Sri Aurobindo: But it was an exaggeration all the same and not, as it claimed to be, the indispensable path to the true goal.     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.


Sri Aurobindo: 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. A sudden descent of this kind or a series of descents accumulative in force and efﬁcacy is a well-known phenomenon of spiritual experience.  Or again one may start a mental process of one kind or another for the purpose which would normally mean a long labour and yet may pull down or be seized midway, or even at the outset, by an overmind inﬂux, a rapid intervention or manifestation of the higher Silence, with an effect sudden, instantaneous, out of all proportion to the means used at the beginning. One commences with a method, but the work is taken up by a Grace from above, by a response from That to which one aspires or by an irruption of the inﬁnitudes of the Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: It was in this last way that I myself came by the mind’s absolute silence, unimaginable to me before I had the actual experience.  There is another question of some importance — what is the exact nature of this brightness, clearness, stillness, of what is it constituted, more precisely, is it merely a psychological condition or something more? Professor Sorley says these epithets are after all metaphors and he wants to express and succeeds in expressing — though not without the use of metaphor — the same thing in a more abstract language. But I was not conscious of using metaphors when I wrote the phrase though I am aware that the words could to others have that appearance. I think even that they would seem to one who had gone through the same experience, not only a more vivid, but a more realistic and accurate description of this inner state than any abstract language could give.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true that metaphors, symbols, images are constant auxiliaries summoned by the mystic for the expression of his vision or his experience. It is inevitable because he has to express in a language made or at least developed and manipulated by the mind the phenomena of a consciousness other than the mental and at once more complex and more subtly concrete. It is this subtly concrete, this supersensuously sensible reality of the phenomena of the spiritual — or the occult — consciousness to which the mystic arrives that justiﬁes the use of metaphor and image as a more living and accurate transcription than the abstract terms which intellectual reﬂection employs for its own characteristic process. If the images used are misleading or not descriptively accurate, it is because the writer has a paucity, looseness or vagueness of language inadequate to the intensity of his experience. Apart from that, all new phenomenon, new discovery, new creation calls for the aid of metaphor and image.


Sri Aurobindo: The scientist speaks of light waves or of sound waves and in doing so he uses a metaphor, but one which corresponds to the physical fact and is perfectly applicable — for there is no reason why there should not be a wave, a limited ﬂowing movement of light or of sound as well as of water.  But still when I speak of the mind’s brightness, clearness, stillness, I have no idea of calling metaphor to my aid; it is meant to be a description quite precise and positive — as precise, as positive as if I were describing in the same way an expanse of air or a sheet of water. For the mystic’s experience of mind, especially when it falls still, is not that of an abstract condition or impalpable activity of the consciousness; it is rather an experience of a substance — an extended subtle substance in which there can be and are waves, currents, vibrations not physically material but still as deﬁnite, as perceptible, as tangible and controllable by an inner sense as any movement of material energy or substance by the physical senses. The stillness of the mind means, ﬁrst, the falling to rest of the habitual thought movements, thought formations, thought currents which agitate this mind-substance. That repose, vacancy of movement, is for many a sufﬁcient mental silence.


Sri Aurobindo: But, even in this repose of all thought movements and all movements of feeling, one sees, when one looks more closely at it, that the mind-substance is still in a constant state of very subtle formless but potentially formative vibration — not at ﬁrst easily observable, but afterwards quite evident — and that state of constant vibration may be as harmful to the exact reﬂection or reception of the descending Truth as any formed thought movement or emotional movement; for  these vibrations are the source of a mentalisation which can diminish or distort the authenticity of the higher Truth or break it up into mental refractions. When I speak of a still mind, I mean then one in which these subtler disturbances too are no longer there. As they fall quiet one can feel an increasing stillness which is not the lesser quietude of repose and also a resultant clearness as palpable as the stillness and clearness of a physical atmosphere.  This positiveness of experience is my justiﬁcation for these epithets “still, clear”; but the other epithet, “bright”, links itself to a still more sensible phenomenon of the subtly concrete.


Sri Aurobindo: For in the brightness I describe there is another additional element that is connected with the phenomenon of Light well known and common to mystic experience. That inner Light of which the mystics speak is not a metaphor, as when Goethe called for more light in his last moments; it presents itself as a very positive illumination actually seen and felt by the inner sense.  The brightness of the still and clear mind is a reﬂection of this Light that comes even before the Light itself manifests — and, even without any actual manifestation of the Light, is sufﬁcient for the mind’s openness to the greater consciousness beyond mind — just as we can see by the dawn-light before the sunrise; for it brings to the still mind, which might otherwise remain just still and at peace and nothing more, a capacity of penetrability to the Truth it has to receive and harbour. I have emphasised this point at a little length because it helps to bring out the difference between the abstract mental and the concrete mystic perception of supraphysical things which is the source of much misunderstanding between the spiritual seeker and the intellectual thinker.  Even when they speak the same language it is a different order of perceptions to which the language refers.


Sri Aurobindo: The same word in their mouths may denote the products of two different grades of consciousness. This ambiguity in the expression is a cause of much non-understanding and disagreement, while even a surface agreement may be a thin bridge or crust over a gulf of difference.    I come now to the question raised by Professor Sorley, what is the relation — or rather the position — of the intellect in regard to mystic or spiritual experience. Is it true as it is often contended that the mystic must, whether as to the validity of his experience itself or the validity of his expression of it, accept the intellect as the judge?


Sri Aurobindo: It ought to be very plain that in the search, the discovery, the getting of the experience itself the intellect cannot claim to put its limits or its law on an endeavour whose very aim, ﬁrst principle, constant method is to go beyond the domain of the ordinary earth-ruled and sense-ruled mental intelligence.  It would be as if you were to ask me to climb a mountain with a rope around me attaching me to the terrestrial level — or as if I were permitted to ﬂy but only on condition that I kept my feet on the earth or near enough to the safety of the ground while I do it. It may indeed be the securest thing to walk on earth, to be on the ﬁrm ground of terrestrial reason always; to attempt to ascend on wings to the Beyond-Mind ether may be to risk mental confusion and collapse and all possible accidents of error, illusion, extravagance, hallucination or what not — the usual charges of the positive earth-walking intellect against mystic experience; but I have to take the risk if I want to do it at all.  The reasoning intellect bases itself on man’s normal consciousness, it proceeds by the workings of a mental perception and conception of things; it is at its ease only when founded on a logical basis formed by terrestrial experience and its accumulated data. The mystic goes beyond into a region where the everyday mental basis falls away; the terrestrial data on which the reason founds itself are exceeded, there is even another law and canon of perception and knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: His entire business is to break out or upward or widen into a new consciousness which looks at things in a very different way, and if this new consciousness may include, though viewed with quite another vision, the data of the ordinary external intelligence, yet it cannot be limited by them, cannot bind itself to see from the intellectual standpoint or conform to its manner of conceiving, reasoning, its established interpretation of experience. A mystic entering the domain of the occult or of the spirit with the intellect as his only or his supreme light or guide would risk to see nothing, or see according to his preconceived mental idea of things or else he would arrive only at a subtly “positive” mental realisation of perceptions already laid down for him by the abstract speculations of the intellectual thinker.  There is a strain of spiritual thought in India which compromises with the modern intellectual demand and admits Reason as a supreme judge, — but it must be a Reason which in its turn is prepared to compromise and accept the data of spiritual experience as valid. That is to do what the Indian philosophers have always done; for they have tried to establish by the light of metaphysical reasoning generalisations drawn from spiritual experience; and it was always on the basis of that experience that they proceeded and with the evidence of the spiritual seekers as a supreme proof ranking higher than intellectual speculation or inference. In that way they preserved the freedom of spiritual and mystic experience and allowed the reasoning intellect to come in only on the second line as a judge of the generalised metaphysical statements drawn from the experience, but not of the experience itself.


Sri Aurobindo: This is, I presume, something akin to Professor Sorley’s own position — for he concedes that the experience itself is of the domain of the ineffable, but he suggests that as soon as I begin to interpret it, to state it, I fall back inevitably into the domain of the thinking mind; I am using its terms and ways of thought and expression and must accept the intellect as judge.  If I do not, I knock away the ladder by which I have climbed — through mind to Beyond-Mind — and I am left unsupported in the air. It is not quite clear whether the truth of my experience itself is supposed to be invalidated by this unsustained position, but at any rate it remains something aloof and incommunicable without support or any consequences for thought or life. There are three propositions, I suppose, which I can take as laid down or admitted in this contention and joined together. First, the spiritual experience is itself of the Beyond-Mind, ineffable and, it should be presumed, unthinkable.


Sri Aurobindo: Next, — in the expression, the interpretation of the experience, you are obliged to fall back into the domain of the consciousness you have left and so you must abide by its judgments, accept the terms and the canons of its law, submit to its verdict; for you have abandoned the freedom of the Ineffable and are no longer your own master. Last, spiritual truth may be true in itself, in its own self-experience, but any statement of it is liable to error and here the intellect is the sole possible arbiter.  I do not think I am prepared to accept any of these afﬁrmations completely just as they are. It is true that spiritual and mystic experience carries one ﬁrst into domains of OtherMind or All-Mind (and also Other-Life and All-Life and I would add Other-Substance and All-Substance) and then emerges into the Beyond-Mind; it is true also that the ultimate Truth has been described as unthinkable, ineffable, unknowable — “speech cannot reach there, mind cannot arrive to it.” But I may observe that it is so to human mind, but not to itself, since it is not an abstraction, but a superconscious (not unconscious) Existence, — for it is described as to itself self-evident and self-luminous, — therefore in some direct supramental or at least overmind way knowable and known, eternally self-aware.


Sri Aurobindo: But here the question is not of an ultimate realisation of the ultimate Ineffable which according to many can only be reached in a supreme trance withdrawn from all outer mental or other awareness; we are speaking rather of an experience in a luminous silence of the mind and any such experience presupposes that before there is any last unspeakable experience of the Ultimate or disappearance into it, there is possible a reﬂection or descent of at least some Power or Presence of the identical Reality into the mind-substance. Along with it there is a modiﬁcation of mind-substance, an illumination of it, — and of this experience an expression of some kind, a rendering into thought ought to be possible. Moreover an immense mass of well-established spiritual experience would have been impossible unless we suppose that the Ineffable and Unknowable has truths of itself, aspects, revealing presentations of it to our consciousness which are not utterly unthinkable and ineffable.  If it were not so, indeed, all account of spiritual truth and experience would be impossible. At most one could speculate about it, but that would be an activity very much indeed in the air and even a movement in a void, without support or data.


Sri Aurobindo: At best, there could be a mere manipulation of all the possible ideas of what conceivably might be the Supreme and Ultimate.  For we would have nothing before us to go upon other than the bare fact of a certain unaccountable translation by one way or another from consciousness to an incommunicable Supraconscience. That is indeed what much mystical seeking actually held up as the one thing essential both in Europe and India. Many Christian mystics spoke of a total darkness through which one must pass into the Ineffable Light and Rapture, a falling away of all mental lights and all that belongs to the ordinary activity of the nature; they aimed not only at a silence but a darkness of the mind protecting an inexpressible illumination. The Indian Sannyasins sought by silence, by concentration inwards, to shed mind altogether and pass into a thought-free trance from which, if one returns, no communication or expression could be brought back of what was there except a remembrance of ineffable existence and bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: But still even here there were previous glimpses or contacts and results of contact of That which is Beyond; there were contacts of the Highest or of the occult universal Existence, which were held to be spiritual truths and on the basis of which the seers and mystics did not hesitate to formulate their experience and the thinkers to build on it numberless philosophies, theologies, books of exegesis or of creed and dogma. All then is not ineffable; there is a possibility of communication and expression, and the only question is of the nature of this transmission of the facts of a different order of consciousness to the mind and whether it is feasible for the intellect or must be left for something else than intellect to  determine the validity of the expression or, even, of the original experience .


Sri Aurobindo: If no valid account were possible there could be no question of the judgment of the intellect — only the violent contradiction of mind sitting down to judge a Beyond-Mind of which it can know nothing, starting to speak of the Ineffable, think of the Unthinkable, comprehend the Incommunicable.  I have heard of McTaggart as a philosopher but am totally unacquainted with his thought and his writings, so it is a little difﬁcult for me to answer you with any certitude. Isolated thoughts or sentences may easily be misunderstood if they are not read against the background of the thinker’s way of looking at things taken as a whole. There is always, too, the difference of standpoint and approach between the spiritual seeker or mystic who (sometimes) philosophises and the intellectual thinker who (sometimes or partly) mysticises. The one starts from a spiritual or mystic experience or at the least an intuitive realisation and tries to express it and its connection with other spiritual or intuitive truth in the inadequate and too abstract language of the mind; he looks behind thought and expression for some spiritual or intuitive experience to which it may point and, if he ﬁnds none, he is apt to feel the thought, however intellectually ﬁne, or the expression, however intellectually signiﬁcant, as something unsubstantial because without spiritual substance.


Sri Aurobindo: The intellectual thinker starts from ideas and mentalised feelings and other mental or external phenomena and tries to reach the essential truth in or behind them; generally, he stops short at a mental abstraction or only a derivative mental realisation of something that is in its own nature other than mental. But if he has the true mystic somewhere in him, he will sometimes get beyond to at least ﬂashes and glimpses. Is it not the compulsion of this approach (I mean the inadequacy of the method of intellectual philosophy, its ﬁxation to the word and idea, while to the complete mystic word and idea are useful symbols only or signiﬁcative ﬂashlights) that kept McTaggart, as it keeps many, from the unfolding of the mystic within him? If the reviewer is right, that would be why he is abstract and dry, while what is beautiful and moving in his thought might be some light that shines through in spite of the inadequate means of expression to which philosophical thinking condemns us. However, subject to this rather lengthy caveat, I will try to deal with the extracted sentences or summarised thoughts you have placed before me in your letter.


Sri Aurobindo: This seems to me a little excessive. If instead of “the main occupation” it were said “an essential power”, that might pass. I would myself say that bliss and onene


Sri Aurobindo: ss are the essential condition of the absolute reality and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities; but the activities themselves may be not of one main kind but manifold in character.  . In mental experience benevolence and sympathy have to be distinguished from love; but it seems to me that beyond the dividing mind, where the true sense of oneness begins, these become at a higher intensity of their movement characteristic values of love. Benevolence becomes an intense compulsion imposed by love to seek always the good of the loved, sympathy becomes the feeling out of love to contain, participate in and take as part of one’s own existence all the movements of the loved and all that concerns him.


Sri Aurobindo: That is not often true in human practice; for there the destiny of love and its justiﬁcation depend very much as a rule (though not always) on the nature of the cause or object. For if the object of love is trivial in the sense of his being an inadequate instrument for the dynamic realisation of the sense of oneness which McTaggart says is the essence of love, then love is likely to be baulked of its fulﬁlment. Unless, of course, it is satisﬁed with existing, with spending itself in its own fundamental way on the loved without expecting any return for its self-expenditure, any mutual uniﬁcation. Still, of Love in its essence the statement may be true; but then it would point to the fact that Love at its origin is a self-existent force, an absolute, a transcendent (as I have put it), which does not depend upon the objects, — it depends only on itself or only on the Divine, — for it is a self-existent power of the Divine. If it were not self-existent, it would hardly be independent of the nature or reaction of its object.


Sri Aurobindo: It is partly what I mean when I speak of transcendent Love — though this is only one aspect of its transcendence. That self-existent transcendent Love spreading itself over all, turning everywhere to contain, embrace, unite, help, upraise towards love and bliss and oneness, becomes cosmic divine Love; intensely ﬁxing itself on one or others to ﬁnd itself, to achieve a dynamic uniﬁcation or to reach here towards the union of the soul with the Divine, it becomes the individual divine Love. But there are unhappily its diminutions in the human mind, human vital, human physical; there the divine essence of Love may easily become mixed with counterfeits, dimmed, concealed or lost in the twisted movements born of division and ignorance.  . It sounds very high, but also rather dry; this “emotion” in the lover does not seem to be very emotional, it is a hill-top syllogising far above the ﬂow of any emotional urges.


Sri Aurobindo: Self-reverence in this sense or in a deeper sense can come from Love, but it come equally from a participation in Knowledge, in Power or anything else that one feels to be the highest good or else of the essence of the Highest. But the passion of love, the adoration of love, can bring in a quite different, even an opposite emotion. Especially in love for the Divine or for one whom one feels to be divine, the Bhakta feels an intense reverence for the Loved, a sense of something of immense greatness, beauty or value and for himself a strong impression of his own comparative unworthiness and a passionate desire to  into likeness with that which one adores. What does come very often with the inrush of Love is an exaltation, a feeling of a greatening within, of new powers and high or beautiful possibilities in one’s nature or of an intensiﬁcation of the nature; but that is not exactly self-reverence. There is a deeper selfreverence possible, a true emotion, a sense of the value and even the sacredness of the soul, even the mind, life, body as an offering or itself the temple for the inner presence of the Beloved.


Sri Aurobindo: These reactions are intimately connected with the fact that Love, when it is worthy of the name, is always a seeking for union, for oneness, but also in its secret foundation it is a seeking, if sometimes only a dim groping for the Divine. Love in its depths is a contact of the Divine Possibility or Reality in oneself with the Divine Possibility or Reality in the loved.  It is the inability to afﬁrm or keep this character that makes human love either transient or baulked of its full signiﬁcance or condemned to sink into a less exalted movement diminished to the capacity of the human receptacle. But there McTaggart brings in his saving clause, “When I love, I see the other not as he is now (and therefore really is not), but as he really is (that is, as he will be).” The rest of it, that “the other with all his faults is somehow inﬁnitely good — at least for his friend”, seems to me too mental to convey anything very deﬁnite from the standpoint of the spiritual inner values.


Sri Aurobindo: But the formula quoted also is not overclear. It means, I suppose, something like Vivekananda’s distinction between the apparent Man and the real Man; or it coincides up to a point with the saying of one of the early teachers of Vedanta, Yajnavalkya, “Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear” (or, the friend — for the wife is only the ﬁrst of a list), “but for the sake of the Self (the greater Self, the Spirit within) is she dear.” But Yajnavalkya, a seeker of the one (not the plural) Absolute, would not have accepted the implication in McTaggart’s phrase; he would have said that one must go beyond and eventually seek the Self not in the wife or friend — even though sought or glimpsed there for a time, but in its own self-existence. In any case there seems to be here an avowal that it is not the human being (what he now is), but the Divine or a portion of the Divine within (call it God if you will or call it Absolute) that is the object of the love. But the mystic would not be satisﬁed like McTaggart with that “will be”, — would not consent to remain in love with the ﬁnite for the sake of an unrealised Inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: He would insist on pushing on towards full realisation, towards ﬁnding the Divine in Itself or the Divine Manifest; he would not rest satisﬁed with the Divine unconscious of itself, unmanifested or only distantly.  There is where the parallel with the Ishta Devata which you suggest would not hold; for the Ishta Devata on whom the seeker concentrates is a Personality of the Divine answering to the needs of his own personality and showing to him as in a representative image what the Divine is or at least pointing him through itself to the Absolute. On the other side, when I spoke of the self-absorption of the Divine Force in its energising, I was trying to explain the possibility in a Divine or cosmic manifestation of this apparently inconscient Matter.  I said that in the frontal movement there was something of the Divine that had thrown itself into material form with so much concentration that it became the motion and the form which the motion of Force creates and put all that was not that behind it, — even, but in a greater degree and more permanently, as a man can concentrate and forget his own existence in what he is doing, seeing or making. In man himself, who is not inconscient, this appears in a different way; his frontal being is unaware of what is behind the surface personality and action, like the part of the actor’s being which becomes the role and forgets entirely the other more enduring self behind the actor.


Sri Aurobindo: But in either case there is a larger self behind, “a Conscient in things inconscient”, which is aware both of itself and of the self-forgetting frontal form seen as the creature. Does McTaggart recognise this conscious Divine within? He makes too little of this Absolute or Real Self which, as he yet sees, is within the unreal or less real appearance. His denial of the Divine comes from the insistence of his mind and vital temperament on the friend as he is, even though his higher mind may try to escape from that by the idea of what his friend will be; otherwise it is difﬁcult to understand the stupendous exaggeration of his thesis that the love for friends is the real thing in life and his unwillingness to give God a chance, lest that should take away the friend and leave the Divine in his place.  I do not quite seize what is his conception of the Absolute.


Sri Aurobindo: How can it be said that a society (?) of distinct selves are collectively the Absolute? If it is meant that where there is a union of conscious liberated selves there is the presence of the Divine and a certain manifestation is possible, — that is intelligible. Or if by society is meant only that the sum or totality of all distinct selves is the Divine and these distinct individual selves are portions of the Divine, that would be an intelligible (pantheistic) solution.  Only, it would be a Divine All or some kind of Cosmic Self or Spirit rather than the Absolute. For if there is an Absolute — which intellectually one is not bound to believe, except that something in the higher mind seems imperatively to ask for it or feel that it is there, — it must surely exist in its own absolute right, not constituted, not dependent for its being on a collectivity of distinct selves, but self-existent.


Sri Aurobindo: To the intellect such an Absolute may seem an indeﬁnable which it cannot grasp; but mystic or spiritual experience pushed far enough ultimately leads to it, and whatever may be the gate of experience through which one gets the ﬁrst glimpse of it, it is there even though not fully grasped in that opening experience.  Your own experience of it was, you say, that of an irruption of the Inﬁnite into the ﬁnite — of a greater Power descending upon you or uplifting you to itself. That indeed is what it is always to the spiritual experience — and that is why I speak of it as the Transcendent. It reveals itself as such a descending and uplifting Power or a descending and uplifting Love — or Light, Peace, Bliss, Consciousness, Presence; it is not limited by its manifestation in the ﬁnite, — one feels it, the Peace, the Power, Love, Light or Bliss or the Presence in which all these are, to be a self-existent inﬁnity, not something constituted by or limited to our ﬁrst sight of it here. McTaggart’s love of friends remained the real thing for him; I must suppose that he had not this glimpse.


Sri Aurobindo: But once this irruption has taken place, this descent and uplifting, that is bound to become in the end the one thing real, for by that alone can the rest ﬁnd its own lasting greater reality. It is the descent of the Divine Consciousness and the ascent or uplifting into it of which we speak in our Yoga. All else can only hold, make good, fulﬁl itself if it can lift itself to be a part of this divine realisation or of its manifestation, and, to do that, it must accept a great transformation and perfection.  But the central realisation must be the one central aim, and it is that realisation only which will make other things, all that is intended to be made part of it, divinely possible.  I have not read him [] sufﬁciently to pronounce.


Sri Aurobindo: So far as I know, he seems to have some perception of the dynamic creative intuition involved in Life, but none of the truly suprarational intuition above. If so, his Intuition which he takes to be the sole secret of things is only a secondary manifestation of something transcendent which is itself only the “rays of the Sun”.     Instinct and intuition as described by him [] are vital, but it is possible to develop a corresponding mental intuition, and that is probably what he suggests — and which depends not on thought but a sort of mental direct contact with things.


Sri Aurobindo: This is not exactly mysticism, though it is a ﬁrst step towards it.     No, it [ ´elan vital] is not the Supramental. But Bergson’s “intuition” seems to be a Life Intuition which is of course the Supramental fragmented and modiﬁed to act as a Knowledge in “Life-in-Matter”.


Sri Aurobindo: I can’t say deﬁnitively yet, but that is the impression it gave me.    [ ´elan vital:] Not Sachchidananda but Chit-shakti in the disguise of Pranashakti. Bergson is, I believe, a vitalist (as opposed to a materialist on one side and an idealist on the other) with a strong perception of Time (in Upanishadic times they speculated whether Time was not the Brahman and some schools held that idea). So for him Brahman = ConsciousnessForce = Time-Force = Life-Force.


Sri Aurobindo: But the last two he sees vividly, while the ﬁrst which is the real thing behind creation he sees very dimly.     He [] sees Consciousness (Chit) not in its essential truth but as a creative Force = a sort of transcendent Life-Energy descending into Matter and acting there.


Sri Aurobindo:   I suppose Bergson must already know what the “mystics” say about the matter and has put his own interpretation or value upon it. So he would not at all be impressed by your suggestion.  He would say, “I know all about that already.”  I do not ﬁnd it easy to answer the few brief and casual sentences in’s letter, — precisely because they are so brief and casual.


Sri Aurobindo: Not knowing him or the turns of his mind, I do not exactly seize what is behind this passage in his letter. It would be easier to reply if I had some notion of the kind of thought or experience on which he takes his stand when he dismisses so cavalierly the statement of spiritual truth put forward in the. As it is, I am obliged to answer to what be behind his sentences and, as there is much that possibly stands behind them, the reply becomes long and elaborate and is in danger of seeming long and discursive. I could of course answer easily myself by a few brief and trenchant sentences of the same calibre, but in that kind of discussion there is no proﬁt.


Sri Aurobindo: Let me say that he makes an initial mistake — quite natural for him, since he has not read the, — when he describes the extract sent to him as a “theological fragment”. I must insist that there is no theology in the. Nothing there is written to support or to develop any kind of religious belief or dogma or to conﬁrm or enunciate the credo of any old or new religion.  No less does he miss the mark when he describes as a scholastic distinction the substance of the passage. The teaching there is not taken from books, nor, although put in philosophic language, is it based upon abstract thought or any formal logic.


Sri Aurobindo: It expresses a fundamental spiritual experience, dynamic for the growth of the being, conﬁrmed and enlarged and ﬁlled with detail by almost thirty years of continuous sadhana, and, as such, it cannot be seriously challenged or invalidated by mere intellectual question or reasoning, but, if at all, then only by a greater and wider spiritual experience. Moreover, it coincides (not in expression, it may be, but in substance) with the experience of hundreds of spiritual seekers in many paths and in all parts of the world since the days of the Upanishads — and of Plotinus and the Gnostics and Suﬁs — to the present time. It is hardly admissible then to put it aside as the thought of a tyro or beginner in spiritual knowledge making his ﬁrst clumsy potshots at a solution of the crossword enigma of the universe. That description seems to show that he has missed the point of the passage altogether and that also makes it difﬁcult to reply; for where there is no meeting point of minds, discussion is likely to be sterile.  I was a little surprised at ﬁrst by this entire lack of understanding, shown still more in his cavil at the two Divines — for I had somehow got the impression that was a Christian and the recognition of “two Divines” — the Divine Transcendent and the Divine Immanent — is, I have read, perfectly familiar to Christian ideas and to Christian experience.


Sri Aurobindo: The words themselves in fact — transcendent and cosmic — are taken from the West. I do not know that there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the language of Indian spiritual thinking, although the experiences on which the distinction rests are quite familiar. On another side, Christianity insists not only on a double but a triple Divine. It even strikes me that this triple Godhead or Trinity is not very far off at bottom from my trinity of the individual, cosmic and transcendent Divine — as far at least as one can judge who has not himself followed the Christian discipline. Christ, whether as the human Incarnation or the Christos in men or the Godhead proceeding from the Father, seems to me to be quite my individual Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: The Father has very much the appearance of the One who overstands and is immanent in the cosmos. And although this is more obscure, yet if one can be guided by the indications in the Scripture, the Holy Ghost looks very much like a rather mysterious and inexpressible Transcendence and its descent very much like what I would call the descent of Light, Purity, Peace — that passeth all understanding — or Power of the supramental Spirit. In any case these Christian and Western ideas show surely that my afﬁrmation of a double or a triple Divine is not anything new and ought not to be found startling or upsetting and I do not see why it should be treated as (in itself) obscure and unintelligible.  Again, are these or similar distinctions very positively made in the Christian, Suﬁ or other teachings mere theoretical abstractions, scholastic distinctions, theological cobwebs, or metaphysical puzzles? I had always supposed that they corresponded to very living, very dynamic, almost — for the paths to which they relate — indispensable experiences.


Sri Aurobindo: No doubt, for those who follow other ways or no way at all or for those who have not yet had the illuminating and vivifying experience, they may seem at ﬁrst a little difﬁcult or unseizable. But that is true of most spiritual truth — and not of spiritual truth alone. There are many very highly intelligent and cultured people to whom a scientiﬁc explanation of even so patent and common a fact as electricity and electric light (this is a reminiscence of an article by Y. Y. in the) seems equally difﬁcult to seize by the mind or to ﬁx either in the memory or the intelligence.   And yet the distinction between positive and negative electricity, both necessary for the existence of the light, — like that of the passive and active Brahman (another scholastic distinction?) both necessary for the existence of the universe, — cannot be dismissed for that reason as something academic or scholastic, but is a very pertinent statement of things quite dynamic and real.


Sri Aurobindo: No doubt the non-scientiﬁc man does not and perhaps need not trouble about these things and can be content to enjoy the electric light (when he is allowed to do so by the grace of the Pondicherry Municipality), without enquiring into the play of the forces behind it: but for the seeker after scientiﬁc truth or for the practical electrician it is a different matter. Now these distinctions in the spiritual ﬁeld are a parallel case; they seem theoretical or abstract only so long as experience has not made them concrete, but once experienced they become living stuff of the consciousness and, after a certain stage, even the basis of action and growth in the spiritual life.  Here I am driven to a rather lengthy digression from the main theme — for I am met by’s rather bafﬂing appeal to Whitham’s History of Science. What has Whitham or Science to do with spiritual truth or spiritual experience? I can only suppose that he condemns all intrusion of anything like metaphysical thought into the spiritual ﬁeld — a position excessive but not altogether untenable — and even perhaps proposes to bring the scientiﬁc method and the scientiﬁc mentality into spiritual experience as the sole true way of arriving at or judging the truth of things. I should like to make my view clear as to that point, because here much confusion has been created about it, and more is possible.


Sri Aurobindo: And the ﬁrst thing I would say is that if metaphysics has no right to intervene in spiritual experience, neither has Science. There are here three different domains of knowledge and experience each with its own instrumentation, its own way of approach and seeing, suited for its own task, but not to be imposed or substituted in these other ﬁelds of knowledge, — at least unless and until they meet by some kind of supreme reconciling transmutation in something that is at the source of all knowledge. For knowledge may be essentially one, but like the one Divine, it manifests differently in different ﬁelds of its play and to abolish their distinctions is not the way to arrive at true understanding of experience.  Science deals effectively with phenomena and process and the apparent play of forces which determine the process. It cannot deal even intellectually in any adequate way with ultimate truths, that is the province of the higher, less external mind — represented up till now by metaphysics, though metaphysics is not its only possible power.


Sri Aurobindo: If Science tries to ﬁx metaphysical truth by forcing on this domain its own generalisations in the physical ﬁeld, as people have been doing for almost the last century, it makes a mess of thought by illegitimately extended conclusions and has in the end to retire from this usurpation as it is now beginning to retire. Its discoveries may be used by philosophy, but on the grounds proper to philosophy and not on the grounds proper to Science. The philosopher must judge the scientiﬁc conceptions of relativity or discontinuity or space-time, for instance, by his own processes and standards of evidence. So too, Science has no instrumentation or process of knowledge which can enable it to discover spiritual truth or to judge or determine the results of spiritual experience. There is a ﬁeld of knowledge of process in the spiritual and the occult domain, in the discovery of a world of inner forces and their way of action and even of their objective dynamisation in the mind and life and the functioning of the body.


Sri Aurobindo: But the mathematical exactitudes and rigid formulas of physical Science do not apply here and the mentality created by them would hamper spiritual experience.  I do not think anything can be said that would convince one who starts from exactly the opposite viewpoint to the spiritual, the way of looking at things of a Victorian agnostic. His points of doubt about the value — other than subjective and purely individual — of Yoga experience are that it does not aim at scientiﬁc truth and cannot be said to achieve ultimate truth because the experiences are coloured by the individuality of the seer. One might ask whether Science itself has arrived at any ultimate truth; on the contrary, ultimate truth even on the physical plane seems to recede as Science advances. Science started on the assumption that the ultimate truth must be physical and objective — and the objective Ultimate (or even less than that) would explain all subjective phenomena.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga proceeds on the opposite view that the ultimate Truth is spiritual and subjective and it is in that ultimate Light that we must view objective phenomena. It is the two opposite poles and the gulf is as wide as it can be.  Yoga, however, is scientiﬁc to this extent that it proceeds by subjective experiment and bases all its ﬁndings on experience; mental intuitions are admitted only as a ﬁrst step and are not considered as realisation — they must be conﬁrmed by being translated into and justiﬁed by experience. As to the value of the experience itself, it is doubted by the physical mind because it is subjective, not objective. But has the distinction much value?


Sri Aurobindo: Is not all knowledge and experience subjective at bottom? Objective external physical things are seen very much in the same way by human beings because of the construction of the mind and senses; with another construction of mind and sense quite another account of the physical world would be given — Science itself has made that very clear. But your friend’s point is that the Yoga experience is individual, coloured by the individuality of the seer. It may be true to a certain extent of the precise form or transcription given to the experience in certain domains; but even here the difference is superﬁcial.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a fact that Yogic experience runs everywhere on the same lines. Certainly, there are, not one line, but many; for, admittedly, we are dealing with a many-sided Inﬁnite to which there are and must be many ways of approach; but yet the broad lines are the same everywhere  and the intuitions, experiences, phenomena are the same in ages and countries far apart from each other and systems practised quite independently from each other. The experiences of the mediaeval European bhakta or mystic are precisely the same in substance, however differing in names, forms, religious colouring etc., as those of the mediaeval Indian bhakta or mystic — yet these people were not corresponding with one another or aware of each other’s experiences and results as are modern scientists from New York to Yokohama. That would seem to show that there is something there identical, universal and presumably true — however the colour of the translation may differ because of the difference of mental language.


Sri Aurobindo: As for ultimate Truth, I suppose both the Victorian agnostic and, let us say, the Indian Vedantin may agree that it is veiled but there. Both speak of it as the Unknowable; the only difference is that the Vedantin says it is unknowable by the mind and inexpressible by speech, but still attainable by something deeper or higher than the mental perception, while even mind can reﬂect and speech express the thousand aspects it presents to the mind’s outward and inward experience. The Victorian agnostic would, I suppose, cancel this qualiﬁcation; he would pronounce for the doubtful existence and, if existent, for the absolute unknowableness of this Unknowable.  I do not think the two questions you put are of much importance from the viewpoint of spiritual sadhana.  The question about science and spirituality would have been of some moment some twenty years ago and it ﬁlled the minds of men in the earlier years of the twentieth century, but it is now out of date.


Sri Aurobindo: Science itself has come to the conclusion that it cannot, as it once hoped, determine what is the truth of things or their real nature or what is behind physical phenomena; it can only deal with the process of physical things and how they come about or on what lines men can deal with and make use of them. In other words, the ﬁeld of physical science has been now deﬁnitely marked off and limited and questions about God or the ultimate reality or other metaphysical or spiritual problems are outside it. This is at least the case all over continental Europe and it is only in England and America that there is still some attempt to reason about these things on the basis of physical science. The so-called sciences which try to deal with the mind and men (psychology etc.) are so much dependent on physical science that they cannot go beyond narrow limits. If science is to turn her face towards the Divine it must be a new science not yet developed which deals directly with the forces of the Lifeworld and of Mind and so arrives at what is beyond Mind, but present-day science cannot do that.


Sri Aurobindo: From the spiritual point of view such temporary phenomena as the turn of educated Hindus towards materialism are of little importance. There have always been periods when the mind of nations, continents, cultures turned towards materialism and away from all spiritual belief. Such periods came in ancient Europe in the ﬁrst century.., in western Europe in the nineteenth century, but they are usually of short duration. Western Europe has already lost its faith in materialism and is seeking for something else, either turning back to old religion or groping for something new. Russia and Asia are now going through the same materialistic wave.


Sri Aurobindo: These waves come because of a certain necessity in human development — to destroy the bondage of old forms and leave a free ﬁeld for new truth and new forms of truth and action in life as well as of what is behind life.    You ask me whether you have to give up your predilection for testing before accepting and to accept everything in Yoga — and by testing you mean testing by the ordinary reason. The only answer I can give to that is that the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain and go according to a law of their own, have their own method of perception, criteria and all the rest of it which are neither those of the domain of the physical senses nor of the domain of rational or scientiﬁc enquiry. Just as scientiﬁc enquiry passes beyond that of the physical senses and enters the domain of the inﬁnite and the inﬁnitesimal about which the senses can say nothing and test nothing — for one cannot see or touch an electron or know by the evidence of the sense-mind whether it exists or not or decide by that evidence whether the earth really turns round the sun and not rather the sun round the earth as our senses and all our physical experience daily tell us — so the spiritual search passes beyond the domain of scientiﬁc or rational enquiry and it is impossible by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and nature.


Sri Aurobindo: As in science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the past, you have to develop an intuitive discrimination which compares the experiences, see what they mean, how far and in what ﬁeld each is valid, what is the place of each in the whole, how it can be reconciled or related with others that at ﬁrst sight seem to contradict it, etc. etc. until you can move with a secure knowledge in the vast ﬁeld of spiritual phenomena. That is the only way to test spiritual experience.  I have myself tried the other method and found it absolutely incapable and inapplicable. On the other hand if you are not prepared to go through all that yourself — as few can do except those of extraordinary spiritual stature — you have to accept the leading of a Master, as in science you accept a teacher instead of going through the whole ﬁeld of science and its experimentation all by yourself — at least until you have accumulated sufﬁcient experience and knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: If that is accepting things, well, you have to accept. For I am unable to see by what valid tests you propose to make the ordinary reason the judge of what is beyond it.  You quote the sayings of Vivekananda and Kobiraj Gopinath. Is this Kobiraj the disciple of the Jewel Sannyasi or is he another? In any case, I would like to know before assigning a value to these utterances what they actually did for the testing of their spiritual perceptions and experiences.


Sri Aurobindo: How did Vivekananda test the value of his spiritual experiences — some of them not more credible to the ordinary mind than the translation through the air of Bijoy Goswami’s wife to Lake Manas or of Bijoy Goswami himself by a similar method to Benares? I know nothing of Kobiraj Gopinath, but what were his tests and how did he apply them? What were his methods? his criteria? It seems to me that no ordinary mind could accept the apparition of Buddha out of a wall or the half hour’s talk with Hayagriva as valid facts by any kind of testing.


Sri Aurobindo: It would either have to accept them or on the sole evidence of Vivekananda which comes to the same thing or to reject them as hallucinations or mere mental images accompanied in one case by an auditive hallucination. I fail to see how it could “test” them. Or how was I to test by the ordinary mind my experience of Nirvana? To what conclusion could I come about it by the aid of the ordinary positive reason? How could I test its validity?


Sri Aurobindo: I am at a loss to imagine. I did the only thing I could — to accept it as a strong and valid truth of experience, let it have its full play and produce its full experiential consequences until I had sufﬁcient Yogic knowledge to put it in its place. Finally, how without inner knowledge or experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of others?  I have often said that discrimination is not only perfectly admissible but indispensable in spiritual experience. But it must be a discrimination founded on knowledge, not a reasoning founded on ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise you tie up your mind and hamper experience by preconceived ideas which are as much  as any acceptance of a spiritual truth or experience can be. Your idea that surrender can only come by love is a point in instance. It is perfectly true in Yogic experience that surrender by true love which means psychic and spiritual love is the most powerful, simple and effective of all, but one cannot, putting that forward as a dictum arrived at by the ordinary reason, shut up the whole of possible experience of true surrender into that formula or announce on its strength that one must wait till one loves perfectly before one can surrender. Yogic experience shows that surrender can also be made by the mind and will, a clear and sincere mind seeing the necessity of surrender and a clear and sincere will enforcing it on the recalcitrant members.  Also experience shows that not only can surrender come by love, but love also can come by surrender or grow with it from an imperfect to a perfect love.


Sri Aurobindo: One starts by an intense idea and will to know or reach the Divine and surrenders more and more one’s ordinary personal ideas, desires, attachments, urges to action or habits of action so that the Divine may take up everything. Surrender means that, to give up our little mind and its mental ideas and preferences into a divine Light and a greater knowledge, our petty personal troubled blind stumbling will into a great calm tranquil luminous Will and Force, our little restless tormented feelings into a wide intense divine Love and Ananda, our small suffering personality into the one Person of which it is an obscure outcome. If one insists on one’s own ideas and reasonings, the greater Light and Knowledge cannot come or else is marred and obstructed in the coming at every step by a lower interference; if one insists on one’s own desires and fancies, that great luminous Will and Force cannot act in its own true power — for you ask it to be the servant of your desires; if one refuses to give up one’s petty ways of feeling, eternal Love and supreme Ananda cannot descend or is mixed and is spilt from the effervescing crude emotional vessel. No amount of ordinary reasoning can get rid of that necessity of surmounting the lower in order that the higher may be there.  Scientiﬁc laws only give a schematic account of material processes of Nature — as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself.


Sri Aurobindo: Water for instance is not merely so much oxygen and hydrogen put together — the combination is simply a process or device for enabling the materialisation of a new thing called water; what that new thing really is is quite another matter. In fact there are different planes of substance, gross, subtle and more subtle going back to what is called causal () substance. What is more gross can be reduced to the subtle state and the subtle brought into the gross state; that accounts for dematerialisation and materialisation and rematerialisation. These are occult processes and are vulgarly regarded as magic.


Sri Aurobindo: Ordinarily the magician knows nothing of the why and wherefore of what he is doing, he has simply learned the formula or process or else controls elemental beings of the subtler states (planes or worlds) who do the thing for him. The Tibetans indulge widely in occult processes; if you see the books of Madame David-Neel who has lived in Tibet you will get an idea of their expertness in these things. But also the Tibetan Lamas know something of the laws of occult (mental and vital) energy and how it can be made to act on physical things. That is something which goes beyond mere magic. The direct power of mind-force or life-force upon Matter can be extended to an almost illimitable degree.


Sri Aurobindo: It must be remembered that Energy is fundamentally one in all the planes, only taking more and more dense forms, so there is nothing impossible in mind-energy or life-energy acting directly on material energy and substance; if they do they can make a material object do things or rather can do things with a material object which would be to that object in its ordinary poise or “law” unhabitual and therefore apparently impossible.  I do not see how cosmic rays can explain the origination of Matter; it is like Sir Oliver Lodge’s explanation of life on earth that it comes from another planet; it only pushes the problem one step farther back — for how do the cosmic rays come into existence? But it is a fact that Agni is the basis of forms as the Sankhya pointed out long ago, i.e. the ﬁery principle in its three powers radiant, electric and gaseous (the Vedic trinity of Agni) is the agent in producing liquid and solid forms of what is called matter.  Obviously a layman can’t do these things, unless he has a native “psychic” (that is, occult) faculty and even then he will have to learn the law of the thing before he can use it at will. It is always possible to use spiritual force or mind-power or willpower or a certain kind of vital energy to produce effects in men, things and happenings; but knowledge and much practice is needed before this possibility ceases to be occasional and haphazard and can be used quite consciously, at will or to perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: Even then to have “a control over the whole material world” is too big a proposition; a local and partial control is more possible or, more widely, certain kinds of control over matter.    The desire [] to satisfy the physical scientists is absurd and illogical. The physical scientists have their own ﬁeld with its own instruments and standards. To apply the same tests to phenomena of a different kind is as foolish as to apply physical tests to spiritual truth.


Sri Aurobindo: One can’t dissect God or see the soul under a microscope. So also the subjection of disembodied spirits or even of psycho-physical phenomena to tests and standards valid only for material phenomena is a most false and unsatisfactory method. Moreover the physical scientist is for the most part resolved not to admit what cannot be neatly packed and labelled and docketed in his own system and its formulas. Dr. Jules Romains, himself a scientist as well as a great writer, makes experiments to prove that men can see and read with the eyes blindfolded, the scientists refuse even to admit or record the results. Khuda Baksh comes along and proves it patently, indubitably, under all legitimate tests, the scientists are quite unwilling to cede and record the fact even though his results are undeniable.


Sri Aurobindo: He walks on ﬁre unhurt and disproves all hitherto suggested explanations, — they simply cast about for another and still more silly explanation! What is the use of trying to convince people who are determined not to believe?    These theosophic and other modern attempts to square physical Science with Yoga (Yogis formerly did not bother to differentiate spiritual functions from grey matter and white matter) make me always suspicious. It looks like manufacture of the mind, pseudo-science.


Sri Aurobindo: It is quite true that the word “superstition” has been habitually used as a convenient club to beat down any belief that does not agree with the ideas of the materialistic reason, that is to say, of the physical mind dealing with the apparent law of physical process and seeing no farther. It has also been used to dismiss ideas and beliefs not in agreement with one’s own idea of what is the rational norm of supraphysical truths as well. For many ages man cherished beliefs that implied a force behind which acted on principles unknown to the physical mind and beyond the witness of the outward reason and the senses. Science came in with a method of knowledge which extended the evidence of this outer ﬁeld of consciousness and thought that by this method all existence would become explicable. It swept away at once without examination all the ancient beliefs as so many “superstitions” — true, half true or false, all went into the dustbin in one impartial sweep, because they did not rely on the method of physical Science and lay outside its data or were or seemed incompatible with its standpoint.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in the ﬁeld of supraphysical experience only so much was admitted as could give a mentally rational explanation of itself according to a certain range of ideas — all the rest, everything that seemed to demand an occult, mystic or below-the-surface origin to explain it, was put aside as so much superstition. Popular beliefs that were the fruit sometimes of imagination but sometimes also of a traditional empirical knowledge or of a right instinct shared naturally the same fate. That all this was a hasty and illegitimate operation, itself based on the “superstition” of the all-sufﬁciency of the new method which really applies only to a limited ﬁeld, is now becoming more and more evident. I agree with you that the word superstition is one which should be used either not at all or with great caution. It is evidently an anachronism to apply it to beliefs not accepted by the form of religion one happens oneself to follow or favour.


Sri Aurobindo: The growing reversal of opinion with regard to many things that were then condemned but are now coming into favour once more, is very striking. In addition to the instances you quote a hundred others might be added. One does not quite know why a belief in graphology should be condemned as irrational or superstitious; it seems to me quite rational to believe that a man’s handwriting is the result of or consistent with his temperament and nature and, if so, it may very well prove on examination to be an index of character. It is now a known fact that each man is an individual by himself with his own peculiar formation different from others and made by minute variations in the general human plan, — this is true of small physical characteristics, it is evidently equally true of psychological characteristics; it is not unreasonable to suppose a correlation between the two.  On that basis cheiromancy too may very well have a truth in it, for it is a known fact that the lines in an individual hand are different from the lines in others and that this as well as differences of physiognomy may carry in it psychological indications is not impossible.


Sri Aurobindo: The difﬁculty for minds trained under rationalistic inﬂuences becomes greater when these lines or the data of astrology are interpreted as signs of destiny, because modern rationalism resolutely refused to admit that the future was determined or could be determinable. But this looks more and more like one of the “superstitions” of the modern mind, a belief curiously contradictory of the fundamental notions of Science. For Science has believed, at least until yesterday, that everything is determined in Nature and it attempts to ﬁnd the law of that determination and to predict future physical happenings on that basis. If so, it is reasonable to suppose that there are unseen connections determining human events in the world and that future events may therefore be predictable. Whether it can be done on the lines of astrology or cheiromancy is a matter for enquiry and one does not get any farther by dismissing the possibility with a summary denial.


Sri Aurobindo: The case for astrology is fairly strong; a case seems to exist for cheiromancy also.  On the other hand it is not safe to go too hastily in the other direction. There is the opposite tendency to believe everything in these ﬁelds and not keep one’s eyes open to the element of limitation or error in these difﬁcult branches of knowledge — it was this excess of belief that helped to discredit them, because their errors were patent. It does not seem to me established that the stars determine the future — though that is possible, but it does look as if they indicate it — or rather some certitudes and many potentialities of the future. Even the astrologers admit that there is another element of determination in man himself which limits the ﬁeld of astrological prediction and may even alter many of its ascertained results.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a very tangled and difﬁcult complex of forces making up any determination of things in the world and when we have disentangled one thread of the skein and follow it we may get many striking results, but we cannot rely on it as the one wholly reliable clue. The mind’s methods are too rigid and conveniently simple to unravel the true or whole truth whether of the Reality or of its separate phenomena.  I would accept your statement about the possibility of knowing much about a man from an observation of a small part of his being, physical or psychological, but I think it is to go too far to say that one can reconstruct a whole man from one minute particle of a hair. I should say from my knowledge of the complexity and multiplicity of elements in the human being that such a procedure would be hazardous and would leave a large part of the Unknown overshadowing the excessive certitude of this inferential structure.  I suppose we cannot go so far as to deny that there is such a thing as superstition — a ﬁxed blind belief without any ground in something that is quite unsound and does not hang together.


Sri Aurobindo: The human mind readily claps on such beliefs to things which can be or are in themselves true, and this is a mixture which very badly confuses the search for knowledge. But precisely because of that mixture, because somewhere behind the superstition or not far off from it there is very usually some real truth, one ought to be cautious in using the word or sweeping away with it as a convenient broom the true, the partly true and the unfounded together and claiming that the bare ground left is the only truth of the matter.    When I wrote that sentence [] I was not thinking really of religious beliefs, but of common popular ideas and beliefs. Your feeling about the matter, in any case, is quite sound.


Sri Aurobindo: One can and ought to believe and follow one’s own path without condemning or looking down on others for having beliefs different from those one thinks or sees to be the best or the largest in truth. The spiritual ﬁeld is many-sided and full of complexities and there is room for an immense variety of experiences. Besides, all mental egoism, — and spiritual egoism — has to be surmounted and this sense of superiority should therefore not be cherished.  P. S. A sincere, whole-hearted and one-pointed following of this Yoga should lead to a level where these rigid mental divisions do not exist for they are mental walls put round one part of Truth and Knowledge so as to cut it off from the rest, but this view from above the mind is comprehensive and everything falls into its place in the whole.


Sri Aurobindo: I think what you write is unexceptionable as a statement of the necessary limitations of physical Science to its own ﬁeld. It is only in the occult sciences that one can ﬁnd the necessary connection or bridge between the spiritual and material which  is demanding from the physical sciences. ’s attitude is a sort of reaction against the old error of the materialism which used science to discredit not only the mistakes of religion, but all spiritual truth — but that phase is now over and one can be content with recording its passing without trying to reverse the process by using science to support or establish spiritual truth —  spiritual truth can exist in itself and needs no such buttressing from outside.


Sri Aurobindo:   I think bases his ideas on the attempt of Jeans, Eddington and other English scientists to thrust metaphysical conclusions into scientiﬁc facts; it is necessary that he should appreciate fully the objections of more austerely scientiﬁc minds to such a mixture.  Moreover, spiritual seeking has its own accumulated knowledge which does not depend in the least on the theories or discoveries of science in the purely physical sphere. ’s attempt like that of Jeans and others is a reaction against the illegitimate attempts of some scientiﬁc minds in the nineteenth century and of many others who took advantage of the march of scientiﬁc discovery to discredit or abolish as far as possible the religious spirit and to discredit also metaphysics as a cloudy verbiage, exalting science as the only clue to the truth of the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: But I think that attitude is now dead or moribund; the scientists recognise, as you point out, the limits of their sphere. I may observe that the conﬂict between religion and science never arose in India (until the days of European education) because religion did not interfere with scientiﬁc discovery and scientists did not question religious or spiritual truth because the two things were kept on separate but not opposing lines.    The defect in what writes about Science seems to be that he is insisting vehemently on the idea that Science is still materialistic or at least that scientists, Jeans and Eddington excepted, are still fundamentally materialists. This is not the fact.


Sri Aurobindo: Most continental scientists have now renounced the idea that Science can explain the fundamentals of existence. They hold that Science is only concerned with process and not with fundamentals. They declare that it is not the business of Science nor is it within its means to decide anything about the great questions which concern philosophy and religion. This is the enormous change which the latest developments of Science have brought about.  Science itself nowadays is neither materialistic nor idealistic.


Sri Aurobindo: The rock on which materialism was built and which in the 19th century seemed unshakeable has now been shattered. Materialism has now become a philosophical speculation just like any other theory; it cannot claim to found itself on a sort of infallible Biblical authority, based on the facts and conclusions of Science. This change can be felt by one like myself who grew up in the heyday of absolute rule of scientiﬁc materialism in the 19th century. The way which had been almost entirely barred except by rebellion now lies wide open to spiritual truths, spiritual ideas, spiritual experiences. That is the real revolution.


Sri Aurobindo: Mentalism is only a halfway house but mentalism and vitalism are now perfectly possible as hypotheses based on the facts of existence, scientiﬁc facts as well as any others. The facts of Science do not compel anyone to take any particular philosophical direction. They are now neutral and can even be used on one side or another though most scientists do not consider such a use as admissible. Nobody here ever said that the new discoveries of physics supported the ideas of religion or churches; they merely contended that Science had lost its old materialistic dogmatism and moved away by a revolutionary change from its old moorings.  It is this change which I expected and prophesied in my poems in the ﬁrst volume, “A Vision of Science” and “In the Moonlight”.


Sri Aurobindo:  Psychologists of course having to deal with mental movements more easily recognise that there can be no real equation between them and physiological processes and at the most mind and body react on each other as is inevitable since they are lodging together. But even a great physical scientist like Huxley recognised that mind was something quite different from matter and could not possibly be explained in the terms of matter. Only since then physical Science became very arrogant and presumptuous and tried to subject everything to itself and its processes. Now in theory it has begun to recognise its limitations in a general way, but the old mentality is still too habitual in most scientists to shake off yet.


Sri Aurobindo:   The minds of these people [] are too much accustomed to deal with physical things and things measurable by instruments and ﬁgures to be much good for any other provinces.  Einstein’s views outside his domain are crude and childish, a sort of unsubstantial commonplace idealism without grasp on realities. As a man can be a great scholar and yet simple and foolish, so a man can be a great scientist but his mind and ideas negligible in other things.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is nothing superior in the scientist’s brain except a faculty of observing and analysing and drawing conclusions. It is the intellectual plane.   The scientiﬁc mind refuses to leave anything unclassed. Has it not classiﬁed the Divine also?


Sri Aurobindo:   How does Sir James Jeans or any other scientist know that it was by a “mere accident” that life came into existence or that there is no life anywhere else in the universe or that life elsewhere must either be exactly the same as life here under the same conditions or not existent at all? These are mere mental speculations without any conclusiveness in them. Life can be an accident only if the whole world also is an accident — a thing created by Chance and governed by Chance. It is not worth while to waste time on this kind of speculation, for it is only the bubble of a moment.


Sri Aurobindo: The material universe is only the fa¸cade of an immense building which has other structures behind it and it is only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its signiﬁcance.  If the earth is the only ﬁeld of the spiritual evolution in Matter — (assuming that) — then it must be as part of the total design.  The idea that all the rest must be a waste is a human idea which would not trouble the vast Cosmic Spirit — whose consciousness and life are everywhere, in the slime and dust as much as in the human intelligence. But this is a speculative question which is quite alien to our practical purpose.


Sri Aurobindo: For us it is the development of the spiritual consciousness in the human body that matters.  In this development there are stages — the whole truth cannot be known till all are passed and the ﬁnal stage is there. The stage in which you are is one in which the Self is beginning to be realised, the Self free from all embodiment and not depending on embodiment for its perpetual existence. It is therefore natural that you should feel the embodiment to be something quite subordinate and like the earth-life of Jeans almost accidental. It is because of this stage that the Mayavadins, taking it for ﬁnal, thought the world to be an illusion.


Sri Aurobindo: But this is only a stage of the journey. Beyond this Self which is static, separate, formless, there is a greater consciousness in which the Silence and the Cosmic Activity are united but in another knowledge than the walled-in ignorance of the embodied human being. This Self is only one aspect of the Divine Reality. It is when one gets to that greater Consciousness that cosmic existence and form and life and mind no longer appear to be an accident but ﬁnd their signiﬁcance. Even there there are two stages, the overmental and the supramental, and it is not till one gets to the last that the full truth of existence can become entirely real to the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Observe what you experience and know that it has its value and is indispensable as a stage, but do not take the experience as the ﬁnal knowledge.   The difﬁculty is that you are a non-scientist trying to impose your ideas on the most difﬁcult because most material ﬁeld of science — physics. It is only if you were a scientist yourself basing your ideas on universally acknowledged scientiﬁc facts or else your own discoveries — though even then with much difﬁculty — that you could get a hearing or your opinion have any weight.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise you open yourself to the accusation of pronouncing in a ﬁeld where you have no authority, just as the scientist himself does when he pronounces on the strength of his discoveries that there is no God. When the scientist says that “scientiﬁcally speaking God is a hypothesis which is no longer necessary” he is talking arrant nonsense — for the existence of God is not and cannot be and never was a scientiﬁc hypothesis or problem at all, it is and always has been a spiritual or a metaphysical problem.  You cannot speak scientiﬁcally about it at all either pro or con.   The metaphysician or the spiritual seeker has a right to point out that it is nonsense; but if you lay down the law to the scientist in the ﬁeld of science, you run the risk of having the same objection turned against you.


Sri Aurobindo: As to the unity of all knowledge, that is a thing, not  yet The mechanical method of knowledge leads to certain results, the higher method leads to certain others, and they at many points fundamentally disagree. How is the difference to be bridged — for each seems valid in its own ﬁeld: it is a problem to be solved, but you cannot solve it in the way you propose. Least of all in the ﬁeld of physics.


Sri Aurobindo: In psychology one can say that the mechanical or physiological approach takes hold of the thing by the blind end and is the least fruitful of all — for psychology is not primarily a thing of mechanism and measure, it opens to a vast ﬁeld beyond the physical instrumentalities of the body consciousness. In biology one can get a glimpse of something beyond mechanism, because there is from the beginning a stir of consciousness progressing and organising itself more and more for self-expression. But in physics you are in the very domain of the mechanical law where process is everything and the driving consciousness has chosen to conceal itself with the greatest thoroughness — so that, “scientiﬁcally speaking”, it does not exist there. One can discover it there only by occultism and Yoga, but the methods of occult science and of Yoga are not measurable or followable by the means of physical science — so the gulf remains still in existence. It may be bridged one day, but the physicist is not likely to be the bridge builder, so it is no use asking him to try what is beyond his province.


Sri Aurobindo:   The Isha Upanishad passage is of course a much larger statement of the nature of universal existence than the Einstein theory which is conﬁned to the physical universe. You can deduce too a much larger law of relativity from the statement in the verse.  What it means from this point of view — for it contains much more in it — is that the absolute Reality exists but it is immovable and always the same, the universal movement is a motion of consciousness in this Reality of which only the Transcendent itself can seize the truth, which is self-evident to It, while the apprehension of it by the Gods (the mind, senses etc.) must necessarily be imperfect and relative since they can try to follow but none can really overtake (apprehend or seize) that Truth, each being limited by its own view-point, lesser instrumentality or capacity of consciousness etc. This is the familiar attitude of the Indian or at least the Vedantic mind which held that our knowledge, perception and experience of things in the world and of the world itself must be, relative, practical or pragmatic only, — so declared Shankara, — it is in fact an illusory knowledge, the real Truth of things lying beyond our mental and sensory consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Einstein’s relativity is a scientiﬁc, not a metaphysical statement. The form and ﬁeld of it are different — but, I suppose, if one goes back from it and beyond it to its essential signiﬁcance, the real reason for its being so, one can connect it with the Vedantic conclusion. But to justify that to the intellect, you would have to go through a whole process to show how the connection comes — it does not self-evidently follow.  As for Jeans, many would say that his conclusions are not at all legitimate. Einstein’s law is a scientiﬁc generalisation based upon certain relations proper to the domain of physics and, if valid, valid there in the limits of that domain, or, if you like, in the general domain of scientiﬁc observation and measurement of physical processes and motions; but how can you transform that at once into a metaphysical generalisation?


Sri Aurobindo: It is a jump over a considerable gulf — or a forceful transformation of one thing into another, of a limited physical result into an unlimited all-embracing formula. I don’t quite know what Einstein’s law really amounts to, but does it amount to more than this that our scientiﬁc measurements of time and other things are, in the conditions under which they have to be made, relative because subject to the unavoidable drawback of these conditions? What metaphysically follows from that — if anything at all does follow — it is for the metaphysicians, not the scientists to determine.  The Vedantic position was that the Mind itself (as well as the senses) is a limited power making its own representations, constructions, formations and imposing them on the Reality. That is a much bigger and more intricate affair shooting down into the very roots of our existence.


Sri Aurobindo: I think myself there are many positions taken by modern Science which tend to be helpful to that view — though in the nature of things they cannot be sufﬁcient to prove it.  I state the objections only; I myself see certain fundamental truths underlying all the domains and the one Reality everywhere. But there is a great difference in the instruments used and the ways of research followed by the seekers in these different ways (the physical, the occult and the spiritual) and for the intellect at least the bridge between them has still to be built.  One can point out analogies but it can be maintained very well that Science cannot be used for yielding or buttressing results of spiritual knowledge. The other side can be maintained also and it is best that both should be stated — so this is not meant to discourage your thesis.


Sri Aurobindo:   The article [] reads as if it had been written by a professor rather than a philosopher. What you speak of is, I suppose, a survival of the nineteenth-century scientiﬁc contempt for metaphysics; all thinking must be based on scientiﬁc and the generalisations of science, often so faulty and ephemeral, must be made the basis for any sound metaphysical thinking. That is to make philosophy the handmaid of science, metaphysics the camp-follower of physics and to deny her her sovereign rights in her own city. It ignores the fact that the philosopher has his own domain and his own instruments; he may use scientiﬁc discoveries as material just as he may use any other facts of existence, but whatever generalisations science offers he must judge by his own standards — whether they are valid for transference to the metaphysical plane and, if so, how far.


Sri Aurobindo: Still in the heyday of physical science before it discovered its own limitations and the shakiness of its scheme of things ﬂoating precariously in a huge inﬁnity or boundless Finite of the Unknown, there was perhaps some excuse for such an attitude.  But spiritualism gloriﬁed under the name of psychical research?  That is not a science; it is a mass of obscure and ambiguous documents from which you can draw only a few meagre and doubtful generalisations. Moreover, so far as it belongs to the occult, it touches only the inferior regions of the occult — what we would call the lowest vital worlds — where there is as much falsehood and fake and confused error as upon the earth and even more. What is a philosopher to do with all that obscure and troubled matter?


Sri Aurobindo: I do not catch the point of many of his remarks. Why should a prediction of a future event alter our conception — at least any philosophic conception — of Time? It can alter one’s ideas of the relation of events to each other or of the working out of forces or of the possibilities of consciousness, but Time remains the same as before.  The dream is, of course, the rendering of an attempt at communication on the subtle plane. As for the telephone and cinema, there is something of what you say, but it seems to me that these and other modern things could have taken on a different character if they had been accepted and used in a different spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Mankind was not ready for these discoveries, in the spiritual sense, nor even, if the present confusions are a sign, intellectually ready. The aesthetic downfall is perhaps due to other causes, a disappointed idealism in its recoil generating its opposite, a dry and cynical intellectualism which refuses to be duped by the ideal, the romantic or the emotional or anything that is higher than the reason walking by the light of the senses.  The Asuras of the past were after all often rather big beings; the trouble about the present ones is that they are not really Asuras, but beings of the lower vital world, violent, brutal and ignoble, but above all narrow-minded, ignorant and obscure. But this kind of cynical narrow intellectualism that is rampant now, does not last — it prepares its own end by increasing dryness — men begin to feel the need of new springs of life.


Sri Aurobindo: I am afraid I have lost all interest in these speculations [ ]; things are getting too serious for me to waste time on these inconclusive intellectualities. I do not at all mind your driving your point triumphantly home and replacing a dogmatism from materialistic Science on its throne of half a century ago from which it could victoriously ban all thought surpassing its own narrow bounds as mere wordy metaphysics and mysticism and moonshine. Obviously, if material energies alone can exist in the material world, there can be no possibility of a life divine on the earth. A mere metaphysical “sleight of mind”, as one might call it, could not justify it against the objections of scientiﬁc negation and concrete common sense.  I had thought that even many scientiﬁc minds on the Continent had come to admit that Science could no longer claim to decide what was the reality of things, that it had no means of deciding it and could only discover and describe the how and process of the operations of material Force in the physical front of things.


Sri Aurobindo: That left the ﬁeld open to higher thought and speculation, spiritual experience and even to mysticism, occultism and all those greater things which almost everybody had come to disbelieve as impossible nonsense. That was the condition of things when I was in England. If that is to return or if Russia and her dialectical materialism are to lead the world, well, fate must be obeyed and life divine must remain content to wait perhaps for another millennium. But I do not like the idea of one of our periodicals being the arena for a wrestle of that kind. That is all.


Sri Aurobindo: I am writing under the impression of your earlier article on this subject, as I have not gone carefully through the later ones; I dare say these later ones may be entirely convincing and I would ﬁnd after reading them that my own position was wrong and that only an obstinate mystic could still believe in such a conquest of Matter by the Spirit as I had dared to think possible. But I am just such an obstinate mystic; so, if I allowed your exposition of the matter to be published in one of our own periodicals, I would be under the obligation of returning to the subject in which I have lost interest and therefore the inclination to write, so as to reestablish my position and would have to combat the claim of materialistic Science to pronounce anything on these matters on which it has no means of enquiry nor any possibility of arriving at a valid decision. Perhaps I would have practically to rewrite  as an answer to the victorious “negation of the materialist”! This is the only explanation which I can give, apart from sheer want of time to tackle the subject, for my long and disappointing silence.  You are reasoning on the analogy of our own very cabined and limited sense-consciousness and its rather clumsy relations with the happenings in material space.


Sri Aurobindo: What is space after all but an extension of conscious being in which Consciousness-Force builds its own surroundings? In the subtle physical plane there are not one, but many layers of consciousness and each moves in its own being, that is to say, in its own space. I have said that each subtle plane is a conglomeration or series of worlds.  Each space may at any point meet, penetrate or coincide with another; accordingly at one point of meeting or coincidence there might be several subtle objects occupying what we might rather arbitrarily call the same space, and yet they may not be in any actual relation with each other. If there is a relation created, it is the multiple consciousness of the seer in which the meeting-place becomes apparent that creates it.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand, there may be a relation between objects in different regions of space correlated to each other as in the case of the gross physical object and its subtle counterpart. There you can more easily reason of relations between one space and another.     The objection is founded on human three-dimensional ideas of Space and division in spaces, which are again founded upon the limited nature of the human senses.


Sri Aurobindo: To some beings space is one-dimensional, to others two-dimensional, to others threedimensional — but there are other dimensions also. It is well recognised in metaphysics that the Inﬁnite can be in a point and not only in extension of space — just as there is an eternity of extension in Time but also an Eternity which is independent of Time so that it can be felt in the moment — one has not to think of millions and millions of years in order to realise it. So too the rigid distinction of One against Many, a One that cannot be many or of an All that is made up by addition and not selfexistent are crude mental notions of the outer ﬁnite mind that cannot be applied to the Inﬁnite. If the All were of this material and unspiritual character, tied down to a primary arithmetic and geometry, the realisation of the universe in oneself, of the all in each and each in all, of the universe in the Bindu would be impossible. Your Arya Samajists are evidently innocent of the elements of metaphysical thinking or they would not make such objections.


Sri Aurobindo:   Time and Space are not limited, they are inﬁnite — they are the terms of an extension of consciousness in which things take place or are arranged in a certain relation, succession, order. There are again different orders of Time and Space; that too depends on the consciousness. The Eternal is extended in Time and Space, but he is also beyond all Time and Space.


Sri Aurobindo: Timelessness and Time are two terms of the eternal existence. The Spaceless Eternal is not one indivisible inﬁnity of Space, there is in it no near or far, no here or there — the Timeless Eternal is not measurable by years or hours or aeons, the experience of it has been described as the eternal moment. But for the mind this state cannot be described except by negatives, — one has to go beyond and to realise it.    Time is to the Intuition an extension of consciousness in which happenings are arranged and has not the same rigidity that it has to the intellect.


Sri Aurobindo:   The idea of time may be a mental construction, but the sense of it may not be. Savages have the idea of time but it is in connection with the sun and stars and the lapse of day and night and the seasons, not perhaps a separate construction — but one is not sure for they have metaphysical conceptions of their own.  Animals are not, I think, so limited in their consciousness — they have not only sensations, but an acute memory of certain things, observation, clear associations, an intelligence that plans, a very accurate sense of place and memory of place, an initial power of reasoning (not reﬂectively as the human mind does, but practically as any vital mind can do).


Sri Aurobindo: I have seen a young kitten observing, arriving at a correct conclusion, proceeding to do what was necessary for her purpose, a necessity imposed by that conclusion, just as a human child might do. We cannot therefore say that animals have no ideas. No clear measure of yesterday and tomorrow, perhaps, but the perception of past and future needs is there and of right times and seasons also — all vital, practical, not reﬂectively mental in the human way.  But it is true that when one gets beyond the mind, this sense of time changes into timelessness, into the eternal present.


Sri Aurobindo:   No doubt, the physical regulated time consciousness belongs mainly to the waking state but it can be subliminal as well as of the mental waking consciousness. E.g. sometimes one wills at night to get up at a ﬁxed time in the morning and wakes exactly at that hour and minute — it is something in the subliminal being that recorded the time and vigilantly executed it.    When one begins to feel the inner being and live in it (the result of the experience of peace and silence) the ordinary time sense disappears or becomes purely external.


Sri Aurobindo:  The present is a convention or only a constant movement out of the past into the future.  As for what you write about your experience and your ideas, it looks as if it were simply the old thoughts and movements rising, as they often do, to interfere with the straight course of the sadhana. Mental realisations and ideas of this kind are at best only half-truths and not always even that; once one has taken up a sadhana that goes beyond the mind, it is a mistake to give them too much importance. They can easily become by misapplication a fruitful ground for error.  If you examine the ideas that have come to you, you will see that they are quite inadequate.


Sri Aurobindo: For example:   1. Matter is only in appearance. As even modern Science admits, Matter is only energy in action, and, as we know in India, energy is force of consciousness in action.


Sri Aurobindo: 2. Prakriti in the material world seems to be, but this too is only an appearance. Prakriti is in reality the conscious power of the Spirit.  3. A bringing down of the Spirit into Matter cannot lead to a in.


Sri Aurobindo: A descent of the Spirit could only mean a descent of light, consciousness and power, not a growth of unconsciousness and inertia which is what is meant by the .  4. The Spirit is there already in Matter as everywhere else; it is only a surface apparent unconsciousness or involved consciousness which veils its presence. What we have to do is to awake Matter to the spiritual consciousness concealed in it.  5.


Sri Aurobindo: What we aim at bringing down into the material world is the supramental consciousness, light and energy, because it is this alone that can truly transform it.  If there is at any time a growth of unconsciousness and inertia, it is because of the resistance of the ordinary nature to the spiritual change. But this is usually raised up in order to be dealt with and eliminated. If it is allowed to remain concealed and not raised up, the difﬁculty will never be grappled with and no real transformation will take place.


Sri Aurobindo: If there were no creative power in the material energy, there would be no material universe. Matter is not unconscious or without dynamism — only it is an involved Force and Consciousness that work in it. It is what the psychologists call the Inconscient from which all comes — but it is not really Inconscient.  The satisfaction of their emotions and desires and their bodily needs [] — mostly. Animals are predominantly the vital creation on earth — the mind in them also is a vital mind — they act according to the push of the forces and have a vital but not a mental will.


Sri Aurobindo:   Even the animal is more in touch with a certain harmony in things than man. Man’s only superiority is a more complex consciousness and capacity (but terribly perverted and twisted by misuse of Mind) and the ability (not much used as yet) of reaching towards higher things.


Sri Aurobindo:   Human life and mind are neither in tune with Nature like the animals nor with Spirit — it [] is disturbed, incoherent, conﬂicting with itself, without harmony and balance. We can then regard it as diseased, if not itself a disease.


Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is a more simple and honest consciousness — that of the animal. Of course it expects something, but even if it does not get, the affection remains. Many animals, even if ill-treated, do not lose their love which means a remarkable psychic development in the vital.    The emotional being of animals is often much more psychic than that of men who can be very insensitive.


Sri Aurobindo: There were recently pictures of the tame tigress kept by a family and afterwards given by them to a Zoo. The look of sorrow on the face of the tigress in her cage at once gentle and tragically poignant is so intense as to be heartbreaking.     A very strong time sense [] — at least some of them — but usually it works only in connection with strong desires or habits, e.g. food.


Sri Aurobindo:   Cats have a very sure vital perception.


Sri Aurobindo: Most animals do not usually attack unless they are menaced or frightened or somehow made angry — and they can feel the atmosphere of people.     There are people who can move the ears without doing Yoga at all or calling upon the resources of the Kundalini.


Sri Aurobindo: I suppose it is simply a movement that man has lost through disuse, not having had like the animals to prick up his ear at every moment to listen to sounds that might indicate danger. I suppose he could revive the faculty if it were of any use.     Yes — to watch the animals with the right perception of their consciousness helps to get out of the human mental limitations and see the Cosmic Consciousness on earth individualising itself in all forms — plant, animal, man and growing towards what is beyond man.


Sri Aurobindo: It is true that the plant world — even the animals if one takes them the right way — can be much better than human beings. It is the mental distortion that makes men worse.     The plants are very psychic, but they can express it only by silence and beauty.


Sri Aurobindo:   Form, colour, scent + something else which is indeﬁnable [ ].     The rose is not the only beautiful ﬂower, there are hundreds of others; most ﬂowers are beautiful.