Sri Aurobindo: A new basis of action and relations has to be built up in which no further sanction will ever seem to be given to the past mistaken movements of the sadhaks which were standing in the way of the descent of the Truth into the physical (material) nature. The basis cannot be built in a day, but the Mother had to stand back, otherwise to build it at all would be impossible.    If it is the same part of the vital that was on the right side and has now turned against the Mother, the explanation is very obvious. It gave its adhesion formerly because it thought that by its adhesion it could make her satisfy its desires; ﬁnding its desires not indulged, it turns against her.


Sri Aurobindo: That is the usual vital movement in ordinary man and in ordinary life, and it has no true place in Yoga. It was just the introduction of this attitude into Yoga by the sadhaks and its persistence which has at last made it necessary for the Mother to draw back as she has done.  What you have to do is to get these lower parts to understand that they exist not for themselves but for the Divine and to give their adhesion, without claim or or subterfuge. It is the whole issue at the present moment in the sadhana; for it is only if this is done that the physical consciousness can change and become ﬁt for the descent. Otherwise there will always be these ups and downs in some part of the being at least, delay, confusion and disorder.


Sri Aurobindo: This is the only true basis for ﬁxity in the true consciousness and for a smooth course in the sadhana.    For the rest, it is not a fact that the Mother is retiring more and more or that she has any intention of going inside entirely like me. Your remarks about the privileged few are incomprehensible to me; we are not conﬁding in a few at the expense of others or telling them what is happening while keeping silent to you. I have, I think, written more to you than to anybody else about these matters and the Mother has not been conﬁding to anybody anything in that ﬁeld which has been held back from you.


Sri Aurobindo: This — about the privileged few — is an old complaint of yours and it has no foundation. If anybody claims to have the special conﬁdence of the Mother, he is making an egoistic claim which is not justiﬁable. Your real point seems to be about the Mother’s not taking up the soup and its accompaniments again.  I have told you already why she was compelled by the experience of her illness to stand back from the old routine — which had become for most of the sadhaks a sort of semi-ecclesiastical routine and nothing more. It was because of the mistaken attitude of the sadhaks which had brought about an atmosphere full of movements contrary to the Yoga and likely to lead to disaster — as it had already begun to do.


Sri Aurobindo: To resume the soup on the old footing would be to bring back the old conditions and end in a repetition of the same round of wrong movements and the same results. The Mother has been slowly and carefully taking steps to renew on another footing her control of things after her illness, but she can take no step which will allow the old dark movements to return — movements of some of which I think you yourself were beginning to take notice. The next step is for the sadhaks themselves to take; they must make it possible (by their change of attitude, by their resolution to rise on the lower vital and physical plane into the true consciousness) for a union with the Mother on that plane  to become possible. More I cannot say just now; but I fully intend to be more explicit hereafter — so far as I can without special reference to individuals; for these are things personal to people’s Yoga that can often be spoken of only to themselves and not to others.  As for your other questions I shall consider them in another letter; it is too late tonight.


Sri Aurobindo: It is already 3.30 a.m. I will only say that what happens is for the “best” in this sense only that the end will be a divine victory in spite of all difﬁculties — that has been and always will be my seeing, my faith and my assurance — if you are willing to accept it from me. But that does not mean that your sadness and depression are necessary to the movement! The sooner they disappear never to recur again, the more joyously the Mother and I will advance on the steep road to the summits, and the easier it will be for you to realise what you want, the complete Bhakti and Ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: You will say, “But at present the Mother has drawn back and it is the supramental that is to blame, because it is in order to bring down the supramental into matter that she retires.” The supramental is not to blame; the supramental could very well have come down into matter under former conditions, if the means created by the Mother for the physical and vital contact had not been vitiated by the wrong attitude, the wrong reactions in the Asram atmosphere. It was not the direct supramental Force that was acting, but an intermediate and preparatory force that carried in it a modiﬁed Light derived from the supramental; but this would have been sufﬁcient for the work of opening the way for the highest action, if it had not been for the irruption of these wrong forces on the yet unconquered lower (physical) vital and material plane. The interference was creating adverse possibilities which could not be allowed to continue.  The Mother would not have retired otherwise; and even as it is it is not meant as an abandonment of the ﬁeld but is only (to borrow a now current phrase from a more external enterprise) a temporary strategic retirement,


Sri Aurobindo: The supramental is therefore not responsible; on the contrary, it is the descent of the supramental that would end all the difﬁculty.  I don’t quite understand the question. I have explained in  that there are three aspects, transcendent, universal and individual, of the Mother.    There is one divine Force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: The Mother stands for all three, but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here — it is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identiﬁed with all the other aspects of the Divine Force.  The universal and individual Mother are the same — these are two aspects of the Supreme Mother — but the differentiation is for the multiple action and play. So also one feels the self as one’s own self in an individual way but also that there is the same self individualised in others and all are one.


Sri Aurobindo:    What people mean by the formless of the Mother, — they mean usually her universal aspect.


Sri Aurobindo: It is when she is experienced as a universal Existence and Power spread through the universe in which and by which all live. When one feels that Presence one begins to feel a universal peace, light, power, bliss without limits — that is her. One meets this more often by rising in consciousness above the head where one is liberated from this limited body consciousness and feels oneself also as something wide, calm, one self with all beings — free from passion and disturbance in an eternal peace. But it can be felt through the heart also — then the heart too feels itself wide as the world, pure and blissful, ﬁlled with the Mother’s presence.  There is also the Mother’s personal and individual presence in the heart which brings immediately love and bhakti and the sense of a close intimacy and personal oneness.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the utility of the physical approach to the Mother — the approach of the embodied mind and vital to her embodied Power. In her universal action the Mother acts according to the law of things — in her embodied physical action is the opportunity of a constant Grace, — it is for that that the embodiment takes place.    It is the work of the Cosmic Power to maintain the cosmos and the law of the cosmos — transforming it by a slow evolution.  The greater transformation comes from the Transcendent above the universe, and it is that transcendent Grace which the embodiment of the Mother is there to bring into action.


Sri Aurobindo: The embodied Mother must be the foundation of the concentration — even when you receive from the universal Consciousness above you, it is from her consciousness that you are receiving.  There are not many Mothers, there is One in many forms. The transcendental is only one aspect of the Mother. I don’t know what is meant by the embodied aspect of the transcendental Mother. There is the embodied aspect of the One Mother — what she manifests through it depends on herself.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes; that is all right. One speaks often however of all above the lower hemisphere as part of the transcendence. This is because the Supermind and Ananda are not manifested in universe at present, but are planes above it. For us the higher hemisphere is  [], the Supreme Transcendence is  [].


Sri Aurobindo: The Sanskrit terms are here clearer than the English.    Yes.  Yes; but from the point of view of the present triple world of mind, life and body governed by the Overmind (Maya), the Supermind and the supramental Divine (all the upper hemisphere in fact) can be spoken of as Transcendent.  The ﬁrst mother is the “Mother” — the eternal Mother; she always exists, she has no beginning or end.


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine Mother is the Consciousness and Force of the Divine — which is the Mother of all things.    The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Divine — or, it may be said, she is the Divine in its consciousness-force. The Ishwara as Lord of the Cosmos does come out of the Mother who takes her place beside him as the cosmic Shakti — the cosmic Ishwara is one aspect of the Divine. The experience therefore is correct so far as it goes.


Sri Aurobindo: The experience of the Mother being the Supreme is the Tantrik experience — it is one side of the Truth.     It depends on what they invoked — it was usually some aspect of the Mother that they called.  The Gita does not speak expressly of the Divine Mother; it speaks always of surrender to the Purushottama — it mentions her only as the Para Prakriti who becomes the Jiva, i.e., who manifests the Divine in the multiplicity and through whom all these worlds are created by the Supreme and he himself descends as the Avatar.


Sri Aurobindo: The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it; the Tantrik tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishwari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother, because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it. This Yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulﬁlment of the object of the Yoga.  In regard to the Purushottama the Divine Mother is the supreme divine Consciousness and Power above the worlds, Adya Shakti; she carries the Supreme in herself and manifests the Divine in the worlds through the Akshara and the Kshara.  In regard to the Akshara she is the same Para Shakti holding the Purusha immobile in herself and also herself immobile in him at the back of all creation. In regard to the Kshara she is the mobile cosmic Energy manifesting all beings and forces.


Sri Aurobindo: The Shankara knowledge is, as your Guru pointed out, only one side of the Truth; it is the knowledge of the Supreme as realised by the spiritual Mind through the static silence of the pure Existence. It was because he went by this side only that Shankara was unable to accept or explain the origin of the universe except as illusion, a creation of Maya. Unless one realises the Supreme on the dynamic as well as the static side, one cannot experience the true origin of things and the equal reality of the active Brahman. The Shakti or Power of the Eternal becomes then a power of illusion only and the world becomes incomprehensible, a mystery of cosmic madness, an eternal delirium of the Eternal.  Whatever verbal or ideative logic one may bring to support it, this way of seeing the universe explains nothing; it only erects a mental formula of the inexplicable.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only if you approach the Supreme through his double aspect of Sat and Chit-Shakti, double but inseparable, that the total truth of things can become manifest to the inner experience. The other side was developed by the Shakta Tantrics. The two together, the Vedantic and the Tantric truth uniﬁed, can arrive at the integral knowledge.  But philosophically this is what your Guru’s teaching comes to and it is obviously a completer truth and a wider knowledge than that given by the Shankara formula. It is already indicated in the Gita’s teaching of the Purushottama and the Parashakti (Adya Shakti) who becomes the Jiva and upholds the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: It is evident that Purushottama and Parashakti are both eternal and are inseparable and one in being; the Parashakti manifests the universe, manifests too the Divine in the universe as the Ishwara and herself appears at his side as the Ishwari Shakti.  Or, one may say, it is the Supreme Consciousness-Power of the Supreme that manifests or puts forth itself as Ishwara Ishwari, Atma Atmashakti, Purusha Prakriti, Jiva Jagat. That is the truth in its completeness as far as the mind can formulate it. In the Supermind these questions do not even arise — for it is the mind that creates the problem by erecting oppositions between aspects of the Divine which are not really opposed to each other but are one and inseparable.


Sri Aurobindo: This supramental knowledge has not yet been attained, because the supermind itself has not yet been attained, but the reﬂection of it in intuitive spiritual consciousness is there and that was what was evidently realised in experience by your Guru and what he was expressing in mental terms in the quoted passage. It is possible to go towards this knowledge by beginning with the experience of dissolution in the One, but on condition that you do not stop there, taking it as the highest Truth, but proceed to realise the same One as the supreme Mother, the Consciousness Force of the Eternal. If on the other hand you approach through the supreme Mother, she will give you the liberation in the silent One also as well as the realisation of the dynamic One and from that it is easier to arrive at the Truth in which both are one and inseparable. At the same time the gulf created by Mind between the Supreme and his Manifestation is bridged and there is no longer a ﬁssure in the truth which makes all incomprehensible. If in the light of this you examine what your Guru taught, you will see that it is the same thing in less metaphysical language.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a matter of realisation. In the yoga of the Gita the cosmic Divine is realised as Vasudeva (Krishna). The Vaishnavas realise it as Vishnu, the Shaivas as Shiva. The Tantrics (Shaktas) realise the Devi (Goddess) as the Cosmic and even as the Transcendent Divine.  It is the Divine who is the Master — the Self is inactive, it is always a silent wideness supporting all things —


Sri Aurobindo: that is the static aspect. There is also the dynamic aspect through which the Divine works — behind that is the Mother. You must not lose sight of that, that it is through the Mother that all things are attained.  Essentially everybody is the Self — but take care to avoid the idea that you are the Lord — for that may raise up the ego.


Sri Aurobindo: You must not try to stop any opening. My remarks were only meant to keep you on your guard against certain errors that sadhaks often make when the cosmic consciousness opens. If there is the psychic opening with its surrender and the higher opening with its wideness and self-realisation, the two together, there is little danger of any such error.    The experiences were all right — but they give only one side of the Divine Truth, that which one attains through the higher mind — the other side is what one attains through the heart.


Sri Aurobindo: Above the higher mind these two truths become one. If one realises the silent Atman above, there is no danger, but there is also no transformation, only Moksha, Nirvana. If one realises the cosmic self, dynamic and active, then one realises all as the Self, all as myself, that self as the Divine, etc. This is all true; but the danger is of the ego catching hold of the “my” in that conception of all as “myself”. For this “myself” is not my personal self but everybody’s self as well as mine.


Sri Aurobindo: The way to get rid of any such danger is to remember that this Divine is also the Mother, that the personal “I” is a child of the Mother with whom I am one, yet different, her child, servant, instrument. I have said that you should not stop realising the Self or the cosmic consciousness, but should at the same time remember that all this is the Mother.  You are seeking for Self-realisation — but what is that Self if not the Mother’s self? There is no other.


Sri Aurobindo: The Self has two aspects, passive and active. In the ﬁrst it is pure silence, wideness, calm, the inactive Brahman — in the second it is the Cosmic Spirit, universal not individual. One can feel in it union or oneness with the Mother. Intimacy is a feeling of the individual, therefore of the psychic being.  I don’t understand exactly.


Sri Aurobindo: Chitshakti or Bhagavat Chetana is the Mother — the Jivatman is a portion of it, the psychic or soul a spark of it. Ego is a perverted reﬂection of the psychic or the Jivatman. If that is what you mean, it is correct.    It is true of every soul on earth that it is a portion of the Divine Mother passing through the experiences of the Ignorance in order to arrive at the truth of its being and be the instrument of a Divine Manifestation and work here.


Sri Aurobindo: It all depends upon what basis one lives in the silence or above.  A speck can be of as much interest to the Divine Consciousness as an inﬁnity.  Everything comes from the Divine; but the lower Prakriti is the power of the Ignorance — it is not therefore a power of Truth, but only of mixed truth and falsehood. The Mother here stands not for the Power of the Ignorance, but for the Power that has come down to bring down the Truth and rise up to the Truth out of the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: In order to get the dynamic realisation it is not enough to rescue the Purusha from subjection to Prakriti; we must transfer the allegiance of the Purusha from the lower Prakriti with its play of ignorant Forces to the Supreme Divine Shakti, the Mother.  It is a mistake to identify the Mother with the lower Prakriti and its mechanism of forces. Prakriti here is a mechanism only which has been put forth for the working of the evolutionary Ignorance. As the ignorant mental, vital or physical being is not itself the Divine, although it comes from the Divine — so the mechanism of Prakriti is not the Divine Mother. No doubt something of her is there in and behind this mechanism maintaining it for its evolutionary purpose — but what she is in herself is not a Shakti of Avidya, but the Divine Consciousness, Power, Light, Para Prakriti to whom we turn for the release and the divine fulﬁlment.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is this much truth that the cosmic Force works out everything and the Cosmic Spirit (Virat Purusha) supports her action.  But this cosmic Force is a Power that works under the conditions of the Ignorance, — it appears as the lower nature and the lower nature makes you do wrong things. The Divine allows the play of these Forces so long as you do not yourself want anything better. But if you are a sadhak, then you do not accept the play of the lower nature, you turn to the Divine Mother instead, and ask her to work through you instead of the lower Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only when you have turned entirely in every part of your being to the Divine Mother and to her alone that the Divine will do all actions through you.     Why should the Mother do bad things in you? It is Nature that acts for that, not the will of the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: You can at least know that anger, jealousy, envy, restlessness, despair, indolence etc. are not divine things and that purity, peace, harmony, zeal, unselﬁshness etc., are good things and help the growth to the Divine.  It is right. There is no difﬁculty about it. Nirguna, Saguna are only aspects taken by the Divine in the manifestation. It is the Mother who manifests (creation is only manifestation) the Saguna or the Nirguna Ishwara.


Sri Aurobindo:   Both experiences are correct. What is opposite and incompatible to the mind which thinks by limitations is not so to the Higher Consciousness. Neither Form nor Formlessness is the sole truth by itself excluding the other; the Divine manifests through both, but is bound by neither.


Sri Aurobindo: To meditate on the Mother as the formless Divine is a good meditation and can be continued, but for the full effect in this Yoga it is not enough. To meditate on the personality of the Mother in the heart is also necessary — but whether she should do that now or not depends on the feeling in herself — whether she needs it or feels ready for it.  Of course. The Mother has many forms on the supraphysical planes.


Sri Aurobindo:   Ananda is not the only thing — there is Knowledge and Power and Love and many other powers of the Divine. As a special experience only it may stand.    It is always so — the Mother manifests in many forms according to the need of what has to be done.


Sri Aurobindo: Adyashakti is the original Shakti, therefore the highest form of the Mother. Only she manifests in a different way according to the plane from which one sees her.  Maheshwari’s natural place is in the higher consciousness above mind, for she is the wideness and largeness and wisdom of the Divine. Mahakali acts most naturally through the higher vital which is the instrument of force and power. Mahalakshmi acts through the heart — in your case at present she is acting through the mind also, though that is less usual — ordinarily it is Mahasaraswati.


Sri Aurobindo: These Powers can manifest on all levels from the Overmind to the Physical.    As to the Gods, man can build forms which they will accept; but these forms too are inspired into man’s mind from the planes to which the God belongs. All creation has the two sides, the formed and the formless; the Gods too are formless and yet have forms, but a Godhead can take many forms, here Maheshwari, there Pallas Athene. Maheshwari herself has many forms in her lesser manifestations, Durga, Uma, Parvati, Chandi etc.


Sri Aurobindo: The Gods are not limited to human forms — man also has not always seen them in human forms only.  Mahakali can work only when there is a calm inner being and a resolute will facing without disturbance all the difﬁculties. When there is not that, then it is only possible for Maheshwari to work in order to bring her calm and wideness into the being.    Yes.


Sri Aurobindo: There is at least one instance in which it was called down by the sadhaka and he met it full. There was a violent action shattering his old sanskaras, attachments etc. into atoms and he came through it all right.  The Mother in her cosmic power is all things and all divine Personalities, for nothing can be in manifestation except by her and as part of her being. But what was meant in the  was that the Ishwara and the Divine Shakti were one Person or Being in two aspects and it puts forward this union of them as Krishna-Mahakali as of great power for the manifestation.  These — Kali, Shyama, etc. — are ordinary forms seen through the vital; the real Mahakali form whose origin is in the Overmind is not black or dark or terrible, but golden of colour and full of beauty, even when formidable to the Asuras.


Sri Aurobindo:   Mahakali and Kali are not the same, Kali is a lesser form.  Mahakali in the higher planes appears usually with the golden colour.  It is in the vital.


Sri Aurobindo: It is Kali as a destroying Force — a symbol of the Nature Force in the ignorance surrounded by difﬁculties, trampling and breaking everything in a blind struggle to get through till she ﬁnds herself standing with her foot on the Divine itself — then she comes to herself and the struggle and destruction are over. That is the signiﬁcance of the symbol.  The lion is the attribute of the Goddess Durga, the conquering and protecting aspect of the Universal Mother.   Durga is the Mother’s power of Protection.   The lion with Durga on it is the symbol of the Divine Consciousness acting through a divinised physical-vital and vital-material force.


Sri Aurobindo:   I suppose it would be some aspect like that — an aspect of Durga.    Your attitude towards any divine manifestation in the Mother’s external consciousness is illuminating, “terrifying not only to the Asuras, but to the sadhaks”. And yet it was only a limited and particular force — the Durga power!


Sri Aurobindo: Others did not go so far as that, but they found her high, far-away, aloof, severe — asked what was the cause of her displeasure against them. And that comes to the same — to be severe against the Asuras is also to be severe against the sadhaks. A few struck a different note, delight at the greatness of the Power they felt, or, even when feeling nothing of that, a sense of the sudden lifting of obstacles. But that is not the general tone. It follows that the Mother cannot manifest anything in her external material because she has to keep on a level with the sadhaks.


Sri Aurobindo: And what then? If she is not to be allowed to protect herself, the work, the sadhaks, against the attacks of the Asuras on the physical plane — for it is there that there is the whole question, — then what is to be done? what can be done? Nothing. We can only wait for the supramental descent — and that descent is methodical but slow, for the opposition to that too is obstinate in the material Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: However, we must go on and do what can be done under these difﬁcult conditions. I do not know how far it is wise not to come to pranam, — the results in others have not been brilliant but if it is only for a few days, and you insist, I shall not refuse.  The real thing is however a change of the mental attitude — getting out of the world of ideas and feelings built by your mind which is a prison into a freedom and openness to the Divine that would be the most helpful to you. There would soon then be a compass and a rudder.


Sri Aurobindo:   Durga combines the characteristics of Maheshwari and Mahakali to a certain extent, — there is not much connection with Mahalakshmi. The combination of Krishna and Mahakali is one that has a great power in this Yoga and if the names rise together in your consciousness, it is a good sign.  The Mother told you all that she saw about the last form — it disappeared almost immediately. The ﬁrst form was the true one, that which she wears on the Overmind Plane which is the home of the greater Gods — as soon as it touched your mind, it took the traditional form which is the one with which your mind is familiar.


Sri Aurobindo: The third shape must be a symbolic one (not traditional) — it would seem to be a correspondent one on the Shakti side to the Trimurti, indicating the unity in difference of three powers in the Cosmic Consciousness — in it is the same manifestation in different forms, — the Overmind Power, the traditional Lakshmi and the One Power in the Mother here.  It is Mahasaraswati’s work to use the power and light and experiences that come in from above so as to change in detail the whole outer nature.    At present since the sadhana came down to the physical consciousness — or rather it is a combination of MaheshwariMahasaraswati forces.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes — all perfection in intricacy of detail shows the touch of Mahasaraswati.   That is the work of Mahasaraswati to move between the higher consciousness and the heart and through them establish the rule of the Truth in all details of the mind and life and physical nature.  Yes — but the images of the Radha-Krishna lila are taken from the vital world and therefore it is only a minor manifestation of the Radha Shakti that is there depicted. That is why she is called Mahaprana Shakti and Hladini Shakti.


Sri Aurobindo: What is referred to is not this minor form, but the full Power of Love and Ananda above.  The Mother’s Vibhutis would normally be feminine personalities most of whom would be dominated by one of the four personalities of the Mother. The others you mention would be personalities and powers of the Ishwara, but in them also as in all the Mother’s force would act. I do not quite catch the question about the transformation of the Vibhutis. All creation and transformation is the work of the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo:   If you mean the divine Personalities of the Mother — the answer is yes. It may even be said that each Vibhuti draws his energies from the Four, from one of them predominantly in most cases, as Napoleon from Mahakali, Rama from Mahalakshmi, Augustus Caesar from Mahasaraswati.  The Mother has not only one appearance, but many at different times.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Many see like that, as if the Mother were taller than her ordinary physical appearance.    The Mother has many different personalities and her appearance varies according as one or another predominates. The something common, of course, exists.


Sri Aurobindo: There is ﬁrst, the one whom all these personalities manifest but that cannot be expressed in name or word — there is also the supramental personality which from behind the veil presides over the aim of the present manifestation.    It is rather, I think, dependent on the personality that manifests in front — as she has many personalities and the body is plastic enough to express something of each when it comes forward.  It must obviously have been some force taking the form of the Mother — that often happens on the vital plane. Suggestions are given by these disguised forces which have to be rejected as you rejected this one.


Sri Aurobindo: The opposition between the Mother’s consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days (due mainly to , and others of that time) and emerged in a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and others. The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness — if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers. If a separation is made like that (I leave aside the turns which their minds so strongly put upon these things), how can the Truth establish itself — from the Truth there is no such separation.


Sri Aurobindo: No, it is a single Power.    Of course you are right in saying we are one and whatever is given is from both. If I give, the Mother’s Force goes with it, or else the sadhak would get nothing, and if the Mother gives, my support goes with it and gives it my light as well as the Mother’s.  It is two sides of one indivisible action, one carrying with it the other.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the Mother’s Force that gives the push, but also the peace.     Whatever one gets from the Mother, comes from myself also — there is no difference. So, too, if I give anything, it is by the Mother’s Force that it goes to the sadhak.


Sri Aurobindo: If you allow such strange and wrong ideas to get hold of you, it is not surprising that you get confusion and ﬁnd it difﬁcult to make any steady progress.  The Mother’s consciousness is the divine Consciousness and  the Light that comes from it is the light of the divine Truth; the Force that she brings down is the force of the divine Truth. One who receives and accepts and lives in the Mother’s light, will begin to see the truth on all the planes, the mental, the vital, the physical. He will reject all that is undivine; the undivine is the falsehood, the ignorance, the error of the dark forces; the undivine is all that is obscure and unwilling to accept the divine Truth and its light and force.


Sri Aurobindo: The undivine, therefore, is all that is unwilling to accept the light and force of the Mother. That is why I am always telling you to keep yourself in contact with the Mother and with her Light and Force, because it is only so that you can come out of the confusion and obscurity and receive the Truth that comes from above.  When we speak of the Mother’s Light or my Light in a special sense, we are speaking of a special occult action — we are speaking of certain lights which come from the Supermind.  In this action the Mother’s is the white Light which puriﬁes, illumines, brings down the whole essence and power of the Truth and makes the transformation possible. But in fact all light that comes from above, from the highest divine Truth is the Mother’s.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine;  we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.  The attempt to set up a division and opposition of this kind, putting the Mother on one side and myself on another and opposite or quite different side, has always been a trick of the forces of the Falsehood when they want to prevent a sadhaka from reaching the Truth. Dismiss all such falsehoods from your mind.  Know that the Mother’s light and force are the light and force of the Truth; remain always in contact with the Mother’s light and force, then only can you grow into the divine Truth.


Sri Aurobindo:   I wrote once before that these ideas about the separation between the Mother and myself and our paths being different or our goal different are quite erroneous. Our path is the same; our goal too is the same — the Supramental Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   Mother was doing Yoga before she knew or met Sri Aurobindo; but their lines of sadhana independently followed the same course. When they met, they helped each other in perfecting the sadhana. What is known as Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; they are now completely identiﬁed — the sadhana in the Asram and all arrangement is done directly by the Mother, Sri Aurobindo supports her from behind. All who come here for practising Yoga have to surrender themselves to the Mother who helps them always and builds up their spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is one aspect of the Divine — but the Divine as the Self and Lord and the Divine as the Mother are the same — there is no less nor greater.     It is the minds that see surface things only and cannot see what is behind them.  Mother and I are one but in two bodies; there is no necessity for both the bodies to do the same thing always.


Sri Aurobindo: On the contrary, as we are one it is quite sufﬁcient for one to sign, just as it is quite sufﬁcient for one to go down to receive Pranam or give meditation.     The Mother and I are one and equal. Also she is supreme here and has the right to arrange the work as she thinks best for the work, no one has any right or claim or proprietorship over any work that may be given him.


Sri Aurobindo: The Asram is the Mother’s creation and would not have existed but for her, the work she does is her creation and has not been given to her and cannot be taken from her. Try to understand this elementary truth, if you want to have any right relation or attitude towards the Mother.   APPENDIX  1


Sri Aurobindo: I am, and the Mother of all my children.  My children are all part of my consciousness and of my being. When transformed and realised, all will have an equal right to manifest each one an aspect of myself and Sri Aurobindo.  It is the unity of all in the solidarity of a common manifestation that will allow the creation of the new and divine world upon the Earth. Each will bring his part, but no part will be complete except as a power in the solidarity of the whole.


Sri Aurobindo: 2  I am the God of Wealth, the Strong and Splendid, I am the Master of the thousands and the Regent of the millions, I am the puissant Creator, the full-handed gatherer, the opulent disposer of treasures. All the riches of every kind that are in the earth and on the earth and below it and all the riches that are in the waters are mine by right; I have power over all their plenitudes.  My power is for the Mother; I call all these riches for her, that I may dedicate them to her, that I may lay them at the feet of the Mother of Radiances.  It means that we act as we do because we take it as a fact that the Divine can manifest and is manifested in a human body.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they ought to know it.  Not unless they are interested and seek the meaning of what we do.   Yes, of course, it applies to everybody who accepts the fundamental truth on which Mother based what she wrote.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, but for that to be a constant realisation in its fullness the same effort has to be made and if made will bring the other realisations with it as parts of the main realisation.  The supramental creation, since it is to be a creation upon earth, must be not only an inner change but a physical and external manifestation also. And it is precisely for this part of the work, the most difﬁcult of all, that surrender is most needful; for this reason, that it is the actual descent of the supramental Divine into Matter and the working of the Divine Presence and Power there that can alone make the physical and external change possible. Even the most powerful self-assertion of human will and endeavour is impotent to bring it about; as for egoistic insistence and vital revolt, they are, so long as they last, insuperable obstacles to the descent.


Sri Aurobindo: Only a calm, pure and surrendered physical consciousness, full of the psychic aspiration, can be its ﬁeld; this alone can make an effective opening of the material being to the Light and Power and the supramental change a thing actual and practicable. It is for this that we are here in the body, and it is for this that you and other sadhaks are in the Asram near us. But it is not by insistence on petty demands and satisfactions in the external ﬁeld or on an outer nearness pleasing to the vital nature and its pride or desire that you can get the true relation with the Divine in this province. If you want the realisation there, it is the true nearness that you must seek, the descent and presence of the Mother in your physical consciousness, her constant inner touch in the physical being and its activities, her will and knowledge behind all its work and thought and movement and the ever present Ananda of that presence expelling all vital and physical separateness, craving and desire. If you have that, then you have all the nearness you can ask for and the rest you will gladly leave to the Mother’s knowledge and will to decide.


Sri Aurobindo: For with this in you there can be no feeling of being kept away, no sense of “gulf” and “distance”, no complaint of a unity that is lacking or an empty dryness and denial of nearness.     It is rather surprising that you should be unable to understand such a simple and familiar statement; for that has been always the whole reason of this Yoga that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience or at the most mukti. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature.


Sri Aurobindo: If it were not so the Mother would not be here and I would not be here — if a realisation of the Impersonal were sufﬁcient.  It is the call of your soul that brought you here and also some aspiration or connection with the Mother and myself in past lives.   The aspiration for union with the Divine and perhaps also for the descent of the Divine on the earth.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many things that have brought it about — a connection in past lives with the Mother and myself, the development of your nature in former births which made it possible for you to seek the Divine, bhakti in those lives bearing its fruit now — ﬁnally, the Divine Grace.   Carrying on the evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.


Sri Aurobindo: Presence where and in whom? If they did not meet, they would not recognise, and even if they met there is no reason why the Mother and I should cast off the veil which hung over these personalities and reveal the Divine behind them. Those lives were not meant for any such purpose.    But why cannot the inner self be hidden from all in such lives?


Sri Aurobindo: Your reasoning would only have some force if the presence on earth then were as the Avatar, but not if it was only as a Vibhuti.  “Presence in Thyself” means nothing. It is “presence” in or behind some body and behind some outer personality. Also “presence” in what part of the world? If Mother were in Rome at the time of Buddha, how could Buddha know as he did not even know the existence of Rome?


Sri Aurobindo: One can be a great man without knowing such things as that.  Great men or even great Vibhutis need not be omniscient or know things which it was not useful for them to know.    An Avatar or Vibhuti have the knowledge that is necessary for their work; they need not have more. There was absolutely no reason why Buddha should know what was going on in Rome.


Sri Aurobindo: An Avatar even does not manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in the front of his consciousness.  As for the Vibhuti, the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis, like Julius Caesar for instance, have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent.


Sri Aurobindo: Why should they? The veil was there necessary for their work.  Why should it be thrown off? So if the Mother was present in the life of Christ, she was there not as the Divine Manifestation but as one altogether human. For her to be recognised as the Divine would have created a tremendous disorder and frustrated the work Christ came to do by breaking its proper limits.


Sri Aurobindo: I never heard of Rishis from India going there. There is a legend of some Mages getting an intimation that a divine Birth was there on earth and following a star that led them to the stable in which Christ was born. But this is a legend, not history.


Sri Aurobindo: We were not on earth as Avataras.    The Avatar is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution. The Avatar is a special manifestation, while for the rest of the time it is the Divine working within the ordinary human limits as a Vibhuti.  I wrote the general law of spiritual life and obedience.


Sri Aurobindo: You have to know that as well as its special application here. Moreover many here are satisﬁed with saying “The Mother is divine,” but they do not follow her commands. Others do not really regard her as Divine — they treat her as if she were an ordinary Guru.   They are supposed to be known. You have to do the right thing and follow the Yoga sincerely.


Sri Aurobindo: Even the Overmind is for all but the Mother and myself either unrealised or only an inﬂuence, mostly subjective.  [ ] Not quite correct in all points. The things to be brought down were in us no doubt — but not all outwardly manifested, from the beginning. Of course’s statement is altogether true only as far as the bracket goes.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, of course. What is being done is meant to prepare the manifestation of the supermind in the earth-consciousness down to Matter itself, so it can’t be for the physical of myself or the Mother alone.    Certainly. If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning, nobody would have been able to approach us nor could the sadhana have been done.


Sri Aurobindo: There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men.  Even as it is, Mother has to come down towards the lower consciousness of the sadhaks instead of keeping always in her own, otherwise they begin to say, “How far away, how severe you were; you do not love me, I get no help from you etc. etc.”  The Divine has to veil himself in order to meet the human.  There are three stages of the sadhana, psychic change, transition to the higher levels of consciousness — with a descent of their powers, conscious forces — the supramental. In the last even the control over death is a later, not an initial stage.


Sri Aurobindo: Each of these stages demands a great length of time and a high and long endeavour. The legend related to you comes partly from a false idea that Mother and Sri Aurobindo will bring down everything and the sadhaks have only to wait and receive, a misconception responsible for much inner indolence and inertia, and the fact that for a long time a certain protection was over the Asram so that there was no death of any sadhak and little illness — the legend survives, though the circumstances are not now the same.  You say that this way is too difﬁcult for you or the likes of you and it is only “avatars” like myself or the Mother that can do it. That is a strange misconception, for it is on the contrary the easiest and simplest and most direct way and anyone can do it, if he makes his mind and vital quiet, even those who have a tenth of your capacity can do it. It is the other way of tension and strain and hard endeavour that is difﬁcult and needs a great force of Tapasya.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difﬁculties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in this Asram or outside, far more difﬁcult conditions, battles to ﬁght, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer, a work such as I am certain none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience not in a mere play or  but in grim earnest all the obstruction, difﬁculty, opposition, bafﬂed and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all that should be repeated over again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others — if they will only consent to take it. It is because of our experience won at a tremendous price that we can urge upon you and others, “Take the psychic attitude; follow the straight sunlit path, with the Divine openly or secretly upbearing you — if secretly, he will yet show himself in good time, — do not insist on the hard, hampered, roundabout and difﬁcult journey.”


Sri Aurobindo:   As for the question about the illness, perfection in the physical plane is indeed part of the ideal of the Yoga, but it is the last item  and, so long as the fundamental change has not been made in the material consciousness to which the body belongs, one may have a certain perfection on other planes without having immunity in the body. We have not sought perfection for our own separate sake, but as part of a general change creating a possibility of perfection for others. That could not have been done without our accepting and facing the difﬁculties of the realisation and transformation and overcoming them for ourselves.


Sri Aurobindo: It has been done to a sufﬁcient degree on the other planes — but not yet on the most material part of the physical plane. Till it is done, the ﬁght there continues and, though there may be and is a force of Yogic action and defence, there cannot be immunity. The  Mother ’s


Sri Aurobindo: difﬁculties are not her own; she bears the difﬁculties of others also and those that are inherent in the general action and working for transformation. If it had been otherwise, it would be a very different matter.    The Mother has often lost ﬂesh and put it on again. It is lasting longer this time because of the pressure of the struggle in the material part of Nature — for the main burden of the struggle on each plane has always fallen on her, since it is she who bears up all the others.


Sri Aurobindo: You are quite mistaken in thinking that the possibility of the sunlit path is a discovery or original invention of mine. The very ﬁrst books of Yoga I read more than thirty years ago spoke of the dark and the sunlit way and emphasised the superiority of the second over the other.  It is not either because I have myself trod the sunlit way or ﬂinched from difﬁculty and suffering and danger. I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share. But that was because the ﬁnders of the Way had to face these things in order to conquer.


Sri Aurobindo: No difﬁculty that can come on the sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact, that is an understatement) before we could overcome; many still remain protesting that they have a right until the perfect perfection is there. But we have never consented to admit their inevitable necessity for others. It is in fact to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden. It was with that object that the Mother once prayed to the Divine that whatever difﬁculties, dangers, sufferings were necessary for the path might be laid on her rather than on others. It has been so far heard that as a result of daily and terrible struggles for years those who put an entire and sincere conﬁdence in her able to follow the sunlit path and even those who cannot, yet when they do put the trust ﬁnd their path suddenly easy and, if it becomes difﬁcult again, it is only when distrust, revolt, abhiman, or other darknesses come upon them.


Sri Aurobindo: The sunlit path is not altogether a fable.  The Mother and myself have passed through it. It comes inevitably in the full opening of the being to the universal.  After realisation whatever the Higher Will demands is the best — but ﬁrst detachment is the rule. To reach the Freedom without the discipline and detachment is given to few.


Sri Aurobindo: The Mother and myself went for years through the utmost self-imposed bareness of life.  By the way, do you think that the Mother or myself or others who have taken up the spiritual life had not enjoyed life and that it is therefore that the Mother was able to speak of a joyous sacriﬁce to the Divine as the true spirit of spiritual sacriﬁce?  Or do you think we spent the preliminary stages in longings for the lost ﬂeshpots of Egypt and that it was only later on we felt the joy of the spiritual sacriﬁce? Of course we did not; we and many others had no difﬁculty on the score of giving up anything we thought necessary to give up and no hankerings afterwards. Your rule is as usual a stiff rule that does not at all apply generally.


Sri Aurobindo: Nobody has found this Yoga a Grand Trunk Road, neither nor  nor even myself or the Mother. All such ideas are a romantic illusion.  These are questions that I cannot answer — it is not for me to reply to such queries. I can only say that the ﬁnal aim of the Yoga here is to bring down the supramental Truth (all other aims and stages being preliminary and instrumental) and organise its action. The Asram proceeds on the assumption that this has to be done through myself and the Mother and in accepting this aim and the descent of this Truth the sadhaks accept myself and the Mother and must be guided by us and receive from us what is descending and cannot attain it otherwise.


Sri Aurobindo: If they follow or want some other Truth, they are free to do so but they cannot do it here, because here they will not succeed, as it is not the end for which the Divine Force is working here. And it has been found that if they reject the Power that comes from us to follow something which is not that, it leads them out of this way and they cannot proﬁt by our presence or by the Yoga or form a harmonious unit in the work that is to be done here. That is all I am prepared to say in this matter.   1. A quiet mind makes consciousness easier.


Sri Aurobindo: 2. If you keep a quiet mind and a constant contact with myself and the Mother and the true Light and Force, then things will become easy and straight — it is the way to get to the realisation.   3. It is a mistake to think that this method will not lead you to the supramental realisation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the only way to advance towards the supramental change.   4. It is because you become doubtful and begin to follow after other ways and other (lower) experiences that you get again confused and full of incertitudes.  5.


Sri Aurobindo: Keep to way, the way shown to you by me. It is by following this way that you can reach the wideness you want — if you run about on many ways, that will bring not wideness but confusion.   6. Here in the lower nature there are many things, but they are in a state of disharmony, so to follow them all together means disharmony, confusion, want of organisation, ﬁght.


Sri Aurobindo: In the higher (supramental) nature there is a greater wideness and much more is there than in the lower nature; but all is harmony, organisation, peace. Follow therefore the one way that leads to the higher supramental nature.  7. Do not be impatient, because full knowledge does not come to you at once. In quietude of mind keep the contact, let the true Light and Force work and with time all knowledge will come and the Truth will grow in you.


Sri Aurobindo: You may be sure that we shall not desert you and that we would never dream of doing so. You say truly that what drives you into these moods is the Asuric Maya or a goad from the Asura — it is what we speak of as the hostile Force. What answers to it is a part of the human vital that has an attraction or habit of response to suffering, self-torment, depression and despair.  But in itself what comes is from outside and not from within you. It is, as I have more than once told you, a formation that has been made and repeats itself and this is shown by the fact that once it starts it goes round always in the same course of ideas, suggestions and feelings.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst thing you have to do is to recognise it for what it is. It was not, for instance, “all your nature” that advised you not to write to the Mother, but it was the suggestion of this Force. If you recognise these things as suggestions — and of a Force adverse to you and your sadhana — it is easier to meet and answer than if you see it as something in yourself. The second thing is to take refuge in your better and higher self against that vital part which responds to these suggestions. You must not regard this part as all your nature, but only a part of your vital which has taken an exaggerated prominence.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in the vital the larger part by far was that which had high ambitions, generous feelings, a large-heartedness which everybody was obliged to recognise. That is what you must regard as your real self and you must believe that the Divine has a use for that and for the faculties that have been given you — believe not in a rajasic or egoistic spirit but in the spirit of the instrument called and chosen to purify itself and be ﬁt for its work and service — and because of that you have no right to throw it or yourself away, but have to persevere quietly till you are rid of the lower nature and the Asuric Maya. And, last but not least, you have to develop the power and the habit of taking refuge in the protection of the Mother and myself. It is for this reason that the habit of criticising and judging by the outer mind or cherishing its preconceived ideas and formations must disappear. You should repeat always to yourself when it tries to rise, “Sri Aurobindo and the Mother know better than myself — they have the experience and knowledge which I have not — they must surely be acting for the best and in a greater light than that of ordinary human knowledge.”


Sri Aurobindo: If you can ﬁx that idea in yourself so that it will remain even in clouded moments, you will be able to face much more easily the suggestions of the Asuric Maya.  The idea of suicide is always a sign of these Asuric formations. Like all the rest it is perfectly irrational — for the suicide after death goes through a hell of misery far worse than was possible in life and when he is reborn he has to face the same problems and difﬁculties he ﬂed from, but in an acuter form and in much less favourable circumstances. The other justifying suggestions were equally irrational and untrue. Wherever you went, the blow would always fall on ourselves and the Asram, for you are and would remain too intimately identiﬁed with us for it to be otherwise and distance would make no difference.


Sri Aurobindo: And certainly the verse in the Gita does not cover a case of suicide, but refers to the consciousness and concentration of the Yogi in his departure.  You need not think that anything can alter our attitude towards you. That which is extended to you is not a vital human love which can be altered by external things: it remains and persistently we shall try to help and lift you up and lead you towards the Light where in the union of soul and heart you will recognise the Friend and the Mother.    I was overjoyed to read your letter — ﬁrst because it relieved me from the anxiety which your persistent trouble had given and, most, because of the clarity of consciousness which has liberated you.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, that was the main difﬁculty — that and the clinging to wrong ideas which it has created. You should never doubt about the reality and sincerity of our feeling towards you, mine and the Mother’s — for it creates a veil and separates, where there should be no separation, and it is a ﬁrst barrier against that openness which is necessary if one is to receive fully or even at all from the Guru. Of course, I saw that something had blinded you and was keeping you unconscious of the source of the trouble, but there was needed a certain clarity of the soul to remove it. Now that it has come, I trust that it will keep the mind clear and free the ways of the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: When these moods come upon you, why do you run away from the Mother and avoid her? Why do you not come to her, tell her frankly what you feel and what is in your mind and let her take the trouble from you?  The reasons you give for wishing to leave us are no good reasons at all. If you want to see the richness and greatness of God, you will, if you wait, see more of it with us than you ever can outside. And if you want to see the Himalayas, it will be much better for you to see them hereafter with your Mother beside you.


Sri Aurobindo: You are quite mistaken when you say that if you will go, there will be no Devil left in the Asram. The Devil is not here because of you; he is here because he wants to give trouble to the Mother and spoil her work. And what he chieﬂy wants is to drive her children away from her, and especially those who like you are nearest to her. If you go, he will remain; and not only he will remain, but he will feel that he has won a great victory and will set himself with a double vigour to attack her through others.  You talk of not giving trouble to the Mother and to me; but do you not realise that nothing can be worse trouble to us than your going away?


Sri Aurobindo: The moods of revolt that come upon you are clouds that pass; but to see you leave us in this way and feel our love rejected and your place near us empty would be indeed a real trouble to us and we would feel it more deeply than anything else you could do.  You know that it is not true that your sole desire is to go away. It is only so when you are in these moods. And you know that these are moods that pass, and if you allow the Mother to take them away, they go at once. The trouble is that when they come, you take them too much to heart and you begin to think that there is nothing else to do but go away.


Sri Aurobindo: I assure you that that is no solution and that we would much rather have you with us even with these moods than be separated from you; compared with our love for you, the trouble they give us is mere dust in the balance.  Read this letter, talk with the Mother and act according to your true self; never mind the rest.   I hope you have been able to recover or have begun to recover from the mass of suggestions that fell upon you with regard to the Mother’s relations with you and her feeling towards you which have not varied from a constant loving kindness, affection and good will. Especially since the time you returned from Bengal her appreciation of the good work you have done for us there has been constant and never varied for a moment.  The suggestions that fell upon you were certainly the result of a passing despondency and nervous upset: there was nothing on our side, no coldness, no displeasure, no indifference and, had these or any similar feelings been there — and there never was any reason for her feeling them — she could not have and had no wish to manifest anything of the kind either by gesture or otherwise.


Sri Aurobindo: These were the suggestions of an adverse force which wanted to push you away from her and create a distance between her and you so that you might be discouraged in your sadhana and, if possible, induced to go away from us. It is impossible that we should ever accept the idea of your leaving us and unthinkable that we should ever admit any sunderance between us. This attack upon you, the depression and nervous upset and all these suggestions were part of a general attack which has been raging against us from adverse forces for some time past, but I hope that the worst of it is over for you and that you will be able to go on untroubled in your sadhana. It is needless then to insist that she never thought of you as excluded from her Light which is also mine; that Light will be with you and will, I hope, help to light you on your path towards the realisation you long for.  When I spoke of being faithful to the light of the soul and the divine Call, I was not referring to anything in the past or to any lapse on your part.


Sri Aurobindo: I was simply suggesting the great need in all crises and attacks, — to refuse to listen to any suggestions, impulses, lures and to oppose to them all the call of the Truth, the imperative beckoning of the Light. In all doubt and depression, to say “I belong to the Divine, I cannot fail”; to all suggestions of impurity and unﬁtness, to reply “I am a child of Immortality chosen by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; I have but to be true to myself and to them — the victory is sure; even if I fell, I would be sure to rise again”; to all impulsions to depart and serve some other ideal, to reply “This is the greatest, this is the Truth, this alone can satisfy the soul within me; I will endure through all tests and tribulations to the very end of the divine journey.” This is what I mean by faithfulness to the Light and the Call.  It is true that we are one, but there is also a relation, which necessitates that one should be open to the Mother.  The Mother proposition is true.


Sri Aurobindo: If one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo.  There is one force only, the Mother’s force — or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force.    I am not aware of that. But now also the Mother does not teach, she asks all to open and receive.


Sri Aurobindo: But she does not tell them and I don’t think I told people to follow their own “knowledge”.  It is quite sure that we are with you day and night; even if you do not yet see the Mother in your dreams or feel her presence, you should think of her as there and supporting you and that will surely help you.  If there is a natural movement of your mind to identify Shiva in the way you speak of and it jumps to myself and the Mother, why not let it take the jump? Perhaps it is not a jump but a natural transition, and reconciliation and not a conﬂict.  Certainly, your pranams are always accepted by us and always will be.


Sri Aurobindo:   Our presence, force, peace, love are always with you. That is a thing you must realise and learn to keep the consciousness of it. If you do that, all the rest is of minor importance (your difﬁculties, the old nature etc.) and will be set right in due time.  You must always aspire towards the Mother, because hers is the force which can alone give you the true realisation of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: If your mind wants to do otherwise, you must control it.  Any separation made by it between the Mother and myself (like substituting my name for hers) must be discouraged — because when that happens, errors may creep into the inner experience.    Probably I come to work in you so that it may become easier for you to feel the Mother with you always.  There are no conditions for receiving the inﬂuence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother except faith, an entire sincerity in following the spiritual path and a will and capacity to open oneself to the inﬂuence; but this capacity usually comes as the result of sincerity and faith.


Sri Aurobindo: It is quite possible to follow the Yoga while remaining outside the Asram. There are many both in Northern and Southern India who do it.  You can submit your doubts for elucidation to Sri Aurobindo, if brief answers are sufﬁcient, as he has little time. If longer and more detailed answers are necessary, it could only be done through one of his disciples.   We are doubtful about the advisability of your coming here the next winter.


Sri Aurobindo: Your illness and the fact that you suffer from the heat stand in the way, for in Southern India the heat is extreme.  The sudden change of climate and ways of life may be hard to bear. Moreover there will not be truly competent medical aid and advice available here as it would be in America. Finally, you do not know perhaps that I am living for the present in an entire retirement, not seeing or speaking with anyone, even the disciples in the Asram, only coming out to give a silent blessing three times in a year. The Mother also has not time to give free or frequent access to those who are here.


Sri Aurobindo: You would therefore probably be disappointed if you came here with the idea of a personal contact with us to help you in your spiritual endeavour.  The personal touch is there but it is more of an inward closeness with only a few points of physical contact to support it. But this inner contact, inner help can very well be received at a distance.  We have not any disciples in America, though several Americans have come recently here and became interested in the Yoga. But we have disciples in France and some of these have been able already to establish an inner closeness with us and to become aware of our nearness and help in their spiritual endeavour and experience.


Sri Aurobindo: We would advise you therefore to try this way where you are rather than face the difﬁculty and inconveniences of a journey and stay here which, if necessary, could be undertaken with more advantage after you have gone some way on the path rather than at present.  If you want the plain and simple truth, the plain truth is this that you have entered into a complete falsehood and have put yourself into the hands of a hostile Inﬂuence that lives by confusion and ignorance. You began by setting your own imperfect thinking power against a superior Truth and Knowledge. And by false and fantastic reasonings you have so clouded your mind that it has become entirely muddled and confused and incapable of understanding the plainest distinctions or discriminating between falsehood and Truth. This is evident in all you are saying and doing; it is not Truth and religion, but the false and inadequate ideas of your own confused and weakened mind that you are trying to force upon others.


Sri Aurobindo: The letter you wrote to me shows a surprising inability to understand the plainest distinctions and the simplest truths. The one who was an instrument for giving birth to the physical body of was no doubt in her lifetime his material mother. But the relation which exists between the Mother here and (and between the Mother and all who accept her), is a psychic and spiritual motherhood. It is a far greater relation than that of the physical mother to her child; it gives all that human motherhood can give, but in a much higher way, and it contains in itself inﬁnitely more. It can therefore, because it is greater and more complete, take altogether the room of the physical relation and replace it both in the inward and the outward life.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing here that can confuse anyone who has common sense and a straightforward intelligence. The physical fact cannot in the least stand in the way of the greater psychic and spiritual truth or prevent it from being true. is perfectly right when he says that this is his true mother; for she has given him a new birth in an inner life and is creating him anew for a diviner existence.   The idea of spiritual Motherhood is not an invention of this Asram; it is an eternal truth which has been recognised for ages past both in Europe and in Asia.


Sri Aurobindo: The distinction I have drawn between the physical relation and the psychic and spiritual relation is also not a new invention; it is an idea known and understood everywhere and found to be perfectly plain and simple by all. It is the present confused state of your own mind which prevents you from understanding what men have found natural and intelligible everywhere.  As for and, you have no claim over them and no right to control their thoughts and actions. is of an age to choose and decide; he can think and act for himself and has no need of you to think and act for him. You are not his guardian nor’s; you are not even the head of the family.


Sri Aurobindo: On what ground do you claim to decide where he shall go or where he shall stay? Your pretension to have the responsibility for him or her before God is an arrogant and grotesque absurdity. Each one is responsible for himself before God unless he freely chooses to place the responsibility upon another in whom he trusts. No one has the right to impose himself as a religious or spiritual guide on others against their free will. You have no claim at all to dictate to or  either in their inner or their outer life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is again the confusion and incoherence of your mind in its present state that prevents you from recognising these plain and simple facts.  Again, you say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and inﬁnite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, — those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders.


Sri Aurobindo: Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and ﬁnd the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and ﬁnally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence.


Sri Aurobindo: These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.  You have insisted on my writing and asked for the Truth and I have answered. But if you want to be a Mussulman, no one prevents you. If the Truth I bring is too great for you to understand or to bear, you are free to go and live in a half-truth or in your own ignorance. I am not here to convert anyone; I do not preach to the world to come to me and I call no one.


Sri Aurobindo: I am here to establish the divine life and the divine Consciousness in those who of themselves feel the call to come to me and cleave to it and in no others. I am not asking you and the Mother is not asking you to accept us. You can go any day to Hyderabad and live either the worldly life or a religious life according to your own preference. But as you are free so also are others free to stay here and follow their own way. You are not entitled to try to make yourself a centre of disturbance and an obstacle to their peace and their spiritual progress.


Sri Aurobindo: In answering you I am answering the ideas which have been put in you by the Power of darkness and ignorance that is just now using you for its own purpose. This Power is very obviously not the divine Power. It is a Power of Falsehood that is making you do and say extravagant things which are not Islamic but a caricature of Islamic faith and action; its intention is to make not only Islam but all spirituality and religion ridiculous through you. It hopes to disturb the divine work upon earth, even if it can only do it a little. It is trying to spoil your brain and destroy your intelligence, to make you say and do foolish and extravagant things and turn you into an object of sorrow and pity for your friends and well-wishers and a laughing-stock to others.


Sri Aurobindo: If you have any respect for yourself or for God or religion, if you truly hope for the Truth and Light, if you wish for the awakening and salvation of your soul, you must stop speaking and doing these extravagant things and you must throw away the Inﬂuence that is now driving you.     If you listen to the inspirations of the Asura against the Mother that brings a quarrel with me — just as if you did anything against me, it will land you in a quarrel with her. It is precisely this arrogance, egoism and pride that make it difﬁcult for you to feel the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo:   If all that you write against us is correct, there is only one logical conclusion possible that the Mother and myself are a queer combination of impotent imbecile and selﬁsh mean-minded oppressive Asura. Perhaps we are, though I am not yet persuaded to recognise myself or the Mother in the picture. But why do you want to be docile and devoted to such people?


Sri Aurobindo: The other conclusion to be gathered from your remarks is that our life work is likely to be and is indeed already a failure because of our insincerity and tyrannical meanness and our leniency and love for the insincere and oppression of the sincere and our unspiritual conduct in all ways. It may be so. I have tried to offer what I felt to be the Light and the Truth to the Earth and her children — if the Earth and her children do not want it or if my Truth is falsehood and my Light is Darkness and Evil in the eyes of men — well, be it so. If there is nothing to be done on earth, the Mother and I can always return into our own Self and see the thing better done by others.  These doctrines still sound strange to me.


Sri Aurobindo: I should also be very glad to know of the swift and easy method of Yoga by which all that can be done in a few years — or else not at all, for that seems to be your alternative. What I see in this Asram is that people catch hold of something said or written by the Mother, give it an interpretation other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a crudely extreme logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. If we protest against these crude ideas being put upon us, the “disciples” cling to their own deductions and delusions and push aside our protests as inconsistent with what we have once said, insincere or unintelligible. The Mother has long ago given up trying to correct these things, for she ﬁnds that they do not listen to her but to something in their own minds which they follow and announce as hers. I still sometimes try, but with no great success.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the logical conclusion drawn — well! It is natural, I suppose, and part of the game. It is so much easier to come to vehement simple logical conclusions than to look at the truth as it is, many-sided and whole.    I have always told you that you should not take what any sadhak says or thinks as authoritative or coming from me or the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: Even when they say that it is from me or her, it cannot be accepted, for it is often an idea of their own minds which they “think” to be ours also or a onesided misunderstanding of what we may have said in a particular connection but which their minds apply to something with which it was not connected or to all things in general. But when they simply write to you their own ideas without referring to us at all, why on earth should you suppose or imagine that it comes from us? I know nothing of what wrote to you, except from your own letter. What writes is’s, we must not be held responsible for it. For that matter no sadhak, whoever he or she may be, can stand for us in our place or speak for us.


Sri Aurobindo: Each must be taken as speaking on his own account his own thought or feeling.  First of all, why get upset by such slight things, a phrase in a poem, a tap on the head of doubt? I do not see at all why you should take it as a personal assault on yourself. It is clear from the poems themselves that they are not an assault but a riposte. Some have been criticising and ridiculing faith and his sadhana, there have been criticisms and attacks on the Mother indicating that it is absurd to think of her as divine.


Sri Aurobindo: justiﬁes his faith in his own way — and in doing so hits back at the critics and scorners. No doubt, he ought not to do so, he ought to disregard it all, as we have told him to more than once.  But it is a hard rule to follow for a militant enthusiasm endowed with a gift of expression. But what is there in all that to affect you who do not gibe at faith, even if you yourself doubt, and do not attack or criticise the Mother.  As for the sense of superiority, that too is a little difﬁcult to avoid when greater horizons open before the consciousness, unless one is already of a saintly and humble disposition.


Sri Aurobindo: There are men like Nag Mahashoy in whom spiritual experience creates more and more humility, there are others like Vivekananda in whom it erects a giant sense of strength and superiority — European critics have taxed him with it rather severely; there are others in whom it ﬁxes a sense of superiority to men and humility to the Divine. Each position has its value. Take Vivekananda’s famous answer to the Madras Pundit who objected to one of his assertions, “But Shankara does not say so.” To which Vivekananda replied, “No, Shankara does not say so, but I, Vivekananda, say so”, and the Pundit sank back amazed and speechless. That “I, Vivekananda” stands up to the ordinary eye like a Himalaya of self-conﬁdent egoism.


Sri Aurobindo: But there was nothing false or unsound in Vivekananda’s spiritual experience. This was not mere egoism, but the sense of what he stood for and the attitude of the ﬁghter who, as the representative of something very great, could not allow himself to be put down or belittled. This is not to deny the necessity of non-egoism and of spiritual humility, but to show that the question is not so easy as it appears at ﬁrst sight. For if I have to express my spiritual experiences, I must do it with truth — I must record them, their, the thoughts, feelings, extensions of consciousness which accompany them.  What can I do with the experience in which one feels the whole world in oneself or the force of the Divine ﬂowing in one’s being and nature or the certitude of one’s faith against all doubts and doubters or one’s oneness with the Divine or the smallness of human thought and life compared with this greater knowledge and existence?


Sri Aurobindo: And I have to use the word “I” — I cannot take refuge in saying “this body” or “this appearance”, — especially as I am not a Mayavadin. Shall I not inevitably fall into expressions which will make shake his head at my assertions as full of pride and ego? I imagine it would be difﬁcult to avoid it.  Another thing, it seems to me that you identify faith very much with mental belief — but real faith is something spiritual, a knowledge of the soul. The assertions you quote in your letter are the hard assertions of a mental belief leading to a great vehement assertion of one’s creed and god because they are one’s own and must therefore be greater than those of others — an attitude which is universal in human nature.


Sri Aurobindo: Even the atheist is not tolerant, but declares his credo of Nature and Matter as the only truth and on all who disbelieve it or believe in other things he pours scorn as unenlightened morons and superstitious half-wits. I bear him no grudge for thinking me that; but I note that this attitude is not conﬁned to religious faith but is equally natural to those who are free from religious faith and do not believe in Gods or Gurus.  I don’t think that real faith is so very superabundant in this Asram. There are some who have it, but for the most part I have met not only doubt, but sharp criticism, constant questioning, much mockery of faith and spiritual experience, violent attacks on myself and the Mother — and that has been going on for the last fourteen years and more. Things are not so bad as they were, but there is plenty of it left still, and I do not think the time has come when the danger of an excessive faith is likely to take body.


Sri Aurobindo: You will not, I hope, mind my putting the other side of the question. I simply want to point out that there is this other side, that there is much more to be said than at ﬁrst sight appears, and the moral of it all is that one must bear with what calm and philosophy one can the conﬂicts of opposing tendencies in this welter of the Asram atmosphere and wait till the time has come when a greater Light and with it some true Harmony can purify and unite and recreate.  No, I don’t take them on myself — though sometimes they try to throw themselves on me, but that is from the general atmosphere. The method of taking upon oneself had its utility at one time (the Mother used always to do it); but it is useful no longer.  The thing has to be driven out, its right to remain altogether denied.


Sri Aurobindo: It is very silly and childish to have; for it means that you expect everyone including the Mother and myself to act always according to your ideas and do what you want us to do and never do anything which will not please you! It is for the Mother to do whatever she ﬁnds to be right or necessary; you must understand that; otherwise you will always be making yourself miserable for nothing.    It is no question of fault or punishment — if we have to condemn and punish people for their faults, and deal with the sadhaks like a tribunal of justice, no sadhana could be possible. I do not see how your reproach against us is justiﬁable.


Sri Aurobindo: Our sole duty to the sadhaks is to take them towards their spiritual realisation — we cannot behave like the head of a family intervening in domestic quarrels, supporting one, putting our weight against the other! However often may stumble we have to take him by the hand, lift him up again and get him to move once more towards the Divine. We have always done the same with you.  But we could not support any demand of yours upon him.  We have always treated it as something between him and the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: For you, the one thing we have insisted on and that with your full consent and with your prayers to us to be helped in doing it, is to cut the vital relation with him altogether and to base nothing upon it any more. Yet now you write to us that because we have not approved of your action of what you said to, no matter what that might be, — you renounce us forever.  I must ask you to return to your better self and your true consciousness and throw off these moods of vital passion which are unworthy of your soul. You have repeatedly written of your love for the Mother, the Ananda which you received from her and the number of spiritual experiences. Remember that and remember that that is your true way and your true being and nothing else matters.


Sri Aurobindo: Get back your poise and throw off the lower nature and its darkness and ignorance.     The Mother and myself deal with all according to the law of the Divine. We receive alike rich and poor, those who are high-born or low-born according to human standards, and extend to them an equal love and protection.


Sri Aurobindo: Their progress in sadhana is our main concern — for they have come here for that, not to satisfy their palates or their bellies, not to make ordinary vital demands or to quarrel about position or place or comforts. That progress depends on how they answer to the Mother’s love or protection — whether they receive the forces she pours on all alike, whether they use or misuse what she gives them. But the Mother has no intention or obligation to deal with all outwardly in the same way — the demand that she should do so is absurd and imbecile — and if she did it, she would prove false to the truth of things and the law of the Divine. Each sadhak has to be dealt with according to his nature, his capacities, his real needs (not his claims or desires) and according to what is best for his spiritual welfare. As to how it is to be done, we refuse to be dictated to by the ignorance of those of the sadhaks who consider that the Mother must act according to their standards or their ideas of equality or justice or the demands of their vital or the notions they have brought with them from the outside world.


Sri Aurobindo: We act according to the Light within us and for the Truth that we are striving to establish in this earthly Nature.    The human consciousness is made of many materials and all cannot bear quickly a constant spiritual endeavour — they have to be trained, enlightened, changed in their habits. That is why the Mother and I always give time for the soul to grow upon the other parts and we do not mind if it takes time, provided there is a central sincerity and will — as certainly there is in you. Do not be impatient or easily discouraged because things do not go fast.


Sri Aurobindo: Aspire, try to keep yourself in the sunshine of conﬁdence and let the seed grow.    Each has to get rid of his wrong reactions — they are here for that. What other remedy is there? If they are not prepared to do that, then we remain on the ground of the ordinary life where one has to do as in a big family, intervening in quarrels, reconciling, soothing, rebuking, punishing, lecturing, somehow getting things going until the next clash.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no end to that  and we gave it up long ago. Each must mend himself — there is no other way out of it.


Sri Aurobindo: Here again is the rajasic ego in you dictating to us what we should have done and showing us our mistakes.   You attributed too many motives — e.g. that the Mother tries to allure the vital by indulging it in the beginning. She has no such intention. She behaves naturally and simply with the being — whatever change there is is in the vital’s impressions about her action rather than in the action itself — except in so far as there is a change necessitated by the change in the consciousness.  Formerly you were writing from the higher mind mostly, but partly from the vital — the vital was often dissatisﬁed with my answers, so I ceased answering to it and wrote only what would help your higher mind and psychic.


Sri Aurobindo: Now it is from the physical mind and vital that you often write and so my answers must be to them and they feel they are not given the answers they want or in the tone of indulgence they would like. But to satisfy and indulge them would not be helpful to your sadhana.    The Mother put no pressure whatever about’s letter and there was no reason why she should do so. As for myself, I never even thought of it when I wrote the “all right”.


Sri Aurobindo: The word “pressure” besides is an entirely wrong one to use; the only thing we put is a supporting force to help you in your difﬁculties or else to bring down more peace and more of the higher consciousness. I do not see how that can be described as an unnecessary pressure or produce bad consequences. But the idea that we were displeased about’s letter or withdrew our support or were putting any kind of pressure about it is absolutely groundless. You ought not to make constructions of the mind like that or believe in them; for it is always these wrong constructions that upset you.


Sri Aurobindo:   That is because Mother’s pressure for change is always strong — even when she does not put it as force it is there by the very nature of the Divine Energy in her.  It is necessary for you to be conscious, and to put your selfobservation before us; it is on that that we can act. A mere action on our own observation without any corresponding consciousness on the part of the sadhak would lead to nothing.


Sri Aurobindo: Previously? My God, we would have to spend all our time prevising the sadhaks’ experiences. Do you think Mother has nothing else to do? As for myself, I never previse anything, I only vise and revise. All that Mother prevised was that there was something not right in, some part of him at odds with his aspiration.


Sri Aurobindo: That might lead to trouble. That is why, , I want him to ﬁnd out what part of him didn’t want the descent.  I think I know as much about the dualities, weaknesses, ignorance of human nature as you do and a great deal more. The idea that the Mother or I are spiritually great but ignorant of everything practical seems to be common in the Asram. It is an error to suppose that to be on a high spiritual plane makes one ignorant or unobservant of the world or of human nature.


Sri Aurobindo: If I know nothing of human nature or do not consider it, I am obviously unﬁt to be anybody’s guide in the work of transformation, for nobody can transform human nature if he does not know what human nature is, does not see its workings or, even if he sees, does not take them into consideration at all. If I think that the human plane is like the plane or planes of inﬁnite Light, Power, Ananda, infallible Will-Force, then I must be either a stark lunatic or a gibbering imbecile or a fool so abysmally idiotic as to be worth keeping in a museum as an exhibit. I am glad however to know that this is the opinion that you and all the other members of the Asram (I suppose this is what “we” means) have about me. I am glad however to know that you think the Mother is less of an exalted imbecile than myself.  Human nature is like that in its very grain; so if we are not patient, there would be little hope of its changing.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is something else in the human being which is sincere and can be a force for the change. The difﬁculty in people like is to get at that something (it is so covered up) and get it to act.  Well, what an amazing mass of extraordinary mental constructions you have built up about the Mother and myself! The Mother is a great Yogi of a rather grave and impersonal type! I am Vedantic and vast and cosmic and impersonal and what not!


Sri Aurobindo: What not indeed! Nothing is impossible after that!! However, I won’t protest — for mental constructions are to the mind like his favourite productions to an author, the more you criticise them the more the mind clings to them. Let me point out however by example how they come unnecessarily in your way and how very unnecessarily you let them do that, so that my insistence — in or elsewhere — on getting rid of mental constructions is not so groundless after all. The Mother told you very simply that if you prayed to her (your prayers to Krishna having according to you no effect) you would have received quicker help.


Sri Aurobindo: That was simply to help you — she is here close to you and the others and any number here have received help by calling to her simply and directly, of course without any questions or misgivings. Even now there are several who are emerging out of the same illness as yours, a habit of many years of long attacks of black despondency with the usual round of suggestions, “unﬁtness, this Yoga hopeless for me, no response, no experience, the Divine does not love me, Mother is distant and far, how long can I go on, how can anyone live like this, running away, suicide etc.,” and they are emerging because they have suddenly managed to turn simply and directly towards her. So what the Mother said was not something unfounded and a mere idea of hers. But it was simply a suggestion to help you.


Sri Aurobindo: How did your mind come to the conclusion that it was a command to be followed on pain of displeasure, spiritual hanging or rejection and exile? The habit of mental constructions, that is all. Fear?  But the fear itself is a mental construction which could have no real foundation if you had remembered the constant indulgence and patience the Mother has always shown to you.


Sri Aurobindo: The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciples or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you. The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it — the vital brings in the suggestions of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difﬁculty that cannot be effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a selfcreated difﬁculty — a self-formed sanskara or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.  As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes usually only when the being is ready.


Sri Aurobindo: You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or sanskara, and so the adverse force ﬁnds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the sanskara of doubt — to annul the force of its recurrence. I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they came. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother’s) will be there.


Sri Aurobindo: It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success — one’s own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.  I will do what is necessary to give the help you must receive.  To say you cannot would not be true, for you have received times without number and it has helped you to recover.


Sri Aurobindo: I will try to do so.  But it is a pity you cannot form the habit and stabilise the power to reject this thing when it comes — for it would mean that the difﬁculty was practically over and the whole being under the right direction and on the right way. Other difﬁculties are of minor importance, it is this one thing that is standing obstinately in the way of the soul’s deliverance.  I will put my force to pull you out — I hope I shall get the full response.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not see why your having difﬁculties or the external consciousness denying the inner truth should prevent you from calling our help. At that rate hardly anybody could call for help.  Almost everybody in the Asram except a few have this difﬁculty of the external consciousness denying or standing in the way of the inner experience and trying to cling to its old ways, ideas, habits and desires. This division in human nature is a universal fact and one should not make too much of it. Once the Peace and Power are there, it is best to trust to that to remove in time the opposition and enlighten and occupy the external nature.


Sri Aurobindo:   We are sorry that you have suffered so much. It was not to hurt you that the Mother put the pressure, but to liberate. It has always been with a deep affection and sympathy with you in your struggles that she has tried to help you. I trust you will recover soon your ease of mind and peace.


Sri Aurobindo: I will try to give you all the help possible.     The Mother and I will do all to get rid of the cloud which the physical mind presents against the permanent consciousness of your soul’s connection with the Mother; but let your thinking mind be ﬁrm in its will to be rid of it and to call the aid of our Force.


Sri Aurobindo:   As we receive some hundreds of such signals daily, we are obliged to be impersonal about it, otherwise we would have no time for anything else.     It is very painful for us to see you in this condition and it makes us very sad and anxious.