Sri Aurobindo: But in this Yoga we become aware not only of this taking up but of a pouring down of the powers of the higher Self, so that there comes in the possibility of a descent of the Supramental Self and nature to dominate and change our present nature and turn it from nature of Ignorance into nature of Truth-Knowledge (and through the supramental into nature of Ananda) — this is the third or supramental transformation.  It does not always go in this order, for with many the spiritual descent begins ﬁrst in an imperfect way before the psychic is in front and in charge, but the psychic development has to be attained before a perfect and unhampered spiritual descent can take place, and the last or supramental change is impossible so long as the two ﬁrst have not become full and complete. That’s the whole matter, put as brieﬂy as possible.


Sri Aurobindo: No need of logic to see that — a little common sense is sufﬁcient.   If anyone, no matter who he be, thinks that this world of ignorance, limitation and suffering is a plane of eternal and inﬁnite Light, Power and Ananda, infallible Will and Power, what can he be but a self-deceiving fool or lunatic? And where then would be the need of bringing down the said Light, Power etc. from the higher planes, if it was already gambolling about all over this blessed earth and its absurd troop of human-animal beings?  But perhaps you are of the opinion of Ramana Maharshi, “The Divine is here, how can he descend from anywhere?”


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine may be here, but if he has covered here his Light with darkness of Ignorance and his Ananda with suffering, that, I should think, makes a big difference to the plane and, even if one enters into that sealed Light etc., it makes a difference to the Consciousness but very little to the Energy at work in this plane which remains of a dark or mixed character.  I have not read Ramdas’s writings nor am I at all acquainted with his personality or what may be the level of his experience.  The words you quote from him could be expressions either of a simple faith or of a pantheistic experience; evidently if they are used or intended to establish the thesis that the Divine is everywhere and is all and therefore all is good, being Divine, they are very insufﬁcient for that purpose. But as an experience, it is a very common thing to have this feeling or realisation in the Vedantic sadhana — in fact without it there would be no Vedantic sadhana. I have had it myself on various levels of consciousness and in numerous forms and I have met scores of people who have had it very genuinely — not as an intellectual theory or perception, but as a spiritual reality which was too concrete for them to deny whatever paradoxes it may entail for the ordinary intelligence.


Sri Aurobindo: Of course it does not mean that all here is good or that in the estimation of values a brothel is as good as an Asram, but it does mean that all are part of one manifestation and that in the inner heart of the harlot as in the inner heart of the sage or saint there is the Divine. Again his experience is that there is one Force working in the world both in its good and in its evil — one Cosmic Force; it works both in the success (or failure) of the Asram and in the success (or failure) of the brothel. Things are done in this world by the use of the force, although the use made is according to the nature of the user, one uses it for the works of light, another for the works of Darkness, yet another for a mixture. I don’t think any Vedantin (except perhaps some modernised ones) would maintain that all is good here — the orthodox Vedantic idea is that all is here an inextricable mixture of good and evil, a play of the Ignorance and therefore a play of the dualities. The Christian missionaries, I suppose, hold that all that God does is morally good, so they are shocked by the Taoist priests aiding the work of the brothel by their rites.


Sri Aurobindo: But do not the Christian priests invoke the aid of God for the destruction of men in battle and did not some of them sing Te Deums over a victory won by the massacre of men and the starvation of women and children? The Taoist who believes only in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil, but that the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here works through the dualities, therefore through both good and evil, joy and suffering, has a thesis which at least accounts for the double fact of the experience of the Supreme which is All Light, All Bliss and All Beauty and a world of mixed light and darkness, joy and suffering, what is fair and what is ugly. He says that the dualities come by a separative Ignorance and so long as you accept this separative Ignorance, you cannot get rid of that, but it is possible to draw back from it in experience and to have the realisation of the Divine in all and the Divine everywhere and then you begin to realise the Light, Bliss and Beauty behind all and this is the one thing to do. Also you begin to realise the one Force and you can use it or let it use you for the growth of the Light in you and others — no longer for the satisfaction of the ego and for the works of the ignorance and darkness.  As to the dilemma about the cruelty of things, I do not know what answer Ramdas would give.


Sri Aurobindo: One answer might be that the Divine within is felt through the psychic being and the nature of the psychic being is that of the divine light, harmony, love, but it is covered by the mental and separative vital ego from which strife, hate, cruelty naturally come. It is therefore natural to feel in the kindness the touch of the Divine, while the cruelty is felt as a disguise or perversion in Nature, although that would not prevent the man who has the realisation from feeling and meeting the Divine behind the disguise. I have known even instances in which the perception of the Divine in all accompanied by an intense experience of universal love or a wide experience of an inner harmony had an extraordinary effect in making all around kind and helpful, even the most coarse and hard and cruel. Perhaps it is some such experience which is at the base of Ramdas’s statement about the kindness. As for the Divine working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the confused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see what each step, happy or unhappy, meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth of his spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Naturally this comes fully as the realisation progresses; before that he had to walk by faith and may have often felt his faith fail and yielded to grief, doubt and despair for a time.  As for my writings, I don’t know if there is any that would clear up the difﬁculty. You would ﬁnd mostly the statement of the Vedantic experience, for it is that through which I passed and, though now I have passed to something beyond, it seems to me the most thorough-going and radical preparation for whatever is Beyond, though I do not say that it is indispensable to pass through it. But whatever the solution, it seems to me that the Vedantin is right in insisting that one must, to arrive at it, admit the two facts, the prevalence of evil and suffering here and the experience of that which is free from these things — and it is only by the progressive experience that one can get a solution — whether through reconciliation, a conquering descent or an escape. If we start from the basis taken as an axiom that the prevalence of suffering and evil in the present and in the hard, outward fact of things, disproves of itself all that has been experienced by sages and mystics of the other side, the realisable Divine, then no solution seems possible.


Sri Aurobindo: What he speaks is all purely mental — if he has any glimpses of realisation, they are in the mind only.    I don’t think there is much either in this man himself or in his teachings. It does not seem to me that he is a yogi in the true sense of the word but rather a man with some intellectual ability who is posing as a spiritual teacher. His photograph gives an impression of much pretension and vanity and an impression also of much falsity in the character.


Sri Aurobindo: As for what he teaches, it does not hang together. If all books are worthless, why did he write a book and one of this kind telling people what they should do, what they should not do and if all teachers are unhelpful, why does he take the posture of a teacher since according to his own statement that cannot be helpful to anybody? Krishnamurti was, before he broke away on his own, certainly the disciple of two Gurus, Leadbeater and Annie Besant: if he has denounced Mrs. Besant, Krishnaprem is quite entitled to denounce him as a.  You are quite right. She was an occultist, not a spiritual personality.


Sri Aurobindo: What spiritual teachings she gave, seemed to be based on knowledge, not on realisation. Her attitude was Tibetan Buddhistic. She did not believe in God, but in Nirvana, miraculous powers and the Mahatmas.  This is a photograph of Madame David-Neel taken long ago when she was much younger. Her story about her travels is perfectly authentic.


Sri Aurobindo: She came here once to Pondicherry and saw me on her way to the North — that was before the Mother came here. Mother knew her very well in Paris. Even before she went to Tibet she was a Buddhist and deeply versed in Buddhism. As to the authenticity of all in this book (magic, mysticism) Mother cannot say as she has not read it. But she is not a woman with any imagination or invention and has a rather hard positive mind, — if there are any “travellers’ tales” she is more likely to have heard them than invented them.


Sri Aurobindo: When I knew him the Gaekwar was a free-thinker without any religion; I don’t know if he has altered his views since. Formally, he is of course a Hindu.    One can’t expect anything more than catchwords and the most common ones from the Gaekwar on such subjects and occasions — in fact the whole affair of this Conference is likely to be little else. There are people who have a faith in words and think that with them they can sweep back the realities of life and embody effectively the realities of spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: As for Gandhi, why should you suppose that I am so tender for the faith of the Mahatma? I do not call it faith at all, but a rigid mental belief, and what he terms soul-force is only a strong vital will which has taken a religious turn. That, of course, can be a tremendous force for action, but unfortunately Gandhi spoils it by his ambition to be a man of reason, while in fact he has no reason in him at all, never was reasonable at any moment in his life and, I suppose, never will be. What he has in its place is a remarkable type of unintentionally sophistic logic. Well, what this reason, this amazingly, precisely unreliable logic brings about is that nobody is ever sure and, I don’t think, he is himself really sure what he will do next.


Sri Aurobindo: He has not only two minds, but three or four minds, and all depends on which will turn up topmost at a particular moment and how it will combine with the others.  There would be no harm in that, on the contrary there might be an advantage if there were a central Light somewhere choosing for him and shaping the decision to the need of the action. He thinks there is and calls it God — but it has always seemed to me that it is his own mind that decides and most of the time decides wrongly. Anyhow I cannot imagine Lenin or Mustapha Kemal not knowing their own minds or acting in this way — even their strategic retreats were steps towards an end clearly conceived and executed. But whatever it be, it is all mind-action and vitalforce in Gandhi.


Sri Aurobindo: So why should he be taken as an example of the defeat of the Divine or of a spiritual Power? I quite allow that there has been something behind Gandhi greater than himself and you can call it the Divine or a Cosmic Force which has used him, but then there is that behind everybody who is used as an instrument for world ends, — behind Kemal and Lenin also, — so that is not germane to the matter.    I don’t think it was the voice of God that raged and thundered till Gandhi decided to starve himself on to the danger line — it looks as if it were the other fellow.


Sri Aurobindo: One can only hope that he will scrape through somehow and that the doctors are wrong as they most often are when they opine in the plural; but the last experiment was not encouraging. And as this time there seems to be no reason whatever for this inspired procedure and no practical or practicable object set before it, there is no tangible means either of bringing it to a timely close. What an extraordinary ignorance of spiritual things to take any “inner” shout for the command of the Supreme!


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t think he would accept the Truth that is here. His mind is too rigid for it.    Gandhi has his own work, his own ideal and dharma — how can he open himself to receive anything from here?


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t see how I can see him — the time has not come when I can depart from my rule.   It would have meant a very serious and quite unproﬁtable and unnecessary disturbance.    That is all nonsense. Gandhi’s decision not to come here was made before the notice was put on the board.


Sri Aurobindo: My decision to issue the notice and his decision not to come may have coincided — but how could he know it except by telepathy?  I suppose the disappointment was nothing more than a phrase — meaning, I would so much have liked to see what kind of a person you are. If I have read his last letter to Govindbhai aright, his request was dictated by curiosity rather than anything else.  If anybody expected him to come here seeking for Truth, it was absurd — he has his own ﬁxed way of seeing things and is not likely to change it.


Sri Aurobindo: Gandhi wrote to Govindbhai and from his letter it seemed as if he were still expecting to see the Mother and the Asram or at least expecting an answer. In view of this persistence we sent Govindbhai to explain to him that it was impossible for the Mother to receive his visit.     Mosquitoes do have strong preferences (and dislikes) in the matter of blood.


Sri Aurobindo: One person is sleeping in a room, no mosquitoes — another enters, immediately there is a cloud of mosquitoes.  Also as between two persons in a room, they will swarm round one and leave the other.  I don’t think the Ahimsa principle works like that with Governments — after all Gandhi is trying to do to them or their interests immense harm and you can’t expect his mere nonviolence to make them love him for that or leave him alone. On the other hand Ahimsa does work (though not invariably) with animals — if you don’t kill them, they don’t as a rule go out of their way to kill you — unless they are frightened or mad or otherwise abnormal or unless it is their rule to kill. I don’t know what effect it can have on mosquitoes.


Sri Aurobindo: All-love is a different matter — it has sometimes a powerful effect, very powerful, in conciliating automatically men, animals, Nature itself. The only beings who do not respond are the Asuras and Rakshasas.    It seems to be very foolish, these fasts — as if they could alter anything at all. A fast can at most affect one’s own condition, but how can it “atone” for the doings of others or change their nature?


Sri Aurobindo:   If it is meant by the statement that the form of religion is something permanent and unchangeable, then that cannot be accepted. But if religion here means one’s way of communion with the Divine, then it is true that that is something belonging to the inner being and cannot be changed like a house or a cloak for the sake of some personal, social or worldly convenience.  If a change is to be made, it can only be for an inner spiritual reason, because of some development from within. No one can be bound to any form of religion or any particular creed or system, but if he changes the one he has accepted for another, for external reasons, that means he has inwardly no religion at all and both his old and his new religion are only an empty formula.


Sri Aurobindo: At bottom that is, I suppose, what the statement drives at. Preference for a different approach to the Truth or the desire of inner spiritual self-expression are not the motives of the recommendation of change to which objection is made by the Mahatma here; the object proposed is an enhancement of social status and consideration which is no more a spiritual motive than conversion for the sake of money or marriage. If a man has no religion in himself, he can change his credal profession for any motive; if he has, he cannot; he can only change it in response to an inner spiritual need. If a man has a bhakti for the Divine in the form of Krishna, he can’t very well say “I will swap Krishna for Christ so that I may become socially respectable.”


Sri Aurobindo: I do not know what Mahatma Gandhi means by complete realisation. If he means a realisation with nothing more to realise, no farther development possible, then I agree — I have myself spoken of farther divine progression, an inﬁnite development. But the question is not that; the question is whether the Ignorance can be transcended, whether a complete essential realisation turning the consciousness from darkness to light, from an instrument of the Ignorance seeking for Knowledge into an instrument or rather a manifestation of Knowledge proceeding to greater Knowledge, Light enlarging, heightening into greater Light, is or is not possible. My view is that this conversion is not only possible, but inevitable in the spiritual evolution of the being here. The embodiment of life has nothing to do with it.


Sri Aurobindo: This embodiment is not of life, but of consciousness and its energy, of which life is only one phase or force. As life has developed mind, and the embodiment has modiﬁed itself to suit this development (mind is precisely the main instrument of ignorance seeking for knowledge), so mind can develop supermind which is in its nature knowledge not seeking for itself, but manifesting itself by its own automatic power, and the embodiment can again modify itself or be modiﬁed from above so as to suit this development.  Faith is a necessary means for arriving at realisation because we are ignorant and do not yet know that which we are seeking to realise; faith is indeed knowledge giving the ignorance an intimation of itself previous to its own manifestation, it is the gleam sent before by the yet unrisen Sun. When the Sun shall rise there will be no longer any need of the gleam. The supramental knowledge supports itself, it does not need to be supported by faith; it lives by its own certitude.


Sri Aurobindo: You may say that farther progression, farther development will need faith. No, for the farther development will proceed on a basis of knowledge, not of Ignorance. We shall walk in the light of knowledge towards its own wider vistas of self-fulﬁlment.    I would prefer to avoid all public controversy especially if it touches in the least on politics.


Sri Aurobindo: Gandhi’s theories are like other mental theories built on a basis of one-sided reasoning and claiming for a limited truth (that of non-violence and of passive resistance) a universality which it cannot have. Such theories will always exist so long as the mind is the main instrument of human truth seeking. To spend energy trying to destroy such theories is of little use; if destroyed they are replaced by others equally limited and partial.  As for imperialism, that is no new thing — it is as old as the human vital; there was never a time in known human history when it was not in existence. To get rid of it means to change human nature or at least to curb it by a superior power.


Sri Aurobindo: Our work is not to ﬁght these things but to bring down a higher nature and a Truth-creation which will make spiritual Light and Power the chief force in terrestrial existence.     The view taken by the Mahatma in these matters is Christian rather than Hindu — for the Christian self-abasement, humility, the acceptance of a low status to serve humanity or the Divine are things which are highly spiritual and the noblest privilege of the soul. This view does not admit any hierarchy of castes; the Mahatma accepts castes but on the basis that all are equal before the Divine, a bhangi doing his dharma is as good as the Brahmin doing his, there is division of function but no hierarchy of functions.


Sri Aurobindo: That is one view of things and the hierarchic view is another, both having a standpoint and logic of their own which the mind takes as wholly valid but which only corresponds to a part of the reality. All kinds of work are equal before the Divine and all men have the same Brahman within them, is one truth, but that development is not equal in all is another. The idea that it needs special to be born as a bhangi is of course one of those forceful exaggerations of an idea which are common with the Mahatma and impress greatly the mind of his hearers.  The idea behind is that his function is an indispensable service to the society, quite as much as the Brahmin’s, but that being disagreeable it would need a special moral heroism to choose it voluntarily and he thinks as if the soul freely chose it as such a heroic service and as a reward of righteous acts — that is hardly likely. The service of the scavenger is indispensable under certain conditions of society, it is one of those primary necessities without which society can hardly exist and the cultural development of which the Brahmin life is part could not have taken place.


Sri Aurobindo: But obviously the cultural development is more valuable than the service of the physical needs for the progress of humanity as opposed to its ﬁrst static condition and that development can even lead to the minimising and perhaps the eventual disappearance by scientiﬁc inventions of the need for the functions of the scavenger. But that I suppose the Mahatma would not approve of as it is machinery and a departure from the simple life. In any case it is not true that the bhangi life is superior to the Brahmin life and the reward of especial righteousness. On the other hand the traditional conception that a man is superior to others because he is born a Brahmin is not rational or justiﬁable.  A spiritual or cultured man of Pariah birth is superior in the divine values to an unspiritual and worldly-minded or a crude and uncultured Brahmin.


Sri Aurobindo: Birth counts, but the basic value is in the man himself, the soul behind and the degree to which it manifests itself in his nature.  I have not read Jawaharlal’s book and know nothing of his life except what is public; now of course I have no time for reading.  But he bears on himself the stamp of a very ﬁne character, a nature of the highest sattwic kind, full of rectitude and a high sense of honour: a man of the ﬁnest Brahmin type with what is best in European education added — that is the impression he gives. I must say that Mother was struck by his photograph when she ﬁrst saw it in the papers, singling it out from the mass of ordinary people.  But peace?


Sri Aurobindo: Peace is never easy to get in the life of the world and never constant, unless one lives deep within and bears the external activities as only a surface front of our being. And the work he has to do is the least peaceful of all. If Buddha had to lead the Indian National Congress, well! For the spiritual life there is perhaps no immediate possibility: his mind stands in between, for it has seized strongly the Socialist dream of social perfection by change as the thing to be striven for and has made that into a sort of religion. The best possible on earth has been made by his mind its credo: the something beyond he does not believe in, the something more here would seem to him a dream without basis, I suppose.


Sri Aurobindo: But pray for him, of course.  He is a man with a strong psychic element and in this life or another that must go beyond the mind to ﬁnd its source.  I have read your correspondence with Subhas Bose. Your main point is of course quite the right thing to answer; all this insistence upon action is absurd if one has not the light by which to act. Yoga must include life and not exclude it does not mean that we are bound to accept life as it is with all its stumbling ignorance and misery and the obscure confusion of human will and reason and impulse and instinct which it expresses.


Sri Aurobindo: The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush everything can be put right; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of the illusion under which they labour.  Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that the true basis of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule. But within does not mean some quarter inch behind the surface. One must go deep and ﬁnd the soul, the self, the Divine Reality within us and only then can life become a true expression of what we can be instead of a blind and always repeated confused blur of the inadequate and imperfect thing we were. The choice is between remaining in the old jumble and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the godhead within and without us.


Sri Aurobindo:  I am not sure that Subhas is prepared to receive any effect from it — it is only because your inner preparation had proceeded to a point at which you could feel something of what was behind the words that it had an effect upon you. All the same — you can send it, if you like.   I had never a very great conﬁdence in Subhas’s yoga-turn getting the better of his activism — he has two strong ties that prevent it, ambition and need to act and lead in the vital and in the mind a mental idealism — these two things are the great fosterers of illusion. The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism — one has to see the real value of the things that are — which is very little, except as steps in evolution. Then one can either follow the spiritual static path of rest and release or the spiritual dynamic path of a greater truth to be brought down into life.


Sri Aurobindo: But otherwise —   Well, his also is the old old story repeated without any satisfactory result or liberating end.     As for the desperate Subhas, why the deuce does he want everybody to agree with him and follow his line of conduct or belief?


Sri Aurobindo: That is the never realised dream of the politician; we, incarnate Gods, Gurus, spiritual men, are more modest in our hopes and are satisﬁed with a handful or, if you like, an Asramful of disciples, and even we don’t ask for that, — they come, they come.  So are we not nearer to reason and wisdom than the political leaders? Unless of course we make the mistake of founding a universal religion, but that is not our case. Moreover, Subhas upbraids you for losing your reason in blind faith, but what is his view of things except a reasoned faith; you believe according to your faith, which is quite natural, he believes according to his opinion, which is natural also but no better so far as the likelihood of getting at the true truth of things is in question.  His opinion is according to his reason?


Sri Aurobindo: So is the opinion of his political opponents according to their reason, yet they afﬁrm the very opposite idea to his. How is reason going to show which is right? The opposite parties can argue till they are blue in the face, they won’t be anywhere nearer a decision. In the end he prevails whom the greater force or whom the trend of things favours. But who can look at the world and say that the trend of things is always (or ever) according to right reason — whatever this thing called right reason may be?


Sri Aurobindo: As a matter of fact there is no universal infallible reason which can decide and be the umpire between conﬂicting opinions, there is only my reason, your reason, x’s, y’s, z’s reason multiplied up to the discordant innumerable. Each reasons according to his view of things, his opinion, that is, his mental constitution and mental preference. So what’s the use of running down faith which after all gives something to hold on to amidst the contradictions of an enigmatic universe? If one can get at a knowledge that knows, it is another matter; but so long as we have only an ignorance that argues, well, there is a place still left for faith — even, faith may be a glint from the knowledge that knows, however far off, and meanwhile there is not the slightest doubt that it helps to get things done. There’s a bit of reasoning for you!


Sri Aurobindo: just like all other reasoning too, convincing to the convinced, but not to the unconvincible, i.e., who don’t agree with the ground upon which the reasoning dances. Logic after all is only a measured dance of the mind, nothing else.    Poor Subhas! But he is a politician and the rationality of politicians has perforce to move within limits; if they were to allow themselves to be as clear-minded as that, their occupation would be gone.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not everybody who can be as cynical as Birkenhead or as philosophical as C. R. Das and go on with political reason or political humbug in spite of knowing what it all came to — from in the one and from patriotism in the other case.  Yes, but human reason is a very convenient and accommodating instrument and works only in the circle set for it by interest, partiality and prejudice. The politicians reason wrongly or insincerely and have power to enforce the results of their reasoning, so make a mess of the world’s affairs, — the intellectuals reason and see what their minds show them, which is far from being always the truth, for it is generally decided by intellectual preference and the mind’s inborn or education-inculcated angle of vision, — but even when they see it, they have no power to enforce it.  So between blind power and seeing impotence the world moves, achieving destiny through a mental muddle.  Seized with lunacy?


Sri Aurobindo: But that implies the nation is ordinarily led by reason? Is it so? Or even by common sense? Masses of men act upon their vital push, not according to reason — individuals too mostly, though they frequently call in their reason as a lawyer to plead the vital’s case.


Sri Aurobindo:   I would certainly not hang anybody on the testimony of Padmaja: she has too much of a delight in scandal-mongering of the worst kind; but I suppose she would not cite Jawaharlal as a witness if there were nothing in it. The question is: how much exaggeration? I am afraid it is not at all impossible that Subhas should say one thing to Jawaharlal and quite another to somebody else. Politics is like that, a dirty and corrupting business full of “policy”, “strategy”, “tactics”, “diplomacy”: in other words, lying, tricking, manoeuvring of all kinds.


Sri Aurobindo: A few escape the corruption but most don’t. It has after all always been a trade or art of Kautilya from the beginning, and to touch it and not be corrupted is far from easy. For it is a ﬁeld in which people ﬁx their eyes on the thing to be achieved and soon become careless about the character of the means, while ambition, ego and self-interest come pouring in to aid the process. Human  nature


Sri Aurobindo: is prone enough to crookedness as it is, but here the ordinary restraints put upon it fail to be at all effective. That however is general: in a particular case one can’t pronounce without knowing the circumstances more at ﬁrst hand or before having seen the documents cited.     Excuse me — country is not the only thing for Subhas Bose — there is also Subhas Bose and he looms very large.


Sri Aurobindo: You have illusions about these political heroes — I have seen them close and have none.     I am not responsible for anything that may have been said by any sadhak in the Asram. I have not said that Subhas was my enemy and that anybody sympathising with him ought to leave the Asram.


Sri Aurobindo: If this statement was made, it certainly did not have my authority. There is absolutely no reason why you should say anything contrary to your feelings or to what you believe to be the truth, or feel that in not doing so you were going contrary to what was expected of you and think of leaving the Asram. The question you put me as to what you should do, does not really arise, for I would never make any such demand on anybody. I hope that will clear your mind and restore your peace.


Sri Aurobindo:   In all this imbroglio about the book on Subhas one thing is positive that I never gave any such order and it ought to have been evident to everybody that I could not have done it since I permitted the publication of your book and the prohibition of it would have been too outrageous a self-contradiction to be even thinkable. . .


Sri Aurobindo: .  Behind all that is an old story which may account for everything. You will remember that both the Mother and I were very angry against Subhas for having brought the Japanese into India and reproached him with it as a treason and crime against the Motherland. For if they had got in, it would have been almost impossible to get them out. The Mother knows the Japanese nation well and was positive about that.


Sri Aurobindo: Okawa, the leader of the Black Dragon (the one who shammed mad and got off at the Tokyo trial) told her that if India revolted against the British, Japan would send her Navy to help, but he said that he would not like the Japanese to land because if they once got hold of Indian soil they would never leave it, and it was true enough.  If the Japanese had overrun India, and they would have done it if a powerful Divine intervention had not prevented it and turned the tables on them, they would have joined the Germans in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus and nothing could have saved Europe and Asia from being overrun. This would have meant the destruction of our work and a horrible fate for this country and for the world. You can understand therefore the bitterness of our feelings at that time against Subhas and his association with the Axis and the disaster to his country for which he would have been responsible. Incidentally, instead of being liberated in 1948, India would have had to spend a century or several centuries in a renewed servitude.


Sri Aurobindo: When therefore the Mother heard that you were writing a book eulogising Subhas, she disapproved strongly of any such thing issuing out of the Ashram and she wanted that you should be asked not to publish it. . . .  . . . Subsequently she met one of the chief lieutenants of Subhas, a man from Hyderabad who had been his secretary and companion in the submarine by which he came from Germany to Japan, and he recounted his daily talks in the submarine and strongly defended his action. From what he said it was evident although we still regarded Subhas’s action as a reckless and dangerous folly, that the aspect of a crime against the country disappeared from it. Since then Mother modiﬁed her attitude towards Subhas; moreover, the war was receding into the past and there was no longer any room for the poignancy of the feeling it had raised and it was better that all that should be forgotten.


Sri Aurobindo: But although almost a year had passed, the impressions made at that time have remained in the minds of many and account for the attitude of and to your book and must also be the psychological source of’s misunderstanding about the supposed order.  We regret that a blow should have fallen on you and the pain accompanying it when no blow was really given or intended.  Anyhow, the matter has been rectiﬁed; the library has been informed that there has been a misunderstanding, no prohibition was actually made and the book must be issued to sadhaks.  In Napoleon’s case they say it was the result of his disease, he was no longer quite his old self. The Kaiser was a man without any real strong stuff in him to face adversity.


Sri Aurobindo: In the German case they simply lost hope after the American intervention and the failure of the submarine campaign — there was no way out any longer and they felt exhausted by a hopeless struggle. But the end was inevitable. After the turning back at Compi`egne all the balance of forces had passed to the other side.  Hitler and his chief lieutenants Goering and Goebbels are certainly vital beings or possessed by vital beings, so you can’t expect common sense from them. The Kaiser, though ill-balanced, was a much more human person; these people are hardly human at all.


Sri Aurobindo: The nineteenth century in Europe was a preeminently human era — now the vital world seems to be descending there.  But where did you read that? It must be someone who since Stalin became powerful has exaggerated his share in the work.  When Lenin lived he alone was all-powerful and dictated the whole policy changing it whenever that was needed. As for military operations, the man who saved Bolshevism in history was Trotsky who organised the Red Army, created it out of nothing and directed its operations.


Sri Aurobindo: Stalin was not so much the vital as the physical mind working out details; after Lenin’s death he took charge and arranged everything by this faculty.  But I don’t understand. Why should there be a ferment about this affair among the “most”? What is Edward Windsor to them or they to Edward Windsor? He has very sensibly kicked over the traces and chucked the unpleasant work of being a King who can do nothing except nod his head like a marionette to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and preferred to have his own life as a man and not a pseudo-king.


Sri Aurobindo: Quite natural.  What is said is that he was too democratic and socialistic for the British Parliamentarians, wanted to create a free and united Ireland, give full Dominion autonomy without reserve to India, do something for the workers etc. and generally made himself a vigorous nuisance to Baldwin and Co. Hence they took the ﬁrst opportunity to put him in the dilemma “Be a puppet or go.”  It is very probable. Anyhow it seems that the new George will suit them very well.


Sri Aurobindo: So all is for the best in the best possible of all possible Baldwinian worlds and there is nothing to be in a ferment over.  You can write to your father that Sri Aurobindo has given no such orders to his disciples. The statement of Sunderlal has no foundation.  That was never the view of the Nationalists, even those who were ardent Hindus who would prefer Moslem to British rule.  The Asram is not concerned with politics; but I cannot believe without proof that this is the state of their mentality.


Sri Aurobindo: That seems to be a description of “Dominion Status”. In the Dominions the British Government have only a nominal power, not any real sovereignty.  It is not the time to speak of these things — for we have kept politics out of our scope. What we have to do is not to trouble ourselves about it but to get the spiritual realisation. The rest will work itself out according to the Divine Decree.


Sri Aurobindo: What India? The Legislative Assembly? You think it has force enough to exact freedom as a price of some military help? Must have changed much if they can do that.  The spread of India’s spirit is obviously the essential.


Sri Aurobindo: As for freedom it is necessary and certainly no empire is everlasting — but I expect the ﬁrst days of freedom will be rather trying.  Perhaps a Mussolini will have to rise to get rid of the corruption and mutual quarrelling and disorder.     It looks as if it were going to be like that everywhere.


Sri Aurobindo: In Europe also.  That is all settled. It is a question of working out only. The question is what is India going to do with her independence?  The above kind of affair?


Sri Aurobindo: Bolshevism? Goonda-raj? Things look ominous.    You are a most irrational creature.


Sri Aurobindo: I have been trying to logicise and intellectualise you but it seems in vain. Have I not told you that the independence is all arranged for and will evolve itself all right? Then what’s the use of my bothering about that any longer? It’s what she will do with her independence that is not arranged for — and so it is that about which I have to bother.


Sri Aurobindo: I am not a prophet like Baroda Babu. All I can say is that the coming of independence is now sure (as anyone with any political sense at all can see). As you do not accept my “play of forces”, I can say no more than that — for that is all that can be said by the “human time-sense”.  As regards Bengal, things are certainly very bad; the conditions of the Hindus there are terrible and they may even get worse in spite of the interim at Delhi. But we must not let our reaction to it become excessive or suggest despair.


Sri Aurobindo: There must be at least 20 million Hindus in Bengal and they are not going to be exterminated, — even Hitler with his scientiﬁc methods of massacre could not exterminate the Jews who are still showing themselves very much alive and, as for Hindu culture, it is not such a weak and ﬂuffy thing as to be easily stamped out; it has lasted through something like 5 millenniums at least and is going to carry on much longer and has accumulated quite enough power to survive. What is happening did not come to me as a surprise. I foresaw it when I was in Bengal and warned people that it was probable and almost inevitable and that they should be prepared for it.


Sri Aurobindo: At that time no one attached any value to what I said although some afterwards remembered and admitted, when the trouble ﬁrst began, that I have been right; only C. R. Das had grave apprehensions and he even told me when he came to Pondicherry that he would not like the British to go out until this dangerous problem had been settled. But I have not been discouraged by what is happening, because I know and have experienced hundreds of times that beyond the blackest darkness there lies for one who is a divine instrument the light of God’s victory. I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world — I am not speaking of personal things — which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster. There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history.


Sri Aurobindo: Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind, but they too will end as that nightmare has ended. I cannot write fully in this letter of all things which justify my conﬁdence — some day perhaps I shall be able to do it.  I have no intention of doing so — even if all smashed; I would look beyond the smash to the new creation. As for what is happening in the world, it does not upset me because I knew all along that things would happen in that fashion. I never had any illusions about Gandhi’s satyagraha — it has only fulﬁlled my prediction that it would end in a great confusion or a great ﬁasco and my only mistake was that I put an “or” where there should have been an “and” — and as for the hopes of the intellectual idealists I have not shared them, so I am not disappointed.


Sri Aurobindo: I cannot ﬁnd any symptom of a stagger in me, not even of a shake or a quake or a quiver — all seems quite calm and erect, as far as I can make out. And I don’t ﬁnd the prospect lugubrious at all  — the less people expect of you and bother you with their false ideas and demands, the more chance one has to get something real done. It is queer these intellectuals go on talking of creation while all they stand for is collapsing into the without their being able to raise a ﬁnger to save it. What the devil are they going to create and from what material?


Sri Aurobindo: and of what use if a Hitler with his cudgel or a Mussolini with his castor oil can come and wash it out or beat it into dust in a moment?  I don’t think! They will only gasp and talk peace for a bit and then get ready for another war. I don’t see why the supramental should need a general carnage for its appearance — if it were so it should surely have appeared in 1919. But perhaps that was sufﬁcient only for the overmind to look in and it needed Mussolini and a general extermination by all sorts of poison gases to persuade the supramental to follow suit?


Sri Aurobindo: For the poison gases by aeroplane were not ready to make their “descent” in the last war.   The adage “Honesty is the best policy” was invented in a semibarbarous age when mankind had not made so much progress as now, an age which no longer exists — except perhaps in the wilds of Abyssinia, and now Mussolini is out to ﬁnish with it and bring in the blessings of civilisation even there. Nowadays the saying is notoriously out of date; it only means that with honesty you have less chances of going to jail — provided you are lucky and also provided you have not met Mahatma Gandhi.  But Rockefellers and the rest of the commercial aristocracy were not born for jail but for palaces with marble water closets and the immortality of Rockefeller institutes and honour in the land of the gangsters and the free. All this is not meant to tempt you out of the paths of virtue.


Sri Aurobindo:   You write as if what is going on in Europe were a war between the powers of Light and the powers of Darkness — but this is no more so than during the Great War. It is a ﬁght between two kinds of Ignorance. Our aim is to bring down a higher Truth, but that Truth must be able to live by its own strength and not depend upon the victory of one or other of the forces of the Ignorance. That is the reason why we are not to mix in political or social controversies and struggles; it would simply keep down our endeavour to a lower level and prevent the Truth from descending which is none of these things but has a quite different law and basis.


Sri Aurobindo: You speak of Brahmatej being overpowered by Kshatratej, but where is that happening? None of the warring parties incarnates either.  You have said that you have begun to doubt whether it was the Mother’s war and ask me to make you feel again that it is. I afﬁrm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother’s war.  You should not think of it as a ﬁght for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superﬁcial circumstance. It is no use concentrating on the defects or mistakes of nations; all have defects and commit serious mistakes; but what matters is on what side they have ranged themselves in the struggle. It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there would be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet at all realise. If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth for which we stand to establish itself on the earth.


Sri Aurobindo: Those who ﬁght for this cause are ﬁghting for the Divine and against the threatened reign of the Asura.     What I have said is not that the Allies have never done wrong things, but that they stand on the side of the evolutionary forces.  I have not said that at random, but on what to me are clear grounds of fact.


Sri Aurobindo: What you speak of is the dark side. All nations and governments have shown that side in their dealings with each other, — at least all who had the strength or got the chance. I hope you are not expecting me to believe that there are or have been virtuous Governments and unselﬁsh and sinless peoples? It is only individuals and not too many of them who can be described in that style. But there is the other side also.


Sri Aurobindo: Your correspondents are condemning the Allies on grounds that people in the past would have stared at, on the basis of modern ideals of international conduct; but looked at like that, all big nations and many small ones have black records. But who created these ideals or did most to create them (liberty, democracy, equality, international justice and the rest)? Well, America, France, England — the present Allied nations. They have all been imperialistic and still bear the burden of their past, but they have also deliberately spread these ideals and introduced self-governing bodies and parliamentary institutions where they did not exist; and whatever the relative worth of these things, they have been a stage, even if a still imperfect stage, in a forward evolution. (What of the others?


Sri Aurobindo: What about the Axis’ new order? Hitler swears it is a crime to educate the coloured peoples, they must be kept as serfs and labourers.)  England has helped certain nations to be free without seeking any personal gain; she has conceded independence to Egypt and Eire after a struggle, to Iraq without a struggle. On the whole she has been for some time moving away steadily from Imperialism towards a principle of free association and cooperation; the British Commonwealth of England and the Dominions is something unique and unprecedented, a beginning of new things in that direction. She is turning in spirit in the direction of a world-union of some kind after the war; her new generation no longer believes in an “imperial mission”; she has offered India Dominion Independence (even, if she prefers it, she can choose or pass on to isolated independence) after the war, on the base of an agreed free constitution to be chosen by Indians themselves; though this, it has been feared, leaves a loophole for reactionary delay, it is in itself extremely reasonable and it is the Indians themselves with their inveterate habit of disunion who will be responsible if they are imbecile enough to reject the opportunity.


Sri Aurobindo: All that is what I call evolution in the right direction — however slow and imperfect and hesitating. As for America she has forsworn her past imperialistic policies in regard to Central and South America, in Cuba, the Philippines, — everywhere apart from some islands in the Paciﬁc which would go plop into other hands, if she withdrew from them.  It is perhaps possible, some suggest, that she may be tempted towards a sort of ﬁnancial imperialism, the rule of the Almighty American Dollar, by her new sense of international power, or led into other mistakes, but if so we may fairly assume from her other strong tendencies that she will soon withdraw from it. The greater danger is that she may retire again into a selﬁsh isolationism after the war and so destroy or delay the chance of a possible beginning that may lead eventually to some beginning of a free world-union. But still there again is the evolutionary force.


Sri Aurobindo: Is there a similar trend on the part of the Axis? The answer is plain enough both from their own declarations and their behaviour. Avowedly and openly, Nazi Germany today stands for the reversal of this evolutionary tendency, for the destruction of the new international outlook, the new Dharma, for a reversion not only to the past, but to a far-back primitive and barbaric ideal. She fully intended to reimpose it on the whole earth, but would have done so if she had had, as for a time she seemed to have, the strength to conquer. There can be no doubt or hesitation here; if we are for the evolutionary future of mankind, we must recognise that it is only the victory of the Allies that can save it.


Sri Aurobindo: At the very least, they are at the moment the instruments of the evolutionary Forces to save mankind’s future, and these declarations of their own show that they are conscious of it. Other elements and motives there are, but the main issue is here. One has to look at things on all sides, to see them steadily and whole. Once more, it is the forces working behind that I have to look at, I don’t want to go blind among surface details. The future has ﬁrst to be safeguarded; only then can present problems and contradictions have a chance to be solved and eliminated.


Sri Aurobindo: For us the question put by you does not arise. The Mother made it plain in a letter which has been made public that we did not consider the war as a ﬁght between nations or governments (still less between good people and bad people) but between two forces, the Divine and the Asuric. What we have to see is on which side men and nations put themselves; if they put themselves on the right side, they at once make themselves instruments of the Divine purpose in spite of all defects, errors, wrong movements and actions (past or present or possible backslidings in the future) which are common to human nature and to all human collectivities. The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces; the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That is the whole question and all other considerations are either irrelevant or of a minor importance. The Allies at least stand for human values, though they may often have acted against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical (e.g. the “virtues” of the , the master race).


Sri Aurobindo: That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but as an indicator it has a decisive importance.  Nolini, I should suppose, gave the Kurukshetra example not as an exact parallel but as a traditional instance of a War between two world-forces in which the side favoured by the Divine triumphed, because its leaders made themselves his instruments. I don’t suppose he envisaged it as a battle between virtue and wickedness or between good and evil men or intended to equate the British with the Pandavas, nations with individuals or even individuals with individuals, — shall we say, Stafford Cripps with Yudhisthir, Churchill with Bhima and General Montgomery with Arjuna! After all, were even the Pandavas virtuous without defect, calm and holy and quite unselﬁsh and without passions? There are many incidents in the Mahabharat which seem to show to the contrary that they had their defects and failings.


Sri Aurobindo: And in the Pandava army and its leaders there must have been many who were not angels or paragons of virtue, while there were plenty of good men and true on Duryodhana’s side. Unselﬁshness? But were not the Pandavas ﬁghting to establish their own claims and interests — just and right, no doubt, but still personal claims and self-interest? Theirs was a righteous battle,, but it was for right and justice in their own case. The Allies have as good or even a better case and reason to call theirs a righteous quarrel, for they are ﬁghting not only for themselves, for their freedom and very existence, but for the existence, freedom, maintenance of natural rights of other nations, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Belgians, Dutch, French, Greece, Yugoslavia and a vast number of others not yet directly threatened; they too claim to be ﬁghting for a Dharma, for civilised values, for the preservation of great ideals and in view of what Hitler represents and openly professes and what he wishes to destroy, their claim has strong foundations.


Sri Aurobindo: And if imperialism is under all circumstances a wickedness, then the Pandavas are tainted with that brush, for they used their victory to establish their empire continued after them by Parikshit and Janamejaya. Could not modern humanism and paciﬁsm make it a reproach against the Pandavas that these virtuous men (including Krishna) brought about a huge slaughter (alas for Ahimsa!) that they might establish their sole imperial rule over all the numerous free and independent peoples of India?  Such a criticism would be grotesquely out of place, but it would be a natural result of weighing ancient happenings in the scales of modern ideals. As a matter of fact, such an empire was a step in the right direction then, just as a world-union of free peoples would be a step in the right direction now, — and in both cases the right consequences of a terriﬁc slaughter.  Who are the people who have such a tenderness for Hitler and object to his being compared to Duryodhana?


Sri Aurobindo: I hope they are not among those — spiritual people among them, I am told, — who believe — or perhaps once believed? — Hitler to be the new Avatar and his religion (God help us!) to be the true religion which we must all help to establish throughout the wide world or among those who regard Hitler as a great and good man, a saint, an ascetic and all that is noble and godlike. I don’t see why Hitler should not be compared to Duryodhana, except that Duryodhana, if alive, might complain indignantly that the comparison was a monstrous and scandalous injustice to him and that he never did anything like what Hitler has done. By the way, what about Krishna’s ? An unholy and unethical bribe? Or what on earth did he mean by it?


Sri Aurobindo: But battle and conquest and imperial rule were then a and consecrated by a special form of sacriﬁce. We should remember that conquest and rule over subject peoples were not regarded as wrong either in ancient or medieval times and even quite recently but as something great and glorious; men did not see any special wickedness in conquerors or conquering nations. Just government of subject peoples was envisaged, but nothing more — exploitation was not excluded.  No doubt, many nations in the past were jealous of their own independence and some like the Greeks and later the English had the ideal of freedom, more especially of individual liberty. But the passion for individual liberty went along in ancient times with the institution of slavery which no Greek democrat ever thought to be wrong; no Greek state or people thought it an injustice to take away the freedom of other Greek states, still less of foreign peoples, or deemed it immoral to rule over subject races.


Sri Aurobindo: The same inconsistency has held sway over human ideas until recent times and still holds sway over international practice even now. The modern ideas on the subject, the right of all to liberty both individuals and nations, the immorality of conquest and empire, or, short of such absolutist ideas, such compromises as the British idea of training subject races for democratic freedom, are new values, an evolutionary movement, a new Dharma which has only begun slowly and initially to inﬂuence practice, — an infant Dharma that would be throttled for good if Hitler succeeded in his “Avataric” mission and established his new “religion” over all the earth. Subject nations naturally accept the new Dharma and severely criticise the old imperialisms; it is to be hoped that they will practise what they now preach when they themselves become strong and rich and powerful. But the best will be if a new world-order evolves which will make the old things impossible, — a difﬁcult task, but not, with God’s grace, absolutely impracticable.  The Divine takes men as they are and uses them as his instruments even if they are not ﬂawless in character, without stain or sin or fault, exemplary in virtue, or angelic, holy and pure.


Sri Aurobindo: If they are of good will, if, to use the Biblical phrase, they are on the Lord’s side, that is enough for the work to be done.   Even if I knew that the Allies (I am speaking of the “big” nations, America, Britain, China) would misuse their victory or bungle the peace or partially at least spoil the opportunities opened to the human world by that victory, I would still put my force behind them. At any rate, things could not be one hundredth part as bad as they would be under Hitler. The ways of the Lord would still be open — to keep them open is what matters.


Sri Aurobindo: Let us stick to the real issue and leave for a later time all side-issues and minor issues or hypothetical problems that would cloud the one all-important and tragic issue before us.   P.S. This is an answer to what is implied in your letter and, I suppose, in those of your correspondents, not to anything in K’s letter. His observations are all right, but circumstances alter cases.


Sri Aurobindo: Ours is a sadhana which involves not only devotion or union with the Divine or a perception of him in all things and beings, but also action as workers and instruments and a work to be done in the world, a spiritual force to be brought on the world, under difﬁcult conditions; then one has to see one’s way and do what is commanded and support what has to be supported, even if it means war and strife carried on whether through chariots and bows and arrows or tanks and cars and American bombs and aeroplanes, in either case a: the means and times and persons differ, but it does not seem to me that Nolini is wrong in seeing in it the same problem as in Kurukshetra.  As for war, violence, the use of force to maintain freedom for the world, for the highest values of human civilisation, for the salvation of humanity from a terrible fate, etc., the old command rings out once again after many ages for those who must ﬁght or support this battle for the right, .  Well, they seem to be making some headway in spite of Hitler’s arrangement. I seem to remember Hitler made arrangements for taking Stalingrad; the result was that he has been kicked out almost entirely from old Russia.  It doesn’t look like it; but perhaps they have conﬁdential information?


Sri Aurobindo: People say that he did — on the authority of the man to whom he said it. Does deny his saying it?  All these things are silly utterances in which the wishes of the mind are presented as truth and fact. That is a common habit in this very imperfect humanity and ordinarily it would be of no importance, except that such inventions and falsehoods are most improper in the mouth of a sadhaka and the habit must be a great obstacle to any progress. But here the wish behind, whether they are conscious of it or not, is that the Asura shall prevail against the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: That means a most dangerous giving of oneself to the Falsehood that is seeking to prolong its hold on the world and establish deﬁnitely the reign of Evil over the whole world.  That is what the victory of Hitler would have meant — it would have meant also the destruction of my work. You are quite right therefore in resenting this kind of attitude (also there is the fact that it establishes a centre of support for the Falsehood and Evil in the Asram). The propagation of this Falsehood, false ideas, false feelings, false actions and persuading people that they are right is the chief instrument of the Asura and its prevalence and success a sign of the growth of darkness on the earth. Fortunately the intensity of the peril is over, however long the struggle may still last.


Sri Aurobindo: Other perils and manoeuvres of the Asura may follow afterwards; so it is good to discourage ﬁrmly the tendency so that it may not do harm hereafter.  All that [] is however another matter than the question about the present human civilisation. It is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved, and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine.  The present civilisation must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater truth, is the issue. The Mother has left the question hanging and I can only do the same.


Sri Aurobindo: After all, the wise man, unless he is a prophet or the Director of the Madras Astrological Bureau, must often be content to take the Asquithian position. Neither optimism nor pessimism is the truth, they are only modes of the mind or moods of the temperament. Let us then, without either excessive optimism or excessive pessimism, “wait and see”.


Sri Aurobindo: This is no time for patting the Germans on the back or embracing and consoling them. If they are allowed to get on their legs again without trouble or without making an atonement for the horror of darkness and suffering they have inﬂicted on the world, they will rise only to repeat their performance, — unless somebody else forestalls them. The only help we can give to Germany now is silence.


Sri Aurobindo: I know that this is a time of trouble for you and everybody. It is so for the whole world; confusion, trouble, disorder and upset everywhere is the general state of things. The better things that are to come are preparing or growing under a veil and the worse are prominent everywhere. The one thing is to hold on and to hold out till the hour of light has come.


Sri Aurobindo: Sri Aurobindo is in no way bound by the present world’s institutions or current ideas whether in the political, social or economic ﬁeld; it is not necessary for him either to approve or disapprove of them. He does not regard either capitalism or orthodox socialism as the right solution for the world’s future; nor can he admit that the admission of private enterprise by itself makes the society capitalistic, a socialistic economy can very well admit some amount of controlled or subordinated private enterprise as an aid to its own working or a partial convenience without ceasing to be socialistic. Sri Aurobindo has his own view as to how far Congress economy is intended to be truly socialistic or whether that is only a cover, but he does not care to express his view on that point at present.  At least I had no such glimpse before I started Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: I can’t say about others — perhaps some had — but the glimpse could only bring faith, it could not possibly bring knowledge; knowledge comes by Yoga, not before it.  I repeat that all one needs to know is whether the soul in one has been moved to the Yoga or not.  I suppose I have had myself an even more completely European education than you and I have had too my period of agnostic denial, but from the moment I looked at these things I could never take the attitude of doubt and disbelief which was for so long fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supraphysical experiences and powers, occult or Yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not be limited by the ordinary physical human-animal consciousness; it must have other ranges.


Sri Aurobindo: Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is supernatural or incredible the power to write a great poem or compose great music. Few people can do it, as things are, — not even one in a million; for poetry and music come from the inner being and to write or to compose true and great things one has to have the passage clear between the outer mind and something in the inner being. That is why you got the poetic power as soon as you began Yoga — Yoga-force made the passage clear. It is the same with Yogic consciousness and its powers; the thing is to get the passage clear, — for they are already there within you.  Of course the ﬁrst thing is to believe, aspire and, with the true urge within, make the endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: Why? What is there  in it?  Well, it is better to be  than to be a sententious ass and pronounce on what one does not understand.  Perfectly natural — they marry before the change — then the change comes and the marriage belongs to the past self, not to the new one.


Sri Aurobindo: Then what’s the harm?  No doubt. But then when they marry, there is not an omniscient ass like this biographer to tell them that they were going to be  or  or in any way concerned with any other than the biographer’s.  Well, if a biographer of Confucius can be such an unmitigated ass, Confucius may be allowed to be unwise once or twice, I suppose.  Why delicate?


Sri Aurobindo: and why a puzzle? Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life — when the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it — nothing puzzling in that.  What do you call meditation? Shutting the eyes and concentrating?


Sri Aurobindo: It is only one method for calling down the true consciousness. To join with the true consciousness or feel its descent is the only thing important and if it comes without the orthodox method, as it always did with me, so much the better. Meditation is only a means or device, the true movement is when even walking, working or speaking one is still in sadhana.  I do not know what Krishnaprem said or in which article, I do not have it with me. But if the statement is that nobody can have a successful meditation or realise anything till he is pure and perfect, I fail to follow it; it contradicts my own experience.


Sri Aurobindo: I have always had realisation by meditation ﬁrst and the puriﬁcation started afterwards as a result. I have seen many get important, even fundamental realisations by meditation who could not be said to have a great inner development. Are all Yogis who have meditated to effect and had great realisations in their inner consciousness perfect in their nature? It does not look like it to me. I am unable to believe in absolute generalisations in this ﬁeld, because the development of spiritual consciousness is an exceedingly vast and complex affair in which all sorts of things can happen and one might almost say that for each man it is different according to his nature and that the one thing that is essential is the inner call and aspiration and the perseverance to follow always after it no matter how long it takes or what are the difﬁculties or impediments — because nothing else will satisfy the soul within us.


Sri Aurobindo: A realisation in 1890? It does not seem possible. There was something, though I was not doing Yoga and knew nothing about it in the year of my departure from England; I don’t remember which it was but probably 1892–3 which would make 20 years, not 18. I don’t remember anything special in 1890.  Where did he see this written?


Sri Aurobindo: For, as to this “Grace”, we describe it in that way because we feel in the inﬁnite Spirit or Self of existence a Presence or a Being, a Consciousness that determines — that is what we speak of as the Divine, — not a separate Person, but the one Being of whom our individual self is a portion or a vessel. But it is not necessary for everybody to regard it in that way. Supposing it is the impersonal Self of all only, yet the Upanishad says of the Self and its realisation, “This understanding is not to be gained by reasoning nor by tapasya nor by much learning, but whom this Self chooses, to him it reveals its own body.” Well, that is the same thing as what we call the Divine Grace, — it is an action from above or from within independent of mental causes which decides its own movement. We can call it the Divine Grace; we can call it the Self within choosing its own hour and way to manifest to the mental instrument on the surface; we can call it the ﬂowering of the inner being or inner nature into selfrealisation and self-knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: As something in us approaches it or as it presents itself to us, so the mind sees it. But in reality, it is the same thing and the same process of the being in the Nature.  I could illustrate my meaning more concretely from my own ﬁrst experience of the Self, long before I knew even what Yoga was or that there was such a thing, at a time when I had no religious feeling, no wish for spiritual knowledge, no aspiration beyond the mind, only a contented agnosticism and the impulse towards poetry and politics. But it would be too long a story, so I do not tell it here.


Sri Aurobindo: Good Lord! I never said it was too long for you to read, I meant it was too long for me to write now. And I can’t write such things by themselves as an autobiographical essay — it is only if they turn up in the course of something that I can do so. Last night I had no blessed time to illustrate. I thought of writing it because it seemed very appropriate, but when I couldn’t, I just mentioned it in order to hint that what I had written was not mere theory, but provable by solid experience.


Sri Aurobindo: No fell intention to tantalise.    I can’t help that. It happened. The mind’s canons of the rational and the possible do not govern spiritual life and experience.


Sri Aurobindo: Great Jumble-Mumble! What has Vasudeva to do with it? Vasudeva is a name of Krishna, and in the Uttarpara Speech I was speaking of Krishna, if you please.   Yes.


Sri Aurobindo: But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder, touching Indian soil, ﬂowered one day in the ﬁrst year of my stay in Baroda, at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise enough?  Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankara self. Atman, Atman!


Sri Aurobindo: A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn’t understand either.  One thing I feel I must say in connection with your remark about the soul of India and’s observation about “this stress on this-worldliness to the exclusion of other-worldliness”. I do not quite understand in what connection his remark was made or what he meant by this-worldliness, but I feel it necessary to state my own position in the matter. My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental ﬁeld and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and intimate bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Inﬁnite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies.


Sri Aurobindo: At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with inﬂuences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is the Brahman and I ﬁnd the Divine everywhere. Everyone has the right to throw away this-worldliness and choose other-worldliness only and if he ﬁnds peace by that choice he is greatly blessed.  I, personally, have not found it necessary to do this in order to have peace. In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview, the spiritual and the material, and to try to establish the divine Consciousness and the divine Power in men’s hearts and in earthly life, not for personal salvation only but for a life divine here.


Sri Aurobindo: This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity of an entire other-worldliness excluding any kind of this-worldliness altogether, but that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible. My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds, the plane of the supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and their possible effects upon our life and material world; but it will be quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the supreme Being or Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of ourselves and our works or else the universal Sachchidananda, and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered by the Spirit.  It is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write and.


Sri Aurobindo: The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve him with one’s works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.   Kashmir is a magniﬁcent place, its rivers unforgettable and on one of its mountains with a shrine of Shankaracharya on it I got my second realisation of the Inﬁnite (long before I started Yoga).  Your bells etc. mentioned by you as recent experiences were already enumerated as long ago as the time of the Upanishads as signs accompanying the opening to the larger consciousness,. If I remember right your sparks come in the same list.


Sri Aurobindo: The fact has been recorded again and again in yogic literature. I had the same experience hundreds of times in the earlier part of my sadhana. So you see you are in very honourable company in this matter and need not trouble yourself about the objections of physical science.    I remember, when I ﬁrst began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientiﬁc friend of mine began to talk of after-images — “these are only after-images!”


Sri Aurobindo: I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time — he said, “no”, to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values — he could not reply in the afﬁrmative. That is how these so-called scientiﬁc explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher.    It is only at the beginning that concentration is necessary to see these colours, afterwards it comes of itself. There was a long time when I used to see colours spontaneously or wherever I cast my eyes, just as you do now, and at every time of concentrated meditation they used to ﬁll the room.


Sri Aurobindo: Many, indeed, begin to see them spontaneously without any concentration at all, ﬁrst with closed eyes, afterwards with the eyes open. Seeing them with the eyes closed happens often enough to people who have never practised or even heard of Yoga; but in such cases it proves that there is some kind of occult vision there very near to the surface.    With many people the faculty of this kind of occult vision is the ﬁrst to develop when they begin sadhana. With others it is there naturally or comes on occasions without any practice of Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: But with people who live mainly in the intellect (a few excepted) this faculty is not usually there by nature and most have much difﬁculty in developing it. It was so even with me.  It would be something of a miracle to see things without the faculty of seeing. We don’t deal much in miracles of that kind.  By the way what is this story about my four or ﬁve hours’ concentration a day for several years before anything came down?


Sri Aurobindo: Such a thing never happened, if by concentration you mean laborious meditation. What I did was four or ﬁve hours a day pranayam — which is quite another matter. And what ﬂow do you speak of? The ﬂow of poetry came down while I was doing pranayam, not some years afterwards. If it is the ﬂow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the pranayam for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed.


Sri Aurobindo: And it came as a result not of years of pranayam or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a temporary guru (but it wasn’t that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and Krishna. So don’t try to turn me into an argument against the Divine; that attempt will be perfectly ineffective.    What a wooden head! What is the use of saying things if you deliberately misinterpret what I write?


Sri Aurobindo: I said clearly that the pranayam brought me nothing of any kind of spiritual realisation. I had stopped it long before. The Brahman experience came when I was groping for some way, doing no sadhana at all, making no effort because I didn’t know what effort to make, all having failed. Then in three days I got an experience which most Yogis get only at the end of a long Yoga, got it without wanting or trying for it, got it to the surprise of Lele who was trying to get me something quite different. But I don’t suppose you are able to understand — so I say no more.


Sri Aurobindo: I can only look mournfully at your ununderstanding pate.  I think it was the year in which I began my Yoga — that is, the practice of Yoga — for I had had experiences before without knowing what they were.    It was not any such thing before I started the Yoga. I started the Yoga in 1904 and all my work except some poetry was done afterwards.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover my intelligence was inborn and so far as it grew before the Yoga it was not by training but by a wide haphazard activity developing ideas from all things read, seen or experienced. That is not training, it is natural growth.  It is not that there is anything peculiar to you in these difﬁculties; every sadhaka entering this Way has to get over similar impediments. It took me four years of inner striving to ﬁnd a real Way, even though the Divine help was with me all the time, and even then it seemed to come by an accident; and it took me ten more years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to ﬁnd  Way — and that was because I had my past and the world’s Past to assimilate and overpass before I could ﬁnd and found the future.   I think you have made too much play with my phrase “an accident” [], ignoring the important qualiﬁcation, “it to come by an accident”.


Sri Aurobindo: After four years of and other practices on my own, with no other result than an increased health and energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a great outﬂow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous patterns and ﬁgures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did not know, a bhakta with a limited mind but some experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an absolute ﬁdelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The ﬁrst result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness which he never intended — for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against Adwaita Vedanta — and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. The ﬁnal upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its will, a principle or rather a seed-force to which I kept unswervingly and increasin


Sri Aurobindo: gly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single rule or system or dogma or Shastra to where and what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter . Yet he understood so little what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed, tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the Devil that had got hold of me.  Does not all that justify my phrase “it seemed to come by an accident”? But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are not like that of the human mind or according to our patterns and it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we do.


Sri Aurobindo: If we admit the Divine at all, both true reason and bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and surrender. I do not see how without them there can be (one-pointed adoration).    I am rather astonished at your ﬁnding Wordsworth’s realisation, however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or dictated by emotional effervescence. Wordsworth was hardly an emotional or effervescent character.


Sri Aurobindo: As for an abstract realisation, it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself and ﬁnd it difﬁcult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or more vivid. Still, Wordsworth’s did not make that impression on me and to him it certainly came as something positive, powerful and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his time and surroundings, at least to a man of his mainly moral and intellectual temper.  In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing can be.


Sri Aurobindo: Such a realisation of the personal Divine or of the impersonal Brahman or of the Self does not usually come at the beginning of a sadhana or in the ﬁrst years or for many years.  It comes so to a very few; mine came ﬁfteen years after my ﬁrst pre-Yogic experience in London and in the ﬁfth year after I started Yoga. That I consider extraordinarily quick, an express train speed almost — though there may no doubt have been several quicker achievements. But to expect and demand it so soon and get fed up because it does not come and declare Yoga impossible except for two or three in the ages would betoken in the eyes of any experienced Yogi or sadhaka a rather rash and abnormal impatience. Most would say that a slow development is the best one can hope for in the ﬁrst years and only when the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the Divine can the deﬁnitive experience come.


Sri Aurobindo: To some rapid preparatory experiences can come at a comparatively early stage, but even they cannot escape the labour of the consciousness which will make these experiences culminate in the realisation that is enduring and complete. It is not a question of my liking or disliking your demand or attitude. It is a matter of fact and truth and experience, not of liking or disliking, two things which do not usually sway me. It is the fact that people who are grateful and cheerful and ready to go step by step, even by slow steps, if need be, do actually march faster and more surely than those who are impatient and in haste and at each step despair or murmur.  It is what I have always seen — there may be instances to the contrary and I have no objection to your being one, — none at all.


Sri Aurobindo: I only say that if you could maintain “hope and fervour and faith”, there would be a much bigger chance — that is all.  This is just a personal explanation — a long explanation but which seemed to be called for by your enhancement of my glory — and is dictated by a hope that after all in the long run an accumulation of explanations may persuade you to prefer the sunny path to the grey one. My faith again perhaps? But, sunny path or grey one, the one thing wanted is that you should push through and arrive.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not the human defects of the Guru that can stand in the way when there is the psychic opening, conﬁdence and surrender. The Guru is the channel or the representative or the manifestation of the Divine, according to the measure of his personality or his attainment; but whatever he is, it is to the Divine that one opens in opening to him, and if something is determined by the power of the channel, more is determined by the inherent and intrinsic attitude of the receiving consciousness, an element that comes out in the surface mind as simple trust or direct unconditional self-giving, and once that is there, the essential things can be gained even from one who seems to others than the disciple an inferior spiritual source and the rest will grow up in the sadhak of itself by the grace of the Divine, even if the human being in the Guru cannot give it. It is this that Krishnaprem appears to have done perhaps from the ﬁrst; but in most nowadays this attitude seems to come with difﬁculty, after much hesitation and delay and trouble. In my own case I owe the ﬁrst decisive turn of my inner life to one who was inﬁnitely inferior to me in intellect, education and capacity and by no means spiritually perfect or supreme; but, having seen a Power behind him and decided to turn there for help, I gave myself entirely into his hands and followed with an automatic passivity the guidance.


Sri Aurobindo: He himself was astonished and said to others that he had never met anyone before who could surrender himself so absolutely and without reserve or question to the guidance of the helper.  The result was a series of transmuting experiences of such a radical character that he was unable to follow and had to tell me to give myself up in future to the Guide within with the same completeness of surrender as I had shown to the human channel.  I give this example to show how these things work; it is not in the calculated way the human reason wants to lay down, but by a more mysterious and greater law.    To reject doubts means control of one’s thoughts — very certainly so.


Sri Aurobindo: But the control of one’s thoughts is as necessary as the control of one’s vital desires and passions or the control of the movements of one’s body — for the Yoga, and not for the Yoga only. One cannot be a fully developed mental being even, if one has not control of the thoughts, is not their observer, judge, master, — the mental Purusha,,, ,. It is no more proper for the mental being to be the tennis ball of unruly and uncontrollable thoughts than to be a rudderless ship in the storm of the desires and passions or a slave of either the inertia or the impulses of the body. I know it is more difﬁcult because man being primarily a creature of mental Prakriti identiﬁes himself with the movements of his mind and cannot at once dissociate himself and stand free from the swirl and eddies of the mind whirlpool. It is comparatively easy for him to put a control on his body, at least a certain part of its movements: it is less easy but still very possible after a struggle to put a mental control on his vital impulsions and desires; but to sit, like the Tantrik Yogi on the river, above the whirlpool of his thoughts is less facile.


Sri Aurobindo: Nevertheless it can be done; all developed mental men, those who get beyond the average, have in one way or other or at least at certain times and for certain purposes to separate the two parts of the mind, the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet masterful part which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing them, judging, rejecting, eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections and changes, the Master in the House of Mind, capable of self-empire, .  The Yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master there, but even while in mind in a way, he gets out of it, as it were, and stands above or quite back from it and free. For him the image of the factory of thoughts is no longer quite valid; for he sees that thoughts come from outside, from the universal Mind or universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes unformed and then they are given shape somewhere in us. The principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or refusal to these thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or this giving a personal-mental form to thought-stuff (or vital movements) from the environing NatureForce.


Sri Aurobindo: It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me this.  “Sit in meditation,” he said, “but do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts; before they can enter throw them away from you till your mind is capable of entire silence.” I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think of either questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw a thought and then another thought coming in a concrete way from outside; I ﬂung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought or a labourer in a thought-factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free too to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thoughtempire.


Sri Aurobindo: I mention this only to emphasise that the possibilities of the mental being are not limited and that it can be the free Witness and Master in its own house. It is not to say that everybody can do it in the way I did and with the same rapidity of the decisive movement (for of course the later fullest development of this new untrammelled mental Power took time, many years); but a progressive freedom and mastery over one’s mind is perfectly within the possibilities of anyone who has the faith and will to undertake it.    Literature and art are or can be ﬁrst introductions to the inner being — the inner mind and vital; for it is from there that they come. And if one writes poems of bhakti, poems of divine seeking etc., or creates music of that kind, it means that there is a bhakta or seeker inside who is supporting himself by that selfexpression.


Sri Aurobindo: There is also the point of view behind Lele’s answer to me when I told him that I wanted to do Yoga but for work, for action, not for Sannyasa and Nirvana, — but after years of spiritual effort I had failed to ﬁnd the way and it was for that I had asked to meet him. His ﬁrst answer was, “It should be easy for you as you are a poet.”    Because I told him I wanted to do Yoga in order to get a new inner Yogic consciousness for life and action, not for leaving life.  So he said that.


Sri Aurobindo: A poet writes from an inner source, not from the external mind, he is moved by inspiration to write, i.e. he writes what a greater Power writes through him. So the Yogi Karmachari has to act from an inner source, to derive his thoughts and movements from that, to be inspired and impelled by a greater Power which acts through him. He never said that sadhana will be easy for me through poetry. Where is the “through poetry” phrase? Poetry can be done as a part of sadhana and help the sadhana — but sadhana “through” poetry is a quite different matter.


Sri Aurobindo: To get rid of the random thoughts of the surface physical mind is not easy. It is sometimes done by a sudden miracle as in my own case, but that is rare. Some get it done by a slow process of concentration, but that may take a very long time. It is easier to have a quiet mind with things that come in passing on the surface, as people pass in the street, and one is free to attend to them or not — that is to say, there develops a sort of double mind, one inner silent and concentrated when it pleases to be so, a quiet witness when it chooses to see thoughts and things, — the other meant for surface dynamism. It is probable in your case that this will come as soon as these descents of peace, intensity or Ananda get strong enough to occupy the whole system.


Sri Aurobindo:   I ﬁnd nothing either to add or to object to in Prof. Sorley’s comment on the still, bright and clear mind; it adequately indicates the process by which the mind makes itself ready for the reﬂection of the higher Truth in its undisturbed surface or substance.  But one thing perhaps needs to be kept in view — that this pure stillness of the mind is indeed always the required condition, the desideratum, but for bringing it about there are more ways than one. It is not, for instance, only by an effort of the mind itself to get clear of all intrusive emotion or passion, to quiet its own characteristic vibrations, to resist the obscuring fumes of a physical inertia which brings about a sleep or a torpor of the mind instead of its wakeful silence, that the thing can be done. This is indeed an ordinary process of the Yogic path of knowledge; but the same end can be brought about or automatically happen by other processes — for instance, by the descent from above of a great spiritual stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart, on the life stimuli, on the physical reﬂexes.