Sri Aurobindo: Very few people are aware of their souls — when they speak of their soul, they usually mean the vital + mental being or else the (false) soul of desire. The psychic remains behind and acts only through the mind, vital and physical wherever it can. For this reason the psychic being except where it is very much developed has only a small and partial, concealed and mixed or diluted inﬂuence on the life of most men. By coming forward is meant that it comes from behind the veil, its presence is felt clearly in the waking daily consciousness, its inﬂuence ﬁlls, dominates, transforms the mind and vital and their movements, even the physical. One is aware of one’s soul, feels the psychic to be one’s true being, the mind and the rest begin to be only instruments of the inmost within us.


Sri Aurobindo: The inner mental, vital, physical are also veiled, but much nearer to the surface and much of their movements or inspirations get through the veil (but not in any fullness or purity) in the lives of developed human beings, something even in the lives of ordinary people. But these too in Yoga throw down the veil after a time and come in front and their action predominates in the consciousness while the external is no longer felt as one’s own self but only as a front or even a fringe of the being.   Awakening [] is a different thing [ ], it means the conscious action of the psychic from behind. When it comes to the front it invades the mind and vital and body and psychicises their movements.


Sri Aurobindo: It comes best by aspiration and an unquestioning and entire turning and surrender to the Mother. But also it sometimes comes of itself when the Adhar is ready.     That is what we speak of as the psychic being coming in front — to psychicise the whole consciousness, i.e. make it subject to the psychic truth and full of the psychic nature.


Sri Aurobindo: At the same time the ordinary vital being has to disappear and be changed into the true vital.     The soul in itself contains all possible strength, but most of it is held behind the veil and it is what comes forward in the nature that makes the difference. In some people the psychic element is strong and in others weak; in some people the mind is the strongest part and governs, in others the vital is the strongest part and leads or drives.


Sri Aurobindo: But by sadhana the psychic being can be more and more brought forward till it is dominant and governs the rest. If it were already governing, then the struggles and difﬁculties of the mind and vital would not at all be serious; for each man in the light of the psychic would see and feel the truth and more and more follow it.  It is the psychic being in you that has come forward — and when the psychic being comes forward all is happiness, the right attitude, the right vision of things. Of course in one sense it is the same I that puts forward different parts of itself. But when these different parts are all under the control of the psychic and turned by it towards the reception of the higher consciousness, then there begins the harmonisation of all the parts and their progressive recasting into moulds of the higher consciousness growing in peace, light, force, love, knowledge, Ananda which is what we call the transformation.


Sri Aurobindo:   The psychic being in you is open always to the Divine Power, and when it comes in front, your spiritual capacity awakens and you are fully within the protection and can be moved by the Mother’s force. The other parts are divided and can be carried away by the wrong movements of the ordinary nature. Especially if you trust your physical mind and mistake its ideas and suggestions for the true inspiration, you are liable to fall into serious errors both in your attitude and your choice of action and may lose the results of the protection and of the Force.


Sri Aurobindo: Aspire to live always in your psychic being and to be open to the Mother; let the psychic part in you dominate the instruments, mind, life and body. Then the habit of the true intuition and the true impulse to action will  come and you will be able to live in conscious communion, to feel her presence and be moved only by her Force. This is your true way in the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: A central love, bhakti, surrender, giving everything, a sight within that sees always clearly what is spiritually right or wrong and automatically rejects the latter — a movement of entire consecration and dedication of all in one to the Mother [ ].     It is your psychic being which came in front, probably, or else it is the true vital being in you which was able to come in front because you took the psychic attitude. When the psychic being comes in front, then there is an automatic perception of the true and untrue, the divine and the undivine, the spiritual right and wrong of things and the false vital and mental movements


Sri Aurobindo: and attacks are immediately exposed and fall away and can do nothing; gradually the vital and physical as well as the mind get full of this psychic light and truth and sound feeling and purity and such violent attacks as you have are impossible. When the true vital being comes forward, it is something wide and strong and calm, an unmoved and powerful warrior for the Divine and the Truth repelling all enemies, bringing in a true strength and force and opening the vital to the greater Consciousness above.  It has to be seen which of the two it is you feel within you.    That is good.


Sri Aurobindo: It means that the psychic has come up again. When the psychic is in the front, the sadhana becomes natural and easy and it is only a question of time and natural development. When the mind or the vital or the physical consciousness is on the top, then the sadhana is a tapasya and a struggle.


Sri Aurobindo: Excuse me, — if it [] goes on with its karma, then it does not get liberation. If it wants only farther experience, it can just stay there in the ordinary nature. The aim of Yoga is to transcend karma. Karma means subjection to lower Nature; through Yoga the soul goes towards freedom.  You are describing the action of the ordinary existence, not the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga is a seeking (not a mental searching), it is not experimenting in contraries and contradictories. It is the mind that does that and the mind that analyses. The soul does not search, analyse, experiment — it seeks, feels, experiences.   The only grain of truth is that the Yoga is very usually a series of ups and downs till you get to a certain height.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is a quite different reason for that — not the vagaries of the soul. On the contrary when the psychic being gets in front and becomes master, there comes in a fundamentally smooth action and although there are difﬁculties and undulations of movement, these are no longer of an abrupt or dramatic character.   It is very good; all you write is a strong sign of the psychic emergence of which I spoke in yesterday’s letter. There is at once the deep plunge into the psychic and the emergence of the psychic inﬂuence in mind and heart. The depth of the plunge is the reason why action has become so slow, because the consciousness is too much inside to act swiftly on outside things.


Sri Aurobindo: This is a stage which one passes through in the process of the inner change. At the same time the ideas in the mind and the perceptions and the mental and vital attitude towards things and happenings and people are becoming more and more of a psychic character. Love and devotion to the Divine is the central feeling of the psychic nature and that is growing in you towards the Mother, pervading your being. A psychic love towards all is also emerging; this love is a thing inward and does not seek to express itself outwardly like the vital love which men usually have. The psychic and spiritual attitude is also not dependent on the good and bad in beings, but is self-existent regarding them as souls who carry the Divine in them however thickly concealed and are children of the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo:   Once the condition has come in which the thoughts that cross are not believed, accepted or allowed to govern the conduct, it must be understood that the vital mind is no longer dominant — for the nature of the vital mind is always to cloud the true mind’s perception and drive it towards action. Neither the vital mind nor the physical mind are things that have to be got rid of, but they must be quietened, puriﬁed, controlled and transformed. That will take place fully when the thinking mind becomes fully conscious and when the psychic comes forward and leads and governs both it and the vital and physical being.  Your thinking mind is becoming more and more conscious; that is shown by what you write, for the perceptions there expressed are quite clear-seeing and correct and show an increasingly right understanding.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover what is making you conscious is the increasing pressure of the psychic behind to come forward. For what you felt as trying to come out from behind was the psychic itself. The feeling of ﬂowers and fragrance and a coolness and peace are always sure signs that the psychic is becoming active.  It has been developing in you for some time past, only it was covered over by rushes of the old vital mind which did not want to lose its hold or its place. Now that the vital mind is quiet, it is again the psychic that is pressing to come forward and establish its inﬂuence.


Sri Aurobindo: The thoughts that came afterwards about the defects of your action towards others, repentance and the reasons why you could not establish proper relations with others were the result of this psychic emergence. For when the psychic comes forward or when it strongly inﬂuences mind or vital, then one begins to see clearly and rightly about one’s own nature and action and about things and about others and to have the right feelings. It was under this pressure of the psychic also that while the mind got these right thoughts and perceptions, the vital felt repentance for what had been done and wished to ask forgiveness. But while this readiness to ask forgiveness was in itself a right feeling, to do so physically would not have been quite the wisest or best action.  So the psychic itself at once told you what was the true thing to do, to ask forgiveness instead from the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: What was necessary having been done in the mind and vital, the psychic then cleared the whole consciousness and brought back its own quiet and peace. I explain all that to you so that you may begin to understand how these things work within and what is meant by the psychic and its action and inﬂuence.  The vision you had of the other luminous and peaceful and beautiful world was a sort of symbolic image of the true physical consciousness and the world in which it lives, the physical consciousness as it is when it is directly under the control of the psychic, and the character of the world which it tends to create for itself.  The psychic knows that the Divine is and afﬁrms its knowledge against all appearances.


Sri Aurobindo: The direct relation with the Divine can only grow from within — it is there in the soul and it has to come out by sadhana — that is indeed the reason for doing sadhana. The natural mind of man follows its own ideas, the vital clings to its own desires, the physical follows its own habits — these divide from the Divine.  It is only when the psychic being grows and comes forward and governs the mind and vital and physical and changes them that this veil of personal ideas, desires and habits can fall — then the direct relation and nearness grows in the being till the whole consciousness is united with the Divine. When you go deep into the psychic, then you begin to feel the Mother near — when the mind or vital is under the inﬂuence of the psychic this sense grows in them also. That is the way in which it must come.


Sri Aurobindo:   The realisation of the psychic being, its awakening and the bringing of it in front depend mainly on the extent to which one can develop a personal relation with the Divine, a relation of bhakti, love, reliance, self-giving, rejection of the insistences of the separating and self-asserting mental, vital and physical ego.    It may be either way [ ].


Sri Aurobindo: There is a touch and the realisation comes and the psychic takes its proper place as the result; or the psychic may come to the front and prepare the nature for the realisation.  Aspiration constant and sincere and the will to turn to the Divine alone are the best means of bringing forward the psychic being.     There is no approved method of bringing forward the psychic being.


Sri Aurobindo: It depends on the aspiration, the growth of faith and devotion, the diminution of the hold of the mental and vital ego and their movements — at a certain point in this development the screen between the psychic and the rest of the nature thins and begins to break, the psychic becomes more and more visible and active and ﬁnally takes over charge. Sometimes it may come suddenly, but there is no rule for that.     There is no process for it [].


Sri Aurobindo: It comes like the other things — you have to aspire for it and it can only happen when you are sufﬁciently advanced.     It [] comes forward of itself either through constant love and aspiration or when the mind and vital have been made ready by the descent from above and the working of the Force.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] can help the psychic to come forward, but it does not always do so automatically — it at least creates better conditions for the psychic.


Sri Aurobindo: To bring the psychic forward, selﬁshness and demand (which is the base of the vital feelings) must be got rid of — or at least never accepted.     Nothing done in the past or present can prevent the psychic from coming forward if there is the true will to get rid of these things and live in the psychic and spiritual consciousness.   If there is the will to surrender in the central being, then the psychic can come forward.


Sri Aurobindo:  There is absolutely no reason why you should return when you have come with the intention of staying here for a sufﬁcient time and it is better to keep to your intention.  It is not necessary to make an effort to bring your psychic being to the front; all that is necessary is a steady and quiet aspiration; if that is there always, all that is necessary to prepare for the result will be done by degrees and the psychic being will come fully to the front when all is ready and it is time. It happens usually that much in the mental, vital and physical has to be prepared before it can happen. This preparation cannot fail to be hastened by your stay here.  Bhakti and love are part of the psychic movement, a large part of it; in aspiring for the psychic change, you are aspiring for bhakti and love.


Sri Aurobindo: But it is not useful to restrict your aspiration by a single movement like that of the Vaishnava sadhana; for this Yoga is more ample and contains, but is not conﬁned to, what is essential in the Vaishnava sadhana. Whether you visit the physical Brindavan or not does not matter; what is necessary is to ﬁnd the inner union through love and bhakti.  As for weeping, there is nothing against the tears that come from the inner aspiration; it is only when it is vital, outward, too much on the surface that it becomes a movement of disturbance and emotional disorder. Intensity of prayer is not at all to be rejected; it is one of the most powerful means of the sadhana.  As for the obstacle to meditation or experience, it would usually be when some part of the being is dealt with which has still to be prepared and to open.


Sri Aurobindo: Such periods always occur in sadhana and one has to meet these with a patient and persistent aspiration and a quiet vigilance of self-introspection that will bring about the necessary opening. It should not awaken depression or lead to any relaxation of will and the effort of sadhana.  Open yourself more and more, that is all that is needed.  You have been keeping the psychic in the background during a thousand lives and indulging the vital. That is why the psychic is not strong.


Sri Aurobindo:   The mind and the vital have always been dominant and developed themselves and are accustomed to act for themselves. How do you expect an inﬂuence [] coming forward for the ﬁrst time to be stronger than they are?


Sri Aurobindo: Of course the ego and the vital with its claims and desires is always the main obstacle to the emergence of the psychic. For they make one live, act, do sadhana even for one’s own sake and psychicisation means to live, act and do sadhana for the sake of the Divine.    The psychic being emerges slowly in most men, even after taking up sadhana. There is so much in the mind and vital that has to change and readjust itself before the psychic can be entirely free.


Sri Aurobindo: One has to wait till the necessary process has gone far enough before it can burst its agelong veil and come in front to control the nature. It is true that nothing can give so much inner happiness and joy — though peace can come by the mental and vital liberation or through the growth of a strong samata in the being.     It is the action of the psychic being, not the being itself, that gets mixed with the mental, vital and physical distortions because it has to use them to express what little of the true psychic feeling gets through the veil.


Sri Aurobindo: It is by the heart’s aspiration to the Divine that the psychic being gets free from these disabilities.     Even when the psychic is in front, there may be and are likely to be mental and vital difﬁculties — only then, there is also the right psychic power and perception behind to deal with them.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] can be misused on a large scale only if there is a strong and vehement vital ego not accustomed to correction or else a vital full of the . On a small scale it can be misused by the small selﬁshnesses, vanities, ambitions, demands of the lower vital supporting themselves upon it. If you are on guard against these things then there is no danger of misuse. If the psychic puts forth psychic discernment along with the love, then there is no danger, for the light of psychic discernment at once refuses all mixture or misuse.


Sri Aurobindo:   That is of course the difﬁculty, even when one sees what is to be done and wishes to do it. One forgets at the moment when the control is needed. The habit of remembering and applying one’s knowledge at the right moment comes only by a great patience and perseverance which refuses to be discouraged by frequent failure. Only if the psychic being is in front, then it reminds the mind and the thing can be more quickly done.


Sri Aurobindo: It was your physical ill-health combined with the difﬁculty of the physical consciousness (which is always a thing of habits and repeats and clings to the old habits even when the mind wants to get rid of them) that prevented the emergence of the psychic from completing itself. With the disappearance of ill-health the difﬁculty may be more successfully tackled and achieved. As for the long period of seven years without the spiritual success there is nothing unusual in that — the old Yogins used to say that one must be ready for 12 years of preparation before the old nature will be sufﬁciently modiﬁed to allow of the spiritual opening.  That is of course not inevitable; it can be done more brieﬂy; but still it takes usually a long time — it has done so with most in the Asram. But in your case the ﬁrst opening did come, it is only temporarily and not altogether closed, awaiting a second opening which should free the nature for the external as well as the inner change.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] may and does retire from the front or gets clouded over, but once it has been in front it is never relegated back behind the veil altogether and it can always return to the front with comparative ease.     The conversion which keeps the consciousness turned towards the light and makes the right attitude spontaneous and natural and abiding and rejection also spontaneous is the psychic conversion.


Sri Aurobindo: That is to say, man usually lives in his vital and the body is its instrument and the mind its counsellor and minister (except for the few mental men who live mostly for the things of the mind, but even they are in subjection to the vital in their ordinary movements). The spiritual conversion begins when the soul begins to insist on a deeper life and is complete when the psychic becomes the basis or the leader of the consciousness and mind and vital and body are led by it and obey it. Of course if that once happens fully, doubt, depression and despair cannot come any longer, although there may be and are difﬁculties still.  If it is not fully, but still fundamentally accomplished, even then these things either do not come or are brief passing clouds on the surface — for there is a rock of support and certitude at the base, which even if partially covered cannot disappear altogether.  Mostly however the recurrence of depression and despair or of doubt and revolt is due to a mental or vital formation which takes hold of the vital mind and makes it run round always in the same circle at the slightest provoking cause or even without cause.


Sri Aurobindo: It is like an illness to which the body consents from habit and from belief in the illness even though it suffers from it, and once started the illness runs its habitual course unless it is cut short by some strong counteracting force. If once the body can withdraw its consent, the illness immediately or quickly ceases — that was the secret of the Cou´e system. So too if the vital mind withdraws its consent, refuses to be dominated by the habitual suggestions and the habitual movements, these recurrences of depression and despair can be made soon to cease.  But it is not easy for this mind, once it has got into the habit of consent, even a quite passive and suffering and reluctant consent, to cancel the habit and get rid of the black circle. It can be done easily only when the mind refuses any longer to believe in the suggestions or accept the ideas or feelings that start the circle.


Sri Aurobindo:   The facts or arguments you put forward to support your difﬁdence or depression cannot stand in the light of the Yoga experience of others — if they were enough to justify discouragement, how many would have had to turn back from the way who are now far on towards the goal? I cannot now deal with them in detail, but they do not, any of them, justify your inference [].  Also, your psychic being does not deserve the censure you have bestowed upon it. What prevents it from coming out in its full power is the crust of past habits, formations, active vibrations of the mind-stuff and vital stuff which come from a mind and life which have been more creative and outgoing and expansive than indrawn and introspective.


Sri Aurobindo: In many who are like this — active men and intellectuals — the ﬁrst stage of Yoga is long and difﬁcult with slow development and sparse experiences, most of the work being done in the subliminal behind the veil — until things are ready.  When the time comes for the deﬁnite opening and removal of the purdah between the inner and the outer man, I think I can promise you that you will ﬁnd your power of Yoga and Yogic experience at least as unexpectedly complete as you, and others, have found your power for poetry — though necessarily its working out will take time, because it is not a detail but the whole life and the whole nature in which there must be the divine victory.  The psychic inﬂuence in the ordinary life of man tries to bring the truth of the soul into human action, human thought and feelings.  When it is spiritualised, it tries to turn the human towards the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   These are movements of the vital under the psychic touch. If there is the ﬁrm psychic foundation underneath, it will be felt as an underlying quietude and conﬁdence or a ﬁxed spirit of surrender.


Sri Aurobindo: The demands were there already — when the psychic touches there is an intensiﬁcation of love but the lower vital mixes up the love with all sorts of demands.    The soft feeling [] must be that of the psychic being spreading itself through the higher centres. Faithfulness is one of the ﬁrst characteristics of the psychic being.


Sri Aurobindo: What you describe shows that things are going on very well within, it is the psychic condition that is being gradually prepared as a basis for the sadhana. The special experiences of the burning of the psychic ﬁre, descent of peace etc. are always intermittent until this basis is ready, but they help it to grow.    It is this freedom from all ties and entire and sole turning to the Mother that is the deepest psychic condition. It is coming to you as touches of that condition from the psychic, therefore there is not yet the permanent state; but these touches prepare the future permanence.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁre which you feel in the chest must surely be the psychic ﬁre, for it is there that is the seat of the psychic and the fact that it burns strongly when you sit alone points to the same thing.  The psychic ﬁre is the ﬁre of aspiration, puriﬁcation and tapasya which comes from the psychic being. It is not the psychic being, but a power of the psychic being.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic being is a Purusha, not a ﬂame — the psychic ﬁre is not the being, it is something proper to it.   It [] is the psychic ﬁre kindled in the heart. The psychic being in the heart is described by the Upanishads as of the size of a thumb,  — it may manifest ﬁrst as this psychic ﬂame.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁre [] is always the ﬁre of sacriﬁce and selfoffering, the ﬁre of aspiration or the ﬁre of tapasya.    That the constant ﬁre of aspiration has to be lit is true; but this ﬁre is the psychic ﬁre and it is lit or burns up and increases as the psychic grows within and for the psychic to grow quietude is needful. That is why we have been working for the psychic to grow in you and for the quietude also to grow and that is why we want you to wait on the Mother’s working in full patience and conﬁdence. To be always remembering the Mother and always with the equal unwavering ﬁre within means itself a considerable progress in sadhana and it must be prepared by various means such as the experiences you have been having.


Sri Aurobindo: Keep steadfast in conﬁdence therefore and all that has to be done will be done.    The experience of the Fire is quite correct, — it is the great ﬁre of puriﬁcation and concentration (i.e. gathering up of the consciousness and turning it ﬁxedly towards the Divine), the psychic ﬁre which all must pass through so as to reach the Mother permanently and completely.    It is egoistic if the ego thinks that it is the psychic ﬁre.


Sri Aurobindo: If the consciousness feels identiﬁed with the psychic ﬁre and becomes conscious that the ﬁre can burn out all impurities, then it is a true experience.    The central ﬁre is in the psychic being, but it can be lit in all the parts of the being.  The ﬁre you saw was the ﬁre of the psychic being, the ﬁre of aspiration and tapasya, burning under the earth, that is to say, in the subconscient. It opens the earth, the physical consciousness to the Divine Light.


Sri Aurobindo: Moonlight may symbolise the spiritual consciousness and the room your own personal being or individual physical consciousness. With these clues it will be easy for you to understand the signiﬁcance of your experience.    The ﬁre you saw was again the psychic ﬁre of puriﬁcation and tapasya and the garland was the offering it was preparing for the Mother, the psychic and divine consciousness (pearl and diamond) in the sadhak. The beautiful place was also probably a symbol of the psychic and the lotus indicated the opening of the psychic consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The twelve-petalled lotus and the twelve-rayed sun indicate the same thing, the complete Truth-consciousness of the Divine Mother. It was rising but only half risen. The red colour was the sign of Power.


Sri Aurobindo: All these things are signs, now often repeated, of the process that is going on. The heat is the result of the psychic ﬁre burning away obstacles — the coolness and complete quietude come as a result. The tendency to sleep is really a tendency to go inside into the depths of the inner consciousness due to the pressure for the change.  The wideness of light you saw was the wideness of the true consciousness liberated from the narrow limits of the human mind, human vital, human body consciousness. It is true that the mind is narrow, not only yours, but all human minds even the most developed, — compared with the wideness of the true consciousness which has no limits.


Sri Aurobindo: It is precisely this wideness which will come by the sadhana and which these processes are preparing. The rain of ﬂowers means a plenty of the psychic qualities and movements and the white ﬂower of mental victory indicates the step towards it which is now being led up to — the victory in the mind of the inner light over the outer ignorance.    The difﬁculty in giving up habits is common to the physical mind in all people; nothing is more difﬁcult to it. The ﬁre you feel


Sri Aurobindo: must be what we call Agni, the ﬁre of puriﬁcation acting on this physical mind to change it.  The bridge you saw was the symbol of transition from the ordinary to the spiritual consciousness; the wide plain was a symbol of the large peace and silence which comes with the spiritual consciousness when one rests in the Divine.  The perfumes you felt were true perfumes but not of the physical world. This body of ﬂesh and blood is not the whole of ourselves; there is unseen by the eyes a subtle body also and one becomes aware of it when the inner consciousness opens. It was from deep within there that the perfumes came, perfumes of purity, of love and surrender (rose) etc.


Sri Aurobindo: It is there deep within that the psychic being dwells and it is there that you are trying to go when the inward-going impulse or pressure comes; it is why you felt more and more peaceful, because you were going deeper and deeper into the psychic from which these fragrances came.   The heat in the body is due simply to the working that is going on within; it is what is called the heat of tapas — there is nothing unhealthy in it as in the heat of fever. The beautiful scent that you get is a subtle or psychic fragrance, just as the vision of the lotus is a subtle or psychic sight.  The psychic being is often seen or felt within in the form of a child, — it is perhaps that that you are feeling within you; it is calling for a complete sincerity, but sincerity is used here in the sense of opening to nothing but the divine inﬂuences and impulses. It does not mean that you have committed any fault, but only that the psychic in you wants you to be completely under its sole government, so that all in you may be for the Divine only.


Sri Aurobindo: The feeling of sorrow is probably a response of the vital in you to this demand — thinking that it must have erred; but such a feeling of sorrow is not necessary. The vital can quietly wait for the psychic working to do all that is needed in due time.  It is the Agni ﬁre that you feel. Agni is at once a ﬁre of aspiration, a ﬁre of puriﬁcation, a ﬁre of tapasya, a ﬁre of transformation.


Sri Aurobindo:   Agni in the form of an aspiration full of concentrated calm and surrender is certainly the ﬁrst thing to be lighted in the heart.     It [] comes sometimes from the approach of Agni ﬁre, sometimes from that of love or Ananda, sometimes simply from a touch of the Force.


Sri Aurobindo:   The fear of the ﬁre you saw is misplaced, for it is the ﬁre of the purifying Agni that you see burning and that does no harm; it only clears away what should not be there. That is why it is followed by a lightness or an emptiness. You have only to be quiet and let the ﬁre do its work. The heat one feels at that time is not the heat of fever or any other morbid heat.


Sri Aurobindo: Afterwards, as you felt, all becomes cool and light.     The burning is sometimes the heat of a difﬁculty and resistance, but then it disturbs. When it does not disturb, it is usually the purifying ﬁre of Agni.


Sri Aurobindo:   It may be pressure of the Agni ﬁre that you feel [ ] as the heat — especially if there is something that has to be puriﬁed or a difﬁculty burned away. The cool spray on the other hand comes as an accompaniment of the sense of puriﬁcation.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Fire [] is the power of the Yoga — Yogashakti.    That kind of pull [] is not the same thing as the lighting of Agni. Agni meets men who are not leading the religious life at all but who have Agni burning in them and are intent to keep the ﬁre ablaze — scientists, artists etc. who have the intense will of perfecting what they do and all their central energies are thrown into this ﬂame.


Sri Aurobindo: The same intense ﬁre should burn in the Yoga.     It is the Mother’s Force that works in the Agni.  If it is in the heart it may be psychic ﬁre — it is possibly not the joy that created the ﬁre, but the decision you had come to to believe in the Mother’s action whether the mind understood or not.


Sri Aurobindo: Such an attitude encourages the opening of the psychic and would therefore bring at once the psychic joy and the kindling of Agni in the psychic centre.     It is some association in the mind probably coupling Agni with the psychic. Of course the individual Agni ﬁre has its startingpoint in the psychic, but the mere burning of the ﬁre does not show that the psychic is coming forward.


Sri Aurobindo: When it burns in the heart, it is the ﬁre the psychic. The psychic ﬁre is individual and takes usually the form of a ﬁre of aspiration or personal tapasya. This Fire is universal and it came from above.    The psychic ﬁre may burn in the vital.


Sri Aurobindo: It all depends on whether it is the ﬁre of the general Force that comes from above or the ﬁre of your soul’s aspiration and tapasya.     All that [] is simply the burning of the Agni in various parts of the being. It prepares it for transformation.


Sri Aurobindo: But the coming forward of the psychic is another matter and its signs are psychological.    Agni is the psychic ﬁre — it is not the Divine Presence. If the psychic is active and open, the Presence may be felt — it is not necessary for that that it should be in the front. Also it may be in the front, but the Divine Presence in the heart may not be felt as yet, there may be only the aspiration, bhakti, self-giving.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no ﬁxed law about these things — it develops differently in different natures.  It [] is not mere vital excitement or heightened nerve sensation, it is an attempt of the psychic to emerge from behind the veil and what you feel is the psychic joy. (The psychic is seated behind the heart, behind the emotional centre.) But when this psychic joy comes, it communicates itself to the mind, the vital and the body. You have then to be careful that no mixture comes in from the vital and the physical — such as the sex impulse.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind, the vital, the physical must receive the psychic Ananda and make it their own, but not bring in their own deviations or any degraded mixture into it.    There is a dynamic joy as well as the self-existent joy in the soul itself.  There is a psychic sorrow which usually comes when the soul feels how strong is the resistance in the world and how much the Forces in it rage against the Mother.   It is the soul, the psychic being in you, behind the heart, that is awake and wants to concentrate the mind on the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the nature of the mind to go out to other things, but now when it does that, there is the unease in the heart, the psychic sorrow because the heart feels at once that this is wrong and the head also aches because of the resistance to the Divine Force at work.  This is a thing that often happens at an early stage, after the opening of the consciousness to the sadhana.    The vital took it up perhaps and gave it a more vehement and turbid expression — otherwise there is nothing disturbing in a psychic sorrow.


Sri Aurobindo:   The psychic sadness is of a purifying and not a depressing kind.     There are many things that are spiritual that are not the essence of the higher consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: All that tends towards the transformation and helps to prepare it is spiritual. Psychic sorrow is a spiritual movement, but sorrow is not part of the essential character of the higher consciousness. Resignation, the ego’s submission to the divine will, is a spiritual movement, but the higher consciousness has no need of resignation and a submitted ego is not a part of its essence, for it has no ego.  Yes, there is a psychic sorrow of that kind [ ] — but psychic tears need not be sorrowful, there are also tears of emotion and joy.


Sri Aurobindo: The tears probably come from the inner psychic being (behind the heart) which is touched in this state of quietness and peace.  It is the sign of an aspiration and devotion in the soul which is trying to come to the surface. If the psychic being can come to the surface and a harmony be established in the nature, all of it being turned towards the Divine, this kind of expression will cease.


Sri Aurobindo: The weeping that comes to you comes from the psychic being — it is the tears of psychic yearning and aspiration. At a particular stage it so comes to many and is a very good sign. The other feelings and tendencies are also from the same source. They show that the psychic is exercising a strong inﬂuence and preparing, as we say, to come in front. Accept the movement and let it fulﬁl itself.


Sri Aurobindo:   A weeping that comes with the feeling you speak of is the sign of a psychic sorrow — for it translates as an aspiration of the psychic being. But depression and hopelessness ought not to come. You should rather cling to the faith that since there is a true aspiration in you — and of that there can be no doubt — it is sure to be fulﬁlled, whatever the difﬁculties of the external nature. You must recover in that faith the inner peace and quietude while at the same time keeping the clear insight into what has to be done and the steady aspiration for the inner and outer change.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is quite correct that [] weeping brings in the forces that should be kept outside — for the weeping is a giving way of the inner control and an expression of vital reaction and ego. It is only the psychic weeping that does not open the door to these forces — but that weeping is without afﬂiction, tears of bhakti, spiritual emotion or Ananda.  Your experience was a very beautiful one — the inner being realises by such experiences that which must be established in the waking state as the foundation of the spiritual consciousness and spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: The yearning of the heart may be there but it should not disturb the peace.    I think it is better to stop it [] for the present. It is very possible that the vital is taking advantage of it to create dissatisfaction with the progress of the sadhana. The psychic yearning brings no reaction of impatience, dissatisfaction or disturbance.


Sri Aurobindo:  Your new attitude towards food and outward things is the true attitude, the psychic attitude and shows that the psychic is already controlling the vital physical as well as the other parts of the vital nature.  As for the heart, the movement of longing for the Divine, weeping, sorrowing, yearning is not essential in this Yoga. A strong aspiration there must be, an intense longing there may very well be, an ardent love and will for union; but there need be no sorrow or disturbance. The quiet and silence you feel in your heart is the result of the pressure of the higher consciousness to come down. That always brings a quietude in mind and heart and as it descends a great peace and silence.


Sri Aurobindo: In the silent heart and mind, there must be the true attitude and thus you have the feeling that you are the Mother’s child, the faith and the will to be united with her. Along with that there may be an aspiration or silent expectation of what is to come. That also you seem to have. All therefore is well.  I have read your letter of explanation of the “strange” ideas.


Sri Aurobindo: I still maintain that your views on the lack of all intensity in the psychic things or in the spiritual or their inferiority to vital pleasure strange, because they contradict all psychic and spiritual experience except that of the mere vairagis and make the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. What have Ramakrishna’s excesses or the ﬂuctuations of Vivekananda’s vital receptivity between exaltation and depression or Chaitanya’s  to do with the question in issue? These are difﬁculties of the body and the vital. The question was of the intensity of  and experience — psychic devotion and love, peace, Ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: You cannot base a general denial on your own particular experience, because you have only the initial experiences of calm etc. and have got to the intensities as I have done and others before me have done. It is only when one lives centrally in the psychic with the mental, vital and physical as provinces held under its rule that one knows what psychic intensity is. It is only when the higher consciousness comes down in its ﬂoods that one can know what can be the intensities or ecstasies of spiritual peace, light, love, bliss. You can say, “I have not yet had these intensities”, but you cannot say in a sweeping way, “They do not exist and I shall never have them”, or “They are only tepid quiet little things, soothing and more capable of lasting, but not intense and glorious like the vital joys and pleasures.” Do not cling to these notions born of the past limitations, but keep yourself open and plastic to greater possibilities in the future.


Sri Aurobindo: My own experience is limited to a radiant peace; I know very well what ecstasy and Ananda are from the Brahmananda down to the, and can experience them at any time.  But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done — for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the Ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence.  The psychic is not uneasy, it makes you uneasy when you do the wrong thing.    The uneasiness created by the psychic is not depression — it is in the nature of a rejection of the wrong movement.


Sri Aurobindo: If the uneasiness causes depression or vital dissatisfaction, it is not psychic.   The uneasiness is simply a reminder to you to be more vigilant in future.     The unhappiness is not necessary or inevitable in the sadhana, but it comes because your inner nature feels the touch of the Divine Presence indispensable to it and uneasy when it does not feel it.


Sri Aurobindo: To feel it always a certain constant detachment within allowing you to remain within and do everything from within is necessary. This can more easily be done in quiet occupations and quiet contacts. For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.  Psychisation means the change of the lower nature, bringing right vision into the mind, right impulse and feeling into the vital, right movement and habit into the physical — all turned towards the Divine, all based on love, adoration, bhakti — ﬁnally, the vision and sense of the Mother everywhere in all as well as in the heart, her Force working in the being etc., faith, consecration, surrender.  The spiritual change is the established descent of the peace, light, knowledge, power, bliss from above, the awareness of the self and the Divine and of a higher cosmic consciousness and the change of the whole consciousness to that.


Sri Aurobindo:  Between psychisation and spiritualisation there is a difference.  The spiritual is the change that descends from above, the psychic is the change that comes from within by the psychic dominating mind, vital and physical.     The psychic is the ﬁrst of two transformations necessary — if you have the psychic transformation it facilitates immensely the other, i.e., the transformation of the ordinary human into the higher spiritual consciousness — otherwise one is likely to have either a slow and dull or exciting but perilous journey.


Sri Aurobindo:  I never said anything about a “transformation of the psychic”; I have always written about a “psychic transformation” of the nature which is a very different matter. I have sometimes written of it as a psychisation of the nature. The psychic is in the evolution, part of the human being, its divine part — so a psychisation will not carry one beyond the present evolution but will make the being ready to respond to all that comes from the Divine or Higher Nature and unwilling to respond to the Asura, Rakshasa, Pishacha or Animal in the being or to any insistence of the lower nature which stands in the way of the divine change.   It is not the psychic but the mind that gets raised and transformed and its action intensiﬁed by the intuitivising of the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic is always the same essence and adapts its action without need of transformation to any change of consciousness.     I have read your account of your sadhana. There is nothing to say, I think, — for it is all right — except that the most important thing for you is to develop the psychic ﬁre in the heart and the aspiration for the psychic being to come forward as the leader of the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: When the psychic does so, it will show you the “undetected ego-knots” of which you speak and loosen them or burn them in the psychic ﬁre. This psychic development and the psychic change of mind, vital and physical consciousness is of the utmost importance because it makes safe and easy the descent of the higher consciousness and the spiritual transformation without which the supramental must always remain far distant. Powers etc. have their place, but a very minor one so long as this is not done.  What you see above is of course the true or higher consciousness — the Mother’s — in which one sees all the world as one, a vast free consciousness full of freedom, peace and light — it is that that we speak of as the higher or divine consciousness. Even if it comes and goes, yet its effect on the heart shows that a connection has been established through the psychic — for the psychic is behind the heart.


Sri Aurobindo: It is there above the head that the consciousness has to ascend and remain, while it also descends into the head and heart and lower vital and physical and brings there its wideness, light, peace and freedom.   It is the union of the consciousness above with the awakened psychic being that makes the true connection between what is above and the universe.   There is something in you that has become aware of the higher consciousness and gone up there — above the head where the ordinary consciousness and the higher planes meet. That has to be developed till the whole source of the consciousness is there and all the rest directed from there — with, at the same time, a liberation of the psychic so that it may support the action from above in the mind, the vital and the physical parts.


Sri Aurobindo:    If the development of a higher consciousness did not bring things that were not before heard of by the mind, it would not be good for much. The uniﬁcation of the psychic and the higher consciousness forces and activities is indispensable for the sadhana at one time or another.


Sri Aurobindo:   Complete psychisation brings entire openness of the being to the Divine and to the Higher Consciousness and an entire inability to accept anything untrue and undivine.   The psychic when it acts as the main power, acts through a certain feeling and inherent psychic sense which repels the falsehood. But the ranges of mind above mind do not act in that way — there it is discrimination and will that act and their action is wider but less sure and less automatic so to speak.


Sri Aurobindo:   When the concentration is at the top of the head, it means that the mental being is joining the higher consciousness there and there is not much resistance or none. The other place indicates the joining is of the psychic being to the higher consciousness, hence the greater silence, as the psychic is more central than the mental being; but also there is the attempt to join through the psychic the rest of the lower consciousness to the higher and there there is a resistance. The mental joining does not affect the vital and physical, so they remain quiet or can do so for the present — the psychic joining puts on them a pressure to which the ﬁrst reaction is the sense of fatigue and the last might be a turmoil.


Sri Aurobindo: But the psychic joining if effectual is much more powerful for the change of the whole being.  The two feelings are both of them right — they indicate the two necessities of the sadhana. One is to go inward and open fully the connection between the psychic being and the outer nature.  The other is to open upward to the Divine Peace, Force, Light, Ananda above, to rise up into it and bring it down into the nature and the body. Neither of these two movements, the psychic and the spiritual, is complete without the other.


Sri Aurobindo: If the spiritual ascent and descent are not made, the spiritual transformation of the nature cannot happen; if the full psychic opening and connection is not made, the transformation cannot be complete.  There is no incompatibility between the two movements; some begin the psychic ﬁrst, others the spiritual ﬁrst, some carry on both together. The best way is to aspire for both and let the Mother’s Force work it out according to the need and turn of the nature.    The experiences you describe are coherent with each other and very clearly explicable.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst shows that some part of your mind was open and this aided by an opening in the psychic enabled you to ascend into the regions above, the ranges of the liberated spiritual mind with the inﬁnite path of the spirit leading to the highest realisation. But the rest of the nature was not ready.  The straining to recover the experience was not the right thing to do then; what should have been done was the aspiration for the puriﬁcation and preparation of the nature, the permanent psychic opening and the increase of the higher spiritual opening above till there could be a total release of the being. The vehemence of the action of the forces was due to the resistance and the breaking of the knots in the head and different parts of the nature was their working for the release. The “electricity” passing through the spinal column was the passage of the Force making its way down through the centres


Sri Aurobindo: . Obviously it is the dark resisting force of the vital, the desire nature, that rises up and clouds all up to the heart. On the other hand the ﬂow from above and the silence it creates is a sign of the opening above being still there; for the silence, the quietude of the nature is a touch from above and very necessary for puriﬁcation and release.  What is lacking is the full opening of the psychic being behind the heart — for that could liberate the heart from the dark force and make possible a cleaning of the rest by a quiet and steady rather than a vehement working attended by chaotic action and struggle. When there is an opening in the spiritual mind but not a sufﬁcient psychic change, there is or can be this kind of vehement force-action and resistance; when the psychic opens, then it acts on the whole nature, mind, vital, physical, governing them from within, to transform themselves and become ready for the complete spiritual opening and spiritual consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Devotion and a more and more complete inner consecration are the best way to open the psychic.    It is very good. The ideas and feelings that came up from within you were those of the newborn psychic nature.  The feeling you had in the afternoon of the cessation of thought and the sensation of something within you going up above the head is part of the movement of the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a higher consciousness above you, not in the body, so above the head, which we call the higher, spiritual or divine consciousness, or the Mother’s consciousness. When the being opens then all in you, the mind (head), emotional being (heart), vital, even something in the physical consciousness begin to ascend in order to join themselves to this greater higher consciousness. One has when one sits with eyes closed in meditation the sensation of going up which you describe. It is called the ascension of the lower consciousness. Afterwards things begin to descend from above, peace, joy, light, strength, knowledge etc. and a great change begins in the nature.


Sri Aurobindo: This is what we call the descent of the higher (the Mother’s) consciousness.  The unease you felt was because of the unaccustomed nature of the movement. It is of no importance and quickly goes away.  As I have written often, there are two transformations in this Yoga. The ﬁrst is when the psychic being comes forward and controls and changes the nature.


Sri Aurobindo: This is what has happened in you with great rapidity; it must complete itself, but that it will do naturally. The second is the descent of the Mother’s consciousness from above the head and its transformation of the whole being and nature. This also is now preparing in you. It is the reason of the pressure, the silence in the heart etc. What you experienced this time when you went above was the wideness of the higher being in that higher consciousness above with the Light coming down through it.


Sri Aurobindo: That wideness and that light will afterwards come down into you and your consciousness will be changed into the light and wideness and all that is in them.   It is evident from what you write that the true consciousness is growing in you and that when it is there all is right — for what you describe in this morning’s letter is the true psychic consciousness come up in some fullness. This fullness was not there before, so that is a very encouraging progress. But its remaining seems to depend on the concentration on the Mother.  When there is the concentration on the Mother, then the progress can be smooth and continuous; when there is a failure of the concentration, you come into the outward physical mind and at once there is a conﬂict between the growing quietude and the inner psychic ﬁre and the physical consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: The quietude seeks to hold and control the physical consciousness and the ﬁre to burn out the wrong activities and imperfections, but the consciousness ﬁnds the pressure hard to bear ; it feels dull and troubled by the heat. For when the ﬁre has won, all is cool; when it has to burn the resistances, then there is heat, it becomes a ﬁre of tapasya. This seems to be the explanation of these alternating conditions. It is important therefore to keep the concentration and remain ﬁxed in the Mother; nothing else for the time has any importance comparatively with that.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the experience at the Pranam it was the other thing, the descent of the higher consciousness (the Mother’s consciousness) from above, with its light, peace and wideness. When the individual consciousness is enveloped in that, rests in it, then you feel that you are lying in the Mother’s lap. As the psychic consciousness grows from within, it becomes more and more possible for this to descend from above.    The concentration in the heart which is intended to bring out the psychic being and the calling down of the descent from above are two sides of the same thing and are complementary and can go naturally together.


Sri Aurobindo:   Certainly the concentration in the heart is very necessary for the full transformation. When peace is established in the heart, it is possible for the psychic being to come forward and rule the mind, life and body. The descent from above prepares the being, but unless the psychic acts fully it cannot change by itself the outer being, though one can have a settled inner peace, freedom, light, not disturbed by the outer movements, but the outer movements will remain.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only the combined action of the psychic and the spiritual power that can change it.   It is by meditation, by concentration, by the constant turning or call [] — secondly, by the keeping of the mind and vital still for the descent of the Presence, peace, light, Ananda and for the psychic being to emerge. When the psychic being is in front, the descent constant, then the constant feeling of the Divine in you and of yourself in the Divine becomes more easy to have.


Sri Aurobindo: One can receive [] always through the psychic part of the being, even before the veil is broken.  You were quite right in what you wrote about the supermind — people here do indeed use the “big word” much too freely as if it were something quite within everybody’s grasp. The ﬁrst thing to be done is the psychic change and until that has progressed  sufﬁciently, supermind is a far-off thing and people need not think of it at all. You have certainly progressed, but the change of the outer nature is always a slow movement, so that need not distress you.


Sri Aurobindo:   To merge the consciousness in the Divine and to keep the psychic being controlling and changing all the nature and keeping it turned to the Divine till the whole being can live in the Divine is the transformation we seek. There is farther the supramentalisation, but this only carries the transformation to its own highest and largest possibilities — it does not alter its essential nature.   The psychic when sufﬁciently developed can be strong enough to make the preliminary clearance [].


Sri Aurobindo: It is the supramental alone that can transform the material being, but the physical mind and physical vital can be very much  changed by the action of the psychic and of the overmind. The entire change however is made only when there is the supramental inﬂuence. But for the present the psychic is the force that may be relied on for the preliminary puriﬁcation of the lower nature.


Sri Aurobindo: That [] is the basic experience of the higher consciousness — it is what is called the realisation of the Atman (the Self).    It is the Atman, the spiritual being above the mind — the ﬁrst experience of it is a silence and calm (which one perceives afterwards to be inﬁnite and eternal) untouched by the movements of mind and life and body. The higher consciousness lives always in touch with the Self — the lower is separated from it by the activities of the Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: When one becomes aware of the Self calm, silent, wide, universal, it is no longer covered over by the ignorance; when one identiﬁes with the Self and not with the mind, life and body and their movements or with the small ego, that is the release of the Self.     And how is the outer nature to rise into the higher Prakriti before you realise the Self? The higher nature is that of the higher consciousness of which the ﬁrst basis is the peace and wideness and realisation of the Self, the One that is all.


Sri Aurobindo:   The gaining of peace makes it easier to get the experience of the pure and free Self.


Sri Aurobindo: If not aspiration, at least keep the idea of what is necessary — (1) that the silence and peace shall become a wideness which you can realise as the Self, (2) the extension of the silent consciousness upwards as well so that you may feel its source above you, (3) the presence of peace etc. all the time. These things need not all come at once, but by realising what has to be in your mind, any falling towards a condition of inertia can be avoided.     What one feels ﬁrst [] is the pure existence of the self, without any idea, characteristic or movement — existence pure and simple, Sat Brahman — or else one feels that and a vast peace and wideness.


Sri Aurobindo: Afterwards other things are felt such as Ananda, but always with this as the basis.    A great wave (or sea) of calm and the constant consciousness of a vast and luminous Reality — this is precisely the character of the fundamental realisation of the Supreme Truth in its ﬁrst touch on the mind and the soul. One could not ask for a better beginning or foundation — it is like a rock on which the rest can be built. It means certainly not only a Presence, but Presence — and it would be a great mistake to weaken the experience by any non-acceptance or doubt of its character.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary to deﬁne it and one ought not even to try to turn it into an image ; for this Presence is in its nature inﬁnite.  Whatever it has to manifest of itself or out of itself, it will do inevitably by its own power, if there is a sustained acceptance.  It is quite true that it is a grace sent and the only return needed for such a grace is acceptance, gratitude and to allow the Power that has touched the consciousness to develop what has to be developed in the being — by keeping oneself open to it. The total transformation of the nature cannot be done in a moment; it must take long and proceed through stages; what is now experienced is only an initiation, a foundation for the new consciousness in which that transformation will become possible.


Sri Aurobindo: The automatic spontaneity of the experience ought by itself to show that it is nothing constructed by the mind, will or emotions; it comes from a Truth that is beyond them.    The vastness, the overwhelming calm and silence in which you feel merged is what is called the Atman or the silent Brahman. It is the whole aim of many Yogas to get this realisation of Atman or silent Brahman and live in it. In our Yoga it is only the ﬁrst stage of the realisation of the Divine and of that growing of the being into the higher or divine Consciousness which we call transformation.


Sri Aurobindo:   A sadhak of integral Yoga who stops short at the Impersonal is no longer a sadhak of integral Yoga. Impersonal realisation is the realisation of the silent Self, of the pure Existence, Consciousness and Bliss in itself without any perception of an Existent, Conscient, Blissful. It leads therefore to Nirvana. In the integral knowledge the realisation of the Self and of the impersonal Sachchidananda is only a step, though a very important step, or part of the integral knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a beginning, not an end of the highest realisation.  The experience described in your letter is a glimpse of the realisation of the true Self which is independent of the body. When this settles itself there is the liberation (). Not only the body, but the vital and mind are felt to be only instruments and one’s self is felt to be calm, self-existent and free and wide or inﬁnite. It is then possible for the psychic being to effect in that freedom the full transformation of the nature.


Sri Aurobindo: All your former experiences were preparing for this, but the physical consciousness came across. Now that you have had the glimpse of the self separate from the body, this physical difﬁculty may soon be overcome.    The experience you have is the experience of the true self. Untouched by grief and joy, desire, anxiety or trouble, vast and calm and full of peace, it observes the agitations of the outer being as one might the play of children.


Sri Aurobindo: It is indeed the divine element in you. The more you can live in that, the ﬁrmer will be the foundation of the sadhana. In this self will come all the higher experiences, oneness with the Divine, light, knowledge, strength, Ananda, the play of the Mother’s higher forces. It does not always become stable from the ﬁrst, though for some it does; but the experience comes more and more frequently and lasts till it is no longer covered by the ordinary nature.  Yes, the sense of individuality can disappear altogether when all is peace and wideness.


Sri Aurobindo: One feels that the peace and wideness are oneself, but not in an individual sense — for it is the “Atman” of everybody else also. Afterwards there can come an experience of another kind of I, but it is a universalised I which contains everybody else and is in unison with everybody else and is itself contained in the Divine. This is what Yogins sometimes call the “large” as opposed to the small Aham. I have written of it as the true Person.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Self is essentially universal; the individualised self is only the universal experienced from an individual centre. If what you have realised is not felt to be one in all, then it is not the “Atman”; possibly it is the central being not yet revealing its universal aspect as Atman.   The Self is felt as either universal, one in all, or a universalised individual the same in essence as others, extended everywhere from each being but centred here. Of course centre is a way of speaking, because no physical centre is usually felt — only all the action takes place around the individual.


Sri Aurobindo:  All is in the self; when identiﬁed with the universal self, all is in you.  Also, the microcosm reproduces the macrocosm — so all is present in each, though all is not expressed (and cannot be) in the surface consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the experience of the microcosm (the universe in oneself) in which all that is in the macrocosm (the larger universe) is present. All these things are for experience, for knowledge and must be taken as such. No merely personal turn should be given to them.  The essential “I” sense disappears when there is the stable realisation of the one universal Self in all and that remains at all moments in all conditions under any circumstances. Usually this comes ﬁrst in the Purusha consciousness and the extension to the Prakriti movements is not immediate.


Sri Aurobindo: But even if there are “I” movements in the Prakriti reactions, the Purusha within observes them as the continued running of an old mechanism and does not feel them as his own. Most Vedantists stop there, because they think that those reactions will fall away from one at death and all will disappear into the One. But for a change of the nature it is necessary that the experience and seeing of the Purusha should spread to all the parts, mind, vital, physical, subconscient. Then the ego movements of Prakriti can also disappear gradually from one ﬁeld after another till none is left. For this a perfect samata even in the cells of the body and in every vibration of the being is necessary —.


Sri Aurobindo: One is then quite free from it  in works also. The individual remains but that is not the small separative ego, but a form and power of the Universal which feels itself one with all beings, an acting centre and instrument of the Universal Transcendent, full of the Ananda of the presence and the action but not thinking or moving independently or acting for its own sake. That cannot be called egoism. The Divine can be called an ego only if he is a separate Person limited as in the Christian idea of God by his separateness (though even there esoteric Christianity abolishes the limitation).


Sri Aurobindo: An I which is not separate in that way is no I at all.  One has ﬁrst to become aware of the Self and its wide silence and eternal peace and acquire the cosmic consciousness in which one is aware of the whole universe as one with oneself and to live in that. One has at the same time to be aware — it becomes possible when one lives in the cosmic consciousness, cosmic Self and cosmic Nature, — of the different beings in oneself, psychic, mental, vital, physical, and then there appears also the central being which stands above all of them and is the source of all the surface personalities. It is only then that one can know the aspect or bhava one is intended to manifest.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos — it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the Overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.  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.


Sri Aurobindo: The personal being naturally feels itself as something very small and insigniﬁcant in that Inﬁnite. 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.  It is probably the true Cosmic Self or spirit with its cosmic consciousness and power that you feel on a plane above the ordinary mind or vital or physical — what plane is not as yet clear — for what you describe is common to this Self on whatever plane it manifests; it is felt like that as soon as the being or any part of the being detaches itself from the surface Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Self is met ﬁrst on the level of the Higher Mind, but it is not limited to one station — it is usually felt as something outspread in wideness, but one may also feel a centralising consciousness in the Sahasrara or above it.    A complete silence makes realisation of the Self more possible — but that can be had on the Higher Mind level far below Overmind.


Sri Aurobindo: In the self or pure existence there is no time or space — except spiritual space or wideness.   Yes — in the silence of the self there is no time — it is.     Yes, that is correct.


Sri Aurobindo: In the ﬁrst realisation of silence in the higher consciousness there is no Time — there is only the sense of pure existence, consciousness, peace or a strong featureless Ananda.  If anything else comes in it is a minor movement on the surface of this timeless self-existence. This and the sense of liberation that comes with it is the result of the mind’s quiescence. At a higher level this peace and liberation remain, but can be united with a greater and freer dynamic movement.  It is always possible to have realisations of a kind on the mentalspiritual plane even if the vital is still impure.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a sort of separation of the mental Purusha and Prakriti which results in a knowledge that has no transforming effect on the life. But the theory of these Yogis is that one has to know the Self; life and what one does in life do not matter. Have you not read of the Yogi who came with his concubine and Ramakrishna asked him, “Why do you live like that?” He answered, “All is Maya, so it does not matter what I do so long as I know the Brahman.”  It is true Ramakrishna replied, “I spit on your Vedanta”, but logically the Yogi had a case.


Sri Aurobindo: For if all life and action are Maya and only the silent Brahman is real — well!  What you felt as a strong subtle air was the concrete expression of consciousness or conscious existence in itself independent of the body. As yet the experience is still limited by the body, but when it is felt without that limit then it is a sense of a wide ether ﬁlling all space, Akash Brahman. As this grows, the body sense disappears and when the mind also is quite inactive, one feels oneself to be that spreading out to all Inﬁnity.


Sri Aurobindo:   The feeling you have of all being one and not this a tree or that such and such an object, seems to be a ﬁrst touch of the realisation of all being One. For it is so that one sees things then, — all seems to be One and not something separate like a tree or a house. The tree or house is only a form in the One; the tree is really that One.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only by feeling all things as one spiritual substance that one can arrive at unity [] — unity is in the spiritual consciousness. The material point is only one point among millions of millions — so that is not the base of unity. But once you get the unity in consciousness, you can feel through that the unity of mind substance, mind force, etc., the unity of life substance (mobile) and life force, the unity of material substance and energies. Being — consciousness of being — energy of consciousness — form of consciousness, all things are really that.


Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual consciousness [] is that which is in contact with Sachchidananda, that is, with the pure existence, consciousness and bliss of the Divine. Any contact with Sachchidananda must bring either peace or bliss.  There can be no mental rule or deﬁnition [ ]. One has ﬁrst to live in the Divine and attain to the Truth — the will and awareness of the Truth will organise the life.


Sri Aurobindo: To be always merged in the Divine is not so easy. It can be done only by an absorption in one’s own inner self or by a consciousness that sees all in the Divine and the Divine in all and is in that condition. There is none [] who has attained to that yet.  It [] is what we call the higher or spiritual consciousness — it contains or supports all the higher planes, the higher worlds. When one begins to feel this always above, it is a great step forward in the sadhana; then the consciousness can go up there and from there see, discern and control all that is in the mind, vital and body.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the meeting-place of the ascending and descending forces, as you see.  Of course, Krishnaprem’s view about the canalisation of Niagara is my standpoint also. But for the human mind it is difﬁcult to get across the border between mind and spirit without making a forceful rush or push along one line only and that must be some line of pure experience in which, especially if it is the bhakta way, one gets easily swallowed up in the rapids (did not Chaitanya at last disappear in the waters?) and goes no farther. The ﬁrst thing is to break into the spiritual consciousness, any part of it, anyhow and anywhere, afterwards one can explore the country, to which exploration there can hardly be a limit, one is always going higher and higher, getting wider and wider; but there is a certain intense ecstasy about the ﬁrst complete plunge which is extraordinarily seizing. It is not only the bhakta’s rapture, but the jnani’s plunge into Brahma-Nirvana or Brahmananda or release into the still eternity of the Self that is of that seizing and absorbing character — it does not look at ﬁrst as if one could or would care or need to get beyond into anything else.


Sri Aurobindo: One cannot ﬁnd fault with the Sannyasi lost in his laya or the bhakta lost in his ecstasy; they remain there probably because they are constituted for that and it is the limit of their leap. But all the same it has always appeared to me that it is a stage and not the end; I subscribe fully to the canalisation of Niagara.  The ﬁrst experience there [] is peace and calm and wideness. It is not till these are settled that other experiences of that plane can come.   The experience you had of the wideness with many roads opening was an image of the higher consciousness in which all the movements of the being are open, true and happy — the ignorance and incapacity of the lower nature disappear.


Sri Aurobindo: It is that that the light from above is bringing.    Wideness is necessary for the working of the higher consciousness — if the being is shut up in itself, there can be intense experiences and some opening to touches from the heights, but not the full stable basis for the transformation.


Sri Aurobindo: Wideness is a sign of the extension of the consciousness out of the ordinary limits — whiteness of the wideness means that it is the pure consciousness one is feeling, unless it is white light or luminous white which indicates the Mother’s consciousness there or some inﬂuence of it. The subtle barrier you felt must have been the same thing that prevents your ascent from the heart and from it going beyond into the regions above. There is always a sort of lid there and it is only when that is opened or disappears that one can go freely above. One can be aware of the “unseen wideness” but one is not oneself there until that is done.


Sri Aurobindo: If the workings are really those of the higher consciousness or if these predominate the ego fades out — but there is also often a wideness of opening to the universal mental, vital, physical existence and, if the sadhak responds more to these than to the higher consciousness, then he does not get free. Sometimes even the ego gets aggrandised. But if the psychic is awake, then there is not this danger; one ﬁnds one’s true being in place of the ego.    She has had experiences but on the mental and vital plane.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only a real descent of the higher consciousness from above that can give a peaceful and beautiful merging of the atoms (?) into the wideness of the Divine — that is to say one feels the very cells sharing in that peace and wideness. This is possible even if the material body is ill. In most cases it is the subtle body that feels like that, but as the subtle penetrates everywhere the gross physical, the physical body also feels like that. But then it does not feel disturbed by the pains or motions of the illness — they do not affect its peace or Ananda.  The plane makes a considerable difference in the power and luminosity and completeness etc. of the experience.


Sri Aurobindo: A mental realisation is very different from an overmental or supramental although the Truth realised may be the same. So also to know Matter as the Brahman has a very different result from knowing Life, Mind, Supermind or Ananda as the Brahman. If realising the Divine through the Mind was just the same as realising him on higher planes, there would be no meaning in this Yoga at all — there would be no need of ascending to Supermind or bringing Supermind down.    The consciousness which he calls supramental, is no doubt above the human mind, but it should be called the higher consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: In this higher consciousness there are many degrees, of which the supramental is the summit or the source. It is not possible to reach that summit or source all at once; ﬁrst, all the lower consciousness has to be puriﬁed and made ready. That is the meaning of the Light he saw, whose inner body or substance is too dense and powerful to be penetrated at present.    The higher consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind, intuition and overmind up to the border line of the supramental.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all the planes from the Higher Mind upwards, for there some realisation or vision of the One Truth or the Universal is the natural frame and basis of the whole consciousness. But the higher one rises upward, the more the spiritual view changes, the power of consciousness changes, the Light becomes ever more intense and potent. The essential static realisation of Inﬁnity and Eternity and the Timeless One remains the same, but the vision of the workings of the One becomes ever wider and is attended with a greater instrumentality of Force and a more comprehensive grasp of what has to be known and done.


Sri Aurobindo: All possible forms and constructions of things become more and more visible, more perfectly put in their proper place, more luminously utilisable. A clear spacious thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes a mass of illuminations in the Illumined Mind and heightens into direct intimate vision on the Intuition level. But the Intuition sees in ﬂashes and combines through a constant play of light — through a chain or coordinated harmony of revelations, inspirations, intuitions, swift discriminations. The Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and deep and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally, in wholes; it has the universal touch not only in spirit but in its manner. It creates and acts in the same way — for the Overmind is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.


Sri Aurobindo: But each Godhead creates in his own way; he sees all but that all is seen from his own divine viewpoint.  There is not the absolute supramental harmony and certitude.  These are some of the differences. I speak of these planes in themselves — for when they act in the human consciousness, they are necessarily much diminished in their working, for they have to work with and depend on the human instrumentation or man’s smaller seeking mental intelligence, his passionate turbid vital and mental, his cabined and narrow physical intellect — their workings get badly mixed up with these inferior modes of consciousness and their diluted light of ignorance. Only when these lower impotencies are quieted can those higher powers get a fuller force and reveal more of their original luminous character.


Sri Aurobindo: The Ignorance can act from above the head — but not as part of the higher planes — it comes from outside. The higher planes just above the head are not however the absolute Truth; that you only get in the supermind.     Absolute certitude about all things can only come from the supermind.


Sri Aurobindo: Meanwhile one has to go on with what knowledge the other planes give.   The Truth manifesting on all the planes is one thing, the Supramental is another, although it is the source of all Truth.   To go into the supermind is impossible for the human mind. One has to rise into the higher planes of consciousness above human mind and transform the human mind into that; only afterwards can we hope to touch the supermind.   One has to go by stages, and to reach and be conscious on the higher planes between mind and Overmind is already sufﬁciently difﬁcult without insisting on Supermind as the immediate goal.


Sri Aurobindo:  One has to know about Overmind and Supermind but there should be no ambition to reach them — it should be regarded as a natural end of the sadhana which will come of itself. The concentration should be all on the immediate step — whatever is being done at the time. So have the working of the Power and let it work all out step by step.   What you see is perfectly correct.


Sri Aurobindo: These three are three levels of the higher Mind — on the lowest the consciousness is in connection with the Divine not directly but through the touch of the Light, Peace, Power and Knowledge, on the second it is in the Light etc. and already sees the Divine, on the third it is in union with the Divine and surrendered. These are three well known conditions of the higher consciousness in its approach to the Divine.  You probably went up into the illumined Mind which has a pale blue light and were receiving there lights from the higher planes and occasionally seeing the ﬂash of the full orb of the Divine Truth.   It is always a mistake for the mind to become active and wanting to know while the experience is going on — it usually stops the experience or disturbs or alters it in some way.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind must remain passive till the experience is over.  Overmind experience comes when one rises to the overmind plane and sees things as they are on that plane or as they look to the consciousness which sees the other planes from the overmind view. When one is in the mind, life or physical plane, then it is the overmind Inﬂuence that comes down and modiﬁes the mind, life or physical workings in greater or less degree according to the possibilities or the thing to be done at the moment. It is not the sole power as it is in its own plane but works under mental, vital or physical conditions. Its power is more subjective than objective — it is easy for it to change our view and experience of the object and our knowledge about it, but not so easy for it to change the object or its nature or circumstances or the outward state of things in that plane.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is perfectly simple, it is the attraction towards the Divine Oneness represented in concrete experience. Is it the concreteness of the experiences that puzzles you? All experience there [ ] tends to be concrete, there are no “abstract” truths as in the mind, — even thought in the Overmind is a concrete force and a palpable substance.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes — it is one aspect of the Truth: for in the Overmind there are many aspects of Truth, separate or combined together or arranged one above the other.   Both [] are true on different levels of the Overmind plane or in different cosmic formulations that come from the Overmind. All aspects are there


Sri Aurobindo: in the Overmind, even those which the intellect considers contradictory to each other — in the Overmind they are not contradictions, but complementary to each other.     It is perfectly natural. In these experiences you become aware of the consciousness proper to other planes.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus you get the experience of being a form of the Divine Consciousness, the Mother, and while the experience lasts you feel her power —  when the experience ceases, you come back to your normal state, the power withdraws. These experiences impregnate the consciousness with the Overmind knowledge and they prepare it for transformation.


Sri Aurobindo: The overmind experience does not necessarily deliver from the lower vital and physical movements — it changes them only to a certain extent and prepares them for a greater Truth.  People talk very lightly of the overmind and the supermind as if it were quite easy to enter into them and mistake inferior movements for the overmental or supramental, thereby confusing the Truth and delaying the progress of the sadhana.     Certainly, it [] is necessary for those who want the supramental change.


Sri Aurobindo: Unless the overmind opens, there can be no direct supramental opening of the consciousness. If one remains in mind, even illumined mind or the intuition, one can have indirect messages or an inﬂuence from the supramental, but not a direct supramental control of the consciousness or the supramental change.     It is only the supermind that has an absolute freedom from error.


Sri Aurobindo: The Overmind presents truths in all sorts of arrangements all of which taken together presents something like the whole truth — but these again are reﬂected in you in the terrestrial consciousness or conveyed to your terrestrial consciousness by the descent from the higher planes; but in receiving it the terrestrial consciousness can make mistakes in interpretation, in understanding, in application, in arrangement.    It is not very clear [] what is meant by this Knowledge-Will. It is usually a description of the Supramental where there is no division between Knowledge and Will, each acting on each other or rather ﬁxed together in oneness and therefore infallible. You say it has taken form in mind, vital and body; if that were so, it would mean the ﬁnal and decisive transformation; so it cannot be the Supramental.


Sri Aurobindo: It must be some overmind truth plane.     There are certain things in these three letters that are not correct, notably:


Sri Aurobindo: (1) He seems to say that beyond the overmind there is a plane of “higher luminous Intelligence”. This is impossible. Beyond the overmind there is the Supermind — the overmind is the highest of all the planes below the supramental, and he is not yet in touch with the supramental. What he calls here the overmind cannot be the true overmind. His experiences are those of the mind opening to the higher mental planes and trying to bring down something from them and their powers into the mind, life and body.


Sri Aurobindo: (2) E.g. his classiﬁcation of four worlds (Parvati-Shankar etc.) is an attempt of the mind to interpret something he had seen, but it has not got it at all right. If Mahasaraswati stopped him at this moment, it must have been because his mind was making a wrong formation and it was no use carrying it any farther.  At this stage of his Yoga he must observe what is going on, but not attach a deﬁnitive or ﬁnal importance to any such classiﬁcations or mental arrangements. The mind at this stage sometimes gets these things correctly, sometimes makes formations of them which are not correct and have to be discarded or set right when a higher knowledge comes.   Your experience means manifestly the uniting of the IshwaraShakti sides of the manifestation — as in the Hara-Gauri ﬁgure — with the result of a universalisation of the individual consciousness indicated by the shooting out towards inﬁnite distances.


Sri Aurobindo: The currents are of course the currents of the double force working to make this liberation. The blue and gold must be the blue of Krishna and the gold of the Mother (Durga-Mahakali).  All this is not a supramental experience, but comes from the Overmind. But the overmind experiences must come ﬁrst and liberate the consciousness. It is only after the overmind liberation that the true experience of the supermind can come.


Sri Aurobindo:   You must realise that the supramentalisation of the overmind is one of the most difﬁcult things possible and proceed with great care so as to avoid haste and error.  One can get the experiences of a higher plane by reﬂection or some partial descent in the lower.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is the experience of the transcendent planes as reﬂected on the higher planes of consciousness (Overmind, etc.), in relation to them; just as one can have an experience of Sachchidananda and these planes as reﬂected in the mind or vital or physical consciousness, so one can have it there — but on each plane it appears in a different way.  The higher planes are not planes on which man is naturally conscious and he is even not open to their direct inﬂuence — only to some indirect inﬂuence from those nearest to the human mind. He can reach them only in a deep inner condition or trance and the higher he goes the less easy is it for him to be conscious of them even in trance. If you are not conscious of your inner being, then it is more difﬁcult to be conscious in trance.


Sri Aurobindo: To live in a higher plane and see the action on the physical from it as something separate is a deﬁnite stage in the movement towards transformation.  What I mean by the spiritual transformation is something dynamic (not merely liberation of the self, or realisation of the One which can very well be attained without any descent). It is a putting on of the spiritual consciousness dynamic as well as static in every part of the being down to the subconscient.  That cannot be done by the inﬂuence of the Self leaving the consciousness fundamentally as it is with only puriﬁcation, enlightenment of the mind and heart and quiescence of the vital.  It means a bringing down of Divine Consciousness static and dynamic into all these parts and the entire replacement of the present consciousness by that.


Sri Aurobindo: This we ﬁnd unveiled and unmixed above mind, life and body and not in mind, life and body.  It is a matter of the undeniable experience of many that this can descend and it is my experience that nothing short of its descent can thoroughly remove the veil and mixture and effect the full spiritual transformation.    The power of concentration above the head is to bring peace, silence, liberation from the body sense, the identiﬁcation with mind and life and open the way for the lower (mental-vitalphysical) consciousness to rise up to meet the higher Consciousness above and for the powers of the higher (spiritual or divine) Consciousness to descend into mind, life and body. This is what is called in this Yoga the spiritual transformation.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a double movement in the sadhana — the Divine Consciousness, Power, Light, Peace descending into all the body, the consciousness from all parts of the body rising upwards to meet the Divine Consciousness above — the descent and the ascent.    The sadhana is based on the fact that a descent of Forces from the higher planes and an ascent of the lower consciousness to the higher planes is the means of transformation of the lower nature — although naturally it takes time and the complete transformation can only come by the supramental descent. Your experiences here are forms of the widening experiences of this process.


Sri Aurobindo: The practice of this Yoga is double — one side is of an ascent of the consciousness to the higher planes, the other is of a descent of the power of the higher planes into the earth consciousness so as to drive out the Power of darkness and ignorance and transform the nature.     All the consciousness in the human being who is the mental embodied in living matter has to rise so as to meet the higher consciousness; the higher consciousness has also to descend into mind, into life, into matter. In that way the barriers will be removed and the higher consciousness will be able to take up the whole lower nature and transform it by the power of the supermind.


Sri Aurobindo: The earth is a material ﬁeld of evolution. Mind and life, supermind, Sachchidananda are in principle involved there in the earth consciousness, but only matter is at ﬁrst organised; then life descends from the life plane and gives shape and organisation and activity to the life principle in matter, creates the plant and animal; then mind descends from the mind plane, creating man.  Now supermind is to descend so as to create a supramental race.


Sri Aurobindo: There are two movements — one an ascension of the lower consciousness to meet the higher, the other the descent of the higher consciousness into the lower. What you ﬁrst experienced was an uprush of the lower consciousness from all parts so strong as to break the lid of the inner mind — that was the splitting of the skull — and to enable the joining of the two consciousnesses above to be complete. The result was a descent.  Usually the ﬁrst thing that descends from the higher consciousness is its deep and entire peace — the second is the Light, here the white light of the Mother. When the higher consciousness descends or is intensely felt, there is very usually an opening of the limited personal being into the cosmic consciousness — one feels a wide and inﬁnite being which alone exists, the identiﬁcation with the body and even the sense of the body disappears, the limited personal consciousness is lost in the Cosmic Existence.


Sri Aurobindo: You had all this ﬁrst in the impersonal way, but after the burning up of the psychic ﬁre, you felt the Personal wideness, the cosmic consciousness of the Divine Mother and received her blessing.    If your consciousness rises above the head, that means that it goes beyond the ordinary mind to the centre above which receives the higher consciousness or else towards the ascending levels of the higher consciousness itself. The ﬁrst result is the silence and peace of the Self which is the basis of the higher consciousness; this may afterwards descend into the lower levels, into the very body. Light also can descend and Force.


Sri Aurobindo: The navel and the centres below it are those of the vital and the physical; something of the higher Force may have descended there.  The lower consciousness ascends towards the higher to join it — the higher descends into the lower to transform it. It is the rule of the consciousness in this sadhana.    A going up and up higher, though a part of the total necessary movement, does not by itself have any effect on the outer being.


Sri Aurobindo: It only divides the consciousness into two and its only logical outcome is Nirvana. I have always written that the descent is necessary to change the nature; ascent is useful to open the higher planes and exalt the level of the consciousness, but it does not change the lower being except superﬁcially by opening to it certain possibilities it had not before. But the descent must ﬁrst take place in the inner being. When the higher consciousness is settled in the inner being, then it can change the outer. But necessarily the descent must be dynamic, not merely that of a static peace; the inner peace must itself become dynamic.


Sri Aurobindo: The descent whether of peace or force or light or knowledge or Ananda must occupy the whole inner being down to the inner physical. Without that how is the outer to be transformed at all?  It is an amazing idea to suppose that the outer can be changed while the inner is left to itself. What you had in the inner being was a static stillness which did not even entirely occupy the inner physical except at times — that was why the dynamic descent was necessary, but in the inner being or if possible the whole being, the inner outﬂowing into the outer, not in the outer being to the exclusion of the inner.


Sri Aurobindo:   In the physical consciousness the descent is the most important.  Something of the subtle physical can always go up — but the external physical consciousness can only do it when the force from above comes down and ﬁlls it. There is then a sort of uniﬁcation made when the higher consciousness and the physical are one undivided consciousness and there is an ascent of forces from below and descent from above, simultaneous and mutually interpenetrating.


Sri Aurobindo:   I am not speaking of mere rising above [ ]. The rising above has to be followed by the descent of the higher consciousness into the different parts of the being. That aided by the psychic development and aiding it changes the external nature.