Sri Aurobindo: Help her journey towards her place of rest by calm thoughts and the call to the Divine Help to aid her upon it. Grief too long continued does not help but delays the journey of the departed soul. Do not brood on your loss, but think only of her spiritual welfare.   The telegram announces the passing away of your husband.  All has been done that could be done to keep him in life.


Sri Aurobindo: What has happened must now be accepted calmly as the thing decreed and best for his soul’s progress from life to life though not the best in human eyes which look only at the present and at outside appearance. For the spiritual seeker death is only a passage from one form of life to another, and none is dead but only departed. Look at it as that and shaking from you all reactions of vital grief — they cannot help him in his journey, — pursue steadfastly the path to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing to grieve about as death means only passing over to another country — to which you probably go very often when you are asleep.  That is, so long as one has attachment — one ought to look at it like that. But all attachment to past ties should be overcome.    Of course, that is the real fact — death is only a shedding of the body, not a cessation of the personal existence.


Sri Aurobindo: A man is not dead because he goes into another country and changes his clothes to suit that climate.  There is after death a period in which one passes through the vital world and lives there for a time. It is only the ﬁrst part of this transit that can be dangerous or painful; in the rest one works out, under certain surroundings, a remnant of the vital desires and instincts which one had in the body. As soon as one is tired of these and able to go beyond, the vital sheath is dropped and the soul, after a little time needed to get rid of some mental survivals, passes into a state of rest in the psychic world and remains there till the next life on earth.  One can help the departed soul by one’s good will or by occult means if one has the knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: The one thing that one should not do is to hold them back by sorrow for them or longings or anything else that would pull them nearer to earth or delay their journey to their place of rest.     It may happen to some not to realise for a little time that they are dead, especially if the death has been unforeseen and sudden, but it cannot be said that it happens to all or to most — some may enter into a state of semi-unconsciousness or obsession by a dark inner condition, created by their state of mind at death, in which they realise nothing of where they are etc., others are quite conscious of the passage.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true that the departing being in the vital body lingers for some time near the body or the scene of life very often for as many as eight days and in the ancient religions mantras and other means were used for the severance.   Even after the severance from the body a very earthbound nature or one full of strong physical desires may linger long in the earthatmosphere up to a maximum period extended to three years.  Afterwards it passes to the vital worlds, proceeding on its journey which must sooner or later bring it to the psychic rest till the next life. It is true also that sorrow and mourning for the dead impedes its progress by keeping it tied to the earth-atmosphere and pulling it back from its passage.


Sri Aurobindo:  After death the soul passes in a little while or at once from the earth atmosphere and goes into the vital worlds where it remains for a time until it is ready to leave it. Thus it passes on its way till it is ready to pass into the psychic world where it rests until it is ready for a new birth.   After death one passes through various vital and mental planes till the psychic being drops its vital and mental sheaths and enters into rest on the psychic plane till the time comes for rebirth.   At the time of death the being goes out of the body through the head; it goes out in the subtle body and goes to different planes of existence for a short time until it has gone through certain experiences which are the result of its earthly existence.  Afterwards it reaches the psychic world where it rests in a kind of sleep until it is time for it to start a new life on earth.


Sri Aurobindo: That is what happens usually — but there are some beings who are more developed and do not follow this course.     That is a superstition [ naraka () ]. People after death pass through certain vital and mental worlds or through certain psychological states which are the results of their nature and action in life, afterwards they go to the psychic world and return to birth at a later time.


Sri Aurobindo:   When the Mother spoke of the continuance of the same trouble after death, she did not mean another life. At death you go out of this physical frame in another kind of body, not physical, and are the same person with the same consciousness. That is why to talk of dying as going to rest is an ignorance and why it is useless. The only real thing is to get rid of the old lower self and be reborn to the new higher one, which can only be done by a change within you.


Sri Aurobindo: That is what the Mother wants of you.  The psychic being at the time of death chooses what it will work out in the next birth and determines the character and conditions of the new personality. Life is for the evolutionary growth by experience in the conditions of the Ignorance till one is ready for the higher light.    The dying wish of the man is only something on the surface — it may be determined by the psychic and so help to shape the future but it does not determine the psychic’s choice.


Sri Aurobindo: That is something behind the veil. It is not the outer consciousness’s action that determines the inner process, but the other way round. Sometimes, however, there are signs or fragments of the inner action that come up on the surface, e.g. some people have a vision or remembrance of the circumstances of their past in a panoramic ﬂash at the time of death, that is the psychic’s review of the life before departing.   The psychic being’s choice at the time of death doesn’t work out the next formation of personality, it ﬁxes it. When it enters the psychic world, it begins to assimilate the essence of its experience and by that assimilation is formed the future psychic personality in accordance with the ﬁxation already made.


Sri Aurobindo: When this assimilation is over, it is ready for a new birth — but the less developed beings do not work out the whole thing for themselves, there are beings and forces of the higher world who have that work. Also when it comes to birth, it is not sure that the forces of the physical world will not come across the working out of what it wanted — its own new instrumentation may not be strong enough for that purpose; for there is the interaction of its own energies and the cosmic forces here. There may be frustration, diversion, a partial working out — many things may happen. All that is not a rigid machinery, it is a working out of complex forces. It may be added however that a developed psychic being is much more conscious in this transition and works much of it out itself.


Sri Aurobindo: The time depends also on the development and on a certain rhythm of the being — for some there is practically immediate rebirth, for others it takes longer, for some it may take centuries; but here again, once the psychic being is sufﬁciently developed, it is free to choose its own rhythm and its own intervals. The ordinary theories are too mechanical — and that is the case also with the idea of and and their results in the next life. There are certainly results of the energies put forth in a past life, but not on that rather infantile principle. A good man’s sufferings in this life would be a proof according to the orthodox theory that he had been a very great villain in his past life, a bad man’s prospering would be a proof that he had been quite angelic in his last visit to earth and sown a large crop of virtues and meritorious actions to reap this bumper crop of good fortune.  Too symmetrical to be true.


Sri Aurobindo: The object of birth being growth by experience, whatever reactions come to past deeds must be for the being to learn and grow, not as lollipops for the good boys of the class (in the past) and canings for the bad ones. The real sanction for good and ill is not good fortune for the one and bad fortune for the other, but this that good leads us towards a higher nature which is eventually lifted above suffering and ill pulls us towards the lower nature which remains always in the circle of suffering and evil.  The soul after it leaves the body travels through several states or planes until the psychic being has shed its temporary sheaths, then it reaches the psychic world where it rests in a kind of sleep till it is ready for reincarnation. What it keeps with it of the human experience in the end is only the essence of all that it has gone through, what it can use for its development.  This is the general rule, but it does not apply to exceptional cases or to very developed beings who have achieved a greater consciousness than the ordinary human level.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not the soul (the psychic being) that takes a lesser form [], it is some part of the manifested being, usually some part of the vital that does it, owing to some desire, afﬁnity, need of particular experience. This happens fairly often to the ordinary man.   After leaving the body, the soul, after certain experiences in other worlds, throws off its mental and vital personality and goes into rest to assimilate the essence of its past and prepare for a new life.  It is this preparation that determines the circumstances of the new birth and guides it in its reconstitution of a new personality and the choice of its materials.  The departed soul retains the memory of its past experiences only in their essence, not in their form or detail.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only if the soul brings back some past personality or personalities as part of its present manifestation that it is likely to remember the details of the past life. Otherwise, it is only by Yogadrishti that the memory comes.  There may be what seem to be retrograde movements [ ], but these are only like zigzag movements, not a real falling back, but a return on something not worked out so as to go on better afterwards.  The soul does not go back to the animal condition; but part of the vital personality may disjoin itself and join an animal birth to work out its animal propensities there.  There is no truth in the popular belief about the avaricious man becoming a serpent.


Sri Aurobindo: These are popular romantic superstitions.    The soul takes birth each time, and each time a mind, life and body are formed out of the materials of universal Nature, according to the soul’s past evolution and its need for the future.  When the body is dissolved, the vital goes into the vital plane and remains there for a time, but after a time the vital sheath disappears. The last to dissolve is the mental sheath.


Sri Aurobindo: Finally the soul or psychic being retires into the psychic world to rest there till a new birth is due.  This is the general course for ordinarily developed human beings. There are variations according to the nature of the individual and his development. For example, if the mental is strongly developed, then the mental being can remain; so also can the vital, provided they are organised by and centred around the true psychic being; they share the immortality of the psychic.  The soul gathers the essential element of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for farther experience.


Sri Aurobindo: It is really for the vital part of the being that and rites are done — to help the being to get rid of the vital vibrations which still attach it to the earth or to the vital worlds, so that it may pass quickly to its rest in the psychic peace.   The movement of the psychic being dropping its outer, its vital and mental sheaths on its way to the psychic plane, is its normal movement after death. But there can be any number of variations; one can return directly from the vital plane without passing on to farther and higher states, and there are cases of an almost immediate rebirth, sometimes even attended with a detailed memory of the events of the past life.  Hell and heaven are often imaginary states of the soul, or rather of the vital being, which it constructs about it after its passing. What is meant by hell is a painful passage through some vital world or a dolorous lingering there, as for instance in many cases of suicide where one remains surrounded by the forces of suffering and turmoil created by this unnatural and violent exit.


Sri Aurobindo: There are also, of course, real worlds of mind and vital worlds which are penetrated with joyful or dark experiences, and one may pass through these as the result of things formed in the nature which create the necessary afﬁnities. But the idea of reward or retribution is a crude and vulgar conception and we can disregard it as a mere popular error.  There is no rule of complete forgetfulness in the return of the soul to rebirth. There are, especially in childhood, many impressions of the past life which can be strong and vivid enough, but a materialising education and the overpowering inﬂuences of the environment must often, but not quite always, prevent their true nature from being recognised. There are even a number of people who have deﬁnite recollections of a past life.


Sri Aurobindo: But these things are discouraged by education and the atmosphere and cannot remain or develop; in most cases they are stiﬂed out of existence.  At the same time it must be noted that what the psychic being mainly carries away with it and brings back is ordinarily the essence and effect of the experiences it had in former lives, and not the details, so that you cannot expect the same coherent memory as one has of past happenings in the present existence.  A soul can go straight to the psychic world but that depends on the state of consciousness at the time of departure. If the psychic is in front at the time, this immediate transition is possible.  It does not depend on the acquisition of a mental and vital as well as a psychic immortality — those who have acquired that would rather have the power to move about in the different planes and even act on the physical world without being bound to it.


Sri Aurobindo: On the whole it may be said that there is no one rigid rule for these things; manifold variations are possible depending upon the consciousness, its energies, tendencies and formations, although there is a general framework and design into which all ﬁt and take their place.  It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit.  The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death — although it does not itself die, for it is immortal — from one state to another, from the earth-plane to other planes and back again to the earth-existence.


Sri Aurobindo: It goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being. This being supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil, showing something of its divine self only in so far as the imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulﬁlment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested consciousness than the mental human — it can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Till then, till it has reached the spiritual realisation, there is no reason why it should cease from birth, it cannot in fact so cease. If having reached the spiritual state, it wills to pass out of the terrestrial manifestation, it may indeed make such an exit, — but there is also possible a higher manifestation, in the Knowledge and not in the Ignorance.  Your question therefore does not arise. It is not the naked spirit, but the psychic being that goes to the psychic plane to rest till it is called again to another life.


Sri Aurobindo: There is therefore no need of a Force to compel it to take birth anew. It is in its nature something that is put forth from the Divine to support the evolution and it must do so till the Divine’s purpose in its evolution is accomplished. Karma is only a machinery, it is not the fundamental cause of terrestrial existence — it cannot be, for when the soul ﬁrst entered this existence, it had no Karma.  What again do you mean by “the all-veiling Maya” or by “losing all consciousness”? The soul cannot lose all consciousness, for its very nature is consciousness though not of the mental kind to which we give the name.


Sri Aurobindo: The consciousness is merely covered, not lost or abolished by the so-called Inconscience of material Nature and then by the half-conscious ignorance of mind, life and body. It manifests, as the individual mind and life and body grow, as much as may be of the consciousness which it holds in potentiality, manifests it in the outward instrumental nature as far as and in the way that is possible through these instruments and through the outer personality that has been prepared for it and by it — for both are true — for the present life.  I know nothing about any terrible suffering endured by the soul in the process of rebirth; popular beliefs even when they have some foundation are seldom enlightened and accurate.


Sri Aurobindo: 1. The psychic being stands behind mind, life and body, supporting them; so also the psychic world is not one world in the scale like the mental, vital or physical worlds, but stands behind all these and it is there that the souls evolving here retire for the time between life and life. If the psychic were only one principle in the rising order of body, life and mind on a par with the others and placed somewhere in the scale on the same footing as the others, it could not be the soul of all the rest, the divine element making the evolution of the others possible and using them as instruments for a growth through cosmic experience towards the Divine. So also the psychic world cannot be one among the other worlds to which the evolutionary being goes for supraphysical experience, it is a plane where it retires into itself for rest, for a spiritual assimilation of what it has experienced and for a replunging into its own fundamental consciousness and psychic nature.  2. For the few who go out of the Ignorance and enter into Nirvana, there is no question of their going straight up into higher worlds of manifestation.


Sri Aurobindo: Nirvana or Moksha is a liberated condition of the being, not a world — it is a withdrawal from the worlds and the manifestation. The analogy of Pitriyana and Devayana can hardly be mentioned in this connection.  3. The condition of the souls that retire into the psychic world is entirely static; each withdraws into himself and is not interacting with the others. When they come out of their trance, they are ready to go down into a new life, but meanwhile they do not act upon the earth life.


Sri Aurobindo: There are other beings, guardians of the psychic world, but they are concerned only with the psychic world itself and the return of the souls to reincarnation, not with the earth.  4. A being of the psychic world cannot get fused into the soul of a human being on earth. What happens sometimes is that a very advanced psychic being sometimes sends down an emanation which resides in a human being and prepares it until it is ready for the psychic being itself to enter into the life. This happens when some special work has to be done and the human vehicle prepared.


Sri Aurobindo: Such a descent produces a remarkable change of a sudden character in the personality and the nature.   5. Usually, a soul follows continuously the same line of sex.  If there are shiftings of sex, it is as a rule a matter of parts of the personality which are not central.


Sri Aurobindo: 6. As regards the stage at which the soul returning for rebirth enters the new body no rule can be laid down, for the circumstances vary with the individual. Some psychic beings get into relation with the birth-environment and the parents from the time of inception and determine the preparation of the personality and future in the embryo, others join only at the time of delivery, others even later on in the life and in these cases it is some emanation of the psychic being which upholds the life. It should be noted that the conditions of the future birth are determined fundamentally not during the stay in the psychic world but at the time of death — the psychic being then chooses what it should work out in the next terrestrial appearance and the conditions arrange themselves accordingly.


Sri Aurobindo: Note that the idea of rebirth and the circumstances of the new life as a reward or punishment for or is a crude human idea of “justice” which is quite unphilosophical and unspiritual and distorts the true intention of life. Life here is an evolution and the soul grows by experience, working out by it this or that in the nature, and if there is suffering, it is for the purpose of that working out, not as a judgment inﬂicted by God or Cosmic Law on the errors or stumblings which are inevitable in the Ignorance.    It is difﬁcult to give a positive answer to these questions, because no general rule can be laid down applicable to all.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind makes rigid rules or one rigid rule, but the Manifestation is in reality very plastic and various and many-sided. My answers therefore must not be taken as exhaustive of the subject or complete.   1. He [] can go wherever his aim was ﬁxed, into a state of Nirvana or one of the divine worlds and stay there or remain, wherever he may go, in contact with the earthmovement and return to it if his will is to help that movement.  This is doubtful [ ].


Sri Aurobindo: If originally he is not a being of the evolution but of some higher world, he could go back to that world. If he wants to go higher, it is logical that he should return to the ﬁeld of evolution so long as he has not evolved the consciousness proper to that higher plane. The orthodox idea that even the gods have to come to earth if they want salvation may be applied to this ascension also. If he is originally an evolutionary being (Ramakrishna’s distinction of the Jivakoti and Ishwarakoti may be extended to this also), he must proceed by the evolutionary path to either the negative withdrawal through Nirvana or some positive divine fulﬁlment in the increasing manifestation of Sachchidananda.  As to the impossibility of return [], that is a knotty question.


Sri Aurobindo: A divine being can always return — as Ramakrishna said, the Ishwarakoti can at will ascend or descend the stair between Birth and Immortality. For the others, it is probable that they may rest for a relative inﬁnity of time,, if that is the will in them, but a return cannot be barred out unless they have reached their highest possible status.   No [ ]. That is part of the evolutionary line only, not obligatory for divine returns.


Sri Aurobindo: 2. An advanced psychic being may mean here [ ] one who has arrived at the soul’s freedom and is immersed in the Divine — immersed does not mean abolished.  Such a being does not sleep in the psychic world, but may remain in his state of blissful immersion or come back for some purpose.  The word “descend” has various meanings according to the context — I used it here in the sense of the psychic being “coming down” into the human consciousness and body ready for it; that descent might be at the time of birth or before or it may come down later and occupy the personality it has prepared for itself.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not quite understand what are these personalities from above — it is the psychic being itself that takes up a body.   3. No, the psychic being cannot take up more than one body. There is only one psychic being for each human being, but the Beings of the higher planes, e.g. the Gods of the Overmind can manifest in more than one human body at a time by sending different emanations into different bodies.


Sri Aurobindo: These would be called Vibhutis of these Devatas.  4. These [] are not human souls nor is this an ofﬁce to which they are appointed nor are they functionaries — these are beings of the psychic plane pursuing their own natural activity in that plane. My word “guardians” [] was simply a phrase meant to indicate by an image or metaphor the nature of their action.  When there is a new birth one brings all that is necessary from past lives but also one gathers what is necessary from the earth consciousness and so too brings in new elements as one develops.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is a little difﬁcult to explain. When one gets a new body, the nature which inhabits it, nature of mind, nature of vital, nature of physical, is made up of many personalities, not one simple personality as is supposed — although there is one central being.  This complex personality is formed partly by bringing together personalities of past lives, but also by gathering experiences, tendencies, inﬂuences from the earth atmosphere — which are taken up by one of the constituent personalities as suitable to his own nature.


Sri Aurobindo: Such an inﬂuence left behind by Vivekananda or one of his disciples may have been taken up by you without your being an incarnation of either.     The being as it passes through the series of its lives takes on personalities of various kinds and passes through various types of experiences, but it does not carry these on to the next life, as a rule. It takes on a new mind, vital and body.


Sri Aurobindo: The mental capacities, occupations, interests, idiosyncrasies of the past mind and vital are not taken over by the new mind and vital, except to the extent that is useful for the new life. One may have the power of poetic expression in one life, but in the next have no such power nor any interest in poetry. On the other hand tendencies suppressed or missed or imperfectly developed in one life may come out in the next. There would be therefore nothing surprising in the contrast which you noted. The essence of past experiences is kept by the psychic being but the forms of experience or of personality are not, except such as are needed for the new stage in the soul’s progress.


Sri Aurobindo: The being in its long course of experience may permit for a time the search after sensual pleasure and afterwards discard it and turn to higher things. This can happen even in the course of a lifetime, in a second life where the old personalities would not be carried over.  You must avoid a common popular blunder about reincarnation.  The popular idea is that Titus Balbus is reborn again as John Smith, a man with the same personality, character, attainments as he had in his former life with the sole difference that he wears coat and trousers instead of a toga and speaks in cockney English instead of popular Latin. That is not the case.


Sri Aurobindo: What would be the earthly use of repeating the same personality or character a million times from the beginning of time till its end! The soul comes into birth for experience, for growth, for evolution till it can bring the Divine into matter. It is the central being that incarnates, not the outer personality — the personality is simply a mould that it creates for its ﬁgures of experience in that one life. In


Sri Aurobindo: another birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities, a different life and career. Supposing Virgil is born again, he may take up poetry in one or two other lives, but he will certainly not write an epic but rather perhaps slight but elegant and beautiful lyrics such as he wanted to write, but did not succeed, in Rome. In another birth he is likely to be no poet at all, but a philosopher and a Yogin seeking to attain and to express the highest truth — for that too was an unrealised trend of his consciousness in that life. Perhaps before he had been a warrior or ruler doing deeds like Aeneas or Augustus before he sang them. And so on — on this side or that the central being develops a new character, a new personality, grows, develops, passes through all kinds of terrestrial experience.


Sri Aurobindo: As the evolving being develops still more and becomes more rich and complex, it accumulates its personalities, as it were.  Sometimes they stand behind the active elements, throwing in some colour, some trait, some capacity here and there, — or they stand in front and there is a multiple personality, a many-sided character or a many-sided, sometimes what looks like a universal capacity. But if a former personality, a former capacity is brought fully forward, it will not be to repeat what was already done, but to cast the same capacity into new forms and new shapes and fuse it into a new harmony of the being which will not be a reproduction of what it was before. Thus you must not expect to be what the warrior and the poet were — something of the outer characteristics may reappear but very much changed and new-cast in a new combination. It is in a new direction that the energies will be guided to do what was not done before.


Sri Aurobindo: Another thing. It is not the personality, the character that is of the ﬁrst importance in rebirth — it is the psychic being who stands behind the evolution of the nature and evolves with it.  The psychic when it departs from the body, shedding even the mental and vital on its way to its resting place, carries with it the heart of its experiences, — not the physical events, not the vital movements, not the mental buildings, not the capacities or characters, but something essential that it gathered from them, what might be called the divine element for the sake of which the rest existed. That is the permanent addition, it is that that helps in the growth towards the Divine. That is why there is usually no memory of the outward events and circumstances of past lives — for this memory there must be a strong development towards unbroken continuance of the mind, the vital, even the subtle physical; for though it all remains in a kind of seed memory, it does not ordinarily emerge.


Sri Aurobindo: What was the divine element in the magnanimity of the warrior, that which expressed itself in his loyalty, nobility, high courage, what was the divine element behind the harmonious mentality and generous vitality of the poet and expressed itself in them, that remains and in a new harmony of character may ﬁnd a new expression or, if the life is turned towards the Divine, be taken up as powers for the realisation or for the work that has to be done for the Divine.  Nothing in the nature is carried over [] except the essence of the past experiences and energies as much as is necessary for the new life. The rest is held in reserve, but things so held in reserve can be brought forward in a new form and under new conditions.


Sri Aurobindo:   If all is centred consciously around the psychic then they [ ] survive, otherwise they separate. The vital for instance survives for a time, then breaks up and dissolves into desires and fragmentary bits of vital personality.  The mental is usually more lasting — but that too dissolves. It all depends on the person, how far he has developed his mind or vital or connected them with the psychic.


Sri Aurobindo:   If one has had a strong spiritual development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic — of the vital the same can hardly be said.


Sri Aurobindo: Napoleon had a strong vital but not one organised round the psychic being.    What you suggest [ ] is true — that is to say when it is some past personality which or part of which is strongly carried over into the present life. It is, I believe, true that you were a revolutionary in a past life or if not a revolutionary, engaged in a violent political action. I can’t put a name or a precise form on it.


Sri Aurobindo: But it was not only the sudden angers and violences, but probably also the desire to help, to reform, to purify and other intensities and vehemences that came from there. When a personality is carried over like that it is not only the undesirable sides that are carried over but things that puriﬁed and chastened can be useful.     There is no such thing as an insuperable difﬁculty from past lives.


Sri Aurobindo: There are formations that help and formations that hamper; the latter have to be dismissed and dissolved, not to be allowed to repeat themselves. The Mother told you that to explain the origin of this tendency and the necessity of getting rid of it — there was no hint of any insuperable difﬁculty, quite the contrary.     For most people [] the vital dissolves after a time as it is not sufﬁciently formed to be immortal.


Sri Aurobindo: The soul descending makes a new vital formation suitable for the new life.     The physical always dissolves and in each new life one gets a new physical formation. To preserve the same physical would mean physical immortality.


Sri Aurobindo:   Not they are. What remains and to what degree depends on the development in each case. Of course the centres themselves remain — for they are in the subtle body and it is from there that they act on the corresponding physical centres.


Sri Aurobindo:   No, the subconscient is an instrument for the physical life and disappears []. It is too incoherent to be an organised enduring existence.  What is exactly your theory? There is one thing — inﬂuences — everybody undergoes inﬂuences, absorbs them or rejects, makes them disappear in one’s own developed [] style or else keeps them as constituent strands.


Sri Aurobindo: There is another thing — lines of Force. In the universe there are many lines of Force on which various personalities or various achievements and formations spring up — e.g. the line Pericles–Caesar–Napoleon or the line Alexander–Jenghiz–Tamerlane–Napoleon — meeting together there — so it may be too in poetry, lines of poetic force prolonging themselves from one poet to another, meeting and diverging. Yours seems to be a third — a daemon or individual Spirit of Poetry migrating from one individual to another, several perhaps meeting together in one poet who gives them all a combined full expression. Is that it? If so, it is an interesting idea and arguable.


Sri Aurobindo:   But after all it is a line of consciousness and not a personality that reincarnates; the personality is only for the one life, so it does not bind though it may inﬂuence at certain points the present life.  It is always possible for a being of the higher planes to take birth on earth — in that case they create a mind or vital for themselves or else they join a mind, vital and body which has already been prepared under their inﬂuence — there are indeed many ways and not one only in which they can manifest here.   As there are many personalities in a man in his various ordinary planes of consciousness, so also several beings can associate themselves with his consciousness as it develops afterwards — descending into his higher mind or other higher planes of being and connecting themselves with his personality. That is for the principle.


Sri Aurobindo: But as for the particular information [ ], it is inaccurate. It has probably reference to the period when Mother was bringing down beings to aid in the work.  All human incarnations or births have naturally a psychic being.  It is only other types like the vital beings that have not, and that is precisely the reason why they want to possess men and enjoy physical life without being themselves born here, for so they escape the psychic law of evolution and spiritual progress and change. But these formations [ ] are different, they are things that do not leave the earth and do not possess but simply attach themselves to some human rebirth (of course with a psychic in it) which has some afﬁnity and therefore does not object to or resist their inclusion.


Sri Aurobindo:   The fragments [] are not of the inner being (who goes on his way to the psychic world) but of his vital sheath which falls away after death. These can join for birth the vital of some other Jiva who is being born or they can be used by a vital being to enter a body in process of birth and partly possess it for the satisfaction of its propensities. The junction can also take place after birth.  There is a vital connection generally — the psychic is comparatively rare.


Sri Aurobindo: It is something in past lives usually that determines these connections in this one, but the connection in this life is seldom the same as that of the past which determined it.  As far as I know, the births follow usually one line [] or the other and do not alternate — that, I think, is the Indian tradition also, though there are purposeful exceptions like Shikhandi’s. If there is a change of sex, it is only part of the being that associates itself with the change, not the central being.    Not sex exactly [], but what might be called the masculine and feminine principle.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a difﬁcult question [ ]. There are certain lines the reincarnation follows and so far as my experience goes and general experience goes, one follows usually a single line. But the alteration of sex cannot be declared impossible. There may be some who do alternate.  The presence of feminine traits in a male does not necessarily indicate a past feminine birth — they may come in the general play of forces and their formations.


Sri Aurobindo: There are besides qualities common to both sexes. Also a fragment of the psychological personality may have been associated with a birth not one’s own. One can say of a certain person of the past, “That was not myself, but a fragment of my psychological personality was present in him.” Rebirth is a complex affair and not so simple in its mechanism as in the popular idea.


Sri Aurobindo:   All the instances I have heard of in the popular accounts of rebirth are of man becoming man and woman becoming woman in the next life — except when they become animal, but even then I think the male becomes a male animal and the female a female animal. There are only stray cases quoted like Shikhandi’s in the Mahabharata for variations of sex. The Theosophist conception is full of raw imagination, one Theosophist even going so far as to say that if you are a man in this birth you are obliged to be a woman in the next and so on.   can’t possibly mean “animal”.


Sri Aurobindo: The Gita uses precise terms and if it had meant animal it would have said animal and not Asuric. As for the punishment, it is that they [] go down in their nature to more depths of Asurism till they touch bottom as it were. But that is a natural result of their uncontrolled tendencies which they freely indulge without any effort to rise out of them while by the cultivation of the higher side of personality one naturally rises and develops towards godhead or the Divine. In the Gita the Divine is regarded as the controller of the whole cosmic action through Nature, so the “I cast” is in harmony with its ideas. The world is a mechanism of Nature, but a mechanism regulated by the presence of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: The soul in the animal evolves its manifestation to a point at which it can pass from the expression in animal to the expression in human consciousness.    It is when the vital gets broken up, some strong movements of it, desires, greeds, may precipitate themselves into animal forms, e.g., sexual desire with the part of the vital consciousness under its control into a dog or some habitual movement of excessive greed may carry part of the vital consciousness into a pig. The animals represent the vital consciousness with mind involved in the vital, so that it is naturally there that such things would gravitate for satisfaction.


Sri Aurobindo:   or [] does not necessarily refer to animal birth, but it is true that there has been a general belief of that kind [ ] not only in India but wherever “transmigration” or “metempsychosis” was believed in. Shakespeare is referring to Pythagoras’ belief in transmigration when he speaks of the passage of somebody’s grandmother into an animal. But the soul, the psychic being, once having reached the human consciousness cannot go back to the inferior animal consciousness any more than it can go back into a tree or an ephemeral insect.  What is true is that some part of the vital energy or the formed instrumental consciousness or nature can and very frequently does so, if it is strongly attached to anything in the earth life.  This may account for some cases of immediate rebirth with full memory in human forms also.


Sri Aurobindo: Ordinarily it is only by Yogic development or by clairvoyance that the exact memory of past lives can be brought back.  Certainly, the subconscient is formed for this life only and is not carried with it by the soul from one life to another. The memory of past lives is not something that is active anywhere in the being — if by memory is meant the memory of details. That memory of details is quiescent and untraceable except in so far as certain constituent personalities taken over from the past retain the memories of the particular life in which they were manifest.  E.g. if some personality that was put forth by one in Venice or Rome remembers from time to time a detail or details of what happened then.


Sri Aurobindo: But usually it is only the essence of past lives that is activised in the being, not any particular memories. So it is impossible to say that the memory is located in a particular part of the consciousness or in a particular plane.   These ideas of past lives are not experiences, they are mental formations trying to give a name and form to something that is true, but you must not attach any importance to the forms the mind gives it. The truth is that there was a connection in past lives, but the forms given by the mind are likely to be mistaken.


Sri Aurobindo:  It is not the ego, but the inner being that remembers the past lives — and the inner being as a rule is perfectly detached about them.    The different and contrasting phases through which you pass are obviously due to the emergence of different personalities in you created by past lives. One is full of the zest of life and its ardour, the other has the Nirvanic tendency and a certain incapacity for mastery over the physical existence. This is very self-evident and the putting of a name or a frame to the past lives in which these personalities were formed could hardly add anything of importance.


Sri Aurobindo: If you yourself remembered the essence of them (not the details), then it might be of some use for your own consciousness in determining the limits of each inﬂuence in you and its place — but that can also be done well enough even without that remembrance.  These things (events etc.) [] are not known usually unless they come in some concentrated state of vision of themselves. The Mother nowadays seldom has these states because the whole concentration is on bringing down the supramental principle here. When that work is done then these things may come.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Mother only speaks to people about their past births when she sees deﬁnitely some scene or memory of their past in concentration; but this happens rarely nowadays.  What is remembered mainly from past lives is the nature of the personality and the subtle results of the life-experience.  Names, events, physical details are remembered only under exceptional circumstances and are of a very minor importance.


Sri Aurobindo: When people try to remember these outward things, they usually build up a number of romantic imaginations which are not true.  I think you should dismiss this idea about the past lives. If the memory of past personalities comes of itself (without a name or mere outward details) that is sometimes important as giving a clue to something in the present development, but to know the nature of that personality and its share in the present constitution of the character is quite enough. The rest is of little use.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not of course indispensable to know []. It is sometimes a matter of interest for knowing the lines of one’s past development and how one has come to what one is now.  But to overpass this outward development is of course the main aim of the Yoga. We are not to be tied by our past lives.


Sri Aurobindo:   Too much importance must not be given to past lives. For the purpose of this Yoga one is what one is and, still more, what one will be. What one was has a minor importance.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary to attach any entire belief to these ideas of past births. ’s idea of’s rebirth is evidently a mere idea — nothing else.  When there is any truth in these things, it is most often a perception that some Force once represented in a certain person has also some part in one’s own nature — not that the same personality is here.


Sri Aurobindo: Of course, there is rebirth, but to establish that one is such a one reborn, a deeper experience is necessary, not a mere mental intuition which may easily be an error.   Ideas of this kind about Vivekananda and Ramakrishna are ideas of the mind to which the vital strongly attaches itself — the truth of the past lives cannot be discovered in that way. These mental ideas are not true. You must wait for direct knowledge in a liberated nature before you can know who in past lives you were.   It is better not to think of past lives just now.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind and vital would probably become active and weave things that are not true.     Seriously, these historical identiﬁcations are a perilous game and open a hundred doors to the play of imagination. Some may, in the nature of things must be true; but once people begin, they don’t know where to stop.


Sri Aurobindo: What is important is the lines, rather than the lives, the incarnation of Forces that explain what one now is — and, as for particular lives or rather personalities, those alone matter which are very deﬁnite in one and have powerfully contributed to what one is developing now.  But it is not always possible to put a name upon these; for not one hundred-thousandth part of what has been has still a name preserved by human Time.  The general Divine Will in the universe is for the progressive manifestation in the universe. But that is the general will — it admits the withdrawal of individual souls who are not ready to persevere in the world.


Sri Aurobindo: The escape from birth was a universal ideal at that time [ ] except with one or two sects of the Shaivas, I believe. It is not at all consistent with the Divine taking many births, for the Gita speaks of the highest condition not as a, but as a dwelling in the Divine. If so there seems to be no reason why the and who has reached that dwelling in the consciousness of the Divine should fear rebirth and its troubles any more than the Divine does.    The Pitriyan is supposed to lead to inferior worlds attained by the Fathers who still belong to the evolution in the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: By the Devayan one gets beyond the Ignorance into the light.  The difﬁculty about the Pitris is that in the Puranas they are taken as the Ancestors to whom the tarpan is given — it is an old Ancestor worship such as still exists in Japan, but in the Veda they seem to be the Fathers who have gone before and discovered the supraphysical worlds.  But that [] is just what is disputed by the Western scientiﬁc mind or was up till yesterday and is still considered as unveriﬁable today. It is contended that the idea of self is an illusion — apart from the body. It is the experiences of the body that create the idea of a self and the desire to live prolongs itself illusorily in the notion that the self outlasts the body.


Sri Aurobindo: The West is accustomed besides to the Christian idea that the self is created with the body — an idea which the Christians took over from the Jews who believed in God but not in immortality — so the Western mind is dead set against any idea of reincarnation. Even the religious used to believe that the soul was born in the body, God ﬁrst making the body then breathing the soul into it (Prana?). It is difﬁcult for Europeans to get over this past mental inheritance.  [] The knowledge and right use of the hidden forces of Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: What did he himself [] say about it — that it was the sins of his disciples which constituted the cancer. There is a physical aspect to things and there is an occult supraphysical aspect — one need not get in the way of the other. All physical things are the expression of the supraphysical. The existence of a body with physical instruments and processes does not, as the 19th century wrongly imagined, disprove the existence of a soul which uses the body even if it is also conditioned by it. Laws of Nature do not disprove the existence of God.


Sri Aurobindo: The fact of a material world to which our instruments are accorded does not disprove the existence of less material worlds which certain subtler instruments can show to us.  [] The forces that can only be known by going behind the veil of apparent phenomena — especially the forces of the subtle physical and supraphysical planes.


Sri Aurobindo: Nature-forces are conscious forces — they can very well combine all that is necessary for an action or a purpose and when one means fails, take another.      They


Sri Aurobindo: [ ] are able to act with a greater force if they can make a special formation than by a general psychological action common to all human nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The forces are conscious. There are besides individualised beings who represent the forces or use them. The wall between consciousness and force, impersonality and personality becomes much thinner when one goes behind the veil of matter. If one looks at a working from the side of impersonal force one sees a force or energy at work acting for a purpose or with a result, if one looks from the side of being one sees a being possessing, guiding and using or else representative of and used by a conscious force as its instrument of specialised action and expression. You speak of the wave, but in modern science it has been found that if you look at the movement of energy, it appears on one side to be a wave and act as a wave, on the other as a mass of particles and to act as a mass of particles each acting in its own way.


Sri Aurobindo: It is somewhat the same principle here.   The experience you had of something going out from the head like an arrow probably indicates something going out of the mental consciousness towards some aim or object. Sometimes it is a part of the mind-consciousness itself that goes like that either upward to a higher plane or somewhere in the world around — and afterwards returns. Sometimes it is a thought-force or a willforce. Forces are always going out from us without our knowing it even, and often they have some effect there.


Sri Aurobindo: If we think of a person or a place and things happening there, something can go out like that to that person or place. If we have a will or strong mental desire that something should happen, a will-force may go out and try to make that happen. But also forces can go out from the inner mind without any conscious cause on the surface.  My experience shows me that human beings are less deliberate and responsible for their acts than the moralists, novelists and dramatists make them and I look rather to see what forces drove them than what the man himself may have seemed by inference to have intended or purposed — our inferences are often wrong and even when they are right touch only the surface of the matter.   All life is the play of universal forces.


Sri Aurobindo: The individual gives a personal form to these universal forces. But he can choose whether he shall respond or not to the action of a particular force. Only most people do not really choose — they undergo the play of the forces. Your illnesses, depressions etc. are the repeated play of such forces. It is only when one can make oneself free of them that one can be the true person and have a true life — but one can be free only by living in the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   Predestination and chance are words — words that obscure the truth by their extreme rigidity of deﬁnition. All is done through a play of forces which seems to be a play of different possibles, but there is Something that looks and selects and uses without being either blindly arbitrary (predestination) or capriciously decisive (chance).


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no question of responsibility. The “Something” does not act arbitrarily, paying no heed to the play of forces or the man’s nature. “Selects” does not mean “selects at random”. If a man puts himself on the side of or into the hands of the hostile inﬂuences and says, “This way I will go and no other.


Sri Aurobindo: I want my ego, my greatness, my ﬁeld of power and action”, has not the Something the right to say, “I agree. Go and ﬁnd it — if you can”? On the other hand, if the balance of forces is otherwise, less on one side, the selection may be the other way, the saving element being present, and determine another orientation. But to understand the working of this Cosmic Something one must see not only the few outward factors observed by the human eye, but the whole working with all its multitudinous details — that one cannot do unless one is oneself in the cosmic consciousness and with some opening at least to the Overmind.  There is no such thing as “free” will, but there is the power of the Purusha to say “yes” or “no” to any particular pressure of Prakriti and there is the power of the mind, vital etc. to echo feebly or strongly the Purusha’s “yes” or “no” or to resist it.


Sri Aurobindo: A constant (not a momentary) Yes or No has its effect in the play of the forces and the selection by the Something.    No, of course not [].  But they seem so to all who live in the outward vision only. “Coincidence the scientists do them call.”


Sri Aurobindo: But anyone with some intelligence and power of observation who lives more in an inward consciousness can see the play of invisible forces at every step which act on men and bring about events without their knowing about the instrumentation. The difference created by Yoga or by an inner consciousness — for there are people like Socrates who develop or have some inner awareness without Yoga — is that one becomes conscious of these invisible forces and can also consciously proﬁt by them or use and direct them. That is all.


Sri Aurobindo: I have not said [] that everything is rigidly predetermined. Play of forces does not mean that. What I said was that behind visible events in the world there is always a mass of invisible forces at work unknown to the outward minds of men and by Yoga (by going inward and establishing a conscious connection with the cosmic Self and Force and forces) one can become conscious of these forces, intervene consciously in the play, to some extent at least determine things in the result of the play. All that has nothing to do with predetermination. On the contrary one watches how things develop and gives a push here and a push there when possible or when needed.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing in all that to contradict the dictum of the great scientist Sir C. V. Raman. Raman said once that all these scientiﬁc discoveries are only games of chance. Only, when he says these things are games of chance, he is merely saying that human beings don’t know how it works out. It is not a rigid predetermination, but it is not a blind inconscient Chance either. It is a play in which there is a working out of possibilities in Time.


Sri Aurobindo:  What said is true, the play of the forces is very complex and one has to be conscious of them and, as it were, see and watch how they work before one can really understand why things happen as they do. All action is surrounded by a complexity of forces and if one puts a force for one of them to succeed, one must be careful to do it thoroughly and maintain it and not leave doors open for the other contrary ones to ﬁnd their way in. I left at least two doors open and the forces that wanted him [ ] here pushed in through them. As for what they were, it can only be said that it was probably a mixture. Each man is himself a ﬁeld of many forces — some were working for his sadhana, some were working for his ego and desires.


Sri Aurobindo: There are besides powers which seek to make a man an instrument for purposes not his own without his knowing it. All of these may combine to bring about a particular result. These forces work each for the fulﬁlment of its own drive — they need not be at all what we call hostile forces, — they are simply forces of Nature.  It is not a fact however that hostile forces cannot bring a man here — e.g. when came back and wanted to enter the Asram, there was clearly a hostile force working that wanted to create trouble, but it was not strong enough to do it.   ’s new consciousness makes him feel more strongly the opposite forces that one contacts when one moves in the world and has to do affairs and meet with others and he is afraid of a response in his vital which will upset his sadhana or create difﬁculties.


Sri Aurobindo: Evidently he is a man who is psychically sensitive or has become so to that thing which you blindly refuse to recognise even when you are in the midst of it — the play of forces. You can feel your friend’s atmosphere through the letter “so beautiful, so strengthening, so refreshing” and it has an immediate effect on you. But your mind stares like an owl and wonders, “What the hell can this be?” — I suppose, because your medical books never told you about it and how can things be true which are not known either to the ordinary mind or science? It is by an incursion of an opposite kind of forces that you fall into the Old Man’s clutches, but you can only groan and cry, “What’s this?”  and when they are swept aside in a moment by other forces blink and mutter, “Well, that’s funny!”


Sri Aurobindo: Your friend can feel and know at once when he is being threatened by the opposite forces — and so he can be on his guard and resist Old Nick, because he can detect at once one of his principal means of attack.   It is this play of forces that is trying to bring about your removal to Burdwan and, if it succeeds, you have not to be troubled or shaken or disappointed, but to accept and make use of all that happens for your sadhana and progress. For the play of cosmic forces, the will in the cosmos — as one might say — does not always work apparently in favour of a smooth and direct line for the work or the sadhana, it often brings in what seem to be upheavals, sudden turns which break or deﬂect the line, opposing or upsetting circumstances or perplexing departures from what had been temporarily settled and established. The one thing is to preserve equanimity and make an opportunity and means of progress out of all that happens in the course of the life and the sadhana. There is a higher secret Will transcendent behind the play and will of the cosmic forces — a play which is always a mixture of things favourable and things adverse — and it is that Will which one must wait upon and have faith in; but you must not expect to be able always to understand its workings.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind wants this or that to be done, the line once taken to be maintained, but what the mind wants is not at all always what is intended in a larger purpose. One has to follow indeed a ﬁxed central aim in the sadhana and not deviate from it, but not to build on outward circumstances, conditions etc. as if they were fundamental things.     One can not only receive a force, but an impulse, thought or sensation.


Sri Aurobindo: One may receive it from others, from beings in Nature or from Nature herself if she chooses to give her Force a ready-made form of that kind.   The force “created” is not yours — it is Prakriti’s — your will sets it in motion, it does not really create it; but once set in motion, it tends to fulﬁl itself so far as the play of other forces will allow it. So, naturally, if you want to stop it, you have to set a contrary force in motion which will be strong enough to prevail against its momentum.    There is one cosmic Force working in all and a vibration of that Force or any one of its movements can awake (it does not always) the same vibration in another.


Sri Aurobindo:    The play of forces can lead to nothing, if the One Force does not take them up and change them.  To know and use the subtle forces of the supraphysical planes is part of the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo:   You take a very utilitarian view of spiritual things. Whatever develops in the sadhana, provided it is genuine, has its place in the total experience and knowledge. A knowledge of the occult worlds and occult forces and phenomena has its place also.


Sri Aurobindo: Visions and voices are only a small part of that vast realm of occult experience. As for utility, for one who has intelligence and discrimination, visions etc. have many uses — but very little use for those who have no discrimination or understanding.     Because a great number of people don’t know how to use these [] faculties or misuse them or give them excessive value or nourish their ego by them, does it follow that the faculties themselves have no Yogic use or value?


Sri Aurobindo:   Even by itself it [] is a progress in the development of the consciousness though it may not carry with it any spiritualisation of the nature.    I do not know what you mean by practical sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: If one develops the occult faculty and the occult experience and knowledge, these things can be of great use, therefore practical. In themselves they are a proof of opening of the inner consciousness and also help to open it farther — though they are not indispensable for that.    He [] discouraged his disciples [ ] because his aim was the realisation of the inner Self and the intuition — in other words the fullness of the spiritual Mind — visions and voices belong to the inner occult sense, therefore he did not want them to lay stress on it. I also discourage some from having any dealing with visions and voices because I see that they are being misled or in danger of being misled by false visions and false voices.


Sri Aurobindo: That does not mean that visions and voices have no value.    People who have the occult faculty always tend to give too large a place to it.  About spiritism I think I can say this much for the present.  It is quite possible for the dead or rather the departed — for they are not dead — who are still in regions near the earth to have communication with the living.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes it happens automatically, sometimes by an effort at communication on one side of the curtain or the other. There is no impossibility of such communication by the means used by the spiritists; usually however genuine communications or a contact can only be with those who are yet in a world which is a sort of idealised replica of the earth-consciousness in which the same personality, ideas, memories persist that the person had here. But all that pretends to be communication with departed souls is not genuine, — especially when it is done through a paid professional medium. There is there an enormous amount of mixture of a very undesirable kind — for apart from the great mass of unconscious suggestions from the sitters or the contributions of the medium’s subliminal consciousness one gets into contact with a world of beings which is of a very deceptive or selfdeceptive illusory nature. Many of these come and claim to be the departed souls of relatives, acquaintances, well-known men, famous personalities etc.


Sri Aurobindo: There are also beings who pick up the discarded feelings and memories of the dead and masquerade with them. There are a great number of beings who come to such s´eances only to play with the consciousness of men or exercise their powers through this contact with the earth and who dupe the mediums and sitters with their falsehoods, tricks and illusions. (I am supposing of course the case of mediums who are not themselves tricksters.) A contact with such a plane of spirits can be harmful (most mediums become nervously or morally unbalanced) and spiritually dangerous. Of course, all pretended communications with the famous dead of long-past times are in their very nature deceptive and most of those with the recent ones also — that is evident from the character of these communications.


Sri Aurobindo: Through conscientious mediums one may get sound results (in the matter of the dead) but even these are very ignorant of the nature of the forces they are handling and have no discrimination which can guard them against trickery from the other side of the veil. Very little genuine knowledge of the nature of the after-life can be gathered from these s´eances; a true knowledge is more often gained by the experience of individuals who make serious contact or are able in one way or another to cross the border.   They [] are most of them in contact with the vital-physical or subtle physical worlds and do not receive anything higher at all.    Not much conﬁdence can be placed in all that [ ].


Sri Aurobindo: If examined closely it will be seen that these spirit guides only suggest to their subjects what is in the mind of the sitter or sitters or in the air and it comes to very little. Inﬂuences from the other worlds there are of course and any number of them, but the central guidance is not of this kind except in very rare cases.  Automatic writings and spiritualistic s´eances are a very mixed affair. Part comes from the subconscious mind of the medium and part from that of the sitters. But it is not true that all can be accounted for by a dramatising imagination and memory.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes there are things none present could know or remember; sometimes even, though that is rare, glimpses of the future. But usually these s´eances etc. put one into rapport with a very low world of vital beings and forces, themselves obscure, incoherent or tricky and it is dangerous to associate with them or to undergo any inﬂuence. Ouspensky and others must have gone through these experiments with too “mathematical” a mind, which was no doubt their safeguard but prevented them from coming to anything more than a surface intellectual view of their signiﬁcance.   The psychic does not give up the mental and other sheaths (apart from the physical) immediately at death. It is said that it takes three years on the whole to get clear away from the zone of communicability with the earth — though there may be cases of slower or quicker passage.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic world does not communicate with earth — at any rate not in that way. And the ghost or spirit who turns up at s´eances is not the psychic being.  What comes through the medium is a mixture of the medium’s subconscient mind (using subconscient in the ordinary, not in the Yogic sense), that of the sitters, vital sheaths left by the departed or perhaps occupied or used by some “spirit”, i.e. some vital being, the departed himself in his vital sheath or else something assumed for the occasion (but it is the vital part that communicates), elementals, spirits of the lowest vital physical world near earth, etc. etc. A horrible confusion for the most part — a hotch-potch of all sorts of things coming through a medium of “astral” grey light and shadow. Many communicants seem to be people who have just gone across into some subtle world where they feel surrounded by an improved edition of the earthly life and think that is the real and deﬁnitive other world after earth — but it is a mere optimistic prolongation of the ideas and images and associations of the human plane.


Sri Aurobindo: Hence the next world as depicted by the spiritualist “guides” and other s´eance communicants.  What do you mean by a ghost? The word “ghost” as used in popular parlance covers an enormous number of distinct phenomena which have no necessary connection with each other.  To name a few only —


Sri Aurobindo: (1) An actual contact with the soul of a departed human being housed in its subtle body and transcribed to our mind by the appearance of an image or the hearing of a voice.  (2) A mental formation stamped by the thoughts and feelings of a departed human being on the atmosphere of a place or locality, wandering about there or repeating itself — till that formation either exhausts itself or is dissolved by one means or another. This is the explanation of such phenomena as the haunted house in which the scenes attending or surrounding or preceding a murder are repeated over and over again and many similar phenomena.   (


Sri Aurobindo: 3 ) A being of the lower vital planes who has assumed the discarded vital sheath of a departed human being or a fragment of his vital personality and appears and acts in the form and perhaps with the surface thoughts and memories of that person.  (4) A being of the lower vital plane who by the medium of a living human being or by some other means or agency is able to materialise itself sufﬁciently so as to appear and act in a visible form or speak with an audible voice or, without so appearing, to move about material things, e.g. furniture or to materialise objects or to shift them from place to place. This accounts for what are called, phenomena of stone-throwing, tree-inhabiting and other well-known phenomena.


Sri Aurobindo: (5) Apparitions which are the formations of one’s own mind but take to the senses an objective appearance.  (6) Temporary possession of people by vital beings who sometimes pretend to be departed relatives etc.  (7) Thought-images of themselves projected, often by people at the moment of death, which appear at that time or a few hours afterwards to their friends or relatives.  You will see that in only one of these cases, the ﬁrst, can a soul be posited and there no difﬁculty arises.  The as obtained in the ordinary Yoga are vital powers or, as in the Rajayoga, mental siddhis.


Sri Aurobindo: Usually they are uncertain in their application and precarious depending on the maintenance of the process by which they were attained.    It is certainly possible to have consciousness of things going on at a distance and to intervene.  The idea that true Yogins do not or ought not to use such powers, I regard as an ascetic superstition. I believe that all Yogins who have these powers do use them whenever they ﬁnd that they are called on from within to do so.


Sri Aurobindo: They may refrain if they think the use in a particular case is contrary to the Divine Will or see that preventing one evil may be opening the door to worse or for any other valid reason, or simply because it is outside the scope of their action, but not from any general prohibitory rule.  What is forbidden to anyone with a strong spiritual sense is to be a miracle-monger, performing extraordinary things for show, for gain, for fame, out of vanity or pride. It is forbidden to use powers from mere vital motives, to make an Asuric ostentation of them or to turn them into a support for arrogance, conceit, ambition — or any other of the amiable weaknesses to which human nature is prone. It is because half-baked Yogins so often fall into these traps of the hostile forces that the use of Yogic powers is sometimes discouraged as harmful to the user. But it is mostly people who live much in the vital that so fall; with a strong and free and calm mind and a psychic awake and alive, such pettinesses are not likely to occur.


Sri Aurobindo: As for those who can live in the true divine consciousness, certain powers are not “powers” at all in that sense, not, that is to say, supernatural or abnormal, but rather their normal way of seeing and acting, part of the consciousness — and how can they be forbidden or refuse to act according to their consciousness and its nature?  I suppose I have had myself an even more completely European education than you and I have had too my period of agnostic denial, but from the moment I looked at these things I could never take the attitude of doubt and disbelief which was for so long fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supraphysical experiences and powers, occult or Yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not be limited by the ordinary physical human-animal consciousness; it must have other ranges. Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is supernatural or incredible the power to write a great poem or compose great music.


Sri Aurobindo: Few people can do it, as things are, — not even one in a million; for poetry and music come from the inner being and to write or to compose true and great things one has to have the passage clear between the outer mind and something in the inner being. That is why you got the poetic power as soon as you began Yoga — Yoga-force made the passage clear. It is the same with Yogic consciousness and its powers; the thing is to get the passage clear, — for they are already there within you.  Of course the ﬁrst thing is to believe, aspire and, with the true urge within, make the endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not possible to put any credence in the stories about this Swami and Mahabhutan. It is possible that he has practised some kind of Tantric Yoga and obtained a few occult powers, but in all that you have said about him and in the printed papers there is no trace of any spiritual realisation or experience. All that he seems to think about is occult powers and feats of thaumaturgy. Those who take their stand on occult powers divorced from spiritual experience are not Yogis of a high plane of achievement. There are Yogis who behave as if they had no control over themselves — the theory is that they separate the spirit from the nature and live in the inner realisation leaving the nature to a disordered action “like a child, mad man, pisacha or inert object”.


Sri Aurobindo: There are others who deliberately use rough or violent speech to keep people at a distance or to test them. But the outbreak of rage of this Swami which you recount seems to have been simply an outburst of fury due to offended egoism. His judgment about Ramana Maharshi is absurd in the extreme. As to his asking for the nail, hair etc. and his presenting of clothes or jumper, it was probably to establish a physical means of establishing an occult inﬂuence on you and your wife possibly by some Tantric or magic kriya — in Tibet such magic processes are well known and in common use.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many Yogins of the Vedantic school who follow both siddhis and the ﬁnal emancipation — they would say, I suppose, that they take the siddhis on the way to Nirvana. The harmonisation is in the supermind — the Divine Truth at once static and dynamic, a withdrawal and extinction of the Ignorance, a re-creation in the Divine Knowledge.     I am unable to see why you should give up Yoga, because you cannot believe in the action of occult laws and forces or in siddhis.


Sri Aurobindo: The object of Yoga is realisation of the Divine; these other things are side-matters which need be no part of spiritual experience, nor is belief in them necessary for realisation. Everyone has the right of private judgment in these matters; so you need not worry.  Yes, the object of our Yoga is to establish direct contact with the Divine above and bring down the divine consciousness from above into all the centres. Occult powers belonging to the mental, vital and subtle physical planes are not our object. One can have contact with various Divine Forms and Personalities on the way, but there is no need to establish them in the centres, though sometimes that happens automatically (as with the four Personalities of the Mother) for a time in the course of the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is not a rule to do so. Our Yoga is meant to be plastic and to allow all necessary workings of the Divine Power according to the nature, but these in the details may vary with each individual.    All these “experiments” of yours are founded upon the vital nature and the mind in connection with it; working on this foundation, there is no security against falsehood and fundamental error. No amount of powers (small or great) developing can be a surety against wandering from the Truth; and, if you allow pride and arrogance and ostentation of power to creep in and hold you, you will surely fall into error and into the power of rajasic Maya and Avidya.


Sri Aurobindo: Our object is not to get powers, but to ascend towards the divine Truth-consciousness and bring its Truth down into the lower members. With the Truth all the necessary powers will come, not as one’s own, but as the Divine’s. The contact with the Truth cannot grow through rajasic mental and vital self-assertion, but only through psychic purity and surrender.    An activity on the astral plane in contact with the astral Forces attended by a leaving of the body is not a spiritual aim but belongs to the province of occultism.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not a part of the aim of Yoga. Also fasting is not permissible in the Asram, as its practice is more often harmful than helpful to the spiritual endeavour.  This aim suggested to you seems to be part of a seeking for occult powers; such a seeking is looked on with disfavour for the most part by spiritual teachers in India because it belongs to the inferior planes and usually pushes the seeker on a path which may lead him very far from the Divine. Especially, a contact with the forces and beings of the astral (or, as we term it, the vital) plane is attended with great dangers. The beings of this plane are often hostile to the true aim of spiritual life and establish contact with the seeker and offer him powers and occult experiences only in order that they may lead him away from the spiritual path or else that they may establish their own control over him or take possession of him for their own purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: Often, representing themselves as divine powers, they mislead, give erring suggestions and impulsions and pervert the inner life. Many are those who, attracted by these powers and beings of the vital plane, have ended in a deﬁnitive spiritual fall or in mental and physical perversion and disorder. One comes inevitably into contact with the vital plane and enters into it in the expansion of consciousness which results from an inner opening, but one ought never to put oneself into the hands of these beings and forces or allow oneself to be led by their suggestions and impulsions. This is one of the chief dangers of the spiritual life and to be on one’s guard against it is a necessity for the seeker if he wishes to arrive at his goal. It is true that many supraphysical or supernormal powers come with the expansion of the consciousness in Yoga; to rise out of the body consciousness, to act by subtle means on the supraphysical planes etc. are natural activities for the Yogi.


Sri Aurobindo: But these powers are not sought after, they come naturally, and they have not the astral character. Also, they have to be used on purely spiritual lines, that is by the Divine Will and the Divine Force, as an instrument, but never as an instrumentation of the forces and beings of the vital plane. To seek their aid for such powers is a great error.  Prolonged fasting may lead to an excitation of the nervous being which often brings vivid imaginations and hallucinations that are taken for true experiences; such fasting is frequently suggested by the vital Entities because it puts the consciousness into an unbalanced state which favours their designs. It is therefore discouraged here.


Sri Aurobindo: The rule to be followed is that laid down by the Gita which says that “Yoga is not for one who eats too much or who does not eat”; a moderate use of food sufﬁcient for the maintenance and health and strength of the body.  There is no brotherhood of the kind you describe in India.  There are Yogis who seek to acquire and practise occult powers but it is as individuals learning from an individual Master.  Occult associations, lodges, brotherhoods for such a purpose as described by European occultists are not known in Asia.  As regards secrecy, a certain discretion or silence about the instructions of the Guru and one’s own experiences is always advisable, but an absolute secrecy or making a mystery of these things is not.


Sri Aurobindo: Once a Guru is chosen, nothing must be concealed from him. The suggestion of absolute secrecy is often a trick of the astral Powers to prevent the seeking for enlightenment and succour.     Ordinarily, all the more inward and all the abnormal psychological experiences are called psychic.


Sri Aurobindo: I use the word psychic for the soul as distinguished from the mind and vital. All movements and experiences of the soul would in that sense be called psychic, those which rise from or directly touch the psychic being; where mind and vital predominate, the experience would be called psychological (surface or occult). “Spiritual” has nothing to do with the Absolute, except that the experience of the Absolute is spiritual. All contacts with self, the higher consciousness, the Divine above are spiritual. There are others that could not be so sharply classiﬁed and set off against each other.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual realisation is of primary importance and indispensable. I would consider it best to have the spiritual and psychic development ﬁrst and have it with the same fullness before entering the occult regions. Those who enter the latter ﬁrst may ﬁnd their spiritual realisation much delayed — others fall into the mazy traps of the occult and do not come out in this life. Some no doubt can carry on both together, the occult and the spiritual, and make them help each other; but the process I suggest is the safer.  The governing factors for us must be the spirit and the psychic being united with the Divine — the occult laws and phenomena have to be known but only as an instrumentation, not as the governing principles.


Sri Aurobindo: The occult is a vast ﬁeld and complicated and not without its dangers. It need not be abandoned but it should not be given the ﬁrst place.     You need not think about the occult Power.


Sri Aurobindo: Let the Mother’s consciousness grow in you and her Force work; occult powers are not indispensable, but if they are needed they will come in their proper time.    A sincere heart is worth all the extraordinary powers in the world.  There are a number of rules, really of an ethical, not a spiritual nature, which are necessary for the very safety of the society itself — those, for instance, against an egoistic use of occult secrets ; for if that were disregarded, there would be inevitably a clash with other formations on the same plane and consequent disaster.


Sri Aurobindo: About’s faculty of receiving the thoughts of others, — if this had been of the nature of thought reading, that is to say looking at the minds of others and seeing what is there, the remedy would have been simple; refusal to look would be enough and even the faculty might disappear by atrophy through long discontinuance. But if the thoughts of others come to her of themselves, it may be the psychic opening in her inner mind which it would be difﬁcult to get rid of. If she could remain indifferent or push away these unwelcome visitors behind her and not think of them again, that would be one remedy; it might even be discouraged from coming after a time by this lack of reception. As for why it comes, it is not something that comes but something that is there, a faculty or a psychic habit of the nature — I use the word psychic in the popular sense, it has nothing to do with what I call the psychic being. If she practises Yoga and is able to make some considerable progress, then it would be possible for her to bar the door to these visitors.


Sri Aurobindo: At the same time I might say that this power need not be a mere source of trouble; it can be helpful even: for it can give one who has acquired mastery over his own nature the knowledge of the thoughts and feelings around her and she can then help, guide, change what has to be changed in their minds so that they can become more effective for the divine work. I shall await what further you have to tell me about’s experiences before saying anything further about her entry into the ﬁeld of Yoga.  Your generalisation cannot stand because it is contradicted by other numerous instances which go to prove the opposite. In my own experience I have found that those who possessed well developed and well organised “psychic” and occult powers were healthy and well poised; indeed they said that in ill health or physical weakness they could do nothing — it impaired their power. These certainly had no lack or deﬁciency of the red aura.


Sri Aurobindo: The woman you speak of was evidently under a vital Inﬂuence. A vital Inﬂuence always acts by disorganising the system and by disturbing the mental, vital or physical balance. But such cases of phenomena in the vital mind due to a possession or inﬂuence have no relation to the true mastery of psychic or occult powers (clairvoyance, clair-audience etc.).  Visions and experiences need not at all depend upon physical weakness or a pathological taint. It is not safe to judge from individual cases.


Sri Aurobindo: The majority of those who have developed the faculty do not suffer from these defects. Those on the other hand who cannot keep their psychic experiences when in a robust state of health, lose them because then they get into a very external consciousness and feel at ease in it; but the true psychic does not depend for his experiences on disease.  I don’t know whether I can throw any positive light on’s mystic experiences. The description, at any rate the latter part, is not very easy to follow as it is very allusive in its expressions and not always precise enough to be clear. The ﬁrst part of the experience indicates a native power of healing of whose action she herself does not know the process.


Sri Aurobindo: It seems from her account to come from something in herself which should be, from the terms she uses, a larger and higher and brighter and more powerful consciousness with which she is in occasional communion but in which she does not constantly live. On the other hand another sentence seems to point to a Godhead or Divine Presence and it would then be not so much within as above. The language later on would seem to indicate such a Presence giving commands to her to guide others so that they might grow in consciousness.  But she distinctly speaks of it as a greater “me” standing behind a blue diamond force. We must fall back then on the idea of a greater consciousness very high up with a feeling of divinity, a sense of considerable light and spiritual authority — perhaps in one of those higher spiritual mental planes of which I speak in and the letters.


Sri Aurobindo: The diamond light could well be native to these planes; it is usually white, but there it might well be blue: it is a light that dispels or drives away all impure things, especially a demoniac possession or the inﬂuence of some evil force. Evidently, the use of a power like this should be carefully guarded from the intrusion of any wrong element such as personal love of power, but that need not cause any apprehension as a keen inlook into oneself would be sufﬁcient to reject it or keep it aloof. I think that is all I can say upon the data given in her letter.


Sri Aurobindo: It is difﬁcult to say [] — it looks from the Bible account as if he did it as a sign that he was one sent by the Divine with power.  What do you mean by a miracle? What people call a miracle is only something done in a striking way by a process unknown to them which their minds cannot follow.


Sri Aurobindo: I have explained that there is no such thing as a miracle. If a higher consciousness opens a higher power in him, the sadhak has to use it as part of the new consciousness but in the right way, without egoism, selﬁshness, vanity or pride.   (magic) is a special practice which is done by professional magicians or those who learn the art of the magician, but it is no part of Yoga. What happens in Yoga is that sometimes or even very commonly certain powers develop in the sadhak by which he can inﬂuence others or make them do things or make things happen that he wants. This and other Yogic powers should never be used by the sadhak for egoistic purposes or to satisfy his vital desires.


Sri Aurobindo: They can only be used when they become part of the realised divine consciousness by the Mother herself or at her command for good and unselﬁsh purposes. There is no harm in Yogic powers that come naturally as a part of the new consciousness and are not used for a wrong personal purpose.  For instance you see something in vision or dream and that happens afterwards in the waking state. Well, that is a Yogic power of prevision, knowing future things which often occurs as the consciousness grows; there is nothing wrong in its happening; it is part of the growth in sadhana. So with other powers.


Sri Aurobindo: Only one must not get proud or boast or misuse the powers for the sake of desire, pride, power or the satisfaction of the ego.   By black magic is meant the occultism of the adverse powers — the occultism of the divine Powers is quite different. One is based on unity, the other on division.


Sri Aurobindo: To ﬁnd the Divine is indeed the ﬁrst reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, — that is, ﬁrst of all to transform one’s own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the inﬁnite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one’s essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one’s active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth — these things cannot be the ﬁrst or true object of spiritual seeking. We must ﬁnd the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or means towards ﬁnding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: As we grow in the inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more ﬂow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a half-way formation the true growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outﬂowing of His will in our life.


Sri Aurobindo: This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulﬁlled by an outﬂowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outward, not by the working out of a mental principle.  You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience.  The ﬁrst necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself.


Sri Aurobindo: The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real self. But there is another, a hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we can become aware of the real self and of a larger, deeper truth of nature, can realise the self and liberate and transform the nature. To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object of this concentration. Of this true consciousness other than the superﬁcial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual.


Sri Aurobindo: This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us.  To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the ﬁrst way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other way.  That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and ﬁnds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Inﬁnite. There it begins to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head is only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise one may get shut up in one’s own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reﬂection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there.


Sri Aurobindo: For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternately — but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable.  The other side of discipline is with regard to the activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord the nature with the inner realisation so that one may not be divided into two discordant parts. There are here several disciplines or processes possible.  One is to offer all the activities to the Divine and call for the inner guidance and the taking up of one’s nature by a Higher Power.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is the inward soul-opening, if the psychic being comes forward, then there is no great difﬁculty — there comes with it a psychic discrimination, a constant intimation, ﬁnally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, brings the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by past workings, not as any part of our real being; in proportion as one succeeds in this, becomes detached, sees mind and its activities as not oneself, life and its activities as not oneself, the body and its activities as not oneself, one becomes aware of an inner Being within us — inner mental, inner vital, inner physical — silent, calm, unbound, unattached which reﬂects the true Self above and can be its direct representative; from this inner silent Being proceeds a rejection of all that is to be rejected, an acceptance only of what can be kept and transformed, an inmost Will to perfection or a call to the Divine Power to do at each step what is necessary for the change of the Nature. It can also open mind, life and body to the inmost psychic entity and its guiding inﬂuence or its direct guidance. In most cases these two methods emerge and work together and ﬁnally fuse into one. But one can begin with either, the one that one feels most natural and easy to follow.