Sri Aurobindo: The rose is among the ﬁrst of ﬂowers because of the richness of its colour, the intensity of sweetness of its scent and the grace and magniﬁcence of its form.  As for the other question, there is no reason to suppose that there is not life in any part of the material cosmic system except earth. No doubt the suns and nebulae cannot harbour material life because there is not the necessary basis, but wherever there is a formed world, Life can exist. It used formerly to be supposed that life could not exist except in conditions identical with the earth, but it is now being discovered that even man and the animals can adapt themselves to atmospheric conditions deﬁcient in oxygen such as exist in the stratosphere — this proves that all depends on adaptation. There are animals that can exist only in the sea, yet sea-animals have become amphibious or turned into land animals — so animals on earth can by habit of the adaptation live only in a certain range of atmosphere and need oxygen, but they could adapt themselves to other conditions — it is a law of habit of Nature, not a law of inevitable necessity of Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: It is therefore quite possible for life to exist on other planets in our and other systems, though the beings there may not be quite like earthly humanity or life quite the same.  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.    I regard the spiritual history of mankind and especially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose, not a book that is closed, the lines of which have to be constantly repeated. Even the Upanishads and the Gita were not ﬁnal though everything may be there in seed.


Sri Aurobindo: In this development the recent spiritual history of India is a very important stage and the names I mentioned [] had a special prominence in my thought at the time — they seemed to me to indicate the lines from which the future spiritual development had most directly to proceed, not staying but passing on. I do not know that I would put my meaning exactly in the language you suggest. I may say that it is far from my purpose to propagate any religion new or old for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter.


Sri Aurobindo: It is news to me that I have excluded Mahomedans from the Yoga. I have not done it any more than I have excluded Europeans or Christians. As for giving up one’s past, if that means giving up the outer forms of the old religions, it is done as much by the Hindus here as by the Mahomedans. The Hindus here — even those who were once orthodox Brahmins and have grown old in it, — give up all observance of caste, take food from Pariahs and are served by them, associate and eat with Mahomedans, Christians, Europeans, cease to practise temple worship or Sandhya (daily prayer and mantras), accept a non-Hindu from Europe as their spiritual director. These are things people who have Hinduism as their aim and object would not do


Sri Aurobindo: — they do it because they are obliged here to look to a higher ideal in which these things have no value. What is kept of Hinduism is Vedanta and Yoga, in which Hinduism is one with Suﬁsm of Islam and with the Christian mystics. But even here it is not Vedanta and Yoga in their traditional limits (their past), but widened and rid of many ideas that are peculiar to the Hindus. If I have used Sanskrit terms and ﬁgures, it is because I know them and do not know Persian and Arabic.


Sri Aurobindo: I have not the slightest objection to anyone here drawing inspiration from Islamic sources if they agree with the Truth as Suﬁsm agrees with it. On the other hand I have not the slightest objection to Hinduism being broken to pieces and disappearing from the face of the earth, if that is the Divine Will. I have no attachment to past forms; what is Truth will always remain; the Truth alone matters.  Religion is always imperfect because it is a mixture of man’s spirituality with the errors that come in trying to sublimate ignorantly his lower nature. Hindu religion appears to me as a cathedral temple half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail, but always fantastic with a signiﬁcance — crumbled and overgrown in many places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: The outer social structure which it built for its approach is another matter.     If it is meant by the statement [] that the form of religion is something permanent and unchangeable, then that cannot be accepted. But if religion here means one’s way of communion with the Divine, then it is true that that is something belonging to the inner being and cannot be changed like a house or a cloak for the sake of some personal, social or worldly convenience.


Sri Aurobindo: If a change is to be made, it can only be for an inner spiritual reason, because of some development from within. No one can be bound to any form of religion or any particular creed or system, but if he changes the one he has accepted for another, for external reasons, that means he has inwardly no religion at all and both his old and his new religion are only an empty formula. At bottom that is, I suppose, what the statement drives at. Preference for a different approach to the Truth or the desire of inner spiritual self-expression are not the motives of the recommendation of change to which objection is made by the Mahatma here; the object proposed is an enhancement of social status and consideration which is no more a spiritual motive than conversion for the sake of money or marriage. If a man has no religion in himself, he can change his credal profession for any motive; if he has, he cannot; he can only change it in response to an inner spiritual need.


Sri Aurobindo: If a man has a bhakti for the Divine in the form of Krishna, he can’t very well say, “I will swap Krishna for Christ so that I may become socially respectable.”    You can write to him not to be depressed by his failures but to go on aspiring and trust in the Divine Grace. He should not allow himself to be impeded by narrow caste ideas. Always in India the Brahmins have bowed down before a man of spiritual realisation, who becomes by that very fact of realisation above caste.


Sri Aurobindo: He should open himself more to the help from here. Man is a mass of imperfections — it is only by the divine Grace that he reaches the Divine.  It is correct, religions at best modify only the surface of the nature. Moreover they degenerate very soon into a routine of ceremonial habitual worship and ﬁxed dogmas.


Sri Aurobindo: If you feel no enthusiasm for the it is better deﬁnitely to stop it. Once on this path there is no meaning in it any longer, — for the reason you yourself give. The is, besides, entirely on the vital plane and if help has to be given to those who have passed into other worlds of consciousness, there are better ways of doing it.    Replace the by a long meditation with on the father praying that he may have all the rest and illumination that the departed can have.


Sri Aurobindo:   I only said what was originally 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 as performed is actually effective is another matter — for those who perform it have not either the knowledge or the occult power.


Sri Aurobindo:  The old traditions [] are still strong with many — let them satisfy this tendency in this way so long as it does not drop from them.     Useless and therefore inadvisable [].


Sri Aurobindo: External sacriﬁces of this kind have no longer any meaning — as so many saints have said, sacriﬁce ego, anger, lust etc. to Kali, not goats or cocks.  There is nothing noble in fanaticism — there is no nobility of motive though there may be a ﬁerce enthusiasm of motive. Religious fanaticism is something psychologically low-born and ignorant — and usually in its action ﬁerce, cruel and base. Religious ardour like that of the martyr who sacriﬁces himself only is a different thing.  I would not describe the perfections you describe in your letter, ﬁne though they are, as spiritual in the proper sense of the word — for they lack the essential condition of spirituality.


Sri Aurobindo: Perfection of all kinds is indeed good, as it is the sign of the pressure of the consciousness in the material world towards full self-expression in this or that limit, on this or that level. In a certain sense it is an urge of the Divine itself hidden in forms that tends in the lesser degrees of consciousness towards its own increasing self-revelation. Perfection of an object or a scene in inanimate Nature, animate perfection of strength, speed, physical beauty, courage or animal ﬁdelity, affection, intelligence, perfection of art, music, poetry, literature, — perfection of the intellect in any kind of mental activity, the perfect statesman, warrior, artist, craftsman, — perfection in vital force and capacity, perfection in ethical qualities, character, temperament, — all have their high value, their place as rungs in the ladder of evolution, the seried steps of the spirit’s emergence. If one likes to call that spiritual because of this hidden urge behind it one can do so; it can at least be regarded as a preparation for the secret spirit’s emergence.  But thought and knowledge can only proceed by making the necessary distinctions.


Sri Aurobindo: Much confusion is created by neglecting them. This mental idealism, ethical development, religious piety and fervour, occult powers and feats have all been taken as spirituality and the spiritual evolution kept tied to the moorings of the planes of lesser consciousness which do indeed prepare the soul by experience for the spiritual consciousness but are not themselves that. For perfection can only become truly spiritual when it is founded on the awakened spiritual consciousness and takes on its peculiar essence. We are told by Europeans that the lined and ravaged face of the Greek bust of Homer is far more spiritual than the empty ecstatic smile of the Buddha.  We are told often nowadays that to earn for one’s family and carry out our domestic duties, to be a good and moral man, a perfect citizen, patriot, worker for the country, is far more spiritual than to sit in idle meditation seeking for a remote and invisible Deity.


Sri Aurobindo: Philanthropy, altruism, service to mankind are represented as the true spiritual things. Mental idealisms, ethical strivings, aesthetic ﬁnenesses are put forward by the modern mind as things spiritual. All this is represented as the best and highest we can achieve — though an increasing disillusionment, dissatisfaction, feeling of emptiness in them is also growing at the same time. All this has had its use, for everything has its own value in its own place and those who are satisﬁed with them are entitled to give them their full value and hold them as the great good and the thing to be done, kartavyam karma. But spirituality stands on its own basis and does not depend on these things nor does it even include them so long as they are based on some other than the spiritual consciousness and not transformed on the inner spiritual basis.


Sri Aurobindo: So also people speak of religious men as spiritual, but one may be a very religious man yet not spiritual. The popular idea confuses great feats of occult power, ascetic feats, miracles, astonishing performances like those of your Jewel Sannyasi as the works of a spiritual achievement and the signs of a great Yogi. But one may be a powerful occultist or do marvels of asceticism and yet be not spiritual at all — for in any true sense of the word, in its proper and native signiﬁcance it means one who has attained to the spiritual consciousness, the realisation of the inner or higher Self, the contact or union with the Divine or that which is eternal or is striving after and approaching these things. Spiritual perfection can only come by a life based on that search and that achievement.  Tagore, of course, belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative afﬁrmations.


Sri Aurobindo: That makes an immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may or may not be correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of a fusion into something new and true — therefore it could create. Now all that idealism has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse Event and everybody is busy exposing its weakness, but nobody knows what to put in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, “Heil Hitler” and the Fascist salute and Five-Year Plan and the beating of everybody into one amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody’s-eyes plunge into the bog in the hope of ﬁnding some ﬁrm foundation there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there?


Sri Aurobindo: Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring creation is possible.    It is queer these intellectuals go on talking of creation while all they stand for is collapsing into the without their being able to raise a ﬁnger to save it. What the devil are they going to create and from what material? and of what use if a Hitler with his cudgel or a Mussolini with his castor oil can come and wash it out or beat it into dust in a moment?


Sri Aurobindo:  If there are such great spiritual men in Europe [ ], they seem to have the gift of invisibility.  Or perhaps he means intellectuals like Romain Rolland or else Roman Catholic priests and cardinals or the Reverend Holmes or paciﬁsts like Lord Robert Cecil or in the past Tolstoy who spent his whole life trying in vain to live according to his ideals.  Idealising intellectualism and religionism are all that is left of spirituality in Europe.  The spiritual life (), the religious life ( ) and the ordinary human life of which morality is a part are three quite different things and one must know which one desires and not confuse the three together. The ordinary life is that of the average human consciousness separated from its own true self and from the Divine and led by the common habits of the mind, life and body which are the laws of the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: The religious life is a movement of the same ignorant human consciousness, turning or trying to turn away from the earth towards the Divine but as yet without knowledge and led by the dogmatic tenets and rules of some sect or creed which claims to have found the way out of the bonds of the earth-consciousness into some beatiﬁc Beyond. The religious life may be the ﬁrst approach to the spiritual, but very often it is only a turning about in a round of rites, ceremonies and practices or set ideas and forms without any issue. The spiritual life, on the contrary, proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one ﬁnds one’s true being and comes ﬁrst into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters.  Morality is a part of the ordinary life; it is an attempt to govern the outward conduct by certain mental rules or to form the character by these rules in the image of a certain mental ideal.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual life goes beyond the mind; it enters into the deeper consciousness of the Spirit and acts out of the truth of the Spirit. As for the question about the ethical life and the need to realise God, it depends on what is meant by fulﬁlment of the objects of life. If an entry into the spiritual consciousness is part of it, then mere morality will not give it to you.  Politics as such has nothing to do with the spiritual life. If the spiritual man does anything for his country, it is in order to do the will of the Divine and as part of a divinely appointed work and not from any other common human motive.


Sri Aurobindo: In none of his acts does he proceed from the common mental and vital motives which move ordinary men but acts out of the truth of the Spirit and from an inner command of which he knows the source.  The kind of worship () spoken of in the letter belongs to the religious life. It can, if rightly done in the deepest religious spirit, prepare the mind and heart to some extent but no more.  But if worship is done as part of meditation or with a true aspiration to the spiritual reality and the spiritual consciousness and with the yearning for contact and union with the Divine, then it can be spiritually effective.  If you have a sincere aspiration to the spiritual change in your heart and soul, then you will ﬁnd the way and the Guide.


Sri Aurobindo: A mere mental seeking and questioning are not enough to open the doors of the Spirit.    In the ordinary life, people accept the vital movements, anger, desire, greed, sex etc. as natural, allowable and legitimate things, part of the human nature. Only so far as society discourages them or wishes to keep them within ﬁxed limits or subject to a decent restraint or measure, people try to control them so as to conform to the social standard of morality or rule of conduct.  Here on the contrary as in all spiritual life, the conquest and complete mastery of these things is demanded.


Sri Aurobindo: That is why the struggle is more felt, not because these things rise more strongly in sadhaks than in ordinary men, but because of the intensity of the struggle between the spiritual mind which demands control and the vital movements which rebel and wish to continue in the new as they did in the old life. As for the idea that the sadhana raises up things of the kind, the only truth in that is this that, ﬁrst, there are many things in the ordinary man of which he is not conscious because the vital hides them from the mind and gratiﬁes them without the mind realising what is the force that is moving the action — thus things that are done under the plea of altruism, philanthropy, service etc. are largely moved by ego which hides itself behind these justiﬁcations; in Yoga the secret motive has to be pulled out from behind the veil, exposed and got rid of. Secondly, some things are suppressed in the ordinary life and remain lying in the nature, suppressed but not eliminated; they may rise up any day or they may express themselves in nervous forms or other disorders of the mind or vital or body without it being evident what is their real cause. This has been recently discovered by European psychologists and much emphasised, even exaggerated in a new science called psychoanalysis. Here again in sadhana one has to become conscious of these suppressed impulses and eliminate them — this may be called raising up, but that does not mean that they have to be raised up into action but only raised up before the consciousness so as to be cleared out of the being.


Sri Aurobindo: As for some men being able to control themselves and others being swept away, that is due to difference of temperament.  Some men are sattwic and control comes easy to them, up to a certain point at least; others are more rajasic and ﬁnd control difﬁcult and often impossible. Some have a strong mind and mental will and others are vital men in whom the vital passions are stronger or more on the surface. Some do not think control necessary and let themselves go.


Sri Aurobindo: In sadhana the mental or moral control has to be replaced by the spiritual mastery — for the mental control is only partial and it controls but does not liberate; it is only the psychic and spiritual that can do that. That is the main difference in this respect between the ordinary and the spiritual life.     Everything depends upon the aim you put before you.


Sri Aurobindo: If for the realisation of one’s spiritual aim it is necessary to give up the ordinary life of the Ignorance (), it must be done; the claim of the ordinary life cannot stand against that of the spirit.  If a Yoga of works alone is chosen as the path, then one may remain in the, but it will be freely, as a ﬁeld of action and not from any sense of obligation; for the Yogin must be free inwardly from all ties and attachments. On the other hand there is no necessity to live the family life — one can leave it and take any kind of works as a ﬁeld of action.  In the Yoga practised here the aim is to rise to a higher consciousness and to live out of the higher consciousness alone, not with the ordinary motives. This means a change of life as well as a change of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: But all are not so circumstanced that they can cut loose from the ordinary life; they accept it therefore as a ﬁeld of experience and self-training in the earlier stages of the sadhana. But they must take care to look at it as a ﬁeld of experience only and to get free from the ordinary desires, attachments and ideas which usually go with it; otherwise it becomes a drag and hindrance on their sadhana. When one is not compelled by circumstances there is no necessity to continue the ordinary life.  One becomes tamasic by leaving the ordinary actions and life only if the vital is so accustomed to draw its motives of energy from the ordinary consciousness and its desires and activities that if it loses them, it loses all joy and charm and energy of existence. But if one has a spiritual aim and an inner life and the vital part accepts them, then it draws its energies from within


Sri Aurobindo: and there is no danger of one’s being tamasic.  The principle of life which I seek to establish is spiritual.  Morality is a question of man’s mind and vital, it belongs to a lower plane of consciousness. A spiritual life therefore cannot be founded on a moral basis, it must be founded on a spiritual basis. This does not mean that the spiritual man must be immoral — as if there were no other law of conduct than the moral.


Sri Aurobindo: The law of action of the spiritual consciousness is higher, not lower than the moral — it is founded on union with the Divine and living in the Divine Consciousness and its action is founded on obedience to the Divine Will.    The beliefs you speak of with regard to right and wrong, beauty and ugliness etc. are necessary for the human being and for the guidance of his life. He cannot do without the distinctions they involve. But in a higher consciousness when he enters into the Light or is touched by it, these distinctions disappear, for he is then approaching the eternal and inﬁnite good and right which he reaches perfectly when he is able to enter into the Truth Consciousness or Supermind.


Sri Aurobindo: The belief in the guidance of God is also justiﬁed by spiritual experience and is very necessary for the sadhana; this also rises to its highest and completest truth when one enters into the Light.    It [ ] is social pressure accompanied by a certain habit of mental control born of the social pressure. It is not from peace at all.


Sri Aurobindo: Remove the social pressure even partly and as in England and America recently people let themselves go and do according to the vital impulses instead of controlling them — except of course those who stick to the religious and moral ideas of the past even when society drifts away from these ideas.  Vice and virtue have nothing to do with darkness or light, truth and falsehood. The spiritual man rises above vice and virtue, he does not rise above truth and light, unless you mean by truth and light, human truth and mental light. They have to be transcended, just as virtue and vice have to be transcended.


Sri Aurobindo: Are you in a position to make a judgment as to what will or will not help God’s work? You seem to have very elementary ideas in these matters. What is your idea of divinisation, — to be a virtuous man, a good husband, son, father, a good citizen etc.? In that case I myself am most undivine, — for I have never been these things. Men like or would then be the great Transformed Divine Men.


Sri Aurobindo:   Many sinners are people who are preparing to turn to the Divine and many virtuous people have a long run of lives yet to go through before they will think of it.    Vices are simply an overﬂow of energy in unregulated channels.


Sri Aurobindo: The passage through sattwa is the ordinary idea of Yoga, it is the preparation and puriﬁcation by the yama-niyama of Patanjali or by other means in other Yogas, e.g., saintliness in the bhakti schools, the eightfold path in Buddhism etc., etc. In our Yoga the evolution through sattwa is replaced by the cultivation of equanimity,, and by the psychic transformation.    It is a very beautiful character that you describe in your letter, a perfect type of the sattwic man, a ﬁne and harmonised ethical nature supported and viviﬁed by a ﬁne and developed psychic being. But still, although it may be regarded as an excellent preparation for the spiritual life, it cannot by itself be called spirituality — unless indeed we reduce the meaning of the word to the connotation ordinarily given to it in the West where mental ideation, ethical striving, a ﬂowering of ﬁne character, altruism, self-sacriﬁce, self-denial, philanthropy, service to men or mankind are considered the height of spiritual aspiration or spiritual attainment.


Sri Aurobindo: Obviously if that is to be the last word of earthly achievement, there is no need for anything farther; the close and vivid discovery of soul or self, the straining towards that which is behind life and above mind, the passion for the Eternal or the Inﬁnite, the hunger for a freedom and wideness of consciousness and existence not limited by the narrow moulds of intellect, character and the past life-aims of humanity, the thirst for union with the Divine or for the pure bliss and beauty of spiritual existence not tied down to mental and vital values must be dismissed as a superﬂuous dream for which there is neither place nor necessity here. Yet these things have been not only dreamed of and hungered after but reached and tasted by beings born in a mortal and human body. Spirituality lies there; its essence consists in a bursting of the human mental, moral, aesthetic, vital moulds in order to reach beyond them and enter into a consciousness of which these things are the very stuff, to which these experiences are native. Anything less than that, than a striving after it or at least a partial realisation of it is not spirituality. The spiritual man is one who has realised something of it even if only in one aspect out of many; one who is striving after it is the spiritual seeker.


Sri Aurobindo: All else however magniﬁcently intellectual, ethical, aesthetically beautiful and harmonious, vitally splendid, great and forceful or physically perfect is a valuable achievement on the way, but not yet that, for one has not passed the Rubicon of mind into a new empire.  Owing to the nature of the past evolution of consciousness and of spirituality itself, there has been much confusion on this point and there is still more today because of the present domination of the Western ideal. On one side or another mental idealism, ethical development, altruistic character and action, religious piety and fervour, occult powers, feats of ascetic endurance have been put forward as the essence of spirituality or the test or proof of achievement or the signposts of the journey to spiritual perfection. It is ignored that any of these things may be there and yet there need not be any spiritual life behind it, any rebirth into a new consciousness or any remoulding of either the inner or the outer consciousness no longer in a higher or richer power of mind and life and body only, the instruments, but in the direct light and force of the hitherto veiled user of the instrument, the now revealed and directly active soul, self, spirit or of the Divine or Eternal whose representatives or aspects they are.


Sri Aurobindo: This confusion meets us at every point and in all sorts of forms whose common error is to ignore the essence and core of the matter. The Western intellect presents us with the strivings of the mind, life, emotions, passions, moral will and tells us these are the real spiritual things, man’s highest aim and endeavour and all else is vain mysticism, asceticism, evasion of life. It appears that the lined and ravaged face of a Greek bust of Homer is a thousand times more spiritual than the empty calm or the ecstatic smile of the Buddha! We are told by others that to care for the family and carry out our social and domestic duties, to be a good man, a perfect citizen, patriot, worker for the community, to serve mankind are the real things far more spiritual than to sit in idle meditation seeking for some remote and invisible transcendental Reality — or unreality. Philanthropy, altruism, service, selﬂess labour for humankind, these are the spiritual summits.


Sri Aurobindo: True selﬂessness lies there, to sacriﬁce or offer one’s life to the good of others, to the community, to the race. To seek one’s own inner spiritual growth, to draw back from ordinary life in order to reach something beyond, to search after the Divine above humanity is mere egoism, not true spirituality, but an aberration, a misdirection of the will and life.  All that might be admirable and true — as certainly all the things thus eulogised have their place in the human evolution, if the premiss on which it were founded were true — that the seeking for something behind, something beyond, something of which the evolution of mind, life and body was only a veil or a preparation is an illusion and a chimaera. But if these things are real, if the seeking is a lasting and major drive in Nature, then all these objections and recommendations are futile. For this drive will fulﬁl itself, this hidden reality will draw and draw us till we achieve it.


Sri Aurobindo: Those who feel its call, cannot do otherwise than follow and strive, even if need be leave all else for it, hold all other greatness, splendour, nobility, beauty as cheaper minor things compared with this other Light and Greatness and Beauty of which they have had the vision, the intimation, the formless attraction or else the passing touch or glimpse. Ever since Mind itself reached a certain development, there has been at ﬁrst dimly and gropingly, then more and more clearly and intimately this drive in man towards something behind and beyond Man, towards the discovery or the expression of something hidden in his being and a world existence which is more real than his surface self even at its best, greater, fuller, truer, more divine. To arrive at that can come only by a change of consciousness, a reversal of consciousness, a new basis of consciousness which is not the lower instrumental consciousness of mind, life and body.  At each step of evolution we have this change, reversal, new base. Matter is bound in an involved consciousness which is in practice an inconscience; life in the plant in a still involved consciousness struggling for growth, expansion, persistence, seeking after movement and sensation and conscious living without yet reaching them; life in the animal in a vital consciousness possessed of these things, already emotional, possessed of a mind, but a mind still involved in life-movement, not reﬂective, not subjective and turning upon life to understand, master and control it.


Sri Aurobindo: Mind is based on a consciousness that has attained this emergence, this reﬂective and controlling power, this growing understanding, mastery, self-awareness. But mind is still aware only of life and of itself, it is not aware of the person, the reality behind, the user of the instrument; it is seeking for these things and it is this search that constitutes the drive for a new evolution; for mind is a twilight preparing for light, an ignorance seeking after knowledge, a bondage to Nature groping after freedom and mastery over Nature. It is not on mind, on its self-modifying ignorance and bondage or even on its half-light, half-mastery, half-knowledge that the next step can base itself. It must base itself on soul consciousness, consciousness of the spirit and self — for so only can there be the full light, the spontaneous mastery, the intimate and real knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo:   Obviously [] the rajasic movements are likely to create more trouble than the sattwic ones. The greatest difﬁculty of the sattwic man is the snare of virtue and self-righteousness, the ties of philanthropy, mental idealisms, family affections etc., but except the ﬁrst, these are, though difﬁcult, still not so difﬁcult to overpass or else transform. Sometimes however these things are as sticky as the rajasic difﬁculties.  Selﬁshness and the reaction of unselﬁshness of which you speak are both of them things that have to be put aside — both are obstacles or movements leading off from the true and straight path.


Sri Aurobindo: For both these things belong to the mind and vital, they are different forms of the ego. The mind in its attempt to get away from the rajasic selﬁsh ego tries to do just the opposite of what selﬁshness usually does and serve others, sacriﬁce itself for others, but in doing so it is only constructing another kind of egoism that prides itself on its own unselﬁshness and altruism and makes human service its mental ideal instead of spiritual service of the Divine. That it is a misguiding movement you saw yourself; for it wanted to sacriﬁce your sadhana, that is, your seeking for the Divine to this new ego of altruistic selfrighteousness; it was prepared to do things without permission of the Mother or rather avoiding asking for permission. One has to get rid of selﬁshness and ego, not in this way, but by selﬂess service of the Divine and by merging the ego in the Divine Consciousness, submitting the personal will to the Divine Will, calling into the being the Divine Peace, Purity, Oneness, Knowledge, Light, Ananda, replacing the ego by the psychic being devoted and surrendered to the Divine. It is the love of the Divine that saves, not a love turned towards human beings.


Sri Aurobindo: When the Divine Consciousness is there, then there comes based on the love of the Divine a true love and oneness for all beings. But that does not act separately from the Divine but only according to the Divine Mother’s will and in her service.    Unselﬁshness is not the only thing to be aimed at — by itself it would be only a moral, not a spiritual attainment.  A spiritual humility within is very necessary, but I do not think an outward one is very advisable (absence of pride or arrogance or vanity is indispensable of course in one’s outer dealings with others) — it often creates pride, becomes formal or becomes ineffective after a time.


Sri Aurobindo: I have seen people doing it to cure their pride, but I have not found it producing a lasting result.    It [] is a feeling which some have who either want to cultivate humility ( used to do it, but I never saw that it got rid of his innate self-esteem) or who have or are trying to have the realisation of Narayan in all with a Vaishnava turn in it. To feel the One in all is right, but to bow down to the individual who lives still in his ego is good neither for him nor for the one who does it. Especially in this Yoga it tends to diffuse what should be concentrated and turned towards a higher realisation than that of the cosmic feeling which is only a step on the way.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is only this habit of the nature — self-worrying and harping on the sense of deﬁciency — that prevents you from being quiet.  If you threw that out, it would be easy to be quiet. Humility is needful, but constant self-depreciation does not help; excessive self-esteem and self-depreciation are both wrong attitudes. To recognise any defects without exaggerating them is useful but, once recognised, it is no good dwelling on them always; you must have the conﬁdence that the Divine Force can change everything and you must let the Force work.


Sri Aurobindo:  The view taken by the Mahatma in these matters [] is Christian rather than Hindu — for the Christian, self-abasement, humility, the acceptance of a low status to serve humanity or the Divine are things which are highly spiritual and the noblest privilege of the soul. This view does not admit any hierarchy of castes; the Mahatma accepts castes but on the basis that all are equal before the Divine; a Bhangi doing his dharma is as good as the Brahmin doing his, there is division of function but no hierarchy of functions. That is one view of things and the hierarchic view is another, both having a standpoint and logic of their own which the mind takes as wholly valid but which only corresponds to a part of the reality. All kinds of work are equal before the Divine and all men have the same Brahman within them, is one truth, but that development is not equal in all is another. The idea that it needs special punya to be born as a Bhangi is of course one of those forceful exaggerations of an idea which are common with the Mahatma and impress greatly the mind of his hearers.


Sri Aurobindo: The idea behind is that his function is an indispensable service to the society, quite as much as the Brahmin’s, but that being disagreeable it would need a special moral heroism to choose it voluntarily and he thinks as if the soul freely chose it as such a heroic service and as a reward of righteous acts — that is hardly likely. The service of the scavenger is indispensable under certain conditions of society, it is one of those primary necessities without which society can hardly exist and the cultural development of which the Brahmin life is part could not have taken place. But obviously the cultural development is more valuable than the service of the physical needs for the progress of humanity as opposed to its ﬁrst static condition and that development can even lead to the minimising and perhaps the eventual disappearance by scientiﬁc inventions of the need for the functions of the scavenger. But that I suppose the Mahatma would not approve of as it is machinery and a departure from the simple life. In any case it is not true that the Bhangi life is superior to the Brahmin life and the reward of especial righteousness.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand the traditional conception that a man is superior to others because he is born a Brahmin is not rational or justiﬁable. A spiritual or cultured man of Pariah birth is superior in the divine values to an unspiritual and worldly-minded or a crude and uncultured Brahmin. Birth  counts, but the basic value is in the man himself, the soul behind, and the degree to which it manifests itself in his nature.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the sense of superiority, that too is a little difﬁcult to avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition. There are men like Nag Mahashoy in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a giant sense of strength and superiority — European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are others in whom it ﬁxes a sense of superiority to men and humility to the Divine. Each position has its value. Take Vivekananda’s famous answer to the Madras Pundit who objected to one of his assertions, “But Shankara does not say so.” To which Vivekananda replied, “No, Shankara does not say so, but I, Vivekananda, say so”, and the Pundit sank back amazed and speechless.


Sri Aurobindo: That “I, Vivekananda” stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-conﬁdent egoism. But there was nothing false or unsound in Vivekananda’s spiritual experience. This was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the ﬁghter who, as the representative of something very great, could not allow himself to be put down or belittled. This is not to deny the necessity of non-egoism and of spiritual humility, but to show that the question is not so easy as it appears at ﬁrst sight. For if I have to express my spiritual experiences, I must do it with truth — I must record them, their, the thoughts, feelings, extensions of consciousness which accompany them.


Sri Aurobindo: What can I do with the experience in which one feels the whole world in oneself or the force of the Divine ﬂowing in one’s being and nature or the certitude of one’s faith against all doubts and doubters or one’s oneness with the Divine or the smallness of human thought and life compared with this greater knowledge and existence?  And I have to use the word “I” — I cannot take refuge in saying “this body” or “this appearance”, — especially as I am not a Mayavadin. Shall I not inevitably fall into expressions which will make shake his head at my assertions as full of pride and ego? I imagine it would be difﬁcult to avoid it.  Another thing, it seems to me that you identify faith very much with mental belief — but real faith is something spiritual, a knowledge of the soul.


Sri Aurobindo: The assertions you quote in your letter are the hard assertions of a mental belief leading to a great vehement assertion of one’s creed and god because they are one’s own and must therefore be greater than those of others — an attitude which is universal in human nature. Even the atheist is not tolerant, but declares his credo of Nature and Matter as the only truth and on all who disbelieve it or believe in other things he pours scorn as unenlightened morons and superstitious half-wits. I bear him no grudge for thinking me that; but I note that this attitude is not conﬁned to religious faith but is equally natural to those who are free from religious faith and do not believe in Gods or Gurus.    Perhaps one could say that it [] is to be aware of the relativity of what has been done compared with what is still to be done — and also to be conscious of one’s being nothing without the Divine Grace.


Sri Aurobindo: Sacriﬁce has a moral and psychological value always. This value is the same no matter what may be the cause for which the sacriﬁce is made, provided the one who makes it believes in the truth or justice or other worthiness of his cause. If one makes the sacriﬁce for a cause one knows to be wrong or unworthy, all depends on the motive and spirit of the sacriﬁce. Bhishma accepting death in a cause he knew to be unjust, obeyed the call of loyalty to what he felt to be his personal duty. Many have


Sri Aurobindo: done that in the past, and the moral and psychic value of their act lies, irrespective of the nature of the cause, in the nobility of the motive.  As to the other question, in this sense of the word sacriﬁce there is none for the man who gives up something which he does not value, except in so far as he undergoes loss, deﬁes social ban or obloquy or otherwise pays a price for his liberation. I may say, however, that without being cold and unloving a man may be so seized by a spiritual call or the call of a great human cause that the family or other ties count for nothing beside it, and he leaves all joyfully, without a pang, to follow the summoning Voice.  In the spiritual sense, however, sacriﬁce has a different meaning — it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one’s being, one’s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of “making sacred” and is used as an equivalent of the word Yajna.


Sri Aurobindo: When the Gita speaks of the “sacriﬁce of knowledge”, it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacriﬁce of works. The Mother has written somewhere that the spiritual sacriﬁce is joyful and not painful in its nature. On the spiritual path, very commonly, if a seeker still feels the old ties and responsibilities strongly, he is not asked to sever or leave them, but to let the call in him grow till all within is ready. Many, indeed, come away earlier because they feel that to cut loose is their only chance, and these have to go sometimes through a struggle.


Sri Aurobindo: But the pain, the struggle, is not the essential character of the spiritual self-offering.    It [] simply means that your sacriﬁce is still mental and has not yet become spiritual in its character. When your vital being consents to give up its desires and enjoyments, when it offers itself to the Divine, then the yajna will have begun. What I meant was that the European sense of the word is not the sense of the word “yajna” or the sense of “sacriﬁce” in such phrases as “the sacriﬁce of works”.


Sri Aurobindo: It does not mean that you give up all works for the sake of the Divine — for then there would be no sacriﬁce of works at all. Similarly the sacriﬁce of knowledge does not mean that you painfully and resolutely make yourself a fool for the sake of the Lord. Sacriﬁce means an inner offering to the Divine and the real spiritual sacriﬁce is a very joyful thing. Otherwise, one is only trying to make oneself ﬁt and has not yet begun the real yajna. It is because your mind is struggling with your vital, the unwilling animal, and asking it to allow itself to be immolated that there is the pain and struggle.


Sri Aurobindo: If the spiritual will (or psychic) were more in the front then you would not be lamenting over the loss of the ghee and butter and curds thrown into the Fire or trying to have a last lick at it before casting it. The only difﬁculty would be about bringing down the gods fully enough (a progressive labour), not about lamentations over the ghee. By the way, do you think that the Mother or myself or others who have taken up the spiritual life had not enjoyed life and that it is therefore that the Mother was able to speak of a joyous sacriﬁce to the Divine as the true spirit of spiritual sacriﬁce? Or do you think we spent the preliminary stages in longings for the lost ﬂeshpots of Egypt and that it was only later on we felt the joy of the spiritual sacriﬁce? Of course we did not; we and many others had no difﬁculty on the score of giving up anything we thought necessary to give up and no hankerings afterwards.


Sri Aurobindo: Your rule is as usual a stiff rule that does not at all apply generally.    Sacriﬁce depends on the inner attitude. If one has nothing outward to sacriﬁce, one has always oneself to give.  The doctrines of Ahimsa and non-violence and altruism are early steps on the road to spiritual knowledge — but once advanced on the road what is true behind them takes its place, as a thread in the complex weft of spiritual truth and feeling, not as a rigid ethical rule or all-swallowing dogma.


Sri Aurobindo: The Manifestation here is too complex in its concealed Unity for such mental or emotional formulas to be unerring guides.   The impersonal Truth, precisely because it is impersonal, can contain quite opposite things. There is a truth in Ahimsa, there is a truth in Destruction also. I do not teach that you should go on killing everybody every day as a spiritual dharma. I say that destruction can be done when it is part of the Divine work commanded by the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Non-violence is better than violence as a rule, and still sometimes violence may be the right thing.  I consider dharma as relative; unity with the Divine and action from the Divine Will the highest way. Buddha did not aim at action in the world, but at cessation from the world-existence.  For that he found the eightfold Path a necessary preparatory discipline and so proclaimed it.  It [] had nothing to do with the Yuga [ ], but with the path towards liberation found by Buddha.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many paths and all need not be one and the same in their teaching.    Destruction in itself is neither good nor evil. It is a fact of Nature, a necessity in the play of forces as things are in this world. The Light destroys the Darkness and the Powers of Darkness, and that is not a movement of Ignorance!


Sri Aurobindo: It all depends on the character of the destruction and the forces that enter into it. All dread of ﬁre or other violent forces should be overcome. For dread shows a weakness — the free spirit can stand fearless before even the biggest forces of Nature.   This world is so arranged that it is not possible to live without some destruction of life — so for this there need be no remorse.  Only one should not destroy life wantonly or inﬂict needless suffering on animals or any living things.


Sri Aurobindo:   I feel inclined to back out of the arena or take refuge in the usual saving formula, “There is much to be said on both sides.”  Your view is no doubt correct from the common-sense or what might be called the “human” point of view. Krishnaprem takes the standpoint that we must not only consider the temporary good to humanity, but certain inner laws.


Sri Aurobindo: He thinks the harm, violence or cruelty to other beings is not compensated and cannot be justiﬁed by some physical good to a section of humanity or even to humanity as a whole; such methods awake, in his opinion, a sort of Karmic reaction apart from the moral harm to the men who do these things. He is also of the opinion that the cause of disease is psychic, that is to say, subjective and the direction should be towards curing the inner causes much more than patching up by physical means. These are ideas that have their truth also. I fully recognise the psychic law and methods and their preferability, but the ordinary run of humanity is not ready for that rule and, while it is so, doctors and their physical methods will be there. I have also supported justiﬁable violence on justiﬁable occasions, e.g., Kurukshetra and the war against Hitler and all he means.


Sri Aurobindo: The question then, from this middle point of view, about the immediate question is whether this violence is justiﬁable and the occasion justiﬁable. I back out.  War and conquest are part of the economy of vital Nature, it is no use blaming this or that people for doing it — everybody does it who has the power and the chance. China who now complains was herself an imperialist and colonising country through all the centuries in which Japan kept religiously within her own borders. If it were not proﬁtable, I suppose nobody would do it.


Sri Aurobindo: England has grown rich on the plundered wealth of India. France depends for many things on her African colonies. Japan needs an outlet for her overabundant population and safe economic markets nearby. Each is pushed by forces that use the minds of rulers and peoples to fulﬁl themselves — unless human nature changes no amount of moralising will prevent it.   There has been almost continuous war in the world — it is as in the history of the Roman Republic when the gates of the temple of Janus were closed only once or twice in its many centuries — a sign that the Republic was at peace with all the world.


Sri Aurobindo: There have been in modern times long intervals between long wars, but small ones have been generally going on somewhere or another.  Man is a quarrelling and ﬁghting animal and so long as he is so how can there be peace?  It is a world which has emerged from the Inconscient and these things [] are results of the imperfect working of the human mind which, being born into the ignorant life and matter, has to learn by effort and experience. Ignorance and ego have to be outgrown before there can be a true utilisation of the resources of Nature.  Why should earthquakes occur by some wrong movement of man?


Sri Aurobindo: When man was not there, did not earthquakes occur? If he were blotted out by poison gas or otherwise, would they cease? Earthquakes are a perturbation in Nature due to some pressure of forces; frequency of earthquakes may coincide with a violence of upheavals in human life but the upheavals of earth and human life are both results of a general clash or pressure of forces, one is not the cause of the other.  Family, society, country are a larger ego — they are not the Divine. One can work for them and say that one is working for the Divine only if one is conscious of the Divine Adesh to act for that purpose or of the Divine Force working within one.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise it is only an idea of the mind identifying country etc. with the Divine.     I suppose each man makes or tries to make his own organisation of life out of the mass of possibilities the forces present to him.  Self (physical self) and family are the building most make — to earn, to create a family and maintain it, perhaps to get some position in the present means of life one chooses, in business, the profession etc., etc.


Sri Aurobindo: Country or humanity are usually added to that by a minority. A few take up some ideal and follow it as the mainstay of their life. It is only the very religious who try to make God the centre of their life — that too rather imperfectly, except for a few. None of these things are secure or certain, even the last being certain only if it is followed with an absoluteness which only a few are willing to give. The life of the Ignorance is a play of forces through which man seeks his way and all depends on his growth through experience to the point at which he can grow out of it into something else.


Sri Aurobindo: That something else is in fact a new consciousness — whether a new consciousness beyond the earthly life or a new consciousness within it.    I don’t remember the context; but I suppose he [ Yogic Sadhan] 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.     Idealising is a pastime of the mind — except for the few who are passionately determined to make the ideal real. Buddha is in Nirvana and his wife and child are there too perhaps, so it is easy to praise his spiritual greatness and courage — but for living people with living relatives a similar action is monstrous.


Sri Aurobindo: They ought to be satisﬁed with praising Buddha and take care not to follow his example.   The tendency you speak of, to leave the family and social life for the spiritual life, has been traditional in India for the last 2000 years and more — chieﬂy among men, it touches only a very small number of women. It must be remembered that Indian social life has subordinated almost entirely the individual to the family. Men and women do not marry according to their free will; their marriages are mostly arranged for them while they are still children. Not only so, but the mould of society has been long of an almost iron ﬁxity putting each individual in his place and expecting him to conform to it.


Sri Aurobindo: You speak of issues and a courageous solution, but in this life there are no problems and issues and no call for a solution — a courageous solution is only possible where there is freedom of the personal will; but where the only solution (if one remains in this life) is submission to the family will, there can be nothing of that kind.  It is a secure life and can be happy if one accommodates oneself to it and has no unusual aspirations beyond it or is fortunate in one’s environment; but it has no remedy for or escape from incompatibilities or any kind of individual frustration ; it leaves little room for initiative or free movement or any individualism. The only outlet for the individual is his inner spiritual or religious life and the recognised escape is the abandonment of the, the family life, by some kind of Sannyasa. The Sannyasi, the Vaishnava Vairagi or the Brahmachari are free; they are dead to the family and can live according to the dictates of the inner spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Only if they enter into an order or asram, they have to abide by the rules of the order, but that is their own choice, not a responsibility which has been laid on them without their choice. Society recognised this door of escape from itself; religion sanctioned the idea that distaste for the social or worldly life was a legitimate ground for taking up that of the recluse or religious wanderer. But this was mainly for men; women, except in old times among the Buddhists who had their convents and in later times among the Vaishnavas, had little chance of such an escape unless a very strong spiritual impulse drove them which would take no denial. As for the wife and children left behind by the Sannyasi, there was little difﬁculty, for the joint family was there to take up or rather to continue their maintenance.  At present what has happened is that the old framework remains, but modern ideas have brought a condition of inadaptation, of unrest, the old family system is breaking up and women are seeking in more numbers the same freedom of escape as men have always had in the past.


Sri Aurobindo: That would account for the cases you have come across — but I don’t think the number of such cases can be as yet at all considerable, it is quite a new phenomenon; the admission of women to Asrams is itself a novelty.  The extreme unhappiness of a mental and vital growth which does not ﬁt in with the surroundings, of marriages imposed that are unsuitable and where there is no meeting-point between husband and wife, of an environment hostile and intolerant of one’s inner life and on the other hand the innate tendency of the Indian mind to seek a refuge in the spiritual or religious escape will sufﬁciently account for the new development. If society wants to prevent it, it must itself change. As to individuals, each case must be judged on its own merits; there is too much complexity in the problem and too much variation of nature, position, motives for a general rule.  Whatever one does must be from the highest spontaneous inner urge in oneself.


Sri Aurobindo: So long as the urge is towards philanthropy, Gandhism etc., he has to follow that — to follow the way of spiritual endeavour he must have the need, the distinct call in himself — not merely a mental recognition but the soul’s call.    Perhaps you could write (in Bengali) something to him about the true object of the Yoga — especially on two points:   (1) The object is not philanthropy but to ﬁnd the Divine, to enter into the Divine Consciousness and ﬁnd one’s true being (which is not the ego) in the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: (2) The cannot be conquered by; even if it succeeds to some extent, it only keeps them down but does not destroy them, often compression only increases their force. It is by puriﬁcation through the Divine Consciousness entering into the egoistic nature and changing it that the thing can be done.  As for accepting him, it depends on his capacity to open himself to the Inﬂuence and receive it. If he likes to try, he can, but he will not succeed unless he is entirely in earnest. There is something in him that can turn to the Divine, but there is also much in his nature that may resist.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only if he gives himself from deep within and is absolutely persevering in the Way that he can succeed.   Give him some idea of the central process of the Yoga, especially opening to the working of the Divine Power and rejection of all that is of the lower nature.  The idea of usefulness to humanity is the old confusion due to secondhand ideas imported from the West. Obviously, to be “useful” to humanity there is no need of Yoga; everyone who leads the human life is useful to humanity in one way or another.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life.  But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.


Sri Aurobindo:   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, 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.


Sri Aurobindo: Nor is there any question (I mean in my own remarks) of philanthropic service; so neither nor 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   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 the cosmic and the individual — not only Nirvana or the Beyond but Life and the All. It is that I stress everywhere.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.     Today a Kanchenjunga of correspondence has fallen on my head, so I could not write about humanity and its progress.


Sri Aurobindo: Were not the later views of Lowes Dickinson greyed over by the sickly cast of a disappointed idealism? I have not myself an exaggerated respect for humanity and what it is — but to say that there has been no progress is as much an exaggerated pessimism as the rapturous hallelujahs of the nineteenth century to a progressive humanity were an exaggerated optimism.  I shall manage to read through the chapter you sent me, though how I manage to ﬁnd time for these things is a standing miracle and a signal proof of a Divine Providence.  Yes, the “progress” you are making is of the genuine kind — the signs are recognisable. And after all the best way to make humanity progress is to move on oneself — that may sound either individualistic or egoistic, but it isn’t; it is only common sense.


Sri Aurobindo: .     It is no use entertaining these feelings. One has to see what the world is without becoming bitter — for the bitterness comes from one’s own ego and its disappointed expectations.


Sri Aurobindo: If one wants the victory of the Divine, one must achieve it in oneself ﬁrst.  All this insistence upon action is absurd if one has not the light by which to act. Yoga must include life and not exclude it does not mean that we are bound to accept life as it is with all its stumbling ignorance and misery and the obscure confusion of human will and reason and impulse and instinct which it expresses. The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush everything can be put right; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of the illusion under which they labour. Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that the true basis of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule.


Sri Aurobindo: But within does not mean some quarter inch behind the surface. One must go deep and ﬁnd the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be instead of a blind and always repeated confused blur of the inadequate and imperfect thing we were. The choice is between remaining in the old jumble and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the godhead within and without us.    I had never a very great conﬁdence in’s yoga-turn getting the better of his activism — he has two strong ties that prevent it, ambition and need to act and lead in the vital and in the mind a mental idealism — these two things are the great fosterers of illusion.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism — one has to see the real value of the things that are — which is very little, except as steps in evolution. Then one can either follow the spiritual static path of rest and release or the spiritual dynamic path of a greater truth to be brought down into life.  But otherwise —  The dynamic aspect of the Divine is the Supreme Brahman, not the Gods. The Gods are Personalities and Powers of the dynamic Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: You speak as if the evolution were the sole creation; the creation or manifestation is very vast and contains many planes and worlds that existed before the evolution, all different in character and with different kinds of beings. The fact of being prior to the evolution does not make them undifferentiated. The world of the Asuras is prior to the evolution, so are the worlds of the mental, vital or subtle physical Devas — but these beings are all different from each other. The great Gods belong to the Overmind plane; in the Supermind they are uniﬁed as aspects of the Divine, in the Overmind they appear as separate personalities.  Any godhead can descend by emanation to the physical plane and associate himself with the evolution of a human being with whose line of manifestation he is in afﬁnity.


Sri Aurobindo: But these are things which cannot be very easily understood by the mind, because the mind has too rigid an idea of personality — the difﬁculty only disappears when one enters into a more ﬂexible consciousness above where one is nearer to the experience of One in all and All in one.  The word soul has various meanings according to the context; it may mean the Purusha supporting the formation of Prakriti which we call a being, though the proper word would be rather a becoming; it may mean on the other hand speciﬁcally the psychic being in an evolutionary creature like man; it may mean the spark of the Divine which has been put into Matter by the descent of the Divine into the material world and which upholds all evolving formations here. There is and can be no psychic being in a non-evolutionary creature like the Asura; there can be none in a God who does not need one for his existence. But what the God has is a Purusha and a Prakriti or Energy of nature of that Purusha. If any being of the typal worlds wants to evolve he has to come down to earth and take a human body and accept to share in the evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: It is because they do not want to do this that the vital beings try to possess men so that they may enjoy the materialities of physical life without bearing the burden of the evolution or the process of conversion in which it culminates. I hope this is clear and solves the difﬁculty.    The three stages you speak of are stages not of evolution but of the involution of the Divine in Matter. The Devas and Asuras are not evolved in Matter; for the typal being only a Purusha with its Prakriti is necessary — this Purusha may put out a mental and vital Purusha to represent it and according as it is centred in one or another it belongs to the mental or vital world.


Sri Aurobindo: That is all.  There is no essential difference anywhere, for all is fundamentally the essential Divine; the difference is in the manifestation. Practically, we may say that the Jivatman is one of the divine Many and dependent on the One; the Atman is the One supporting the Many. The psychic being does not merge in the Jivatman, it becomes united with it so that there is no difference between the central being supporting the manifestation from above and the same being supporting the manifestation from within it, because the psychic being has become fully aware of the play of the Divine through it. What is called merging takes place in the Divine Consciousness when the Jivatman feels itself so one with the Divine that there is nothing else.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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,, .  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, , 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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, . 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.


Sri Aurobindo: “Powers and Personalities” simply describe different aspects of the same being; a Power is not necessarily impersonal and certainly it is not, as you suggest, — on the contrary it is a manifestation acting in the worlds of the divine manifestation.  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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 Ady¯a 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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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 Overmind plane) above the Gods”. 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 Ady¯a 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.  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.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus of the “ineffable Presence” 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.  This is what is termed the Ady¯a Shakti; she is the supreme 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.  The Gods are Personalities or Powers put forth by the Divine — they are therefore in front limited Emanations, although the full Divine is behind each of them.


Sri Aurobindo:   Of course, the gods exist — that is to say, there are Powers that stand above the world and transmit the divine workings. It is the physical mind which believes only in what is physical that denies them. There are also beings of other worlds — gods and Asuras etc.   There are Gods everywhere on all the planes.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Gods are in the universal Self — if identiﬁed with the universal Self one can feel their presence there.    While the Gods cannot be transformed, for they are typal and not evolutionary beings, they can come for conversion — that is to say, to give up their own ideas and outlook on things and conform themselves to the higher Will and supramental Truth of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:  The higher beings are not likely to be in disharmony with each other as they are not subject to the lower ignorance.   The Gods have their own enjoyments, though they may not be of a material character.     There are no planes of manifestation without forms — for without form creation or manifestation cannot be complete.


Sri Aurobindo: But the supraphysical planes are not bound to the forms like the physical. The forms there are expressive, not determinative. What is important on the vital plane is the force or feeling and the form expresses it. A vital being has a characteristic form but he can vary it or mask his true form under others. What is primary on the mental plane is the perception, the idea, the mental signiﬁcance and the form expresses that and these mental forms too can vary — there can be many forms expressing an idea in different ways or on different sides of the idea.


Sri Aurobindo: Form exists but it is more plastic and variable than in physical nature.  As to the Gods, man can build forms which they will accept; but these forms too are inspired into man’s mind from the planes to which the God belongs. All creation has the two sides, the formed and the formless; the Gods too are formless and yet have forms, but a Godhead can take many forms, here Maheshwari, there Pallas Athene. Maheshwari herself has many forms in her lesser manifestations, Durga, Uma, Parvati, Chandi etc. The Gods are not limited to human forms — man also has not always seen them in human forms only.


Sri Aurobindo: The natives of the Overmind are Gods. Naturally the Gods rule the cosmos.     The Overmind is the world of the Gods and the Gods are not merely Powers, but have Forms also.


Sri Aurobindo:   In the Overmind the Gods are still separated existences.    Beyond the Overmind (in the supramental nearest the Overmind for instance) the Gods are eternal in their principle, but not in their forms and separate activities; they are there simply aspects of the One.


Sri Aurobindo: If you meet a Godhead there, it is not as a separate Person; you feel only the Divine having a particular face, as it were, and relation with you for a certain purpose.   The Formateurs of the Overmind have shaped nothing evil — it is the lower forces that receive from the Overmind and distort its forces.  There are many forms of Agni, — the solar ﬁre, the vaidyuta ﬁre and the nether ﬁre are one Trinity — the ﬁvefold ﬁre is part of the Vedic symbolism of sacriﬁce.


Sri Aurobindo: Vayu and Indra are cosmic godheads presiding over the action of cosmic principles — they are not the manomaya purusha or pranamaya purusha in each man. You have a mental being or purusha in you and a vital being or purusha, but you cannot say that you are in your mind Indra or in your vital Vayu. The Purusha is an essential being supporting the play of Prakriti — the Godhead (Indra, Vayu) is a dynamic being manifested in Prakriti for the works of the plane to which he belongs. There is an immense difference.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, Mitra is rather a combination of the two powers [ ].    I indicate the psychological powers which they [] bring with them:


Sri Aurobindo: Mitra — Harmony.  Varuna — Wideness.   Aryaman — Power, Tapasya.


Sri Aurobindo: Brihaspati — Wisdom (Word and Knowledge).  Vishnu — Cosmic Consciousness.  Vayu — Life.  Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva are only three Powers and Personalities of the One Cosmic Godhead.


Sri Aurobindo:   Brahma is the Power of the Divine that stands behind formation and creation.     As for Vishnu being the creator, all the three Gods are often spoken of as creating the universe — even Shiva who is by tradition the Destroyer.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no particular connection between Shiva and the Overmind — the Overmind is the higher station of all the Gods.


Sri Aurobindo: Mahashiva means a greater manifestation than that ordinarily worshipped as Shiva — the creative dance of a greater Divine manifesting Power.     At’s conscientious hesitations between Krishna and Shakti and Shiva I could not help indulging in a smile. If a man is attracted by one form or two forms only of the Divine, it is all right, — but if he is drawn to several at a time he need not torment himself over it.


Sri Aurobindo: A man of some development has necessarily several sides in his nature and it is quite natural that different aspects should draw or govern different personalities in him — he can very well accept them all and harmonise them in the One Divine and the One Adya Shakti of whom all are the manifestations.   Shiva is the Lord of Tapas. The power is the power of Tapas.  Krishna as a godhead is the Lord of Ananda, Love and Bhakti; as an incarnation, he manifests the union of wisdom (Jnana) and works and leads the earth-evolution through this towards union with the Divine by Ananda, Love and Bhakti.  The Devi is the Divine Shakti — the Consciousness and Power of the Divine, the Mother and Energy of the worlds.


Sri Aurobindo: All powers are hers. Sometimes Devi-power may mean the power of the universal World-Force; but this is only one side of the Shakti.     Mahakali and Kali are not the same, Kali is a lesser form.


Sri Aurobindo: Mahakali in the higher planes appears usually with the golden colour.     Ganesh is the Power that removes obstacles by the force of Knowledge — Kartikeya represents victory over the hostile Powers. Of course the names given are human, but the Gods exist.


Sri Aurobindo:   Ganesh (among other things) is the devata of spiritual Knowledge — so as you are getting this knowledge, you saw yourself in this form, identiﬁed with Ganesh.  The hostile forces exist and have been known to Yogic experience ever since the days of the Veda and Zoroaster in Asia (and the mysteries of Egypt and Chaldea and the Cabbala) and in Europe also from old times. These things of course cannot be felt or known so long as one lives in the ordinary mind and its ideas and perceptions — for there there are only two categories of inﬂuences recognisable, the ideas and feelings and actions of oneself and others and the play of environment and physical forces. But once one begins to get the inner view of things, it is different.


Sri Aurobindo: One begins to experience that all is an action of forces, forces of Prakriti psychological as well as physical which play upon our nature — and these are conscious forces or are supported by a consciousness or consciousnesses behind. One is in the midst of a big universal working and it is impossible any longer to explain everything as the result of one’s own sole and independent personality. You yourself have at one time written that your crises of despair etc. came upon you as if thrown on you and worked themselves out without your being able to determine or put an end to them. That means an action of universal forces and not merely an independent action of your own personality, though it is something in your nature of which they make use. But you are not conscious, and others also, of this intervention and pressure at its source for the reason I state.


Sri Aurobindo: Those in the Asram who have developed the inner view of things on the vital plane have plenty of experience of the hostile forces.  However, you need not personally concern yourself with them so long as they remain incognito.    It is true that all comes from the Divine and it is true also that a Divine Presence and a Divine Will is behind all that happens and leads the world towards a divine goal.  At the same time it is also taught in the Gita that this world is a world of obscurity and ignorance and to attain to the Divine one must overcome certain forces of Nature, such as Desire, which the Gita calls the enemy difﬁcult to overcome.


Sri Aurobindo: It is in this sense that we speak of hostile forces — those which stand in the way of coming out of the Ignorance and attaining to the consciousness of the Divine.  It is again true that those who have a complete and living faith in the Divine and a perfect sincerity in their vision of the Divine everywhere and a pure sattwic nature need not trouble themselves about the hostile forces — for from them the forces of the Ignorance fall back and cannot take possession of their nature.  The teaching about the hostile forces (Asuri Rakshasi forces) is necessary for those who have a divided consciousness or a more rajasic temperament — for if they are not on their guard they may fall into the control of undesirable forces of Desire and Ego —   Yes, they [] have their own world and, if they kept to it, there could be no objection to their existence. There is a world that is natural to them and has its own rhythm, its own dharma — just as the lesser gods have theirs.


Sri Aurobindo: But, they want to dominate the evolution and for that purpose they have taken their station in the vital worlds which inﬂuence the earth nature and give it its materials for life.  They were created or rather manifested like other orders of being as a type or several types expressing some cosmic stress, some possibility in the Inﬁnite, the expression of a certain kind of consciousness and force. When the work that they are permitted to do on earth, the work of negation, perversion, miscreation is ﬁnished they will be destroyed here, but there is no reason to suppose that they may not exist in their own universe, as it were, outside the system here. For here their presence is an Adharma, a disturbance of the true harmony and natural evolution there should be on the earth plane; it is an intrusion and not a natural presence.  How did the Ignorance come into being out of Sachchidananda?


Sri Aurobindo: Or ego? The Hostile Forces in their own world embody ego self-fulﬁlled and having its own free play — ego on earth is not self-fulﬁlled and not meant to be, it is in conﬂict with a cosmic Force greater than itself and is only a temporary expedient for bringing forth individuality out of the indeterminateness of just conscient life and inconscient Matter.    If there were no hostile forces and there were still the evolutionary world, there could be ignorance still but not perversity in the ignorance. All would be a partial truth acting through imperfect instruments but for the best purposes of this or that stage in a progressive manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: The mere intensity of the force does not show that it is a bad power; the Divine Force often works with a great intensity.  Everything depends on the nature of the force and its working; what does it do, what seems to be its purpose? If it works to purify or open the system, or brings with it light or peace or prepares the change of the thought, ideas, feelings, character in the sense of a turning towards a higher consciousness, then it is the right force. If it is dark or obscure or perturbs the being with rajasic or egoistic suggestions or excites the lower nature, then it is an adverse Force.   The hostiles have themselves bodies though not of a gross physical kind — they see, but with a subtle seeing that includes not only bodies, but movements of forces, thoughts, feelings.


Sri Aurobindo:   Very great [] — it is their occult powers and knowledge of occult processes that make them so strong and effective.


Sri Aurobindo: The lesser forces of Light are usually too much insistent on seeking for Truth to make effectivity their logic or their rule — the hostiles are too pragmatic to care for Truth, they want only success. As for the greater Forces (e.g. Overmind) they are dynamic and try always to make consciousness effective, but they insist on consciousness, while the hostiles care nothing for that — the more unconscious you are and their automatic tool, the better they are pleased — for it is unconsciousness that gives them their chance.  The universe is certainly or has been up to now in appearance a rough and wasteful game with the dice of chance loaded in favour of the Powers of darkness, the Lords of obscurity, falsehood, death and suffering. But we have to take it as it is and ﬁnd out — if we reject the way out of the old sages — the way to conquer. Spiritual experience shows that there is behind it all a wide terrain of equality, peace, calm, freedom, and it is only by getting into it that we can have the eye that sees and hope to gain the power that conquers.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] is the Power that keeps up ignorance and darkness in the world — it can only be destroyed when mankind is no longer in love with ignorance and darkness. Each sadhak has to push it out of contact with his being. When it has gone from him, then there will be no longer any serious difﬁculties in his sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo:  The hostile Forces are Powers of Darkness who are in revolt against the Light and the Truth and want to keep this world under their rule in darkness and ignorance. Whenever anyone wants to reach the Truth, to realise the Divine, they stand in the way as much as possible. But what they are specially against is the work the Mother and myself are doing, to bring down the Light here into the earth and establish the Truth — that would mean their own expulsion. So they always try to destroy the work as a whole and to spoil the sadhana of each sadhak. It is not only you who are attacked: all are attacked more or less — especially when there is a great progress, these forces try to interfere.


Sri Aurobindo: The only way to avoid it is to be entirely turned towards the Mother and to refuse any opportunity to these Forces.   The evil forces are perversions of the Truth by the Ignorance — in any complete transformation they must disappear and the Truth behind them be delivered. In this way they can be said to be transformed by destruction.  The Asuras and Rakshasas etc. do not belong to the earth, but to supraphysical worlds; but they act upon the earth life and dispute the control of human life and character and action with the Gods. They are the Powers of Darkness combating the Powers of Light.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes they possess men in order to act through them, sometimes they take birth in a human body. When their use in the play is over, they will either change or disappear or no longer seek to intervene in the earth-play.    These things [] are possible but they do not usually happen — because it is difﬁcult for beings of the subtle worlds to materialise to such an extent or for a long time. They prefer to act by inﬂuencing human beings, using them as instruments or taking possession of a human mind and body.


Sri Aurobindo:   There are two kinds of Asuras — one kind were divine in their origin but have fallen from their divinity by self-will and opposition to the intention of the Divine: they are spoken of in the Hindu scriptures as the former or earlier gods; these can be converted and their conversion is indeed necessary for the ultimate purposes of the universe. But the ordinary Asura is not of this character, is not an evolutionary but a typal being and represents a ﬁxed principle of the creation which does not evolve or change and is not intended to do so. These Asuras, as also the other hostile beings, Rakshasas, Pisachas and others resemble the devils of the Christian tradition and oppose the divine intention and the evolutionary purpose in the human being; they don’t change the purpose in them for which they exist which is evil, but have to be destroyed like the evil.


Sri Aurobindo: The Asura has no soul, no psychic being which has to evolve to a higher state; he has only an ego and usually a very powerful ego; he has a mind, sometimes even a highly intellectualised mind; but the basis of his thinking and feeling is vital and not mental, at the service of his desire and not of truth. He is a formation assumed by the life-principle for a particular kind of work and not a divine formation or a soul.    Yes. Some kinds of Asuras are very religious, very fanatical about their religion, very strict about rules of ethical conduct.


Sri Aurobindo: Others of course are just the opposite. There are others who use spiritual ideas without believing in them to give them a perverted twist and delude the sadhaka. It is what Shakespeare described as the Devil quoting Scripture for his own purpose.  At present what they are most doing is to try to raise up the obscurity and weakness of the most physical mind, vital, material parts to prevent the progress or fulﬁlment of the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: As to Asuras, not many of them have shown signs of repentance or possibility of conversion up to now. It is not surprising that they should be powerful in a world of Ignorance, for they have only to persuade people to follow the established bent of their lower nature, while the Divine calls always for a change of nature. It is not to be wondered at that the Asura has an easier task and more momentary success in his combinations. But that temporary success does not bind the future.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is the movements of the lower nature that get puriﬁed. The Asuras themselves are not so easily transformed.    The Asuras are really the dark side of the mental, or more strictly, of the vital mind plane.


Sri Aurobindo: This mind is the very ﬁeld of the Asuras.  Their main characteristic is egoistic strength and struggle, which refuse the higher law. The Asura has self-control, and intelligence, but all that for the sake of his ego. On the lower vital plane the corresponding forces we call the Rakshasas which represent violent passions and inﬂuences. There are also other kinds of beings on the vital plane which are called the Pisachas and Pramathas.


Sri Aurobindo: They manifest more or less in the physico-vital.  On the physical plane the corresponding forces are obscure beings, more forces than beings, what the Theosophists call the elementals. They are not strongly individualised beings like the Rakshasas and Asuras, but ignorant and obscure forces working in the subtle physical plane. What we in Sanskrit call the Bhutas mostly come under this class. But there are two kinds of elementals, the one mischievous and the other not.


Sri Aurobindo: There are no Asuras on the higher planes where the Truth prevails, except in the Vedic sense — “the Divine in its strength”.  The mental and vital Asuras are only a deviation of that power.     The Gandharvas are of the vital plane but they are vital Gods, not Asuras.


Sri Aurobindo: Many Asuras are beautiful in appearance and can carry even a splendour or light with them. It is the Rakshasas, Pisachas, etc. who are ugly or evil in appearance.     Some of the vital beings are very intelligent — but they do not make friends with the Light — they only try to avoid destruction and wait their time.


Sri Aurobindo:   Very few [] come upon earth — they prefer to get hold of human beings and make them their instruments. They do not evolve. They have no evolved or evolving psychic being and they dread to incarnate just because they would then be obliged to progress and evolve the psychic.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no particular number [ ] — but sometimes there are particular vital beings that attach themselves to a man if he accepts them.  Surely for the earth consciousness it is so [ ]. Consider the obscurity here and what it would be if the Divine did not directly intervene and the Light of Lights did not break out of the obscurity — for that is the meaning of the manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo:   An Incarnation is the Divine Consciousness and Being manifesting through a physical body. It is possible from any plane.    It is the omnipresent cosmic Divine who supports the action of the universe; if there is an Incarnation, it does not in the least diminish the cosmic Presence and the cosmic action in the three or thirty million universes.


Sri Aurobindo:   The descending Power chooses its own place, body, time for the manifestation; something of that is foreseen by those who have vision but not the whole.


Sri Aurobindo: An Avatar is supposed to be from birth. Each soul at its birth takes from the cosmic mind, life and matter to shape a new external personality for himself. What prevents the Divine from doing the same? What is continued from birth to birth is the inner being.


Sri Aurobindo:   Each being in a new birth prepares a new mind, life and body — otherwise John Smith would always be John Smith and would have no chance of being Piyush Kanti Ghose. Of course inside there are old personalities contributing to the new lila — but I am speaking of the new visible personality, the outer man, mental, vital, physical. It is the psychic being that keeps the link from birth to birth and makes all the manifestations of the same person. It is therefore to be expected that the Avatar should take on a new personality each time, a personality suited for the new times, work, surroundings.


Sri Aurobindo: In my own view of things, however, the new personality has a series of non-Avatar births behind him, births in which the intermediate evolution has been followed and assisted from age to age.     If they [] are shams, they have no value for others or for any true effect. If they have no value for others or for any true effect, they are perfectly irrational and unreal and meaningless.


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if the sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real. A sham or falsehood cannot help. They must be as real as the struggles and sufferings of men themselves — the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them.  Otherwise his assumption of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no value. It is strange that you cannot understand or refuse to admit so simple and crucial a point.