubbish! He was as attached to his wife as a limpet to the rock. That nonsense won't go down with me, whatever he might pretend to others.
(What more does the Divine expect for perfection ?) 5) anti-laughter, 6) anti-vivacity, 7) and last but not least, pro-meditation.
Returning from Darshan
From left to right: Saraswatiben, Dayakar, Satyakarma (or Rama Reddy, Dayakar's father), (?) , Sailen, Puram, Dilip, Tajdar
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What kind of meditation—fighting devils in Kalighat? This is all I know about his meditation. Of course he may have been seeing heaven as well as forthcoming hell but he never gave me the benefit of his experiences. If he confided in you perhaps you could tell me what they were. It is not by out- ward things like these that a man becomes a Yogi, but by inward growth and change of consciousness. [?]
Still, eight years of Yoga have passed over him with a great output of hirsute potentialities—the only thing [impressing about?] him. But truly the fellow was here away from his people and meditating all the while, yet you could do nothing [?].
I didn't try, so far as I am aware.
I assume he is not in a capital condition—here of course I am open to correction for if you say he is getting on marvelously of course all my scepticism will be knocked off (logically) that one could put one's finger on and a lot undesirable one could put one's finger on, chief of which is his foolish rambling talk of which I could give you heaps of échantillons [samples]. He had, it seems to us, fulfilled a good many of the most difficult conditions anyway—as Kanai too was wondering and saying if after all this they say that he was doing nothing then he would not know where we stood any of us! Rightly, for here we laugh, have tea, tasty vegetable dishes occasionally, do a lot of talking (though alas I have become too busy of late to talk much) so if Nalinesh war's yogic conditions (anti-social, anti-laughter, anti-food, etc. to say nothing of anti-sex to the point of misogyny) availed not—couldn't be briefer than this—but send me a little neckular and ocular force anyhow. I will try to be as [?] as a Dayakar if not quite as enthusiastic as a Nirod who now says that your physical forces are doing [havocs ?] of wonder. He swears all the time by Dayakar and is starting on [Rishabhchand ?] again!
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Venkataraman, Dilip and Anilkumar
Kalyan Chowdhuri, Nirod and Dilip
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But what about Venkata, Sahana, Dilip and so many others ?
But who told Nalineshwar to be all these things ? He has done what he pleased according to his own stupid brain without taking me into confidence. The first thing I tell people when they want not to eat or sleep is that no Yoga can be done without sufficient food and sleep (see the Gita on this point). This is not Gandhi's Ashram or a miracle-shop. Fast- ing and sleeplessness make the nerves morbid and excited and weaken the brain and lead to delusions and fantasies. The Gita says Yoga is not for one who eats too much or sleeps too much, neither is it for one who does not eat or does not sleep, but if one eats and sleeps suitably—yuktāhān' yuktanidrah, then one can do it best. It is the same with everything else. How often have I said that excessive retreat was suspect to me and that to do nothing but meditate was a lopsided and therefore unsound sadhana. Yet you cite Nalineshwar who goes against all my recommendations, as one who best ful- filled all the conditions of success in the Yoga. Everybody in the Ashram persists in putting the old ascetic ideas of Yoga
on this sadhana and then challenges me with his notions as if they were mine.
As for the Force, I shall write some other time. I have told you that it is not always efficacious, but works under conditions like all forces; it is only the supramental Force that works absolutely, because it creates its own conditions. But the Force I am using is a Force that has to work under the present world conditions. It is not the less a Force for that. I have cured myself of all illnesses except three by it and those too when they come I have kept in check; the fact that I have not succeeded yet in eliminating the fact or possibility of those three does not cancel the fact of my success with the others. As for the Mother, she used formerly to cure every- thing at once by the same Power—now she has no time to think about her body or to concentrate on it. Even so, when ^e makes a certain inner concentration, she can see, read, etc., perfectly well without glasses, but she has no time to
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work out the probability which that shows. The prevalence of illness just now is a fact; it is part of the struggle that is going on in the domain of Matter. But even so there are plenty of people in the Ashram who get rid of their ills by reliance on the Mother. If all cannot do it, what does that prove or disprove? It only proves that the Power does not work absolutely, miraculously, impossibly, but it works by certain given means and under conditions. I have always said that, so what is there that is new or that annihilates the truth of the Yoga?
No translation again today. I shall make up in the days to follow when the correspondence is closed in view of the Darshan (that need not interfere with you at all.) Of course I was not serious in my nastāmi [wickedness] [?] my burlesque derivation (throwing one's wife into the water = ābdār [indulgent request, cajoling].) That was only a little gambol on the head of Girija. I shall see also whether I can explain what I mean by Force (the one which I refer to being neither supramental nor omnipotent nor guaranteed to work like Beecham's pills in every case) and how it acts and in what conditions. I have tried it in hundreds of cases besides Dayakar's (on my own body first and [daily?]) and I have no doubt of its reality or efficacy under these conditions. How- ever, of that on some later date.
I shall certainly do my utmost to help you in the days just coming to achieve this object and answer to your appeal. If I
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asked you to take another attitude, it was because I felt that the difficulties—restless doubt in the mind and the habit of vital depression would be then more easy to overcome. But since it is impossible, I must try to get in the experience through all the barriers. It is difficult when the mind is dull or restless under the pressure of effort, but it can arrive.
I cannot write more because it is already 6 o'clock after a terribly heavy night. But words are not what is wanted and from today I shall at least have a little time to do necessary things.
February 9, 1935
Anilkumar has reported Mother's observation correctly, but he does not seem to have understood it. The Mother never meant that by merely willing one could know at once what was in someone else or that all one's impressions about him would be spontaneously and infallibly correct. What she meant was that there is a faculty or power (an occult or yogic faculty) by which one may get the right perceptions and impressions, and if one has the will to do so, one can develop it. Not at once, not by an easy method—tra la la and there you are: it may take years and one has to be careful and scrupulous about it. For these are intuitive perceptions and intuition is a thing that can easily be imitated by many other movements of consciousness that are much more fallible. Your impressions may be mental or vital and a mental or vital impression may have something to justify it or may not—but even in the first case there is no certainty at all that it will be correct; even if it seems the same thing/ it may be incorrectly caught or caught with much mixture of error, twisted into falsehood, Put in the wrong way, etc., etc. And there may be no justification at all; it may be a mere wrong formation of your own mind or vital or of somebody else's wrong impression conveyed to
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you and accepted by you as your own. Your impressions may be the result of a want of affinity between you and the other person, so that if he impresses you as null and neutral, it is because you cannot feel what is in him, it does not come home to you, or if you feel that he is in a wrong condition, it may be only because his vital vibrations rub yours the wrong way. There are lots of things like that which one must have the power to distinguish very carefully and exactly; until one knows one's own consciousness and its operations well, one cannot know the operations of the consciousness of others. But it is possible to develop a certain direct sight or a certain direct feeling or contact by which one can know— only after much time and much careful, scrupulous and vigilant observation and self-training. Till then one can't go about saying that this is an advanced Sadhak or that one is not advanced and that other is no good at all. Even if one knows, it is not necessary always to air one's knowledge.
February 10, 1935
(...) these mental conceptions—since all such conceptions are suspect from your Supramental vision. But do you seriously want me to swallow this mountainous absurdity that any man can be made a Krishna or a Sri Aurobindo, any woman a Mother, any Venkataraman a Tyagaraj, any Harin a Tansen, any Manodhar a Shakespeare, any Sita91 a Raphael, any Radhananda92 a Vyas or Valmiki. You really want me to swallow this [even?] if I suffocate? If you do I will try to but then you mustn't blame me if I do suffocate in the end. Agreed? For your logical proposition "Everything is possible" reduces all human experience to look so hopeless, so childish, and so frightening for a poor— Dilip—who finds it so difficult to believe that any amount of Divine Grace will make a
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Haradhan93 into a Sri Aurobindo or a Rani94 into a Sri Mira. Is it for this preconception that the Divine Grace will shun me like one past all hope ? I am not joking. I mean it. All mental conceptions must go! This too? It is urged, thanks to your logic, that with the Supramental descent every sadhak here will become greater than Krishna since Krishna was—pooh-pooh, an Overmental pigmy god compared with what supramentalized Haradhan will be. Logic irrefutable. But—O tears! flow! flow!
I have never said any of all these things. These egoistic terms are not those in which I think—any more than these egoistic ambitions even are those in which my vital moves. It is a higher Truth I seek, whether it makes men greater or not is not the question but whether it will give them truth and peace and light to live in and make life something better than a struggle with ignorance and falsehood and pain and strife. Then even if they are less great than the men of the past, my object would have been achieved. For me mental conceptions cannot be the end of all things. I know that the supermind is a truth.
You do not seem to have followed the sense of my reasoning very well—perhaps because I clothe my arguments with Nirod in a tone of humour. You have taken my humorous comment about Muthu with a particular seriousness—if you really are not joking: but I suppose you are in spite of your disclaimer.
It is not for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring down the supermind. I care nothing for greatness or little- ness in the human sense. I am seeking to bring some principle of inner Truth, Light, Harmony, Peace into the earth conscious- ness. I see it above and know what it is—I feel it overseeing my consciousness from above and I am seeking to make it possible for it to take up the whole being into its own native power, instead of the nature of man continuing to remain in half-light, half-darkness. I believe the descent of this Truth opening the way to a development of divine consciousness
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there to be the final sense of the earth evolution. If greater men than myself have not had this vision and this ideal before them, that is no reason why I should not follow my Truth- sense and Truth-vision. If human reason regards me as a fool for trying to do what Krishna did not try, I do not in the least care. There is no question of Haradhan or Rani or anybody else in that. It is a {question between the Divine and myself— whether it is the Divine will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible, or not. Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption—I go on till I conquer or perish. This is the spirit in which I seek the supermind, no hunting for greatness for myself or others.
(This is not to be circulated.)
My reason for wanting you to get rid of the mental concepts is that they are rigid and keep you tied to the idea and feeling of your incapacity and the impossibility of the sadhana. Get rid of that and a great obstacle disappears.
You could then see that there is no reason for the constant sense of grief and despair that reacts upon your efforts and makes it sterile. I simply want you to put yourself, if it is possible, in that state of quietude and openness which is favourable to the higher consciousness and its action; if it is not possible at present, I have still said that I will do my utmost to help you to the experience. That does not mean that the utmost has been yet done or that it can be done in a few days. But (although people are not giving me the freedom of mind and disposal of time which I had asked for), it will be done.
I am glad you have got Tagore's foreword, although—but one must not look a gift-horse in the mouth. I regret I can't send
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you anything of the translation today. People seem to have chosen these days and especially this Sunday for pouring things on me in spite of the notice. I am doing everything today including the writing of this note in a great hurry and under much pressure.
I did not mean that anyone here could replace or equal myself and the Mother; much less the persons you name— or the actual Muthu equal the actual Ramakrishna. But certainly it is possible for X and Y and Z (I won't repeat the names) to change, to throw off their present perversities or limitations and come nearer to us than they are now—if they have the sincere will and make the endeavour. I have explained my meaning to Nirod—so I do not repeat it here. Of course in my writing to Nirod, there is a certain note of persiflage and humorous insistence of which you must take account if you want to get the exact measure of my reasoning and its significance .. ,95 [incomplete]
February 22, 1935
I was indeed delighted by your generous praise with which I felt your response came in part. As a result I dashed off two poems in no time. Here they are. You will easily read between the lines—knowing my habit of eternal wail —poetic, attitudinising and what not. My spirits have risen while writing this. It is strange how a vocal attempt fortifies this silent sorrow! But it does nevertheless.
As for the metre I am glad too. This is a difficult metre (as rightly says Prabodh Sen) to write in but very easy to read. It has a peculiar composite lilt made up of the syllabic and quantitative rhythms. None after Satyendranath developed it as Prabodh Sen regretted. But the reason is, he wrote, its difficulty, as every foot has to contain only a fixed number of dosed and open syllables. Here every
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foot has got one closed and three open syllables. But its lilt is new (...)
What you say about the spontaneous development of the capacity in the metre after a silent and inactive incubation of over two years, is quite true. But it is not amazing; it often happens and is perfectly natural to those who know the laws of the being by observation and experience. In the same way one suddenly finds oneself knowing more of a language or a subject after returning to it subsequent to a short interim without study, problems which had been abandoned as unsolvable solving themselves spontaneously and easily after sleep or when they come up again; knowledge or ideas coming up from within without reading or learning or hearing from others. Sudden efflorescences of capacity, intuitions, welling up of all sorts of things point to the same inner power or inner working. It is what we mean when we speak of the word, knowledge or activity coming out of the silence, of a working behind the veil of which the outer mind is unconscious but which one day bears its results, of the inner manifesting itself in the outer. It makes at once true and practical what sounds only a theory to the uninitiated—the strong distinction made by us between the inner being and the outer conscious- ness. It is how also unexpected Yogic capacity reveals itself, sometimes no doubt as a result of long and apparently fruit- less effort, sometimes as a spontaneous outflowering of what was concealed there all the time or else as a response to a call which had been made but at the time and for long seemed to be without an answer.
February 24, 1935
I do not know that I can say anything in defence of my unlovable marbleness—which is also unintentional, for I feel
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nothing like marble within me. But obviously I can lay no claims to the expansive charm and grace and lovability of a Gandhi or Tagore. For one thing I have never been able to establish cheerful hail-fellow contact with the multitude, even when I was a public leader; I have been always reserved and silent except with the few with whom I was intimate or whom I could meet in private. But my reference to Nevinson and the Conference was only casual; I did not mean that I regard the Darshan as I would a political meeting or a public function. But all the same it is not in the nature of a private interview, I feel it as an occasion on which I am less a social person than a receptacle of a certain Power receiving those who come to me. I receive the sadhaks (not Thompson or others) with a smile however unsatisfactory or invisible to you—but I suppose it becomes naturally a smile of the silence rather than a radiant substitute for cordial and bubbling laughter. Que voulez- vous ? I am not Gandhi or Tagore.
All that I really wanted to say was that the inwardness and silence which you feel at the time of Darshan and dislike is not anything grim, stern, ferocious (Narasimha) or even marble. It is absurd to describe it as such when there is nothing in me that has any correspondence with these epithets. What is there is a great quietude, wideness, light and universal or all-containing oneness. To speak of these things as if they were grim, stern, fierce and repellent or stiff and hard is to present not the fact of my nature but a caricature. I never heard before that peace was something grim, wideness repel- lent, light stern or fierce or oneness hard and stiff like marble. People have come from outside and felt these things, but they have felt not repelled but attracted. Even those who went giddy with the inrush of light or fainted like M., had no other wish but to come back and they did not fly away in terror. Even casual visitors have sometimes felt a great peace and quiet in the atmosphere and wished that they could stay here. So even if the sadhaks feel only a terrifying grimness, I am entitled to suppose that my awareness of myself is not an isolated illusion of mine and to question whether grimness
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is my real character and a hard and cold greatness my fundamental nature.
I suppose people get a sense of calm and immobility from my appearance. But what is there terrifying in that? Up till now it used to be supposed that this was the usual Yogic poise and that it could soothe and tranquillise. Am I to under- stand that I have turned it into something fierce and Asuric which terrifies and is fierce, grim and repellent? I find it rather difficult to believe. Or is it that I live too much within and have too much that is unknown and incomprehensible? I have always lived within, and what else could be expected of me? There is something to be manifested and it is only within that it can be found—there is a world struggling to be born and it is only from within that one can find and release it.
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February 26, 1935
I had no intention of being stiff in that letter. I had to write rapidly and concentrate [on?] what was necessary to say, which was perhaps the cause of your impression. If there was anything too sharp or emphatic it was directed against the forces that are troubling you and certainly not towards you. However, I regret if what I said gave you the impression of stiffness or hurt you in any way.
I do not think the trouble would be lessened by change of place; usually it is not but follows one about. It can only be remedied from within and then it radically disappears.
I must say that this idea which constantly recurs to you that I have no feeling of love or affection for you, only commiseration or an indifferent compassion is totally mistaken. It is a strong and lasting personal relation that I have felt with you ever since we met and even before and it is only that that has been the base of all the outward support, consideration, care and constant helping endeavour which I have always extended towards you and which could not possibly have
arisen from any tepid impersonal feeling. On my side that relation is not likely to change ever.
I hope that the headache and exhaustion will pass rapidly and with it this attack of depression. The black rings are often felt when there is an obscuring pressure on the forehead centre. If the japa gave some relief, it is very good; for it ought to have that effect.
February 27, 1935
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.
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March 3, 1935
Well since you have no objection to twins (poetical I mean otherwise the Ashram might be a little too lively— what?) here are two more written this morning. A new lilt. Every foot has three syllables alias five man-as. I will send these to Prabodh Sen who has been asking to write in "the pretty trisyllabic penta-moraic" svaramatrik. But the lilt and the jovial mood hadn't come so long. If such a mood lasts I will present you—esperons [let's hope]—with more twins if you continue your gracious interest. For without that— no inspiration for me—though I have a more vindictive object—I will captivate even-the enemies of Dilipism by the irresistible sweetness of such homely prettiness—light and intelligible and airy and liquid and what not. Qu'en dites-vous ?
Any number of twins will be welcome—manasputra of course or manaskanya96—physical Rishiputras and Rishikanyas97 are not in demand at present. I hope these will charm the [savage beast?] and soothe according to your intention.
March 16, 1935
Just to Jet you know that I have dissolved our tea-party from today, as I wanted to do more japa and concentration from now in the afternoon too. I did a lot. After that as I sat meditating in the pranam hall 1 felt a sense of great pain and loneliness all over and the futility of a life with- out any shred of response from the Divine—a feeling of utter helplessness and impasse. But I kept on to the best of my ability staving off what you call the adverse forces.
I know you are too busy with far more important things
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than such pains of the likes of us. But in case you find an odd minute or two just see if you can do anything to help me. I don't say these things in any spirit of complaint. But when one feels as I have been chronically feeling, I find some relief to tell it to a kind soul who is ready to help but can't because (1) of want of time and of (2) my own recalcitrance to light. As I was reading your Lights on Yoga I was painfully conscious how signally recalcitrant I must be to Mother's Light!
Want of time does not come in the way as there is no day on which I do not devote some time to thinking of you and concentrating for you. The difficulty lies in the removal of the obstruction in the physical mind, what you feel as the impasse. But it will go if you persevere. I have seen only today, as well as often recently, how what seemed to be denied and impossible for years (bringing about a state of helpless stagnation and hopelessness with disbelief in even the good will or the power of the Divine;, the spiritual Force and the Guru) suddenly happens after all and also how those who never had any experience for years get the opening. The difficulty is great and the darkness of the material consciousness is obstinate, but still if one knows how to persist or even how to wait, the light comes.
March 19, 1935
I shall try to see about the Riddance tomorrow—but I am not sure about my regularity just now, there are too many hurdles in the way.
About your aunt and uncle I shall see. The force, of course. out in Maya's case, she had the strong wish to come here and that helps a great de-al—even when circumstances and husbands are adverse. It is true that in the other case to which I
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made allusion there was no help from anywhere and all combined so that what was wanted should not happen, still it happened—but it took me some strenuous years to do it. So by all means let us always give the force a chance.
About Shankar etc. As you see, there are several weak points on our side—e.g. if Esha's share is only due to her on. her coming of age, Shankar can't be made to disgorge before unless there is a special clause. What we have to be careful about is that nothing is done by which the strength of the strong card—the letter—is weakened. E.g. Maya must do nothing that would be construed as condoning his offence, for then it would lose its value. When Duraiswami98 comes, we shall consult him about these things—for we must know exactly how we stand, even if we adopt a waiting policy and do not take any action.
March 21, 1935
I should like to know exactly what Maya wrote from Madras. If she can reproduce it as nearly as possible. He wires as if she had agreed or promised to go back and not stay here. As I wrote it is important that she should do nothing which would imply that she had condoned his offence—for then her legal position (on the strength of the compromising letter) becomes weak or nil—there is only his possible fear of a scandal left. I do not think there is any hurry about wiring. I am keeping the telegram as all that is written, wired, etc. on either side is of importance and must be carefully recorded. We must be cool and careful in all we do.
One thing more. What was the position Maya took when she left—that she was going definitely and would not return? If so, did she make it clear to Shankar? If not, what exactly did she convey to him. It is important to know that.
P.S. I saw Maya's letter after writing this. It had better
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wait till I have the above information and can decide what should or should not be written.
March 22, 1935
Maya,
I have read your letter, I have written in detail to Dilip about it. So long as you are here Shankar cannot force you to return or do anything against you. If you have the letter in your hands and so long as you do not condone his offence or promise to live or actually live with him as before—which would make the letter useless—he could not force you to return to him even if you were in British India. For the letter is a sufficient ground for your refusal. Everything therefore depends upon your own decision and free choice. But I do not think it is wise to write anything immediately to Shankar —it is better to wait till we have consulted Duraiswami and know precisely what is the exact position you can take with the best chance of his coming to favourable terms with you about your and Esha's stay here.
March 1935 ?
If Maya has written no more than what she remembers, I do not think she has committed herself, although it would have been better if she had omitted the suggestion that if he changed she might return, because it has given him a hope and encouraged him to press for a change of her decision. Promises he will be always ready to make, but she must know by this time that these promises have no value and that if she went back it would be to the same conditions and the same troubles.
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No one can force her to return—with the letter in her hands the husband's right becomes inoperative—it is a sufficient ground for her electing to live apart. Under French law here m Pondicherry the husband's right of compulsion does not exist. And the value of the letter remains undiminished so long as she does not live again of her own free will with her husband or does not pledge herself or offer to forgive his offence and resume the old relations. If she does either, then the letter has no further value and she will lose the hold it
gives her against him.
Esha is a different matter, but here too I think the letter gives a sufficient ground for her to refuse to leave her under his guardianship. But on this side I have to consult Duraiswami as there are one or two points that are doubtful. In any case there will be before his eyes the fear of a scandal if he uses legal means to claim her and if Maya remains firm and is not affected by anything he may say, he may come to terms
here also.
As soon as Duraiswami comes I will get all the questions that rise solved by him. Meanwhile the best is to correspond as little as possible with Shankar as the position is quite definite and clear—sending at most a colourless wire if D. is delayed; he may come for a day this week.
1 have not been able to do the page this time—too many preoccupations.
March 1935
It is no use waiting for Duraiswami. He is tied up in a whirl of mofussil engagements—owing to the bad times there is no longer work for the lawyers in Madras—is on the move all the time and unable to come here, except for flying visits, in spite of all his efforts. Besides he can say nothing unless he has definite facts to go on. The best is to write at once to Bijoy Chatterji and your uncle of the predestination fame. We must
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know what there is—apart from Shankar's statements. After- wards we can consult Duraiswami and decide what to do. We shall certainly do what we can to get things done with the minimum of trouble, but you know what Shankar is when it is a question of money! Anyhow Maya has cut free—it has taken a little long for the forces to work, but after all not so long as I thought it would take. I hope it may not be necessary for her to have to move from here for [her things ?]—but that we shall see after a while as things shape out a little.
I have put all the circumstances before Duraiswami and here is his answer. It reveals a stupefying state of things as regards the Hindus. It appears what I said about the British law applies to Brahmos and registered marriages, but not to marriages under, the Hindu law. Duraiswami says he has known cases in which judges have ordered the wife back to the husband's house even when the tatter's concubine was living there!! Fortunately, the latter part of his opinion carries more comfort.
It is evident she cannot move legally as the law is against her, but in the situation Shankar also is hampered in doing anything effective. It is a stalemate except for the money which he retains in his possession. We can only await further correspondence and determine accordingly what Maya should do. For the rest I shall see if the unseen forces can do anything effective, they have brought her here, but as per human law, it is not sufficient and something more has to be done.
P.S. Please return Duraiswami's opinion for filing after you have read it.
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March 26, 1935
I had written last night a somewhat sad note which on second thoughts I did not send but I send today.
Today after meals I began japa and meditation, etc. of Mother after reading your Lights on Yoga and some lovely poems of Harm (though sometimes too ecstatic for poor Dilip) I fell to wondering whether Yoga was what you claimed: founded on any bed-rock of reality. Suchi's and Sarala's99 case lent colour to this trend of thought in me. I was musing whether ecstasies about peace and light, etc. (however valid for the few who can live in such a subjective world of temporary bliss which the hard world of reality wrecks sooner or later as it did with Suchi and Sarala) are worth striving for with so much suffering and straining and seclusion from life, whether in this world created as it is such a citadel of bliss and light, etc., was not, when all was said, at the mercy of what you call the hostile forces and what we see to be the fabric and texture of the world,
Still I repeated Mother's name and prayed on. I fell asleep, and then suddenly felt keenly conscious and the cycle currents and bhakti and weeping with waves which created almost a dizziness started. Only this time I was not afraid at all. I said again and again: I will surrender to this force of the Mother, if I die, why, I don't care—but surrender I must unconditionally. And then it continued and deepened and I found a great relief—if not peace exactly— and certainly a sense of gratefulness for Mother's sending it. What was more remarkable was however that after that, I saw Mother blessing me attending to trivial details of my scarf, etc. very lovingly and listening to my recital of this experience. She then said: Sit quiet and I will concentrate on your inside. So that is that. I need not be more prolix. You and she will understand. Of late I have been feeling very amorphous. This has given me some fresh
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lease of hope again. Believe me I will be grateful for that, anyway.
I am glad to hear of the experience. The Mother's remark about concentrating on your inside is perhaps significant; for it is the inner realisation, [ease?], light, etc. that is the fundamental thing to be attained and which sadhana can undoubtedly give. Suchi had already attained to sufficient of it and Sarala also to an unexpected degree—so that what has happened did not come to them with a sense of wreck. Sarala, however affected outwardly, is conscious of an inner calm and of the abiding of the light both for him and her. Is not a thing which can abide like that in one other emotional and agitated nature a reality as good as anything the outward life can give? And there is much more than that that Yoga can bring—even if the physical life with its transcience and shocks is a field that has still to be conquered.
April 5, 1935
Does the man across the Atlantic—but would not that mean America?—really expect an immediate reply? I thought you hinted he was a procrastinator? Well, I had not forgotten him, but I was for one thing much pressed or oppressed with other matters and for another I wanted after all to procrastinate because I have been feeling a strong resistance to this publication of a book of small selections. It seems to me not the thing and not the time. It is a little difficult to explain in a mental form, for the mental reasons are on the surface and can be counter-argued. However, I shall perhaps try to do so on Sunday.
On Sunday also I shall look at the Urvasie.100 It is a poem I am not in love with—not that there is not some good poetry m it, but it seems to me as a whole lacking in originality and
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life. However, I may be mistaken; a writer's opinions on his productions generally are.
I am again obliged to put off the niskriti from Nishkriti101 till tomorrow as it is 4.30 a.m. and I have not finished my other work. By the way what does this title really mean or refer to_ is it a riddance or a deliverance and, in any case, whose from whom or what? It is the occurrence of the word in Shailaja's prayer that raises this questioning.
April 7, 1935
I must remind you of your promise not to yield to sorrow and despair and to face your difficulties with fortitude and patience. Suicide is not only a weak and unmanly evasion, but it is worse than useless since the same misery continues after death intensified in the consciousness which can think of nothing else and one has to come back to earth and face the same difficulties under worse conditions. The Gita has never said that suicide can under any circumstances lead to Nir- vana; the death spoken of is a natural or a yogic death with the mind concentrated with faith and absorption in the Divine. I am sure that Ramakrishna also never meant such a thing as that anyone dying under any circumstances would have his last wish satisfied. There is no escape by that kind of exit. I do not know either how you can say that you love me and all the same deliberately decide to deal such a blow to me as your suicide would be. I do not speak of Maya and others to whom you have still some obligations and what it would mean for them. It is also strange that you should think I could be willing to receive your property or any money offered at such a price or ask Duraiswami to aid in such an arrangement. You must have been very much clouded by your fit of despair not to see that. All that apart, I must press on you not to allow these dark attacks with their morbid suggestions to
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carry you away. If you have the true yearning for the Divine, as you have undoubtedly in your soul, it is not by yielding to vital weakness that you will show it but by persisting, what-ever the time and the difficulties, till it is achieved. You have promised to do that and I again recall you to your promise. Nirvana itself cannot be so achieved, but only by rising above all other desires and attachments until one has the supreme liberation and peace. Raman Maharshi himself would tell you that and I suppose you can believe him if you cannot believe me.
It is difficult for me to say anything else since you have told me that no words of mine have any truth or value and that all my experiences also are subjective delusions without any truth or value. I suppose all spiritual or inner experiences can be denounced as merely subjective and delusive. But to the spiritual seeker even the smallest inner experience is a thing of value. I stand for the Truth I hold in me and I would still stand for it even if it had no chance whatever of outward fulfilment in this life. I should go on with it even if all here abandoned and repudiated me and denounced it to the world as a delusion and a folly. I have never disguised from myself the difficulties of what I have undertaken, it is not difficulties or the threat of failure that can deter me.
I hope however that you will get over this attack and see things one day as all the past seekers of the Divine have seen it, viz. that what one seeks is so precious and such a supreme thing that a whole lifetime of effort however arduous or painful is not by any means too much to give to it. I say nothing else since you say that words of encouragement from me can have no value for you. But this at least is a thing that is true and that others whose spiritual experience and greatness cannot be disputed would tell you.
If you have the love for me you speak of—I will say nothing of mine for you, since you do not seem to believe much in it—you will listen to what I say and renew and carry out your promise to go through with your quest to the end with Patience and courage.
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P.S. One correction. Suchi had not lost interest in life—he was to the last deeply interested in Yoga and life. Only he knew that he could not attain now since his body was old and worn with its seventy five years and the accidents that had overtaken it; he was content to prepare himself so that by passing away in Light he could fulfil hereafter.
I repeat what I wrote in the morning that the one thing to be seen is whether there is the true yearning for the Divine or, to put it more strongly, whether that is the one thing that really matters to the being. If there is that, then all other considerations become minor or irrelevant; what is happening in the world or how others react to the search for the Divine or how long the search takes. One must be prepared to give one's whole lifetime and one's whole self to that and count all well spent for the one only and supreme object. When the Divine is a necessity of the being what is the use of mental questionings as to whether He exists or what he is like, kind or cruel, slow or swift in response, easy to reach or hard to discover. He appears all or any of these things to different seekers, but to all He is the one necessity of their existences. If one finds Him quickly, so much the better; if it takes long, still one has to go on seeking till one finds. One may have hard moments of anguish or despair because the human vital is weak, but still one goes on because the soul insists. But there is no logic in the position that because my need of the Divine is entire and even in six years I have not got him, therefore the proper thing to do is to despair and give up. The logical position is, my need for the Divine is entire, so I must go on till I find Him, however long it may take, whether one year or six or twelve; for if my need is entire and persists always, I cannot fail to arrive. That is the position that is taken
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by the spiritual seeker and it is the true and natural one. I1 is no use saying that you are unfit and cannot take it; you have to come to it, if your need is true and entire.
The misery of the world or the activity of the Asuras is also irrelevant. Nobody has ever contended that this is a happy and perfect world, nobody in India at least, or the best possible world or put that forth as a proof of the Divine existence. It is known that it is a world of death, ignorance, suffering and that its pleasures are not enduring. The spiritual seeker takes that not as a disproof of the Divine Existence, but as a greater spur for seeking and finding it out. He may seek it as a means of escape from life and entry into Nirvana or moksha or Goloka, Brahmaloka or Vaikuntha;'102 he may seek the divine Self and its peace or Ananda behind existence and if he attains to that and is satisfied with it he can move through the world untouched by its vicissitudes and troubles; or he may seek it, as I have done, for the base of a greater and happier life to be brought now or hereafter into the world-existence. but whatever be the aim, the actual state of the world is no argument at all against the seeking for the Divine or the truth of Yoga. Also the accidents of the search, that A. is dead and will attain only in another body or B. is ill or C. misbehaves are side matters altogether. It makes no difference to one's own entire need of the Divine and the necessity of persevering m one's seeking till one finds and reaches.
My words about the great secret of sadhana simply pointed out that that was the most effective way if one-could get the things done by the Power behind, did not rule out mental effort so long as one could not do that. Ramakrishna's way of putting it was the image of the baby monkey and baby cat; I have only said the same thing in other words; both are permissible methods, only one is more early effective. Any method sincerely and persistently followed can end by bringing the opening. You yourself chose the method of prayer and japa because you believed in that, and I acquiesced because it does prepare something in the consciousness and, if done the persistent faith and bhakti, it can open all the doors.
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Another method is concentration and aspiration in the heart which opens the inner emotional being. Another is the concentration in the head of which I spoke which opens the inner mind or opens the passage through the Brahmarandhra103 to the higher consciousness. These things are no fantastic invention of mine which one can dismiss as a newfangled and untested absurdity; they are recognised methods which have succeeded in thousands of cases and here also there are plenty who have found their effect. But whatever method is used will not bring its effect at once; it must be done persistently, simply, directly till it succeeds. If it is done with a mind of doubt watching it as an experiment to see if it succeeds or if it is continually crossed by a spirit of hasty despondency saying constantly, "You see it is all useless," then it ought to be obvious that the opening will be very difficult, because there is that clogging it every time there is a pressure or a push to open. That is why I wanted you to get rid of these two things and have harped on that so much, because I know by my own experience and that of others how strongly they can stand in the way of what you seek. For you are not the only one who have been troubled by these two obstacles; most have had to struggle against them. If one can get rid of them in their central action, the removal of their activity in the circumference does not so much matter; for then the opening becomes possible, both to make and to keep and the rest can follow.
The six years of which you speak have been spent by you mainly in struggling with sex and doubt and vital difficulties—many take more than that time about it. What I have been wanting you to do now is to get the right positive attitude within at the centre free from these things. Its basis must be what I have said, "\ want the Divine and the Divine only;
since I want and need, I shall surely arrive, however long it takes, and till I do, I shall persist and endure with patience and courage." I do not mean by that that you should have no activity but prayer and concentration; few can do that; but whatever is done should be done in that spirit.
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P.S. I did not write by the way, that you should "press on"—I said, we must go on pressing on the obstacle till it is broken.
April 9, 1935
It is surely better to seek to right yourself than to let yourself float in the stream of vital despondency and weakness. What do you expect the Mother to answer to such prayers? It is not the soul's demand or need, but the outcry of vital weakness. Suchi did not pray for death, but for light and progress out of his lower consciousness towards the Truth. Ramana Maharshi whatever his objections to birth in this world, did not pray or seek for death, but for elevation to a height of consciousness for which there is neither birth nor death: he is certainly not so ignorant as to believe that the mere death of the body brings by itself a release; if he were, he would not have taken the trouble to go through so pro- longed and intense a tapasya. If a way out is wanted, that is the only way out and there is no other.
April 10, 1935
The Mother has been considering what you have written in your letter about leaving the Tresor and finding another place for you. It is impossible to ask Sarala to move; and as the accommodation now is to find a combination by which you can have what you want is not at all easy, she does not see the way. But it has occurred to her that she might rent Chandrashekhar's house, which he has given up, and make some arrangements there (electric, etc.) which will give you
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Dilip on the terrace of his house
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the solitude you want. Mother will see you at 1 o'clock tomorrow, Thursday.
I trust all will be well and remain well and turn towards happiness and light.
April 12, 1935
Mother,
Will you be so good as to ask Chandulal to be a little prompt. I feel suddenly a new enthusiasm—after a long time and want to do hours of japa, prayer, etc. to you for your love and in a sort of secure seclusion in that room. I want to do as much as I can to get an opening to you and I want your especial force. I want your especial aid to be as patient as you want to try some austerities in my day concentration so that I may not be discouraged (as I always am after a spell of strenuous effort) by my meditation, etc. not yielding results. I want to do all this for real concrete surrender to you and I feel if I really try now while this enthusiasm is burning I may get something. In any case I sincerely want to try and don't want to weep in future if I fail this time. But let me try with your and Sri Aurobindo's special blessing. But that cloison104 is badly needed and please ask Chandulal to do it tomorrow if possible. If not well tant pis—but I will still try in Arjava's former room then.
You are asking for an impossible speed—I mean about the cloison. The work is begun and going on, but it needs a little more time to be ready. However, Mother is asking Chandulal to hurry it up as much as possible.
Not to get discouraged when there is no immediate result is very important—for then the force within sinks and when the force within sinks there is the tapo-bhanga 105 of which the
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old Rishis were always complaining, for each time the tapas broke they had to start afresh till it was reconstructed.
Tonight, I think I shall have time for work on the Nishkriti. I have in fact started making minor improvements and marking the passages where the style is deficient and the inspiration for the right change does not immediately come. I shall also look at the Translator's note and see what has to be done.
P.S. The Mother has just seen in Chandulal´s report that the cloison will be ready and put in on Tuesday.
P.P.S.Gone through a lot of Deliverance, one-third—shall finish preliminary [?] which I will send chapter by chapter for typist.
April 14, 1935
I think you are quite right in what you wrote this afternoon towards the end of your letter and I thank you for pointing it out to me. In fact I had long since ceased to write or say any- thing about the quarrels of the sadhaks and I do not very well know why I stumbled into it here—the force of old habit, I suppose. I shall try to intervene as little as possible in these things and any others that belong to the same plane. There is only one thing needful, to turn to the Divine alone and to realise and I shall concentrate on doing what I can to help people to that end. The rest lies with what rules from behind the veil.
I am sorry I have not been able to proceed with the "Deliverance" these two days—the circumstances have not been favourable. If I can get some free time as on Friday on two or three nights, I shall be able to finish the book, I believe, and after that it will be only a final reading chapter by chapter to assure myself that nothing has escaped notice.
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April 16, 1935
I have always told you that you ought not to stop your poetry and similar activities. It is a mistake to do so out of asceticism or with the idea of tapasya. One can stop these
-things when they drop of themselves, because one is in full .experience and so interested in one's inner life that one has 310 energy to spare for the rest. Even then, there is no rule for .giving up; for there is no reason why the poetry etc. should mot be a part of sadhana. The love of applause, of fame, the ego-feeling have to be given up, but that can be done without giving up the activity itself. Your vital needs some activity, most vitals do, and to deprive it of its outlet, an outlet that can :be helpful and is not harmful, makes it sulky, indifferent and despondent or else inclined to revolt at any moment and throw up the sponge. Without the assent of the vital it is difficult to do sadhana—it non-co-operates, or it watches with a grim, even if silent dissatisfaction ready to express at any moment doubt and denial; or it makes a furious effort and then falls back saying: "I have got nothing." The mind by itself cannot do much, it must have support from the vital; for that the vital must be in a cheerful and acquiescent state. It has the joy of creation and there is nothing spiritually wrong in creative action. Why deny your vital this joy of outflow?
I had already hinted to you that to be able to wait for the Divine Grace (not in a tamasic spirit, but with a sattwic reliance) was the best course for you. Prayer, yes—but not prayer insisting on immediate fulfilment—but prayer that is itself a communion of the mind and the heart with the Divine and can have the joy and satisfaction of itself, trusting for fulfilment by the Divine in His own time. Meditation? Yes, but Your meditation has got into a wrong āsana, that of an eager and vehement wrestling followed by a bitter despair. It is no use going on with it like that; it is better to drop it till you get a new Asana. I am referring to the old Rishis who established Asana, a place and a fixed position, where they would sit
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till they got siddhi—but if the Asana got successfully disturbed by wrong forces (Asuras, Apsaras, etc.), they left it and sought for a new one. Moreover, your meditation is lacking in quietude, you meditate with a striving mind—but it is in the quiet mind that the experience comes, as all Yogis agree—the still water that reflects rightly the sun. Your vital besides is afraid of quietude and emptiness, and that is because, probably, the strife and effort in you make what comes of them something neutral or desert, while they should be a restful quietude and an emptiness giving the sense of peace, purity or silence, the cup made empty so that the soma-rasa106 of the spirit may be poured in it. That is why I would like you to desist from these too strenuous efforts and go on quietly, praying and meditating if you like but tranquilly without strain and too vehement striving, letting the prayer and meditation (not too much of the latter) prepare the mind and heart till things begin to flow into them in a spontaneous current when all is ready;
I wrote what I wrote because you asked me whether that was the thing to do and I have often told you that it is, so I said so again. However, as you do not accept it, it can be thrown into the W.P.B. and forgotten there.
I did not say that meditation was congenitally impossible to you. I simply said that your meditation up to the present had certain elements which stand in the way of successful meditation and must take another position before it can lead to the opening—that is a thing that happens to many sadhaks before they get into the right movement and it does not prove that they are congenitally incapable of sadhana.
It is perfectly true that all human greatness and fame and achievement are nothing before the greatness of the Infinite
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and Eternal. There are two possible deductions from that, first, that all human action has to be renounced and one should go into a cave; the other is that one should grow out of ego so that the activities of the nature may become one day consciously an action of the Infinite and Eternal. But it does not follow that one must or can grow out of ego and the vital absorption at once and, if one does not, that proves incapacity for Yoga. I myself never gave up poetry or other creative human activities out of tapasya—they fell into a subordinate position because the inner life became stronger and stronger slowly—nor did I really drop them, only I had so heavy a work laid upon me that I could not find time to go on. But it took me years and years to get the ego out of them or the vital absorption, but I never heard anybody say and it never occurred to me that that was a proof that I was not born for the Yoga. These doctrines still sound strange to me. I should also be very glad to know of the swift and easy method of Yoga by which all that can be done in a few years—or else not at all, for that seems to be your alternative. What I see in this Ashram is that people catch hold of something said or written by the Mother, give it an interpretation other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a crudely extreme logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. If we protest against these crude ideas being put upon us, the "disciples" cling to their own deductions and delusions and push aside our protests as inconsistent with what we have once said, insincere or unintelligible. The Mother has long ago given up trying to correct these things, for she finds that they do not listen to her but to something in their own minds, which they follow and announce as hers. I still sometimes try, but with no great success. As for the logical conclusion drawn—well! It is natural, I suppose, and part of the game. It is much easier to come to vehement ample logical conclusions than to look at the truth as it is many-sided and whole.
As to the born Yogi, what I said was that there was a born yogi in you, and I very explicitly based it on the personality
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that showed itself in your earlier experiences in a vivid way which no one accustomed to the things of Yoga or having any knowledge about them could fail to recognise. But I did not mean that there was nothing in you which was not "born Yogic." Everyone has many personalities in him and many of them are not yogic at all in their propensities. But if one has the will to Yoga, the born Yogi prevails as soon as he gets a chance of manifesting himself through the crust of the mind and vital nature. Only, very often that takes time. One must be prepared to give the time.
Perseverance and discipline are excellent things, but if you want that the first thing is to discipline the fretful vital and to reject perseveringly the hypnotism of the fixed conviction that nothing can be done and nothing will be done. Perseverance and discipline are indeed mighty adjuncts to the Yoga— if that is the arsenic, I have no objection to your applying any amount of it for killing the sheep—whether the sheep be the restlessness of the mind and vital or any other obstacle in the Yoga.107
P. S. I had no time to speak of the poem and I doubt where there is anything useful I can say.
April 1935
I was not irritated and I am sorry if my perhaps too vivid expression about the W.P.B. gave you that feeling. Your letter gave me the impression that mine had displeased you and that you interpreted it as a condemnation of yourself as unfit for meditation and consequently for Yoga. That in fact was what you wrote and I had to protest against the imputation of any such idea to me. I also wrote protesting strongly against the idea that I condemned poetry and other things of the kind as inconsistent with Yoga or considered them of no value (as well as the misconception that the Mother disliked music and condemned literature, etc. or I may add, the idea
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that Mother and I have never suffered and do not know what suffering is). If I felt that I had to repudiate these groundless imaginations with some energy it is because they are constantly recurring in your letters and you make them a sort of food and justification for your depression and despair. It did not mean that I was irritated with you but only that I wanted these constantly reiterated misconceptions to cease. I have no objection to your writing to me what is in your mind, but you on your side must not mind if sometimes in reply I point out what is wrong in the ideas and attitude that you express— for if I do not do that, they will persist and repeat themselves always and stand in the way of your sadhana.
There is no reason why you should go away. The one thing that would justify your going would be if you lost all faith in me and all regard for me and no longer considered me as your Guru. So long as you have the feeling that you express, I do not see why you should leave me.
April 17, 1935
After reading your letter now, just a word to tell you that you are mistaken; I actually missed your presence at pranam and I am sorry you did not come. If you had listened inwardly you would have heard me calling you.
April 30, 1935
These poems are quite new in manner—simple and precise and penetrating. What you describe is the psychic fire, agni pāvaka, which burns in the deeper heart and from there is lighted in the mind, the vital and the physical body. In the
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mind it becomes a light of intuitive perception and discrimination which sees at once what is the true vision or idea and the wrong vision or idea, the true feeling and the wrong feeling, the true movement and the wrong movement. In the vital it becomes a fire of right emotion and a kind of intuitive feeling, a sort of tact which makes for the right impulse, the right action, the right sense of things and reaction to things. In the body it becomes a similar but still more automatic correct response to the things of physical life, sensation, body experience. Usually it is the psychic light in the mind that is first lit of the three, but not always—for sometimes it is the psycho-vital flame that takes precedence.
In ordinary life also there is no doubt an action of the psychic—without it man would be only a thinking and planning animal. But its action there is very much veiled, needing always the mental or vital to express it, usually mixed and not dominant, not unerring therefore; it does often the right thing in the wrong way, is moved by the right feeling but errs as to the application, person, place, circumstance. The psychic, except in a few extraordinary natures, does not get its full chance in the ordinary consciousness; it needs some kind of Yoga or sadhana to come by its own and it is as it emerges more and more "in front" that it gets clear of the mixture. That is to say, its presence becomes directly felt, not only behind and supporting, but filling the frontal consciousness and no longer dependent or dominated by its instruments— mind, vital and body, but dominating them and moulding them into luminosity and teaching them their own true action.
It is less easy to say whether the poems are esoteric; for these words "esoteric" and "exoteric" are rather ill-defined in their significance. One understands the distinction between exoteric and esoteric religion—that is to say, on one side, creed, dogma, mental faith, religious worship and ceremony, religious and moral practice and discipline, on the other an inner seeking piercing beyond the creed and dogma and ceremony or finding their hidden meaning, living deeply within in spiritual and mystic experience. But esoteric poetry?
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perhaps what deals in an occult way with the occult may be called esoteric—e.g., the "Bird of Fire," "Trance," etc. "The Two Moons"108 is, it is obvious, desperately esoteric. But I don't know whether an intimate spiritual experience simply and limpidly told without veil or recondite image can be called esoteric—for the word usually brings the sense of something kept back from the ordinary eye, hidden, occult. Is "Nirvana" for instance an esoteric poem? There is no veil or symbol there—it tries to state the experience as precisely and overtly as possible. The experience of the psychic fire and psychic discrimination is an intimate spiritual experience, but it is direct and simple like all psychic things. The poem which expresses it may easily be something deeply inward, esoteric in that sense, but simple, unveiled and clear, not esoteric in the more usual sense. I rather think, however, the term "esoteric poem" is a misnomer and some other phraseology would be more accurate.
May 1, 1935
Mother will speak to Nolini, but you might speak to Nolini yourself also, as Mother might forget, there are so many things she has to think about. Pulin has been told to take only the flowers that fall; it did not occur to anybody that he would go up the staircase.
Mother never said Anilkumar was a better painter than Nishikanta, which would be obviously absurd. Mother spoke only about some sketches of the place they had gone to— Anilkumar's were carefully done, while Nishikanta only put down a few indications, so she preferred Anilkumar's. But a Painter cannot be judged by his sketches—only by his finished work. What extraordinary interpretations are put on casual remarks of the Mother!
The poem is beautiful—there is certainly no apotheosis of
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[pain?] in it, though that with a little symbol and mystery could easily be made "esoteric." Herewith the corrected typescript.
Anilkumar
May 1935 ?
109... be gladdest of all if he were—but I fail to see any signs of the genius yet in him. I say this humbly and open
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to correction—in fact I would be glad to learn that you and Mother considered him a [born ?] painter, that is, a genius. But I want to know whether you really said so. I won't blab about it—1 have no fight left in me—it isn 't worthwhile besides. Still it is good to know—for personal guidance.
Another poem on agni—four in all—a sister (today's) to yesterday's. I fear the house itself will be on fire if I encourage so much fieriness? What? In these poems I feel a great power—Nishikanta, Nirod, Kanai and others too feel a great power of concentrated emotion.
Do write on back not here.
I am, by the way, a little too sensitive to power maybe— that is perhaps why I like Nishikanta's poems (vital ?) and painting. I find a familiar friend there—the power I mean. Intuition again of course. But should I distrust it as Leonard Wool! does?
No, Mother did not say that. She said something about what one [who?] has painting in his blood would do and it seems to have been applied to Anilkumar. Anilkumar is still learning; he is very clever and ingenious, loves painting and works hard at it and recently he has been making remarkable progress in technique.
Nishikanta has already his own developed technique and a certain originality of vision—two things which must be there before a man can take risk as a painter. There are on the other hand certain defects and limitations. Power he has but not as yet any consummate harmony.
These observations are of course private and for you only. Mother does not want to pass any public judgment. Let each grow in his own way and to his own possible stature—with as little rivalry or vainglory as may be.
As for intuition—well! One has to make a distinction—if We can—between a pure intuition and a mixed one. A pure intuition carries in it a truth, even if it is only a fragment or Point of truth, and can be trusted. A mixed one carries in it me suggestion of truth which gets coated with mental
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matter—here one has to use discrimination and separate the true suggestion from the less reliable mental matter. Intuition and discrimination must always go together so long as one moves in the mental plane—and for some time after.
P.S. From tonight I have resolved (subject to your approval of course) of meditating, japaing, praying, etc. at night—that is not reading and writing at all at night- do the work in day time and meditating etc. at night. I am a little cowed at the prospect of sufferings this will involve, but perhaps with your help the sufferings maybe a little minimised. I am suffering anyhow. So what do you say? Will you help me a little here or would you rather I didn't try this meditation which I both love and dread ? I want to try once more as the Divine may take pity (though it is highly improbable, I grant) by way of a sort of accident, who knows ? Life is queer, sadhana is still more so, in which unexpected things do occasionally happen.
I shall help you of course and I don't say that the accident can't happen. But you know why I was not anxious that you should go on with the meditation and japa—because of the background of struggle, wrestling for the result with a strong undercurrent of the expectation of failure that had got itself attached to this method. That was why I [wanted?] you to take the way of psychic preparation instead. But if that back- ground were not there, there could be no objection to the continuance of the meditation.
May 5, 1935
I send you the last chapter of "Nishkriti" but keep Raihana's inspiration for today. I have made something for the badrastha nei—very long,
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but as you say, what to do? There is no way in English of putting all that into three or four words, without being abrupt and perhaps enigmatic—at least I found none.
May 6, 1935
Saurin has written nothing, at least I have received nothing —so it is no use passing a judgment. Of course the argument that one can claim back one's gifts because one has been unable to give oneself along with them cannot stand. Given is given. But in this case Mother has returned the gift for special reasons connected with Maya's position, not on any psychological grounds, so there is no need to look farther. Maya herself knows what these reasons are.
P.S. A magnificent poem this one, one of your very best! At once powerful and beautiful. I am sorry I could not attend to Raihana tonight also. Tomorrow night I hope will be more quiet and I shall do it.
May 7, 1935
We are very glad to hear that you have had a complete reconciliation with Maya. That is as I wanted it and as it should be.
As for Saurin, well, he has these things but he has a soul "1 him also and it depends on himself which part prevails over the other.
Anyhow I hope that now we shall be able to put these Pleasant things away from us and rise to calmer and clearer regions—such as the limpid beauty and delicate ether of your night's poem.
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Raihana still waits, for tonight was again crowded with letters to write—but as she waits with the light of Golok around her!
May 9, 1935
What you say is perfectly correct. The first two of your four points are brought out clearly enough, (but not didactically) in the poem and very beautifully put. The third and fourth as put by you in the letter are more implied than expressed, but the essential idea in them comes out all the same. Of course, the French saying "tout pardonner" does not express so much a personal forgiveness as a general charity which condemns nothing because it understands everything—-so that agrees very well with the .gist of your poem—which is very beautiful.
May 29, 1935
Let us first put aside the quite foreign consideration of what we would do if the union with the Divine brought eternal joylessness, Nirananda or torture. Such a thing does not exist and to drag it in only clouds the issue. The Divine is ānandamaya and one can seek him for the Ananda he gives;
he has also in him many other things and one may seek him for any of them, for peace, for liberation, for knowledge, for power, for anything else to which one may take a fancy. It 1s quite possible for someone to say: "Let me have Power from the Divine and do His work or His Will and I am satisfied, even if the use of Power entails suffering also." It is possible to shun bliss as a thing too tremendous or ecstatic and ask
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only or rather for peace, for liberation, for Nirvana. You speak of self-fulfilment—one may regard the Supreme not as the Divine but as one's highest Self and seek fulfilment of one's being in that highest Self; but one need not envisage it as a self of bliss, ecstasy, Ananda—one may envisage it as a self of freedom, vastness, knowledge, tranquillity, strength, calm, perfection—perhaps too calm for a ripple of anything so disturbing as joy to enter. So even if it is for something that one approaches the Divine, it is not a fact that one can approach Him or seek union for the sake of Ananda and nothing else.
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being—but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects— wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of Him—it follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or another of him. The only thing is first to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and everything else begin to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
Your argument that because we know the union with the Divine will bring Ananda, therefore it must be for the Ananda that we seek the union, is not true and has no force. One who loves a queen may know that if she returns his love it willing him power, position, riches and yet it need not be for the power, position, riches that he seeks her love. He may love her for herself and could love her equally if she were not
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a queen; he might have no hope of any return whatever and yet love her, adore her, live for her, die for her simply because she is she. That has happened and men have loved women without any hope of enjoyment or result, loved steadily, passionately after age has come and beauty has gone. Patriots do not love their country only when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; love for country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss, wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived, served and died for her—for her own sake, not for what she could give. Men have loved Truth for her own sake and for what they could seek or find of her, accepted poverty, persecution, death itself; they have been content even to seek for her always, not finding, and yet never given up the search. That means what? That man, country. Truth and other things beside can be loved for their own sake and not for anything else, not for any circumstance or attendant quality or resulting enjoyment, but for something absolute that is either in them or behind their appearance and circum- stance. The Divine is more than a man or woman, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the Person beyond all persons, the Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only imperfect figures. And can He not then be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature ?
What your reasoning ignores is what is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine—something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that changes to a sheer " I seek you for you". It is that marvellous
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and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna." The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.
I have written all that only to explain what we mean our- selves and Krishnaprem and other spiritual seekers, when we speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else—so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to self-giving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being—for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it was really that that was drawing you from the beginning and it is that that is there behind the loneliness and emptiness and need of being filled that you increasingly feel—it is the categorical imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine.
I do not know why you suppose that we should be angry for this or that. If you can feel the Divine in the Guru so much the better, for that is an enormous help, but this is not one of the things that the reasoning mind by itself can see. Mean- while that you should feel more and more need for the Divine in whatever way is so much to the good and we are glad that it should be so. For it is that that should grow until it calls down the response is the one thing needful.
P.S. Don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. Why, the self-giving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, brings in its wake an inexpressible Ananda—and it brings it sooner than any other method, so that one can say almost, "A self-less self-giving is the best Policy" Only one does not do it out of policy. Ananda is the insult, but it is done not for the result, but for the thing itself
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and for the Divine himself—a subtle distinction, it may seem to the mind, but very real.
May 30, 1935
Here is a miracle si vous voulez [if you like]! The Parichay publishing an enthusiastic tribute to Dilip the singer and composer!! I enclose the copy. You need not read all the technicalities, if you don't feel like it, only read the portion I have selected marked in red pencil.
It is a generous tribute undoubtedly though Dhurjati110 is wrong in opining there is no great difference between me and Tagore. There is and that is fundamental. I stand (whatever my worth) for the Classical style in music viz. that class of music where the singer or executant is a creator at every step in improvisations etc. while Tagore is for fining the cadre of the melody a la European music where the singer, as you know, follows the composer—having no choice. I stand for the free movement in music with all its dangers which are great; Tagore for the safe mediocrity since it is fixed and no liberty is given to the singer to vary the melody.
But truce to technicalities.
What about Raihana ? Please—
Working very hard. A little cold today. So read Bhababhuti.111
P.S. Please read Niren's prose poems. It is against such counterfeits that my gadya & padya [prose and poetry] is directed. Are these not counterfeits ? Tell me.
I have not been able yet to go through the whole review- though I shall—but have seen the first two pages and the passages underlined. Well—to Americanise—that is some praise.
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Raihana unborn.
Bhababhuti? Didn't know he was a tonic against cell! As for Niren's poems, well, you know my opinion about free verse; I consider that even Whitman and Carpenter have failed to justify the departure. Niren's achievements do not alter my opinion. But the first two lines or so hare the modern epic quality—they transport us to celestial regions.
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June 2, 1935
But why then did Nishikanta see that blessed vision ? What in the name of Supramental Perplexity was its raison d'etre ? Is it then all a string of accidents or raisings of the subconscient fellow you are up against d´après Nirod? if so then why have people attached so much confounded importance to visions and experiences? Why do I eat my heart out in sorrow (from time to time—thank God, not all the time!) that I am not cut out for visions and expends. Why do I envy Raihana112 for her seeing the Gopis dance and sing that lovely song ? But then even granting all such visions are not even worthwhile discussing why does the sphinx of a Divine shower these on some while to otters they are denied ? If these visions have no value, if experiences don't contribute to a change of nature or of the subconscient Enfant Terrible— then 0 why from times immemorial have the sadhaks and seekers marvelled marvelled at these ?
Visions and experiences (especially experiences) are all right; but you cannot expect every vision to translate itself in a responding physical fact. Some do, the majority don't (I speak of visions only here), others belong to the supra- Physical entirely and indicate realities, possibilities or tendencies that have their seat there. How far these will influence
the life or realise themselves in it or whether they will do so at all depends upon the nature of the vision, the power in it, sometimes on the will or formative power of the seer. I don't know what exactly was the nature of Nishikanta's vision, whether it was of the suggestive or of the positive veridical kind. Farther there was nothing to indicate that it had to do with the answer about Raihana or could realise itself on the spot.
People value visions for one thing because they are one key (there are others) to contact with the other worlds or with the inner worlds and all that is there and these are regions of immense riches which far surpass the physical plane as it is at present. One enters into a larger freer self and a larger more plastic world—of course individual visions only give a contact, not an actual entrance, but the power of vision accompanied with the power of the other subtle senses (hearing, touch, etc.) as it expands does give this entrance. Even if Raihana had not received the song, yet the mere contact with the world of Krishna and the Gopis would have brought her or could at least a joy and an uplifting of the touch of Goloka or of some reproduction of it on the vital plane. These things have not the effect of a mere imagination (as a poet's or artist's, though that can be strong enough), but if fully followed out bring a constant growth of the being and the conscious- ness and its richness of experience and its scope.
People also value the power of vision for a greater reason than that: it can give a first contact with the Divine in his forms and powers, it can be the opening of a communion with the Divine—of the hearing of the Voice that guides, of the Presence as well as the Image in the heart, of many other things that bring what man seeks through religion or Yoga.
Further, vision is of value because it is often a first key to inner planes of one's own being (as distinguished from worlds, etc.) and of one's consciousness. Yoga-experience
(Sri Aurobindo's note:) Note Raihana's contact with the Blue Radiance that was Krishna.
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often begins with some opening of the third eye in the fore- head (the centre of vision in the brows) or with some kind of beginning and extension of subtle seeing which may seem unimportant at first, but is the vestibule to deeper experience. Even when it is not that, for one can go to experience directly, it can come in afterwards as a powerful aid to experience;
it can be full of indications which help to self-knowledge or knowledge of things or knowledge of people; it can be veridical and lead to prevision, premonition and other things of less importance but very useful to a Yogi.
In short, vision is a great instrument though not absolutely indispensable.
But, as I have suggested, there are visions and visions, just as there are dreams and dreams, and one has to develop discrimination and a sense of values and kinds and know how to understand and make use of these things. But that is too big and intricate a matter to be pursued now.
June 6, 1935
The image of the cow is a very good one. The ship is going to the harbour, he should go with the ship—why take exploratory promenades in other directions which may leave him tired out and far away or lost on a reef? To keep to the ship is his last chance. Poetry by itself does not bring to the goal, but it can help as a means to express and deepen one's aspiration while it gives the vital an activity which can keep it from rusting and maintains its energy. Otherwise it may droop or go dry or sulk or non-cooperate. What will bring towards the goal is the growth of the psychic being, the increase in bhakti, psychic clarity of vision, with regard to one's inner movements and the will to get rid of the vital ego, increase in pure self-giving. Meditation and the rest can bring only partial results or often no results until there has
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been a sufficient psychic preparation. Even with those who begin with a flood of experiences because of some mental or vital preparation or past lives whose results happen to be near the surface, these lead to nothing definite till the psychic preparation is made; they often have all their struggle still to go through and some sink with their bag of experiences on the head and a magnified ego on their back. It was this psychic growth that suddenly began in you. Don't let it stop; for through that lies your way. Once that is done, you can meditate and do .everything else that may be needful.
Excuse my being so brief. I am busy with the mud of subconscient earth—dredging, dredging, dredging. And as everything depends on my getting through—well!
June 9, 1935 -
I had begun something about visions of this kind and A.E's and other theories but that was a long affair—too long, as it turned out—to finish or even do more than begin. I can only now answer your questions rather briefly.
There is an earth-memory from which one gets or can get things of the past more or less accurately according to the quality of the mind that receives them. But this experience is not explicable on that basis—for the Gopis here are evidently not earthly beings and the place Raihana saw was not a terrestrial locality. If she had got it from the earth-mind at all, it could only be from the world of images created by Vaishnava tradition with perhaps a personal transcription of her own. But this also does not agree with all the details.
It is quite usual for poets and musicians and artists to receive things—they can even be received complete and direct, though oftenest with some working of the individual mind and consequent alteration—from a plane above the physical mind, a vital world of creative art and beauty in which these things are prepared and come down through the fit channel. The
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musician, poet or artist, if he is conscious, may be quite aware and sensitive of the transmission, even feel or see something of the plane from which it comes. Usually, however, this is in the waking state and the contact is not so vivid as that felt by Raihana.
There are such things as dream inspirations—it is rare, however, that these are of any value. For the dreams of most people are recorded by the subconscient. Either the whole thing is a creation of the subconscient and turns out, if recorded, to be incoherent and lacking in any sense, or, if there is a real communication from a higher plane, marked by a sense of elevation and wonder, it gets transcribed by the subconscient and what that forms is either flat or ludicrous. Moreover, this was seen between sleep and waking—and things so seen are not dreams, but experiences from other planes—either mental or vital or subtle physical or more rarely psychic or higher plane experiences.
In this case it is very possible that she got into some kind of connection with the actual world of Krishna and the Gopis—through the vital. This seems to be indicated first by the sense of extreme rapture and light and beauty and secondly, by the contact with the "Blue Radiance" that was Krishna—that phrase and the expressions she uses have a strong touch of something that was authentic. I say through the vital, because of course it was presented to her in forms and words that her human mind could seize and understand; the original forms of that world would be something that could hardly be sizable by the human sense. The Hindi words of course belong to the transcribing agency. That would not mean that it was a creation of her personal mind, but only a transcription given to her, just within the bounds of what it could seize, even though unfamiliar to her waking conscious- ness. Once the receptivity of the mind awakened, the rest came to her freely through the channel created by the vision. That her mind did not create the song is confirmed by the fact that it came in Hindi with so much perfection of language and technique.
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To anyone familiar with occult phenomena and their analysis, these things will seem perfectly normal and intelligible. The vision-mind in us is part of the inner being, and the inner mind, vital, physical are not bound by the dull and narrow limitations of our outer physical personality and the small scope of the world it lives in. Its scope is vast, extraordinary, full of inexhaustible interest and, as one goes higher, of glory and sweetness and beauty. The difficulty is to get it through the outer human instruments which are so narrow and crippled and unwilling to receive them.
June 10, 1935
I sent you this morning Professor Buddhadev Bhattacharya's letter, if you remember. So it is high time you glanced at my neglected, shelved, weeping, hoping-to-be- glanced-at drama Apad. Really, it deserves a little glancing- at from you written as it is by your inspiration.
And tell me, apropos, do we imagine or is it true that you send us concrete force for such literature too. This suspicion entered my head as I read thro 'Jyoti's novel. The last part is poignant and strong and throbbing with a force which I would never have suspected her (or even a young male hopeful of Bengal) capable of. Did you supply her this strength consciously or are we building castles in the air in a delectable reverence ?
I am thinking of asking my publisher to publish six of her short stories in the form of a book if you agree.
I think there is no objection.
She is eager to dedicate it to you as she fondly believes your force did the trick. But I have my doubts. For though the stories are fine—full of humour and pathos and what
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not—can one suspect you truly (I mean not vaguely!) of inspiring a story-teller any more than you can inspire a Dilip in writing a drama on Trouble (Apad) ?
But do read Apad. Eh ?
I am keeping fine and devout. Mother was so sweet.
Yes, of course, I have long been helping Jyotirmayi. Always when somebody really wants to develop the literary power, I put some force to help him or her. If there is faculty and application, however latent the faculty, it always grows under the pressure and can even be turned in this or that direction. Naturally, some are more favourable ādhārs [recipients] than others and grow more decisively and quickly. Others drop-off, not having the necessary power of application. But on the whole it is easy enough to make this faculty grow, for there is co-operation on the part of the recipient and only the tamas of the apravrttiand aprakās [inertia and obscurity] in the human instrument to overcome which are not such serious obstacles in the things of the mind as a vital resistance or non-cooperation of the will or idea which confronts one when there is a pressure for change or progress in other directions.
June 27, 1935
There can be no objection to your keeping your gratitude and feelings for Ramakrishna. I don't know what is Krishnaprem's objection to emotion; it has its place, only it must not be always thrown outward but press inward so as to open fully the psychic doors.
As the poem is long and you ask me to read it at one sitting, I have kept in the hope that tomorrow I may find the needed leisure. If not then on Sunday—for Saturday is usually a desperate proposition.
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July 1, 1935
Of course, Nishikanta has turned it into poetry and very good poetry; but the clear thought of Lawrence has disappeared and its development is not traceable any longer. The main point of Lawrence is that the metaphysics or philosophy on which the art of an age is built has its curve of developing vision followed by its curve of decline and we are an age of decline with a dead empty metaphysics producing lifeless art and then old values have all to be broken in order that a new metaphysics and a new art founded on a new vision may come. This has not been brought out in a clear and balanced way; we only catch glimpses of it in a rather confused thought sequence.
July 10, 1935
I have indeed been very sad last night because they had said that probably twenty out of our thirty songs would be spoilt because of electricity fluctuations. I woke up at 11 p.m. after a dream that I was sobbing at Mother's feet in great tenderness and love but sadly because I was attached to the prospect of success of my hard endeavour. When I woke up I liked this devotional sobbing business at Mother's feet (I always do—as everything that makes me conscious of my loyalty to her and you do give me concrete joy and the concrete things I love, you know) but was still sad at the prospect of the records failing after so much effort.
I then realised that though I had persuaded myself that I did not do this singing etc., for fame, it was not wholly true, for I did attach a lot of importance to my hard work (how hard it was you don't know) being crowned with
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success. I would not bear the idea of failing in music my forte, after Herculean efforts. I felt humble then and repent- ant and shed tears. "Why must I care, if I fail ?" I said to myself, in the dead of night through my tears, "I should literally, and not theoretically, mean my work as an offering without any attachment to its fruits. If my eventual failure hurts my vanity—for I can't be sure if the songs have come out well—I should look upon it as Mother's Grace and I must open myself to be so corrected." Then and there I felt a lot of relief and prayed to Mother: "Do change this egoist Dilip, if need be hurt me or give me the strong will not to take my hurt in the wrong spirit but in the spirit of opening my weak parts to your light." I realised then that this sort of movement was the right movement and did help me correctly as it moved my egoistic will in the right direction—to surrender. Am I not right?
Yes. It is the true psychic movement.
I then prayed to you and Mother and told myself that what were visions, experiences, etc. and why should I feel so sorry because I don't have them. I felt that this sort of hammering at my egoism, etc. and my tremendously powerful egoistic will and my ability to take the blow in the right way was far more needful to my nature than passing visions, experiences, etc. I had strong perceptions about Yoga, I realised de nouveau, and J was thankful that I was feeling more and more grateful for such blows—for I have always been shying at blows to say nothing of gratefulness.
Please read this letter to Mother and if possible write to me a letter hereanent—it need not be long if you have no time. But tell me is this not an important part of my Yoga— or am I deluding myself?
What you say is perfectly correct—I am glad you are becoming so lucid and clear-sighted, the result surely of a psychic
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change. Ego is a very curious thing and in nothing more than in its way of hiding itself and pretending it is not the ego. It can always hide even behind an aspiration to serve the Mother. The only way of getting rid of it is to chase it out of all its veils and corners.
You are right also in thinking that this is really the most important part of your Yoga. The Rajayogis are right in putting purification in front of everything and a preliminary to successful meditation—as I was also right in putting it in front along with concentration in The Synthesis of Yoga. You have only to look about you to see that experiences and even realisations cannot bring to the goal if this is not done—at any moment they can fall owing to the vital still being impure and full of ego.
I cannot write more, as correspondence is raging, but this is the central gist of the matter.
July 20, 1935
I am rather in a fix. Harm came twice to me. The first time at '12.30 when I was working at my novel. He didn't knock finding my door locked. Then he came at 2.30. He said he had to run a house and this month Mrinalini113 would be sending him less than she did last month so he wants to eke out his income by contributing some poems to the Statesman whose editor Mr. Moore I know and who had once given him some Rs.40 he told me. I said I would gladly help him if I could, so he said he would give me six poems for Mr. Moore. There. But I feel a little uneasy now. If I understand rightly that he has your full consent, etc. in going to that house, I suppose I may help him in this way which costs me nothing. But then he doesn't give the money to Mother this time, so ? What should I do ? Of course he may send the poems on his own, but I
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understood you were against his publishing poems at all just now. Is that true? If it is, then evidently I am in the wrong. But how to back out now? You see, I have always been willing to help all who came my way and so I blurted I would gladly send his poems to Press. It was an impulse born of a long-standing habit—vous comprenez [do you understand] ? But Harm's is I gather a somewhat peculiar case. He is in the Ashram spiritually, yet not in it. He accepts you as his guru yet runs a house after having lived in your house. He was complaining that he was prevented from publishing his poems, and yet now sends (forced to poor fellow, I feel for him, yet it is his own bed he has made and he must sleep there I suppose?) poems for money—to keep body and soul together. He sees all yet does not come to pranam. Is retired, yet goes to theatres. Is in hush yet speaks with Sita three hours and a half daily (he himself told me—from 12.30 to 3.30 daily, good Lord.' even in my moony days I could hardly talk for more than an hour at a stretch on romance with qui que ce soit [whomsoever]! And he with his bird-of-paradise silence talks and talks like this after three months of slate-pencil— forgive my frivolity—give the old frivolous Dilip a little latitude at times since he is becoming a desperate reformer of himself—truly—lives like a true hermit now!). The other day he started singing at my place and simply would not stop when I hinted to him more than once to. Still in confidence my Master—must emulate you now in deep secrecy, you know, must make headway in every blessed direction supposed to be spiritual, what?
But levity apart. Tell me in confidence if you will, for I have now become secretive like a sepulchre, what should I do? O Lord—what a long letter on you long-suffering Divine. Such a letter on Statesmanian poems. Yet, que voulez-vous ? Yoga is no laughing matter. Must look round if there are imps about ready to pounce through the Dilipian wrong movement anent Statesman-Harin affair. Really I would gladly obey whatever your commandment. Shall I
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tell Harm to shift for himself? But he may be offended now, I warn you, since I inadvertently agreed to help and since the poor Mother's poet must live even apart from the Mother through poems on her. Anomaly. Mais que voulez- vous. "Anomaly, thy name is Human!"
I have today fifty letters each two thousand pages long— of course this is not a mathematically accurate statement, but it expresses the impression they make on me—so excuse brevity in my answer to your length. When Harin went to his outside house, it was understood that he was going to lead the "independent" life—also that he was going to try to earn his living by poetry, etc. and was free to publish. So as you have promised to help him statesmanly you need have no scruple in carrying out the promise. He has informed us about sending his A.E. poem to the Statesman. Our attitude in these matters is perfectly neutral and passive—we neither approve nor disapprove. As for Harin's contradictions, well it was just to see what he could do with these contradictions that he went out; Mother approved his going because he had to find his way between his soul and his outer nature; it was impossible that he should go on swinging between the two in the impossibly extreme see-saw. Note that we have not rejected him nor he us—he is making an experiment and we let him do it because we consider it inevitable. Evanesce. But all this is frightfully confidential, if you please, and only to give you a central light on the matter.
August 12, 1935
What you describe is the Darshan "complex" trying to come back—i.e. the mind putting forward the idea that some- thing very great or at least something decisive ought to happen on the 15th, the vital putting forward its certainty or at least its overwhelming expectation that nothing would happen
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except indeed something very disagreeable, the physical mind helping the vitals expectation to realise itself by discovering the something very disagreeable e.g. in the absence of a smile and my very disagreeable intention behind the refusal to smile. It is the old recurrent vital suggestion and fixed movement which used to happen with so much persistence and which by a psychic step forward you had got rid of. To allow it to return would be to go back from the psychic road to the old troubled vital movement. You should not revert to that on any ground whatever.
It does not matter if strenuous meditation leads to experiences or not. Remember what I told you that it is the psychic growth and not experiences that are the road for you just now. That means these things—1st the drawing back from the vital ego and its perturbations to a quiet attitude of faith and surrender; 2nd the growth of something within that sees what is to be changed in the nature and gives the impulse to change it; 3rd the psychic feeling in sadhana which presses towards the growth of bhakti, feels it a joy simply to think, feel, write, speak of, remember the Divine, grows full of a quiet self-up liftmen towards the Divine and lives in that more than in outward things. When the consciousness is full of these things altogether, i.e. when there is the full psychic state or opening, then experiences begin to come of them- selves. The first two at least had started of themselves in you—let them grow and the third should necessarily follow. The psychic opening first, the higher consciousness and its experiences afterwards—this is the safe road and it seems to be the one your inner consciousness wants to follow. Why not follow it? To go back to the vital's demand for experiences at this stage—whether as a right or as a reward for being good—is surely an anachronism when once the psychic has shown its head even a little.
P.S. Mother thinks she can give about half an hour to you tomorrow, but it cannot be before 12.
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August 13, 1935
It is rather difficult for me to conceive of myself as a big grim fierce terrifying supramental Raksasa but I will defend myself no longer on that score.
I am rather surprised at Krishnaprem's surprise about my statement of faith. I thought he had said once you should not hanker after experiences. As for experience being necessary for faith, no, faith without it, that contradicts human psychology altogether. Thousands of people have faith before they have experience and it is the faith that helps them to the experience. The doctrine "No belief without proof" applies to physical science, it would be disastrous on the field of spirituality—or for that matter in the field of human action. The saint or bhakta have the faith in God long before they get the experience of God—the man of action has the faith in his cause long before his cause is crowned with success, other- wise they could not have been able to struggle persistently towards their end in spite of defeat, failure and deadly peril. I don't know what Krishnaprem means by true faith. For me faith is not intellectual belief but a function of the soul; when my belief has faltered, failed, gone out, the soul has remained steadfast, obstinately insisting, "This path and no other; the Truth I have felt is the Truth whatever the mind may believe or not believe." On the other hand, experiences do not necessarily lead to faith. One sadhak writes to me: "\ feel the grace of the Mother descending into me, but I can't believe it because it may be my vital imagination." Another has experiences for years together, then falls down because he has, he says, "Tost faith." All these things are not my imagination, they are facts and tell their own tale.
All that, however, is by the way. I have no objection to you or anybody having experiences. I am not a fool. Let every- body have as many experiences as possible. What I say is that the hankering for experiences should not be there in such a way as to replace the true attitude and bring disappointment
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and revolt. Bhakti is not an experience, it is a state of the heart and soul. It is a state which comes when the psychic being is awake and prominent. It is for that reason that I asked you to cleave to the psychic way and not go back to that of vital desire. I have not said that your psychic being was "in front" in such a way as to be proof against all attack. What I said was that it was becoming awake and active giving you the right attitude and helping you towards the change of your nature. I certainly did not mean a moral but a spiritual change. Freedom from ego is not a moral but a spiritual change —a moral man may be chockfull of ego, an ego increased by his sense of goodness and rectitude. Freedom from ego is spiritually valuable because then one can be centred, no longer in one's personal self, but in the Divine; and that too is the condition of bhakti.
I write all that, but I do not expect you to accept anything I say; that is not possible while these forces are in action. The only thing to do is to get rid of them. All that I can do is to try and help you to do it—I only hope it will not take too long.
August 20, 1935
I wrote a letter to Subhash this morning in reply to his exhorting me to come away, assuring me that all my friends want me back and that nobody is cross with me, etc. I wrote that I must be faithful to the call of my soul and to my Guru whom I do believe to be the Divine incarnate. Perhaps he will smile the well-known "the old story" smile of our up-to-date rationalism.
Well, his also is the old old story repeated without any satisfactory result or liberating end.
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August 22, 1935
(...) Subhash writes about all my friends being eager to welcome me back if I return now—surely I have been in seclusion long enough, etc., etc., etc.—activism philosophy, vous comprenez? I wrote back—a quoi bon, en un mot [what is the use, in a word]. Strange that, is it not? When I am disappointed in Yoga I pout at the Divine but when I am called to return to the un Divine I staunchly and unflinchingly refuse! Inscrutable are the ways of the supramental, what?
But, good Lord, that is not the Supramental—there are no such contradictions in the Supramental. These are "the ways" of the mental-vital being in its search for the Supramental or rather for the Divine on any plane—and that is a very different affair. It is only a colloquy on the way between the vital and the psychic, the one saying, "Here, I say, where is this confounded Divine of yours?" the other, "Ah! people want me to give up my Divine! I'll be damned (I know it) if I do!"
But do tell me please do you really get anything solid from this nebulous Supramental? He looks too suspiciously like leaving-in-the-lurch kind of customer. Nirod tells me you scaled and winged like lightning on Its pinions. Have you really? I mean did it mean something like motion or a sort of Marvellous Calm which seems like motion through some Supramental jugglery of consciousness. Some enlightenment on this bewildering problem would be highly edifying even to the mortals and humans you may be sure. Also Rajani114 has to be gagged somehow:
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he talks of nothing but the Supramental. And what am I to answer? Shall I try some imaginative blood-curdling stunt? Please let me know if I may.
You have created your own "bewildering problem" by supplying your own data! There is nothing nebulous about the supramental, its action depends on the utmost precision possible. As for solidity, since I have got many solid things from much lower forces, I do not see why the highest ones should only give nebulosities. But that seems the human mind's position, only what is earthy is solid, what is high is misty and unreal—the worm is a reality, but the eagle's a vapour!
However; I have not told Nirod that I am scaling and winging—on the contrary I am dealing with very hard practical facts. I only told him I had got the formula of solution for the difficulty that had been holding me up since last November and I am working it out.
To return to the supramental—the supramental is simply the direct self-existent Truth consciousness and the direct self-effective Truth Power. There can therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality to make it more so! Again, a calm that "seems like motion" is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence which can support or produce action— that I know and that is what I have had—the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for four months and wrote six and a half volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages, etc., etc. I have written since. If you say that writing is not an action or motion but only something that seems like it, a jugglery of the consciousness—well, still out of that calm and silence I conducted a pretty strenuous political activity and have also taken my
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share in keeping up an Ashram which has at least an appearance to the physical senses of being solid and material! If you deny that these things are material or solid (which of course metaphysically you can), then you land yourself plump into Shankara's illusionism, and there I will leave you.
You will say however that it is not the Supramental but at most the Overmind that helped me to these non-nebulous notions. But the Supermind is by definition a greater dynamic - activity than mind or Overmind. I have said that what is not true, is not supramental; I will add that what is ineffective is not supramental. And finally I will conclude by saying that I have [not] told Nirod that I have taken possession of the Supramental—I only admit to be very near to it or at least to its tail. But very near is—well/ after all a relative phrase like all human phrases.115
I don't know how you are to "gag" Rajani. You might per- haps by my two formulas, but it is doubtful. Or perhaps you might tell him that the supramental is silence—only it would be untrue! So I leave you in your fix—there is no other go. At least until I have firm physical hold of the tail of the supra- mental and can come and tell the mortals and humans—no doubt in language which will be unintelligible to them, for they have totally misunderstood even the little I have already written about it.
August 23,1935
I can't resist the temptation of sending you the enclosed. The reviewer I know not. So I am glad he is so laudatory— though his language is rather pompous.
I have been typing your letter written to me this morning, and pondering and pondering. I trust I have grown wiser, believe me, not less so by the irony in your letter on us mentals. But que voulez-vous, you have expressed
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yourself, willy-nilly, in the language which the mental has invented after all. So you are also in no less a fix than I. The only difference between you and us seems to be the difference between a Jivanmukta116 who accepts the "fixes" voluntarily while the baddhas (bound) are crushed in the "fixes" toils. But anyhow it is refreshing to see that a Jivanmukta can accept bonds which he transcends.
Why should I be in a fix for that? I use the language of the mind because there is no other which human beings can understand—even though most of them understand it badly. If I were to use a supramental language like Joyce, you would not even have the illusion of understanding; so, not being an Irishman, I don't make the attempt. But of course anyone who wants to change earth-nature must first accept it in order to change it. To quote from an unpublished poem117 of my own:
"He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way."
As to the supramental language however the review you sent me stirs in me wild hopes. "Angelic heights throbbing with the spirit of the [vettling wingerin?]" (magnificent! let Joyce beat that [vettling wingerin?], if he can!). Arguing with "devil don't care dialectics", "[?] [?] in the midst of theories controversed and knotty self-criticism," "in spite of the bludgeon hits of dilettantism," etc. etc. If I could write like that I might be able to explain the supramental to you and perhaps with the aid of some "indulgence in slow ruminations" punctuated with "chuckling witticism" here and there you might arrive at some raw inklings and uncooked understanding of the Supermind. But alas! such writing is beyond me.
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August 24, 1935
Here is another poem of the new series of four verses each in prabahamān [flowing] mātrā-vrtta—my new successful chhanda—Prabodh Sen has adjudged. So I am reassured about the technique (by technique here I mean the technique about enjambement, structure, etc.—). I have experimented long in this chhanda as you know and, after many stumblings pointed out by Prabodh Sen, because it is the most difficult chhanda in a sense, have acquired an easy flow in it). But I want to ask you about one thing.
You know how hard I had to work at my artistry effect, etc. I did the same in music too though I could sing spontaneously since I was four and would beat time since I was two—lam told. But then should artistry be too conscious ? How will this new series of poems look? The last line of each verse repeats in a way the first line of the same verse in a sort of refrain-like cadence. This is conscious and deliberate. I don't mean it is laboured—for it isn't, I now- a-days write fairly easily and with very little effort—but about its artistry and architecture, the first three verses leading up to the fourth—the enjambements, etc. are all conscious and the metre perfected after a great deal of effort, after many first failures. Now, I am sure about the technique now—in fact now-a-days I receive letters from so many poets, poetesses, etc. asking me to adjudicate on the intricatest points of metrical gymnastics even and I can, if I like, do gymnastics too like Satyen Dutta, only I never do it. I never write poems, as you know, regularly, U] write only when I feel a kind of urge. But to resume my question:
As I understand, Swinburne spent a lot of labour on conscious artistry and thereby spoilt the spontaneity of many poems! I don't fancy that. That is why I ask you— should I try such conscious artistry as I do in this poem ? I mean the artistry about assonances (note here the liquid
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hidden rhymes in every, line—the rhyming is deliberate for mellifluousness—duhkha bedan majheo kehan [who even in pain and sorrow], etc. every long line has such internal rhymes within) enjambements, stanza-formation, etc. Are these risky? But I don't feel any artificiality about it— except in the sense that all perfection of rhythmic utterance is of necessity somewhat artificial. Still I do feel a natural flow. Many others also feel it, even my enemy Girija as I wrote to you, started praising my poems now. But nevertheless I don't care to emulate Yeats whom you praise for his artistry but are indifferent to at bottom. My diffidence arises from my having acquired my technical mastery by a great deal of conscious determined study of technique and metrical research. It would not be too much to say that I pondered over each syllable once for hours when it was necessary. Now, of course, I don't have to— but can direct my concentration to artistry and chiselling of structure, etc. But my question still remains.
I don't know that Swinburne really did that—before assenting to such a proposition about him I should like to know which were these poems he spoiled by too much artistry of technique. So far as I remember, his best poems are those in which he is most perfect in his technique. I think his decline came when he became too much at ease and poured out an endless melody without caring for substance and the finer finenesses of form. Attention to technique harms only when a writer is so busy with his technique that he becomes indifferent to substance. But if the substance is adequate, the attention to technique can only give it greater beauty. Things like a refrain, internal rhymes, etc. can indeed be great aids to the inspiration and the expression—just as can ordinary rhyme. It is in my view a great error to regard metre, rhyme etc. as artificial. Metre is on the contrary the most natural form of expression for a certain state of creative emotion and vision, much more natural and easy than a non-metrical form; they express themselves best and most powerfully in
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a balanced rather than in a loose and shapeless rhythm. The search for technique is simply the search for the best and most appropriate form for expressing what has to be said and once it is found, the inspiration can flow quite naturally and fluently into them. There can be no harm therefore in attention to technique so long as there is no inattention to substance.
There are only two conditions about artistry: (1) that the artistry does not become so exterior as to be no longer art and (2) that substance (in which of course I include bhava) is not left behind in the desert or else art and bhava not woven into each other.
Editor's note
In September 1935 there was an exchange of letters between Sri Aurobindo and Dilip on the subject of Harin. Respecting Sri Aurobindo's wish to "throw a veil of silence" over Harm, we have omitted most of these "private" letters. All the same we have plucked a few lines from here and there, when the individual merged with the universal. After all, none of us are free from our dark side. For, are we not all buffeted by the play of universal forces, such as anger, pride, etc. ?
Sri Aurobindo and Mother gave Harm a "long and full chance to develop his better side of spiritual experience," as they gave to so many other sadhaks. The question is whether we "want to drive both the black and the white horse" or choose to ride only the white horse.
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September 1935
But time, however Einsteinian, is not indefinitely elastic— so how to find time for the necessary except at the cost of the unnecessary. (...)
No, I did not put any conscious force for that this time. It was a resultant as you say, of several forces, among which may be counted the one I put upon you for the purpose that other time which you did not then diagnostise. It is a fact that forces so put are not altogether wasted but bide their time and become suddenly effective under the proper conditions at a later time. I have seen that hundreds of times—with very curious results since they act under circumstances which form no part of the Idea that originally put them forth. How- ever your impulse was all right—only I value it more as a step in your conquest of ego than for its original purpose, though that too is all right. (...)
Private
Well, I think I know Harm's psychology pretty well by this ' time and there is nothing new to me in all that you write, nor anything inexplicable in his actions or motives. I am quite aware of the alternate adoring and bowing of which you speak, and always have been—it is a fairly common thing in human nature. I am not frightened by the prospect—for my motives in dealing with people are not those of the ego. Besides, from the first I knew that Harin would either rise very high or fall very low or do both—and I took the risk, as it seemed worth taking.
I My cryptic utterances were not in the least meant as a defence of Harin. I did the defending business in days when
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I was still trying to "harmonise" the people here—but I have given that up as a bad job. Harmony can come with the loss of the ego or it may come in the supramental whose nature is harmony; but before—well, it is more unreasonable than asking for the moon. How can there be harmony in a world of ego ?(...)
I had not heard of the Gramophone letter; but I suppose I could tell the motives behind it—if I cared to do so. Harm's grievance about these things was that we allowed you to publish your poetry, write in the papers, sing, play music, have music parties, call Udayshankar, etc., etc., all "vital things"—while he was prevented by us from doing any of them. As almost everybody in the Ashram thinks about such things, so he too thought that the difference made was due to personal partiality, and that the Mother's rule of the Ashram was full of partiality, etc. which is also a thing almost every- body has thought and probably still thinks about it. Voila. Of course they don't think that of any so called "privilege" given to themselves—for that is quite tolerable! So the world is made.
Finally, why occupy your mind with Harin? It won't help what you are now trying to do in the sadhana. For your relation with him is the clash of two egos and you are trying to get out of that line of business altogether.
P.S. One thing I would ask you in all humility. Can I be as nice to him as I like ? I like to be kind and nice to him.
No objection to niceness. If it makes him a little nicer. You can judge for yourself how nice to be.
You can be absolutely sure he won't affect me in the least
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by his talk. It is a curious phenomenon with me (I have noticed before too—and always.) that whenever I see hostility or wrong movements in others, far from vacillating, I feel adamant and peaceful like Raman Maharshi. (...)
You have written a very fine poem. But Harin's bidroha [revolt] is of another character—there is something behind low and dark which he does not want to get out of himself. So—
P.S. Of course it was not my intention in writing the last letter that you should cut or throw off Harin. I only wanted you to know our position and the difficulties and this letter also I write from the same standpoint. If you have converted him, good—but let it be a true conversion.
September 9, 1935
Yes, I am confident about immunity from Harm's movements. Was dreadfully busy whole day in unyogic work re. proofs, etc. But what about Krishnaprem and that letter? To give you a fillip I send his two letters I spoke about. See if you can comment thereon along with the question. What the deuce he means by this Light of his? Knowledge ? Well will you give me some hints as to its concreteness? Light, good Lord! What is it?
Will answer you about Krishnaprem tomorrow. God will- ing. Not much to say though—when one heartily agrees, what can one say except "Hurrah! ditto!" However.
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September 10, 1935
(Dilip had received a letter from Krishnaprem
which we include here. Sri Aurobindo's reply comes after.)
My dear Dilip,
At last I must sit down and write a reply to your letter. And first let me thank you for the prasadi petals from your Gurudev and for the interesting copy of the Sunday Times.
Now what is the "faith and experience" business ? I can't remember any remarks on the subject today. In fact the only thing I ever remember saying on the subject of faith was contained in a letter to you in which, as far as I remember, I said that faith was the light of the higher self penetrating the lower or some words to that effect.
Casting about in my memory I do seem to recollect some vague talk with M.B. [Moni Bagchi]118 but the remarks were no doubt ad hoc and probably were directed against the orthodox religious demand for a blind acceptance of dogmatic belief. Such belief or pseudo-belief (for it seldom, if ever, is real belief) has nothing to do with what I meant by faith in writing to you. The latter is not an intellectual assent to intellectualised propositions for which one has insufficient evidence but an attitude of the soul which is based on a dim perception in the personality of something more clearly known at higher levels. That, at any rate, is what I meant by "true faith" and I should have thought your Gurudev would have more or less agreed with it. But at any rate that is my position at present; I fancy that Moni Bagchi must have garbled what I said.119
Certainly experiences are not the goal but experience (in a way, at least) is, for by experience I mean living knowledge manifesting in one's being and if that is not present something is wrong or at least something has not started yet.
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Of course faith precedes experience on this level but it does so only because it is itself the Light from experience already present higher up.
Do you know what is immortal or what is mortal ? And do you know which of these you are ?
Answer these questions and you will understand what I mean by faith. Incidentally you will also know what I mean by bhakti, the ahuti120 of the mortal in this flame of the immortal.
I say again ("I said it loud; I said it clear; I went and shouted in his ear") that I am not in any way against emotion. That would be quite absurd. But I do criticise the current practice of weltering in emotion for its own sake and for the sake of the pleasure attaching to it. That is like a man weltering in a hot bath.
Know Krishna, love Krishna and work for Krishna. Then you can leave all the "blisses" to take care of themselves. You will certainly not find any shortage of them. Of course there is bliss experienced in self-offering but do not offer yourself' in order to get the bliss hut offer yourself because He is Krishna and your being can only fulfil itself by being united with His being.
About bhakti—the word is ambiguously used. Some people mean by it an emotional rapture as such. (Don't ignore these two small words.) In that case bhakti is not the highest thing. Others, including myself, mean by it self-giving to Krishna which is of course accompanied by emotional rapture but is not performed for the sake of the rapture. In that case it is the "highest" or something like highest. Loud applause from you at this point I suppose but be sure you don't misunderstand me. Before you can offer the "ghee" in the fire you have to know where the fire is and Krishna is in the Light, in the Light, in the Light!
Of course I have left out all sorts of qualifications. There is such a thing as preliminary offering, or, say, wish to offer, and much more but I am writing a letter not a book.
Disregard the Light at your peril for He is the Light and
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a Light must mingle with a Light. Fail to know the light and you will helplessly tread the dark path of the "daksimyana"121 whirling helplessly, the sport but not the master of Karma.
Everybody should strive to find out so that at death he may echo the cry of the Orphic initiate: "From the pure I go to the Pure". All I can say is that the Light in which Krishna dwells is a Light which sees, not a light which is seen and the voice of Krishna is a voice which speaks not a voice which' is heard.
I really can't go over those old letters of mine that you have typed out. Make what you can of them and throw away the rest. As regards the point you query with red pencil, no "not" is required. The point is simply that symbols which are known as symbols are sometimes less dangerous than symbols which are not recognised as such and it is impossible, however "abstract" and "Vedantic" one may be, to escape from symbols as all words are symbols.
I have, however, added a "tippamī"22 to your comments. I find that the letter is largely a repetition of the previous ones. Evidently I am running dry so had better shut up.
I do not know that I can answer your question about what Krishnaprem means by Krishna's light. It is certainly not what people ordinarily mean by knowledge. He may mean the Light of the Divine Consciousness or, if you like, the light that is the Divine Consciousness or the light that comes from it or he may mean the luminous being of Krishna in which all things are in their supreme truth—the truth of Knowledge, the truth of Bhakti, the truth of ecstasy and Ananda, everything is there.
There is also a manifestation of Light—the Upanishads speak of jyotir brabma, the Light that is Brahman. Very often the sadhak feels a flow of Light upon him or around him or
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a flow of Light invading his centres or even his whole being and body, penetrating and illumining every cell and in that Light there grows the spiritual consciousness and one becomes open to all or many of its workings and realisations. Appositely, I have a review of a book of Ramdas (of the "Vision") before me in which is described such an experience got by the repetition of the Rama mantra, but, if I understand rightly, after a long and rigorous self-discipline. "The mantra having stopped automatically, he beheld a small circular light before his mental vision. This yielded him thrills of delight. This experience having continued for some days, he felt a dazzling light like lightning flashing his eyes, which ultimately permeated and absorbed him. Now an inexpressible trans- port of bliss filled every pore of his physical frame." It does not always come like that—very often it comes by stages or at long intervals, at first, working on the consciousness till it is ready.
We speak here also of Krishna's light—Krishna's light in the mind, Krishna's light in the vital; but it is a special light—in the mind it brings clarity, freedom from obscurity, mental error and perversion; in the vital it clears out all perilous stuff and where it is there is a pure and divine happiness and glad- ness.
There are some however who seem to regard this invasion of Light not merely as a thing without value but a thing of evil or, possibly, one that can be such and so to be distrusted: for I have before me a letter describing an experience very similar to Ramdas's, but it was condemned by the writer's Guru as an attempt at possession by a devil to be dispelled by uttering the name of Ramakrishna!
That is as much as I can write about it just now. The usual arrest by time is there. But why limit oneself, insist on one thing alone and shut out every other? Whether it be by Bhakti or by Light or by Ananda or by Peace or by any other means whatsoever that one gets the initial realisation of the Divine, to get it is the thing and all means are good that bring it.
If it is Bhakti that one insists on, it is by the Bhakti that
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Bhakti comes and Bhakti in its fullness is nothing but an entire self-giving, as Krishnaprem very rightly indicates. Then all meditation, all tapasya, all means of prayer or mantra must have that as its end and it is when one has progressed sufficiently in that that the Divine Grace descends and the realisation comes and develops till it is complete. But the moment of its advent is chosen by the wisdom of the Divine alone and one must have the strength to go on till it arrives;
for when all is truly ready it cannot fail to come.
I shall try to write more tomorrow.
It seems to me a pity that you have dropped even for a moment the line you had taken, which in my eyes at least was really serious Yoga, and given the whole emphasis to the meditation. If you find it dull, it can hardly succeed. However, as you say, it is no use complaining: I only hope you will get back to the psychic line in which you were making good progress. I note at any rate that you are determined to stick to the spiritual endeavour in spite of the keenness of your disappointment. It is the sticking to it and seeing it through that makes success possible. I don't know that it is useful just now to say anything more. I can only give all the help possible.
September 11, 1935
I was quite in earnest in speaking of the progress you had made by the psychic movement and the endeavour to detect and remove the ego. I had already written to you strongly approving of that way. It is in our Yoga the way to devotion
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and surrender—for it is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of ego that makes it possible to surrender. The two things indeed go together.
The other way which is the way to knowledge is the meditation in the head by which there comes the opening above, the quietude or silence of the mind and the descent of peace, etc. of the higher consciousness generally till it envelops the being and fills the body and begins to take up all the movements. But this involves a passage through silence and a certain emptiness of the ordinary activities—they being pushed out and done as a purely superficial action—and you strongly dislike silence and emptiness.
The third way which is one of the two ways towards Yoga by works is the separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, the inner silent being from the outer active one, so that one has two consciousnesses or a double consciousness, one behind watching and observing and finally controlling and changing the other which is active in front. But this also means living in an inner peace and silence and dealing with the activities as if they were a thing of the surface. (The other way of beginning the Yoga of Works is by doing them for the Divine, for the Mother, and not for oneself, consecrating and dedicating them till one concretely feels the Divine Force taking up the activities and doing them for one.)
It is therefore the first way that would seem the one for you to follow and I was naturally very glad to see you take it.
If there is any secret or key of my Yoga which you say you have not found, it lies in these methods—and, in reality, there is nothing so mysterious, impossible or even new about them in themselves. It is only the farther development at a later stage and the aim of the Yoga that are new. But that one need not concern oneself with in the earlier stages unless one wishes to do so as a matter of mental knowledge.
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September 12, 1935
I am grateful to learn that I have succeeded in making you somewhat partial to Peace and even almost able to envisage Silence without horror. It is a well-nigh supramental achievement—and yet you are unwilling to believe in the supermind or in me! However what I want to remind you of is that inner peace and silence are not necessarily a passage to Nirvana and nowhere, else. I have shown by my own example (and there are others) that it can be a transition and a support to an inexhaustible and unfailing activity of knowledge, production and many things else. That tears the guts out of your fixed theory and constant assertion to the contrary—but you are always calling up its ghost and making it fight on like a bhūt [ghost] of Norwegian saga or the heroes of the Hindi epic long after the life is out of it or its head and legs. cut off. I hope the time will soon come when you will let it rest peace- fully in its grave.
Also the psychic approach is not the thing you paint it in your letter. All these highly literary and rhetorical, swingingly forceful or pungent phrases with which you pepper it, as once you did with the supermind, are, as those were, singularly inappropriate. It need, besides, be no slower in its result than the other ways. It depends on the sustained force and earnestness which you put into it whether it fructifies sooner or later.
As fop romance, you would have had your fill of it if you had come earlier here, but you would also have had all the difficulties afterwards. As it is, the Gods who preside over your evolution seem to have made up their minds that you must deserve the romance of spiritual achievement before you get it. Perhaps they are wiser than your desire.
As to meditation it was for two reasons that I discouraged it, first, because it was through your impatience dropping you into the slough of despond instead of bringing you nearer to peace—next, because there was some chance if it bore fruit
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of its bringing emptiness and silence—and then you would have stood numb with horror and perhaps sunk aghast into the arms of Inertia! But if you turn suddenly into a monument of indomitable patience and are no longer afraid of Peace and Silence—well, then of course my objections would disappear.
But still even then I maintain the equal or greater necessity of the psychic way through devotion, the conquest of ego and surrender.
September 13, 1935
It is a pity you have lost all gladness or enthusiasm for the way of psychic devotion, for surely you had some and whatever you may say, it had brought a real progress—not in startling experiences, certainly, but in a movement of the being God- wards—a turn towards the way of inner spiritual ripeness. However, if you don't feel like continuing it, I suppose it is no use your forcing yourself. I still hope you will at some time come back to it yourself.
Asceticism has its own uses provided it is done very seriously and consistently, and if you felt a real call that way I would not say no. Of course, you can try the meditation still. It may succeed in spite of the despondency. For sometimes, as I have seen in two or three cases recently, the change or experience comes in a most unexpected and irrational way.
September 14, 1935
The Mother smiled because she was looking at you—the inner you also of course with the inward look—and from what she saw it came again to her "Yes, you are faithful".
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Which was just what you were being by resisting the suggestions of the insinuating adverse Force.
As for these emotions, I don't think Krishnaprem would have at all objected to them—as I understood his letters— and we certainly do not and have never done. He would say, I think, that they—such feelings towards the Guru—are quite akin to and near to the Light—for the Light can express itself in the emotional being as well as through the self and mind. What you express in your letter is precisely what I mean by the growth or opening of the psychic being; the feelings you express are what I call the psychic emotions—fidelity, gratitude, self-offering, service, the love that cleaves to the Beloved whatever may happen—what else do 1 mean by self-offering, self-giving? It is when the whole being is recast in this spirit, when all is an expression of love, fidelity, service, self-offering that the psychic being is complete and surrender becomes possible. Strange! you gird at the psychic way and yet you write to me almost in the same breath one of the most psychic letters possible!
The fact is that your mind has got mixed up with all sorts of preconceived mental notions about these things and that is why you misunderstand or fail to understand what Krishnaprem or I write to you. There is such a misprision about the conquest of ego and the seeking of Krishna for Krishna's own sake and the crumbs—which I want to set right in another letter; it would be too long for this Saturday night.
Anyhow I have no objection to your meditating or even to your giving a trial to asceticism—I object to it as a goal, but have no feeling against it as a passage, for I have been there myself and so has the Mother. I am bound to say that many in the Ashram would be better for a taste of it. Also I have never bound you down to crumbs; I have only pointed out that most seekers start with crumbs, proceed with slices and then get the whole loaf, and it is not good spiritual politics to be dissatisfied with what comes and jump into the slough of despond because you can't get the whole loaf straight off. I have no objection to your getting the whole loaf at once—
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provided it does not give you indigestion as it or something that looked like it gave to X, Y and Z. But in their case also did I ever object to their swallowing that big production of the spiritual oven? Never! I even helped them to it at all risks to them and me. So!
September 15, 1935
Well, great guru, so be it. I will plump for asceticism then, since no other way for a speedy arrival I gather ? But let it be a concrete asceticism then, since I want the concrete realisations. Quid pro quo, what? So I propose these recipes for your full approval, for mind you, no non-committal supramental permissive ambiguous sanctions for me, to be obviated or disclaimed later by your arch- favourite "Well, Dilip-was-doing-his-own-Yoga" refuge. I must renounce then things which I like:
1) HI give up tea. I love it.
2) I'll give up cheese. I like it.
3) I'll bid adieu to fried potatoes, onions, butter, I adore these.
4) I will start periodic fasts, to feel hungry, heroically, without food.
5) Will part company with hair-oil.
6) Will shave off my head, that is authentic asceticism: I am not joking, I will, I grimly undertake, if only to show that I mean business. I will have at least the grim satisfaction of enjoying your failure to identify the metamorphosed Dilip and marvel how quickly the unregenerate Dilip has been made an end of by your withering Supramental.
7) I will sleep on blankets—pillowless. But note: I tried this before already and remember that although you have kept me in reasonable comfort, I came ready to brave any austerity.
8) Last, though not least, I will sleep without the mosquito-
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curtain which will be the most heroic of my ascetic stunts, as I have never yet been able to sleep without the comfy net.
Only please believe me when I urge that though my language is still unregenerate, poor Dilip being still Supramentally un trans formed, my intention can defy the seriousest of Supramental vagaries. For though the language is flip- pant the heart is tearful comme il faut and tuned on to the top-notes of austerity. But now, do be business-like your-self, too, and bless beautifically: "Amen."
I am rather aghast as I stare at the detailed proposals made by you! Fastings ? I don't believe in them, though I have done them myself. You would only eat like an ogre afterwards. Shaved head! Great heavens! have you realised the consequences ? I pass over the aesthetic shock to myself on the 24th November from which I might not recover—but the row that would arise from Cape Cormorin to the Himalayas! You would be famous in a new way which would cast all your previous glories into the shade. And just when you are turn- ing away from fame and all the things of the ego! No, no— too dangerous by half. Sleep without the mosquito net? That would mean no sleep which is as bad as no eating. Not only your eyes would become weak, but yourself also—and to boot gloomy, grey and gruesome, more gruesome than the Supramental of your worst apprehensions. No and no again. As for the rest, I placed some of them before the Mother and she eyed them without favour.
After all real asceticism is hardly possible except in a hut or in the Himalayas. The heart of asceticism, besides, is having no desires or attachment, being indifferent, able to do without things, satisfied with whatever comes. If you asceticise outwardly it becomes a rule of life and you keep it up because it is a rule, for the principle of the thing or for the kudos of it or as a point of honour. But I have noticed about the ascetics by rule that when you remove the curb they become just like others—with a few exceptions, of course; which proves
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that the transformation was not real. A more subtle method used by some is to give up for a time, then try the object of desire again and so go on till you have thoroughly tested yourself! E.g., you give up potatoes and eat only Ashram food for a time—if a call comes for the potatoes or from them, then you are not cured: if no call comes, still you cannot be sure till you have tried the potatoes again and seen whether the desire, attachment or sense of need revives. If it does not and the potatoes fall away from you of themselves, then there is some hope that the thing is done!
However, all this will make you think that I am hardly fit to be a guru on the path of asceticism and you will probably be right. You see I have such a strong penchant for the inner working and am so persuaded that if you give the psychic a chance, it will get rid of the vital bonds without all this stern- ness and trouble.
But I will write again and try to see without being aghast. I had no time to steady myself under the shock today.
P.S. Raihana's reproduction is very expressive of the Gopi, but what else to say about it. It is a drawing and a drawing expresses the vision of the artist more often than the sitter— so one can say nothing from it.
September 16, 1935
O Guru, I thank you sincerely for refusing assent to my doom. And yet, paradoxically, I feel a definite disappointment too along with the relief. For I had a lurking suspicion that your Supramental wisdom might still be wanting to impose asceticism on me since I have, willy-nilly, to practise your Supramental Yoga and no other; so I decided, after a mighty wrench, to ban everything my mental loved or even approved of. But now you yourself are turning down my proposal to conquer attachments
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which are holding me up. I repeat, however, that I am still "game" if you reconsider your veto to give me another trial.
How in the earthly did you get this strange idea that we were pressing asceticism on you? When? how? where? I only admitted it as a possibility after repeated assertions from you that you wanted to do this formidable thing, and it was with great heart-searchings and terrible apprehensive visions of an ascetic Dilip with wild weird eyes and a loin-cloth, eating ground-nuts and nails and sleeping on iron spikes in the presence of a dumbfounded Lord Shiva! I never prescribed the thing to you at all; it was you who were clamouring for it, so I gave in and tried to make the best of it, hoping that you would think better of it. As for the Mother the first time she heard of it, she knocked it off with the most emphatic "Nonsense!" possible. In fact what you proposed was even more formidable than my vision—a shaven-headed and mosquito-bitten Dilip + the loin-cloth and the rest of it (not that you actually proposed the last, but it is the logical outcome of that devastating shave!). Conquest of attachment is quite a different matter—one has to learn to take one's tea and potatoes without weeping for them or even missing them if they are not there. But we have repeatedly said that you could go on with them and need not follow the way taken by some others. As to seclusion I have written my distrust of "retirement" several times; it is only a few people who can do it and profit, but they are not a rule for others. So your subtle supra- mental interpretation of our intentions or wishes was a bad misfit. However all's well that ends well and in spite of your suggestion of being still game, I will consider the danger as over. Laus Deo [Praise be to God]!
By the way, what's all that about Rishabhchand, Radhananda and Ambabhikshu?123 It is very cryptic. Radhananda's "ascetic" ways are his own and of long-standing and our influence has been towards their diminution if anything; I am not aware that Rishabhchand is an ascetic or sitting upon nails.
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Ambabhikshu? Is it because he does not receive visitors in his room? but that is a prohibition belonging to the upstairs of Retraite and not to the person.
September 20, 1935
Last evening I saw Harm off at the station for a few minutes. He looked very black in the face and gloomy too. I felt for the poor fellow who lost all through his own waywardness, etc. Still 1 felt a little sad as I came back alone. The question recurred to me again and again if Sri Krishna had truly meant it concretely or merely poetised when he had said na hi kalyana-krt kascid durgatim tata gacchati ?124
You have forgotten the context. Arjuna asks what of a yogi who fails in this life because of his errors—does he fall from both the ordinary life and the spiritual and perish like a bro- ken chord? Krishna says no. All who follow the Good get the reward of their effort and don't perish as they get it first in the life beyond and afterwards in the next birth in which the Yogi who fails now may even resume his effort under the best conditions and arrive at Siddhi. Krishna never said that nobody ever in this life fails who attempts the Yoga.
For all of us have some failing or other—enough for any Divine to declare us unfit after even a superficial examination of our immeritoriousness. Harm's demerit seems to have been—constantly thinking that he was too meritorious.
[[Was that his only difficulty? Egoism was indeed his first and main difficulty, but the others? He himself knew that they were there, but he chose not only to keep them out of his
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poetry but in speech to pretend to others that they were not there. That was because something in him was determined not to change.]]125
I remember when I was on bad terms with him, as I perused his poems of luscious self-approbation, I told myself constantly: "The fellow is living in a fool's paradise—too unsceptic for Dilipian taste." ... Though even now I like beautiful poetry like Harm's qua aesthetic poetry. But it is not what I was going to say. I was going to say that Harin's collapse—he looked perfectly annihilated—made me think why should a seeker, like him, after spiritual life (for a seeker he was, was he not?) head so straight for disaster especially with you and Mother as his gurus?
And if a man refuses to listen to his gurus and claims to be wiser and more righteous than they are?
(...) This morning as I pranamed Mother, I felt a deep emotion with tears (which the Lightists disapprove)
The Light does not disapprove.
and this song was the result. As I was singing it I felt deeply stirred this morning.
This song is in the same metre (not altogether the same rhyme scheme all through) as my father's famous and beautiful song on Nostalgia which I copy out side by side for your convenience. I used to sing this song to thousands in Bengal. Anilbaran, you may remember, had composed a year or two ago a song in the same metre and rhyme scheme which Sahana sang to Mother: Tui Ma amar hiyar hiyā tui Mā āmār ankhir ālo [Mother thou art the heart of my heart, thou art the light of my eyes] I will sing this song sometime to you and Mother—my own I mean, as it came out of a deep emotion and very spontaneously.
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September 21, 1935
Absolutely no hope of correcting your poem today—too heavy a mass of work. I have another mass of important out- side correspondence filling my box for the last month or more which I absolutely must clear off tomorrow—for my past Sundays have been as heavy as the week days and I could not deal with them. But I shall see if I can get a few minutes for this translation—you seem to have progressed greatly in your English verse (how so quickly? Yogic force? internal combustion? the subliminal self?) and perhaps much rehandling is not needed. I send you Raihana's letter and drawing which have unaccountably turned up again with me (Poltergeist? your inadvertence? mine?).
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September 22, 1935
Could not meditate of late thanks to mountains of proofs. But soon I will start like a Pahari Baba: beware.
After the mountain of proof the mountain of meditation with you, the BABA on top? All right: I am ready to face it.
September 28, 1935
This friend126 of mine—a top hole chappie from the unyogic humanistic point of view, from the "die-of-a-rose- in-aromatic-pain" cultural one to boot—is heart-broken, etc. for reasons you know. But what, his letter gives food for thought because
He's disappointed that my stay [in the Ashram]
Has been refreshing in a way!—
In that he assumes, I have professed
To have in Yoga alas, progressed!!—
In throwing off Dilipian charms
But lo! be finds my mental warms
Up to a friend who comes to you
To claim his Supramental blue
For PALE he's to all outward seeming
But can you afford to be now beaming?
Do write I prithee on the back
That the eye may follow your master-track!
I read your poem first and was in deep waters. After reading your friend's letter, I struggled to the surface; but the crucial lines are cryptic still. I am always beaming like a supramental sun. Why should I not afford to beam now? Why should the Moon-Lord's127 pallor defeat me? Rather he
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should flush up with my radiance—and your warmth. N'est- ce pas ?
October 4, 1935
The Mother felt a close sympathy with Somnath. There is in him of course a great mental capacity, but what he has in an unusual degree is a very fine psychic being and nature capable of true and profound psychic feelings and power of psychic experience. He is not aware as yet of all that is there in his soul, but there are great possibilities there waiting to be developed.
October 5, 1935
To Mother and Sri Aurobindo,
Although you did not permit me,
(Perhaps my letter did not see ?)
Yet cooked have I—eat, I prithee
For in love I've cooked I guarantee
Albeit there was (twixt you and me)
In it some dare-divinery.
But then you didn't (did you ?) foresee:
Through hush there is no holding me ?
The dauntless Dilip when Yoga-free.
I read your letter but ironically forgot all about that part of it (the excellent part) so there was no answer. As for the preparation itself the acclamation that rose from the palate when it encountered the remarkable concoction was "Queer but good!"
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You wrote about the attempt aborting and trying again, etc. This has sent me to despair almost, it will I fear follow into the grave-limbo of Nirvana/ Harmony and so many others. If I had a footing in Yoga this would not have mattered. But not having acquired it I have perforce to be a little thirsty for your letters on such matters—though I so genuinely hesitate to disturb you. But truly your letter of this morning has filled me with despairing alarm. Once such things are shelved, they do not come back to surface as I know to my cost. Still 1 can't insist, as I know you are so busy. But if you find some time do at least remember my two chief questions W whether in Vaishnavism and Ramakrishnaism there wasn't partial transformation at least, and that (2) does not any light of realisation, if it is to be lasting, presuppose some transformation of the adhar in order that the descent may not be fugitive. As a corollary a light that descends in realisation does it not partially transform whether we aim at it or not?
Under your pressure (not supramental) I have splashed about a little on the surface of the subject—the result is imperfect and illegible. (I am sending it down to Noni to wrestle with it.) Your fault! How on earth do you expect me to go deep or to the point or do anything else but scribble when I have no time at all, at all, at all.
I am not sure what you mean by the Vaishnava transformation or Ramakrishna's, so I can't say anything about that. I can only say that by transformation I do not mean some change of the nature—I do not mean, for instance, sainthood or ethical perfection or yogic siddhis (like the Tantrik's). I use transformation in a special sense, a change of consciousness radical and complete and of a certain specific kind which is so conceived to bring about a strong and assured step for- ward in the spiritual evolution of the consciousness such as and greater than what took place when a mentalised being
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first appeared in a vital and material animal world. If any- thing short of that takes place or at least if a real beginning is not made on that basis, a fundamental progress towards it, then my object is not accomplished. A partial realisation, does not meet the demand I make on life and Yoga.
Light of realisation is not the same thing as Descent. I do not think realisation by itself necessarily transforms anything; it may bring only an opening or heightening or widening of the consciousness so as to realise something in the Purusha part without any radical change in the parts of Prakriti. One may have some light of realisation at the spiritual summit of the consciousness but the parts below remain what they were. I have seen any number of instances of that. There must be a descent of the light not merely into the mind or part of it but into all the being down to the physical and below before a real transformation can take place. A light in the mind may spiritualise or otherwise change the mind or part of it in one way or another, but it need not change the vital nature; a light in the vital may purify and enlarge the vital movements or else silence and immobilise the vital being, but leave the body and the physical consciousness as it was, or even leave it inert or shake its balance. And the descent of Light is not enough, it must be the descent of the whole higher consciousness, its Peace, Power, Knowledge, Love, Ananda. Moreover, the descent may be enough to liberate, but not to perfect, or enough to make a great change in the inner being, while the outer remains an imperfect instrument, clumsy, sick or inexpressive. Finally, the transformation effected by the sadhana cannot be complete unless it is a supramentalisation of the being. Psychisation is not enough, it is only a beginning; spiritualisation and the descent of the higher consciousness is not enough, it is only a middle term;
the ultimate achievement needs the action of the supramental Consciousness and Force. Something less than that may very well be considered enough by the individual, but it is not enough for the earth-consciousness to take the definitive stride forward it must take at one time or another.
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I have never said that my Yoga was something brand new in all its elements. I have called it the integral Yoga and that means that it takes up the essence and many procedures of the old Yogas—its newness is in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method. In the earlier stages which is all I deal with in books like the "Riddle" or the "Lights" or in the new book to be published128 there is nothing in it that distinguishes it from the old yogas except the aim underlying its comprehensiveness, the spirit in its movements and the ultimate significance it keeps before it—also the scheme of its psychology and its working, but as that was not and could not be developed systematically or schematically in these letters, it has not been grasped by those who are not already acquainted with it by mental familiarity or some amount of practice. The later stages of the Yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.
I know very well also that there have been seemingly allied ideals and anticipations—the perfectibility of the race, certain Tantric sadhanas, the effort after a complete physical siddhi by certain schools of Yoga, etc., etc. I have alluded to these things myself and have put forth the view that the spiritual past of the race has been a preparation of Nature not merely for attaining to the Divine beyond the world, but also for the very step forward which the evolution of the earth- consciousness has now to make. I do not therefore care in the least—even though these things were far from identical with mine—whether this Yoga and its aim and method are accepted as new or not, that is in itself a trifling matter. That it should be recognised as true in itself and make itself true by achievement, is the one thing important; it does not matter if it is called new or a repetition or revival of the old which was forgotten. I laid emphasis on it as new in a letter to certain sadhaks so as to explain to them that a repetition of the old yogas was not enough in my eyes, that I was putting forward a thing to be achieved that has not yet been achieved, not yet clearly visualised, even though it is the
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natural but still secret desired outcome of all the past spiritual endeavour. It is new as compared with the old yogas:
1. Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into a Heaven or a Nirvana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object. If there is a descent in other Yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent—the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life; here the object is the fulfilment of life.
2. Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of Consciousness (the supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth- nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
3. Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive. I have not found this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or realised in the old yogas. If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out paths and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public.
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October 1, 1935
As usual when this mood seizes you, you are erecting many quite groundless supports to justify it and others that are surely too flimsy to bear such an edifice. We have never said that music was incompatible with sadhana. Mother has never forbidden anyone to hear your music nor has she ever said that your singing would disturb or injure your sadhana or anybody else's sadhana. One or two found themselves disturbed at concerts by the crowd or did not care to go and to them she may have said that they should not go if they did not care or were disturbed, that surely is a perfectly natural reply and is not a prohibition of singing. Neither has Mother prohibited Sahana from singing or hearing your songs; there has sometimes arisen a question of her retiring from too much outward contacts or discussions, etc. because it disturbed her poise which was still insecure. There are people who need that, just as there are others to whom it makes no difference; and each must do what is found best in his own case. But that has nothing to do with music and it is a strange and violent twist to say that it includes a prohibition of music as incompatible with sadhana. On the contrary I have always encouraged you to do whatever, poetry or music, helps the devotion and combats the false idea that there is no capacity for spiritual things in you. The very fact that people find in your music so much more than before shows that it has not been discouraged but fostered here. It is you yourself who have in your moods of despondency belittled the spiritual use of your poetry and music, it is not we who have done so.
In the same way I am surprised to see you make a tragedy out of my humorous phrase with the thrice repeated "at all."129 I certainly did not expect you to take it in such a way or I would not have written it. I have given always in the past all the time I could give, far more than to anyone else individually in the Ashram, in this matter of writing. Nowadays I have no more time for long letters, I am obliged to be brief—
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yet I have made exceptions and mostly for you. I wrote the phrase about no time at all, but it was after devoting a good part of two nights in succession to an endeavour to give you an answer—and a fairly long one. So in this respect I do not think I have at all failed you.
As for the other complaints, e.g. about your quarrels with Sahana, surely it is a great exaggeration to quarrel about such perfectly indifferent matters as a disagreement about the merits of Moni Bagchi—whether in the Ashram or out- side it in ordinary life one can differ in opinion about people or things without the difference spoiling the atmosphere for them. Certainly, liking or disliking people has nothing to do with Yoga; neither liking people, which is a very amiable quality, nor music has ever been declared by us incompatible with Yoga.
All your letter therefore is built on the void except as far as it relates to your unsuccess in meditation. But the remedy for that does not lie in throwing up but in persevering in the Yoga. It is simply an attack; for all the suggestions enumerated by you are those which usually accompany such attacks. Throw them off whenever they come instead of nursing them;
it is the only way to get rid of them in a definitive way.
Kashmir? Impracticable, for it is not the season; impracticable also, because it is not the cure.
October 10, 1935
[[I think you are somewhat out as regards the parallel between you and Harin. (...) The imperative to be a great Yogi and spiritual poet is one thing—many have it at first—the inspiration to be true and pure in all the being is not so common. No resemblance to your case, therefore.]]130
Aspiration and will to change are not so very far from each other, and if one has either, it is usually enough for going
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through—provided, of course, it maintains itself. The opposition in certain parts of the being exist in every sadhak and can be very obstinate. Sincerity comes by having first the constant central aspiration or will, next, the honesty to see and avow the refusal in parts of the being, finally the intention of seeing it through even there, however difficult it may be. You have admitted certain things changed in you, so you can no longer pretend that you have made no progress at all.
The peculiarity you note is pretty universal—it is one part of the being which believes and speaks the right and beautiful things; it is another which doubts and says just the opposite. I get communications for instance from X in which for several pages he writes wise and perfect things about the sadhana— suddenly without transition he drops into his physical mind and peevishly and complainingly says—well, things ignorant and quite incompatible with all that wisdom. X is not insincere when he does that—he is simply giving voice to two parts of his nature. Nobody can understand himself or human nature if he does not perceive the multi-personality of the human being. To get all parts into harmony, that is the difficult thing.
As for the lack of response, well, can't you see that you are in the ancient tradition. Read the "Lives of the Saints"—you will find them all (perhaps not all, but at least so many) shouting like you that there was no response, no response and getting into frightful tumults, agonies and desperations—until the response came. Many people here who can't say they have had no experiences, do just the same—so it does not depend on experiences, I don't advise this procedure to any- body—mind you. I only want to say that the feeling of never having had a response does not mean that there never will be a response and that fits of despair at having arrived no- where do not mean that one will never arrive.
P.S. Have read the preface. Of course.
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October 12, 1935
But how the deuce can I give a formal "psychic certificate" like that to Mahendra Sarkar?131 His capacities are undoubted and his experiences confirm what I saw at once about him that his is not an ordinary nature. But he is more complex than Somnath and for the moment I don't want to act as a "Delimitation Committee."
You put me in a great quandary by your question. We never know what to ask when such a question is put to us—we always try to shove the choice back on the shoulders of the giver. It is not ill-will but inability to think of anything what- ever; it is only when something forces itself on our notice as needed or useful that we know and that never happens when somebody wants to give and says, "Tell me what."
You can have him at the Tresor132—in spite of his hopeless- ness for Yoga. But does he expect to pay his respects to me? The Man in the Moon would be more possible. You can at least see him across Space while I am invisible and untouchable—except when I am not but that is a day astronomically distant.133
You have made me acutely aware of "the wide high void that is my silent mind." Imagination? not a trace of it—how can there be imagination in the sunya Brahman [Supreme Void] ? It would be so much easier for you who have an active mind to "eureka" something in the matter. The only thing I can do is to beat a long empty and quiescent boom with no result or else to wait calmly for the descent of a strong inspiration from the far-off Infinite.
October 19, 1935
The poor Dilip writes in a rich Harinian vein with a mind unclouded by hazes in an amazing gusto to dare anything.
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Which expiates for the enclosed: Krishnaprem's letter to whom I wrote regretfully that clouds were my perennial comrades.
What next? Must tell you something charming. If I can't tell you something real—must concoct it in the last resort, in poetry.
Mais pourquoi? Voila [But why? Here it is]: look, do look at Krishnaprem's compliment bien tourne [well- turned compliment]: the line marked in red. I wish I had typed it all in capital letters. "But being naturally of a tactful disposition"—as said the peacock—I desist from exhibiting my strut. Well? What do you think of that?
And yes, do you know what my friend Somnath told me today about my music. Alas, the same bashfulness gags me otherwise you would have had some gush, as Somnath is recognised as one of the connoisseurs of first class Indian music, an instrumentalist himself—and fed from his childhood on classical music. Dash it all, let me burst out. He said he cannot conceive of a greater height in original creation in Bengali vocal music with such a wide gamut of devotional feelings etc. etc. etc. My bashfulness again— alas! So I stop—but only after adding that he said that it was so rare to see a composer achieve such technical perfection and that it can't come by effort.
And something else to gush about: when good fortunes come sometimes they too come in battalions, what? My dear friend Dhurjati writes that he has been experiencing a change inly—that the intellectual life is barren and that his friends consider his Pondicherry culmination not too far. He is a sincere fellow and never says anything he means not. I feel Sotuda's134 and Somnath's coming here in the wake of Arjava's and Dilip's (Arjava is a dear friend of his, or at least he was) has somewhat undermined his self-sufficiency. Anyhow a little force sentto him won't be inopportune and I do so wish he would come: I owe a great deal to him and he is one of my dearest friends— dearer than Somnath though not so dear as Subhash or
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Krishnaprem. Anyhow—good news that, no ? At least for gushing purpose ?
P. S. Truly do you know as I was singing Raihana 's songs this morning (on Krishna) I felt a thrill of bhakti emotion and every time I repeated his name in the song it came with a new thrill and melodic outpour. Please, for Supramental's sake (how do you like this adjuration ?) read all this out to Mother in the name of Commiseration.
Very good indeed! Proof that singing and music can help!
October 20, 1935
Well you did look very sweet I admit, but you said you wanted a time-piece to Somnath on his pressing to know what he could make you a cadeau of. But when I made that enquiry you didn't say anything and now see what plight I am in—moving heaven and earth to think up some- thing that may at once please you and serve you. Amiya suggested a toilet-box, Sahana—kingkhap135 pieces for crown. I think of a revolving book-case. Qu'en dites- vous? And for Sri Aurobindo say a Shantipuri dhuti136 very fine stuff costing Rs.30 say? Qu'en dites-vous? For Supra's sake do say something if only to smash Silence which so terrifies all good souls.
Well, when you wrote, the clocks were not needed, for there were three going merrily together though giving quite different times. But since then there has been a debacle and Somnath appeared as a providential saviour, so he was asked to fish us out of the difficulty.
Mother suggests that the book-case might do, but as it will perhaps take up all the money, you could make it a joint present (ajugal murti present, so to speak). What do you say?
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I told my friend Somnath to see about a book-case, then dhotis, then kingkhap crown-pieces—till he was quite muddled—no wonder. So in the end I obliterated all orders and said prophetically I would write later.
But then what to write about? Ah, that is the question of questions! To please a Mother that only smiles but speaks not and a Guru who only fences and puzzles and bewilders a poor mental sisya out of his human wits!!
Well, what are human wits except to be puzzled till they don't know where they are? It is only when they are reduced to that condition that there is some chance of their clutching at the tail of the Supramental.
Quite sympathise with your bashfulness under such a bombardment of compliments—you must feel worse off than Ras [Sayoun?] in Abyssinia137 though perhaps with less inclination to retreat and hide yourself in the desert. But .what do you think of Krishnaprem's Upanishadic sentences about the "Light that sees"; it does not puzzle your "poor human wits" ? As for Dhurjati, well, every mind has its day—of discovery that "mind is not enough", and he must have been expend- ing his so lavishly that the development is not surprising. The rest lies on the knees of the gods and I suppose the gods will see to it.
October 29, 1935
Each mind can have its own way of approaching the supreme Truth and there is an entrance for each as well as a thousand ways for the journey to it. It is not necessary to believe in the Grace or to recognise a Godhead different from one's high- est Self—there are ways of Yoga that do not accept these things. Also, for many no form of Yoga is necessary—they arrive at some realisation by a sort of pressure of the mind or the heart or the will breaking the screen between it and
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what is at once beyond it and its own source. What happens after the breaking of the screen depends on the play of the Truth on the consciousness and the turn of the nature. There is no reason, therefore, why Dhurjati's realisation of his being should not come in its own way by growth from within, not by the Divine Grace, if his mind objects to that description, but, let us say, by the spontaneous movement of the Self within him.
For, as to this "Grace", we describe it in that way because we feel in the infinite Spirit or Self-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 this 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 it is the same thing and the same process of the being in 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.
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October 30, 1935
But I have already told you more than once that I have no objection to your seeking Krishna or to your asking for Ananda or Milān [union] or anything else. I have never pressed you or others either to search after supermind or to accept me as an Avatar. These things have risen as an answer to questions put by yourself or others and I have treated them as matters of knowledge. But each must go by his own way and his own nature to his own goal. Ahaitukī bhakti [motive- less devotion] according to the Vaishnava ideal is the highest way and also the quickest, but if one does not feel equal to it, sahaitukī [motivated] bhakti will do well enough. Or if one has no turn for bhakti at all, there are plenty of other ways. Or if one does not care to follow any way, there is, as I said, in answer to Dhurjati's question, the pressure of something in the nature to find the Self, if that is what it is after, or God or Krishna or the Mother or whatever it may be.
If you know the urge in you, well, follow it straight—there is no need of questioning or going this side or that. Follow the heart's urge till it reaches what it is seeking.
October 31, 1935
I am rather taken aback by the interpretation you have put on my letter. There was absolutely nothing in it of dismissal or giving you up. You had written that you found you desired Krishna only and in the old way with desire for the Ananda and the Milan, that you could not arrive at ahaitukī bhakti and that the Supramental glories of my Yoga and the greatness of my Avatarhood were beyond you and not for you and that you wanted only Krishna. You concluded that I should find you unfit and send you away. My answer was intended to
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31 October 1935
show that none of these things need constitute unfitness. I had not asked you to seek after the Supermind, my writing about it was only in answer to questions for intellectual discussion and knowledge; for none can attain to Supermind unless Supermind comes to them, unless, as I put it, it descends into the earth-consciousness. As for Avatarhood, we had agreed that you should regard me as Guru and it was not necessary for you to accept or see me as the Divine. I had also said several times that I had no objection to your seeking after the Divine in the form and personality of Krishna. AH these things had been agreed upon between us—at least so I understood it—some time ago. So I did not see why for these things I should declare you unfit or send you away. So long as you have the seeking for the Divine as Krishna that is quite sufficient. As for ahaitukī' bhakti, I wanted to point out that to think I insisted on it is a mistake; it is the highest and most powerful method, but in its absence sahaitukībhakti is quite enough. I emphasised my point by saying that even if that were absent—I never said that that was your case or that your case was like Dhurjati's—a man need not despair of reaching the Divine, for there were other ways, such as that of Knowledge, or even without any way a sincere pressure of seeking on the nature would end by finding whatever it sought of the Divine in whatever form. Therefore it was sufficient to follow the urge in you and not force yourself to seek other things or consider them indispensable for fitness.
I hope this will make my meaning clear to you. I never thought of dismissing you or giving you up and the idea of wanting you to go away is so far from me and foreign to me that I did not even think it necessary to say so, as you knew it well from past correspondence and from my attitude to you all throughout—it has never changed from that of an unalterable love and sympathising patience. For I know that you can arrive at the goal if you give yourself the chance.
The only thing that stands in your way is the impatience of the length of the way and these repeated fits of despair. Even that has been the experience of many bhaktas and yet they
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have gone through, but there is no necessity for these despondencies. I had shown you what to do to avoid them and while you did it you made great progress in preparing the nature so that Somnath could speak to the Mother of the miraculous change he found in your character. An equally miraculous change can come in the direction of spiritual experience. All that is needed is the fixed will to go through.
I do not see why you should try to force yourself to go away when neither you nor I desire it. For me to desire it is indeed not thinkable. I trust that you will put that thought away altogether.
November 1935 ?
I believe Krishnaprem's comment was on a passage in which I wrote that this Yoga was not like the old ones in that it aimed not at an ascent or passing beyond life but at a descent of the divine consciousness into life. Its aim is double —two movements fusing themselves into one—an ascending into divine consciousness and a transformation of earth life by the divine consciousness coming down here. All the old Yogas put the emphasis on going to Nirvana or to heaven, Vaikuntha, Goloka, Brahmaloka, etc. for good and so getting rid of rebirth. My emphasis is on life here and its transformation and I put that as the aim at once of my Yoga and of the terrestrial manifestation. I am quite unaware that any of the old Yogas held this as the aim before them. Even Vaishnavism and Tantra are in the end otherworldly: mukti is the aim of their efforts and anything else could be only coincidental and subordinate or a result on the way. If my view is correct, then my statement was not an error.
I have not denied that the ideal of a change on earth is of old standing. It is there vaguely in the human mind perhaps since the beginning, though more often perfection is put in some golden age of the past and deterioration and a cataclysm
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is the law of the future. Christianity foresees a descent of Christ and his rule on earth, but this is figured as a natural event, not as a change produced by an inward power and process or by Yoga. A reign of the saints is also foreshadowed in some Hindu scriptures, but that equally is something different from my conception. As for sainthood itself or the siddhis of Yoga including a siddha body, that too is not what I mean by transformation, it is a radical change of consciousness and nature itself that I envisage. I do not know also that these things were sought by the process of descent—the Tamil Shaiva saints for instance sought for the siddha body by tremendous austerities; the siddhis they sought were all there in the suksma mental and vital worlds and by a stupendous effort and mastery of the body they brought them down into the physical instrument. I have always said that these things and these methods are out of my scope and eschewed by me in my Yoga. I tried one of these but after achieving some initial results I saw it was a bypath and I left it.
To get rid of or mastery over kama-krodha [desire and anger] is not the transformation, it is at best a preliminary step towards it provided it is done not in the moral way by mental self control but in the spiritual way. Sainthood is not my object. I do not know how far Ramakrishna had gone towards the transformation as I conceive it; the metaphors you quote contain nothing precise with which I can compare my own experience or my own intuitions about the change. According to certain accounts there was a descent of Kali into his body which made it luminous, but he repressed it as something contrary to what he was seeking after. If there is something anywhere in the past which coincides with the aim and conceived process of my Yoga I shall be glad to know of it; for that would certainly be an aid to me. I put no value on the newness of what I am doing or trying to do. If the path was already there open and complete, it is a great pity that I should have wasted all my life cleaving it out anew with much difficulty and peril when I could just have walked on a clear and safe avenue towards the goal of my endeavour. But the
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nearest I could get to it were some things in the Veda and Upanishads (sacred words, veiled hints) which seemed to coincide with or point towards certain things in my own knowledge and experience. But after incorporating certain parts of the Vedic method as far as I could interpret or recover it, I found it was insufficient and I had to seek farther, [incomplete]
Assuredly, rejection means control of one's thoughts, and why should not one be master of one's own mind and thoughts and not only master of one's vital passions and bodily movements ? If it is the right thing to control the body and not allow it to make a stupid, wrong or unconscious movement, if it is the right thing to reject from the vital an ignorant passion or low desire, it must be equally the right thing to reject from the mind a thought that ought not to be there or that for good reasons one does not want to be there. As for possibility, I suppose when a thought that is manifestly stupid or false presents itself to the mind, one can and usually does reject and throw it out and bid it not recur again. If one can do that with a given thought, it follows that one can do it with any thoughts that need for any reason to be excluded. If a scientist goes into his laboratory to work out a problem, he shuts out from his mind for the time being all thoughts of his wife, his family or his financial affairs, and if they come he repels them and says "This is not your time." If he has resolved to carry out a line of investigation to the end or a method of invention and, if doubts assail him, he will certainly throw them aside and say "\ mean to see this through to the end and till I have reached the end, I have no intention of listening to you." At every step a man of any mental calibre has to exercise some power over his mind, otherwise he would be as
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much in a state of restless mental confusion or of mechanical incoherence as one who had no control over his impulses and desires ... [incomplete]
The question put to me was whether it was possible for one to love another's child as well as one loved one's own children. To that of course there can be only one reply that it is perfectly possible, for it often happens. It is even possible to love another's child better than one's own. I don't think it can be said that in all these cases the equal or greater love is an illusion. Where it is an illusion (the cases you quote), it is because the thinking mind has influenced the vital feeling;
the stepmother knowing that it is her duty to care for all equally, helped perhaps by a psychic strain in her emotions, comes to believe or imagine (without any hypocrisy but not without some involuntary self-deception) that her love is equal for all. When it comes to the test the genuine vital attachment for her own prevails over the lesser vital attachment for the one who is not her own; the vital reveals itself as the deciding factor and the mental element and the psychic strain are unable to prevail against it. But where the love for the other's child is itself vital, not based on a mental ideal, and is truly intense, the same result would not follow. Again if there is a strong psychic affinity between the man or woman and the child not his or her own by birth and this has been seconded by an equally strong vital pull, the resultant love would reveal itself as intense and genuine and the more ordinary love would not prevail against it.
Of course, these cases are not in the majority. Ordinarily the family feeling and sense of [ownness] would be stronger. But if we ask why, I doubt the answer that it is because of the bodily parentship, the animal fact of the child being from the mother's own womb. In reality the animal mother will bring
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up a substituted little one (alone or with the others) as tenderly and carefully as if it had been from her own womb, it will often so bring up even one of another species. If an alien human infant were substituted for the real one in the cradle without the mother knowing it the result would not be different. Therefore what counts is an idea, feeling, imagination in the vital mind that this is "mine" and an instinctive vital attachment created by it along with the love and affection that grows up in the very act of nursing and bringing up a clinging and dependent creature. This in human beings gets farther strengthened by the mental idea of the lasting family tie which prevents the relation from being evanescent as in the animal creation. All that creates a very powerful samskar which has become automatically effective and tenacious. It is natural that in a majority of cases, it should be stronger than a tie not supported by all these things together. And the human vital, even if it follows the ordinary groove, is not limited by it and it has a power of free play according to its fancy or impulsion which makes for it many other lines than the ordinary one.
November 3, 1935
The solution of the enigma is that the being and nature are made up of different parts and personalities. There is a being in you which is a bhakta and in potency a Yogi—it is the one that has joined to him the poet and the musician and singer and expresses himself through them, they form now a harmonious group, almost a composite person. There is another part or being in you which was drawn towards the world, society, success, fame, food—a spoilt child of Fortune and Nature (but still vitally strong, generous, full of enthusiasm, amiable, affectionate) which was rather dragged to the Yoga rather than came to it willingly, but it came because the others
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insisted and did not allow it to have the rasa of the outside life and besides promised it something that would be the divine equivalent or compensation of these vital pleasures; a spiritual vital love, ananda, enjoyment of the Divine. This part has now less attraction for the old things or none, but it wants badly the thing promised and has no taste for tapasya and the long effort of sadhana. Thirdly, there was yet another who had many defects of egoism, vanity, egoistic sensitive- ness, etc. which made a tremendous row against changing. A large part of it has been modifying itself—it is perhaps what Somnath meant when he spoke of the miraculous change in your character. For he told the Mother when he used the phrase, "We all loved Dilip, but there were defects in his character of which we could not approve and now I can no longer find any trace of them—he is so miraculously changed." It is the combination of No.2 and No.3 which has made the difficulty all along because they were mixed up together, otherwise No.2 would not have been difficult to manage. The despair, defeatism, fretfulness, gloom, angry impatience which No.3 brought into the affair was the chief cause of your despondencies, otherwise No.2 might have been eager and impatient but not in this way. In combination with No.l there might have been yearning, pangs of viraha, etc. but not the crises. There is not the slightest doubt that your nature was made for ananda and that all the other beings except the last one are naturally themselves full of it. That is what people feel when you meet them and they contact your natural self in speaking with you or your inner self through your songs, poems, music. The rest from which you suffer so much is, as I have repeatedly told you, a formation, a sort of accretion, a recurring artificial crisis imposed on you from outside and accepted by No.3—not normal or native to the healthy soundness of your nature. The difficulty is that not being conversant with these things you take it as your own and let it have its course instead of drawing back from it as you did during the first few months when you began to follow the psychic movement. It is quite possible that if you definitely get rid of it and
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completed the psychic change, spiritual experience would come with a rush. That has happened to several and is happening to others.
The late Brahmananda, one of the most favourite disciples of Sri Ramakrishna has said, "The human is lax by nature, that is why he does not prescribe for himself a hard askesis (tapasya) nor a long sadhana and revels in platitudes about the Divine Grace. But it is all a rationalisation of our inveterate tendency to follow the line of least resistance in as much as without tapasya Grace does not descend. You must labour hard if you really mean business." What do you say to that?
I am glad that Brahmananda has intervened or at least wandered in at the right moment—it is something more than a coincidence. It is true that Brahmananda though not a great man or a great personality like Vivekananda, was or became a more perfect bhakta and sattwic Yogi. What he says about tapasya is of course true. If one is not prepared for labour and tapasya, control of the mind and vital, one cannot demand big spiritual gains—for the mind and vital will always find tricks and excuses for prolonging their own reign, imposing their likes and dislikes and staving off the day when they will have to become obedient instruments and open channels of the soul and spirit. Grace may sometimes bring undeserved or apparently undeserved fruits, but one can't demand Grace as a right and privilege—for then it would not be Grace. As you have seen—let us bless Brahmananda for it!— one can't claim that one has only to shout and the answer must come. Besides, I have always seen that there has been really a long unobserved preparation before the Grace intervenes, and also, after it has intervened, one has still to put in a good deal
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of work to keep and develop what one has got—as it is in all other things—until there is the complete siddhi. Then of course labour finishes and one is in assured possession. So tapasya of one kind or another is not avoidable.
You are right again about the imaginary obstacles. Good Lord! What mountains of them you had piled up on the way— a regular Abyssinia. It is why we are always imprecating against mental constructions and vital formations—because they are the defence-works mind and vital throw up against their capture by the Divine. However, the first thing is to become conscious of all that as you have now become—the secret thing is to be firm in knocking it all down and making a tabula rasa,138 a foundation of calm, peace, happy openness for the true building.
November 7, 1935
All right about the Rs.300. You can bring it to the Mother on Saturday at one.
We have already seen the gentleman sitting with the musical instrument. Without accepting as gospel truth the figures of the assistant, one can say that the story is credible. The amiable Ch. is no doubt an honourable man ("so are they all"), but he is also a sharp business man, not Rockefeller certainly, but—. I have no reason to challenge Russell's conclusions—I share them without having the data. The adage "Honesty is the best policy" was invented in a semi-barbarous age when mankind had not made so much progress as now, an age which no longer exists—except perhaps in the wilds of Abyssinia, and now Mussolini is out to finish with it and bring in the blessings of civilisation even there. Nowadays the saying is notoriously out of date; it only means that with honesty you have less chances of going to jail—provided you are lucky and also provided you have not met Mahatma Gandhi. But Rockefellers and the rest of the commercial aristocracy were not born for
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jail but for palaces with marble water closets and the immortality of Rockefeller institutes and honour in the land of the gangsters and the free. All this is not meant to tempt you out of the paths of virtue, but only to point the moral which seems "Therefore, 0 Dilip, keep thy weather-eye open and do not allow Ch. to ch. you too much, for to prevent it altogether is, I fear, a Utopian idea; honourable men must earn their living." By the way, why should Rockefeller go for Russell; he has got his millions and why should he mind an impotent little reminder ,of the way he got it?
The carpet is very fine; the mats also. So the failure of my supramental philosophy does not upset me.
Welcome to the moisture! May it change before long into the Rain of Heaven.
November 12, 1935
It was Mother's sweet grace to offer to translate my song of Kali into French that made me launch into this desperate attempt to render it in English somehow. So please correct and make it presentable. I have at places put within brackets alternatives; which to retain, if any, please indicate by deleting the ones to be rejected. Often your deleting too are as indecipherable, strange!!
I keep your translation and will look to it. But a verse rendering is not very apt for translation into French. A prose (but not prosaic) rendering would be better.
Read however the portions marked in blue of two letters enclosed: one is that of a savant professor, the other of the foremost Musalman novelist of Bengal. So you see I have waxed somewhat of a celebrity in literature too, what? But if you doubt this, hear this convincing datum: an unknown
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gentleman from a town of Bengal writes they have to present an address to a Doctor there honoured by a Raja. So whom do you think he approaches, eh ?—this Dilip striving frantically to be humble! But how to do it when fame puts him into such embarrassing and unheard-of predicament? Has such a thing happened to any other celebrity from the day of Adam's fall? Only I hope this will not accomplish the last of his old Adams?
I sympathise. Three cheers though for Abul Fazal and the savant. don't feel so enthusiastic about the Doctor even though honoured by a Raja. An address in honour of a Doctor! What are we coming to? N.B. Please don't read this to Nirod. But perhaps it may be on the principle "Honour thy Doctor that thy life may be long in the land." To call an eminent novelist for the purpose is after all appropriate. You could give a long address on the romance of medicine beginning with Dhanvantari, Charaka and Galen139 and ending with Nirod Talukdar and Dr. Ramchandra.
Romen has drawn a design for Jyoti's wrapper (of her stories which we have made into a book). How do you like it? I find it rather a nicish thing—but I am no judge of painting, you know? So-sorry to trouble you in your seclusion.
It is excellent—very cleverly done and suitable to the purpose.
Joking apart, believe me I was greatly touched by your voluntarily asking me not to mind your notice. Only tell me in confidence (I will be moved nevertheless) is it to 121 out of 150 that you have entrusted this grace or to 97 only? But truly Guru, however irreverent my pen is my heart is truly much moved by such abiding consideration from you. But I won't abuse your kindness. I will write as little as possible. Only forgive the two letters enclosed. Can't resist such temptations for the life of me, vous savez ?
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The number specially exempted is two by tacit understanding, two by express notice, two—well by self-given permission. There are also "urgent" and indispensable letters—tending to be rather numerous, though not overwhelmingly so. If it had been 97 or 121.I would have had to translate myself to Lake Manas or the Gobi desert in the style of Bejoy Goswami.
What about Nalina ? I dreamed yesterday that she was receiving force from you or something of equally good portend—I have forgotten ninety per cent; the one per cent remaining means that you told me or suggested Nalina was progressing, is there anything in the dream ?
Well, she is receiving force. It is also certain that she has been progressing. So your dream as far as the remembered one per cent goes is all right. Dreams are not dreams except when they are—which cryptic statement will I hope, be clear to you as crystal.
November 14, 1935
Anilbaran's song is best rendered by an Elizabethan simplicity and intensity with as little artifice of metre and diction as possible. I have tried to do it in that way.
I have read the long poem, but should like to read it once more before returning it.
Your "The Deep" is very good, but there are too many "it" and "for"; "shied thy Orient" is not English, a preposition is indispensable; "your glimpse" again is not said, but "a glimpse of you"—"a glimpse" is sufficient here; "decides" is too prosaic;
"and home" is loose and conveys no precise connection or meaning. I have therefore altered at all these points.
"Stilescade" needs more alteration. "When" is much needed in the first line to give more flowing and less abrupt syntax.
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Between "feet" and "heart" a syllable is needed to avoid the clash of the two "t"s and "my" gives more emotion to the phrase. "Darks" (plural) can hardly stand and is also awkward; the two next lines are awkward also in construction, while in the fourth line "sky's lullaby" will never do. Stanza three, "are" is needed, not "were" to show that the effect continues; "numb" sounds queer and, while the oxymoron "your hush was not dumb" is permissible, to say that the "hush carolled and danced" is too violent for even an illogical English mind; it is better hinted or stated by inference than put with a too bald and bold directness. I think with my corrections the two poems make two very pretty lyrics.
(...)
P.S. Your translation is not quite successful, which is not surprising, for I would have found it difficult to translate in verse myself; so I am taking time over it.
November 15, 1935
I am sending you the translation corrected—not too indecipherable I hope. It is rather the expression than the rhythm that was insufficient in your version. As it is now, I think it might be made the basis for the French version, so that a prose translation would not be necessary.
I don't think there is anything you could write or anybody write that would shock me, so that need not trouble you. Of course you are right about the lies, there are of all sorts, and also about all men being durachar [wicked, of ill-conduct] only some are virtuous durachars, some sinful ones and some a mixed lot! I don't mean to deny that there are Harischandras and Shukadevas here and there, but one has to take a micro- scope or a telescope or anything else handy to find them. But enough! Sufficient [unlit?] the night is the cynicism thereof !
Your dreams are of a very familiar kind, both coming often
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to sadhaks. The first is a sort of formation on the vital plane or a possibility for the future—whether or how it will come about in the physical is a different matter. The other is an excursion into the vital world where there are all the types and forms of things that happen here, and having its own region or province there. One is constantly going into these planes (and others also mental and psychic and subtle physical also as well as vital) and seeing and doing things there. Very often what one does and experiences there is a symbol of things in the nature, tendencies, achievements, difficulties, things hidden within or only half seen on the surface. This one came clearly to show how far you have travelled from certain elements, tendencies or possibilities that were there
in the past. The feeling in the dream was the sign of that progress.
November 18, 1935
Will see to your song, but today too much correspondence in spite of the notice. But Mother is rather alarmed by the length of the song; how can that be finished in two and a half minutes? She is very particular that the programme should not be exceeded; for she fixed it at the very maximum that (non-musical) European listeners can be expected to hear without losing interest or feeling fatigue. There is only one, a Mr. Cime, who is an addict of Indian music, the rest— He however is also a busy man who cannot be expected to give more than an hour at most to much aesthetic and un-administrative relaxations. If the function is to be a success, the time limit is of great importance.
I return your letters. Evidently the reading public is of a different opinion from the high brow critics. But I hope that you are reading all these letters with a high Yogic equanimity and that your ego (like a Mr. Jack Horner140 in his corner)
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is not indulging in a chuckle or at least a secret beatific smile. For he is getting plenty of pie.
November 19, 1935
Your warning is apposite and timely. For I do often find I enjoy such high praises with a beatific smile as you put it. I am trying very sincerely however (I have just a redeeming feature or two in my composition I hope ?) not to accept such praises for my separate and egoistic enjoyment. But having been "a spoilt child of Fortune and Nature" as you put it it is difficult not to "smile" secretly upon such "spoilers". But I do try and am fully conscious and my aspiration as well as will are entirely d'accord that I should and must get rid of every vainglory and egoistic and aesthetic satisfaction, etc. I do very often pray earnestly to be able to repudiate such praises, etc. as not the dues of my ego but to look upon every delight I can give to others as the gift and grace of my guru and Mother. Truly. You don't believe ? Mais vous devez, car c'est la verite [But you ought to, because it is the truth].
Right. But there is no objection to aesthetic satisfaction, that is needed for the work. It is only Jack Horner who has to disappear.
Je vous envoie la traduction de (( Mahakal)) ; c'etait tres interessant a faire. Quant a la chanson de Krishna garcon,je n'etaispas vraiment
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inquiète—mais maintenant vous m´avez tout a fait rassurée. Avec nos bénédictions.
[I am sending you the translation of "Mahakali"; it was a very interesting thing to do.
Regarding the song of the boy Krishna, I was not really worried—but now you have reassured me altogether.
With our blessings.]
November 21, 1935
O Guru, Needless to thank? I send you the typescript, with your correction. There, where the "long-dried" is in evidence you will please note another word which looks suspiciously like "soulless" is soulfully struggling for survival. But I don't see how it could, except with some supramentalised rhythmic grace. How do you favour its title for a passport! Also see if "long-dried" can be changed into "toneless" tor shuni tan baila ujanjamuna gān geye [On hearing your melody, the Jamunā flowed upstream gurgling] has this hint that Jamunā which was musicless flows on gurglingly. (Ujān boye has the idea of music.) Can this be somehow imparted or even a suggestion ? Lastly, in the penultimate line, shall there be a comma after illumined ? Awaiting your verdict. To our Bengali ears filled and child will of course be as atrocious as sky and eternity or grove and love. But since in English I have seen such rhymes used unrepentantly I of course bow. But if it could be possibly changed or improved upon by hook or by crook do see—spend three and a half seconds on this problem, as it is the last line and with us, the last line rhyme is extremely important. Also child occurs once before in the first verse though the space is decently wide enough, I admit. Still—
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It is no use applying a Bengali ear to English rhythms any more than a French ear to English or an English ear to French metres. The Frenchman may object to English blank verse because his own ear misses the rhyme or the Englishman to the French Alexandrine because he finds it rhetorical and monotonous. Irrelevant objections both. Imperfect rhymes are regarded in English metre as a source of charm in the rhythmic field bringing in possibilities of delicate variation in the constant clang of exact rhymes. As for the repetition, there is no law of style forbidding the repetition of a word in the same poem—only if it is too near. Here the repetition is perfectly appropriate in a poem of this character and with this subject.
What I had written was 'The soul's long-dried river". With-out some pointing of the symbolism the dragging of rivers is rather bewildering to the English mind. As for toneless rivers, it would have no meaning—the English man would ask what the devil are these unconnected ideas put together without any coherent meaning? In any case toneless river is impossible in English. Voiceless if you like.
I understand Mother is somewhat anxious that Rajangam is playing the tambura with me. It is only for practice, please assure her. There at Aroume, Sahana and Venkataram will play gladly enough and two tamburas sound beautifully together without stressing its symmetrical picturesque effect (it is the orthodox style by the way). I remember Mother emphasised the couleur locale and picturesque ness of the ambiance. I hope when Mother hears this elle sera rassuree de nouveau [she will be again reassured]? I had never dreamed of taking Rajangam there (specially without having first asked Mother's permission.)
P.S.: And Anilbaran's song? Do make it stand similarly on the tottering legs I have given by some sort of a Supraprop, what?
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November 30, 1935
(from Mother)141
Bravo! bravo! bravo! c´était magnifique et nos invités étaient ENCHANTÉS. Votre Mahakali a été un triomphe.
[Bravo! bravo! bravo! it was magnificent and our guests were DELIGHTED. Your Mahakali has been a triumph.]
December 1935
As yet I have no luck with my answer to your arguments against any Yoga that is not obvious to the senses and subject to their verdict and sentence; for this night I have been assailed with a mass of letters and a mass of bothers. The bothers I can regard with equality, but they and the letters had to be dealt with, so I could not make any headway with that subject. Your tenant seems to be a curious fellow; he lectures you from a sharp and lofty pedestal. Don't get worried however, we will see about the matter. Mother will speak to Uday Singh,142 but you will have to give a note of authorisation so that they may act.
As I have a few minutes I may comment on your today's letter so as to get that out of the way. I must say your arguments about R. and S., made me smile. When on earth were politeness and good society manners considered as a part or a test of spiritual experience or true yogic siddhi ? It is no more a test than the capacity of dancing well or of dressing nicely. Just as there are many very good and kind men who are boorish and rude in their manners, so there may be very spiritual men (I mean who have had deep spiritual experiences) who have no grasp over physical life or action (many intellectuals too are like that) and are not at all careful about their manners. I suppose I myself am accused of rude and arrogant behaviour because I refuse to see people, do not
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answer letters, and a host of other misdemeanours. I have heard of a famous recluse who threw stones at anybody com- ing to his retreat because he did not want disciples and found no other way of warding off the flood of candidates. I at least would hesitate to pronounce that such people had no spir- itual life or experience. Certainly, I prefer that sadhaks should be reasonably considerate towards each other, but that is for the sake of collective life and harmony, not as a siddhi of the Yoga or an indispensable sign of inner experience.
143 [As for the other matter how can the écarts of the sadhaks here, none of whom have reached perfection or anywhere near it, be a proof that spiritual experience is null or worthless.] You write as if the moment [one had] any kind of spiritual experience or realisation, one must at once be a perfect person without defects or weaknesses. That is to make a demand which it is impossible to satisfy and it is to ignore the fact that spiritual life is a growth and not a sudden and inexplicable miracle. No sadhak can be judged as if he were already a siddha [perfect] yogi, least of all those who have only travelled a quarter or less of a very long path [as it is the case with most who are here]. Even great yogis do not claim perfection and you cannot say that because they are not absolutely perfect, there- fore their spirituality is false or of no use to the world. There are, besides, all kinds of spiritual men, some who are content with spiritual experience and do not seek after an outward perfection or progress, some who are saints, others who do not seek after sainthood, others who are content to live in the cosmic consciousness in touch or union with the All but allowing all kinds of forces to play through them, e.g., in the typical description of the Paramahamsa. The ideal I put before our Yoga is one thing but it does not bind all spiritual life and endeavour. The spiritual life is not a thing that can be formulated in a rigid definition or bound by a fixed mental rule; it is a vast field of evolution, an immense kingdom potentially larger than the other kingdoms below it, with a hundred provinces, a thousand types, stages, forms, paths, variations of the spiritual ideal, degrees of spiritual advancement. It is from the basis of this
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truth [which I shall try to explain in subsequent letters] that things regarding spirituality and its seekers must be judged, if they are to be judged with knowledge. Let me do that first and afterwards if I am able to give some idea of it, which is not easy, particular questions can be more solvable.
P.S. AU these things I say, must not be applied to the personal cases you mention which are only an occasion for saying them. The one thing that applies to them is that they are sadhaks, not siddhaks, raw still, not ripe.
I am glad to have got your second letter in which the psychic being in you expresses itself with such fullness. It would have been impossible for me to go on with my explanations of the [case?] for spirituality if the exposition of it, carrying as it must do many things contrary to your own mental views, were to upset or hurt you. I have no intention of doing that and have always avoided it except that sometimes I have to express an unpalatable view of things rather plainly in answer to your own insistence. 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 dealt with 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
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speak about it, while the public view of much of those as are known are 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.
I should like, however, to clear up first some misunderstandings in your letter about what I had written: (1) What I wrote about politeness had nothing to do with Sahana or the quarrel with Anilkumar—I referred to that as an écart and I said that such lapses on the part of sadhaks who were far from being siddha Yogis could not be advanced as a disproof of spiritual experience or of its value. My remark was not at all meant as justification of loss of self-control in an argument and getting angry and excited if crossed in one's views. It was merely a refusal to accept that as an argument against spirituality in general—spiritual experience, as I said, does not inevitably lead to perfection and you cannot expect it to do so. Equality and self-control are most necessary to Yoga, but also most difficult; one has to strive always after them; they are not, at least in their completeness, easily attainable. The whole being has to be pervaded by calm and peace; the nerves and cells of the body have to be full of calm and peace. Until then what one has to strive to attain is inner calm in the inner being which remains even when the outer is disturbed by invasions of grief, [unease?] or anger. The Yogi arrives first at a sort of division in his being on which the inner Purusha fixed and calm looks at the perturbations of the outer man as one looks at the passions of an unreasonable child; that once fixed, he can proceed afterwards to control the outer man also. Whether he can easily control the actions depends on the temperament of his outer man, whether it is vehement, emotional and passionate or comparatively sedate and quiet. Such a complete control of the outer man needs a long and arduous tapasya. It cannot be expected and even the [assured?] inner calm cannot be expected of those who are still in a very early stage of the journey, who are still sadhaks and not Yogis.
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(2) I said that as regards both cases, Radhananda and Sahana, my remarks must be taken as limited to this proposition that you cannot expect from the raw what you can expect from the ripe, that is from the siddha Yogi.
(3) But even from the siddha Yogi you cannot always expect a perfect perfection; there were many who do not even care for the perfection of the outer nature, yet they have spiritual experience, even spiritual realisation and the unperfected outer nature cannot be held as a disproof of their realisation or experience- If you so regard it, you have to rule out of count the greater number of Yogis of the past and the Rishis of the old time also.
(4) I said that the ideal of my Yoga is different but I cannot bind by it other spiritual men and their achievements or discipline. My own ideal is transformation of the outer nature, perfection as perfect as it can be. But it is impossible to say that those who have not achieved it or did not care to achieve it had no spirituality or that their spirituality was of no value. Beautiful conduct—not politeness which is an outer thing, however valuable—but beauty founded upon a spiritual realisation of unity and harmony projected into life, is certainly part of the perfect perfection. But all that I regard as the ideal, the thing to be attained in the fullness of the siddhi. I do not expect perfect perfection from those who are on the way and as yet far from the goal. If they have it, it is delightful; but if they do not have it, I cannot deduce from that that they have no spiritual experiences or that these experiences are of no value
You yourself speak of the Baradi Brahmachari.144 Because of his habits of speech, it is surely impossible to deny great- ness as a spiritual man to this remarkable ascetic admired by Ramakrishna and revered by Vivekananda. Even Ramakrishna himself had habits of speech about which Vivekananda in a letter to his gurubhais [brother disciples] [rates?] them for translating these portions as it would make a very bad impression on his English readers. But would these English readers have been justified in denouncing Ramakrishna on that
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account as an unspiritual man or spirituality as therefore without value.
This was my reasoning and, so stated in a clear way, I hope, you will not find it either irrational or offensive. I wanted to clear this up because, if you remain under the impression that I am saying outrageous things, it will be difficult to go farther.
I want to show that spiritual seeking and achievement are not one [bundled?] thing that can be clearly defined in a sin- gle mental formula and reduced to a single rule or set of rules but a kingdom like the mental kingdom with all sorts of stages, lines, variations, provinces, types of spiritual men, and it is only by so understanding it that one can understand it truly, enter in its past or its future or put in their place the spiritual men of the past and the present or relate the different ideals, stages, etc. thrown up in the spiritual evolution of the human being.
December 5, 1935
I send you the penultimate couplet-poem with the translation I made last night. When I look at my translation's spontaneity and distinctive expressions and style I feel myself in despair: to realise how hopeless is this leeway I have to make up in English verse. But never say die—what do you say ? Anyhow I learn how much exoticism Bengali can well bear, since I nowadays make my Bengali translations almost meticulously literal e.g. see sphathic phenil [crystal clear foam]: I see here with a gratefulness to you how much I have gained in my Bengali poems through struggling to totter on English crutches. I was surprised last night how les mots justes [the right words] spring ready to the pen's call in Bengali—alas, can't say the same thing of English when I always fumble so. But there again never say die. Tell me however how do you find the Bengali
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translation's exoticism. Does it not sound as having the proper ring and ambience ?
Yes; it is exceedingly fine. Of course there is an immense difference with the English which is good but not superlative;
but one cannot expect to seize in poetry the finer and more elusive tones which are so important in a learned language, however well-learned, as in one's natural tongue. Unless of course one succeeds in so making it natural, if not native.
A little pleasant vanity. A professor friend of mine connoisseur of music—he is an acquaintance really—writes enthusiastically of my record majlo āmār manbhramarā kāli pada nīlkamale [My mind-bee has merged in the blue lotus of Kali's feet]. He, incidentally, shows me how far I have travelled from my old music. Yes there has been some progress here and in poetry too, thanks to your truly all- tolerant lamp of encouragement. Note however that he seizes what I have all along wanted: deshbāsl jeno laghugāneātmavismrita na hoy [May my countrymen not be self- forgetful in light music]. It was here, by the way, that Tagore opposed me heart and soul and tried to equate the pretty and light with the lovely and deep in music. (...) I could not take that lying down. Anyhow I am glad my classical style has taken on, for I was truly doubtful of its success in those days of Tagorism. I sing the glory of your blessing, thanks to which, even the Gramo music has become an unexpected success both commercially and among connoisseurs.
I am glad of that, as I put much force for that result and was rather contrarie when the whole thing seemed to be becoming a failure. I am also glad that the progress of your music is being testified to on all sides and on the right lines.
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December 6, 1935
O Guru
Highly delighted (unyogically though) to learn you had put much force for Gramophone. But highly intrigued too, withal. What is this force? A will on your part? A sweet blessing that all should be smooth in this rough world ? Or is it a conscious way of directing a control as one controls an organisation in a music choir, to be precise ? Can you throw some tiny force hereon ? I mean does this force mean concrete business as the scheming of schemer does ? I ask this naive question since your force always somewhat puzzles me, though 1 accept it (not that it would much matter if I didn't), in a sense? But then can one accept a force either, property speaking, when one does not under- stand the least about its concrete existence ? I mean can one honestly say, "1 believe in Thy force," when one has only seen Thee but seen or felt nothing at all of Thine workings ? Can you give me an answer somehow—even an apology of an answer if you will—if only crypticism happens to be the only fitting answer, that is ?
Well, I made the mistake of "thinking aloud with my pen" when I wrote that unfortunate sentence about the force I had put for the success of the gramophone. As my whole action consists of the use of force or forces—except, of course, my writing answers to correspondence which is concrete, but even that I am made to do by and with a force, otherwise I can assure you I would not and could not do it—I sometimes am imprudent enough to make this mistake. It is foolish to do so because a spiritual or any other force is obviously some- thing invisible and its action is invisible, so how can anyone believe in it? Only the results are seen and how is one to know that the results are the result of the Force? It is not concrete.
But I am myself rather puzzled by your instances of the
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concrete. How are the schemes of a schemer concrete? Some- thing happens and you tell me it was the result of a schemer's scheme. But the schemer's scheme was a product of his consciousness and not at all concrete; it was in his mind and another fellow's mind is not concrete to me unless I am a Yogi or a thought-reader. I can only infer from some things he said or did that he had a scheme, things which I have not myself seen or heard and which are therefore not to me concrete. So how can I accept or believe in the scheme of the schemer? And even if I saw or heard, I am not bound to believe that it was a scheme or that which happened was the result of a scheme. He may have acted on a chain of impulses and what happened may have been the result of something quite different or itself purely accidental. Again, how did you control the music choir? By word and signs etc. which are of course concrete? But what made you use those words and signs and why did they produce a control? And why did the other fellows do what you told them? What made them do that? It was something in your and their consciousness, I suppose; but that is not concrete. Again, scientists talk about electricity which is, it seems, an energy, a force in action and it seems that everything has been done by this energy, my own physical being is constituted by it and it is at the base of all my mental and life energies. But that is not concrete to me. I never felt my being constituted by electricity, I cannot feel it working out my thoughts and life processes—so how can I believe in it or accept it? The force I use is not a sweet blessing—a blessing (silent) certainly is not concrete, like a stone or a kick or other things seizable by the senses; it is not even a mere will saying within me "let it be so"—that also is not concrete. It is a force of consciousness directed towards or on persons and things and happenings—but obviously a force of consciousness is not seizable by the physical senses, so not concrete. I may feel it and the person acted on may feel it or may not feel it, but as the feeling is internal and not external and perceivable by others, it cannot be called concrete and nobody is bound to accept or believe in it. For
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instance, if I cure someone (without medicines) of a fever and send him fresh and full of strength to his work, all in the course of a single night, still why should any third person believe or accept that it was my force that did it? It may have been Nature or his imagination that made him cure (three cheers for those concrete things, imagination and Nature!)— or the whole thing happened of itself. So, you see the case is hopeless, it can't be proved at all—at all.
December 7, 1935
If I was annoyed, it was with myself for speaking of things which ought to be kept under a cover. I put the whole thing in a light form, no doubt, but the substance was perfectly serious, the intention being to point out that even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or of subjective forces was open to doubt and discussion in which there would be no material certitude—while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of spiritual force. Each must form his own idea about that—for if it is accepted it cannot be as a result of proof and argument, but only as a result of experience, of faith or of that insight in the heart or the deeper intelligence which looks behind appearances and sees what is behind them. Moreover it would not be seemly for me to appear to be making a claim for myself and pleading for recognition or acceptance—for the spiritual consciousness does not claim in that way, it can state the truth about itself but not fight for a personal acceptance. A general and impersonal statement about spiritual force is another matter, but I doubt whether the time has come for it or whether it could be understood by the mere reasoning intelligence.
As for discussion of such instances as Sarat's illness, it is a good example of the futility of trying to settle such things by
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evidence and the statements of people. Sarat regards Ramchandra as Dhanvantari himself? To others in the next breath he has described him as a tyrant who is torturing and killing him by an utter disregard of the facts of his past bodily condition and nature of his present illness. What can be built on such evidence ? Ramchandra claims that the cure was due to his Dhanvantarimsm? He has also made the statement that Sarat's cure (which he says is not complete, but only a metamorphosis of a dangerous illness into an ordinary dyspepsia) is still a miracle which he attributes to the intervention of the Mother's grace. Which statement is the correct one? The partisans of reason will plump for the first one, the partisans of spiritual force for the other. And we are where we were. You will excuse me therefore if I do not go into the Gramophone affair. It was incautious of me to make a statement which can be valid only for myself; I must not make the imprudence worse by seeming to try establish an egoistic claim by farther statements which can also be valid for myself alone.
One or two general statements may perhaps be made. All the world, according to Science, is nothing but a play of Energy—a material Energy it used to be called, but it is now doubted whether Matter, scientifically speaking, exists except as a phenomenon of Energy. All the world, according to Vedanta, is a play of a power of a spiritual entity, the power of an original consciousness, whether it be Maya or Shakti, and the result an illusion or real. In the world so far as man is concerned we are aware only of mind-energy, life-energy, energy in Matter; but it is supposed that there is a spiritual energy or force also behind them from which they originate. All things, in either case, are the results of a Shakti, energy or force. There is no action without a Force or Energy doing the action and bringing about its consequence. Further, any- thing that has no Force in it is either something dead or something unreal or something inert and without consequence. If there is no such thing as spiritual consciousness, there can be no reality of Yoga, and if there is no Yoga-force, spiritual force. Yoga shakti, then also there can be no effectivity
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in Yoga. A Yoga-consciousness or spiritual consciousness which has no power or force in it, may not be dead or unreal, but it is evidently something inert and without effect or con- sequence. Equally, a man who sets out to be a Yogi or Guru and has no spiritual consciousness or no power in his spiritual consciousness—a Yoga-force or spiritual force—is making a false claim and is either a charlatan or a self-deluded imbecile; still more is he so if having no spiritual force he claims to have made a path others can follow. If Yoga is a reality, if spirituality is anything better than a delusion, there must be such a thing as Yoga-force or spiritual force.
It is evident that if spiritual force exists, it must be able to produce spiritual results—therefore there is no irrationality in the claim of those sadhaks who say that they feel the force of the Guru or the force of the Divine working in them and leading towards spiritual fulfilment and experience. Whether it is so or not in a particular case is a personal question, but the statement cannot be denounced as per se incredible and manifestly false, because such things cannot be. Further, if it be true that spiritual force is the original one and the others are derivative from it, then there is no irrationality in supposing that spiritual force can produce mental results, vital results, physical results. It may act through mental, vital or physical energies or [through?] their means, or it may act directly on mind, life or matter as the field of its own special and immediate action. Either way is prima facie possible. In a case of cure or illness, someone is ill for two days, weak, suffering from pains and fever; he takes no medicine, but finally asks for cure from his Guru; the next morning he rises well, strong and energetic. He has at least some justification for thinking that a force has been used on him and put into him and that it was a spiritual power that acted. But in another case, medicines may be used, while at the same time the invisible force may be called for to aid the material means, for it is a known fact that medicines may or may not succeed—there is no certitude. Here for the reason of an outside observer (neither the user of the force nor the Doctor nor the patient) it remains
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uncertain whether the patient was cured by the medicines only or by the spiritual force with the medicines as an instrument. Either is possible, and it cannot be said that because medicines were used, therefore the working of a spiritual force is per se incredible and demonstrably false. On the other hand, it is possible for the doctor to have felt a force working in him and guiding him or he may see the patient improving with a rapidity which, according to medical science, is incredible. The patient may feel the force working in himself bringing health, energy, rapid cure. The user of the force may watch the results, see the symptoms he works on diminishing, those he did not work upon increasing till he does work on them and then immediately diminishing, the doctor working according to his unspoken suggestions, etc., etc., until the cure is done. (On the other hand, he may see forces working against the cure and conclude that the spiritual force has to be contented with a withdrawal or an imperfect success.) In all that the doctor, the patient or the user offerees is justified in believing that the cure is at least partly or even fundamentally due to the spiritual force. Their experience is valid of course for themselves only, not for the outside rationalising observer. But the latter is not logically entitled to say that their experience is incredible and must be false.
Another point. It does not follow that a spiritual force must either succeed in all cases or, if it does not, that proves its non-existence. Of no force can that be said. The force of fire is to burn, but there are things it does not burn; under certain circumstances it does not burn even the feet of the man who walks barefoot on red-hot coals. That does not prove that fire does not burn or that there is no such thing as force of fire, Agni Shakti.
I have no time to write more; it is not necessary either. My object was not to show that spiritual force must be believed in, but that the belief in it is not necessarily a delusion and that belief in it can be rational as well as possible.
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December 8, 1935
There would be much to say about the ideas you speak of which come so much in your way, more than I can do tonight —as I have the arrears of the week to clear off, if possible, I must leave them to another time. But surely it is rather unreasonable to accept the statement of a man like Sarat when you have so much doubt about Prithwi Singh's. Men like Anilbaran and Prithwi Singh are not likely to pretend to have experiences they do not have. Harin's fall after one year's rapid progress had obvious reasons in his character which do not exist in them. But apart from that the fall of a sadhak from Yoga proves nothing against the truth of spiritual experience. It is well known to all Yogis that a fall is possible and the Gita speaks of it more than once. But how does the fall prove that spiritual experience is not true and genuine ? The fall of a man from a great height does not prove that he
Prithwi Singh
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never reached a great height. The experiences of Prithwi Singh have been those of many others before him and will be those of many others who do not yet have them; I fail to see why the fact of people having them or their intensity or the joy and confidence (not that Prithwi Singh is at all blind to the difficulties in himself or in the sadhana) they give should make them suspect as untrue. As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men—so far as I know history both in the east and west there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names—which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past. It is like the statement of Leonard Woolf that mysticism arises only in periods of lifeless decadence, and it can only be true if intellect is considered as synonymous with a scientific or sceptical intelligence.
But what strange ideas again!—that I was born with a supramental temperament and had never any brain or mind or any acquaintance with human mentality—and that I know nothing of hard realities. Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from struggle and hardships and semi-starvation in England through the fierce difficulties and perils of revolutionary leadership and organisation and activity in India to the far greater difficulties continually crop- ping up here in Pondicherry, internal and external. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character. But, of course, as we have not been shout- ing about these things, it is natural, I suppose, for the sadhaks to think I am living in an august, glamorous, lotus-eating dreamland where no hard facts of life or nature present them- selves. But what an illusion all the same!
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I have written more than I had time for after all, but the main point I have not touched which is the real nature of spiritual life and Yoga—its reality and not the unreal image of it constructed in the minds of people.
December 10, 1935
I am reassured that you do understand. Forgive me that doubts come like this. I quite see that it's the vital's trick. I won't trouble you to write at length to me. Only explain that saying of Sri Ramakrishna about gurur kripa [the Guru's grace]. I have long felt I have got gurur kripa though till now I have seldom felt I have got Krishna's kripa. But I thought Guru's kripa will lead to Krishna as Guru and Krishna are really one and Krishna comes as the Guru to facilitate the introduction to himself. I don't really question your ineffable grace and Mother's matchless sweetness and the patience of both. But it is a prolonged drought which makes me burst into flashes of impatience. Your power also I cannot possibly doubt, seeing that even Nishi- kanta who knows so little English can write so many startlingly beautiful expressions in English rhymed free-verse, I should say, for I could not [scan ?] his lines metrically.
Free verse (true free verse) is free from both metre and rhyme.
Nevertheless they are startling. I will henceforth try to bleat faith like a docile lamb and not roar doubts like a dying lion.
Good, especially as one must be the lamb of God before being His lion.
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December 11, 1935
Something thrilling in a sense—metrically. Please note the correspondence of general movement. It is this lilt that came to me—yesterday for "Recapture"—I caught myself pronouncing the lilt (in English) in that Bengali way. Here you will note my scansion. Four syllables to each foot (syllable unit) but a caesura of one syllable at the end of each of the first six lines. Very simple—but extremely delectable to the Bengali ear. Tell me do you see the correspondence of the two lilt ? It is strange you know that English lilt can have such a close correspondence. 0 metre—inscrutable is thy name! But apart from the metre tell me isn't the whole movement sweet, subtle and delicate ? I [?] a great aesthetic joy—for the translation also you will find very close. But alas, this joy is too unqualifiedly aesthetic (due to a kind of metrical tour de force) to be comme. il faut from the yogic viewpoint. But seeing that such elation is very difficult to resist for the likes of us you will surely excuse in all solemnity? What?
Very beautiful indeed, the translation and the rhythm exquisite, So thrill away as much as you like!
It is most amazing that after every tension I get such new flashes metrically though! Reminded of Bergson who says:
life's unfolding proceeds by tensions followed by evolution. " Is it true that? But whatever you may say against dramas life does corroborate Bergson at least this terrestrial life as it is does. N'est-ce pas ? At least somewhat? Eh ?
Humph! Such a method is all very well, but one has so much of it in life and in this Ashram that I rather yearn for a smoother un Bergsonian evolution. Even if the Lord God and Bergson planned it together, I move an amendment.
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December 21, 1935
I am keeping the estimate and Meghen's letter for further examination. I should like to ask certain questions.
(1) When were the last repairs done, how many years ago. You say the man charged 2000 ? For such a sum repairs should last for ten years at least.
(2) What is the annual amount to which the rent of the house comes.
(3) As to Meghen's proposal of buying the materials, it is a good one if he or the buyer is well acquainted with building materials, their quality, the state of the market, etc. Will that condition be satisfied in his scheme?
O.K. for the play!
December 22, 1935
Last night, after hours of bewildering meditation something rather wonderfullish happened: I started with a galvanized unyogic vitality and penned these four sonnets one after the other finishing the four sonnets in half an hour! A word about its context won't be amiss I hope ?
Sometime back my friend Arindam Bose who stopped with me as the Ashram's guest, started a series of attacks on the ashramites. I kept quiet for a little while whereafter I hit back with my far-from-ahimsa chaleur.... But the seed of inspiration had then been sown of writing a poem on the raison d'etre of an ashram. But tell me, was I wrong in not taking it lying down ? You know docility is not my swadharma, don't you ? And about the esoteric truth in the poem ?
P. S. You wrote to Nirod the other day: "My aim [in writing or encouraging others to write]145 is not personal glory but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry."
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Please revise this sentence as this I will quote in my new book Sūryamukhīas I have felt greatly joyous on reading this. This line in fact has prompted, me to write about these four sonnets which perhaps I would not have attempted otherwise as it might sound somewhat esoteric as an Ashramitic poem. But tell me how can it be so esoteric? Common ideals bind people in a purer tie of friendship the world over is it not?
So ? Qu'en dites-vous ?
I suppose the words I have added are necessary to fill out the meaning?
Your four sonnets are very fine. What you have written is an esoteric truth that seeks to realise itself—for common ideals in the human world do not always bind people in friendship;
often those who have a common ideal are very far from being united. What you write is the psychic and spiritual truth behind friendship and comradeship in a common aim, what ought to be always. The personality in you which writes poetry knows esoteric things very well and has faith also.
As for Arindam's utterances, they were evidently second- hand; the voice in this case was Esau's,146 though the mouth that uttered them was Jacob's. I am glad you gave him the straight and fiery answer.
December 23, 1935
I told Mother the figures. She found it scandalous that after spending Rs.2100 two or three years ago, you should again be asked to spend Rs.1400 now. Usually in Europe house owners put aside one month's rent in the year for repairs. At that rate 1400 represents ten years; you are asked to spend ten months' rent after two or three years only. But of course if mosaics are to come in or other palatial features, any expense is possible.
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I presume the best thing is to ask Meghen as you propose to use his discretion accepting his figure as a fair amount to spend. But all depends on the actual condition of the house— if doors have to be replaced, that is a costly item. If we had more time we could have asked Chandulal to examine the estimate; although he does not know the Calcutta prices, he might have suggested some points, but as time presses I return the papers.
Mother understands and appreciates very much your wish to surrender and give the houses; but there are certain points to be considered. Sale could be managed, but it is doubtful if it could be done advantageously now. For the rest there is the difficulty of arranging for the management and Mother would not like to take the responsibility without having someone she could entirely trust. Uday Singh is such a man of course, but he has been persistently asking to be relieved of work and responsibilities so that he may come here. Anyhow you can talk of all these things with the Mother when you see her today.
I have more than once told you you are progressing—certainly much better than your mind is willing to believe. You doubt because it is being pushed on from below the surface both in changes of the inner nature and dream experiences, etc. while your mind is accustomed as yet to look at the most surface results only, and these while they are there, as in this instance, appear like isolated sprouts and do not make an obvious mass to your own eyes. But as you saw in Somnath's case, they do to men who knew you long ago and have not seen you for some time. A change of spirit is there and a change in the vital—which is preparing the final opening and surrender.
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December 24, 1935
Your letter is cheering to a great extent. It would have been fully cheering if I could have had the full conviction that it is not so worded to cheer a little. For I somehow feel that such words of good cheer had gone also to Harin and others who at last came to what they came to: all but shipwreck. The reason for this diffidence I could not drive home to you-hitherto and that is why I am haunted often by the idea that our Guru is a marvellous superman but not human enough to understand why humans are so sorrowful and what causes them these besetting sorrows: the absence of some abiding peace and restfulness and sense of security in life—a power to be able to feel that the Divine does prop without their being aware of it. When such a sense of loneliness comes the evidence of a Somnath or another gives but scanty succour. But I won't labour this hackneyed theme. If I revert to it still, it is only to let you know that though I did a lot of japa etc. today I feel again rather amorphous if not exactly sad. It is these ups and downs of the spiritual life—the fugitiveness of joys that cause me so much sadness so often. For one should have thought (which my experience hitherto contradicts) that the spiritual Light would be more abiding than the light of elation of worldly joys. But this I have not been able to impress upon you so far and you have (whenever I have alluded to this absence of concrete realisations which are somewhat enduring resorted to Socratic dialectics to corner me and prove that nothing after all is concrete. Of course I can't cope with you in penmanship— but still the fact doth remain 0 Guru, that the heart wants some abiding peace, some feeling of Divine guidance, some lifting of the veil which blinds, some enlargement of the vision which gives a sense of unity with and meaning to the world of senses, and above all a feeling of love out- flowing within one. Instead of all that there is a continuous
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tussle with one's doubts and shortcomings, etc. and a desolate conviction that one can't merit the Divine joy, grace, etc. unless one is wholly blemishless. Even that would be somewhat supportable had one seen that it is so with all. But as I saw it is not so with many unfaulty people who come here for a short while and go back to the world. They have the feeling of Mother's guidance and force and experiences to speak about with great exaltation which I do believe to be genuine, at least with some (though about Harm's exaltations galore you will surely forgive me now if I beg to retain my old doubts—I had never believed he was truthful when he used to brag so n'ght and left) and do envy these fortunate souls. Anyhow I won't give vent to these anymore but try to dwell on the comforting fact that Mother and you at least have some love for me and that my loyalty to you, if not inner surrender, is genuine as 1 found yesterday for which I am indeed grateful to the Divine or Krishna or whoever it is that constantly lures but always eludes in a rather disheartening way to say the least. But I will try not to lament more, but aspire for faith and patience, since there is no other way. But I thank you for your kind and well-meaning assurance that I progress all the more gratefully because I see my difficulties remain and the heart finds only very short-lived feelings of rest and security as ever. Anyhow—
I write according to my knowledge of the processes of sadhana which being a thing spiritual works within and not only by surface means. If my knowledge is wrong or imperfect, so be it; but what I write is never a "well-meaning" insincerity or falsehood, that much I can state.
I hope that you will soon acquire the faith and patience for which you aspire and these oscillations cease. For me the path of Yoga has always been a battle as well as a journey, a thing of ups and downs, of light followed by darkness, followed by a greater light—but nobody is better pleased than myself when a disciple can arrive out of all that to the smooth
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and clear path which the human physical mind quite rightly yearns for!
Accustomed as I am to the misunderstanding or misreporting of the Mother's statements, I found that this about her having said that transformation is easy carries the habit to the extreme limit. Needless to say, she did not and could not say anything of the kind and it is astonishing that you should believe she could say anything so absurd and false. I must remind you that I have always insisted on the difficulty of the sadhana. I have never said that to overcome doubt is easy; I have said on the contrary that it was difficult because it was the nature of something in the human physical mind to cling to doubt for its own sake. I have never said that to overcome grief, depression, gloom and suffering was easy; I have said that it was difficult because something in the human vital clings to it and almost needs it as part of the drama of life. So also I have never said that sex, anger, jealousy, etc. were easy to overcome, I have said it was difficult because they were ingrained in the human vital, and, even if thrown out were always being brought back into it either by its own habit or by the invasion of the general Nature and the resurgence of its own old response.147 [These things I have repeated hundreds of times. Your idea that my difficulties were different from those of human nature is a mental construction or inference without any real basis. If I were ignorant of human difficulties and therefore intolerant of them, how is it that I am so patient with them as I think you cannot deny that I am ? Why for years and years do I go on patiently arguing with your doubts, spending so much of my time, always trying to throw light on your difficulties, to show how things stand, to give reasons for a knowledge gained by living and indiscutable experience? Am I writing these letters every night because I
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have no understanding and no sympathy with you in your doubts and difficulties? Why do I wait patiently for years for sadhaks to get over their sex difficulties? Why do I tolerate and help and write soothing and encouraging letters to those women who break out and hunger-strike and threaten suicide once a fortnight? Why do we bear all this trouble and fracas and fracas and resistance and obloquy and harsh criticism from the sadhaks, why were we so patient with men like Bejoy and Harin and others, if we had no understanding and no sympathy with the difficulties of human nature? It is because I press always on faith and discourage doubt as a means of approach to the spiritual realisation ? What spiritual guide with a respect for truth can do otherwise? And if I encourage and support doubt the only result will be that doubt will last forever and no [outward?] realisation be possible—just as if I encourage and support sex or any other contrary movement it will last for ever—even without that they last quite long enough by their own force and motion. All that I can do for them is to tolerate and be patient and give time enough for their transformation or removal. Surely when you look at all this fairly, you will see that you have made a very incorrect inference.]
As to the statement about drama and something liking to suffer, nobody doubts that your external consciousness dislikes its suffering. The physical mind and consciousness of man hates its own suffering and if left to itself dislikes also to see others suffer. But if you will try to fathom the significance of your own admission of liking drama or of the turn towards drama—from which very few human beings escape—and if you go deep enough, you will find that there is something in the vital which likes suffering and clings to it for the sake of the drama; it is something below the surface, not on the surface, but it is strong, almost universal in human nature and difficult to eradicate unless one recognises it and gets inwardly away from it. The mind and the physical of man do not like suffering, for if they did, it would not be suffering any longer, but this thing in the vital wants it in order to give a spice to
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life. It is the reason why constant depressions can go on returning and returning even though the mind longs to get rid of them, because this in the vital responds, goes on repeating the same movement like a gramophone as soon as it is got going and insists on turning the whole round of the often repeated record. It does not really depend on the reasons which the vital gives for starting off to the round, these are often of the most trivial character and wholly insufficient to justify it. It is only by a strong will to detach oneself, not to justify, to reject, not to welcome that one can in the end get rid of this most troublesome and dangerous streak in human nature. When therefore we speak of the vital comedy, the vital drama, we are speaking from a psychological knowledge which does not end with the surface of things but looks at these hidden movements. It is impossible to deal with things for the purposes of Yoga if we confine ourselves to the surface consciousness only.
Each of the points you have touched in your letter need a long handling to be properly understood—so I have no time for the rest tonight. Tomorrow I shall try to write about Ramakrishna's statement and how far it is true and after- wards about Prithwisingh's ideas which raise very large questions and in connection with that with your Kabiraj's guru and other gurus. Provided of course I am given the time.
I think this saying of Ramakrishna's148 expresses a certain characteristic happening in sadhana and cannot be interpreted in a general and absolute sense; for in that sense it is hard for it to be true. All difficulties disappearing in a minute? Well, Vivekananda had the grace of Ramakrishna from the beginning, but I think his difficulty of doubt lasted for some time and to the end of his life the difficulty of the control of anger was there—making him say that all that was good in
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him was his Guru's gift, but these things (anger etc.) were his own property. But what could be true is that the central difficulty may disappear by a certain touch between the Guru and the disciple. But what is meant by the kripā? If it is the general compassion and grace of the Guru, that, one would think, is always there on the disciple; his acceptance itself is an act of grace and the help is there for him to receive. But the touch of grace, divine grace, coming directly or through the Guru is a special phenomenon having two sides to it, the grace of the Guru or the Divine, in fact both together, on one side and a "state of grace77 in the disciple on the other. This "state of grace" is often prepared by a long tapasya or purification in which nothing decisive seems to happen, only touches or glimpses or passing experiences at the most, and comes suddenly without warning. If this is what is spoken of in Ramakrishna's saying, then it is true that when it comes, the fundamental difficulties can in a moment and generally do disappear. Or, at the very least, something happens which makes the rest of the sadhana—however long it may take— sure and secure.
This decisive touch comes most easily to the "baby cat" people, those who have at some point between the psychic and the emotional vital a quick and decisive movement of surrender to the Guru or the Divine. I have seen that when that is there and there is the conscious central dependence compelling the mind also and the rest of the vital, then the fundamental difficulty disappears. If others remain they are not felt as difficulties, but simply as things that have just to be done and need cause no worry. Sometimes no tapasya is necessary—one just refers things to the Power that one feels guiding or doing the sadhana and assents to its action, rejecting all that is contrary to it, and the Power removes what has to be removed or changes what has to be changed, quickly or slowly—but the quickness or slowness does not seem to matter since one is sure that it will be done. If tapasya is necessary, it is done with so much feeling of a strong sup- port that there is nothing hard or austere in the tapasya.
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For the others, the "baby monkey" type or those who are still more independent, following their own ideas, doing their own sadhana, asking only for some instruction or help, the grace of the Guru is there, but it acts according to the nature of the sadhak and counts upon his effort to a greater or less degree; it helps, succours in difficulty, saves in the time of danger, but the disciple is not always, is perhaps hardly at all aware of what is being done as he is absorbed in himself and his endeavour. In such cases the decisive psychological movement, the touch that makes all clear, may take longer to come.
But with all the kripa is there working in one way or another and it can only abandon the disciple if the disciple himself abandons or rejects it—by decisive and definitive revolt, by rejection of the Guru, by cutting the painter and declaring his independence, as X and others did, or by an act or course of betrayal that severs him from his own psychic being. Even then, except perhaps in the last case if it goes to an extreme, a return to grace is not impossible.
That is my own knowledge and experience of the matter. But as to what lay behind Ramakrishna's saying and whether he himself meant it to be a general and absolute statement— I do not pronounce.
December 25, 1935
It is the usual fit and the same round of thoughts mechanically repeated that you always get in those fits. These thoughts have no light in them and no truth, for the physical mind which engenders this routine wheel of suggestions is shut up in surface appearances and knows nothing of deeper truth or the things of the spirit. There is plenty of "increment", but with this superficial part of the physical mind it is not likely or possible that you can see it. Your impression of the dwindling
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light is also an impression of this mind natural to it, especially in its periods of darkness; for that matter when the periods of darkness come to any sadhak they always seem darker than before; that is the nature of the darkness to give that impression always. It is also quite according to the rule of these reactions that it should have come immediately after a considerable progress in bhakti and the will to surrender in the inner being—for it comes from the spirit of darkness which attacks the sadhak whenever it can, and that spirit resents fiercely all progress made and hates the very idea of progress and its whole policy is to convince him by its attacks and suggestions that he has made none or that what progress he has made is after all null and inconclusive.
I admired Harin's insight into truth like a devotee? or perhaps like a disciple ? Truly, I am astonished... What we admired in him was his receptivity to experience and his power of poetic expression of what he received and nothing more. Once indeed I got through his thinking mind's resistance and he was beginning to express, not by ordered thought but by inspiration, a deeper truth, but only for a short time. As for his idea of the Divine being bound or a hostage to law as much as Harin himself or his cat,149 that was an old idea of his written in his poems long before he came here, an idea that can be accepted only by those who are unable to think philosophically or make the necessary spiritual distinctions. The laws of this world as it is are the laws of the Ignorance and the Divine in the world maintains them so long as there is the Ignorance—if He did not, the universe would crumble to pieces—utsideyurime lokah, as the Gita puts it.150 There are also, very naturally, conditions for getting out of the Ignorance into the Light. One of them is that the mind of the sadhak should co-operate with the Truth and that his will should co-operate with the Divine Power which, however slow its action may seem to the vital or to the physical mind, is uplifting the nature towards the Light. When that co-operation is complete, then the progress can be rapid enough; but the sadhak should not grudge the time and labour needed to
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make that co-operation fully possible to the blindness and weakness of human nature and effective.
All the call for faith, sincerity, surrender is only an invitation to make that co-operation more easily possible. If the physical mind ceases to judge all things including those that it does not know or are beyond it, like the deeper things of the spirit, then it becomes easier for it to receive the Light and know by illumination and experience the things that it does not yet know. If the mental and vital will place themselves in the Divine Hand without reservation, then it is easier for the Power to work and produce tangible effects. If there is resistance, then it is natural that it should take more time and the work should be done from within or, as it might appear, underground so as to prepare the nature and undermine the resistance. It seems to me that the demand for patience is not so terribly unreasonable.
December 1935?
Well, what an amazing mass of extraordinary mental constructions you have built up about the Mother and myself! The Mother is a great Yogi of a rather grave and impersonal type? I am Vedantic and vast and cosmic and impersonal and what not! What not indeed! Nothing is impossible after that!! However, I won't protest—for mental constructions are to the mind like his favourite productions to an author, the more you criticise them the more the mind clings to them. Let me point out however by example how they came unnecessarily in your way and how very unnecessarily you let them do that, so that my insistence—in The Mother or elsewhere in getting rid of mental constructions is not so groundless after all. The Mother told you very simply that if you prayed to her (your prayers to Krishna having, according to you, no effect) you would have received greater help. That was simply to help
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you—she is here close to you and the others and any number here have received help by calling to her simply and directly of course without any questions or misgivings. Even now there are several who are emerging out of the same illness as yours, a habit of many years of long attacks of black despondency with the usual round of suggestions, "unfitness, this Yoga hopeless for me, no response, no experience, the Divine does not love me. Mother is distant and far, how long can I go on, how can any one live like this, running away, suicide, etc.," and they are emerging because they have suddenly managed to turn simply and directly towards her. So what the Mother said was not something unfounded and a mere idea of hers. But it was simply a suggestion to help you. How did your mind come to the conclusion that it was a command to be followed on pain of displeasure, spiritual hanging or rejection and exile? The habit of mental constructions, that is all. Fear? But the fear itself is a mental construction which could have no such foundation if you had remembered the constant indulgence and patience the Mother has always shown to you... [incomplete]
December 26, 1935
Your long letter to hand; I fear it is full of confusions and fallacies and mixing up of things that are very desperate. I felt inclined to go for you with a logical club, knock you down, roll you over and generally wipe the [mental?] floor with you; but it would have been a long operation and I am drowned today with urgent things. I have to finish an answer to some questions put to me by Madame P. (the half-finished answer to which was lying with me for a week), as she is soon going;
other things also that have waited for still longer but refuse to wait any more. I shall see from tomorrow whether some kind of more compact unravelling of your mental perplexities
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and confusions can't be managed by a stern self-suppression of my more aggressive instincts. Read the letter and diary of your friend—beautifully idealistic, but it does not make allowance for the hard struggle of the spiritual emergence and leaps to fulfilment with a too radiant and ethereal sweep. But the musical analysis is very interesting and much more illuminative than the superficialities one ordinarily comes across. By the way did you hear of the Governor's comment on the music to Pavitra, "I have listened to much Indian music, but never to anything that could at all equal that!" A thorough going eulogy—what? and obviously sincere.
December 27, 1935
(from Mother)
Un mot pour vous dire que je suis très touchée par votre decision et que j´en profiterai pour prendre du repos comme vous me Ie demandez.
Vous pouvez être assure que ma force est affectueusement avec vous et Ie sera toujours dans votre effort votre les hauteurs spirituelles.
P.S. Je vous demanderai de ne montrer ce petit mot a personne, carje ne tienspas a une exposition de mes sentiments.
[A word to tell you that I am very touched by your decision and I will take this opportunity to take rest as you ask me.
You can rest assured that my force is affectionately with you and will ever be in your endeavour towards the spiritual heights.
P.S. I would ask you not to show this small note to any- body, as I am not keen to expose my feelings.]
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December 30, 1935
A fine poem. Self-offering is never easy, but when the soul desires it, the rest is sure to follow, whatever the obstacles. I have written to Prithwi Singh tonight.151
I was not able to complete the letter as I had hoped tonight, but have made some headway. Apart from the pressure of other things and lack of time, the presentation of the subject is difficult, because what I have to say about it is new—not the old conventional idea of a departure from life into a state of consciousness which has nothing to do with life; for that is a very easy view to put forward and the questions you raise do not at all arise under it, since it is then a matter only of getting out of all life activity and not of transforming it. It is difficult to express what I have to say adequately without spreading oneself out a little, so it is getting longer than I expected—taking a bigger stretch of space and time. You will not mind that since it means a clearer and fuller statement of the whole affair.
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