Sri Aurobindo: It is on the contrary the resistance to Yoga that does it.     It usually happens like that — when one comes out of the world, the forces that govern the world do all they can to pull you back into their own unquiet movement.


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know why. It is perfectly irrational. People have been going as well as coming since the Asram began. Perhaps it arises from the ignorant idea that the people who go like and are true bhaktas and sadhaks — while the fact is that never made much progress even elementary and has been in a state of vital revolt sometimes against the Mother, sometimes against myself, battling against both, for the last six or seven years. People go away because they are too proud and arrogant to accept the control of the Guru or of the Truth or of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: had decided that the Truth was in him alone and there was no Truth in myself or in the Mother.     The reason why it recurs so much is that it is not so much a personal reaction as a force that whenever it gets the door of the consciousness open, is consciously pressing the idea of departure with all sorts of reasons to support it. There are a certain number in the Asram who have it with the same recurrence — while there are others who used to have it but from whose consciousness it is now after a long series of attacks excluded or fading out.


Sri Aurobindo: Obviously to give the movement any kind of scope would be no conquest. One day it will give up coming of itself, as it has done with others, when the external vital nature has got as convinced as the inner being of the imperativeness of its spiritual destiny.     I do not understand the meaning of the complaint in your letter.


Sri Aurobindo: I am not aware that there was any maltreatment of you by us or any lack of true love and care. In your spiritual life I have striven to give you all the possible help and support and guidance, more so than to most others because I felt that you had much need of it. I do not see any reason why you should go on the goad of a difﬁculty which always occurs in sadhana or under the driving of a suggestion or impulse; if it were a mature and deliberate decision taken after full reﬂection, one could understand it. In any case, this Asram is here as your spiritual home so long as you choose to avail yourself of it and our help and consistent support in your difﬁculties are at your disposal so long as you need and desire them for the attainment of the goal of your spiritual endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: Why do you allow these suggestions to get hold of your mind?  You have made great progress here which you could not have made over there — and as for usefulness, there are few whose work can be relied on as yours can. Dry moments come to all — that is not a reason for doubting one’s call to the Yoga. Shake off these false suggestions — they must surely be the result of the old atmosphere coming in in such a mass — and regain the peace and stillness that you were having before.


Sri Aurobindo: I have given you the permission to go only on your insistence that the pull from there is too strong for you to resist. It is not because we think that it is the right or the best thing for you — on the contrary we do not like the idea of your going at all. I have told you that to stay and ﬁght out any inner difﬁculty here is always the true course. If there is any misconception about that, you should reconsider your decision.   I have written to to set right any misunderstanding — if there is really a misunderstanding — about our consent to her going.


Sri Aurobindo: That consent I consider as forced from me by her own insistence that she could not stay — the pull was too great — she must go.  I reminded her of what I told her before that the only true way was to stay and ﬁght out the difﬁculty — the only justiﬁcation for going would be if her call was more to the family life than to the spiritual life. I have told her that we keep to that and the Mother and I do not like her going — and asked her to reconsider her decision. For it is hers not mine. You know that I dislike any one who has a psychic call going away from here, because it is throwing away their spiritual destiny or at least postponing it.


Sri Aurobindo: For I don’t suppose, if she persists in going, will remain always under the illusion of the family bonds — but the risk is there and the postponement is there. Mother has called her tomorrow morning and we will see what she decides.    The Mother was not distant and had no reason for being so — that cannot be put forward as a reason for going away. It is the feeling of the vital-physical that has been stopped in its activities and is not yet able to receive the touch of the higher consciousness or keep it that makes you feel like that.


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know that you would get so much interest or satisfaction from the life outside that it would be worth while to give up and go.  To persist is better.    The inability to go can come from the psychic which refuses, when it comes to the point, to allow the other parts to budge, or it can come from the vital which has no longer any pull towards the ordinary life and knows that it will never be satisﬁed there.  It is usually the higher parts of the vital that act like that.


Sri Aurobindo: What still is capable of turning outwards is probably the physical vital in which the old tendencies have not been extinguished.    I certainly do not wish to “put you in the wrong box”, nor have I an idea or any desire to keep you here against your own inclination or choice. Going or staying is a matter entirely for your own decision. If you can stay here with spiritual proﬁt to yourself, we shall be very glad; but if you ﬁnd that there is nothing to be gained by staying or that you cannot receive anything or that your will is decidedly for the ordinary life, I certainly would not like to put any undue pressure on you to stay against your own real interest or will.


Sri Aurobindo: You must consider yourself entirely free to shape your own course in life by your own independent choice.   I am not telling you to go, but if I tell you the opposite it will only strengthen the suggestion that is being put on you — viz. that you are being kept here contrary to your own nature’s choice and your mind’s judgment for something that you cannot do and no longer want to do, a spiritual life that you cannot live and don’t want to live. You think it is something in yourself that says that, but in reality it is not so. Only as you cannot see that at present, I have no choice but to leave everything to your own decision so that the sense of being outrageously compelled to stay may have no ground for growing in you.  You have mentioned’s case more than once as analogous, but his was quite opposite.


Sri Aurobindo: He considered himself as the holder of the supramental Truth whom all ought to approach for the Truth, but that this was an Asram peopled by Asuras who refused to recognise him and all these Asuras were supported against him at every step by the Mother and me. He gave me the ultimatum that in this we must support him against the others and give him his proper position or else give him freedom to leave the Asram with which he had no longer any afﬁnity, an impossible place for such a one as he, so that he might give the Truth to others elsewhere. No point of contact at all there with you except the Force driving him away.  What is happening just now is that there is a great uprush of the subconscient in which are the seeds or the strong remnants of the habitual difﬁculties of the nature. But its character is a confusion and obscurity without order or clear mental or other arrangement — it is a confused depression, discouragement, inability to progress — a feeling of what are we doing?


Sri Aurobindo: why are we here? how can we go on? will anything ever be attained? and along with it old difﬁculties recurring in a confused and random but often violent and distressing fashion.  You cannot “begin” again; it would be too difﬁcult a thing in this confusion.


Sri Aurobindo: You have to get back to the point at which you deviated. If you can get back to the Peace that was coming and with it aspire to the freedom and wideness of the Purusha consciousness forming a of detachment and separation from all this confusion of the subconscient Prakriti, then you will have a ﬁrm ground to stand upon and proceed. But for that you must make your choice ﬁrmly and refuse to be upset at every moment and diverted from it.    It is well understood that the permission given does not exclude the possibility of the experiment ending badly.


Sri Aurobindo: But the experiment becomes necessary if the pull of the ego or outer being and that of the soul have become too acute for solution otherwise or if the outer being insists on having its experience.     It is especially when the outer being rejects the Truth and insists on living its own life and refuses the rule of the spiritual life that the experiment becomes inevitable. I have never said that it is recommendable.


Sri Aurobindo: In some it is too strong; they have to go and see for themselves.  That does not mean that everyone has to go whenever he feels a difﬁculty. These are exceptional cases.    You have forgotten the context.


Sri Aurobindo: Arjuna asks what of a Yogi who fails in this life because of his errors — does he fall from both the ordinary life and the spiritual and perish like a broken cloud?  Krishna says no. All who follow the Good get the reward of their effort and do not perish — they get it ﬁrst in the life beyond and afterwards in the next birth in which the Yogi who fails now may even resume his effort under the best conditions and arrive at Siddhi. Krishna never said that nobody ever in this life fails who attempts the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is a Force that is always seeking to push people away; formerly more than half the sadhaks were getting from time to time the suggestion to go. This has diminished now in its general power, but the Force is still there and presses very heavily on some. When it gets anyone to go, then the power of the suggestion revives through that person and spreads to others. Those who are specially sensitive receive it most.


Sri Aurobindo:   Do you think so? Those who have gone do not ﬁnd the world like that — they feel miserable and harassed on every side. So it has been with all who left here.


Sri Aurobindo: It is difﬁcult for the Mother to decide for you. If you had been settled in Yoga as a resident sadhak of the Asram recognised as such by your family and everybody, then the rule of not allowing any tie of the world to draw you away would have stood with force against all such calls. But now it is different and you have to see for yourself what you feel called upon to do. For the Mother to decide would not be a solution from the spiritual point of view and it is better if the decision rises out of yourself — then only is it likely to be the true one.


Sri Aurobindo: What takes people away mostly is not the smaller failings like family attachment etc., but either ambition and great vanity or sexual desire or else some extreme form of vital ego which wants its own way and not the Divine’s. It is from the ﬁrst two causes that the departures from the Asram have mostly taken place and  and’s case is no exception to the rule.    You can have permission to go. But one knows when one goes, one does not know whether or when one will come back.


Sri Aurobindo: But if you really want to go, we cannot refuse permission.     If you wish to go, Mother gives the permission. But we cannot assure you that you will be able to come back or that it will not injure your sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: These things depend on yourself and on circumstances.      has been here on probation for three years now. If we are sending her home, it is not as a punishment for any offence or out of anger or any similar reason, but it is because that is the best thing for her also.


Sri Aurobindo: It is after long observation of her that this step has been taken and it is not a sudden decision on our part but has been maturing for some time. We have not rejected her, — it is with our blessings that she will go and if she keeps the right attitude our protection will be with her there. This has all been now explained to her and I believe she is not any longer.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a little difﬁcult for me to answer your letter in view of what you have written there. I have certainly persuaded you to remain here because I did not think that going away was the right solution, nor do I think so now. But from what you wrote last time after this came on you, I understood that you did not really want to go and were glad that I had persuaded you, that in fact you would have suffered greatly if I had given my consent.  Here you write very differently and in such a way that if I am to take what you say in its full sense I would have to reply at once “Yes, go, since there is no other alternative.” Let me say that persuasion is not force.


Sri Aurobindo: Last time I don’t think I even used persuasion; I simply gave my opinion against your proposal. My opinion remains the same, but that is not binding on you. I have also never thought of cutting you off if you go to Cape Comorin for a time or to Calcutta. Everyone here is free to follow his own decision in these matters. But when I am asked for a full consent, I take it as an invitation to give my own view on what is proposed and I give it.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no question there of detaining or refusing a bitter need and therefore there can be no reason for your being driven to the extremes of which you speak in your letter.  As for the way out of the impasse, I know only of the quieting of the mind which makes meditation effective, puriﬁcation of the heart which brings the divine touch and in time the divine presence, humility before the Divine which liberates from egoism and the pride of the mind and of the vital, the pride that imposes its own reasonings on the ways of the spirit and the pride that refuses or is unable to surrender, sustained persistence in the call within and reliance on the Grace above. These things come by the inner discipline which you had begun to practise some time ago, but did not continue. Meditation, japa, prayer or aspiration from the heart can all succeed, if they are attended by these or even some of these things. But I do not know that you can be promised what you always make the condition of any inner endeavour, an immediate or almost immediate realisation or beginning of concrete realisation.


Sri Aurobindo: I fully believe on the other hand that one who has the call in him cannot fail to arrive, if he follows patiently the way towards the Divine.  Frankly this is my view of the matter. I have never seen that anyone by changing place arrived at spiritual realisation — it always comes by a change of mind and heart. I put before you what I can see. The rest is for you to consider.


Sri Aurobindo:   I have surely never said that you should not want the Divine Response. One does Yoga for that. What I have said is that you should not expect or insist on it at once or within an early time.  It can come early or it can come late, but come it will if one is faithful in one’s call — for one has not only to be sincere but to be faithful through all.


Sri Aurobindo: If I deprecate insistence, it is because I have always found it creates difﬁculties and delays — owing to a strain and restlessness which is created — in the nature and despondencies and revolts of the vital when the insistence is not satisﬁed. The Divine knows best and one has to have trust in His wisdom and attune oneself with His will. Length of time is no proof of an ultimate incapacity to arrive — it is only a sign that there is something in oneself which has to be overcome and, if there is the will to reach the Divine, it can be overcome.  Suicide solves nothing — it only brings one back to life with the same difﬁculties to be faced in worse conditions. If one wishes to escape from life altogether, it can only be by the way of complete inner renunciation and merging oneself in the Silence of the Absolute or by a bhakti that becomes absolute or by a karmayoga that gives up one’s own will and desires to the will of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: I have said also that the Grace at any moment act suddenly, but over that one has no control, because it comes by an incalculable Will which sees things that the mind cannot see.  It is precisely the reason why one should never despair, — that and also because no sincere aspiration to the Divine can fail in the end.  Mother does not remember having said to what you report — it may have been something in another sense which understood in that way. For it cannot be said that you have never received Force from us, you have received it to any extent; it can only be said that you were not conscious of it, but that happens with many. Certainly none of the sadhaks receives and uses all the Force the Mother sends, but that is a general fact and not peculiar to you.


Sri Aurobindo: I hope you will not carry out your idea of going suddenly away — if you have to go for a time, it should be with our knowledge and our protection around you. I hope it will not be necessary at all, but certainly it should not be in that way.  Whatever else you doubt, you should not doubt that our love and affection will be always with you. But I still hope that you will be able to overcome this despair and this impulse of ﬂight and develop the quiet force of intense will which brings the Light that is sure to come.   Your analysis and reasonings are those of Grand-m`ere Depression which sees only what she allows to come to the surface for her purposes.


Sri Aurobindo: There are other things that Madame suppresses because they don’t suit her. It does not greatly matter what brought you here — the important thing is to go on till the psychic truth behind all that becomes manifest. The inertia of your physical nature is only a thick crust on the surface which gives way slowly, but under the pressure it will give way. If you had some big object in the ordinary life and nothing to hope for here it might be different, but as things are it would be foolish to walk off under the instigation of this old Mother Gloom-Gloom. Stick on and you will get the soul’s reward hereafter.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no reason to be so much cut down or despair of your progress. Evidently you have had a surging up of the old movements, but that can always happen so long as there is not an entire change of the old nature both in the conscious and subconscient parts. Something came up that made you get out of poise and stray into a past round of feelings. The one thing to do is to quiet yourself and get back into the true consciousness and poise. . . .


Sri Aurobindo: Always keep within and do things without involving yourself in them, then nothing will happen or, if it does, no serious reaction will come.  The idea of leaving for any reason is of course absurd and out of the question. Eight years is a very short time for transformation. Most people spend as much as that or more to get conscious of their defects and acquire the serious will to change — and after that it takes a long time to get the will turned into full and ﬁnal accomplishment. Each time one stumbles, one has to get back onto the right footing and go on with fresh resolution; by doing that the full change comes.


Sri Aurobindo:   You must not deceive yourself into thinking that the ordinary life will prepare you for the Asram life. So we cannot tell you how to prepare yourself. It is better to choose frankly between the two. If you go away, you would ﬁnd the same difﬁculties if you came back.


Sri Aurobindo: It is knowing that that you must decide.    Since the attacks of fear do not cease, it is best that you should go and rest for the time being from the sadhana — for these two cannot go together. In order to be quite sure, it would be advisable to see in Calcutta whether there is not some physical cause also such as blood pressure. It is not possible for the Mother to see you before you go as you have to go tonight.


Sri Aurobindo: For the rest, we can decide only after seeing how you go on over there. If you keep your trust in the Divine and clear yourself of all that conﬂicts with it, there is no reason to fear that the Divine will abandon you. For the present what is necessary is to shake off this disturbance and get out of the condition of fear and nervous disturbance altogether.    As you say that you are determined to go, I can only answer by reafﬁrming our disapproval of the step you propose to take and the rejection — from a blind vital feeling — of the true path and the spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not true that you could not appreciate our help and solicitude or that you were unable to follow the sadhana, you are only shutting the doors of your mind and vital to the help and laying stress on a temporary block which would have disappeared if you had dissociated yourself from it. I can only express the hope that the true being in you will awake in time and draw you back from this course, restoring the inner contact with us and the unity with the higher Self, a glimpse of which had come to you for a moment.     Neither the Mother nor I have asked you to go nor approved of your going.


Sri Aurobindo: As I could not give any assent to it and the reasons put forward by you precluded my asking you to stay, I had to be silent. Mother could not withhold from you the money you asked for because you claimed it as your own and her withholding it would have looked like an undue interference with your personal liberty and your formed decision. I must now say however that if you go, it will be your own decision and not in any way ours. If you change your decision and resolve to face out your difﬁculty here until it is solved, we shall be very glad of it.  There is no such impossibility of your victory over the harder parts of your nature as you imagine.


Sri Aurobindo: There is only needed the perseverance to go on till this resistance breaks down and the psychic which is not absent nor unmanifest is able to dominate the others. That has to be done whether you stay here or not and to go is likely only to increase the difﬁculty and imperil the ﬁnal result — it cannot help you. It is here that the struggle however acute has, because of the immediate presence of the Mother, the best chance and certitude of a solution and successful ending.


Sri Aurobindo: No one in fact is kept here when his will or decision is to go — although the principle of the spiritual life is against any return to the old one even for a time especially if the deeper urge is there and striving towards a ﬁrm foundation of the new consciousness — for the return to the ordinary atmosphere and surroundings and motives disturbs the work and throws back the progress.     No, it does not; it simply means that we can’t always be holding back people whose vital says “I want to go, I want to go” and they side with the vital. They are allowed to go and take their risk.


Sri Aurobindo:   May I ask why? People have been leaving the Asram since it began, not only now. Say 30 or 40 people have gone, 130 or 140 others have come. The big Maharathas,,, departed from this too damnable Asram where great men are not allowed to do as they like.


Sri Aurobindo: The damnable Asram survives and grows. A  and B and C fail in their Yoga — but the Yoga proceeds on its way, advances, develops.


Sri Aurobindo: Why then kick, shock and heartquake?  And what then?  Not so strongly or concentratedly as it ought, but better than before.  Even if it were so, that is their own business. The Divine is driving nobody out except in rare cases where their staying would be a calamity to the Asram (for instance it could decide one day to drive out); if they cannot bear the pressure and rush away, listening to the “Go away, go away” push and suggestion of the Hostiles can it be said then that it was the Divine who drove them away and the push and suggestion of the Hostile is that of the Divine?


Sri Aurobindo: A singular logic! The “Go, go” push and suggestion have been successfully there ever since the Asram started and even before when there was no Asram. How does that square with your theory that it is due to the concentrated descent of the Force?    What you say about yourself — the jealousy etc. — is already known; you have yourself written it all before to the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: In spite of that we did not consider you unﬁt for the Yoga. Every sadhak has by nature certain characteristics which are a great obstacle in the way of the sadhana; these remain with obstinacy and can only be overcome after a very long time by an action of the Divine from within. Your mistake is — not to have these defects, others have defects of anger, jealousy, envy etc. very strongly and not only have them within but show them very openly, — but to accept it as a reason for despair and the wish to go away from here. There is absolutely no meaning in going away, for nothing would be gained by it. One does not escape from what is within oneself by changing place; it follows and reproduces itself under other circumstances and among other surroundings.


Sri Aurobindo: To go away and die does not solve anything either; for one’s being and nature do not end with death, they continue.  The only way to get rid of them is to throw them out and the only place where you can get rid of them is here. Here, if you remain, a time is sure to come when these things will go out of you. The suffering it causes cannot cease by going out — it can only cease by the cause being removed or else by your drawing back from them and realising your true self which even if they rose would not be troubled by them and could refuse to regard them as part of itself — this liberation too can only come here by sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo:   What you have written is quite correct. To say that the Divine is defeated when a sadhak goes away is an absurdity. If the sadhak allows his lower nature to get the better of him, it is his defeat, not the Divine’s. The sadhak comes here not because the Divine has need of him, but because he has need of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: If he carries out the conditions of the spiritual life and gives himself to the Mother’s leading, he will attain his goal but if he wants to lay down his own conditions and impose his own ideas and his own desires on the Divine, then all the difﬁculty comes. This is what happened to and and several others. Because the Divine does not yield to them they go away; but how is that a defeat for the Divine?


Sri Aurobindo: You speak as if the majority of the sadhaks who came here had gone! As a matter of fact it is only a small minority. Some went owing to a revolt of pride and ambition thinking that they had a great work to do or that they were already the equals or superiors of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo — some because they were unable to resist their sexual desires, others because they preferred to take their own way instead of following the directions of the Guru and went off the track. These things always happen to a number of those who start on the way, whatever the path they follow. It is no proof of the special difﬁculty of this Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: If one yields to ambition, sexual passion or self-sufﬁciency, a fall is always possible. There is also the possibility of being driven off the track by doubt or attraction to the old life — family, friends etc. The only one of these things that can act in your case is this doubt of your own capacity.  As I have told you, the capacity for having inner experience — and that is the one thing all sadhaks must have or develop — this you have, for it showed itself clearly. The rest does not depend on personal capacity, but on reliance and opening to the Mother’s force.


Sri Aurobindo: It was because you had that that you were progressing for some time very well. It got covered over by the physical consciousness which understands only external things and understands even those wrongly and obscurely. If that consciousness opens, there is no reason to suppose that you will not be able to go through.    It is the right path for your inner nature and there there is the call.


Sri Aurobindo: The resistance is from the outer, especially the mind, but that is due to a dissatisﬁed restlessness which is part of the outer mental nature (the reasons given are only supports which it builds for its restlessness) and that would have interfered wherever you might have been and on whatever path. To conquer this outer nature is the only way and that can be best done here, since the change of the outer being is here a part of the sadhana and you will receive the necessary help.    I repeat that he took himself away. No Force can take a man away, who really wants not to go and really wants the spiritual life.


Sri Aurobindo: wanted the “Divine Response” only, not spiritual life — his doubts all rose from that.    Yes, you can do as you propose. So long as you have the attachment to the family, it is not possible to do any good sadhana here. Yoga and attachment do not go together.


Sri Aurobindo: As long as you have it, the best you can do is to go on with the ordinary life, develop Bhakti and try to prepare yourself for a true and complete sadhana hereafter.     When there is so sharp a difference between the inner and the outer being, it is always the sadhak who has to make his choice.  As for coming back, many who have gone out have come back, others have not — for in going out there is always the danger of entering into a current of forces that make return impossible.


Sri Aurobindo: Whatever decision you make should be clear and deliberate — otherwise, you may go out and as soon as you are there want to come back and after coming here again want to go; that would be inadmissible.   I have already answered more than once to what you have written in your last two letters and I can only give the same answer as before.  You write as if our only reason for not consenting to your going away or for not sending you away was that you had nowhere to go. But that is not so. It is because we do not approve of the idea of your going; it is a wrong step altogether without any sense or reason in it.


Sri Aurobindo: The difﬁculties in your nature are not peculiar to you alone among the sadhaks here and their persistence is no sign that you cannot do Yoga. The few years you have been here is too short a time to expect a transformation of the character. Nobody can expect a transformation in so short a time.  It is not a fact that you are incapable of doing Yoga. Anyone who can open his consciousness and have inner experiences is capable of Yoga and that did happen in you.


Sri Aurobindo: The closing of this openness by a descent into the physical consciousness is something that has happened to most in this Asram and it usually takes a long time to come out of the closing. There is therefore no reason for concluding that this shows incapacity for Yoga and therefore there is no use in staying here.  The only reasonable thing for you to do is to get rid of this wrong idea and remain quietly here where alone the true consciousness and the true life can come to you.   These ideas are only suggestions that always come up when you allow this sadness to grow in you; instead of indulging them, they should be immediately thrown from you. There is no “why” to your feeling of our far-away-ness and indifference, for these do not exist, and the feeling comes up automatically without any true reason along with this wave of the wrong kind of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Whenever this comes up, you should be at once sure that it is a wrong turn and stop it and reject all its characteristic suggestions. It is when you have been able to do so for a long time that you have made great progress and developed a right consciousness and right ideas and the true psychic attitude. You are not hampering our work nor standing in the way of others coming here; in cleaving to the sadhana in spite of all difﬁculties you are not deceiving yourself but, on the contrary, doing the right thing and you are certainly not deceiving the Divine, who knows very well both your aspiration and your difﬁculties. So there is not a shred of a reason for your going away. If you “sincerely want to do Yoga”, and there can be no doubt about that, that is quite a sufﬁcient reason for your being here.


Sri Aurobindo: It does not matter about not having as yet any occult experiences, like the rising of the Kundalini etc.; these come to some early, to some late; and there are besides different lines of such experiences for different natures. You should not hanker after these or get disappointed and despondent because they do not yet come. These things can be left to come of themselves when the consciousness is ready. What you have to aspire to is bhakti, puriﬁcation of the nature, right psychic consciousness and surrender. Aspire for bhakti and it will grow in you.


Sri Aurobindo: It is already there within and it is that which expresses itself in your poetry and music and the feelings that rise up as in the temple of the Mother at the Cape. As the bhakti and aspiration in the nature grow, the right psychic consciousness will also increase and lead to the full surrender. But keep steady and don’t indulge these ideas of incapacity and frustration and going away; they are stuff of tamas and good only to be ﬂung aside.  It is not the house, it is the inner nearness that matters.  What is true is that there is a strong force going out from here and it is naturally strongest at the centre.


Sri Aurobindo: But how it affects there, depends on how one receives it. If it is received with simple trust, faith, openness, conﬁdence, then it works as a complete protection. But it can so work too at a distance.


Sri Aurobindo: The atmosphere of the houses as houses is pretty much the same in all the Asram. But people make their own atmosphere as well; a number of people living together may create one that is agreeable to this person and disagreeable to another. A single man also may leave a vital atmosphere in a house which is felt by others who follow him or, even if they do not feel it, they may be inﬂuenced by it for a time — that I have observed often enough.  The surroundings also have sometimes an effect. But all that is very secondary — one ought to create one’s own atmosphere (of course of the right kind) and keep it, then other vibrations will fall away from it.


Sri Aurobindo: What are the Asram precincts? Every house in which the sadhaks of the Asram live is in the Asram precincts. People have a queer way of talking of the houses in this compound as the Asram — it has no meaning. Or do they think the Mother’s inﬂuence or mine is shut up in a compound?


Sri Aurobindo: The force is there in the atmosphere, but you must receive it in the right way — in the spirit of self-giving, openness, conﬁdence.  All the rest depends on that.    It is certainly strange. Most people after the atmosphere here cannot tolerate the ordinary atmosphere.


Sri Aurobindo: If they go outside, they are restless until they return. Even’s aunt who was here only for a few months writes in the same way. But probably when people get into the control of a falsehood as and did, they are projected into the unregenerated vital nature and no longer feel the difference of the atmosphere.


Sri Aurobindo: It is easier to feel the presence in the atmosphere of the Asram than outside it. But that is only an initial difﬁculty which one can overcome by a steadiness in the call and a constant opening of oneself to the inﬂuence.   Magre like many others got an immediate strong impression of the atmosphere of the Asram — most feel it as an atmosphere of calm and peace, something quite apart from that of the ordinary world. He thought it was the atmosphere of the people. Besides, of the few who saw him, he saw only the best.


Sri Aurobindo: Also many here if not most have something in their appearance different from people outside, something a little luminous, which a man of sensitive perceptions like Magre could feel. The other side becomes apparent only if one stays long and mixes in the ordinary life of the Asram or hears the gossip of the Sadhaks. People from this country, Gujaratis or others, more easily see or feel this side and do not feel the rest because they enter at once into relation with the exterior life of the Asram.    There are two atmospheres in the Asram, ours and that of the sadhaks.


Sri Aurobindo: When people with a little perceptiveness come from outside, they are struck by the deep calm and peace in the atmosphere and it is only when they mix much with the sadhaks that this perception and inﬂuence fade away. The other atmosphere of dullness or unrest is created by the sadhaks themselves — if they were opened to the Mother as they should be, they would live in the calm and peace and not in unrest or dullness.  It is a sign of physical expansion. The progress depends upon what is behind; if the inner progress is not there, the physical expansion is of no great use.


Sri Aurobindo: There was some idea of that years ago, but circumstances took another turn and it did not materialise.  There is no communal sadhana. It is the individuals who do the sadhana and that creates a collective atmosphere with a character and movements of its own.  What commune? There is no commune here, there is only a group of people who are supposed to follow the same sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: Anyone can help another if he has the capacity. It has nothing to do with a “commune”.   The highest Truth is there for anyone who can reach it.  You have now taken the right attitude, and if you keep it all will go better.


Sri Aurobindo: It is to the divine Mother that you have come for Yoga, not for the old kind of life. You should also regard this as an Asram, not an ordinary Sansar, and in your dealings with others here strive to conquer anger, self-assertion and pride, whatever may be their attitude or behaviour towards you; for so long as you keep these moods, you will ﬁnd it difﬁcult to make progress in the Yoga.   The vital difﬁculties persist so long as one indulges in any way the lower nature — even after one has ceased indulging, they persist so long as there is anything in the lower consciousness which desires or regrets them or is still responsive to their touch when they return either as waves from the universal Prakriti or an attack by the hostile forces. If length of time in mastering the vital or transforming it were a proof of unﬁtness, then nobody in this Asram — or outside it — would be ﬁt for the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind can argue like that about anything not yet actually realised and established beyond dispute and without ﬂaw. But what one has to lean on in Yoga is not the reasonings of the physical mind, but faith in the soul and the secret certitude of the Spirit.   Absolutely incorrect. The progress of the sadhana is for most even such an alternation because it is precisely a struggle between the powers of Light and Darkness, those who want the divine transformation and those who want the continuance of the old ignorant Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: At each step something has to be conquered from the hold of the Ignorance, something brought down from the Light above. When the whole nature is opened and the peace and equality are brought down into the vital and physical and settled there, then there is no inner disturbance, but the struggle continues until there is the beginning of the supramental transformation.     It is because outside before people come here, they are quite satisﬁed with their inner spiritual experiences and there is no idea of changing or attempt to change the vital.


Sri Aurobindo: The moment this idea is imposed on the vital or the attempt begins all the vital difﬁculties begin. That is one reason, but by itself it would not have mattered so much, the difﬁculties would have appeared but they could have been conquered without so much trouble.  But here owing to the wrong attitude of many sadhaks, their indulgence of the vital opposition and revolt, an atmosphere of extreme vital difﬁculty has been created and when one comes to stay here all that atmosphere throws itself upon him and it is only by a great and prolonged struggle that he can get back to the spiritual simplicity and straightforward aspiration or the psychic poise.


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


Sri Aurobindo:   Not of my Yoga, but of the blasted atmosphere that has been created here by the theory that revolt, doubt and resultant sorrow and struggle and all that rot are the best way to progress.  The Asram has never been able to get out of it, but only some people have escaped. The others have opened themselves to the confounded Man of Sorrows and got the natural consequence.  But why the devil did you do it?


Sri Aurobindo: The Man of Sorrows is a fellow who is always making a row in himself and covering himself with sevenfold overcoats of tragedy and gloom and he would not feel his existence justiﬁed if he couldn’t be colossally miserable — when he gets on people’s backs he puts the same thing on them. Yoga on the other hand tells you even if you have all sorts of unpleasantnesses to live in the inner sunlight, your own or God’s. At least most Yogas do except the Vaishnava — but the Yoga here is not a Vaishnava Yoga.    I have already answered your question.


Sri Aurobindo: You came because your soul was moved to seek the Divine. That some part of your vital has strong attachments to the people you left behind, is a fact, but it does not make your soul’s seeking unreal. If the presence and persistence of vital difﬁculties were to prove that a sadhak is “unﬁt” and has no chance, then only one or two in the Asram — and perhaps not even they — would survive the test. The feeling of dryness and not being “able to aspire” is also no proof. Every sadhak gets periods and even long periods of such emptiness.


Sri Aurobindo: I could point to some who are considered among the most “advanced” sadhaks and yet are not free yet altogether from the family instinct. It is therefore quite unreasonable to be upset because these reactions still linger in you. These reactions come and go, but the need of the soul is permanent, even when covered up and silent, and will always stay and reemerge.    Rubbish!


Sri Aurobindo: It will be a failure on the part of. I don’t profess to transform men against their will.    If that were your will and not merely an impulse of the vital being, nobody could stop you.


Sri Aurobindo: All who come here did not come with a conscious seeking for the Divine. It is without the mind knowing it the soul within that brought them here. In your case it was that and the relation your soul had with the Mother. Once here the force of the Divine works upon the human nature till a way is opened for the soul within to come out from the veil. The conscious seeking for the Divine does not by itself prevent the struggle with the ignorance of the nature; it is only self-giving to the Mother that can do that.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Divine Force has nothing to do with it. It is the sex and other lower forces that are attacking in order to make it impossible for the Divine Force to do its work or the Supramental to descend.  They hope to prevent it altogether or, if by some miracle it still descends, to limit its extension and prevent anything more than an individual achievement.


Sri Aurobindo: You are right. The hostile forces, their attacks, their suggestions ought now to be superannuated, out of date, out of place here in this sadhana. If somebody would realise that and fulﬁl it in his sadhana, the others might perhaps get strength to follow.  At present these things are still here because the sadhaks open themselves to them, out of habit, out of desire, out of attraction for the drama of the vital, out of fear, out of passive response and unresisting inertia.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is no real necessity for them any longer or true justiﬁcation for their presence here, — the outer world is a different matter. The sadhana could very well go on and should go on as an unfolding, a natural falling away of defects and difﬁculties, a coming of greater and greater light and power and peace and transformation.     It is not the pressure from above that creates difﬁculties.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a strong resistance to change in the lower planes and certain Forces take advantage of it to throw in vortices of disturbance and try to upset as many people as possible. The only action of the Pressure from above on these is to push them out from the atmosphere of the person touched or from the atmosphere generally. After a time they are pushed out of the atmosphere of the person and can no longer work on him except from a distance with very slight effect. When that can be done generally — so as to push them to a distance from the atmosphere of the Asram, then all this trouble will cease.   I wrote because now there is a sufﬁcient descent of Light and Power, for one not to be subject to the ordeals and tests which the Hostile Powers are permitted to put when one has only the mental, or ordinary spiritual forces on the plane of mind, to support one’s progress.


Sri Aurobindo: If you look closely, you will see that when these Forces work now it is in a perfectly irrational, instinctive way, repeating always the same movements without any intellectual or higher vital power behind them. Theirs is now an irrational mechanical method which obscures more in the lowest physical and subconscient than anything else. That means that their true justiﬁcation for being there is gone.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no question of destruction. There is only the question of their exclusion from the Asram. The things enumerated are not causes of the attacks, but they are the occasion, the weakness in the sadhaks that allows them when they could very well be dismissed. The hostile forces are there in the world to maintain the Ignorance — they were there in the sadhana because they had the right to test the sincerity of the sadhaks and their power and will to cleave to the Divine and overcome all difﬁculties.  But this is only so long as the higher Light has not descended into the physical — now it is descending, it is sufﬁciently there for anyone to receive it more and more fully, so that the way becomes smooth and open, a progressive development and not a struggle.


Sri Aurobindo:   Even if it had a place in the world where men do not seek the Divine, it has no right of place in the Asram.


Sri Aurobindo: Anything could have happened — but if the Supramental was to descend immediately, there was no need of matter or evolution — the only reasonable thing would have been to create a supramental world at once without any slow evolution of matter, of life in matter, of mind in living matter or of the spiritual or supramental in spiritualised life in the material body.  Obviously — but this world was created for evolution and not for an immediately luminous manifestation such as already exists on some other planes.  Avidya did not interfere with the earth evolution, it existed before the earth life was evolved in the form of Inconscience.  The meaning of evolution is the evolving or slow manifestation of life, mind and conscious supermind out of matter with its original Inconscience. Avidya is one thing and the intervention of the hostile forces is another.


Sri Aurobindo: It is supposed that the supramental Light and Force is to descend — if the descent is so complete that these forces are driven back to their own world, it is not likely that any efforts on their part would have any success. It is the darkness or the insufﬁcient Light that gave them their chance to intervene. If there is the victory of the true light, they cannot any longer.  The work of this Yoga and therefore the principle of the Asram life is to take the world as it is and deal with it by a transformation of which the supramental descent is not the ﬁrst but the ﬁnal process. The presence of the hostile forces is a part of the world as it is and not to deal with them at all or to act as if they were not there would have been to leave the problem unsolved and the work undone.


Sri Aurobindo: The sadhaks of the Asram are not spotless Saints or perfect born Yogis but men who carry in them their human nature and typify each in his own way what is in the world and what has to be changed. The inﬂuence of the hostile Forces was on them as on all human beings in a less or greater degree, and so long as they open themselves to that inﬂuence, it works on them as on the world, — it is only by a perfect sincerity and by a perfect opening to the Light that it can disappear. In that sense the presence of these forces is a test and the world that has to be changed being what it is and their nature being what it is, it could not be otherwise.  It is not only in the Asram but everywhere that it is like that. It is a well-known principle of all occult knowledge that there are these two elements overstanding each seeker of the Truth.


Sri Aurobindo: The hostile forces are upheld not by the Mother but by something in the sadhaks themselves which opens the doors to them by concentrated egoism, mental arrogance, vital revolt and many other things, e.g. lying, sex etc.  The hostile forces were not in the Budhi house any more than in any other and being in a house near the Asram does not save anybody from their attacks — as is shown by the case of several who lived in houses near the Asram. Even to be in the central building does not necessarily save anybody from attacks.  It depends on oneself, not on purely external things.


Sri Aurobindo: They are no more necessary if the sadhaks open to the Light that is descending — that was what I said — but if they do not open and go on exposing themselves, there will still be a possibility of their presence for some time to come.  The highest solutions cannot be brought in like that, as if one were acting in a clear ﬁeld. If the “temporary” truths of the evolution could be got rid of so easily, there would have been no need of preparation or of a trying and difﬁcult sadhana. It was necessary to deal with what had come into existence in the evolution so that the supramental descent might become possible.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no question about the possibility of a non-evolutionary manifestation — but that is quite irrelevant, for this an evolutionary manifestation and it was evidently intended to be so from the beginning.  What do you mean by an interference? The exclusive Avidya, that is the Inconscience of Matter, was the starting point, not something that came in after life had begun.  A gradual descent of the Supramental Light into what?


Sri Aurobindo: Matter being the starting point, life and mind had to evolve ﬁrst — to begin with a supramental descent would have reversed the order of the creation.  All that depends on the original statement that it might have been otherwise — if a rapid supramental creation had been intended and not an evolution. As this is in its nature an evolutionary world, there is no practical use in pressing that possibility.  As for what can be done at the present time, that is just what is being fought out. But there are two parties to the issue, the higher consciousness and the earth consciousness, the latter largely represented by the sadhaks here.


Sri Aurobindo: If the earth consciousness is ready an easy descent is quite possible, but if it resists, then there is in the nature of things difﬁculty and struggle and the Asuric forces have their chance.     I am not aware of it — not on this earth at any rate. If he was a God-man, why did he allow the interference and degeneration in himself?


Sri Aurobindo: The Bible to which you refer supposes Adam to have been innocent but ignorant in the beginning.  My statement does not bear the meaning you give it.  It has nothing to do with Darwin.   I have no inner knowledge to that effect — that it was intended to be worked out by these three forces alone.


Sri Aurobindo: If it started from the Inconscience, it could not be a perfect manifestation from the beginning.  It would have been not matter but supramental substance.  What is this word beautiful? I never used it and it is an absurd epithet.  Not at all — it is a law that grew up in the world, as I have said clearly, it seems to me, and as this Asram is part of the world, it worked here also.


Sri Aurobindo: That is false.   So much the better. I am not asking anybody to transform the Asuras — I am only asking them to reject them.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not know what you mean by this someone. The existence of a double being is a preexistent fact, it has not been organised by anyone here.  That is your ignorance. There were many others.  Your observation is incorrect.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not accept your idea of the origin of the attacks on you as correct.  It is a practical fact, not a dogma — we have to proceed from what it is, not from what we would like it to have been.   Who is this other?  There is no objection to that, but it is not so easily done — at least to my experience.


Sri Aurobindo: Those who have tried it in a rush have not had very good results.  I don’t see how my answers can do that — since you stick to your own view of the matter.  Which Sangha? I have never called this Asram the Sangha. The Asram is a ﬁeld of growth, not a manifestation of perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no possibility of shooting up suddenly to the Supermind — one has to go step by step — though it may be done more or less quickly — but not with any railway-train speed. Nor is it possible for the supramental to descend without a preparation of the lower parts.  I do not know what you mean by the transformation of the hostile forces. It is the lower nature that has to be transformed into the higher nature. The object of the Yoga is the transformation of terrestrial beings, not of the Asuras.


Sri Aurobindo: That is an ignorant and incorrect statement of our sadhana.  I do not know what you mean by a Sangha descending — it is the Supermind that has to descend.  This transformation cannot be done individually in a solitary way only — if it were possible we would not have undertaken the burden of maintaining this Asram.  It appears from all you have written that you do not accept my knowledge but have ideas and principles of sadhana of your own. My knowledge and action are based on the actual facts of the universe and the relation of the higher Truth with these as I have found them.


Sri Aurobindo: If you have a knowledge superior to mine and a greater way of action, there is no necessity for these questions.    It means that he was ignorant and not merely innocent.  Not at all. If it had been perfect, there would have been no need of evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: An unperverted manifestation is not necessarily a perfect manifestation — it may be unperverted but still imperfect.  It depends on what you mean by Avidya. They are not inconscient like Matter, but until the higher knowledge comes, they  are in the Ignorance.  The evolution I speak of is not the evolution of the Darwinian theory.


Sri Aurobindo: They did not intend to be helping forces, but they have been obliged to help in certain ways.  What is psychic innocence after all?  These are terms which one can use in different senses. There is no Avidya in the highest planes, if by Avidya you mean Ignorance.  I have not accepted it.


Sri Aurobindo: Once pain is in the world and a main part of its working it cannot be got rid of arbitrarily by ignoring it or by a simple surgical operation of cutting out its source. It is the mind with its summary conclusions that thinks the complex knot of things can be dealt with by a simple cut — in fact it is not so.  A transformed hostile being or one who wants to be transformed is no longer hostile. It is simply a power of the vital world which places itself at the service of the Divine. Hostility consists in opposing the Divine Light and ﬁghting against the transformation of the earth consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: But in any case the Mother never spoke of such transformation as the object of the sadhana or the Asrama.  There are many things you have written about which I have not said anything but which I do not endorse. It is impossible for me with my limited time to answer such a long series of questions in detail.  The Mother was not in the habit of using the word sangha, I think.


Sri Aurobindo: No doubt — but when the evolution had to express the possibilities of an emergence from the Inconscience, it was not easy to materialise a ﬂawless unfolding — since out of Inconscience came Ignorance and Ignorance is easily a ﬁeld of deviation and error.  Quite so. Many centuries before Darwin Puranic and Tantric writers spoke very explicitly of an evolution of the soul’s birth through the vegetable and animal to man.  Innocence has two meanings — sinlessness and ignorance. The psychic innocence is not an ignorant condition.


Sri Aurobindo: That does not apply to a converted Asura. The others are not driven — wherever sadhana is going on, they come to disturb it — a fact known to the Yogis and Rishis from early times.  If you mean an invasion of the consciousness by a hostile force, that happens — but it cannot succeed unless something in the sadhaka either welcomes the invasion or is somehow attracted or won over or somehow responds. As for the ordinary attack not amounting to an opening, that nobody escapes.  I said that was an incorrect statement of my sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: I did not start by ascension to the supermind — I fought out the difﬁculties of the mind and vital ﬁrst in such a way as to make it possible for not only the higher mind but the intuition and overmind to descend. The supermind comes last of all.     In that case there is no exclusive Avidya anywhere — for wherever there is Ignorance, there is also the all-knowledge involved in it.


Sri Aurobindo: Not at all. If it were then there would be no use of seeking for the descent of the supermind. A condition which one cannot retain by the inherent light and power of the Knowledge Will in it is not the supermind as I know it.  Srikrishna did not say that he was in the supermind when he spoke the Gita to Arjuna — he was in Yoga, but one can be in Yoga without being in the Supermind. So this is not a point in instance.


Sri Aurobindo: I am not aware of any state of supreme knowledge in which the separative ego or the individual becomes greater in knowledge and will than the Divine or can by his own separate power overcome the Divine Will and correct the world movement.  In the supermind there is not this division of one part of the being of God willing something and some other part ﬁghting against it. There all is viewed from an integral vision and founded on a harmony in the being — how this works out cannot be ﬁxed by the mind, which lives and acts in division. If there is no such integral supermind, then I have nothing to do here and will leave it to greater Minds to solve the problem in their own way.


Sri Aurobindo: As soon as Life was to appear, they intervened in it.  The Mother was not speaking of any Asuras called into the Asram and imposed on some human being there who was to bear the burden of his transformation. She was speaking of certain Lords of the Vital who had taken birth in earthly bodies and tried to prepare the Divine Descent, but each imagining that he alone was the chosen instrument of the Force, spoiled the work they could have done. It was outside the Asram that this originally happened — only the Mother found the same mentality still persisting and interfering with the manifestation of the Force. But it had no reference to the converted Asura who tried to come here in his subtle Form of whom I spoke — that was many years afterwards — and he did not change colour or become hostile.


Sri Aurobindo: Any other case of Asuric intervention was due to an afﬁnity in the sadhak himself or a call from him — as in the case of who was always calling Asuras into himself to convert them and although discouraged by us persisted thinking that he had himself a truer knowledge than we of what was wanted for the work. But again I have not known of any Asura who had accepted submission to the Divine becoming hostile. It is men who are under the inﬂuence of truly hostile beings who become like that.  I am quite aware of the way in which the unconverted hostile beings, who have a hostile intention, get inside — there have been plenty of cases like that, and their method besides has been known by occultists and Yogins all through the ages. As for attacks, they can attack anybody.


Sri Aurobindo: Christ and Buddha too had to bear the assaults of the Asura. But invasion in a man is only possible if there is something in him that gives a response and opens the gate.  I do not seize the signiﬁcance of the question. It has to be done in each individual — otherwise it cannot be done in the collective at all. But there can be a general descent of the Force by which each can proﬁt to have it done in him if he is ready or when he is ready.


Sri Aurobindo:   No, I said “when life began to appear”, that is before the human evolution.  No possibility either, if the supermind is once dominant.  The purpose they serve is to give a full chance to the possibilities of the Inconscience and Ignorance — for this world was meant to be a working out of these possibilities with the supramental harmonisation as its eventual outcome. The life, the work developing here in the Asram has to deal with the world problem and had therefore to meet, it could not avoid, the conﬂict with the working of the hostile Powers in the human being.


Sri Aurobindo: We did not call any. The converted one too came but did not remain, so he too does not count.  I said nothing about their not being Asuras. I said those to whom the Mother referred were not Asuras who had manifested in the Asram, but outside the Asram and before it was formed — as human beings who wanted to help and prepare the Divine Advent but spoiled their work, not by hostility, but by egoism — just as human beings with an Asuric temperament often do.  The Mother’s transforming one Asura was an incident, not an object of the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: I have not said either that it will not be done. If the Divine demands it, it will be done; if not, it won’t be; but in any case it is not an object of the Yoga.  You have missed altogether the qualifying words which I put with great care and prominent emphasis — if you don’t read carefully, you will necessarily misunderstand what I write. I said cannot be done individually ” []. No individual solitary transformation apart from the work for the earth (which means more than any individual transformation) would be either possible or useful.


Sri Aurobindo: (Also no individual human being can by his own power alone work out the transformation, nor is it the object of the Yoga to create an individual superman here and there.) The object of the Yoga is to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth, to ﬁx it there, to create a new race with the principle of the supramental consciousness governing the inner and outer individual and collective life. Therefore the existence of the Asram, whatever difﬁculties it created for ourselves or for the individual, was inevitable. The method was the preparation of the earth consciousness in the human being as represented by the members of the Asram and others (with also a certain working in the general earth consciousness) so as to make the descent of the supramental Force possible. That Force accepted by individual after individual according to their preparation would establish the supramental consciousness in the physical world and so create a nucleus for its own expansion.


Sri Aurobindo: It is quite possible that there have been periods of harmony on different levels, not supramental, which were afterwards disturbed — but those could only be a stage or resting place in a world of spiritual evolution out of the Ignorance.  I don’t see how there can be, given the starting point of the Inconscience. An unfolding of anything involved must necessarily be an evolution.  I have said nothing about that.


Sri Aurobindo: When I said “no more necessary”, I did not mean that their action could not go on — I think I expressly said that if the sadhaks persisted in opening themselves to it, it would continue. There is a difference between the action of the hostile powers and the ordinary action of the lower nature. The latter of course goes on until it is changed but there is no necessity for it to take the form of hostile attacks and upsettings; it can be treated as a machinery that has to be set right and with the aid of the higher Light and Power can be set right. There are several who were once taken by hostile attacks who have now reached the point where they can follow this method, others are approaching it — some of course have always followed and never were attacked, at least in their mind and vital. But there are still many who are very far from it and so the action of the Hostiles continues.


Sri Aurobindo:   There can be no question that it is a most desirable thing that the hostile forces should be destroyed or ejected from the Asram atmosphere and from all hold on the lower vital and physical of the sadhaks — the sooner the better. For the moment they are still able to resist and to keep up the disharmony in this part of Nature. It is only when they do so no more that the capital difﬁculty in the general sadhana will be over.


Sri Aurobindo: It is very doubtful. Our experience is that, generally, it does not succeed very well. Sometimes there is a great improvement so long as the person remains sequestered but it does not stand the test of again coming out into contact with others. Sometimes it has led to an exalted inner activity, occasionally sound but often too unsound, the sadhak in retirement losing in the latter case the power of discrimination between subjective formations and valid truths of fact ( and others). In other cases the result has been a complete failure ().


Sri Aurobindo: As a general rule we consider it safer at the very least to combine some activity of outer life with retirement if any is made.    Mother does not at all approve of the idea of complete retirement. It does not bring the control, only an illusion of a control because the untoward causes are removed for a time. It is a control established while in contact with the outward things that is alone genuine.


Sri Aurobindo: You must establish that from within by a ﬁxed resolution and practice. Too much mixing and too much talk should be avoided, but a complete retirement is not the thing. It has not had the required result with anyone so far.  No — it is very good — there are few who have that in any intensity — if there were more, it might hasten things.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true that devotion here is very insufﬁcient — but these cannot be the reasons, for psychic emotion is not discouraged by us and the integral Sadhana is not integral without bhakti. And yet it is a fact that those who come here full of bhakti lose much of it after a time — with a few exceptions. I think it is because of the prevalence of a too positive mind and the habit of criticising everything from a quite external point of view which is rife in the atmosphere.


Sri Aurobindo: They would not. All the causes you mention operate — perhaps the westernised atmosphere (even more than the education) of the present times is the strongest, but also the nature of the work to be done.     Nothing in the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: It is because their desires had only been limited by poverty and, as soon as the poverty is removed, the desires come surging up. As for the self-imposed renunciation of desire which is of primary importance in this Yoga, only a few ever think of it.     That is why the Asram is what it is.


Sri Aurobindo: Only those who are taking the Yoga seriously are making any progress.    What you have noticed is quite correct. It comes from a wrong movement which takes the rejection of asceticism as if it were a sanction for the indulgence of the body in whatever comfort it can get. The right principle is that one should be free from attachment and be able to do without things but also able to have them and use them without being bound or affected.


Sri Aurobindo: Very few have taken it in that way — the vital has chosen to turn a deaf ear to anything said in that direction and to take as a right the comforts and conveniences given. What you have noted is one of the consequences.  Your ego is small and not gigantic — not tall and vehement and aggressive like’s, but squat and inertly obstinate — not fat, completely, nor thin, but short and roundish and grey in colour.   Squat = short in stature but broad and substantial, so difﬁcult to get rid of.  Not tall and preeminent or ﬂourishingly settled in self-fullness — roundish = plenty of it all the same


Sri Aurobindo: Grey = tamasic in tendency, therefore not aggressive, but obstinate in persistence. But these are not symbols, they are the temperamental ﬁgure of the ego.    Perhaps because then you were looking for ego only in the form which people specially call egoism, i.e. pride, vanity, selﬁshness, insistence on vital satisfactions. But ego is of all kinds — and you are only just now ﬁnding it out.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing to be troubled about. You ought rather to congratulate yourself that you have become conscious. Very few people in this Asram are. They are all ego-centric and they do not realise their ego-centricity.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in their sadhana the I is always there, — sadhana, progress, everything. The remedy is to think constantly of the Divine, not of oneself, to work, act, do sadhana for the Divine, — not to consider how this or that affects personally, not claim anything, but to refer all to the Divine. It will take time to do that sincerely and thoroughly, but it is the proper way.


Sri Aurobindo: But who has got rid of ego in this Asram? To get rid of ego is as difﬁcult as to make a complete surrender.  No. Those who come here have an aspiration and a possibility; something in their psychic being pushes and if they follow it, they will arrive; but that is not conversion. Conversion is a deﬁnite turning of the being away from lower things towards the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: It is certainly the psychic being turning the nature deﬁnitively Godwards, but the transformation has still to be worked out in the nature.   No. Aspiration can lead hereafter to conversion; but aspiration is not conversion.  Mother spoke of three different things: conversion, the turning of the soul decisively towards the Divine, — inner realisation of the Divine, — transformation of the nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The ﬁrst two can happen swiftly and suddenly and once for all, the third always takes time and cannot be done at one stroke, in a moment. One may become aware of a rapid change in this or that detail of the transformation, but even this is a rapid result of a long working.  I certainly gave you no such message or promise as you describe.  You may have picked up something that was in my atmosphere, but, once again, your mental transcription of it was wrong — and turned it into something quite different from the truth. It may or may not be, although no promise of the kind can be made at the present moment, that you or other sadhakas here or all will be brought through in the end by the divine grace in spite of the very serious difﬁculties created by your and their external being and the obstinate obscurities and resistance in its crooked human nature.


Sri Aurobindo: But in any case, to say that “you need not fulﬁl any condition” is a ﬂagrant error. It is the old mischievous suggestion of an inert passivity to all inﬂuences as the true surrender and, if accepted, would legitimate every wrong movement of the nature. First, certain conditions have to be fulﬁlled; afterwards, there will be room for the divine grace to act.    It depends on the Supramental and on the Divine’s will in the sadhak.


Sri Aurobindo: All that can be said is that to conquer disease and death is part of the total physical perfection. But as to other matters nothing can be said as yet.    Yes. Only it does not mean that anybody here is debarred from the supramental consciousness or the physical transformation — if he wants it.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not a question of possibility, but of the need and aspiration in the nature.  When you have got out of this attack, you will yourself recognise the emptiness of such a question. You have the Yogic capacity in you as your experiences show and it is not by going away from here that you will develop it.  I do not understand why it should be insulting to speak always of the cosmic consciousness and the necessity of its settling down. I mean by it the living in the sense of the cosmic Self and the experience of the cosmic forces.


Sri Aurobindo: A certain number here have contact with that, very few have it as a constant realisation, none have it perfected and ﬁxed in all their being. As for going above it there are grades in the cosmic consciousness and one can go above the cosmic mental and rise as far as the overmind. But that also is still the cosmic consciousness.    Why shouldn’t I ask?


Sri Aurobindo: If you mean the Vedantic realisation, several have had it. Bhakti realisation also. If I were to publish the letters on sadhana experiences that have come to me, people would marvel and think that the Asram was packed full of great Yogis! Those who know something about Yoga would not mind about the dark periods, eclipses, hostile attacks, despairings, falls, for they know that these things happen to Yogis. Even the failures would have become Gurus, if I had allowed it, with circles of Shishyas!


Sri Aurobindo: did become one. of course. But all that does not count here, because what is a full realisation outside, is here only a faint beginning of siddhi. Here the test is transformation of the nature, psychic, spiritual, ﬁnally supramental. That and nothing else is what makes it so difﬁcult.


Sri Aurobindo:   I don’t suppose the later stages of the transformation including the physical would be possible elsewhere. In fact in those outside none of the three transformations seems to have begun. They are all preparing. Here there are at least a few who have started one or two of them.


Sri Aurobindo: Only that does not show outside. The physical or external alone shows outside.    The quality of the sadhaks is so low? I should say there is a considerable amount of ability and capacity in the Asram.


Sri Aurobindo: Only the standard demanded is higher than outside even in spiritual matters. There are half a dozen people here perhaps who live in the Brahman consciousness — outside they would make a big noise and be considered as great Yogis — here their condition is not known and in the Yoga it is regarded not as siddhi but only as a beginning.    Eternal Jehovah! you don’t even know what Brahman is!


Sri Aurobindo: You will next be asking me what Yoga is or what life is or what body is or what mind is or what sadhana is! No, sir, I am not proposing to teach an infant class the A-B-C of the elementary conceptions which are the basis of Yoga. There is too who doesn’t know what consciousness is, even!  Brahman, sir, is the name given by Indian philosophy since the beginning of time to the one Reality eternal and inﬁnite which is the Self, the Divine, the All, the more than All, which would remain even if you and everybody and everything else in existence or imagining itself to be in existence vanished into blazes — even if this whole universe disappeared, Brahman would be safely there and nothing whatever lost. In fact, sir, you are Brahman and you are only pretending to be; when  is translating’s poetry into Bengali, it is really Brahman translating Brahman’s Brahman into Brahman.


Sri Aurobindo: When asks me what consciousness is, it is really Brahman asking Brahman what Brahman is! There, sir, I hope you are satisﬁed now.  To be less drastic and refrain from making your head reel till it goes off your shoulders, I may say that a realisation of the Self is the beginning of Brahman realisation; — the Brahman consciousness — the Self in all and all in the Self etc. It is the basis of the spiritual realisation and therefore of the spiritual transformation; but one has to see it in all sorts of aspects and applications ﬁrst and that I refuse to go into. If you want to know you have to read the.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a necessary condition.  Of course not, this realisation of the Self as all and the Divine as all is only the ﬁrst step.  The next step is to get into contact with the higher planes above spiritual mind — for as soon as one gets into the spiritual Mind or Higher Mind, this realisation is possible.  If it is thoroughly established, it is one of peace, freedom, wideness, in the inner being.  All these things you mention become incidents in the external being, on the surface — but the inner being remains untouched by them.


Sri Aurobindo: No, sir. But the inner being is not touched.  It may be covered up in a way — so long as it is not established in all parts of the being. The old Yogis did not consider that necessary, because they wanted to walk off, not to change the being.


Sri Aurobindo: I want to effect the transformation of the whole nature (not only of the physical) — that’s why.  , .  How can you have a practical knowledge of it by knowing who has it? You might just as well expect to have a practical knowledge of high mathematics by knowing that Einstein is a great mathematician.


Sri Aurobindo: Queer ideas you have!  ???????   is an advanced sadhak? This word “advanced” has no sense, it merely feeds the egoism of those who apply it to themselves.


Sri Aurobindo: The Mother never speaks of advanced sadhaks — it is the sadhaks themselves who have invented the phrase. Whenever they used it in their letters to me, I have thrown ridicule on the phrase and said I have no knowledge of there being two classes in the Asram, one of advanced sadhaks and the other of non-advanced sadhaks. So the question about does not arise. If a sadhak, whoever he may be, speaks or acts out of anger, rajasic violence or any other unYogic impulse, his speech or action is contrary to the spirit of the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, you should learn not to be perturbed by talk of this kind from whomsoever it proceeds; I think I have already tried to put you on your guard against listening to “advanced sadhaks” or taking these pronouncements of theirs as authoritative statements of the aims and conditions of the Yoga. Why this claim to be an advanced sadhak and what is the sense of it? it resolves itself into an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justiﬁed so long as there the egoism and the need of assertion — accompanied, as it always is, by a weakness and turbid imperfection which belie the claim of living in a superior consciousness to the “unadvanced” sadhaks. It is time these crudities disappeared from the Asram atmosphere.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, the talk about advanced sadhaks is a thing I have always discouraged — but people go on because that appeals to the vital ego.    Advanced indeed! Pshaw!


Sri Aurobindo: Because one is 3 inches ahead of another, you must make classes of advanced and non-advanced?  Advanced has the same pufﬁng egoistic resonance as “great” or “big”. It leads to all sorts of stupidities — rajasic selfappreciating egoism in some, tamasic self-depreciating egoism in others, round-eyed wonderings why X, an advanced sadhak, one 3 inches ahead of Y, should stumble, tumble or fumble while Y, 3 inches behind X, still plods heavily and steadily on, etc. etc. Why, sir, the very idea in X that he is an advanced sadhak (like the Pharisee, “I thank thee, O Lord, that I am not as other unadvanced disciples”,) would be enough to make him fumble, stumble and tumble. So no more of that, sir, no more of that.


Sri Aurobindo: To act according to a standard of Truth or a rule or law of action (dharma) or in obedience to a superior authority or to the highest principles discovered by the reason and intelligent will and not according to one’s own fancy, vital impulses and desires. In Yoga obedience to the Guru or to the Divine and the law of the Truth as declared by the Guru is the foundation of discipline.   It is not the discipline of Yoga, but the discipline of an organisation, the exterior material discipline one has to accept if one is to be part of an organisation.   To live and act under control or according to a standard of what is right — not to allow the vital or the physical to do whatever they like and not to let the mind run about according to its fancy without truth or order. Also to obey those who ought to be obeyed.


Sri Aurobindo: In the outside world there is a mental and social control and also the absorption in other things. Here you are left alone with your own consciousness and have to replace the mental and outward control by an inner self-control of the spirit.   If there was a perception of the difﬁculties in the adhar, it ought to have moved you to a more strenuous effort, a deeper call on the help and Grace. To indulge in a bout of gross material self-indulgence was a quite imbecile solution. It is true that the Grace is there for all who aspire and, however one may stumble, if there is a sincere repentance and a will to atone, there need be no cause for despair.


Sri Aurobindo: But I must remind you that that is only the individual aspect. There is here an Asram, a group of seekers of the Divine Truth with a collective existence and aim; a work is being done for the Divine against great difﬁculties and in the midst of a hostile and censorious world which is only too glad of any pretext for assailing it and, if possible, injuring its fair fame and success. A conduct like this deals a wound to the work and the collective effort towards a higher life. Your proposed escape from your own fall by suicide would not have been a solution and would only do a still greater injury to the divine Work which is, as much as individual realisation, our spiritual endeavour.  I trust that you are sincere in saying that these things are ﬁnished for ever.


Sri Aurobindo: If you had not confessed, the Mother would have been obliged to deal severely with you; but as you have confessed, this lapse may be considered as annulled, provided it is never repeated. A greater frankness and sincerity in laying yourself open to the Mother will help you avoid such aberrations in future.  There is no reason why you should not succeed in your sadhana if, having seen the defects of your lower nature, you take a ﬁrm resolve in future and keep it to be more strict with yourself, more trustful in the Divine Grace, more sincerely open to the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: Rules like these are intended to help the vital and physical to come under the discipline of sadhana and not get dispersed in fancies, impulses, self-indulgences; but they must be done simply, not with any sense of superiority or ascetic pride, but as a mere matter of course. It is true also that they can be made the occasion of a too great mental rigidity — as if they were things of supreme importance and not only a means. Put in their right place and done in the right spirit, they can be very helpful for their purpose.    I have read your letter.


Sri Aurobindo: What you write is true; has said these things in order to help you and put you in the right way. A certain inner and outer discipline is necessary in order that one may grow into the spirit of the Yoga and the natural impulses of the vital cannot be a guide to action there. One has to perceive what one should or should not do and impose this discipline on oneself; for that’s advice and guidance can be of great help to you.   It is precisely that — one immediately goes out of the protection.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, quite right.  It is a deﬁciency of psychic perception and spiritual discrimination that makes people speak like that and ignore the importance of obedience. It is the mind wanting to follow its own way of thinking and the vital seeking freedom for its desires which argue in this manner. If you do not follow the rules laid down by the spiritual guide or obey one who is leading you to the Divine, then what or whom are you to follow? Only the ideas of the individual mind and the desires of the vital: but these things never lead to siddhi in Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: The rules are laid down in order to guard against certain inﬂuences and their dangers and to keep a right atmosphere in the Asram favourable to spiritual development; the obedience is necessary so as to get away from one’s own mind and vital and learn to follow the Truth.     All your comments seem to rise from the fact that you object to discipline, rule and order. That seems to be the general mind of the Asram.


Sri Aurobindo: Each must be allowed to follow his own inclination, convenience or “common sense”. Those who insist on stemming the chaos of vital indiscipline and disorder are martinets like or capricious and tyrannical like the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: What most want is that things should be done according to their desire without check or reference. The talk of perfection is humbug. Perfection does not consist in everybody being a law to himself. Perfection comes by renunciation of desires and surrender to a higher Will.  The Asram, not being a public institution, has no prospectus or ﬁxed set of rules.


Sri Aurobindo: It is directed by the Mother according to what she sees to be necessary for each individual and for the work as a whole.    Tell him that there are no public rules and regulations for the Asram, as it is not a public institution. Only some of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples who are considered ready or called to the Asram life are admitted. At present however no admissions are being made, as the accommodation capacity of the Asram is exhausted and there is no possibility just now of expanding it.


Sri Aurobindo:   What seems to me of more importance is to try to explain how things are worked out here. Indeed very few are the people who understand it and still fewer those who realise it.  There has never been, at any time, a mental plan, a ﬁxed programme or an organisation decided beforehand.


Sri Aurobindo: The whole thing has taken birth, grown and developed as a living being by a movement of consciousness (Chit-tapas) constantly maintained, increased and fortiﬁed. As the Conscious Force descends in matter and radiates, it seeks for ﬁt instruments to express and manifest it. It goes without saying that the more the instrument is open, receptive and plastic, the better are the results. The two obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth and harmonious working in and through the sadhaks are: (1) the preconceived ideas and mental constructions which block the way to the inﬂuence and the working of the conscious force; (2) the preferences and impulses of the vital which distort and falsify the expression.  Both these things are the natural output of the ego.


Sri Aurobindo: Without the interference of these two elements my physical intervention would not be necessary.  You are quite right when you do not believe in “Mother likes”, “Mother dislikes”: it is quite a childish interpretation.  There is a clear precise perception of the Force and the Consciousness at work, and whenever this Force gets distorted or the Consciousness is obscured in its action, I have to interfere and rectify the movement. In most cases things are mixed up and there again I have to intervene to separate the distorted transcription from the pure one.  Otherwise a great freedom of action is left to all, because the Conscious Force can express itself in innumerable ways and for the perfection and integrality of the manifestation no ways are to be excluded; a trial is very often given before the selection is made.


Sri Aurobindo: The members of the Asram. For the others you can submit the names — long resident visitors in the Asram itself would usually have to see the rules e.g..  It is a little difﬁcult from the wider spiritual outlook to answer your question in the way you want and every mental being wants, with a trenchant “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not”, especially when the “thou” is meant to cover “all”. For while there is an identity of essential aim, while there are general broad lines of endeavour, yet there is not in detail one common set of rules in inner things that can apply to all seekers.


Sri Aurobindo: You ask “Is such and such a thing harmful?” But what is harmful to one may be helpful to another, — what is helpful at a certain stage may cease to be helpful at another, — what is harmful under certain conditions is helpful under other conditions, — what is done in a certain spirit may be disastrous, the same thing done in a quite different spirit would be innocuous or even beneﬁcial. I asked the Mother indeed what she would say to your question about pleasures and social expansiveness (put as a general question) and she answered, “Impossible to say like that; it depends on the spirit in which it is done.” So there are so many things: the spirit, the circumstances, the person, the need and cast of the nature, the stage. That is why it is said so often that the Guru must deal with each disciple according to his separate nature and accordingly guide his sadhana; even if it is the same line of sadhana for all, yet at every point for each it differs.


Sri Aurobindo: That also is the reason why we say the Divine’s way cannot be understood by the mind, — because the mind acts according to hard and fast rules and standards, while the spirit sees the truth of all and the truth of each and acts variously according to its own comprehensive and complex vision. That also is why we say that no one can understand by his personal mental judgment the Mother’s actions and reasons for action; it can only be understood by entering into the larger consciousness from which she sees things and acts upon them. That is bafﬂing to the mind because it loses its small measures, but it is the truth of the matter.  To come down to hard facts and it may make the dictum a little more comprehensible. You speak of retirement and you say that if it is good why not impose it — you couple together,, ,,, !


Sri Aurobindo: Well, take that last name,, and add to it for he also “retired” and went headlong for an intense and solitary sadhana. and proﬁted by their seclusion, what happened to and? We forbade to retire, — he was always wanting to give up work, withdraw from all intercourse and spend all his time in meditation; but he did it as much as he could — result, collapse.   never asked permission and I cannot say what his retirement was like, but I hear he boasted that by his intense sadhana he had conquered sex not only for himself but all the sadhaks! He had to leave the Asram owing to his unconquerable attachment to his wife and child and he is there living the family life and has produced another child — what a success for retirement.


Sri Aurobindo: Where the retirement is helpful and ﬁts the mind or the nature, we approve it, but in the face of these results how can you expect us to follow what the mind calls a consistent course and impose it as the right thing on everybody? You have spoken of your singing. You know well that we approve of it and I have constantly stressed its necessity for you as well as that of your poetry. But the Mother absolutely forbade’s singing? To music for some again she is indifferent or discourages it, for others she approves as for , and others.


Sri Aurobindo: For some time she encouraged the concerts, afterwards she stopped them. You drew from the prohibition to and the stopping of the concerts that Mother did not like music or did not like Indian music or considered music bad for sadhana and all sorts of strange mental reasons like that. Mother prohibited because while music was good for you, it was spiritually poison to — the moment he began to think of it and of audiences, all the vulgarity and unspirituality in his nature rose to the surface. You can see what he is doing with it now! So again with the concerts — though in a different way — she stopped them because she had seen that wrong forces were coming into their atmosphere which had nothing to do with the music in itself; her motives were not mental.


Sri Aurobindo: It was for similar reasons that she drew back from big public displays like Udayshankar’s.  On the other hand she favoured and herself planned the exhibition of paintings at the Town Hall. She was not eager for you to have your big audiences for your singing because she found the atmosphere full of mixed forces and found too you had afterwards usually a depression; but she has always approved of your music in itself done privately or before a small audience. If you consider then, you will see that here there is no mental rule, but in each case the guidance is determined by spiritual reasons which are of a ﬂexible character and look only at what in each case are the spiritual conditions, results, possibilities. There is no other consideration, no rule.


Sri Aurobindo: Music, painting, poetry and many other activities which are of the mind and vital can be used as part of spiritual development or of the work and for a spiritual purpose — “it depends on the spirit in which they are done.”  That being established, that these things depend on the spirit, the nature of the person, its needs, the conditions and circumstances, I will come to your special question about pleasure and especially the pleasure in society of an expansive vital nature.   P.S. Of course there is a category of things that have to be eschewed altogether and of things that have to be followed by all, but I am speaking of the large number that do not fall into the two categories.


Sri Aurobindo:   No, there is no obligation of gloom, harshness, austerity or lonely grandeur in this Yoga. If I am living in my room, it is not out of a passion for solitude, and it would be ridiculous to put forward this purely external circumstance — or’s withdrawnness which is a personal necessity of his sadhana — as if it were the obligatory sign of a high advance in the Yoga or solitude the aim; these are simply incidents which none is called on to imitate. So you need not be anxious; solitude is not demanded of you, for an ascetic dryness of isolated loneliness cannot be your spiritual destiny since it is not consonant with your swabhava which is made for joy, largeness, expansion, a comprehensive movement of the life-force.


Sri Aurobindo: And, as for stern gravity and the majesty of a speechless and smileless face, your transformation into that would be terrifying to think of! I may remind you that the Mother and myself always recommended to you a sunlit and cheerful progress as the best; if we were inclined to complain of anything in you — which we are not, knowing that one does not choose one’s difﬁculties, — it would not be that you have too much gaiety but that you are not always as gay and cheerful as we would like you to be! The storm, cloud, difﬁculty, suffering come, but they are no part of the Yogic idea; they belong to the Nature that is now, not to the divine Nature that is to be.  No such sanction or privilege has been obtained by anybody from the Mother.  Certainly not, that is strictly forbidden.


Sri Aurobindo: When they do it outside in the town, they are taking a liberty — no liberty has been granted to them.   No, they don’t do the right thing — if they know of the rule of the Asram.  Not in the least — any such claim is obvious bunkum.


Sri Aurobindo: That raises the general question of disregard of the rules of the Asram or of the standards of action in Yoga. As such disregard is widespread and common among the sadhaks, if dealt with radically, it could entail a Pride’s purge or Communist puriﬁcation which would leave in the Asram only a greatly reduced number of inmates. Certain things cannot be tolerated especially if done in the Asram. Apart from that we have been waiting for something to develop inwardly in individual sadhaks which will bring about a change. If it doesn’t — well, I suppose a time will come or is coming.


Sri Aurobindo: I am not aware that there are any Buddhas in the Asram.  The right attitude is to keep strictly oneself to the truth and to afﬁrm it quietly whenever it is necessary to do so.  That too is rubbish. Etiquette cannot take precedence over a rule of life proper to the Asram or the Yoga.  It is supposed that all who come here come for the spiritual life and aspire to realise the Divine Truth, leaving all else behind them.


Sri Aurobindo: If you have come here for the spiritual life, you have nothing to do with what others may be doing in the political ﬁeld which you have left behind you. It is no part of your dharma.    The rule for permanent residents of the Asram is that they must abstain from political activities altogether. Although this rule is not rigidly imposed on disciples at a distance, yet it is expected that they should not do anything which would compromise the Asram, and, as a matter of fact, no disciple of Sri Aurobindo is at present participating in political agitation.


Sri Aurobindo: It is also the rule for permanent members of the Asram that they should put their property at the disposal of the Mother, and they do not spend anything of it for other purposes except with the sanction previously given by her. But as you are not a permanent member, this rule does not apply to you, and the Mother cannot undertake to direct you as to the persons and the purposes to which you should give or refuse ﬁnancial assistance.  As a rule we never interfere in the personal lives or affairs of others than whole-time sadhaks who have given up everything else for the spiritual life.  I would suggest that the difﬁculty about giving shelter to Congressmen arises only when there is an arrival of a batch of Salt Law Satyagrahis sent to break the Law. If such a batch arrives at your place and you give them shelter, then, as the law is now being administered, you run the risk of going to jail.