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On His Published Prose Writings
Publication Plans, 1927
There is no intention of withdrawing support. The small book The Mother was given to Rameshwar because it was necessary to bring it out without delay and the A.P.H. [Arya Publishing House] was already occupied with the Essays on the Gita which it had not been able to bring to completion. It was hoped that Rameshwar’s joining the A.P.H. would unite all interests, but since you have not been able to agree together, it will be necessary to give him something from time to time as the long-standing connection with him cannot be broken — there being no reason for giving him up any more than for giving up A.P.H. This will not stand in the way of my giving my principal books to A.P.H. — provided always that the A.P.H. can keep its side of the arrangement by publishing them properly and without inordinate delay. I can understand that there have been financial and other difficulties in putting A.P.H. on a sound footing and I have not insisted either on publication or money or anything else. At the same time I am bound to say that the methods of work seem to be loose and haphazard, e.g. the enormous time taken to publish the Second Series [of Essays on the Gita], the endless delay in sending me my copies of the First Series, the absence of all information regarding the condition of the concern or of any regular accounts of my dues from the House etc. I hope that things will be better in the future. It is not necessary or possible to publish all my books together; hardly any of them can go out without revision and as I have very little time for this kind of work revision will take time.
For Sri Aurobindo’s remarks on his poetic works, see Letters on Poetry and Art, volume 27 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO, pp. 219 363. — Ed.
Page – 74 The Ideal of Human Unity. I was revising, but as there seemed to be no progress with the Gita and I had other work to do, I dropped it. I will now complete the revision and I expect it will not take more than another two months. The Defence of Indian Culture. Not finished. I will look through it and revise and add two or three chapters to finish. The time taken will depend on the amount of revision necessary — probably not very extensive alterations are needed. The Katha Upanishad. This also needs revision before it can be published; but it is not likely to take very long. The Kena Upanishad. My present intention is not to publish it as it stands. This must be postponed for the present.
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It would be no use coming to see me, as I am seeing nobody, not even those who are living here. Nor is there any necessity for the journey, as I have not any present intention of altering the existing arrangement. 30 November 1927
Political Writings
I am an Indian student working for the Ph.D. degree at Harvard University. For my thesis subject I have selected “Contemporary Political Thought in India”. You of course will be one of the authors I will be considering. Unfortunately your books are not available here. Please send me a list of books related to my subject, and the address of your publisher.
Refer him to A.P.H. Tell him that my political writings appeared in the daily Bande Mataram and the weekly Karmayogin and have for the most part not been separately published. You can mention however The Ideal of the Karmayogin, The Renaissance in India, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination as books that may be useful for his subject, as the two former are partly concerned with or touch upon Indian politics, and the two latter are written upon international questions. I do not remember any others; if there are any, they may be included in the list. Ask A.P.H. to send him a complete list of my published works. 11 April 1928 76
Page – 75 Speeches
Now that they have written, I remember that in fact the Speeches were transferred from the Prabartak to A.P.H. But then how is it that Rameshwar asked for it? I gave permission under the impression that it must be in his share of the already published books. You had better write to him about it. After receiving his answer I will decide. 6 May 1929
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I find it impossible to decide about the Speeches; the whole matter has got twisted up in a very undesirable way. It would be better if they settle it themselves amicably; otherwise I shall have to promise it to whoever can bring it out soonest or in the best style or put it up to auction or toss heads or tails. This whole matter of the publications being split up between half a dozen Arya Aurobindo houses is reaching the point of a reductio ad absurdum if not ad impossible. But nothing however absurd seems impossible here. 10 July 1931
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Regarding Speeches of Sri Aurobindo — there has been a great demand for it in the market. If you kindly allow us to omit those speeches which may come under the Press Act, we could print the book. Please let us know your decision.
But who will decide what may come under the Press Act? It is a legal point and the law of sedition is exceedingly elastic. September 1935
The Ideal of the Karmayogin
Have you seen my review of The Ideal of the Karmayogin?
Yes, I have seen it, but I don’t think it can be published in its present form as it prolongs the political Aurobindo of that time into the Sri Aurobindo of the present time. You even assert that I have “thoroughly” revised the book and these articles are an
Page – 76 index of my latest views on the burning problems of the day and there has been no change in my views in 27 years (which would surely be proof of a rather unprogressive mind). How do you get all that? My spiritual consciousness and knowledge at that time was as nothing to what it is now — how would the change leave my view of politics and life unmodified altogether? There has been no such thorough revision; I have left the book as it was, because it would be useless to modify what was written so long ago — the same as with Yoga and Its Objects. Anyway the review would almost amount to a proclamation of my present political views — while on the contrary I have been careful to pronounce nothing — no views whatever on political questions for the last I don’t know how many years. 21 April 1937
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In the new edition of The Ideal of the Karmayogin there is this announcement: — Fourth Edition — January, 1937 (Thoroughly Revised by the Author) Radhakanta is repeating the above formula in all your old books which are really reprints. May I ask him not to do it?
Evidently it is an untrue statement and cannot be allowed to continue as it creates a false impression. But I think it will be necessary for me to write myself — otherwise he may not listen. Or you may write that I have asked you to inform him that I want this to be discontinued in future editions as it creates a wrong impression — since in fact these are reprints and I have not revised or rewritten any part of them. 23 April 1937
A System of National Education
I readily give the permission you request to embody my System of National Education as a chapter in the book projected by your Institute.1 I have no time to go again through it, but I am
1
Page – 77 asking my publishers, the Arya Publishing House of Calcutta, to send you a copy of the corrected and authorised edition. The Madras edition is unauthorised and full of gross errors. The book is only a series of preliminary essays never worked out or completed, but I shall be glad if, even as it is, you think it can be of some use.
Yogic Sadhan
The Yogi from the North (Uttara Yogi)2 was my own name given to me because of a prediction made long ago by a famous Tamil Yogi, that thirty years later (agreeing with the time of my arrival) a Yogi from the North would come as a fugitive to the South and practise there an integral Yoga (Poorna Yoga), and this would be one sign of the approaching liberty of India. He gave three utterances as the mark by which this Yogi could be recognised and all these were found in the letters to my wife. As for Yogic Sadhan it was not I exactly who wrote it, though it is true that I am not a Mayavadin.
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Your name was not printed on the first two editions of Yogic Sadhan. But the third edition (brought out by A.P.H.) has your name on it.
No need of name. The publication of the name in the third edition of Yogic Sadhan was unauthorised and is in fact a falsehood. 6 June 1931
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As to Yogic Sadhan, it is not my composition nor its contents the essence of my Yoga, whatever the publishers may persist in saying in their lying blurb in spite of my protests. 4 May 1934
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The Yogic Sadhan has its use, but it is not one of the main or
2 On the title page of the book Yogic Sadhan (first published in 1911) the editor is given as “The Uttara Yogi”. — Ed.
Page – 78 most important books published among mine, nor is it my own writing. 6 December 1935
Passages from Yogic Sadhan
It is said in Yogic Sadhan: “The Will when it begins to act, will be hampered by the Swabhava; therefore until you are able to act on the Swabhava, you will not, should not bring your Will to bear upon life.”3 I don’t understand what this means.
I don’t remember the passage. Possibly it means that till you can act on the real nature in you and use the true will and consciousness, you should go on trying for that, and not try to shape life with an imperfect will and imperfect instrument. 18 September 1933
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In Yogic Sadhan, Sri Aurobindo has said: “You have so many milestones to pass; but you may pass them walking, in a carriage, in a railway train, but pass them you must” [p. 1378]. What are the main milestones on the Shakti marga?
Answer as under.4 The Yogic Sadhan is not Sri Aurobindo’s writing — only communicated to him. The statement of the publishers that it contains the essence of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is an error propagated by them against his own protest. He cannot therefore say what particular milestones were meant. It is true as a general rule, but can be partly cancelled by a concentrated movement.
I suppose there are different milestones on different paths?
Necessarily.
Again, while discussing the law of resistance, Sri Aurobindo says: “They [old rules, habits or tendencies] are supported by
3 Yogic Sadhan, in
Record of Yoga, volume 11 of T
4
Page – 79
an army of forces or spiritual beings who surround you and live upon your experiences and enjoyments” [p. 1377]. What are these “spiritual beings”?
They are powers, forces or beings of the mental, vital or subtle physical worlds. There are some that simply want to utilise, there are others that want to possess, oppose or destroy and are known by us as “the hostile forces”. 14 April 1936
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What does the author of Yogic Sadhan mean by saying “when the man himself becomes God” [p. 1378]?
He means “when he becomes identified with the Divine”, or “when he feels himself to be only a portion of the Divine and thinks and acts as such.” 24 September 1933
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“It [the Manas] catches thoughts on their way from the Buddhi to the Chitta, but in catching them it turns them into the stuff of sensations . . .” [p. 1383]. Has Manas any right to catch these thoughts? If so, what is the way to stop it so that it does not turn them into stuff of sensations?
The terms Manas etc. belong to the ordinary psychology applied to the surface consciousness. In our Yoga we adopt a different classification based on the Yoga experience. What answers to this movement of the Manas there would be two separate things — a part of the physical mind communicating with the physical vital. It receives from the physical senses and transmits to the Buddhi — i.e. to some part or other of the Thought-Mind; it receives back from the Buddhi and transmits idea and will to the organs of sensation and action. All that is indispensable in the ordinary action of the consciousness. But in the ordinary consciousness everything gets mixed up together and there is no clear order or rule. In the Yoga one becomes aware of the different parts and their proper action, and puts each in its place and to its proper action under the control of the higher consciousness or else under the control of the Divine Power.
Page – 80 Afterwards all gets surcharged with the spiritual consciousness and there is an automatic right perception and right action of the different parts because they are controlled entirely from above and do not falsify or resist or confuse its dictates. 13 September 1933
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What is “the conceptual activity of the Manas” [p. 1385] and how can one still it?
The real conceptual activity belongs rather to the Buddhi — that of the Manas is simply a rendering of perceptions and impressions into thought-forms. There is no necessity of specially stilling this function — it comes best with a general stillness of the mind. 12 September 1933
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It is written in Yogic Sadhan: “Adharma is often necessary as a passage or preparation for passing from an undeveloped to a developed, a lower to a higher Dharma” [p. 1387]. How is this?
I don’t remember the context; but I suppose he means that when one has to escape from the lower Dharma, one has often to break it so as to arrive at a larger one. E.g. social duties, paying debts, looking after family, helping to serve your country, etc. etc. The man who turns to the spiritual life, has to leave all that behind him often and he is reproached by lots of people for his Adharma. But if he does not do this Adharma, he is bound for ever to the lower life — for there is always some duty there to be done — and cannot take up the spiritual dharma or can do it only when he is old and his faculties impaired. That is a point in instance. 14 September 1933
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“I come next to Prana, the nervous or vital element in man which is centralised below the Manas and Chitta in the subtle body and connected with the navel in the Sthula Deha” [p. 1388]. What is that subtle body? Also, I don’t understand
Page – 81
the phrase “connected with the navel in the Sthula Deha”.
How is it you do not know these elementary things? Man has not a gross (sthūla) visible body only, but a subtle body (sūksma deha) in which he goes out of the sthūla deha at his death. The navel is the vital center in the physical body — but the native seat of the vital is in the vital sheath of the subtle body, which sheath it pervades, but for action through the gross body its action is centred at the navel and below it. 16 September 1933
The Yoga and Its Objects, Yogic Sadhan and The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo is the author of Yoga and Its Object.5 It must be by an error of the printers that his name has been omitted. But the book represents an early stage of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana and only a part of it is applicable to the Yoga as it has at present taken form after a lapse of more than twenty years. The Yogic Sadhan is not Sri Aurobindo’s own writing, but was published with a note by him, — that is all. The statement made to the contrary by the publishers was an error which they have been asked to correct. There is no necessity of following the methods suggested in that book unless one finds them suggestive or helpful as a preliminary orientation of the consciousness — e.g. in the upbuilding of an inner Will etc. A book giving some hints about the Yoga compiled from letters to the sadhaks is about to be published,6 but it cannot be said to be complete. There is no complete book on the subject; for even The Synthesis of Yoga, published in the Arya but not yet republished in book form, gives only the theory of different components of the Yoga (Knowledge, Works, Devotion) and remains besides unfinished; it does not cover the more recent developments of the Yoga.
28 October 1934
5 When first published in 1921, The Yoga and Its Objects
was entitled The Yoga and
6 The reference is to Lights on Yoga
Page – 82 The Yoga and Its Objects
A friend says there are no books in Gujarati that he can give to people who want to know about Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. So he suggested I translate The Yoga and Its Object.
The Yoga and Its Object is not at all suitable for the purpose as it was written very long ago and expresses things that belong to the early stages of my sadhana, not the fullness of the integral and supramental sadhana. 16 August 1934
Passages from The Yoga and Its Objects
“To those who demand from him, God gives what they demand. . . .”7 Is this true?
It is not meant that He gives always whatever anyone demands — but that what they demand is all He gives — they cannot get anything else. 9 January 1934
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“For behind the Sad Atman is the silence of the Asat which the Buddhist Nihilists realised as the sunyam and beyond that silence is the Paratpara Purusha (puruso varenya ādityavarnas tamasah parastāt)” [p. 76].
The passage in Yoga and Its Objects is written from the point of view of the spiritualised Mind approaching the supreme Truth directly, without passing through the Supermind or disappearing into it. The Mind spiritualises itself by shedding all its own activities and formations and reducing everything to a pure Existence, Sad Atman, from which all things and activities proceed and which supports everything. When it wants to go still beyond, it negates yet farther and arrives at an Asat, which is the negation of all this existence and yet Something inconceivable to mind, speech or defining experience. It is the silent Unknowable, the Turiya or featureless and relationless Absolute of the monistic
7 Sri Aurobindo, The Yoga and Its Objects, in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Page – 83 Vedantins, the Sunyam of the nihilistic Buddhists, the Tao or omnipresent and transcendent Nihil of the Chinese, the indefinable and ineffable Permanent of the Mahayana. Many Christian mystics also speak of the necessity of a complete ignorance in order to get the supreme experience and speak too of the Divine Darkness — they mean the shedding of all mental knowledge, making a blank of the mind and engulfing it in the Unmanifest, — the param avyaktam. All this is the mind’s way of approaching the Supreme — for beyond the avyakta, tamasah parastāt, is the Supreme, the Purushottama of the Gita, the Para Purusha of the Upanishads. It is āditya-varna in contrast to the darkness of the Unmanifest; it is a metaphor, but not a mere metaphor, for it is a symbol also, a symbol visually seen by the sūksma drsti, the subtle vision, and not merely a symbol, but, as one might say, a fact of spiritual experience. The sun in the Yoga is the symbol of the supermind and the supermind is the first power of the Supreme which one meets across the border where the experience of spiritualised mind ceases and the unmodified divine Consciousness begins the domain of the supreme nature, parā prakrti. It is that Light of which the Vedic mystics got a glimpse and it is the opposite of the intervening darkness of the Christian mystics — for the supermind is all light and no darkness. To the mind the Supreme is avyaktāt param avyaktam, but if we follow the line leading to the supermind, it is an increasing affirmation rather than an increasing negation through which we move. Light is always seen in Yoga with the inner eye and even with the outer eye, but there are many lights; all are not and all do not come from the param jyotih. 18 August 1932
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“Matter itself, you will one day realise, is not material, it is not substance but form of consciousness, guna, the result of quality of being perceived by sense-knowledge” [p. 77].
There is no need to put “the” before “quality” — in English that would alter the sense. Matter is not regarded in this passage as a quality of being perceived by sense; I don’t think that would have any meaning. It is regarded as a result of a certain power
Page – 84 and action of consciousness which presents forms of itself to sense perception and it is this quality of sense-perceivedness, so to speak, that gives them the appearance of Matter, i.e. of a certain kind of substantiality inherent in themselves — but in fact they are not self-existent substantial objects but forms of consciousness. The point is that there is no such thing as the self-existent Matter posited by nineteenth-century Science.
“chitta” and “chetas”
Chitta is ordinarily used for the mental consciousness in general, thought, feeling, etc. taken together with a stress now on one side or another, sometimes on the feelings as in citta-pramāthī, sometimes on the thought-mind — that is why I translated it [on p. 75] “heart and mind” in its wider sense. Chetas can be used in the same way, but it has a different shade of sense, properly speaking, and can include also the movements of the soul, covering the whole consciousness even; [on p. 82] I take it in its most general sense. The translation is not meant to be literal but to render the thought in the line in its fullness. Adhyātmacetasā practically amounts to what in English we would describe as a spiritual consciousness.
“throw our arms around” [p. 78]
It is a figure meaning to comprehend in our consciousness with love and Ananda. “the nature” [p. 81, lines 29, 31, 33] Nature here means the parts of Prakriti in the human being: as it is the condition of the Prakriti that changes with shifting of the gunas and it is this condition of the Prakriti that will become illumined by the transformation of sattva into jyotih.
“lokasangrahārthāya” [p. 85] — Does this mean the present order?
Page – 85 No. It is in a more general sense the maintenance of the world order which may be a developing, not necessarily a stationary one, an order spiritual, moral etc. and not merely a social order.
“Maya means nothing more than the freedom of Brahman from the circumstances through which he expresses himself” [p. 89].
The sentence is rather loose in expression. It does not mean that Maya is Brahman’s freedom, but “the doctrine of Maya simply comes to this that Brahman is free from the circumstances through which he expresses himself.” This limited play is not He, for He is illimitable; it is only a conditioned (partial) manifestation, but He is not bound by the conditions (circumstances) as the play is bound. The world is a figure of something of Himself which he has put forth into it, but He is more than that figure. The world is not unreal or illusory, but our present seeing or consciousness of it is ignorant, and therefore the world as seen by us can be described as an illusion. So far the Maya idea is true. But if we see the world as it really is, a partial and developing manifestation of Brahman, then it can no longer be described as an illusion, but rather as a Lila. He is still more than his Lila, but He is in it and it is in Him; it is not an illusion. 16 October 1931
The Arya
The Arya8 is a work of spiritual philosophy founded on personal realisation; it is obviously not meant for minds that do not think out spiritual things in all their aspects.
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For understanding Arya one must have a sufficiently trained and developed intellect or else a basis of experience along with a capacity of mentalising experience. X as yet has neither. It is
8 The monthly journal (1914 1921) in which The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga
Page – 86 sufficient if he can get accustomed to forming general ideas and thinking coherently about them. 22 September 1933
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What is meant by: 1. the psychic nature, 2. spiritual nature, 3. supramental nature, 4. divine nature?
To answer these questions it would be necessary to write a volume. I have written some letters about the psychic being and the self — you can get hold of those and read them. Supramental nature can only be understood if one understands what supermind is and that is not altogether possible for mind so long as it does not open into the higher planes. So far as a mental account can be given, I have done it in the Arya. Divine Nature is the nature of the divine Consciousness, Truth, Peace, Light, Purity, Knowledge, Power, Ananda on whichever plane it manifests. Supermind is one plane of the Divine Nature. The Divine is Sachchidananda. 18 October 1938
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I do not find it easy to answer the few brief and casual sentences in Angus’ letter, — precisely because they are so brief and casual.9 Not knowing him or the turns of his mind, I do not exactly seize what is behind this passage in his letter. It would be easier to reply if I had some notion of the kind of thought or experience on which he takes his stand when he dismisses so cavalierly the statement of spiritual truth put forward in the Arya. As it is, I am obliged to answer to what may be behind his sentences and, as there is much that possibly stands behind them, the reply becomes long and elaborate and is in danger of seeming long and discursive. I could of course answer easily myself by a few brief and trenchant sentences of the same calibre, but in that kind of discussion there is no profit. 9 The paragraphs that follow are from a letter-draft that was not revised or sent in this form to the correspondent. — Ed.
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Let me say that he makes an initial mistake — quite natural for him, since he has not read the Arya, — when he describes the extract sent to him as a “theological fragment”. I must insist that there is no theology in the Arya. Nothing there is written to support or to develop any kind of religious belief or dogma or to confirm or enunciate the credo of any old or new religion. No less does he miss the mark when he describes as a scholastic distinction the substance of the passage. The teaching there is not taken from books, nor, although put in philosophic language, is it based upon abstract thought or any formal logic. It expresses a fundamental spiritual experience, dynamic for the growth of the being, confirmed and enlarged and filled with detail by almost thirty years of continuous sadhana, and, as such, it cannot be seriously challenged or invalidated by mere intellectual question or reasoning, but, if at all, then only by a greater and wider spiritual experience. Moreover, it coincides (not in expression, it may be, but in substance) with the experience of hundreds of spiritual seekers in many paths and in all parts of the world since the days of the Upanishads — and of Plotinus and the Gnostics and Sufis — to the present time. It is hardly admissible then to put it aside as the thought of a tyro or beginner in spiritual knowledge making his first clumsy potshots at a solution of the crossword enigma of the universe. That description seems to show that he has missed the point of the passage altogether and that also makes it difficult to reply; for where there is no meeting point of minds, discussion is likely to be sterile. I was a little surprised at first by this entire lack of understanding, shown still more in his cavil at the two Divines — for I had somehow got the impression that Angus was a Christian and the recognition of “two Divines” — the Divine Transcendent and the Divine Immanent — is, I have read, perfectly familiar to Christian ideas and to Christian experience. The words themselves in fact — transcendent and cosmic — are taken from the West. I do not know that there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the language of Indian spiritual thinking, although the experiences on which the distinction rests are quite familiar. On another side, Christianity insists not only on a double but a triple
Page – 88
Divine. It even strikes me that this triple Godhead or Trinity is not very far off at bottom from my trinity of the individual, cosmic and transcendent Divine — as far at least as one can judge who has not himself followed the Christian discipline. Christ whether as the human Incarnation or the Christos in men or the Godhead proceeding from the Father, seems to me to be quite my individual Divine. The Father has very much the appearance of the One who overstands and is immanent in the cosmos. And although this is more obscure, yet if one can be guided by the indications in the Scripture, the Holy Ghost looks very much like a rather mysterious and inexpressible Transcendence and its descent very much like what I would call the descent of Light, Purity, Peace — that passeth all understanding — or Power of the supramental Spirit. In any case these Christian and Western ideas show surely that my affirmation of a double or a triple Divine is not anything new and ought not to be found startling or upsetting and I do not see why it should be treated as (in itself) obscure and unintelligible. Again, are these or similar distinctions very positively made in the Christian, Sufi or other teachings mere theoretical abstractions, scholastic distinctions, theological cobwebs, or metaphysical puzzles? I had always supposed that they corresponded to very living, very dynamic, almost — for the paths to which they relate — indispensable experiences. No doubt, for those who follow other ways or no way at all or for those who have not yet had the illuminating and vivifying experience, they may seem at first a little difficult or unseizable. But that is true of most spiritual truth — and not of spiritual truth alone. There are many very highly intelligent and cultured people to whom a scientific explanation of even so patent and common a fact as electricity and electric light (this is a reminiscence of an article by Y. Y. in the New Statesman and Nation) seems equally difficult to seize by the mind or to fix either in the memory or the intelligence. And yet the distinction between positive and negative electricity, both necessary for the existence of the light, — like that of the passive and active Brahman (another scholastic distinction?) both necessary for the existence of the universe, — cannot be
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dismissed for that reason as something academic or scholastic, but is a very pertinent statement of things quite dynamic and real. No doubt the unscientific man does not and perhaps need not trouble about these things and can be content to enjoy the electric light (when he is allowed to do so by the grace of the Pondicherry Municipality), without enquiring into the play of the forces behind it: but for the seeker after scientific truth or for the practical electrician it is a different matter. Now these distinctions in the spiritual field are a parallel case; they seem theoretical or abstract only so long as experience has not made them concrete, but once experienced they become living stuff of the consciousness and, after a certain stage, even the basis of action and growth in the spiritual life. Here I am driven to a rather lengthy digression from the main theme — for I am met by Angus’ rather baffling appeal to Whitham’s History of Science. What has Whitham or Science to do with spiritual truth or spiritual experience? I can only suppose that he condemns all intrusion of anything like metaphysical thought into the spiritual field — a position excessive but not altogether untenable — and even perhaps proposes to bring the scientific method and the scientific mentality into spiritual experience as the sole true way of arriving at or judging the truth of things. I should like to make my view clear as to that point, because here much confusion has been created about it, and more is possible. And the first thing I would say is that if metaphysics has no right to intervene in spiritual experience, neither has Science. There are here three different domains of knowledge and experience each with its own instrumentation, its own way of approach and seeing, suited for its own task, but not to be imposed or substituted in these other fields of knowledge, — at least unless and until they meet by some kind of supreme reconciling transmutation in something that is at the source of all knowledge. For knowledge may be essentially one, but like the one Divine, it manifests differently in different fields of its play and to abolish their distinctions is not the way to arrive at true understanding of experience. Science deals effectively with phenomenon and process and
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the apparent play of forces which determine the process. It cannot deal even intellectually in any adequate way with ultimate truths, that is the province of the higher, less external mind — represented up till now by metaphysics, though metaphysics is not its only possible power. If Science tries to fix metaphysical truth by forcing on this domain its own generalisations in the physical field, as people have been doing for almost the last century, it makes a mess of thought by illegitimately extended conclusions and has in the end to retire from this usurpation as it is now beginning to retire. Its discoveries may be used by philosophy, but on the grounds proper to philosophy and not on the grounds proper to Science. The philosopher must judge the scientific conceptions of relativity or discontinuity or space-time, for instance, by his own processes and standards of evidence. So too, Science has no instrumentation or process of knowledge which can enable it to discover spiritual truth or to judge or determine the results of spiritual experience. There is a field of knowledge of process in the spiritual and the occult domain, in the discovery of a world of inner forces and their way of action and even of their objective dynamisation in the mind and life and the functioning of the body. But the mathematical exactitudes and rigid formulas of physical Science do not apply here and the mentality created by them would hamper spiritual experience.
The Life Divine
There is possible a realistic as well as an illusionist Adwaita. The philosophy of The Life Divine is such a realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and therefore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy; but this is only an appearance, for we
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find in the end that all the dispositions of the world can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supramental consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the delight of existence emerges from the original insentience first in the contrary forms of pleasure and pain and then has to find itself in the bliss of the Spirit or as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman. That is the central idea in the explanation of the universe put forward in The Life Divine.
A Passage from The Life Divine
“This opens the way for other explanations which make Consciousness the creator of this world out of an apparent original Inconscience. . . . All these things we see around us are then the thoughts of an extra-cosmic Divinity, a Being with an omnipotent and omniscient Mind and Will. . . .”10
The phrase “extra-cosmic Divinity” is used here in
The Life
Divine because in that stage of the reasoning nothing more emerged as positively established. In fact Sri Aurobindo regards
the Divinity, the Reality behind and in the universe as at once supracosmic or transcendent of cosmos and immanent in it, and
all, constituting the universe by its being, consciousness and force and by that too bringing out from the Inconscient the evolution and developing its stages inevitably according to a truth
10 Sri Aurobindo,
The Life Divine, volume 21 of T
Page – 92
in things which is its element of Necessity and the possibilities of the Consciousness and Force (seen by the human mind as Chance) through which the truth works itself out.
The Synthesis of Yoga
The Synthesis of Yoga is being revised and largely rewritten for publication; so I don’t think it is possible to send out copies of it like this. For the time the revision has been stopped, because I have not a moment free, but I hope to resume it shortly; the publishers are in fact pressing for the book. It was why I wrote to X that it could not be sent outside. December 1932
*
X would like to see the six revised chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga, as he has translated the unrevised ones. May I send him a copy?
These six chapters cannot be translated and published separately or along with the other unrevised chapters. It can only be done when the revision of the whole book is complete. 3 September 1936
*
What about the publication of the Synthesis? They are all asking me about it. So many are eager that it should see the light, fed up as we all are with the analysis of the universe through science of mind and ignorance of life, what?
I hope you are not referring to the whole colossal mass of the Synthesis, — though that too may be ready for publication before the next world war (?) or after the beginning of the Satya Yuga (new World Order?). If you mean the Yoga of Works, I am writing or trying to write four or five additional chapters for it. I hope they will be ready in a reasonable time, — but my daily time is short and chapters are long. In the absence of exact prophetic power, that is all I can say. 2 March 1944 94
Page – 93
Passages from The Synthesis of Yoga
“Often, we see this desire of personal salvation overcome by another attraction which also belongs to the higher turn of our nature and which indicates the essential character of the action the liberated soul must pursue. . . . It is that which inspires a remarkable passage in a letter of Swami Vivekananda. `I have lost all wish for my salvation,’ wrote the great Vedantin, `may I be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum-total of all souls, — and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species is the special object of my worship. He who is the high and low, the saint and the sinner, the god and the worm, Him worship, the visible, the knowable, the real, the omnipresent; break all other idols. In whom there is neither past life nor future birth, nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we always have been and always will be one, Him worship; break all other idols.’ “The last two sentences contain indeed the whole gist of the matter. . . .”11
As to the extract about Vivekananda, the point I make there does not seem to me humanitarian. You will see that I emphasise there the last sentences of the passage quoted from Vivekananda, not the words about God the poor and sinner and criminal. The point is about the Divine in the World, the All, sarva-bhūtāni of the Gita. That is not merely humanity, still less only the poor or the wicked; surely even the rich or the good are part of the All and those also who are neither good nor bad nor rich nor poor. Nor is there any question (I mean in my own remarks) of philanthropic service; so neither daridra nor sevā is the point. I had formerly not the humanitarian but the humanity view — and something of it may have stuck to my expressions in the Arya. But I had already altered my viewpoint from the “Our Yoga for the sake of humanity” to “Our Yoga for the sake of the Divine”. The Divine includes not only the supracosmic but
11 Sri Aurobindo,
The Synthesis of Yoga, volume 23 of T
Page – 94
the cosmic and the individual — not only Nirvana or the Beyond but Life and the All. It is that I stress everywhere. But I shall keep the extracts for a day or two and see what there is, if anything, that smacks too much of a too narrow humanistic standpoint. I stop here for today. 29 December 1934
*
“This concentration proceeds by the Idea . . . ; for it is through the Idea that the mental being rises beyond all expression to that which is expressed, to that of which the Idea itself is only the instrument. By concentration upon the Idea the mental existence which at present we are breaks open the barrier of our mentality and arrives at the state of consciousness, the state of being, the state of power of conscious-being and bliss of conscious-being to which the Idea corresponds and of which it is the symbol, movement and rhythm” [p. 321].
I have not the original chapter before me just now; but from the sentences quoted it seems to be the essential mental Idea. As for instance in the method of Vedantic knowledge one concentrates on the idea of Brahman omnipresent — one looks at a tree or other surrounding objects with the idea that Brahman is there and the tree or object is only a form. After a time if the concentration is of the right kind, one begins to become aware of a presence, an existence, the physical tree form becomes a shell and that presence or existence is felt to be the only reality. The idea then drops, it is a direct vision of the thing that takes its place — there is no longer any necessity of concentrating on the . It should be idea, one sees with a deeper consciousness, स पश्यति noted that this concentration on the idea is not mere thinking, मननम्— it is an inner dwelling on the essence of the Idea. 27 August 1933
*
” . . . we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea” [p. 330]. Would you explain this to me?
Page – 95
It would take too long. You can get it explained to you by someone, it is not difficult. The central idea is that the Divine Truth is greater than any religion or creed or scripture or idea or philosophy — so you must not tie yourself to any of these things. 18 September 1933
*
“Therefore the psychic life-energy presents itself to our experience as a sort of desire-mind, which we have to conquer if we mean to get back to the true self” [p. 350].
It means the life-energy which comes from within and is in consonance with the psychic being — it is the energy of the true vital being, but in the ordinary ignorant vital it is deformed into desire. You have to quiet and purify the vital and let the true vital emerge. Or you have to bring the psychic in front, and the psychic will purify and psychicise the vital and then you will have the true vital energy. 11 September 1933
The Synthesis of Yoga, The Mother and Lights on Yoga
Does the method of sadhana as given in The Synthesis of Yoga apply now in our practice? What one finds when one reads the Synthesis seems to differ a great deal from what one finds in The Mother and Lights on Yoga.
The Synthesis of Yoga was not meant to give a method for all to follow. Each side of the Yoga was dealt with separately with all its possibilities, and an indication as to how they meet so that one starting from knowledge could realise karma and bhakti also and so with each path. It was intended when the Self-Perfection12 was finished, to suggest a way in which all could be combined, but this was never written. The Mother and the Lights were not intended to be a systematic treatment of the sadhana as a whole; they only touch on various elements in it.
18 May 1936
12 “The Yoga of Self-Perfection”, Part IV of The Synthesis of Yoga
Page – 96 A Passage from “Rebirth and Karma”
In “Rebirth and Karma”,13 I find the following: “We have in fact an immutable Self, a real Person, lord of this ever-changing personality which, again, assumes ever-changing bodies, but the real Self knows itself always as above the mutation, watches and enjoys it, but is not involved in it. Through what does it enjoy the changes and feel them to be its own, even while knowing itself to be unaffected by them? . . . This more essential form is or seems to be in man the mental being or mental person which the Upanishads speak of as the mental leader of the life and body, manomayah prana-śarīra-netā.”14 Would not the mental being be part of the human personality — the mental, nervous and physical composite?
The mental being spoken of by the Upanishad is not part of the mental nervous physical composite — it is the manomayah purusah prana-śarīra-netā, the mental being leader of the life and body. It could not be so described if it were part of the composite. Nor can the composite or part of it be the Purusha, — for the composite is composed of Prakriti. It is described as manomaya by the Upanishad because the psychic being is behind the veil and man being the mental being in the life and body lives in his mind and not in his psychic, so to him the manomaya purusa is the leader of the life and body, — of the psychic behind supporting the whole he is not aware or dimly aware in his best moments. The psychic is represented in man by the Prime Minister, the manomaya, itself being a mild constitutional king; it is the manomaya to whom Prakriti refers for assent to her actions. But still the statement of the Upanishad gives only the apparent truth of the matter, valid for man and
13 The sixteen essays published since 1952 as The Problem of Rebirth
originally appeared in the monthly review Arya
between 1915 and 1921. The first twelve, which
were published in 1915 and 1919, were sometimes referred to as “Rebirth and Karma”.
This informal title was used later as the subtitle of Section I of
The Problem of Rebirth.
(In the United States, it also was used as the title of the entire book.)
The Problem of Rebirth
is reproduced in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, volume 13 of THE
COMPLETE
WORKS OF SRI
AUROBINDO, pp. 255 434. — Ed.
14 Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Page – 97
the human stage only — for in the animal it would be rather the prānamaya purusa that is the netā, leader of mind and body. It is one reason why I have not yet allowed the publication of “Rebirth and Karma” because this had to be corrected and the deeper truth put in its place. I had intended to do it later on, but had not time to finish the remaining articles. 24 December 1935
“The Lines of Karma”
Regarding “The Lines of Karma”,15 we beg to draw your attention to the matter and ask what should be done to publish it. If you kindly manage to write the first part of the book, then we can bring it out.
The book is unfinished — that is the main obstacle to its publication. However I will look at the copy Nolini has sent up and see. 5 September 1935
The Ideal of Human Unity
With regard to The Ideal of Human Unity, the book has to be revised before it is ready for reprinting. Sri Aurobindo will take up the work when he is able to make some time for it.16 19 April 1949
Translations of Vedic Hymns
Last year I got from X some translations of the Rig-Vedic hymns done by the Master after his retirement. I have just retyped them for myself and Y wanted my old copy.
These translations are provisional, not final — so I should not like them to be freely copied and seen by all; but I have no objection to your keeping a copy. 3 December 1936
15 A group of four essays that originally appeared in the Arya
in 1920 and 1921. They
now comprise Section II of The Problem of Rebirth. Here the reference may be to a
proposed book including all of Sri Aurobindo’s essays on rebirth and karma, which
eventually came out as The Problem of Rebirth. — Ed.
16
Page – 98 Glossary of Vedic Words
I see that this is a glossary of Vedic words with their current meanings. I have no objection to that. But I do not want any publication of Vedic interpretations or significances founded upon my translations, so long as my work on the Veda is incomplete and has not taken its final form. 5 March 1929
Essays on the Gita
My brother is thinking of starting a bookselling and publishing business and has asked for one or two books of Sri Aurobindo for publication. May I prepare for him an edition of the Gita with only the text and Sri Aurobindo’s translation compiled from the Essays on the Gita?
The casual renderings in the Essays cannot be published as my translation, — they were not intended for the purpose. 20 January 1932
*
Before coming here, I found some justification for my anger from your Essays on the Gita — though I must say that the tendency to violence was already there. Will there be any place for some sort of violence in the new creation?
The Essays on the Gita explain the ordinary karmayoga as developed in the Gita, in which the work done is the ordinary work of human life with only an inward change. There too the violence to be used is not a personal violence done from egoistic motives, but part of the ordered system of social life. Nothing can spiritually justify individual violence done in anger or passion or from any vital motive. In our yoga our object is to rise higher than the ordinary life of man and in it violence has to be left aside altogether. 12 August 1933
*
I have compiled a translation of most of the slokas of the Gita, using your interpretation of them in the Essays on the Gita. I request you to give me permission to publish the book as it
Page – 99
will help the public to understand the Gita from your point of view.
The permission cannot be given — the translations in the Essays are more explanatory than textually precise or cast in a literary style — I do not want that to go out as my translation of the Gita. 1 August 1934
*
I read your Essays on the Gita twice or thrice before. But when I started reading it again, I found that there were many ideas in it which I had missed before. I think if I read it over and over again I would find newer and newer ideas each time.
That is a common experience — most books with any profundity of knowledge in them have that effect. Almost all spiritual problems have been briefly but deeply dealt with in the Gita and I have tried to bring out all that fully in the Essays. 1 November 1936
*
The Essays on the Gita is the most important of the published books.17 If it is to be translated in Telugu it should be assured that it is an accurate translation in good style. A translation from a translation does not usually secure that object.
Passages from Essays on the Gita
“But the Gita insists that the nature of the action does matter. . . .”18 This perplexes me. Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in reply to my question about office work: “The nature of the work does not matter.”
That is quite a different question from the choice referred to in the passage of the Essays.
17 At the time this letter was written,
Essays on the Gita
18 Sri Aurobindo,
Essays on the Gita, volume 19 of T
Page – 100
What is written must be read and interpreted according to the context. In the Gita, the question is between two kinds of action — the quietistic life of the Sannyasin with the minimum of action and the dynamic life offered in all its actions whatever they be as a sacrifice to the Divine. It might be said that Arjuna might do either, it does not matter — but the Gita thinks it does matter: that Arjuna being called to a life of dynamic action must follow that and not the quietistic life. 3 December 1934
*
In Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo renders the term “Kshara Purusha” as “the universal Soul” [p. 436]. How can the “Kshara” be the universal Soul, if the one is mutable and the other immutable?
This is not my interpretation, it is what the Gita itself plainly says. It explains Kshara as “all existences” and since Purusha is the being which observes and experiences all the movements of Nature, (which is what is meant here by soul) it cannot be anything else than the universal Soul identifying itself with all existences in Nature.
Kindly indicate the relation of the universal Soul to the Divine.
The word क्षर [ksara] means really mobile as opposed to the immobile immutable Akshara. The Kshara Purusha is that which follows the movement of the universe and seems to move and change, because it identifies itself while the Akshara is not identified and stands apart. The Upanishad makes the same distinction of the two Souls and Prakriti.
I used to take ksetra and ksara purusa to mean the lower nature.
Nature is Prakriti — Purusha cannot be Prakriti. Neither can Purusha be ksetra, the field, because Purusha by its very definition is that which is behind Prakriti and its field and observes it — it is the Being not the nature. 28 November 1934
Page – 101 The Future Poetry
I will write later about the University idea. But it is not possible, I think, to give The Future Poetry as a whole. If it is to be published, it should be in England and the time is not ready for that. 26 January 1932
*
There is a review of the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse in the New Statesman. It might be noted as worth getting when you have the money — unless you have already something of the kind. Have you Donne and Blake in the Library? — not that I want them just now, but I shall some day when I revise The Future Poetry. January 1934
The Mother
I sent you a review of The Mother a few days ago. Have you seen it?
Yes. I think it will give the reader the impression that The Mother is a philosophical or practical exposition of Yoga — while its atmosphere is really not that at all. 1 March 1937
The Mother as a Mantra
Some mornings I recite The Mother silently with an aspiration to know what it contains. But sometimes it seems to me that this is intellectual and so not part of our discipline. Should I continue with this recitation?
Yes, if you find that it helps you.
I also recite the Gita with the view to understanding it but along the lines of Essays on the Gita. Is this a good idea?
Yes. It does not matter whether it is mental, if it helps you. These things often help the mind to get into the psychic attitude. 25 June 1933
Page – 102 A Note on the Terminology of The Mother
(1) Falsehood and Ignorance
Ignorance means Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flows from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life. This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth, — truth of being, truth of divine consciousness, truth of force and action, truth of Ananda. As a result instead of a world of integral truth and divine harmony created in the light of the divine Gnosis, we have a world founded on the part truths of an inferior cosmic Intelligence in which all is half truth, half error. It is this that some of the ancient thinkers like Shankara, not perceiving the greater Truth-Force behind, stigmatised as Maya and thought to be the highest creative power of the Divine. All in the consciousness of this creation is either limited or else perverted by separation from the integral Light; even the Truth it perceives is only a half knowledge. Therefore it is called the Ignorance. Falsehood, on the other hand, is not this Avidya, but an extreme result of it. It is created by an Asuric power which intervenes in this creation and is not only separated from the Truth and therefore limited in knowledge and open to error, but in revolt against the Truth or in the habit of seizing the Truth only to pervert it. This Power, the dark Asuric Shakti or Rakshasic Maya, puts forward its own perverted consciousness as true knowledge and its wilful distortions or reversals of the Truth as the verity of things. It is the powers and personalities of this perverted and perverting consciousness that we call hostile beings, hostile forces. Whenever these perversions created by them out of the stuff of the Ignorance are put forward as the truth of things, that is the Falsehood, in the Yogic sense, mithyā, moha.
Page – 103 (2) Powers and Appearances
These are the forces and beings that are interested in maintaining the falsehoods they have created in the world of the Ignorance and in putting them forward as the Truth which men must follow. In India they are termed Asuras, Rakshasas, Pisachas (beings respectively of the mentalised vital, middle vital and lower vital planes) who are in opposition to the Gods, the Powers of Light. These too are Powers, for they too have their cosmic field in which they exercise their function and authority and some of them were once divine Powers (the former gods, pūrve devāh, as they are called somewhere in the Mahabharata) who have fallen towards the Darkness by revolt against the divine Will behind the cosmos. The word “Appearances” refers to the forms they take in order to rule the world, forms often false and always incarnating falsehood, sometimes pseudo-divine.
(3) Powers and Personalities
The use of the word Power has already been explained — it can be applied to whatever or whoever exercises a conscious power in the cosmic field and has authority over the world movement or some part of it or some movement in it. But the Four of whom you speak are also Shaktis, manifestations of different powers of the supreme Consciousness and Force, the Divine Mother, by which she rules or acts in the universe. And they are at the same time divine Personalities; for each is a being who manifests different qualities and personal consciousness-forms of her Godhead. All the greater Gods are in this way personalities of the Divine — one Consciousness playing in many personalities, ekam sat bahudhā. Even in the human being there are many personalities and not only one, as used formerly to be imagined; for all consciousness can be at once one and multiple. “Powers and Personalities” simply describe different aspects of the same being; a Power is not necessarily impersonal and certainly it is not avyaktam, as you suggest, — on the contrary it is a manifestation acting in the worlds of the divine manifestation.
Page – 104 (4) Emanations
Emanations correspond to your description of the Matrikas of whom you speak in your letter. An emanation of the Mother is something of her consciousness and power put forth from her, which so long as it is in play is held in close connection with her and, when its play is no longer required, is withdrawn back into its source, but can always be put out and brought into play once more. But also the detaining thread of connection can be severed or loosened and that which came forth as an emanation can proceed on its way as an independent divine being with its own play in the world. All the Gods can put forth such emanations from their being, identical with them in essence of consciousness and power though not commensurate. In a certain sense the universe itself can be said to be an emanation from the Supreme. In the consciousness of the sadhaka an emanation of the Mother will ordinarily wear the appearance, form and characteristics with which he is familiar. In a sense the four Powers of the Mother may be called, because of their origin, her Emanations, just as the Gods may be called Emanations of the Divine, but they have a more permanent and fixed character; they are at once independent beings allowed their play by the Adya Shakti and yet portions of the Mother, the Mahashakti, and she can always either manifest through them as separate beings or draw them together as her own various Personalities and hold them in herself, sometimes drawn back, sometimes at play, according to her will. In the supramental plane they are always in her and do not act independently but as intimate portions of the original Mahashakti and in close union and harmony with each other.
(5) Gods
These four Powers are the Mother’s cosmic godheads, permanent in the world-play; they stand among the greater cosmic Godheads to whom allusion is made when it is said the Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world “stands there (in the
Page – 105
Overmind plane) above the Gods”.19 The Gods, as has been already said, are in origin and essence permanent Emanations of the Divine put forth from the Supreme by the Transcendent Mother, the Adya Shakti; in their cosmic action they are Powers and Personalities of the Divine each with his independent cosmic standing, function and work in the universe. They are not impersonal entities but cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces. But while in the Overmind and the triple world they appear as independent beings, they return in the Supermind into the One and stand there united in a single harmonious action as multiple personalities of the one Person, the divine Purushottama.
(6) Presence
It is intended by the word Presence to indicate the sense and perception of the Divine as a Being, felt as present in one’s existence and consciousness or in relation with it, without the necessity of any farther qualification or description. Thus of the “ineffable Presence”20 it can only be said that it is there and nothing more can or need be said about it, although at the same time one knows that all is there, personality and impersonality, Power and Light and Ananda and everything else, and that all these flow from that indescribable Presence. The word may be used sometimes in a less absolute sense, but that is always the fundamental significance, — the essential perception of the essential presence supporting everything else.
(7) The Transcendent Mother
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the supreme
19
20
Page – 106
Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her — the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.
Passages from The Mother
What I want to know is — when does God take full charge of our sadhana? The sadhana described in the Arya in the beginning was based on the conviction that God was the sadhak. In subsequent years, individual effort was permitted in Arya, something like cooperation between the individual and God.
This is an error. There is no such variation in the beginning of the Arya and in subsequent years.
In the message of February,21 the operator is God and the individual becomes the operated. The individual effort consists in fasting etc. before and during the operation.
What is all this about operations and fasting? Certainly, I cannot have written anything of the kind.
What are the signs of the coming of the Divine Grace? Does the Divine Grace take full charge of the sadhana as soon as the sadhak gives the charge? If not, when will it take full charge?
If he gives full charge truly and really, with an absolute sincerity of total surrender and does not come in the way of the divine Grace. How many can do that? It cannot be done by a word or by taking up a mental posture. Calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a self-deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection.22 30 May 1927
*
21 Chapter One of The Mother
was first issued as a “message” on 21 February 1927.
— Ed.
22 Sri Aurobindo incorporated this sentence into Chapter Two of The Mother
Page – 107
Does our spiritual destiny mean the fulfilment of “the aim of our endeavour”, which you mentioned at the beginning of The Mother?23
Yes. It means to find your true self, the Divine, and become in the Nature a conscious and illumined part of the Divine in manifestation. 14 November 1933
*
” . . . it is only the very highest supramental Force descending from above and opening from below that can victoriously handle the physical Nature and annihilate its difficulties . . .” [p. 2].
“Opening from below” means this — that the supramental force descending awakes a response from below in the earth consciousness so that it is possible for a supramental activity to be formed in the material itself. All is involved as potentiality in the earth consciousness — life, mind, supermind — but it is only when Life Force descended from the life plane into the material that active and conscious organised life was possible — so it was only when mind descended that the latent mind in Matter awoke and could be organised. The supramental descent must create the same kind of opening from below so that a supramental consciousness can be organised in the material. 20 April 1933
*
” . . . it is only the very highest supramental Force . . . that can victoriously handle the physical Nature . . .” [p. 2]. Is this idea to be found anywhere in the Upanishads or Vedas? What is there in this Force which can deal with Matter, and why cannot other forces do it — for example the occult vital forces that are used to produce kāya siddhi in Hathayoga? The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature — not by imposing siddhis on them, but by 23 Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, p. 1.
Page – 108
creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life — like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of the siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties, but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramentalised physical. I did not learn the idea from Veda or Upanishad, and I do not know if there is anything of the kind there. What I received about the Supermind was a direct, not a derived knowledge given to me; it was only afterwards that I found certain confirmatory revelations in the Upanishad and Veda. 11 September 1936
*
“Detect first what is false or obscure in you . . . then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you” [pp. 4 5]. Does “rightly” mean “it is the right way of calling” or does it mean “then only you have the `right’ to call”?
It means “in the right way”.
“If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands . . .” [p. 3]. Does this mean “you use devotion and surrender as a means of fulfilling your desires and demands”?
Yes, practically it means that. I put it in that way so as to avoid suggesting that the devotion is altogether insincere and meant only as a cover. 12 December 1934
*
No sadhak can rely entirely on the Divine in the beginning. He goes by his own effort. Even as he makes his own effort, many subtle beings, the power of the Divine, etc. must be helping the sadhak. Is not this kind of tapasya and self-dependence a form of the Divine Power’s help?
Page – 109
It has been clearly stated in The Mother that personal effort is necessary so long as the transference to the Divine Power cannot be complete [p. 8]. It is the fact that all power is the Divine’s and therefore self-effort is also a use of the Divine Power conceded by the Divine, but there is a great practical difference between the delegated use and the direct Divine Action.
*
In the book The Mother Sri Aurobindo says, “The personal effort required is a triple labour of aspiration, rejection and surrender.” And “rejection of the movements of the lower nature — rejection of the mind’s ideas, opinions, preferences, habits, constructions, so that the true knowledge may find free room in a silent mind, — rejection of the vital nature’s desires . . .”, etc. [p. 9]. How can I apply this in my working life?
This has to be done in life itself — whether the life is in an Asram or outside, the rule and method is the same. It is an internal change for which one must become conscious of the lower nature as well as of the psychic and spiritual workings. Meditation is usually necessary for that but so also is life, for it is only life that tests the genuineness of the change. 7 April 1938
*
” . . . surrender of oneself and all one is and has and every plane of the consciousness and every movement to the Divine and the Shakti” [p. 10]. Can I take this to mean surrender of the outward life to the Universal Nature through reason and will (i.e. a rational adaptation of the material life to the ways of Nature) and surrender of the inward life to the Divine through faith?
No. Universal Nature is a mass of forces, mental, vital and physical. The Divine is above with its supreme Shakti — and within behind Nature. 25 December 1934
*
In The Mother, you have said: “Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth” [p. 13]. Should one have
Page – 110
such a high aspiration? The general impression in the Ashram is that it would be laughable to try.
There is nothing laughable in aspiring for the supramental Truth so long as one understands that it is not possible to have it at once and one must go through a long preparation and development. What is laughable is to think you have it when you are floundering about it in mental and vital half-truths or delusions — that is what some have done and it is probably these bad examples that have created the impression of which you speak. 2 June 1933
*
In The Mother you write that the Mother is the consciousness and force of the Ishwara [p. 28]. But my experience here is that Ishwara is the consciousness and force of the Supreme Mother. Could you please make it clear to me?
The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Divine — or, it may be said, she is the Divine in its consciousness-force. The Ishwara as Lord of the Cosmos does come out of the Mother who takes her place beside him as the cosmic Shakti — the cosmic Ishwara is one aspect of the Divine. The experience therefore is correct so far as it goes. 16 November 1934
*
In The Mother you write: “There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe” [p. 28]. Is it the Cosmic Spirit that is meant or the Overmind?
It is the Divine Shakti — who acts on all the planes and has all the aspects. 16 June 1933
*
I am or was under the impression that Mother is the Cosmic and Supracosmic Mahashakti.
I don’t quite understand the question. I have explained it in The
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Mother [pp. 28 29] that there are three aspects, transcendent, universal and individual of the Mother. 31 May 1933
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“At the summit of this manifestation of which we are a part there are worlds of infinite existence, consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands as the unveiled eternal Power” [p. 32]. Are we to understand that the Transcendent Mother stands above the Ananda plane? There would then be four steps of the Divine Shakti: (1) The Transcendent Mahashakti who stands above the Ananda plane and who bears the supreme Divine in her eternal consciousness. (2) The Mahashakti immanent in the worlds of Sat-Chit-Ananda, where all beings move in an ineffable completeness. (3) The Supramental Mahashakti immanent in the worlds of Supermind. (4) The Cosmic Mahashakti immanent in the lower hemisphere.
Yes; that is all right. One speaks often however of all above the lower hemisphere as part of the transcendence. This is because the Supermind and Ananda are not manifested in our universe at present, but are planes above it. For us the higher hemisphere पर [parā], the Supreme Transcendence is परात्पर [parātpara]. is The Sanskrit terms are here clearer than the English. 27 January 1932
*
In The Mother you write that the Mother as the Cosmic Mahashakti “stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put out in front of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds to intervene, to govern, to battle and conquer, to lead and turn their cycles, to direct the total and the individual lines of their forces” [pp. 34 35]. Does this imply that the World War or the Bolshevik Revolution or the Satyagraha movement were in some manner arranged by the Mother?
They are incidents in the cosmic plan and so arranged by the
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cosmic Mahashakti and worked out by men under the impulse of the forces of Nature. 1 June 1933
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You write in The Mother that there are Vibhutis of the powers and personalities of the Ishwara and Vibhutis of the Mother, but that in both cases it is the action of the Grace of the Mother that alone can effect a transformation of the Vibhuti [p. 35]. I would like to know the difference. Take for example, Christ, Chaitanya, Ramakrishna, Confucius, Zarathustra, Buddha, Shankara, Mohammed, Alexander, Napoleon — among these well-known figures which are Vibhutis of the Mother and which are Vibhutis of the Ishwara? And what about the Mother’s action in Avataras like Rama and Krishna?
The Mother’s Vibhutis would normally be feminine personalities most of whom would be dominated by one of the four personalities of the Mother. The others you mention would be personalities and powers of the Ishwara, but in them also, as in all, the Mother’s force would act. I do not quite catch the question about the transformation of the Vibhutis. All creation and transformation is the work of the Mother. 29 October 1935
*
Since all creation is her work, can it be taken that it is the personalities of the Mother who, behind the veil, prepare the conditions for the descent of the Avatar or Vibhutis?
If you mean the divine personalities of the Mother — the answer is yes. It may even be said that each Vibhuti draws his energies from the Four, from one of them predominantly in most cases, as Napoleon from Mahakali, Rama from Mahalakshmi, Augustus Caesar from Mahasaraswati. 31 October 1935
*
“Four great Aspects of the Mother, four of her leading Powers and Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this Universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play” [p. 37].
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What are you speaking of here?
Of the Mother in her universal workings. 13 July 1933
*
“Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, Perfection are their several attributes and it is these powers that they bring with them into the world, manifest in a human disguise in their Vibhutis and shall found in the divine degree of their ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct and living influence of the Mother” [pp. 38 39].
I am afraid it [a translation of the above passage] is still wrong. Let me try to explain otherwise. It means “they bring the powers into the world (in their ordinary and in man their human degree), manifest them (in a half-divine degree but) in a human disguise in their Vibhutis and shall (hereafter), in those who can open to the direct influence of the Mother, raise them (the powers) to their highest divine degree and establish them in that degree.” Please don’t translate my explanation, for that will make it very awkward; I only want the true sense of the sentence expressed in the translation as briefly and elegantly as possible. You might send me up what you propose to put for approval and only after approval put in the proof so that there may not be too many erasures.
*
What is meant by “height” in the phrase “not wideness but height” [p. 42]?
It is very much as we speak of high ideas, high feelings, high aspirations. In that sense Mahakali’s movement is a high, swift action, very effective at the point touched, but not wide, patient, comprehensive like Maheshwari’s. 11 August 1933
*
This morning, when I said that I thought that the Mother was putting pressure on me, you wrote that the word “pressure” was “entirely wrong”. If that is so, what is the sense
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of the word “pressure” in this passage from The Mother: “[Maheshwari] puts on them the required pressure” [p. 41]? You wrote also, in regard to Mahakali, of “the vehemence of her pressure” [p. 44].
I was speaking of your case only — it was not my intention to say that the Mother never uses pressure. But pressure also can be of various kinds. There is the pressure of the Force when it is entering the mind or vital or body — a pressure to go faster, a pressure to build or form, a pressure to break and many more. In your case if there is any pressure it is that of help or support or removal of an attack, but it does not seem to me that that can properly be called pressure.
In the same book you say of Mahakali, “her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour” [p. 44]. What do you mean here by “strike”?
It expresses her general action in the world. She strikes at the Asuras, she strikes also at everything that has to be got rid of or destroyed, at the obstacles to the sadhana etc. I may say that the Mother never uses the Mahakali power in your case nor the Mahakali pressure. 5 June 1936
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About the Mother’s Mahakali aspect it is said in The Mother: “When she is allowed to intervene in her strength, then in one moment are broken like things without consistence the obstacles that immobilise or the enemies that assail the seeker” [p. 44]. How is this intervention of the Mahakali force felt?
It is felt as if something swift, sudden, decisive and imperative. When it intervenes, it has a kind of divine or supramental sanction behind it and is like a fiat against which there is no appeal. What is done cannot be reversed or undone. The adverse forces may try, may even touch or invade, but they retire baffled and it is seen as soon as they withdraw that the past ground has remained intact — it is felt even in the attack. Also the difficulties that were strong before touched by this fiat lose their power, their
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verisimilitude destroyed or are weak shadows that come only to flicker and fade away. I say “allowed”, because this supreme action of Mahakali is comparatively rare, the action of the other Powers or a partial action of Mahakali is more common. 24 August 1933
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In the book The Mother what is the sense of “false adaptation” [p. 53] — is it something like a mason doing a coolie’s work?
Well, yes — it means misapplication of any kind and fitting things in where they do not really fit — whether with regard to ideas, activities, or anything else.
“Only when the Four have founded their harmony and freedom of movement in the transformed mind and life and body . . .” [p. 56]. Here does “transformed” mean the full transformation?
At any rate a sufficient foundation of the harmony in a sufficiently transformed Nature for still greater things to come in without perturbation of the Nature. 29 March 1933
*
“There are among them Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation, — most of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers of the universe” [pp. 55 56]. Is not the Personality referred to in this passage the Radha-Power, which is spoken of as Premamayi Radha, Mahaprana Shakti and Hladini Shakti?
Yes — but the images of the Radha-Krishna līlā are taken from the vital world and therefore it is only a minor manifestation of the Radha Shakti that is there depicted. That is why she is called Mahaprana Shakti and Hladini Shakti. What is referred to is
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not this minor form, but the full Power of Love and Ananda above. 7 February 1934
The Riddle of This World
In reference to what Prof. Sorley has written on The Riddle of This World, the book of course was not meant as a full or direct statement of my thought and, as it was written to sadhaks mostly, many things were taken for granted there. Most of the major ideas — e.g. Overmind — were left without elucidation. To make the ideas implied clear to the intellect, they must be put with precision in an intellectual form — so far as that is possible with supra-intellectual things. What is written in the book can be clear to those who have gone far enough in experience, but for most it can only be suggestive. 10 April 1934
*
All that was bowed and rapt lifting clasped hands out of pain and night, How hast thou filled with murmuring ecstasy, made proud and bright! Thou hast chosen the grateful earth for thy own in her hour of anguish and strife, Surprised by thy rapid feet of joy, O Beloved of the Master of Life.24
Your answer is not only fine poetry but it is a true explanation of the descent of the soul into the Ignorance. It is the adventure into the Night (the introduction of the Light, Joy, Immortality) to see whether they cannot be established there — so that there may be a new experience of the Divine and joy of the Divine through separation and union (or reunion) on a new basis. It is what I have hinted at in The Riddle of This World.
24
Page – 117 Passages from The Riddle of This World
In the Riddle you speak of a conversion inwards and a series of conversions upwards.25 Does the upward conversion begin only after the inward conversion, i.e. the psychicisation of the lower nature, is complete?
Not necessarily.
Or do both kinds of work go on simultaneously?
It differs with different people, but the upward conversions cannot go very far or cannot be secure if the lower nature is not psychicised — for there is then always the possibility of a big or even a decisive fall if there is something seriously unpsychic in the lower nature. 29 March 1935
*
What precisely is meant by the “intermediate zone” [pp. 35 45]? Has everyone to pass through it to reach the truth?
The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels, but one can receive something from them, even from the Overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.
It is not necessary for everyone to struggle through the intermediate zone. If one has purified oneself, if there is no abnormal
vanity, egoism, ambition or other strong misleading element, or if one is vigilant and on one’s guard, or if the psychic is in front,
one can either pass rapidly and directly or with a minimum of
25 Sri Aurobindo,
The Riddle of This World
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trouble into the higher zones of consciousness where one is in direct contact with the Divine Truth. On the other hand the passage through the higher zones — higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, is obligatory — they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the Supermind. 28 December 1933
*
About the intermediate zone, you wrote [in the preceding letter]: “One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels.” Are the planes of Higher Mind or Intuition in direct contact with the truth?
Yes — because it is there that one opens to the cosmic Truth (as opposed to the cosmic Ignorance) — the cosmic Divine etc. It is not the full power of the Truth — that one reaches only in the Supermind where one is in direct communion with the Transcendent Reality; but it is still manifested Truth and not manifested Ignorance. This, of course, is when one can rise to those levels and stay there for a time at least or when the mind etc. are already so much changed that they can receive without perverting or distorting or misusing and diminishing too much. It is not so difficult once that is done to receive the Truth in consciousness — what is more difficult is to make it dynamic in its purity for life. 29 December 1933
*
You write in The Riddle of This World: “Very readily they come to think that they are in the full cosmic consciousness when it is only some front or small part of it or some larger Mind, Life-Power or subtle physical ranges with which they have entered into dynamic connection” [p. 37]. What is meant here by “larger Mind”?
It means simply larger than the limited personal mind. It is a play of some combination of cosmic Mind-Forces but not the full cosmic Consciousness, not even the Cosmic Mind. It belongs usually to the Ignorance. 30 March 1934
*
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About polytheism, I certainly accept the truth of the many forms and personalities of the One which since the Vedic times has been the spiritual essence of Indian polytheism — a secondary aspect in the seeking for the one and only Divine. But the passage referred to by Professor Sorley (page 56 [of the first edition])26 is concerned with something else — the little godlings and Titans spoken of there are supraphysical beings of other planes. It is not meant to be suggested that they are real Godheads and entitled to worship — on the contrary it is indicated that to accept their influence is to move towards error and confusion or a deviation from the true spiritual way. No doubt they have some power to create, they are makers of forms in their own way and in their limited domain, but so are men too creators of outward and inward things in their own domain and limits — and even man’s creative powers can have a repercussion on the supraphysical levels. 10 April 1934
*
I have always believed that there was an existence after death akin to our existence in this world minus the physical body.
The soul goes out in a subtle body.
On the strength of certain phenomena that did not appear to me to be capable of being summarily dismissed, I further believed that after a period of confusion immediately following death, the recollections of the life just preceding returned, and persisted till rebirth.
Only for a time, not till rebirth — otherwise the stamp could be so strong that remembrance of past births even after taking a new body would be the rule rather than the exception.
I was also disposed to believe that in cases of pure and unalloyed attachment the relationships of one birth persisted in successive births, the number depending on the strength of attachment.
26 ” . . . for these intermediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas. . . .”
The
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This is possible, but not a law — as a rule the same relationship would not be constantly repeated — the same people often meet again and again on earth in different lives, but the relations are different. The purpose of rebirth would not be served if the same personality with the same relations and experiences were incessantly repeated.
All these beliefs were shattered to pieces when someone drew my attention to certain statements of yours in the book The Riddle of This World [pp. 53 54, 58 60], in which I understood you to say that in the case of forms of life lower than man there is a complete annihilation of the ego on death.
That is not the case.
I further understood you to say that in the case of man, the ego persisted in a static condition of complete rest and carried with it (except in a very few exceptional cases) only the essence of the experiences and the inclinations gathered and acquired in the life just preceding.
This is said not of the ego, but of the psychic being after it has shed its vital and other sheaths and is resting in the psychic world. Before that it passes through vital and other worlds on its way to the psychic plane.
I would like to know whether it is possible to come into direct touch with those who have departed from this world.
Yes, so long as they are near enough to the earth (it is usually supposed by those who have occult experience that it is for three years only) or if they are earth-bound or if they are of those who do not proceed to the psychic plane but linger near the earth and are soon reborn. Universal statements cannot be easily made about these things — there is a general line, but individual cases vary to an almost indefinite extent.
[Note by Sri Aurobindo to his secretary:] You will tell him that
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I do not carry on correspondence usually with people outside, but as his questions were from the book, I have asked you to give him my answers to his questions. 28 February 1938
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“It is not to be denied, no spiritual experience will deny that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world, strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil” [p. 61].
That is when you look at what the world ought to be and lay stress on what it should be. The idealist’s question is why should there be pain at all, even if it is outweighed by the fundamental pleasure of existence. The real crux is why should inadequacy, limit and suffering come across this natural pleasure of life. It does not mean that life is essentially miserable in its very nature. 23 July 1935
*
Weber writes of Spinoza’s conception of God: “God is not the cause of the world in the proper and usual sense of the term, a cause acting from without and creating it once for all, but the permanent substratum of things, the innermost substance of the universe.”27 Does this not find a parallel in the following lines from The Riddle of This World: “For it is not . . . a supracosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat” [pp. 65 66]. I wonder why Spinoza did not arrive at a convincing explanation of the problem of evil and misery.
The European type of monism is usually pantheistic and weaves the universe and the Divine so intimately together that they can hardly be separated. But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution
27 Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1904), pp. 328 29.
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of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being. 6 October 1935
Passages from Lights on Yoga
You write in a letter: “One must not enter on this path, far vaster and more arduous than most ways of Yoga, unless one is sure of the psychic call and of one’s readiness to go through to the end.”28
It is simply an indication to those who wish to enter on to this Path that they must have a call (not take it up as they would take any way for spiritual experience) and must be prepared for great difficulties to surmount.
Can it be said that you have seen in all those who are permanent members of the Asram this readiness to go through to the end?
The readiness to go through to the end is a thing dependent on the will of the sadhak. That will may be there in the beginning and flag afterwards. All who are here did not come as permanent members and some were never told that they were made permanent but they have stuck on and Mother has not sent them away.
What is the exact significance of “to the end”?
Until the siddhi — but it means essentially here to go through in spite of the difficulties. 20 October 1934
*
“The difference or contrast between the Personal and Impersonal is a truth of the Overmind — there is no separate truth
28 Sri Aurobindo, Lights on Yoga
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of them in the Supermind, they are inseparably one” [p. 5]. If this refers to the Personal and Impersonal Divine, the question of the difference can hardly arise, because the Personal Divine (i.e. the Avatar) is not always there. It is only very rarely that the Divine becomes the Avatar to come on earth.
I do not understand. The Personal Divine does not mean the Avatar. What I said was that the scission between the two aspects of the Divine is a creation of the Overmind which takes various aspects of the Divine and separates them into separate entities. Thus it divides Sat, Chit and Ananda, so that they become three separate aspects different from each other. In fact in the Reality there is no separateness, the three aspects are so fused into each other, so inseparably one that they are a single undivided reality. It is the same with the Personal and Impersonal, the Saguna and Nirguna, the Silent and the Active Brahman. In the Reality they are not contrasted and incompatible aspects; what we call Personality and what we call Impersonality are inseparably fused together in a single Truth. In fact “fused together” even is a wrong phrase, because there they were never separated so that they have to be fused. All the quarrels about either the Impersonal being the only true truth or the Personal being the only highest truth are mind-created quarrels derivative from this dividing aspect of the Overmind. The Overmind does not deny any of the aspects as the Mind does, it admits them all as aspects of the One Truth, but by separating them it originates the quarrel in the more ignorant and more limited and divided Mind, because the Mind cannot see how two opposite things can exist together in one Truth, how the Divine can be nirguno gunī; — having no experience of what is behind the two words it takes each in an absolute sense. The Impersonal is Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, not a Person, but a state. The Person is the Existent, the Conscious, the Blissful; consciousness, existence, bliss taken as separate things are only states of his being. But in fact the two (personal being and eternal state) are inseparable and are one reality. 13 October 1935
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You write in Lights on Yoga: “It is a mistake to dwell on the lower nature and its obstacles, which is the negative side of the Sadhana. . . . The positive side of experience of the descent is the more important thing” [cf. p. 5]. But there may be obstacles that themselves prevent the experience of descent. If that is the case, I suppose one would have to deal with them in order to clear the road.
The statement is a general one and like all general statements subject to qualification according to circumstances. What I meant was to discourage what some do which is to be always dwelling on their difficulties and shortcomings only, for that makes them turn for ever like squirrels in a cage always in the same circle of difficulties without the least breaking of light through the clouds. The sentence would be more accurate or generally applicable if it were written “dwell too much” or “dwell solely”.29 Naturally, without rejection nothing can be done. And in hard periods or moments concentration on the difficulties is inevitable. Also in the early stages one has often to do a great amount of clearance work so that the road can be followed at all. 29 April 1935
*
“The taking away of the Force of destruction implies a creation that will not be destroyed but last and develop always” [pp. 7 8]. Does this mean that in the Truth-Creation the force of destruction will be taken away and only the forces of creation and preservation remain? Does it mean that nobody will die — not even plants and animals?
That might be true if the whole world were to be supramentalised and that supramentalisation meant inability to change or put off a form, but it is not so. 16 October 1935
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You write in Lights on Yoga that the subconscient “receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in
29 Sri Aurobindo in fact wrote “dwell too much” in the passage in
Lights on Yoga
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itself” [p. 11]. Where then are stored all the words, images and thoughts that we say come out of memory? What is the difference between storing in memory and this subconscient storing?
The clear memory of words, images and thoughts is an action of the conscious mind, not the unconscious. Of course the memory goes behind, so to speak, in the back part of the mind, but it can be brought out. Also the memory can be lost or defaced, so that one remembers wrongly or forgets altogether, but that is still an imperfect action of the conscious mind, not an action of the subconscious. What the subconscious keeps is a mass of impressions, not of clear or exact images and these can come up as in dreams in an incoherent jumble distorted altogether or else in the waking state as a mechanical recurrence or repetition of the same suggestions, impulses (subconscient vital) or sensations. There is a recognisable difference between the two functionings. 26 October 1935
*
“The true vital being . . . is wide, vast, calm, strong, without limitations, firm and immovable, capable of all power, all knowledge, all Ananda” [p. 13]. Does this imply that the true vital belongs to the cosmic or supracosmic consciousness? If not, how can it have such qualities?
The true being mental, vital or subtle physical has always the greater qualities of its plane — it is the Purusha and like the psychic, though in another way, the projection of the Divine, therefore in connection with the Higher Consciousness and reflects something of it, though it is not altogether that — it is also in tune with the cosmic Truth.
In the change of the vital nature, is the external surface vital to be entirely effaced and replaced by the true vital or is it to be kept and changed into the nature of the true vital? In either case, what is the need of an external vital at all if the true vital is already there?
The true vital is in the inner consciousness, the external is that
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which is instrumental for the present play of Prakriti in the surface personality. When the change comes, the true vital rejects what is out of tune with its own truth from the external and makes it a true instrument for its expression, a means of expression of its inner will, not a thing of responses to the suggestions of the lower Nature. The strong distinction between the two practically disappears. 19 October 1935
*
If the true vital is “capable of all power, all knowledge, all Ananda” [p. 13], it would seem to be the equal of the supramental vital itself or the vital of the Ishwara. How is it possible for an individual to have such a vital?
It is capable of receiving the movements of the higher consciousness, and afterwards it can be capable of receiving the still greater supramental power and Ananda. If it is not, then the descent of the higher consciousness would be impossible and supramentalisation would be impossible. It is not meant that it possesses these things itself in its own right and that as soon as one is aware of the true vital, one gets all these things as inherent in the true vital. 20 October 1935
*
“This central being has two forms — above, it is Jivatman, . . . below, it is the psychic being . . .” [p. 15]. Is it meant that the Jivatman and the psychic being are different forms of the central being? If they are forms of the central being, how can they be beings?
“Forms” is not used in a physical sense here. The central being is the being in its original self, the psychic being is the same in the becoming.
Again, when one rises from the psychic being below to the Jivatman above, does the psychic being cease to be? And when one rises above the Jivatman does the central being become formless?
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The evolution or becoming continues, so the psychic also continues, just as the rest of the nature continues, only spiritualised and felt as one being in all planes. It is not a question of formed or formless. As I have said “forms” is not used here in its outward but its inward or metaphysical sense. 11 October 1935
*
“The Jivatman . . . knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara. It is important to remember the distinction; for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatar or lose balance like Hridaya with Ramakrishna” [pp. 15 16]. Can the Jivatman status be realised before vital egoism is abolished?
One can get the knowledge or perception in the higher mind “I am That” while the vital is still untransformed, — then the vital ego can take it up and give it a wrong application.
How can one go so far as to think of oneself as an Avatar? Is it because, if there is union with the Divine, the sense of all-powerfulness that it brings is reflected on the vital ego as something grandiose?
Yes. It is when one feels that one is the Divine, So aham but not in the impersonal way to which all is the one Brahman, the One Self, but in the personal way “I am God, the Parameshwara”. It is as in the Puranic story in which the knowledge was given both to Indra and Virochana and the God understood but the Asura concluded that he the ego was the Divine and therefore went about trying to impose his ego on the universe. 26 November 1935
*
“The ego . . . does not cease with the body” [pp. 16 17]. Does this mean that it is carried by the psychic as a separate principle after death, just as the psychic sometimes carries with it a highly developed mental or vital being, or does it mean ˙ that it is taken up in the psychic as a seed-samskara or that it exists side by side with the psychic in the after-death state?
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It is only meant that the separative ego is not a creation of birth in the physical body; the mental and the vital have it also. So long as the mental and vital are subject to ignorance, the ego will last also. When the psychic being goes into rest it naturally takes it with the essence of its past experience and in coming back it takes up a mental, vital and physical existence which has the mark of the ego and the ignorance. 29 October 1935
*
“Moreover, the multiple Divine is an eternal reality antecedent to the creation here” [p. 17]. Does this mean that souls existed eternally separate from the Brahman? In other words are Jiva and Brahman eternally separate?
The Brahman is not a mathematical One with the Many as an illusion — he is an infinite One with an infinite multiplicity implied in the Oneness. This is not Dwaitavada — for in Dwaitavada the many are quite different from the One. In the Sankhya Prakriti is one but the Purushas are many, so it is not Sankhya, nor I suppose Jainism, unless Jainism is quite different from what it is usually represented to be.
Does “antecedent to the creation” mean creation as it took place from Supermind downward or does it simply mean the material creation?
The material creation or the creation of the universe generally.
If the multiple Divine is to be taken as an eternal reality, does this not come down to something like Jainism and Sankhya, in which several Purushas exist eternally? This would be a pure Dwaitavada.
It is on the contrary a complete Adwaitavada, more complete than Shankara’s who splits Brahman into two incompatible principles — the Brahman and a universe of Maya which is not Brahman and yet somehow exists. In this view which is that of the Gita and some other Vedantic schools the Para Shakti and the Many are also Brahman. Unity and Multiplicity are aspects of
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the Brahman, just as are Personality and Impersonality, Nirguna and Saguna. 18 March 1936
*
” . . . if the mental is strongly developed, then the mental being can remain [when the body is dissolved]; so also can the vital, provided they are organised by and centred around the true psychic being; they share the immortality of the psychic” [p. 18]. Does this mean that the vital of strong persons like Napoleon is carried forward in the future lives? But how can it be said that their vital was centred around the psychic being? It is only about the Bhaktas and the Jnanis that we can say that their vital was centred around the psychic.
If one has had a strong spiritual development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic — of the vital the same can hardly be said. Napoleon had a strong vital but not one organised round the psychic being. 12 October 1935
*
“It is really for the vital part of the being that Shraddha and rites are done — to help the being to get rid of the vital vibrations which still attach it to the earth or to the vital worlds, so that it may pass quickly to its rest in the psychic peace” [p. 18]. Does this mean that the Shraddha ceremony performed at present by the Brahmins is correct? Does feeding the caste and the Brahmins fulfil the purpose?
I only said what was originally meant by the ceremonies — the rites. I was not referring to the feeding of the caste or the Brahmins which is not a rite or ceremony. Whether the Shraddha as performed is actually effective is another matter — for those who perform it have not either the knowledge or the occult power. 11 April 1935
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I have been reading your Bases of Yoga — a most staggering book: the Himalayan conditions for success you impose — well, shall the likes of us ever fulfil a hundredth part of such countless conditions?
Conditions for success? But these are not conditions for doing
the sadhana, but the basic conditions for the integral siddhi — they are, as it might be said, basic siddhis, realised foundations
on which the total and permanent siddhi can be created — or one may say they are the constituents of the Yogic as opposed
to the ordinary consciousness. When one has arrived fully at this Yogic consciousness, one can be called a Yogi, till then one
is a sadhak. So much as all that is not demanded immediately from a sadhak. From the sadhak all that is asked is “a sincerity
in the aspiration and a patient will to arrive . . . in spite of all obstacles, then the opening in one form or another is sure to
come.”30 “All sincere aspiration has its effect; if you are sincere you will grow into the divine life” [p. 26]. Again “One cannot
become altogether this at once, but if one aspires at all times and calls in the aid of the Divine Shakti with a true heart and
a straightforward will, one grows more and more into the true consciousness” [cf. p. 27]. It is of course said that the success
will come sooner or later, — it is for that reason that patience is indispensable. But these are not Himalayan conditions
— it
is not putting an impossible price on what is asked for. As for the difficulty, as it has also been said in the book, when one
once enters into the true (Yogic) consciousness, “then you see that everything can be done, even if at present only a slight
beginning has been made; but a beginning is enough, once the Force, the Power are there” [pp. 33 34]. It is not really on the
capacity of the outer nature that success depends, (for the outer nature all self-exceeding seems impossibly difficult), but on the
inner being and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the outer
30 Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga
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view and consciousness from the inner — that is the work of the sadhana and it is sure to come with sincerity, aspiration, and patience. All that is not excessively stern or exacting. As a description of the constituents of the Yogic consciousness, the bases of realisation, I don’t think the book can be called staggering or its suggestions Himalayan — for in fact they have already been stated by the Gita and other books on Yoga and, after all, thousands of people have realised them in part at least or in the inner being — though not so well in the outer. But to realise the inner being is quite enough for a foundation — for many it is quite enough even as a last state, for those who do not seek the transformation of the outer nature. Here too, even if one puts the whole ideal, it is not alleged that it must be all done at once or as a first condition for the greater endeavour. 26 June 1936
*
You feel depressed on reading the Bases of Yoga, because your mind becomes active at the wrong end; from the point of view of your obsession about inability, hopelessness, past failure enforcing future failure. The right way to read these things is not to be mentally active, but receive with a quiet mind leaving the knowledge given to go in and bear its fruit hereafter at the proper time, not ask how one can practise it now or try to apply it to immediate circumstances in which it may not fit. I have told you already that these things are the basic siddhis which constitute the Yogic consciousness — they are things towards which one has to move but cannot be established now and offhand. What has to be done now is for each the thing necessary for him at present. I have indicated what is necessary at present for you, the growth of the psychic being which had begun and the power of contact and communication which it will bring with the inner consciousness and through it with the Divine Power or Presence. But for that to grow the mind must keep more quiet, not insisting, not desponding at every moment, but steadily aspiring and letting the things of which these were indications grow from within. 28 June 1936
Page – 132 Passages from Bases of Yoga
I do not remember the context of the sentence quoted,31 without which it is not possible to say what was meant by its not being the first aim of the Yoga. That may mean it is not the one to be pursued at the beginning, for first there should be the union in the heart of the personal being with the Divine. Or it may mean that it does not take priority or importance over all others. For both personality and impersonality have their claims and join together in the final realisation of what transcends and unites them both in one. What has to disappear is the personal separative ego — the dualities of course also. The quickest though not the final way to extinguish ego is to make it disappear in impersonality. When all is one, universal or infinite then there is no place for the sense of ego — the dualities also begin to disappear. But the difficulty is that usually this realisation is confined to the mind or the above-mind while in the vital the stamp of ego remains and is felt in the life and its actions and reactions. Even if full impersonality comes in the vital and physical also, there remains the impossibility, all being impersonal, of having any relation with the Divine. What has therefore to be done is to lose the small personality in impersonality, but also by that loss to discover the true personality which is a portion of the Divine. This person is not separative and limited but is a universal individual, has the sense of uniting with all, but also the power of love and worship for the Divine. That is why I say that to merge the personal consciousness is not the first (or the whole) aim of the Yoga. November 1935
*
In Bases of Yoga one reads, “It is with the Mother who is always with you and in you that you converse” [p. 56]. Could you kindly explain to me how one converses with the Mother?
31 “Also to merge the personal consciousness is not the first aim of the Yoga. . . .”
Bases
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One hears the voice or the thought speaking inwardly and one answers inwardly. Only it is not always safe for the sadhak if there is any insincerity of ego, desire, vanity, ambition in him — for then he may construct a voice or thought in his mind and ascribe it to the Mother and it will say to him pleasing and flattering things which mislead him. Or he may mistake some other Voice for the Mother’s. 2 July 1936
*
You write in Bases of Yoga, “All the ordinary vital movements . . . are waves from the general Nature, Prakriti,” and “The desires come from outside . . .” [p. 61]. If desires are only waves from outside (Prakriti), what then is the vital itself? Is not desire its main constituent?
There can be a vital without desire. When desire disappears from the being, the vital does not disappear with it.
Is not the vital itself part of the same Prakriti?
By Prakriti is meant universal Prakriti. Universal Prakriti entering into the vital being creates desires which appear by its habitual response as an individual nature; but if the habitual desires she throws in are rejected and exiled, the being remains but the old individual prakriti of vital desire is no longer there — a new nature is formed responding to the Truth above and not to the lower Nature.
What determines the first response to these waves? One may suppose that the habit of response is carried over from life to life. But what determined the response when we were animals in some distant past?
Universal Prakriti determined it and the soul or Purusha accepted it. In the acceptance lies the responsibility. The Purusha is that which sanctions or refuses. The vital being responds to the ordinary life waves in the animal; man responds to them but has the power of mental control. He has also, as the mental Purusha is awake in him, the power to choose whether he shall have desire
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or train his being to surmount it. Finally, there is the possibility of bringing down a higher nature which will not be subject to desire but act on another vital principle. December 1936
*
You write in Bases of Yoga, “The whole principle of this Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone . . . and to bring down into ourselves . . . all the transcendent light . . . and Ananda of the supramental Divine. . . .” And then, “It is only after becoming one with the supramental Divine . . .” and also, “It is only the bringing down of the supramental Light, Power and Bliss . . .” [pp. 70 72]. These passages indicate that it is possible for the Jiva to rise up into and bring down the supramental consciousness. But in the Arya you define the supermind as the truth-will of Sachchidananda. How could any human being except one who has come for the divine manifestation reach or bring down the supermind? This is something for the Divine alone.
It is the very principle of this Yoga that only by the supramentalisation of the consciousness which means rising above mind to supermind and the descent of the supermind into the nature can the final transformation be made. So if nobody can rise above mind to supermind or obtain the descent of the supermind, then logically this Yoga becomes impossible. Every being is in essence one with the Divine and in his individual being a portion of the Divine, so there is no insuperable bar to his becoming supramental. It is no doubt impossible for the human nature being mental in its basis to overcome the Ignorance and rise to or obtain the descent of the Supermind by its own unaided effort, but by surrender to the Divine it can be done. One brings it down into the earth Nature through his own consciousness and so opens the way for the others, but the change has to be repeated in each consciousness to become individually effective. 29 July 1936
*
“In this Yoga . . . there can be no place for vital relations or interchanges with others. . . . Still worse would it be if this interchange took the form of a sexual relation . . .” [p. 70].
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The first of these sentences seems to refer to relations between men and men or women and women. But didn’t you once say that ordinary interchanges between people are almost unavoidable? Moreover, almost everyone here [in the Ashram] has friends. Do friendships fall in the category of “vital relations”?
I suppose I must have been referring to the interchanges which are the result of vital relations. The involuntary vital or other involuntary interchange which takes place by the mere fact of meeting, talking or being together are those which are practically unavoidable. That is to say, they are avoidable only when one has become entirely conscious and is able to put a wall of Force around oneself which nothing can penetrate except the things which one wills to accept. But the reference in the passage cannot be to these, but to the interchange due to vital attachments, passions, vital love or hate etc. Friendships can be vital relations if there is strong attachment or desire but the friendship which is the nature of comradeship or mental affinity or of a psychic character need not be a vital relation. 4 January 1937
*
In Bases of Yoga, it is said about the sex-movements that they “throw into the atmosphere forces that would block the supramental descent, bringing instead the descent of adverse vital powers” [p. 71]. Is it meant that any kind of sex-movement in the Ashram atmosphere would block the supramental descent? If it were so, the descent would hardly be possible because new sadhaks or temporary visitors may indulge in sex-movements and throw these forces in the atmosphere.
That is not what is said in that passage. What is spoken of is the taking of sex indulgence as a part of the aim and method of the sadhana. It is said that if that were done, the sadhana would bring down vital Forces of a type adverse to the supramental change which would serve to block (stand in the way of) the supramental descent. 1 August 1936
*
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You write in Bases of Yoga, in regard to “the waves that recur from the general Nature”, that “they return on him [the individual], often with an increased force . . . when they find their influence rejected. But they cannot last long once the environmental consciousness is cleared — unless the `Hostiles’ take a hand” [p. 90]. Two questions arise: (1) Whether the Hostiles are something quite different from the waves of Nature? (2) Whether, during the process you describe (the “return” of the forces and so forth), it was not the Hostiles attacking all the time.
There are some who are never touched by the hostile forces. The normal resistance of the lower Nature in human beings and the action of the Hostiles are two quite different things. The former is natural and occurs in everybody; the latter is an intervention from the non-human world. But this intervention can come in two forms. (1) They use and press on the lower Nature forces making them resist where they would otherwise be quiescent, making the resistance strong or violent where it would be otherwise slight or moderate, exaggerating its violence when it is violent. There is besides a malignant cleverness, a conscious plan and combination when the Hostiles act on these forces which is not evident in the normal resistance of the forces. (2) They sometimes invade with their own forces. When this happens there is often a temporary possession or at least an irresistible influence which makes the thoughts, feelings, actions of the person abnormal — a black clouding of the brain, a whirl in the vital, all acts as if the person could not help himself and were driven by an overmastering force. On the other hand instead of a possession there may be only a strong Influence; there the symptoms are less marked, but it is easy for anyone acquainted with the ways of these forces to see what has happened. Finally it may be only an attack, not possession or influence; the person then is separate, is not overcome, resists. 24 August 1936
The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth
Before coming to the main point I may as well clear out one
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matter not unconnected with it, my articles or messages, as they have been called, in the Bulletin;32 for their appearance there and their contents seem to have caused some trouble, perplexity or misunderstanding in your mind and especially my speculations about the divine body. I wrote the first of these articles to explain about how or why sport came to be included in the programme of the Ashram activities and I think I made it clear, as I went on, that sport was not sadhana, that it belonged to what I called the lower end of things, but that it might be used not merely for amusement or recreation or the maintenance of health, but for a greater efficiency of the body and for the development of certain qualities and capacities, not of the body only but of morale and discipline and the stimulation of mental energies: but I pointed out also that these could be and were developed by other means and that there were limitations to this utility. In fact, it is only by sadhana that one could go beyond the limits natural to the lower-end means. I think there was little room for misunderstanding here but the Mother had asked me to write on other subjects not connected in any way with sport and had suggested some subjects such as the possibilities of the evolution of a divine body; so I wrote on that subject and went on to speak of the Supermind and Truth-Consciousness which had obviously not even the remotest connection with sport. The object was to bring in something higher and more interesting than a mere record of gymnasium events but which might appeal to some of the readers or even to wider circles. In speaking of the divine body I entered into some far-off speculations about what might become possible in the future evolution of it by means of a spiritual force, but obviously the possibilities could not be anything near or immediate and I said clearly enough that we shall have to begin at the beginning and not attempt anything out of the way. Perhaps I should have insisted more on present limitations but that I should now make clear. For the immediate object of my endeavours is to establish spiritual life on earth and
32 The eight essays making up The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth were first published in the Bulletin of Physical Education in 1949 and 1950. — Ed.
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for that the first necessity must always be to realise the Divine; only then can life be spiritualised or what I have called the Life Divine be made possible. The creation of something that could be called a divine body could be only an ulterior aim undertaken as part of this transformation; as obviously the development of such a divine body as was envisioned in these speculations could only come into view as the result of a distant evolution and need not alarm or distract anyone. It might even be regarded as a phantasy of some remotely possible future which might one day happen to come true. 7 December 1949
Publication Plans, 1949
There can be no objection to the immediate or early publication [in the United States] of (1) The Life Divine (2) the Essays on the Gita (3) The Synthesis of Yoga (Yoga of Works) (4) Superman (and other essays) (5) The Hero and the Nymph (with essay on Kalidasa). As regards the Collected Poems numerous corrections have to be made in Perseus and the essay on classical metres, but as these are mainly misprints there is no objection to their being made on the proofs when these are sent to us. As to The Ideal of Human Unity and The Psychology of Social Development they have to be altered by the introduction of new chapters and rewriting of passages and in the Ideal changes have to be made all through the book in order to bring it up to date, so it is quite impossible to make these alterations on the proofs. I propose however to revise these two books as soon as possible; they will receive my first attention. The Defence of Indian Culture is an unfinished book and also I had intended to alter much of it and to omit all but brief references to William Archer’s criticisms. That was why its publication has been so long delayed. Even if it is reprinted as it is, considerable alterations will have to be made and there must be some completion and an end to the book which does not at present exist. The Future Poetry also cannot be published as it is, for there must be a considerable rearrangement of its matter since
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publication from month to month left its plan straggling and ill-arranged and also one or two chapters will have to be omitted or replaced by other new ones. I do not wish it to be published in its present imperfect form. The publication of The Secret of the Veda as it is does not enter into my intention. It was published in a great hurry and at a time when I had not studied the Rig Veda as a whole as well as I have since done. Whole chapters will have to be rewritten or written otherwise and a considerable labour gone through; moreover, it was never finished and considerable additions in order to make it complete are indispensable. 30 June 1949
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