At the feet of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

11 October 1938

MYSELF: It seems there is a control over speech; still, how difficult for me! What we call a slip of the tongue seems also to be less now. I wonder at the amount of tangles in which our nature is caught. To change them will be a Herculean job. One gets lost even to think of it.

SRI AUROBINDO: The habits of the physical or the vital physical nature are always the most difficult to change, because their action is automatic and not governed by the mental will and it is therefore difficult for the mental will to control or transform them. You have to persevere and form the habit of control. If you can succeed in controlling the speech often, — it needs a constant vigilance, — you will finally find that the control stands itself and can in the long run always intervene. This must be done so long as that movement is not fully opened to the Mother’s Force and Light, for if that happens the thing can be done more quickly and sometimes with a great rapidity. There is also the intervention of the psychic, if the psychic is sufficiently awake and active to intervene each time you are going to speak at random and say “No”, then the change becomes more easy.

(11.10.38)

NOTE: The period of correspondence with questions and answers comes to an end. I shall now begin furnishing Sri Aurobindo’s letters without questions — not all, but quite a number of them.