Sri Aurobindo: The difference [] is when a thing is done with the inner mind and when it is done only with the outer brain. What you feel is the inner mind taking it up — then it becomes part of the consciousness and things are really learned — the working of the outer mind is always difﬁcult and superﬁcial.  It is evident that the inner being in you is beginning to come more and more forward. As it does so, these outer difﬁculties will be more and more pushed out and the consciousness will keep the peace and force at ﬁrst in the greater part of it, afterwards in the whole.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is a wall of consciousness that one has to build [ ]. Consciousness is not something abstract, it is like existence itself or ananda or mind or prana, something very concrete. If one becomes aware of the inner consciousness one can do all sorts of things with it, send it out as a stream of force, erect a circle or wall of consciousness around oneself, direct an idea so that it shall enter somebody’s head in America etc. etc.


Sri Aurobindo: It is simply that you became conscious of the inner being and the inner world and rose up to a higher plane of being where the outer difﬁculties do not exist. The object of Yoga is to establish the inner consciousness and the higher being in you and by their strength change the outer existence.  The condition you describe in your work shows that the inner being is awake and that there is now the double consciousness.  It is the inner being which has the inner happiness, the calm and quiet, the silence free from any ripple of thought, the inwardly silent repetition of the name. The automatic repetition of the mantra is part of the same phenomenon — that is what ought to happen to the mantra, it must become a conscious but spontaneous thing repeating itself in the very substance of the consciousness itself, no longer needing any effort of the mind.


Sri Aurobindo: All these doubts and questionings of the mind are useless. What has to happen is that this inner consciousness should be always there not troubled by any disturbance with the constant silence, inner happiness, calm quietude, etc., while the outer consciousness does what is necessary in the way of work etc. or, what is better, has that done through it — it is the latter experience that you have some days as someone pushing the work with so much continuous force without your feeling tired.   If you feel more quiet and the surrender feels more intense, then that is a good, not a bad condition — and if it makes the mind an empty room receiving the light, so much the better.  Experiences and descents are very good for preparation, but change of the consciousness is the thing wanted — it is the proof that the experiences and descents have had an effect.


Sri Aurobindo: Descents of peace are good, but an increasingly stable quietude and silence of the mind is something more valuable. When that is there then other things can come — usually one at a time, light or strength and force or knowledge or ananda. It is not necessary to go on for ever having always the same preparatory experiences — a time comes when the consciousness begins to take a new poise and another state.  The calmness you feel is that of the inner being which remains the same whatever the surface experience. But the use to be made of these things is to liberate oneself from the desires and mental or vital sanskaras of the past so that one may be free to reach that greater Truth consciousness in which there is no need of an Adesh, for all one’s action there is the direct conscious movement of the self-knowing Truth and the Mother herself is the doer.


Sri Aurobindo:   The absence of thought is quite the right thing — for the true inner consciousness is a silent consciousness which has not to think out things, but gets the right perception, understanding and knowledge in a spontaneous way from within and speaks or acts according to that. It is the outer consciousness which has to depend on outside things and to think about them because it has not this spontaneous guidance. When one is ﬁxed in this inner consciousness, then one can indeed go back to the old action by an effort of will, but it is no longer a natural movement and, if long maintained, becomes fatiguing. As for the dreams, that is different.


Sri Aurobindo: Dreams about old bygone things come up from the subconscient which retains the old impressions and the seeds of the old movements and habits long after the waking consciousness has dropped them. Abandoned by the waking consciousness, they still come up in dreams; for in sleep the outer physical consciousness goes down into the subconscient or towards it and many dreams come up from there.  The silence in which all is quiet and one remains as a witness while something in the consciousness spontaneously calls down the higher things is the complete silence which comes when the full force of the higher consciousness is upon mind and vital and body.


Sri Aurobindo: All experiences come in the silence but they do not come all pellmell in a crowd at the beginning. The inner silence and peace have ﬁrst to be established.     The consciousness from which these experiences come [ ] is always there pressing to bring them in.


Sri Aurobindo: The reason why they don’t come in freely or stay is the activity of the mind and vital always rushing about, thinking this, wanting that, trying to perform mountaineering feats on all the hillocks of the lower nature instead of nourishing a strong and simple aspiration and opening to the higher consciousness that it may come in and do its own work. Rasa of poetry, painting or physical work is not the thing to go after. What gives the interest in Yoga is the rasa of the Divine and of the divine consciousness which means the rasa of Peace, of Silence, of inner Light and Bliss, of growing inner Knowledge, of increasing inner Power, of the Divine Love, of all the inﬁnite ﬁelds of experience that open to one with the opening of the inner consciousness. The true rasa of poetry, painting or any other activity is truly found when these activities are part of the working of the Divine Force in you and you feel it as that and you feel in it the joy of that working.  This condition you had of the inner being and its silence, separated from the surface consciousness and its little restless workings, is the ﬁrst liberation, the liberation of Purusha from Prakriti, and it is the fundamental experience.


Sri Aurobindo: The day when you can keep it, you can know that the Yogic consciousness has been founded in you. This time it has increased in intensity, but it must also increase in duration.  These things do not “drop” — what you have felt was there in you all the time, but you did not feel it because you were living on the surface altogether and the surface is all crowd and clamour. But in all men there is this silent Purusha, base of the true mental being, the true vital being, the true physical being.  It was by your prayer and aspiration that the thing came, to show you in what direction you must travel in order to have the true rasa of things, for it is only when one is liberated that one can get the real rasa.


Sri Aurobindo: For after this liberation come others and among them the liberation and Ananda in action as well as in the static inner silence.    I don’t think it is at all owing to the suggestion from what I wrote in the letter that you got the experience [ ]. The fundamental reason of these things does not belong to the surface, it is in the depths — or on the heights, at any rate, in the inner being behind the veil of the frontal consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The actual occasional cause of the spiritual experience, — the match that sets the ﬁre, so to say, — may be something very slight and looking accidental on the surface, a chance word or happening or something else quite fortuitous in its appearance.  The person also through whom it comes may seem very much like a fortuitous instrument. It is true that this is only in appearance; for things slight and seemingly fortuitous have a reason for happening as they do, but that reason too is not on the surface.   As for the experience itself it takes up the movement which had started in you a long time ago and was interrupted by the vital upheaval that brought you so much trouble and struggle.


Sri Aurobindo: Only, there has been since a widening of the consciousness and a step forward which made this form of the experience possible. At that time you had not much appreciation for calm and peace — you hankered only after bhakti and Ananda. But calm, peace, shanti are the necessary basis for any establishment of other things. Otherwise there is no solid foundation in the consciousness; if there is only unrest and movement, bhakti, Ananda and everything else can only come and go in starts and ﬁts and ﬁnd no ground to live on. It must, however, be not a mere mental quiet, but the deep spiritual peace of the shantimaya Shiva.


Sri Aurobindo: It was this that touched you (descending through the head) in this experience. For the rest it is a resumption of the piercing of the veil, the beginning of the power of inner experience as opposed to the lesser experiences of the surface, the opening of the inner being, which is necessary for bringing the Yogic consciousness.  A certain amount of vital puriﬁcation has taken place which made the resumption of this kind of experience possible.  You certainly need not be afraid of going into unconsciousness, for it is not unconsciousness that you would go into, but simply the consciousness, — that going quite inward which is the result of intense and the beginning of a certain kind of.  There is an inner being and an inmost being which we call the psychic.


Sri Aurobindo: When one meditates, one tries to go into the inner being.  If one does it, then one feels very well that one has gone inside.  What can be realised in meditation can also become the ordinary consciousness in which one lives. Then one feels what is now the ordinary consciousness to be something quite external and on the surface, not one’s real self.


Sri Aurobindo: The inner being is composed of the inner mental, the inner vital, the inner physical. The psychic is the inmost — supporting all the others. Usually it is in the inner mental that this separation ﬁrst happens and it is the inner mental Purusha who remains silent observing the Prakriti as separate from himself. But it may also be the inner vital Purusha or inner physical or else without location simply the whole Purusha consciousness separate from the whole Prakriti. Sometimes it is felt above the head — but then it is usually spoken of as the Atman and the realisation is that of the silent Self.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not possible to distinguish the psychic being at ﬁrst. What has to be done is to grow conscious of an inner being which is separate from the external personality and nature — a consciousness or Purusha calm and detached from the outer action of the Prakriti.    The reason why she remembers nothing when she comes out of her meditation is that the experience is taking place in the inner being and the outer consciousness is not ready to receive it.


Sri Aurobindo: Formerly her sadhana was mainly on the vital plane which is often the ﬁrst to open and the connection of that plane with the body consciousness is easy to establish because they are nearer to each other. Even then however her body was suffering because of attacks from the hostile elements in the vital plane. Now the sadhana seems to have gone inward into the psychic being. This is a great advance and she need not mind the want of connection with the most external consciousness at present. The work goes on all the same and it is probably necessary that it should be so just now.


Sri Aurobindo: Afterwards, if she keeps steadily to the right attitude, it will descend into the outer consciousness.  It [] is not by its nature detached from the mental and other activities. It can be detached, it can be involved. In the human consciousness it is as a rule always involved, but it has developed the power of detaching itself — a thing which the lower creation seems unable to do. As the consciousness develops, this power of detachment also develops.


Sri Aurobindo:   Detachment means standing back with part of the consciousness and observing what is being done without being involved in it.  There is no “how” to that; you do it or try it until it succeeds.


Sri Aurobindo: That sense of separate being and concentration behind the frontal consciousness is very good. It helps to liberate the inner being and make it stand back from the movements of the outer nature.     That is the condition of progress, — if, whenever there is an attempt to cloud the consciousness, you can stand back, remain quiet and prevent the clouding.


Sri Aurobindo: Do that always and the progress is sure.     All that you have written here is perfectly correct. It is so, by standing back from these forces [], neither attracted nor disturbed by them, that one gets freedom, perceives their falsity or imperfection and is able to rise above and overcome them.


Sri Aurobindo: The consciousness that comes forward may be either the psychic or the spiritualised mind — it is probably the former.     Well, but it [] is not individual to you.  Everyone has to do that with his difﬁculties.


Sri Aurobindo: Detach means that the Witness in oneself has to stand back and refuse to look on the movement as his own (the soul’s own) and look on it as a habit of past nature or an invasion of general Nature. Then to deal with it as such. It may seem difﬁcult, but it comes perfectly well by trying persistently.


Sri Aurobindo: One must get the power to quiet the mental and vital, if not at ﬁrst at all times, yet whenever one wills — for it is the mind and vital that cover up the psychic being as well as the self (Atman) and to get at either one must get in through their veil; but if they are always active and you are always identiﬁed with their activities, the veil will always be there. It is also possible to detach yourself and look at these activities as if they were not your own but a mechanical action of Nature which you observe as a disinterested witness. One can then become aware of an inner being which is separate, calm and uninvolved in Nature.  This may be the inner mental or vital Purusha and not the psychic, but to get at the consciousness of the inner and  Purusha is always a step towards the unveiling of the psychic being.


Sri Aurobindo:   The condition in which all movements become superﬁcial and empty with no connection with the soul is a stage in the withdrawal from the surface consciousness to the inner consciousness. When one goes into the inner consciousness, it is felt as a calm, pure existence without any movement, but eternally tranquil, unmoved and separate from the outer nature. This comes as a result of detaching oneself from the movements, standing back from them and is a very important movement of the sadhana. The ﬁrst result of it is an entire quietude, but afterwards that quietude begins (without the quietude ceasing) to ﬁll with the psychic and other inner movements which create a true inner and spiritual life behind the outer life and nature.


Sri Aurobindo: It is then easier to govern and change the latter.  At present there are ﬂuctuations in your consciousness because this inner state is not yet fully developed and established.   When it is, there will still be ﬂuctuations in the outer consciousness, but the inner quiet, force, love etc. will be constant and the superﬁcial ﬂuctuations will be watched by the inner being without its being shaken or troubled, until they are removed by the complete outer change.  As for, it is best to let it pass and try to remain steady within and detached; one cannot separate from all contacts; one must become more and more superior to their customary reactions.


Sri Aurobindo:   Detachment is the beginning of mastery, but for complete mastery there should be no reactions at all. When there is something within undisturbed by the reactions that means the inner being is free and master of itself, but it is not yet master of the whole nature. When it is master, it allows no wrong reactions — if any come they are at once repelled and shaken off, and ﬁnally none come at all.


Sri Aurobindo:   The experience you have of a division in the being with the inner void and indifferent,, — not sorrowful, but neutral and indifferent, — is an experience which many pass through and is highly valued by the Sannyasis. For us it is a passage only to something larger and more positive. In it the old small human feelings fall away and a sort of calm neutral void is made for a higher nature to manifest. It must be fulﬁlled and replaced by a sense of large silence and freedom into which the Mother’s consciousness can ﬂow from above.


Sri Aurobindo:   In the ordinary consciousness one takes a personal interest in what is done, feels joy or feels sorrow. When one does sadhana, a condition may come in which the consciousness draws back from these reactions of joy and sorrow and does work and action impersonally as a thing that ought or has to be done but without desire or reactions. The Yogis value this condition of complete detachment very highly. In our Yoga it is a passage only, if it comes, through which one goes from the ordinary consciousness to a deeper one in which one acts out of a deep peace and union with the Divine or else of a self-existent Ananda not depending on anything but the presence of the Divine, in which all works are done not out of personal interest or satisfaction but for the sake of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: A man with a very developed introspective mind often identiﬁes himself with the witness part of his mind and observes his own thoughts and studies their nature. That is a beginning which makes it easy for the full detachment to come. For others it is less easy, but it can be done by all.    There is a stage in the sadhana in which the inner being begins to awake.


Sri Aurobindo: Often the ﬁrst result is the condition made up of the following elements: (1) A sort of witness attitude, in which the inner consciousness looks at all that happens as a spectator or observer, observing things but taking no active interest or pleasure in them.  (2) A state of neutral equanimity in which there is neither joy nor sorrow, only quietude.  (3) A sense of being something separate from all that happens, observing it but not part of it.  (4) An absence of attachment to things, people or events.  It seems as if this condition were trying to come in you; but it is still imperfect.


Sri Aurobindo: For instance in this condition (1) there should be no disgust or impatience or anger when people talk, only indifference and an inner peace and silence. Also (2) there should not be a mere neutral quiet and indifference, but a positive sense of calm, detachment and peace. Again (3) there should be no going out of the body so that you do not know what is happening or what you are doing. There may be a sense of not being the body but something else, — that is good; but there should be a perfect awareness of all that is going on in or around you.  Moreover this condition even when it is perfect is only a transitional stage — it is intended to bring a certain state of freedom and liberation.


Sri Aurobindo: But in that peace there must come the feeling of the Divine Presence, the sense of the Mother’s power working in you, the joy or Ananda.  If you can concentrate in the heart as well as in the head, then these things can more easily come.    The mind can become quiet only when you detach yourself from it and see the thoughts as things that pass. Then you don’t think yourself but see thoughts passing through your mind.


Sri Aurobindo: Afterwards you can stop attending to these passers-by and concentrate on the Mother.  Thoughts and feelings are passing from one human being to another all the time, only people don’t know or observe it. Especially if people live together the same life, as in the Asram, a sort of atmosphere is formed in which the same thoughts and feelings are moving about and constantly passing from one to another.  You have to become conscious — that is to say, there must be something in you which is not carried away by thoughts and feelings, but looks at them and observes how they work and how they affect you. The part that observes and knows is called the Witness in man.


Sri Aurobindo: It is always possible to develop this in oneself.  It is not by thinking and reading that consciousness comes.  There are many who read and think a great deal but are not conscious, have not the witness developed in them. There are others who work all day like, yet are very strongly conscious. When one has the power of stopping thinking altogether and only looking, then the Witness becomes very strong and conscious.


Sri Aurobindo: This consciousness can come by practice, but it can also come by turning to the Mother and thinking of her always and offering to her everything. The being opens, the Mother’s force begins to work and one becomes more and more conscious.    It is indeed a great thing that you can keep this calm and this unaffected witness attitude. It is always the sign of a strong inner foundation in the consciousness and that even the physical being shares in this result of the realisation.


Sri Aurobindo:   As for the “spectator” and the coils of the dragon, it is the ChinoJapanese image for the world-force extending itself in the course of the universe and this expresses the attitude of the Witness seeing it all and observing in its unfolding the unrolling of the play of the Divine, Lila. It is this attitude that gives the greatest calm, peace, samata in face of the riddle of the cosmic workings.  It is not meant that action and movement are not accepted but they are accepted as the Divine Working which is leading to ends which the mind may not always see at once, but the soul divines through all the supreme purpose and the hidden guidance.


Sri Aurobindo: Of course there is afterwards an experience in which the two sides of the Divine Whole, the Witness and the Player, blend together; but this poise of the spectator comes ﬁrst and leads to that fuller experience. It gives the balance, the calm, the increasing understanding of soul and life and their deeper signiﬁcances without which the full supramental experience cannot come.  By itself the Purusha is impersonal, but by mixing itself with the movements of Prakriti it makes for itself a surface ego or personality. When it appears in its own separate nature then it is seen to be detached and observing.


Sri Aurobindo: The consciousness you speak of would be described in the Gita as the witness Purusha. The Purusha or basic consciousness is the true being or at least, on whatever plane it manifests, represents the true being. But in the ordinary nature of man it is covered up by the ego and the ignorant play of the Prakriti and remains veiled behind as the unseen Witness supporting the play of the Ignorance. When it emerges, you feel it as a consciousness behind, calm, central, unidentiﬁed with the play which depends upon it.  It may be covered over, but it is always there.


Sri Aurobindo: The emergence of the Purusha is the beginning of liberation. But it can also become slowly the Master — slowly because the whole habit of the ego and the play of the lower forces (which also you describe correctly here) is against that. Still it can dictate what higher play is to replace the lower movement and then there is the process of that replacement, the higher coming, the lower struggling to remain and push away the higher movement. You say rightly that the offering to the Divine shortens the whole thing and is more effective, but usually it cannot be done completely at once owing to the past habit and the two methods continue together until the complete surrender is possible.   The attitude of the witness consciousness within — I do not think it necessarily involves an external seclusion, though one may do that also — is a very necessary stage in the progress.


Sri Aurobindo: It helps the liberation from the lower prakriti — not getting involved in the ordinary nature movements; it helps the establishment of a perfect calm and peace within, for there is then one part of the being which remains detached and sees without being disturbed the perturbations of the surface; it helps also the ascent into the higher consciousness and the descent of the higher consciousness, for it is through this calm, detached and liberated inner being that the ascent and descent can easily be done. Also, to have the same witness look on the movements of Prakriti in others, seeing, understanding but not perturbed by them in any way is a very great help towards both the liberation and the universalisation of the being. I could not therefore possibly object to this movement in a sadhak.  As for the surrender it is not inconsistent with the witness attitude. On the contrary by liberating from the ordinary Prakriti, it makes easier the surrender to the higher or divine Power.


Sri Aurobindo: Very often when this witness attitude has not been taken but there is a successful calling in of the Force to act in one, one of the ﬁrst things the Force does is to establish the witness attitude so as to be able to act with less interference or immixture from the movements of the lower Prakriti.  There remains the question of the avoidance of contact with others and there there is some difﬁculty or incertitude. Part of your nature has a strong turn towards contact with others, action on others, interchange, almost a need of it. This brings about some ﬂuctuation between the turn to an inner isolation and the turn towards contact and action. There is the same double and ﬂuctuating movement in others here like.


Sri Aurobindo: In such cases I generally do not stress upon either tendency but leave the consciousness to ﬁnd its own poise, because I have seen that to press too much on the isolation tendency when the nature is not mainly contemplative does not succeed very well — unless of course the sadhak himself gets a strong and ﬁxed determination that way. This may be the cause of what you felt. But the question between witness attitude and surrender does not arise, for the reason I have explained — one can very well aid or lead to the other as ours is a Yoga which joins these things together and does not keep them always separate.


Sri Aurobindo: It is by a constant repetition and development of the experience []. But the witness being does not always remain as a point. It becomes something extended supporting the rest.  That is the old Vedantic idea — to be free and detached within and leave the Prakriti to itself. When you die, the Purusha will go to glory and the Prakriti drop off — perhaps into Hell.


Sri Aurobindo: This theory is a source of any amount of self-deception and wilful self-indulgence.     The witness attitude is not meant as a convenient means for disowning the responsibility of one’s defects and thereby refusing to mend them. It is meant for self-knowledge and, in our Yoga, as a convenient station (detached and uninvolved, therefore not subject to Prakriti) from which one can act on the wrong movements by refusal of assent and by substituting for them the action of the true consciousness from within or above.


Sri Aurobindo:  You can certainly go on developing the consciousness of the Witness Purusha above, but if it is only a witness and the lower Prakriti is allowed to have its own way, there would be no reason why it [] should ever stop.  Many take that attitude — that the Purusha has to liberate itself by standing apart, and the Prakriti can be allowed to go on till the end of the life doing its own business, — it is ; when the body falls away, the Prakriti will drop also and the Purusha go off into the featureless Brahman! This is a comfortable theory, but of more than doubtful truth; I don’t think liberation is so simple and facile a matter as that. In any case, the transformation which is the object of our Yoga would not take place.  The Purusha above is not only a Witness, he is the giver (or withholder) of the sanction; if he persistently refuses the sanction to a movement of Prakriti, keeping himself detached, then, even if it goes on for a time by its past momentum, it usually loses its hold after a time, becomes more feeble, less persistent, less concrete and in the end fades away.


Sri Aurobindo: If you take the Purusha consciousness, it should be not only as the Witness but as the Anumanta, refusing sanction to the disturbing movements, sanctioning only peace, calm, purity and whatever else is part of the divine nature. This refusal of sanction need not mean a struggle with the lower Prakriti; it should be a quiet, persistent, detached refusal leaving unsupported, unassented to, without meaning or justiﬁcation the contrary action of the nature.  The experience you had is of course the going inside of the consciousness which is usually called trance or. The most important part of it however is the silence of the mind and vital which is fully extended to the body also. To get the capacity of this silence and peace is a most important step in the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: It comes at ﬁrst in meditation and may throw the consciousness inward in trance, but it has to come afterwards in the waking state and establish itself as a permanent basis for all the life and action. It is the condition for the realisation of the Self and the spiritual transformation of the nature.   The experience you relate, the stillness, the emptiness of mind and vital and cessation of thoughts and other movements, was the coming of the state called “samadhi” in which the consciousness goes inside in a deep stillness and silence. This condition is favourable to inner experience, realisation, the vision of the unseen truth of things, though one can get these in the waking condition also. It is not sleep but the state in which one feels conscious within, no longer outside.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] is not indispensable at this stage; but if it comes of itself, it can be allowed to develop. But experience in the waking state is more important for this Yoga.  Samadhi is a help for reaching the inner depths of the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: One is able to go more easily by it inward below the surface being, to get into direct contact with other supraphysical planes of experience, to pass into other worlds and return, to contact happenings distant in space and time, to see what is in the supraconscient and to enter into what is supraconscient to our mental status.    What she speaks of as losing the body consciousness is probably a tendency of the consciousness to go inside — into Samadhi of some kind. Samadhi means a state in which one is not awake and aware of outward things, but also one is not asleep, one is conscious inwardly with another than the waking consciousness.  If this comes, it is not to be avoided, as Yogic realisation can take place in this condition as well as in the waking state.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is a state of inner immobile silence that one gets in Samadhi when the outer mind is stilled and there is only some inner or some higher consciousness which may itself be either in silent concentration or else experiencing some state of Knowledge or Ananda or Peace.    Going inside does not bring always Ananda. There are many kinds of samadhi and many sorts of experience in each kind.


Sri Aurobindo: What happens when one goes in is that one enters into the inner planes of consciousness, it may be the subconscient, it may be the mental, vital or subtle physical plane. From there one goes into the corresponding worlds or else one rises up into higher planes superconscious to us — to the ranges above our mind or to the spiritual mental plane in which one can unite with the Sachchidananda consciousness or to the Supramental. What you describe seems to be the subconscient, but that may be only a ﬁrst step in the going inside.    In samadhi it is the inner mental, vital, physical which are separated from the outer, no longer covered by it — therefore they can freely have inner experiences.


Sri Aurobindo: The outer mind is either quiescent or in some way reﬂects or shares the experience. As for the central consciousness being separated from all mind that would mean a complete trance without any recorded experiences.     It is the subtle parts of the physical that go up.


Sri Aurobindo: The external consciousness can also go up, but then there is a complete trance.  There is not much utility for the complete trance in this sadhana.     Trance in English is usually used only for the deeper kinds of samadhi; but, as there is no other word, we have to use it for all kinds.


Sri Aurobindo:  Samadhi is not a thing to be shunned — only it has to be made more and more conscious.  It is not necessary to be in samadhi to be in contact with the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they [] can be attained even in full activity. Trance is not essential — it can be used, but by itself it cannot lead to the change of consciousness which is our object, for it gives only an inner subjective experience which need not make any difference in the outer consciousness. There are plenty of instances of sadhaks who have ﬁne experiences in trance but the outer being remains as it was. It is necessary to bring out what is experienced and make it a power for transformation both of the inner and the outer being. But it can be done without going into Samadhi in the waking consciousness itself.


Sri Aurobindo: Concentration of course is indispensable.  Nirvikalpa Samadhi according to tradition is simply a trance from which one cannot be awakened even by burning or branding — i.e. a trance in which one has gone completely out of the body. In more scientiﬁc parlance it is a trance in which there is no formation or movement of the consciousness and one gets lost in a state from which one can bring back no report except that one was in bliss. It is supposed to be a complete absorption in the Sushupti or the Turiya.


Sri Aurobindo: “Nirvikalpa samadhi” properly means a complete trance in which there is no thought or movement of consciousness or awareness of either inward or outward things — all is drawn up into a supracosmic Beyond. But here it cannot mean that — it probably means a trance in a consciousness beyond the Mind.    As to the dream, it was not a dream but an experience of the inner being in a conscious dream state,. The numbness and the feeling of being about to lose consciousness are always due to the pressure or descent of a Force to which the body is not accustomed but feels strongly.


Sri Aurobindo: Here it was not the physical body that was being directly pressed, but the subtle body, the  in which the inner being more intimately dwells and in which it goes out in sleep or trance or in the moment of death. But the physical body in these vivid experiences feels as if it were itself that was having the experience; the numbness was the effect on it of the pressure. The pressure on the whole body would mean a pressure on the whole inner consciousness, perhaps for some modiﬁcation or change which would make it more ready for knowledge or experience; the 3rd or 4th rib would indicate a region which belongs to the vital nature, the domain of the life-force, some pressure for a change there.    It [] depends on the nature of the physical consciousness you keep.


Sri Aurobindo: When there is the descent of consciousness into the body one becomes aware of a subtle physical consciousness and that can remain in samadhi — one seems to be aware of the body, but it is really the subtle body and not the outward physical. But also one can go deep within and yet be aware of the physical body also and of working upon it, but not of outward things. Finally one can be absorbed in a deep concentration but strongly aware of the body and the descent of the Force in it. This last is accompanied with consciousness of outward things, though no attention may be paid to them.  This last is not usually called samadhi, but it is a kind of waking samadhi.


Sri Aurobindo: All conditions from the deep samadhi of complete trance to the working of the Force in the fully waking consciousness are used in this Yoga; one need not insist on complete trance always, for the others also are necessary and without them the complete change cannot take place.  It is good that the higher consciousness and its powers are descending into the parts below the head and heart. That is absolutely necessary for the transformation, since the lower vital and the body must also be changed into stuff of the higher consciousness.    For this Yoga these divisions [ ] are not so important.


Sri Aurobindo: Trance is a going inside away from the waking state. What corresponds to trance in the waking state would be a complete concentration indifferent to outward movements or else a silence of the whole being in Brahman realisation, the state of the Gita.     Immersion in Sachchidananda is a state one can get in the waking condition without Samadhi — dissolution can come only after the loss of the body on condition that one has reached the highest state and does not will to return here to help the world.


Sri Aurobindo:   On the contrary it is in the waking state that this realisation must come and endure in order to be a reality of the life. If experienced in trance it would be a superconscient state true for some part of the inner being, but not real to the whole consciousness.  Experiences in trance have their utility for opening the being and preparing it, but it is only when the realisation is constant in the waking state that it is truly possessed. Therefore in this Yoga most value is given to the waking realisation and experience.


Sri Aurobindo: What you write about the work is correct; to work in this calm ever-widening consciousness is at once a and a .    The entire oblivion of the experience means merely that there is still no sufﬁcient bridge between the inner consciousness which has the experience in a kind of samadhi and the exterior waking consciousness. It is when the higher consciousness has made the bridge between them that the outer also begins to remember.  It [] is the result of the attempt to go above.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not sleep that comes, but a tendency to go inside under the pressure — the old Yogas did this going above precisely in this way, by going into samadhi. For us, it has to come in the waking condition — for until it does, it cannot be made the basis for a new consciousness governing the life.    It [] is a common obstacle with all who practise Yoga at the beginning. The sleep disappears gradually in two ways — (1) by the intensifying of the force of concentration, (2) by the sleep itself becoming a kind of swapna samadhi in which one is conscious of inner experiences that are not dreams (i.e. the waking consciousness is lost for the time, but it is replaced not by sleep but by an inward conscious state in which one moves in the supraphysical of the mental or vital being).


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no reason why one should not have a burning aspiration in sleep, provided one is conscious in sleep. In fact, the condition you describe was not sleep — it was simply that the consciousness was trying to go inside in a sort of indrawn condition (a kind of half-samadhi) while the external mind was constantly coming out of it. What you have, if you go into this indrawn condition, is not dreams but spiritual experiences or visions or experiences in other supraphysical planes of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Your burning aspiration was just such a spiritual experience.     No, it was not sleep. You went inside into an inner consciousness; in this inner consciousness one is awake inside, but not outside, not conscious of external things but of inner things only.


Sri Aurobindo: Your inner consciousness was busy doing what your outer mind had been trying to do, that is to work upon the thoughts and suggestions that bring restlessness and to put them right; it can be done much more easily by the inner consciousness than by the outer mind.  As for the things that are necessary to be done, they can be done much more easily by the Force and Peace descending (bringing the solid strength) than by your own mental effort.   It was not half sleep or quarter sleep or even one-sixteenth sleep that you had; it was a going inside of the consciousness, which in that state remains conscious but shut to outer things and open only to inner experience. You must distinguish clearly between these two quite different conditions, one is, the other the beginning at least of (not of course!). This drawing inside is necessary because the active mind of the human being is at ﬁrst too much turned to outward things; it has to go inside altogether in order to live in the inner being (inner mind, inner vital, inner physical, psychic).


Sri Aurobindo: But with training one can arrive at a point when one remains outwardly conscious and yet lives in the inner being and has at will the indrawn or the outpoured condition; you can then have the same dense immobility and the same inpouring of a greater and purer consciousness in the waking state as in that which you erroneously call sleep.     About your experiences:  (1) The sleep which you felt when meditating was not sleep but an inward condition of the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: When this inward condition is not very deep one can be aware of various scenes, voices etc. which belong not to the physical but to some inner plane of consciousness — their value or truth depends on the plane to which one reaches. Those of the surface are of no importance and one has simply to pass through them till one gets deeper.  (2) The fear, anger, depression etc. which used to rise when making the japa of the names came from a vital resistance in the nature (this resistance exists in everyone) which threw up these things because of the pressure on the vital part to change which is implied in sadhana. These resistances rise and then, if one takes the right attitude, slowly or quickly clear away. One has to observe them and separate oneself from them, persisting in the concentration and sadhana till the vital becomes quiet and clear.


Sri Aurobindo: (3) The things you saw (moon, sky etc.) are due to the opening of the inner vision; this usually comes when the concentration begins to open up the inner consciousness of which this subtle vision is a part. This faculty of vision has its importance in the development of the inner being, and need not be discouraged, even though too much importance should not be attached to the things seen in the earlier stages.  (4) There are some however that are part of the growing spiritual experience, such as the sun you saw overhead and the piece of golden light — for these are signs of an opening within and symbolic. Both are symbols of the Divine Truth and Light and of one action of their inﬂuence.


Sri Aurobindo: (5) The most important experience, however, is that of the peace and quiet which comes with a good concentration. It is this that must grow and ﬁx itself in the mind and vital and body — for it is this peace and quiet that make a ﬁrm basis for the sadhana.    The starting of the body happens very often when it is in a kind of sleep of samadhi and something touches whether from within or without.  The medium trance is of a different kind — they get not into touch with Sachchidananda but with the beings of the lower vital plane.


Sri Aurobindo: To develop the power of going into this higher kind of trance, one must have done some sadhana. As to puriﬁcation, entire puriﬁcation is not necessary, but some part of the being must have turned to higher things.  The three experiences of which you speak belong all to the same movement or the same stage of your spiritual life; they are initial movements of the consciousness to become aware of your inner being which was veiled, as in most, by the outer waking self.  There are, we might say, two beings in us, one on the surface, our ordinary exterior mind, life, body consciousness, another behind the veil, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner physical consciousness constituting another or inner self. This inner self once awake opens in its turn to our true real and eternal self.


Sri Aurobindo: It opens inwardly to the soul, called in the language of this Yoga the psychic being which supports our successive births and at each birth assumes a new mind, life and body. It opens above to the Self or spirit which is unborn and by conscious recovery of it we transcend the changing personality and achieve freedom and full mastery over our nature.  You did quite right in ﬁrst developing the sattwic qualities and building up the inner meditative quietude. It is possible by strenuous meditation or by certain methods of tense endeavour to open doors on to the inner being or even break down some of the walls between the inner and outer self before ﬁnishing or even undertaking this preliminary self-discipline, but it is not always wise to do it as that may lead to conditions of sadhana which may be very turbid, chaotic, beset with unnecessary dangers. By adopting the more patient course you have arrived at a point at which the doors of the inner being have begun almost automatically to swing open.


Sri Aurobindo: Now both processes can go on side by side, but it is necessary to keep the sattwic quietude, patience, vigilance, — to hurry nothing, to force nothing, not to be led away by any strong lure or call of the intermediate stage which is now beginning before you are sure that it is the right call. For there are many vehement pulls from the forces of the inner planes which it is not safe to follow.  Your ﬁrst experience is an opening into the inner mental self — the space between the eyebrows is the centre of the inner mind, vision, will and the blue light you saw was that of a higher mental plane, a spiritual mind, one might say, which is above the ordinary human mental intelligence. An opening into this higher mind is usually accompanied by a silence of the ordinary mental thought. Our thoughts are not really created within ourselves independently in the small narrow thinking machine we call our mind; in fact, they come to us from a vast mental space or ether either as mind-waves or waves of mind-force that carry a signiﬁcance which takes shape in our personal mind or as thought-formations ready-made which we adopt and call ours.


Sri Aurobindo: Our outer mind is blind to this process of Nature; but by the awakening of the inner mind we can become aware of it. What you saw was the receding of this constant mental invasion and the retreat of the thought-forms beyond the horizon of the wide space of mental Nature. You felt this horizon to be in yourself somewhere, but evidently it was in that larger self-space which even in its more limited ﬁeld just between the eyebrows you felt to be bigger than the corresponding physical space. In fact, though the inner mind spaces have horizons, they stretch beyond those horizons — illimitably. The inner mind is something very wide projecting itself into the inﬁnite and ﬁnally identifying itself with the inﬁnity of universal Mind.


Sri Aurobindo: When we break out of the narrow limits of the external physical mind we begin to see inwardly and to feel this wideness, in the end this universality and inﬁnity of the mental self-space. Thoughts are not the essence of mind-being, they are only an activity of mental nature; if that activity ceases, what appears then as a thought-free existence that manifests in its place is not a blank or void but something very real, substantial, concrete we may say — a mental being that extends itself widely and can be its own ﬁeld of existence silent or active as well as the Witness, Knower, Master of that ﬁeld and its action. Some feel it ﬁrst as a void, but that is because their observation is untrained and insufﬁcient and loss of activity gives them the sense of blank; an emptiness there is, but it is an emptiness of the ordinary activities, not a blank of existence.  The recurrence of the experience of the receding away of thoughts, the cessation of the thought-generating mechanism and its replacement by the mental self-space, is normal and as it should be; for this silence or at any rate the capacity for it has to grow until one can have it at will or even established in an automatic permanence. For this silence of the ordinary mindmechanism is necessary in order that the higher mentality may manifest, descend, occupy by degrees the place of the present imperfect mentality and transform the activities of the latter into its own fuller movements.


Sri Aurobindo: The difﬁculty of its coming when you are at work is only at the beginning — afterwards when it is more settled one ﬁnds that one can carry on all the activities of life either in the pervading silence itself or at least with that as the support and background. The silence remains behind and there is the necessary action on the surface or the silence is our wide self and somewhere in it an active Power does the works of Nature without disturbing the silence. It is therefore quite right to suspend the work while the visitation of the experience is there — the development of this inner silent consciousness is sufﬁciently important to justify a brief interruption or pause.  In the case of the other two experiences, on the contrary, it is otherwise. The dream-experience must not be allowed to take hold of the waking hours and pull the consciousness within; it must conﬁne its operation to the hours of sleep.


Sri Aurobindo: So too there should be no push or pressure to break down the wall between the inner self and the outer “I” — the fusion must be allowed to take place by a developing inner action in its own natural time.  I shall explain why in another letter.  Your second experience is a ﬁrst movement of the awakening of the inner being in sleep. Ordinarily when one sleeps a complex phenomenon happens. The waking consciousness is no longer there, for all has been withdrawn within into the inner realms of which we are not aware when we are awake, though they exist; for then all that is put behind a veil by the waking mind and nothing remains except the surface self and the outward world — much as the veil of the sunlight hides from us the vast worlds of the stars that are behind it.


Sri Aurobindo: Sleep is a going inward in which the surface self and the outside world are put away from our sense and vision. But in ordinary sleep we do not become aware of the worlds within either; the being seems submerged in a deep subconscience. On the surface of this subconscience ﬂoats an obscure layer in which dreams take place, as it seems to us, but, more correctly it may be said, are recorded. When we go very deeply asleep, we have what appears to us as a dreamless slumber; but in fact dreams are going on, but they are either too deep down to reach the recording surface or are forgotten, all recollection of their having existed even is wiped out in the transition to the waking consciousness. Ordinary dreams are for the most part or seem to be incoherent, because they are either woven by the subconscient out of deep-lying impressions left in it by our past inner and outer life, woven in a fantastic way which does not easily yield any clue of meaning to the waking mind’s remembrance, or are fragmentary records, mostly distorted, of experiences which are going on behind the veil of sleep — very largely indeed these two elements get mixed up together.


Sri Aurobindo: For in fact a large part of our consciousness in sleep does not get sunk into this subconscious state; it passes beyond the veil into other planes of being which are connected with our own inner planes, planes of supraphysical existence, worlds of a larger life, mind or psyche which are there behind and whose inﬂuences come to us without our knowledge. Occasionally we get a dream from these planes, something more than a dream, — a dream experience which is a record direct or symbolic of what happens to us or around us there. As the inner consciousness grows by sadhana, these dream experiences increase in number, clearness, coherence, accuracy and after some growth of experience and consciousness, we can, if we observe, come to understand them and their signiﬁcance to our inner life. Even we can by training become so conscious as to follow our own passage, usually veiled to our awareness and memory, through many realms and the process of the return to the waking state. At a certain pitch of this inner wakefulness this kind of sleep, a sleep of experiences, can replace the ordinary subconscient slumber.


Sri Aurobindo: It is of course an inner being or consciousness or something of the inner self that grows aware in this way, not, as usually it is, behind the veil of sleep, but in the sleep itself. In the condition which you describe, it is just becoming aware of sleep and dream and observing them — but as yet nothing farther — unless there is something in the nature of your dreams that has escaped you. But it is sufﬁciently awake for the surface consciousness to remember this state, that is to say, to receive and keep the report of it even in the transition from the sleep to the waking state which usually abolishes by oblivion all but fragments of the record of sleep-happenings. You are right in feeling that the waking consciousness and this which is awake in sleep are not the same — they are different parts of the being.  When this growth of the inner sleep consciousness begins, there is often a pull to go inside and pursue the development even when there is no fatigue or need of sleep.


Sri Aurobindo: Another cause aids this pull. It is usually the vital part of the inner being that ﬁrst wakes in sleep and the ﬁrst dream experiences (as opposed to ordinary dreams) are usually in the great mass experiences of the vital plane, a world of supraphysical life, full of variety and interest, with many provinces, luminous or obscure, beautiful or perilous, often extremely attractive, where we can get much knowledge too both of our concealed parts of nature and of things happening to us behind the veil and of others which are of concern for the development of our parts of nature. The vital being in us then may get very much attracted to this range of experience, may want to live more in it and less in the outer life. This would be the source of that wanting to get back to something interesting and enthralling which accompanies the desire to fall into sleep. But this must not be encouraged in waking hours, it should be kept for the hours set apart for sleep where it gets its natural ﬁeld.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise there may be an unbalancing, a tendency to live more and too much in the visions of the supraphysical realms and a decrease of the hold on outer realities. The knowledge, the enlargement of our consciousness of these ﬁelds of inner Nature is very desirable, but it must be kept in its own place and limits.  In my last letter I had postponed the explanation of your third experience. What you have felt is indeed a touch of the Self, — not the unborn Self above, the Atman of the Upanishads, for that is differently experienced through the silence of the thinking mind, but the inner being, the psychic supporting the inner mental, vital, physical being, of which I have spoken. A time must come for every seeker of complete self-knowledge when he is thus aware of living in two worlds, two consciousnesses at the same time, two parts of the same existence.


Sri Aurobindo: At present he lives in the outer consciousness, the outer being and sees within the inner self — but he will go more and more inward, till the position is reversed and he lives within in this new inner consciousness, inner self and feels the outer as something on the surface formed as an instrumental personality for the inner’s self-expression in the material world. Then from within a Power works on the outer to make it a conscious plastic instrument so that ﬁnally the inner and the outer may become fused into one. The wall you feel is indeed the wall of the ego which is based on the insistent identiﬁcation of oneself with the outer personality and its movements. It is that identiﬁcation which is the keystone of the limitation and bondage from which the outer being suffers, preventing expansion, self-knowledge, spiritual freedom. But still the wall must not be prematurely broken down, because that may lead to a disruption or confusion or invasion of either part by the movements of the two separated worlds before they are ready to harmonise.


Sri Aurobindo: A certain separation is necessary for some time after one has become aware of these two parts of the being as existing together. The force of the Yoga must be given time to make the necessary adjustments and openings, and to take the being inward and then from this inward poise to work on the outer nature.  This does not mean that one should not allow the consciousness to go inward so that as soon as possible it should live in the inward world of being and see all anew from there. That inward going is most desirable and necessary and that change of vision also. I mean only that all should be done by a natural movement without haste.


Sri Aurobindo: The movement of going inward may come rapidly, but even after that something of the wall of ego will be there and it will have to be steadily and patiently taken down so that no stone of it may abide. My warning against allowing the sleep world to encroach on the waking hours is limited to that alone and does not refer to the inward movement in waking concentration or ordinary waking consciousness. The waking movement carries us ﬁnally into the inner self and by that inner self we grow into contact with and knowledge of the supraphysical worlds, but this contact and knowledge need not and should not lead to an excessive preoccupation with them or a subjection to their beings and forces. In sleep we actually enter into these worlds and there is the danger, if the attraction of the sleep consciousness is too great and encroaches on the waking consciousness, of this excessive preoccupation and inﬂuence.  It is quite true that an inner purity and sincerity, in which one is motived only by the higher call, is one’s best safeguard against the lures of the intermediate stage.


Sri Aurobindo: It keeps one on the right track and guards from deviation until the psychic being is fully awake and in front and, once that happens, there is no farther danger. If in addition to this purity and sincerity there is a clear mind with a power of discrimination, that increases the safety in the earlier stages. I do not think I need or should specify too fully or exactly the forms the lure or pull is likely to take. It may be better not to call up these forces by an attention to them which may not be necessary. I do not suppose you are likely to be drawn away from the path by any of the greater perilous attractions.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the minor inconveniences of the intermediate stage, they are not dangerous and can easily be set right as one goes by the growth of consciousness, discrimination and sure experience.  As I have said, the inward pull, the pull towards going inward is not undesirable and need not be resisted. At a particular stage it may be accompanied by an abundance of visions due to the growth of the inner sight which sees things belonging to all the planes of existence. That is a valuable power helpful in the sadhana and should not be discouraged. But one must see and observe without attachment, keeping always the main object in front, realisation of the inner Self and the Divine — these things should only be regarded as incidental to the growth of consciousness and helpful to it, not as objects in themselves to be followed for their own sake.


Sri Aurobindo: There should also be a discriminating mind which puts each thing in its place and can pause to understand its ﬁeld and nature. There are some who become so eager after these subsidiary experiences that they begin to lose all sense of the true distinction and demarcation between different ﬁelds of reality. All that takes place in these experiences must not be taken as true — one has to discriminate, see what is mental formation or subjective construction and what is true, what is only suggestion from the larger mental and vital planes or what has reality only there and what is of value for help or guidance in inner sadhana or outer life.  There is no difference between the terms “universal” and “cosmic” except that “universal” can be used in a freer way than “cosmic”. Universal may mean “of the universe”, cosmic in that general sense.


Sri Aurobindo: But it may also mean “common to all”, — e.g., “This is a universal weakness” — but you cannot say, “This is a cosmic weakness.”    Universal applies to everything in the universe — there are individual beings everywhere, but not physical in the terrestrial sense — the composition being different.  Man is shut up at present in his surface individual consciousness and knows the world (or rather the surface of it) only through his outward mind and senses and by interpreting their contacts with the world. By Yoga there can open in him a consciousness which becomes one with that of the world; he becomes directly aware of a universal Being, universal states, universal Force and Power, universal mind, life, matter and lives in conscious relations with these things.


Sri Aurobindo: He is then said to have the cosmic consciousness.    Men are usually shut up in the sense of their separate existence and know of the world and of other beings only what they see, hear, feel by their senses and their mental images and inferences.  By Yoga one can get free of this limitation and become directly aware of the Cosmic Self, the self of other beings, of their movements, of the movements of the cosmic forces, etc. etc. That is the cosmic consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo:   Everyone has a universal consciousness standing concealed behind the individualised personality. When one becomes aware of it one feels in contact with the universal self and forces or one with them.


Sri Aurobindo: When one has the cosmic consciousness, one can feel the cosmic self as one’s own self, one can feel one with other beings in the cosmos, one can feel all the forces of Nature as moving in oneself, all selves as one’s own self.  There is no why except that it is so, since all is the One.     The ordinary consciousness of man is conﬁned to his own individuality — he can enter into the consciousness of others and of the universe only by indirect means or a superﬁcial and incomplete apprehension, by sense experience, contacts of emotional sympathy, mental concepts, analogy with his own movements, inference.


Sri Aurobindo: In Yoga at a certain point this limitation breaks down, the consciousness enlarges itself, becomes directly aware of the Cosmic Self and knows the individual self to be one with it; of the Cosmic Energy and meets directly the action of the cosmic forces; of the cosmic mind, life, matter and feels ﬁrst a contact of its individual mind, life, body with them, then a unity in which one’s own individual mentality, vitality, physicality is felt as only a part of the universal, a wave of the ocean, a dynamo receiving and formulating the universal forces. Finally, the individual melts into the cosmic consciousness, the whole world is felt in oneself and oneself suffused through the world — it is the cosmic Consciousness, Mind, Life, material Energy that works through the individual function. The separate ego either does not exist or is only a convenience for the universal Spirit and its action. This is the complete consummation of the cosmic Consciousness, but in its fullness it is not common, belonging properly to what we may call the Overmind realisation; but a constant partial and growing experience of it or an increasing contact with the cosmic Consciousness is a normal part of Yoga.  The cosmic consciousness does not belong to overmind in especial; it covers all the planes.


Sri Aurobindo:   The overmind is the basis of the total cosmic consciousness, but the cosmic consciousness itself can be felt on any plane, not only above mind, but in mind, life, matter.  The consciousness in the individual widens itself into the cosmic consciousness outside and can have any kind of dealing with it, penetrate, know its movements, act upon it or receive from it, even become commensurate with or contain it — which was what was meant in the language of the old Yogas by having the  within you.  The cosmic consciousness is that of the universe, of the cosmic Spirit and cosmic Nature with all the beings and forces within it. All that is as much conscious as a whole as the individual separately is, though in a different way.


Sri Aurobindo: The consciousness of the individual is part of this, but a part feeling itself as a separate being. Yet all the time most of what he is comes into him from the cosmic consciousness. Only there is a wall of separative ignorance between. Once it breaks down he becomes aware of the cosmic Self, of the consciousness of the cosmic Nature, of the forces playing in it etc. He feels all that as he now feels physical things and impacts.


Sri Aurobindo: He ﬁnds it all to be one with his larger or universal self.  There is the universal mental, the universal vital, the universal physical nature, and it is out of a selection of their forces and movements that the individual mind, vital and physical are made. The soul comes from beyond this nature of mind, life and body. It belongs to the Transcendent and because of it we can open to the higher Nature beyond.  The Divine is always One that is Many.


Sri Aurobindo: The individual spirit is part of the “Many” side of the One, and the psychic being is what it puts forth to evolve here in the earth-nature. In liberation the individual self realises itself as the One (that is yet Many). It may plunge into the One and merge or hide itself in its bosom — that is the Laya of the Adwaita; it may feel its oneness and yet as part of the Many that is One enjoy the Divine, that is the Dwaitadwaita liberation; it may lay stress on its Many aspect and be possessed by the Divine, the Visishtadwaita, or go on playing with Krishna in the eternal Vrindavan, the Dwaita liberation. Or it may, even being liberated, remain in the Lila or manifestation or descend into it as often as it likes. The Divine is not bound by human philosophies — it is free in its play and free in its essence.


Sri Aurobindo:  One has to get above the cosmic consciousness of the mind, life and matter by entering into the spiritual levels above the ordinary mind, into the higher consciousness. This does not cut one off from the cosmic consciousness, but one sees it without being involved in it.     It [] is the release from the limitations by the body consciousness and the opening into the wider being which is universal although it has an individual centre.


Sri Aurobindo: As this develops one becomes aware of the true Self silent and illimitable and the cosmic consciousness. The concentration at the apex above the head is the station in the thousand-petalled lotus. There one becomes aware of states of mind above the ordinary human, the higher mind, the illumined mind, the intuition, the overmind — ﬁnally when one has achieved the overmind one opens directly to the supramental consciousness.    The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and


Sri Aurobindo: above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the Overmind and still above that the Supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live on the Intuitive plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.  A reﬂected static realisation of Sachchidananda is possible on any of the cosmic planes, but the full entering into it, the entire union with the Supreme Divine dynamic as well as static,  comes with the transcendence.


Sri Aurobindo: It [] is sufﬁcient if only a static Consciousness is aimed at — but if transformation and the dynamic Divine is the aim, then the whole must be known. To realise the Cosmic Divine is after all impossible without entering into or opening to the cosmic consciousness — but one has to know the cosmic Prakriti as well as the cosmic Purusha.   1. The spiritual consciousness is that in which we enter into the awareness of Self, the Spirit, the Divine and are able to see in all things their essential reality and the play of forces and phenomena as proceeding from that essential Reality.


Sri Aurobindo: 2. The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or is ﬁlled by a cosmic Spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal Overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself.


Sri Aurobindo: One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modiﬁed by Nature in other bodies or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one’s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their value and appearance; one’s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one’s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things, and the conﬁnes of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost immeasurable degree. The things one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness are the play of a magniﬁed ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: These are things that one has to learn by experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufﬁcient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in the nature.  3. The ordinary consciousness is that in which one knows things only or mainly by the intellect, the external mind and the senses and knows forces etc. only by their outward manifestations and results and the rest by inferences from these data. There may be some play of mental intuition, deeper psychic seeing or impulsions, spiritual intimations etc. — but in the ordinary consciousness these are incidental only and do not modify its fundamental character.


Sri Aurobindo: It is very good. The widening of the consciousness so as to be in touch with the Universal Inﬁnite is an important stage in the sadhana.    The ordinary man lives in his own personal consciousness knowing things through his mind and senses as they are touched by a world which is outside him, outside his consciousness. When the consciousness subtilises, it begins to come into contact with things in a much more direct way, not only with their forms and outer impacts but with what is inside them, but still the range may be small.


Sri Aurobindo: But the consciousness can also widen and begin to be ﬁrst in direct contact with an immense range of things in the world, then to contain them as it were, — as it is said to see the world in oneself, — and to be in a way identiﬁed with it. To see all things in the self and the self in all things — to be aware of one being everywhere, aware directly of the different planes, their forces, their beings — that is universalisation.   Opening is when it [] receives the higher forces — widening is when it is no longer limited to the body but widens to meet the cosmic consciousness.   The widening of the consciousness beyond the body means that there is a preparation to pass out of the limitation by the body consciousness and feel oneself either in the cosmic consciousness or in contact with it. If one has this feeling of enlargement or wideness above the head one is in contact with the universal Self; below it is according to the level with the cosmic Mind, the cosmic vital or the cosmic physical consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: When one is entirely freed from the body limitation, then one feels the consciousness as inﬁnite with the body only as something very small within it.     It [] means the liberation from the body sense in which one can truly say, “I am not the body.” This liberation is part of the cosmic consciousness — as is also the realisation of the cosmic Will.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the liberation from the body sense only. That is quite different from the control of the body.     Yes, your experience was a very good one and your feeling about it was correct.


Sri Aurobindo: When the consciousness is narrow and personal or shut in the body, it is difﬁcult to receive from the Divine — the wider it expands, the more it can receive. A time comes when it feels as wide as the world and able to receive all the Divine into itself.     If you feel the barrier in which you lived broken down and an inner ocean of wideness, then a great thing has happened in you.


Sri Aurobindo: For it is this wideness that comes when the consciousness opens to the Divine. Into this wideness the Divine’s peace, love, light and joy can pour and ﬁx themselves there.  Go on calling the Mother and opening yourself to her. All the rest will come.


Sri Aurobindo:   By a widening of all the parts of the being, a sense of largeness and liberation of the mind, vital and physical, an opening to the Divine everywhere and many other signs [ — ] .


Sri Aurobindo: Yes — it [] is felt as if a great substantial vastness full of power and giving the sense of oneness free and inﬁnite and the same from top to bottom.      The emptiness and wideness in the brain is a very good sign.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a condition for the opening horizontally into the cosmic consciousness and upward into the Self and higher spiritual Mind above the head.     The lightness, the feeling of the disappearance of the head and that all is open is a sign of the wideness of the mental consciousness which is no longer limited by the brain and its body sense — no longer imprisoned but wide and free. This is felt in the meditation only at ﬁrst or with closed eyes, but at a later stage it becomes established and one feels always oneself a wide consciousness not limited by any feeling of the body.


Sri Aurobindo: You felt something of this wideness of your being in the second experience when the Mother’s foot pressed down your physical mind (head) till it went below and left room for this sense of an inﬁnite Self. This wide consciousness not dependent on the body or limited by it is what is called in Yoga the Atman or Self. You are only having the ﬁrst glimpses of it, but later on it becomes normal and one feels that one was always this Atman inﬁnite and immortal.    It is an experience of the extension of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: In Yoga experience the consciousness widens in every direction, around, below, above, in each direction stretching to inﬁnity. When the consciousness of the Yogin becomes liberated, it is not in the body, but in this inﬁnite height, depth and wideness that he lives always. Its basis is an inﬁnite void or silence, but in that all can manifest — Peace, Freedom, Power, Light, Knowledge, Ananda.  This consciousness is usually called the consciousness of the Self or Atman, for it is a pure existence or self that is the source of all things and contains all things.


Sri Aurobindo: You must dismiss the fear of the concentration. The emptiness you feel coming on you is the silence of the great peace in which you become aware of your self, not as the small ego shut up in the body, but as the spiritual self wide as the universe. Consciousness is not dissolved; it is the limits of the consciousness that are dissolved. In that silence thoughts may cease for a time, there may be nothing but a great limitless freedom and wideness, but into that silence, that empty wideness descends the vast peace from above, light, bliss, knowledge, the higher Consciousness in which you feel the oneness of the Divine. It is the beginning of the transformation and there is nothing in it to fear.


Sri Aurobindo:  If these were imaginations, you would be able to reproduce them exactly each time you thought of them. The idea that it is imagination comes from the physical mind which cannot believe in anything supraphysical.  This opening of the chest into the void (not really the void, but the inﬁnite Akash of the Chit universal and illimitable) is always the sign of an opening of the emotional being into the wideness of the Universal Divine. The image of the Akash is often seen by sadhaks in Dhyana. When the consciousness is liberated, whether in the mind or other part, there is always this sense of the wide inﬁnite emptiness.


Sri Aurobindo: From the top of the head to the throat is the mental plane of the being — a similar opening  and emptiness or wideness here is the sign of the mind being freed into the Universal. From the throat to the stomach is the higher vital or emotional region. Below is the lower vital plane.   It is of course the inner wideness in which you were absorbed so that outward things went on of themselves without engaging the interest.


Sri Aurobindo: In the meditation it was the same descent into the head — when it ﬁlls the head, there is often this feeling of there being no head, only that which is coming down or else a wideness in which that is acting. In the end one gets the feeling of being not something conﬁned in the head and body, but a wide consciousness with the body only as something comparatively small inside it. The vision was a ﬁgure of this wider consciousness with the Mother’s inner presence always there.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, what you see is right. It is why the former Yogins preferred to remain in the wide consciousness aloof from the play of the energies — they regarded the latter as something belonging to the life of illusion which would fall away only by the rejection of the physical life through knowledge. It is when you oscillate from one consciousness to another that you seem to lose the higher one or feel as if it were lost. By keeping it within always, one is able to regard both sides and change the recalcitrant lower nature.


Sri Aurobindo:   The wideness comes when one exceeds or begins to exceed the individual consciousness and spread out towards the universal. But the psychic can be active even in the individual consciousness.    At the beginning the experience of wideness like other experiences comes only from time to time.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only afterwards that it becomes frequent and remains long, till ﬁnally it settles and the consciousness remains always wide.  In the cosmic consciousness the personal I disappears into the one Self of all. The I which alone exists is not that of the person, the individualised I, but the universalised I identical with all and with the cosmic Self (Atman).    It is what it represents itself to be — an experience of the universal consciousness aspiring to the Divine Truth and beginning to receive its light.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not your own consciousness, although you feel it in yourself, but a symbolic experience of this universal Vishwa-Purusha. These things one sees when one opens to the Cosmic Consciousness. Observed, felt and taken rightly they help to liberate, universalise and impersonalise. But keep the ego out of it — opening to the Cosmic Divine will have these or similar experiences. Observe and go forward.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no doubt that you will succeed in your endeavour — all that is needed is ﬁrm persistence till the success is complete.  What you saw in the vision was the wide and luminous inﬁnite of what is called the universal Self or spirit. It is that which is one of the fundamental things into which one enters when one reaches the higher consciousness and goes above. The personal being naturally feels itself as something very small and insigniﬁcant in that Inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: But in that Inﬁnite there are higher and higher levels and it is to these levels that the Mother was leading you when she took you by the hand. This often happens in meditation or trance when one has once gone upward into the spiritual inﬁnity. The reason why you did not see the Mother’s form was not that the Mother hid herself, or anything in you came between, but that you were both moving in the formless Inﬁnite as spiritual beings and so it was easier to feel the presence than to see any physical form. Not that the form cannot be there, but it is less insistent and therefore not so soon seen as on the physical plane.


Sri Aurobindo: The silence in the head and heart and the emptiness are both necessary and desirable. When they are there, the consciousness ﬁnds them natural and they give it the sense of lightness and release; that is why the thoughts or speech of the old kind are foreign to it and when they come give fatigue. This silence and emptiness must grow, so that the higher consciousness with its knowledge, light, Ananda, peace can come down in it and progressively replace the old things. They must indeed occupy not only head and heart but the whole body.  Liberation is the ﬁrst necessity — to live in the peace, silence, purity, freedom of the Self.


Sri Aurobindo: Along with that or afterwards if one wakens to the cosmic consciousness, then one can be free, yet one with all things.  To have the cosmic consciousness without the liberation etc. is possible, but then there is no freedom anywhere in the being from the lower nature and one may become in one’s extended consciousness the playground of all kinds of forces without being able to be either free and detached from the Prakriti or free and master.  On the other hand, if there has been self-realisation, there is one part of the being that remains untouched amid the play of the cosmic forces — while if the peace and purity of the self has been established in the whole inner consciousness, then the outer touches of the lower nature cannot come in or overpower.  This is the advantage of self-realisation preceding the cosmic consciousness and supporting it.


Sri Aurobindo: When there is the development of the Self-realisation or of the cosmic consciousness or if there is the emptiness which is the preliminary condition for these things, there comes an automatic tendency for a unity with all — their affections, mental, vital, physical may easily touch. One has to keep oneself free.    Affections here [] has not the ordinary sense — it means “ways in which they are affected by things”, e.g. joy, grief, pleasure, pain, illness etc.


Sri Aurobindo: What you feel is the normal condition when the liberation takes place. The work of the senses etc. goes on as before, but the consciousness is different, so that one feels not only the sense of liberation, separation etc., but that one is living in quite another world than that of the ordinary mind, life or senses. It is another consciousness with another knowledge and way of looking at things that begins. Afterwards as this consciousness takes possession of the instruments, there is a harmony of it with the sense and life; but these too become different, with a changed outlook, seeing the world no more as before but as if made of another substance with another signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is when you feel the universal or divine beauty or presence in things that the senses are open to the Divine.  I think you are speaking of two different sides of the cosmic Consciousness, that which is behind all Cosmos and that which is expressed in the apparent universe.


Sri Aurobindo:   There are in the cosmic consciousness two sides — one the contact with and perception of the ordinary cosmic forces and the beings behind these forces, that is what I call the cosmic Ignorance — the other is the perception of the cosmic Truths, the realisation of the one universal, the one universal Force, all the Vedantic truths of the One in all and all in one; all the various aspects of the Divine in the cosmic and a host of other things can come which do help to realisation and knowledge — provided they are taken in the right way. However all that can be best dealt with when it actually comes. It does not always come as soon as there is the widening — many pass through the widening of the consciousness to what is beyond the cosmic and take the cosmic in detail afterwards — and it is perhaps the safest order.   Each defect of the nature of the Ignorance is a deformation of something in the higher nature — a deformation which amounts to a contradiction even.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a concretised perception of this that you got in your experience.   There is no ignorance that is not part of the cosmic Ignorance — only in the individual it becomes a limited formation and movement, while the cosmic Ignorance is the whole movement of world-consciousness separated from the supreme Truth and acting in an inferior motion in which the Truth is perverted, diminished, mixed and clouded with falsehood and error. The cosmic Truth is the view on things of a cosmic Consciousness in which things are seen in their true essence and their true relation to the Divine and to each other.   The Yogi’s cosmic experiences are spiritual experiences — experience of the play of the Forces and its relation with the self, the action of the Guide, what is behind the appearance of things, occurrences etc. etc., the actual relations of the workings of Purusha and Prakriti etc. The Divine Truth is the truth of the divine Essence, Consciousness, Self-Knowledge, Light, Power, Bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: It is something from which the cosmos derives with all its movements, but it is more than the cosmos.    The cosmic Truth is the truth of things as they are at present expressed in the universe. The Divine Truth is independent of the universe, above it and originates it.  A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would ﬂy to pieces.


Sri Aurobindo: But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements — the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent, — it is only owing to a sustaining divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution, in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our Yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.


Sri Aurobindo: This harmony of the lower consciousness is a harmony of discords brought about by a clash and mixture of forces.   It [] is a representation in sound of the cosmic harmony from which the Ignorance is a fall and a discord.     There is a rhythm in everything unheard by the physical ear and by that rhythm things exist.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not possible for the individual mind, so long as it remains shut up in its personality, to understand the workings of the Cosmic Will, for the standards made by the personal consciousness are not applicable to them. A cell in the body, if conscious, might also think that the human being and its actions are only the resultant of the relations and workings of a number of cells like itself and not the action of a uniﬁed self. It is only if one enters into the Cosmic Consciousness that one begins to see the forces at work and the lines on which they work and get a glimpse of the Cosmic Self and the Cosmic Mind and Will.


Sri Aurobindo: Everything here is not perfect, but all works out the cosmic Will in the course of the ages.  What is happening is that you have got into touch with the cosmic Mind where all sorts of ideas, possibilities, formations are moving about. The individual mind takes up those which appeal to it or perhaps come into distinct form when they touch it. But these are possibilities, not truths, so it is better not to let them run free like that.   One [] is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one’s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one’s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one. This is of course if one opens in the right way and does not merely become a passive ﬁeld of all sorts of ideas and mental forces.    The opening to cosmic mind makes the experience of the Divine everywhere for instance more easy — but it is not essentially spiritual; if there is not a coming of wider spiritual experiences, then it need not be spiritual at all.  One [] becomes aware of all the life-forces and of how they act upon oneself and others, upon mind, upon body — also the force movements behind events.


Sri Aurobindo: One becomes too directly aware of the vital plane, its worlds, its beings, and the direct action of their formations on the earthlife. One has to become aware also at the same time of one’s own true vital being and act from it and not from the surface or desire vital in relation to all these things. All this effect does not come at once, — it develops as the contact with the cosmic Life increases.   In the universal vital especially there is a deceptive attraction and an exhilarating rush of power (not true quiet power but mere force) which those who yield to it cling to as a drunkard to his intoxicants. It gives them a sense of being strong and great and full of interesting things — when it is taken from them, they feel “like ordinary people” and ask for it back again.


Sri Aurobindo:  You had a mental and the beginning of a vital opening to the cosmic consciousness — kept on the spiritualised level, the vision or feeling of the Divine Ananda without seeking for possession or a gross outer enjoyment, it would have established a Yogic consciousness and made a base for knowledge and peace and power and psychic love and surrender to come down.  One cannot be high in the cosmic consciousness unless one has taken one’s station above the body in a cosmic wideness which envelops the whole being. What you did was to open to it to a certain extent and then, instead of plunging into it at once as some do , your sadhana took the turn of coming down into the physical to prepare it. That is not altogether an undesirable turn — for many suffer by not having taken it.


Sri Aurobindo: for instance got a very evident opening into the cosmic, but he lost his way in it altogether because neither his vital nor his physical were cleared of certain very serious imperfections.     Yes, it is the psychising and puriﬁcation that have been going on, but you had some openings of contact with the cosmic consciousness which did not prolong themselves when you came into the physical. ’s


Sri Aurobindo: ascents, I suppose, are more a going out of the body in his mind and vital than any stationing of his consciousness above. The latter would have brought a calm and peace and liberation which he does not possess as yet. This kind of ascent brings a conscious contact with cosmic forces of the mental and vital planes (in his case more the vital) and some extraordinary experiences which are not altogether safe. There is great danger there of entering into and getting perplexed in the intermediate zone. I would rather see him liberated from these things than pursuing them any farther.


Sri Aurobindo: A descent from above of the higher forces would be far more helpful to him than these ascensions.  Universal forces means all forces good or bad, favourable or hostile, of light or of darkness that move in the cosmos.   The cosmic forces here whether good or bad are forces of the Ignorance. Above them is the Truth-Consciousness that can only manifest when ego and desire are overcome — it is the force from the Divine Truth-Consciousness that must descend — the higher Peace, Light, Knowledge, Purity, Power, Ananda must  work upon the cosmic forces in the individual so as to change them and substitute the Truth-Forces in place of the ordinary working.


Sri Aurobindo:   They [] act on everyone, according to the person’s nature — and his will and consciousness.   It [] is necessary — it comes of itself as one gets more and more forward in the cosmic consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo:   They [] are perhaps rather the result of the action of universal forces — but in a certain sense grief and pain may be said to be universal forces — for there are waves of these things that arrive and invade the being often without apparent cause.     The universal forces move by their own force and the consciousness within them — but there is also the Cosmic Spirit who supports them and determines by his onlook and disposing will their play — although the direct action is left to the forces — it is the play of universal Prakriti with the universal Purusha watching behind it.


Sri Aurobindo: In the individual also there is the individual Purusha who can, if he wills, not merely assent to the play of Prakriti, but accept or reject or will for its change. All that is in the play itself as we see it here. There is something above — but the action of that is an intervention rather than a moment to moment control; it can become a constant direct control only when one replaces the play of the forces by the government of the Divine.    One can live in contact with the Divine even amidst the universal forces — but to live in the Divine one must be able to rise beyond the lower universal nature or to call down the Divine consciousness here.


Sri Aurobindo: The beginnings are difﬁcult for most — and at no time is it really easy.  There is only one Force or Energy here in reality; what is called the individual energy does not belong to the individual, but to the one universal Power.  In the one inﬁnite Energy itself a distinction has to be made between the Divine Force that descends from above the mind and the inferior universal Energy with all its different forms, movements, waves and currents that come into you from outside. The inferior Energy proceeds from the Divine Shakti, but it has fallen from the truth of its source and has no longer its direct guidance.  When these universal energies come into touch with the Divine Force, rise to meet it and allow it to take hold of them and occupy and change them, then they are puriﬁed and uplifted and transformed and become a movement of the Divine Force.


Sri Aurobindo: When they are not in touch with the Divine Force, not obedient to it, but act for themselves, they are unenlightened, erring, impure, mixed and confused — powers of the Ignorance.  Always, therefore, keep in touch with the Divine Force. The best thing for you is to do that simply and allow it to do its own work; wherever necessary, it will take hold of the inferior energies and purify them; at other times it will empty you of them and ﬁll you with itself. But if you let your mind take the lead and discuss and decide what is to be done, you will lose touch with the Divine Force and the lower energies will begin to act for themselves and all go into confusion and a wrong movement.


Sri Aurobindo: It is still worse to try to draw these lower universal energies from those around you and keep up with them a vital interchange; what gain can there be in that? On the contrary, it will lead to greater confusion and even bring in all kinds of mischief and trouble.  Often the association of these universal energies with others is a mistake of your mind. Your mind is seeking always to ﬁx them on to somebody, and often it ﬁxes on one or another at random or else according to old experiences which are no longer valid. For instance, what you call’s force was not his, but a universal hostile force which used at one time and, owing to a continued association in your mind, still presents itself to you as his, but may now no longer have anything to do with him.


Sri Aurobindo: By keeping up the old association, you simply give greater opportunity for this undesirable energy to come upon you.  Follow always the one rule, to open yourself directly to the Divine Force and not to others; if you keep in touch with it, all else will progressively arrange itself.  The cosmic Force is under the control of the Overmind. The Supermind does not act on it directly — whatever comes down from there is modiﬁed so as to pass through the Overmind and takes a lesser form suitable to the plane on which it acts, mental, vital or physical. But this intervention is exceptional in the ordinary play of the cosmic forces.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no rule for that [ ]. The human being is ordinarily conscious only on the surface — but the surface records only the results of subliminal agencies at work. It is often through the centres that the forces come in, for then they get the greatest power to act on the nature — but they can enter anywhere.   The universal forces act very often through the subconscient — especially when the force they send is something the person has been in the habit of obeying and of which the seeds, impressions, “complexes” are strongly rooted in the subconscient — or, even if that is no longer the case, of which there is a memory still in the subconscient.  Egoism is part of the machinery — a chief part — of universal Nature, ﬁrst to develop individuality out of indiscriminate force and substance of Nature and, secondly, to make the individual (through the machinery of egoistic thought, feeling, will and desire) a tool of the universal forces.