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His Temperament and Character
The Battle of Life
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 hardship 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 cropping 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 shouting 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 themselves. But what an illusion, all the same! November 1935
Change of Nature
It is perfectly possible to change one’s nature. I have proved that in my own case, for I have made myself exactly the opposite in character to what I was when I started life. I have seen it done in many and I have helped myself to do it in many. But certain conditions are needed. At present in this Asram there is an obstinate resistance to the change of nature — not so much in the inner being, for there are a good number who accept change there, but in the outer man which repeats its customary movements like a machine and refuses to budge out of its groove. X‘s case does not matter — his vital has always wanted to be
Page – 44 itself and follow its own way and his mental will cannot prevail over it. The difficulty is far more general than that. That however would not matter — it would be only a question of a little more or less time, if the divine action were admitted whole-heartedly by the sadhaks. But the conditions laid down by them and the conditions laid down from above seem radically to differ. From above the urge is to lift everything above the human level, the demand of the sadhaks (not all, but so many) is to keep everything on the human level. But the human level means ignorance, disharmony, strife, suffering, death, disease — constant failure. I cannot see what solution there can be for such a contradiction — unless it be Nirvana. But transformation is hardly more difficult than Nirvana. 17 October 1934
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People of sattwic temperament in the ordinary life behave practically in the same manner as sadhaks who realise spiritual peace as a result of Yoga. Can it be said that in sattwic people the peace descends but in a hidden manner? Or is it due to their past lives?
Of course they have gained their power to live in the mind by a past evolution. But the spiritual peace is something other and infinitely more than the mental peace and its results are different, not merely clear thinking or some control or balance or a sattwic state. But its greater results can only be fully and permanently manifest when it lasts long enough in the system or when one feels spread out in it above the head and on every side stretching towards infinity as well as penetrated by it down to the very cells. Then it carries with it the deep and vast and solid tranquillity that nothing can shake — even if on the surface there is storm and battle. I was myself of the sattwic type you describe in my youth, but when the peace from above came down, that was quite different. Sattvaguna disappeared into nirguna and negative nirguna into positive traigunyatita. 23 July 1935
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Keeping Silence
I suppose I am silent, first, because I have no “free-will” and, secondly, because I have no Time. Less metaphysically and more Yogically, there are periods when silence becomes imperative, because to throw oneself outward delays the “work that has to be done”. I suppose someday I will write about Free Will, but for the moment there is no effective will, free or otherwise, to do it. 7 April 1931
Peace and Ananda
My own experience is not limited to a radiant peace; I know very well what ecstasy and Ananda are from the Brahmananda down to the śārīra ānanda, and can experience them at any time. But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done — for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the Ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence. 4 August 1934
The Burden of Love
It is only divine love which can bear the burden I have to bear, that all have to bear who have sacrificed everything else to the one aim of uplifting earth out of its darkness towards the Divine. The Gallio-like “Je m’en fiche“-ism (I do not care) would not carry me one step; it would certainly not be divine. It is quite another thing that enables me to walk unweeping and unlamenting towards the goal. April 1934
Solid Strength
If silence does not contain the fire within, will it not be the silence of a dead man? What can one accomplish without fire, zeal, enthusiasm?
Page – 46 Zeal and enthusiasm are all right and very necessary but the spiritual condition combines calm with intensity. Psychic fire is different — what you are speaking of here is the rajasic vital fire of self-assertion, aggressive self-defence, exerting lawful rights etc.
Fire is the active expression of solid strength. But I feel that this fire is more necessary than solid strength in dynamic work.
I speak from my own experience. I have solid strength, but I have not much of the fire that blazes out against anybody who does not give me lawful rights. Yet I do not find myself weak or a dead man. I have always made it a rule not to be restless in any way, to throw away restlessness — yet I have been able to use my solid strength whenever necessary. You speak as if rajasic force and vehemence were the only strength and all else is deadness and weakness. It is not so — the calm spiritual strength is a hundred times stronger; it does not blaze up and sink again — but is steady and unshakable and perpetually dynamic. 21 November 1933
Rudra Power
I have dropped using the Rudra power — its effects used to be too catastrophic and now from a long disuse the inclination to use it has become rusty. Not that I am a convert to Satyagraha and Ahimsa, — but Himsa too has its inconvenience. So the fires sleep. 26 June 1936
Neither Rejection nor Attachment
I have no special liking for the ideal of Shiva, though something of the Shiva temperament must necessarily be present. I have never had any turn for rejection of the money power nor any attachment to it; one has to rise above these things as your Guru did but it is precisely when one has risen above that one can
Page – 47 more easily command them. 15 January 1936
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It depends on what is meant by asceticism. I have no desires but I don’t lead outwardly an ascetic life, only a secluded one. According to the Gita, tyāga, the inner freedom from desire and attachment, is the true asceticism. 9 July 1937
Not Grim and Stern
The Overmind seems so distant from us, and your Himalayan austerity and grandeur take my breath away, making my heart palpitate!
O rubbish! I am austere and grand, grim and stern! every blasted thing that I never was! I groan in an unAurobindian despair when I hear such things. What has happened to the common sense of all of you people? In order to reach the Overmind it is not at all necessary to take leave of this simple but useful quality. Common sense by the way is not logic (which is the least commonsense-like thing in the world), it is simply looking at things as they are without inflation or deflation — not imagining wild imaginations — or for that matter despairing “I know not why” despairs. 23 February 1935
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The mistake was an old obstinate suggestion returning so as to bring about the old reactions which have to 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 this 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 others 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
Page – 48 seem to have somewhere in you a Nevinson impression of me. Or perhaps you agree with X 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, whatever I may have said to Y or Y may have said to you, I have always given a large place to mirth and laughter and my letters in that style are only the natural outflow of my personality. I 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 I do it quietly and simply and have always done. Don’t set up some gloomy imaginations and take them for the real Aurobindo. By the way, if you get such imaginations like the Nrisinha Hiranyakashipu one, I shall begin to think that the Overmind has got hold of you also. I don’t know the gentleman (Nrisinha) 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 sent for Hiranyakashipu (whoever H. was) and cut him open in the true Neanderthal way! For myself I was sitting there very quiet and as pacific as anybody at Geneva itself — 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 Nrisinha there? Besides it seems to me that I have long overpassed the man-beast stage of evolution — perhaps I flatter myself? — so again why Nrisinha. 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 Nrisinha. February 1935
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I do not know that I can say anything in defence of my unlovable marbleness — which is also unintentional, for I feel 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 a cheerful
Page – 49 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 is 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 X 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 (Nrisinha) 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 repellent, 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 out giddy with the onrush of light or fainted like Y, 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 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
Page – 50 it could soothe and tranquillise. Am I to understand 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. 24 February 1935
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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, degage, more like a robe of ease than any imperial purple. Between X‘s palpitating 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 — নানা মত নানা মুনির . 1935
Sense of Humour
The Divine may be difficult, but his difficulties can be overcome if one keeps at Him. Even my smilelessness was overcome which Nevinson had remarked with horror more than twenty years before — “the most dangerous man in India”, Aurobindo Ghose “the man who never smiles”. He ought to have added, “but who
Page – 51 always jokes”; but he did not know that, as I was very solemn with him, or perhaps I had not developed sufficiently on that side then. Anyhow if you could overcome that, you are bound to overcome all the other difficulties also. 11 February 1937
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[From a report of a meeting with Sri Aurobindo:] “He laughed till his body shook; it was rollicking. . . .”
This won’t do. It is a too exhilarating over-description. It calls up to my mind a Falstaff or a Chesterton; it does not fit in my style of hilarity. It is long since my laughter has been continuous and uncontrolled like that. For that to be true I shall have to wait till the Year 1, S.D. (Supramental Descent). And “rollicking”? The epithet would have applied to my grandfather but not to his less explosive grandson. 1945
Rising above Depression
I am still not able to maintain the right attitude in my own sadhana and yet I try to pose as an adviser and instructor.
Well, one can give good advice even when one does not follow it oneself — there is the old adage “Do what I preach and not what I practise.” More seriously, there are different personalities in oneself and the one that is eager to advise and help may be quite sincere. I remember in days long past when I still had personal struggles and difficulties, people came to me from outside for advice etc. when I was in black depression and could not see my way out of a sense of hopelessness and failure, yet nothing of that came out and I spoke with an assured conviction. Was that insincerity? I think not, the one who spoke in me was quite sure of what he spoke. The turning of all oneself to the Divine is not an easy matter and one must not be discouraged if it takes time and other movements still intervene. One must note, rectify and go on अनिर्विण्णेन चेतसा. 24 February 1935
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Page – 52 We hear that you also had to undergo a lot of suffering and despair — to the extent of wanting to commit suicide!
What nonsense! Suicide! Who the devil told you that? Even if I knew that all was going to collapse tomorrow, I would not think of suicide, but go on to do what I still could for the future. 21 June 1935
Attitude towards Work
It is not a question of liking but of capacity — though usually (not always) liking goes with the capacity. But capacity can be developed and liking can be developed or rather the rasa you speak of. One cannot be said to be in the full Yogic condition — for the purposes of this Yoga — if one cannot take up with willingness any work given to one as an offering to the Divine. At one time I was absolutely unfit for any physical work and cared only for the mental, but I trained myself in doing physical things with care and perfection so as to overcome this glaring defect in my being and make the bodily instrument apt and conscious. It was the same with some others here. A nature not trained to accept external work and activity becomes mentally top-heavy — physically inert and obscure. It is only if one is disabled or too physically weak that physical work can be put aside altogether. I am speaking of course from the point of view of the ideal — the rest depends upon the nature. As for the deity presiding over control of servants, godown work as well as over poetry or painting, it is always the same — the Shakti, the Mother. 11 December 1934
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I have such a push to write poetry, stories, all kinds of things, in Bengali!
Ambitions of that kind are too vague to succeed. You have to limit your fields and concentrate in order to succeed in them. I don’t make any attempt to be a scientist or painter or general. I have certain things to do and have done them, so long as the
Page – 53 Divine wanted; others have opened in me from above or within by Yoga. I have done as much of them as the Divine wanted. 19 September 1936
Genius for Lolling
I intend to loll for a day or two after weeks of protracted hard work. How best to loll is a problem. By the way please note I am taking a regular sea-bath. It is doing me a lot of good.
All right about the sea-baths. As for lolling there is no how about it, — one just lolls, — if one has the genius for it. I have, though opportunities are now lacking for showing my genius. But it can’t be taught, nor any process invented — it is just a gift of Nature. 25 April 1936
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