March 10, 1971
(Satprem begins by reading to Mother
an unpublished letter by Sri Aurobindo.)
A Most Fruitful Adventure
“As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason but can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous, but not the less real for that: they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of the overcoming of the lower animal nature, vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist. A new outlook on things arises which brings with it, if fully pursued into its consequences, a great liberation, inner harmony, unification — many other possibilities besides. These things have been experienced, it is true, by a small minority of the human race, but still there has been a host of independent witnesses to them in all times, climes and conditions and numbered among them are some of the greatest intelligences of the past, some of the world’s most remarkable figures. Must these possibilities be immediately condemned as chimeras
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because they are not only beyond the average man in the street but also not easily seizable even by many cultivated intellects or because their method is more difficult than that of the ordinary sense or reason? If there is any truth in them, is not this possibility opened by them worth pursuing as disclosing a highest range of self-discovery and world discovery by the human soul? At its best, taken as true, it must be that — at its lowest taken as only a possibility, as all things attained by man have been only a possibility in their earlier stages, it is a great and may well be a most fruitful adventure.”
Sri Aurobindo
January 7, 1934
Letters on Yoga, XXII. 188
* * *
(Concerning a disciple who wanted to finish
”The Life of Sri Aurobindo” left incomplete
by Rishabhchand.)
I thought Rishabhchand had finished “The Life of Sri Aurobindo.”
He stopped where Sri Aurobindo comes to Pondicherry [in 1910].
That’s enough. There’s no need to add anything, just a note — a sentence or two will do.
There’s nothing to say about his life here…. Basically no one really knows the life he led here. I am afraid they’ll write a lot of nonsense. I would prefer that nothing be said — they can say he retired to Pondicherry to lead the life of Yoga and henceforth only that mattered, and it’s better not to speak of it. That’s all.
It doesn’t have to be lengthy: just a chapter to close the series, to say that his life in Pondicherry was exclusively taken up with Yoga and that he wrote what he wanted to say, and consequently there’s nothing more to add.
We have everything he wrote, and it’s much better than anything we can say about it.
What’s that sound?
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Nothing…. Someone’s playing a flute in the school…. Someone who must have a lot of heart!
(Mother caresses Satprem’s head
and goes within)
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