Sri Aurobindo:   It is true that what one fears has the tendency to come until one is able to look it in the face and overcome one’s shrinking. One must learn to take one’s foundation on the Divine and overcome the fear, relying on the help to carry one through all things even unpleasant and adverse. There is a Force that works even through them for the seeker and carries him towards his goal.


Sri Aurobindo:  You can write to her that to get rid of fear is the ﬁrst necessity.  Yoga can only be done on a basis of faith and conﬁdence in the Divine.  At the same time one must be on guard against undesirable movements or phenomena in the sadhana. The motion of her head is not a result of the descent of Force, or a sign that it is too much for her, but a wrong movement of the body which she must check and get rid of altogether.  The colours are only a sign that the inner vision is open; if it develops things of a more deﬁnite kind will appear.


Sri Aurobindo:   Write to her again that if she wants to do sadhana, she must get rid of fear altogether; fear opens the door to the adverse forces.  She should not listen to people who try to put fear in her. If ugly forms or sounds are seen and heard, one has not to fear but reject them and call in the Mother’s protection.


Sri Aurobindo: If she feels calmness in the meditation, that is the necessary basis — with that basis one can safely practise the Yoga. It is not indispensable that the mind should be entirely — it is sufﬁcient that it is quiet with a fundamental silence which is not disturbed even if thoughts pass across it.     You should throw away fear as well as anger and go quietly on your way putting your conﬁdence in the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is a mistake to think that by fearing or being unhappy you can progress. Fear is always a feeling to be rejected, because what you fear is just the thing that is likely to come to you: fear attracts the object of fear. Unhappiness weakens the strength and lays one more open to the causes of unhappiness.  One can be quiet, happy, cheerful without being all that in a light or shallow way — and the happiness need not bring any vital reaction.


Sri Aurobindo: All that you need to do is to be observant and vigilant, — watchful so that you may not give assent to wrong movements or the return of the old feelings, darkness, confusion etc. Not fear, but vigilance. If you remain vigilant, then with the increase of the Force upholding you, a power of self-control will come, a power to see and reject the wrong turn or the wrong reaction when it comes. Fear and unhappiness will not give you that. It is only by this vigilance accompanied by an opening to the supporting and guiding Force that it will come.


Sri Aurobindo: What you describe as a capacity to choose the right and the feeling of strength or power that can stop the wrong movement and take the right one as soon as it recognises them, is just this control and vigilance. It is by this control and vigilance supported by the Force that you can prevent the love and devotion too from being mixed with or replaced by selﬁsh desires and impurities.  The more you open, the more this power will increase in you.  Certainly, if talking about old things or excessive speaking brings the wrong reactions at night, it is better to abstain from such talk or speech. Here also control is the thing you have to develop.


Sri Aurobindo:   By bringing down strength and calm into the lower vital (region below the navel) []. Also by will and imposing calm on the system when the fear arises. It can be done in either way or both together.


Sri Aurobindo: Fear is of course a vital and physical thing. Many people who have shown great courage, were not physically or even vitally brave; yet by force of mind they pushed themselves into all sorts of battle and danger. Henry IV of France, a great ﬁghter and victor, was an example. Just because his body consciousness was in a panic, he forced it to go where the danger was thickest.  The true unity with others, in the sadhana, is founded in the unity in the Divine Consciousness, not in the vital movement.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not because of your nature or evil destiny that the vital cannot ﬁnd the satisfaction it expected from relations with others.  These relations can never give a full or permanent satisfaction; if they did, there would be no reason why the human being would ever seek the Divine. He would remain satisﬁed in the ordinary earth life. It is only when the Divine is found and the consciousness lifted up into the true consciousness that the true relations with others can come.


Sri Aurobindo:  Relations which are part of the ordinary vital nature in human life are of no value in the spiritual life — they rather interfere with the progress; for the mind and vital also should be wholly turned towards the Divine. Moreover, the purpose of sadhana  is to enter into a spiritual consciousness and base everything on a new spiritual basis which can only be done when one has entered into complete unity with the Divine. Meanwhile one has to have a calm goodwill for all, but relations of a vital kind do not help — for they keep the consciousness down on a vital basis and prevent its rising to a higher level.


Sri Aurobindo:  Until the vital has been puriﬁed, illumined and wholly offered to the Divine, there is always a vital mixture in these relations — a mixture of the movements of the lower nature.   These movements [] are part of man’s ignorant vital nature. The love which human beings feel for one another is also usually an egoistic vital love and these other movements, claim, demand, jealousy, abhiman, anger etc., are its common accompaniments. There is no place for them in Yoga — nor in true love, psychic or divine.


Sri Aurobindo: In Yoga all love should be turned towards the Divine and to human or other beings only as vessels of the Divine — abhiman and the rest should have no place in it.    I have always said that the vital is indispensable for the divine or spiritual action — without it there can be no complete expression, no realisation in life — hardly even any realisation in sadhana. When I speak of the vital mixture or of the obstructions, revolts etc. of the vital, it is the unregenerated outer vital full of desire and ego and the lower passions of which I speak. I could say the same against the mind and the physical when they obstruct or oppose, but precisely because the vital is so powerful and indispensable, its obstruction, opposition or refusal of cooperation is more strikingly effective and its wrong mixtures are more dangerous to the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: That is why I have always insisted on the dangers of the unregenerated vital and the necessity of mastery and puriﬁcation there. It is not because I hold, like the Sannyasis, the vital and its life power to be a thing to be condemned and rejected in its very nature.  Affection, love, tenderness are in their nature psychic, — the vital has them because the psychic is trying to express itself through the vital. It is through the emotional being that the psychic most easily expresses, for it stands just behind it in the heart centre. But it wants these things to be pure.


Sri Aurobindo: Not that it rejects the outward expression through the vital and the physical, but as the psychic being is the form of the soul, it naturally feels the attraction of soul to soul, the nearness of soul to soul the union of soul with soul are the things that are to it most abiding and concrete. Mind, vital, body are means of expression and very precious means of expression, but the inner life is for the soul the ﬁrst thing, the deepest reality, and these have to be subordinated to it and conditioned by it, its expression, its instruments and channel. I do not think that in my emphasis on the inner things, on the psychic and spiritual, I am saying anything new, strange or unintelligible. These things have always been stressed from the beginning and the more the human being is evolved, the more they take on importance. I do not see how Yoga can be possible without this premier stress on the inner life, on the soul and the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: The emphasis on the mastery of the vital, its subordination and subjection to the spiritual and the psychic is also nothing new, strange or exorbitant. It has been insisted on always for any kind of spiritual life; even the Yogas which seek most to use the vital, like certain forms of Vaishnavism, yet insist on the puriﬁcation and the total offering of it to the Divine — and the relations with the Divine are an inner realisation, the soul offering itself through the emotional being. The soul or psychic being is not something unheard of or incomprehensible.


Sri Aurobindo: Absence of love and fellow-feeling is not necessary for nearness to the Divine; on the contrary, a sense of closeness and oneness with others is a part of the divine consciousness into which the sadhak enters by nearness to the Divine and the feeling of oneness with the Divine. An entire rejection of all relations is indeed the ﬁnal aim of the Mayavadin, and in the ascetic Yoga an entire loss of all relations of friendship and affection and attachment to the world and its living beings would be regarded as a promising sign of advance towards liberation, Moksha; but even there, I think, a feeling of oneness and unattached spiritual sympathy for all is at least a penultimate stage, like the compassion of the Buddhist, before the turning to Moksha or Nirvana. In this Yoga the feeling of unity with others, love, universal joy and Ananda are an essential part of the liberation and perfection which are the aim of the sadhana.  On the other hand, human society, human friendship, love, affection, fellow-feeling are mostly and usually — not entirely or in all cases — founded on a vital basis and are ego-held at their centre. It is because of the pleasure of being loved, the pleasure of enlarging the ego by contact, mutual penetration of spirit, with another, the exhilaration of the vital interchange which feeds their personality that men usually love — and there are also other and still more selﬁsh motives that mix with this essential movement.


Sri Aurobindo: There are of course higher spiritual, psychic, mental, vital elements that come in or can come in; but the whole thing is very mixed, even at its best. This is the reason why at a certain stage with or without apparent reason the world and life and human society and relations and philanthropy (which is as ego-ridden as the rest) begin to pall. There is sometimes an ostensible reason — a disappointment of the surface vital, the withdrawal of affection by others, the perception that those loved or men generally are not what one thought them to be and a host of other causes; but often the cause is a secret disappointment of some part of the inner being, not translated or not well translated into the mind, because it expected from these things something which they cannot give. It is the case with many who turn or are pushed to the spiritual life. For some it takes the form of a which drives them towards ascetic indifference and gives the urge towards Moksha.


Sri Aurobindo: For us, what we hold to be necessary is that the mixture should disappear and that the consciousness should be established on a purer level (not only spiritual and psychic but a purer and higher mental, vital, physical consciousness) in which there is not this mixture.  There one would feel the true Ananda of oneness and love and sympathy and fellowship, spiritual and self-existent in its basis but expressing itself through the other parts of the nature. If that is to happen, there must obviously be a change; the old form of these movements must drop off and leave room for a new and higher self to disclose its own way of expression and realisation of itself and of the Divine through these things — that is the inner truth of the matter.  I take it therefore that the condition you describe is a period of transition and change, negative in its beginning, as these movements often are at ﬁrst, so as to create a vacant space for the new positive to appear and live in it and ﬁll it. But the vital, not having a long continued or at all sufﬁcient or complete experience of what is to ﬁll the vacancy, feels only the loss and regrets it even while another part of the being, another part even of the vital, is ready to let go what is disappearing and does not yearn to keep it.


Sri Aurobindo: If it were not for this movement of the vital (which in your case has been very strong and large and avid of life), the disappearance of these things would, at least after the ﬁrst sense of void, bring only a feeling of peace, relief and a still expectation of greater things. What is intended in the ﬁrst place to ﬁll the void was indicated in the peace and joy which came to you as the touch of Shiva — naturally, this would not be all but a beginning, a basis for a new self, a new consciousness, an activity of a greater nature; as I told you, it is a deep spiritual calm and peace that is the only stable foundation for a lasting Bhakti and Ananda. In that new consciousness there would be a new basis for relations with others; for an ascetic dryness or isolated loneliness cannot be your spiritual destiny since it is not consonant with your Swabhava which is made for joy, largeness, expansion, a comprehensive movement of the lifeforce. Therefore do not be discouraged; wait upon the purifying movement of Shiva.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no taboo in the Yoga on any feeling that is true and pure, but all the feelings undergo the stress of a pressure from the spiritual consciousness and whatever there is that is mixed, impure, egoistic or the feeling itself if it is fundamentally selfregarding, either disappears or, if it remains, becomes an obstacle to the progress. In the ascetic Yoga all human feelings are regarded as illusory and have to disappear — “the knots of the heart are cut” — so as to leave only the one supreme aspiration.  In this Yoga the emotional being has not to be got rid of, but to undergo a transformation; the shortest way of transformation is to turn all the being to the Divine. But when that is done, then it is found that what is pure and true in any human relation survives, but with a rich and subtle change, or else new relations are established that come straight from the Divine. If, however, something resists the change, then it is quite possible that there may be an oscillation between blank indifference or vairagya and the indulgence of the untransformed feeling — the human vital on one side, the disillusioned Vairagi on the other side.


Sri Aurobindo: Some even have to pass through this vairagya in order to reach the possibility of a divinised emotional nature, but that is not the normal movement of this Yoga.  As for being self-centred, it is obviously not the right thing for Yoga to be centred in the ego and revolving round it; one has to be centred in the Divine with all the movements turning round that centre — until they can all be in the Divine. One has naturally to think much of one’s own nature and its change, but that is inevitable for the sadhana — to prevent its turning into a self-centred condition, the aspiration to the Divine, vision of the Divine everywhere, the surrender to the Divine have to be made the main objective of the sadhana.    The idea that all sadhaks must be aloof from each other and at daggers drawn is itself a preconceived idea that must be abandoned.


Sri Aurobindo: Harmony and not strife is the law of Yogic living.  This preconceived idea arises perhaps from the old notion of Nirvana as the aim; but Nirvana is not the aim here. The aim here is fulﬁlment of the Divine in life and for that union and solidarity are indispensable. I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to see in the mind’s eye developing an aversion for you and it would not be easy for you to develop an aversion for; so these nightmares of the vital imagination ought not to emerge. Aversion and quarrelling are unyogic, not Yogic tendencies; the fact that this Asram is full of quarrels only shows that it is still an Asram of very imperfect sadhaks, not yet an Asram of Yogis — it does not at all mean that aversion and quarrelling are the dharma of the spiritual seeker.


Sri Aurobindo: The ideal of the Yoga is that all should be centred in and around the Divine and the life of the sadhaks must be founded on that ﬁrm foundation, their personal relations also should have the Divine for their centre. Moreover, all relations should pass from the vital to the spiritual basis with the vital only as a form and instrument of the spiritual; — this means that from whatever relations they have with each other all jealousy, strife, hatred, aversion, rancour and other evil vital feelings should be abandoned, for they can be no part of the spiritual life. So also all egoistic love and attachment will have to disappear — the love that loves only for the ego’s sake and as soon as the ego is hurt and dissatisﬁed ceases to love or even cherishes rancour and hate. There must be a real living and lasting unity behind the love. It is understood of course that such things as sexual impurity must disappear also.


Sri Aurobindo: That is the ideal, but as for the way of attainment, it may differ for different people. One way is that in which one leaves everything else to follow the Divine alone. This does not mean an aversion for anybody any more than it means aversion for the world and life. It only means absorption in one’s central aim, with the idea that once that is attained it will be easy to found all relations on the true basis, to become truly united with others in the heart and the spirit and the life, united in the spiritual truth and in the Divine. The other way is to go forward from where one is, seeking the Divine centrally and subordinating all else to that, but not putting everything else aside, rather seeking to transform gradually and progressively whatever is capable of such transformation.


Sri Aurobindo: All the things that are not wanted in the relation, — impurity, jealousy, anger, egoistic demand, — drop away as the inner being grows purer and is replaced by the unity of soul with soul and the binding together of the social life in the hoop of the Divine. Your eagerness to bring your friends into the Yoga was perhaps in reality due to a recognition somewhere in the being that this was the safest way to preserve the relation, to found it on the common search for the Divine. If quarrels intervene and there is strife, it is because the old ego-basis stuck still and brought in old reactions not of a Yogic character; but for that the Yoga is not to blame.  It is not that one cannot have relations with people outside the circle of the sadhaks, but there too if the spiritual life grows within, it must necessarily affect the relation and spiritualise it on the sadhak’s side. And there must be no such attachment as would make the relation an obstacle or a rival to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Attachment to family etc. often is like that and, if so, it falls away from the sadhana. That is an exigence which, I think, should not be considered excessive. All that however can be progressively done; a severing of existing relations is necessary for some; it is not so for all. A transformation, however gradual, is indispensable, — severance where severance is the right thing to do.


Sri Aurobindo: P.S. I must repeat also that each case differs — one rule for all is not practical or practicable. What is needed by each for his spiritual progress is the one consideration to be held in view.  The love of the sadhak should be for the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only when he has that fully that he can love others in the right way.    Yes. First, one should enter into union with the Divine, and learn to live in the true light, true consciousness, true force.  Yogic relations with others should come only when one lives in the Divine — then it will be safe and then there can be no inﬂuence [], for the only inﬂuence will be that of the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   It cannot be said that it [] is either bad or good in a general way. It depends on the person, the effects and many other things. As a general rule, all these afﬁnities have to be surrendered to the Divine along with the rest of the old nature — so that only what is in harmony with the Divine Truth can be kept and transformed for its work in you. All relations with others must be relations in the Divine and not of the old personal nature.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not necessary to have love for everybody just now. If you have a general goodwill, that is enough.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is as the love of the Divine grows that the other things cease to trouble the mind.    There is a love in which the emotion is turned towards the Divine in an increasing receptivity and growing union. What it receives from the Divine it pours out on others, but freely without demanding a return.


Sri Aurobindo: If you are capable of that, then that is the highest and most satisfying way to love.  What you write about the family ties is perfectly correct. It creates an unnecessary interchange and comes in the way of a complete turning to the Divine. Relations after taking up Yoga should be less and less based on a physical origin or the habits of the physical consciousness and more and more on the basis of sadhana — of sadhak with sadhaks, of others as souls travelling the same path or children of the Mother than in the ordinary way or with the old viewpoint.   When one enters the spiritual life, the family ties which belong to the ordinary nature fall away — one becomes indifferent to the old things.


Sri Aurobindo: This indifference is a release. There need be no harshness in it at all. To remain tied to the old physical affections would mean to remain tied to the ordinary nature and that would prevent the spiritual progress.    Human physical relations are necessarily temporary — the soul has to go away and prepare itself for other lives through which it will move eventually nearer to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Regard it so and open yourself to the peace from above; turn yourself towards that which is Eternal and Divine.    You ought to be able to see, after receiving today’s telegram, that the cause of the unrest is in yourself and not in the outward circumstances. It is your vital attachment to family ties and the ordinary social ideas and feelings that has risen in you and creates the difﬁculty. If you want to practise Yoga, you must be able to live in the world, so long as you are there, with a mind set upon the Divine and not bound by the environment.


Sri Aurobindo: One who does this, can help those around him a hundred times more than one who is bound and attached to the world.    The question about the family duties can be answered in this  way — the family duties exist so long as one is in the ordinary consciousness of the grahasthan; if the call to a spiritual life comes, whether one keeps to them or not depends partly upon the way of Yoga one follows, partly on one’s own spiritual necessity.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many who pursue inwardly the spiritual life and keep the family duties, not as social duties but as a ﬁeld for the practice of karmayoga, others abandon everything to follow the spiritual call or line and they are justiﬁed if that is necessary for the Yoga they practise or if that is the imperative demand of the soul within them.     There is no harm in devoting yourself to occupations which will help the sadhana. The earning of money and family affairs have only to be looked after if the circumstances are such as to compel it


Sri Aurobindo: . They should then be done in a spirit of entire detachment, dealing with them so as to develop in oneself the consciousness described in the Gita.  There are many kinds of truth and in the Shastra you will ﬁnd all kinds, some seeming in conﬂict with others. Service to parents is part of family and social duty.


Sri Aurobindo: It has nothing to do in itself with Yoga. Yoga is truth not of family or society, but of spiritual life, and in spiritual life the seeking for the Divine takes precedence of everything.  If we ask you to remain still with your father and mother, it is not from the point of view of Truth, but of charity. Four of their children have already left them to come to the Asram; it would be too hard a blow if you also left them now. As you have remained with them so long, you might remain a little longer.


Sri Aurobindo: Even while in the family, you can prepare yourself for the spiritual life, by remembering the Divine in all you do and by doing it as a sacriﬁce for the sake of the Divine.   It [] is a law of human society, not a law of Karma. The child did not ask the father to bring him into the world — and if the father has done it for his own pleasure, it is the least he can do to bring up the child. All these are social relations (and it is not at all a one-sided debt of the child to the father, either), but whatever they are, they cease once one takes to the spiritual life. For the spiritual life does not at all rest on the external physical relations; it is the Divine alone with whom one has then to do.


Sri Aurobindo:  The attachment to parents belongs to the ordinary physical nature — it has nothing to do with Divine Love.  We are sorry to hear that she is suffering from such serious difﬁculties and certainly we are prepared to give her what inner help we can. It is not, however, any force from us that has worked to separate her from her old supporters and friends. It is, evidently, one result of some change and progress in her consciousness which has disturbed the old relation between her internal nature and her external surroundings and power of action upon them.  To try to go back to the old relation does not usually succeed; the only safe course is to progress still farther and arrive at a new consciousness and new power which will enable her to establish a fresh relation with her external environment.


Sri Aurobindo: If one keeps courage and always looks forward, relying on the Force behind which supports, there are no troubles, no difﬁculties, no apparent disasters even which cannot be passed through safely and eventually overcome.    Yes. The inner being turned to the Divine naturally draws away from old vital relations and outer movements and contacts till it can bring a new consciousness into the external being.


Sri Aurobindo: The movement [] of which you speak is not psychic but emotive. It is a vital emotive force that you put out and waste. It is also harmful because, while on the one side you try to reject a past vital relation or tie with these people, you by this movement re-establish in another way a vital relation with them. If there was anything wrong in your ﬁrst movement, this is quite a false way of remedying the defect.  Certainly, it would be better to reject without any violent feeling against any person, because the violence is a sign of a certain weakness in the vital which must be corrected — not for any other reason.


Sri Aurobindo: The rejection should be quiet, ﬁrm, self-assured, decisive; it will then be more radical and effective.  All are not indifferent in this Asram to each other, nor is friendship or affection excluded from the Yoga. Friendship with the Divine is a recognised relation in the sadhana. Friendships between the sadhaks exist and are encouraged by the Mother.  Only we seek to found them on a surer basis than that on which the bulk of human friendships are insecurely founded.


Sri Aurobindo: It is precisely because we hold friendship, brotherhood, love to be sacred things that we want this change — because we do not want to see them broken at every moment by the movements of the ego, soiled and spoiled and destroyed by the passions, jealousies, treacheries to which the vital is prone — it is to make them truly sacred and secure that we want them rooted in the soul, founded on the rock of the Divine. Our Yoga is not an ascetic Yoga: it aims at purity, but not at a cold austerity. Friendship and love are indispensable notes in the harmony to which we aspire. It is not a vain dream, for we have seen that even in imperfect conditions when a little of the indispensable element is there at the very root the thing is possible. It is difﬁcult and the old obstacles still cling obstinately.


Sri Aurobindo: But no victory can be won without a ﬁxed ﬁdelity to the aim and a long effort. There is no other way than to persevere.     In Yoga friendship can remain, but attachment has to fall away or any such engrossing affection as would keep one tied to the ordinary life and consciousness — human relations must take quite a small and secondary place and not interfere with the turn to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   As to the question about affections etc. I answered long ago that in Yoga all attachments have to be given up so that there may be no rival to the Divine, but love and affection can be there — only as a new basis of consciousness has to be reached love and affection have to be rebased on that deeper and higher consciousness, not allowed to remain in their old form or on their old level — all the life must be centred round the Divine. It is so in this Yoga at least. There are others in which a man must become aloof from all things, but that is when one is bound towards Nirvana.


Sri Aurobindo:   Human affection is obviously unreliable because it is so much bound up with selﬁshness and desire; it is a ﬂame of the ego sometimes turbid and misty, sometimes more clear and brightly coloured — sometimes tamasic based on instinct and habit, sometimes rajasic and fed by passion or the cry for vital interchange, sometimes more sattwic and trying to be or look to itself disinterested. But fundamentally it depends on a personal need or a return of some kind inward or outward and when the need is not satisﬁed or the return ceases or is not given, it most often diminishes or dies or exists only as a tepid or troubled remnant of habit from the past or else turns for satisfaction elsewhere. The more intense it is, the more it is apt to be troubled by tumults, clashes, quarrels, egoistic disturbances of all kinds, selﬁshness, exactions, lapses even to rage and hatred, ruptures. It is not that these affections cannot last — tamasic instinctive affections last because of habit in spite of everything dividing the persons, e.g. certain family affections; rajasic affections can last sometimes in spite of all disturbances and incompatibilities and furious ruptures because one has a vital need of the other and clings because of that or because both have that need and are constantly separating to return and returning to separate, or proceeding from quarrel to reconciliation and from reconciliation to quarrel; sattwic affections last very often from duty to the ideal or with some other support though they may lose their keenness or intensity or brightness.


Sri Aurobindo: But the true reliability is there only when the psychic element in human affection becomes strong enough to colour or dominate the rest. For that reason friendship is or rather can oftenest be the most durable of the human affections because there there is less interference of the vital and even though a ﬂame of the ego it can be a quiet and pure ﬁre giving always its warmth and light. Nevertheless reliable friendship is almost always with a very few; to have a horde of loving, unselﬁshly faithful friends is a phenomenon so rare that it can be safely taken as an illusion. In any case human affection whatever its value has its place, because through it the psychic being gets the emotional experiences it needs until it is ready to prefer the true to the apparent, the perfect to the imperfect, the divine to the human. As the consciousness has to rise to a higher level, so the activities of the heart also have to rise to that higher level and change their basis and character.


Sri Aurobindo: Yoga is the founding of all the life and consciousness in the Divine, so also love and affection must be rooted in the Divine and a spiritual and psychic oneness in the Divine must be their foundation — to reach the Divine ﬁrst leaving other things aside or to seek the Divine alone is the straight road towards that change. That means no attachment — it need not mean turning affection into disaffection or chill indifference. But seems to want to take his vital emotions just as they are — — into the Divine — let him try and don’t bother him with criticisms and lectures; if it can’t be done, he will have to ﬁnd it out himself. Or perhaps he wants to clap on the Divine to the rest as a crowning ornament, shikhara, of his pyramid of love and affections.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] is the vital seeking to pour itself out with the implicit idea of getting a return, an interchange. The consciousness of oneness is something behind all life and all forms of affection come no doubt from it, but not consciously, and they get changed, mixed, perverted when the vital takes up the action of the force of Love of whose true or divine nature it is unconscious.


Sri Aurobindo:   But that is the nature of human vital affection, it is all selﬁshness disguised as love. Sometimes when there is a strong vital passion, need or tie, then the person is ready to do anything to retain the affection of the other. But it is only when the psychic is able to get into the movement that there is real unselﬁsh affection or at least some element of it.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is meant [] that you should have the relation of sadhaks with each other, one of goodwill and friendly feeling, but not any special relation of a vital character.  If there is anyone you cannot meet without such a vital relation coming up, then only it is not advisable to meet him or her.    What you write is quite correct — each sadhak must have the direct inner contact with the Mother and rely on her for the spiritual help and progress.


Sri Aurobindo: But there may be psychic or spiritual friendships which may be helpful in another way and especially in certain difﬁcult stages before the inner contact with the Mother is consciously established.  It is not helpful to make so much of the past and give it such a primary value. Whatever may be the glamour of a vital love, once it falls away and one gets to a higher level, it should be seen to have been not the great thing one imagined. To keep the exaggerated estimate of it is to hold the consciousness back from the full towards the greater thing with which that cannot for a moment compare. If one keeps a fervour like that for an inferior past, it must make it more difﬁcult to develop the entire person for a higher future.


Sri Aurobindo: It is indeed not the Mother’s wish that or you either should look back in a spirit of enthusiastic appreciation to the old vital love. It was indeed “so little” in any true estimate of things. It is not at all a question of comparison or of exalting the vital passion of one at the expense of that of the other. It is the whole thing that must dwindle in its proportions and recede into the shadowy constructions of the past which have no longer any importance.


Sri Aurobindo: It is the ordinary nature of vital love not to last or, if it tries to last, not to satisfy, because it is a passion which Nature has thrown in in order to serve a temporary purpose; it is good enough therefore for a temporary purpose and its normal tendency is to wane when it has sufﬁciently served Nature’s purpose. In mankind, as man is a more complex being, she calls in the aid of imagination and idealism to help her push, gives a sense of ardour, of beauty and ﬁre and glory, but all that wanes after a time. It cannot last, because it is all a borrowed light and power, borrowed in the sense of being a reﬂection caught from something beyond and not native to the reﬂecting vital medium which imagination uses for the purpose. Moreover nothing lasts in the mind and vital, all is in a ﬂux there. The one thing that endures is the soul, the spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore love can last or satisfy only if it bases itself on the soul and spirit, if it has its roots there. But that means living no longer in the vital but in the soul and spirit.   The difﬁculty of the vital giving up is because the vital is not governed by reason or knowledge, but by instinct and impulse and the desire of pleasure. It draws back because it is disappointed, because it realises that the disappointment will always repeat itself, but it does not realise that the whole thing is in itself a glamour or, if it does, it repines that it should be so.


Sri Aurobindo: Where the vairagya is sattwic, born not of disappointment but of the sense of greater and truer things to be attained, this difﬁculty does not arise. However the vital can learn by experience, can learn so much as to turn away from its regret of the beauty of the will-o’-the-wisp. Its vairagya can become sattwic and decisive.


Sri Aurobindo: There is nothing unusual in your feelings towards. It is the way that vital love usually takes when there is no strong psychic force to correct and uphold it. After the ﬁrst vital glow is over, the incompatibility of the two egos begins to show itself and there is more and more strain in the relations — for one or both the demands of the other become intolerable to the vital part, there is constant irritation and the claim is felt as a burden and a yoke. Naturally in a life of sadhana there is no room for vital relations — they are a stumbling block preventing the wholesale turning of the nature towards the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   The phenomenon of which you speak is normal to human nature. People are drawn together or one is drawn to another by a certain feeling of afﬁnity, of agreement or of attraction between some part of one’s own nature and some part of the other’s nature. At ﬁrst this only is felt; one sees all that is good or pleasant to one in the other’s nature and even attributes, perhaps, qualities to him that are not there or not so much there as one thinks. But with closer acquaintance other parts of the nature are felt with which one is not in afﬁnity — perhaps there is a clash of ideas or opposition of feelings or conﬂict of two egos.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is a strong love or friendship of a lasting character, then one may overcome these difﬁculties of contact and arrive at a harmonising or accommodation; but very often this is not there or the disagreement is so acute as to counteract the tendency of accommodation or else the ego gets so hurt as to recoil. Then it is quite possible for one to begin to see too much and exaggerate the faults of the other or to attribute things to him of a bad or unpleasant character that are not there. The whole view can change, the good feeling change into ill-feeling, alienation, even enmity or antipathy. This is always happening in human life.  The opposite also happens, but less easily — i.e. the change from ill-feeling to good feeling, from opposition to harmony.


Sri Aurobindo: But of course ill-opinion or ill-feeling towards a person need not arise from this cause alone. It happens from many causes, instinctive dislike, jealousy, conﬂicting interests, etc.  One must try to look calmly on others, not overstress either virtues or defects, without ill-feeling or misunderstanding or injustice, with a calm mind and vision.    There is the selﬁshness which is always a part if not the whole of human love — and it is the reaction of the demand and desire it brings that creates the opposite feeling.


Sri Aurobindo: It is when this selﬁsh element is rejected that one can feel the true psychic or divine love.     Love does not consist in demands and desires — demand and desire spring from ego. Love exists for its own sake and does not offer itself on conditions.


Sri Aurobindo: These feelings do not spring from the psychic and it is only by the psychic prevailing in you that the true consciousness can become free and full in the nature and all these repinings and unhappinesses disappear.     The love in the vital or other parts is the true thing, good for the spiritual life, only when in the vital love is changed into a form of the psychic love and becomes an instrument for the transformation of the soul’s love, no longer for the desires of the ego which men call love.  Ordinary human love is vital, emotional and physical and always egoistic — a form of self-love.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic element is very small except in a few.     Human love is mainly vital, when it is not vital and physical together. It is also sometimes psychic + vital.


Sri Aurobindo: But the Love with a dominant psychic element is rare.    It is difﬁcult to deﬁne its [] limits or to recognise it. For even when there is the psychic love for another person, it gets in the human being so mixed up with the vital that it is the commonest thing to justify a vital love by claiming for it a psychic character. One could say that psychic love is distinguished by an essential purity and selﬂessness — but the vital can put on a very brilliant imitation of that character, when it likes.


Sri Aurobindo:  It depends on what you mean by psychic “love”. One can have a psychic feeling for all beings; it does not depend on sex nor has it anything sexual in it.


Sri Aurobindo: There is a fundamental psychic feeling which is the same for all; but there can also be a special psychic feeling for one or another.      It


Sri Aurobindo: [ ] is sometimes turned to the human person, but it never gets its true satisfaction till it turns to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Men are necessarily separated by the individualisation of their nature and can only establish contacts there. In the psychic being one gets the sense of oneness by psychic sympathy, but not any uniﬁcation, for the psychic is the individual soul and must unify itself with the Divine before it can through the Divine unify with others. In spiritual realisation there are two quite opposite forms — one in which one withdraws from all outer things including all material beings in the world to merge in the Divine and one in which one feels the Self or the Divine in all and through that realisation attains to a universal oneness.    Certainly, as the psychic attitude develops it is bound to have an effect not only on oneself but on the relations with others.


Sri Aurobindo: Personal relation is not a part of the Yoga. When one has the union with the Divine, then only can there be a true spiritual relation with others.    A personal relation is formed when there is an exclusive mutual looking to each other. The rule about personal relations in this Yoga is this: (1) All personal relations to disappear in the single relation between the sadhaka and the Divine; (2) All personal (psychic-spiritual) relations to proceed from the Divine Mother, determined by her, and to be part of the single relation with the Divine Mother.


Sri Aurobindo: In so far as it keeps to this double rule and admits no physical indulgence or vital deformation or mixture, a personal relation can be there. But since as yet the Supramental has not taken possession but is only descending and there is still struggle in the vital and physical levels, there must be a great carefulness such as would not be necessary if the supramental transformation were already there. Both have to be in direct relation with the Mother and in a total dependence on her and to see that that remains and that nothing diminishes its totality or cuts across it in the least degree.    I don’t think it is much use writing about personal relations in the true spiritual life (which does not yet exist here).


Sri Aurobindo: None would understand it except as a form of words. Only three points —  (1) Its very base would have to be spiritual and psychic and  vital. The vital would be there but as an instrument only.  (2) It would be a relation ﬂowing from the higher Truth, not continued from the lower Ignorance.


Sri Aurobindo: (3) It would not be impersonal in the sense of being colourless, but whatever colours were there would not be the egoistic and muddy colours of the present relations.    The Yoga cannot be done if equality is not established. Personal relations must be founded on the relation with the Divine in himself and the Divine in all and they must not be “ties” to pull one down and keep bound to the lower nature but part of the higher unity.


Sri Aurobindo: The natural feeling of one sadhak to another should be kindliness and good feeling to all and the friendliness which is natural or ought to be so between all who follow the same spiritual aim, but personal attachment is supposed to be overcome, as all attachments of the vital must be. Personal relations exist if they are founded on the spiritual consciousness or help towards it, but nothing that holds one back or turns one away from the Divine. I have not opposed any sadhak having a friendly relation with another. But if it is based on ego, on vital desires and impulses or, if these come strongly in, then obviously there is something there that makes it undesirable. In this case, you have written very frankly that your intimacy with would be of that character on your side.


Sri Aurobindo: So I could not but acquiesce in your feeling that it would be better not to go to his room or resume the old close contact.  P. S. In what I have written of the relation of sadhaks, I mean of course the relation on the way. I leave aside the spiritual or psychic love for all which can come afterwards and be the radiation of the union with the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:  Our experience is that it is only when both are in the true consciousness centred round the Divine that there is some chance of a true meeting in the Divine. Otherwise, with the personal relation that forms there comes in either disappointment and alienation or else reactions that are not pure.  One can talk to all, unless one has a reason for not doing so.  The oneness with all is an internal realisation, but it does not necessarily impose the same dealing with all. It is the old story of  and.


Sri Aurobindo: There is the fundamental realisation and there are the disparities of the Lila — both have to be taken into account.     No, that by itself [] is not the wideness needed — the spiritual wideness brings the sense of being one being with all, of containing all in oneself, as it were, and with that comes a kind of universal love which is spiritual, free and pure, but which one is not moved to show to everybody by outward signs, but which has its effect. The personal relation can be only with some, not with all.


Sri Aurobindo:  That was exactly what tried to do — to express the love in connection with this or that person. But universal love is not personal — it has to be held within as a condition of the consciousness which will have its effects according to the Divine Will or be used by that Will if necessary, but to run about expressing it for one’s personal satisfaction or the satisfaction of others is only to spoil and lose it.   The Love cannot go out equally to all — that would create a chaotic disturbance because of the unpreparedness of the majority. It is only the static immutable universal Love that can apply equally to all — that which comes in a still wideness of the heart which corresponds with the still wideness of the mind in which there is the equanimity and inﬁnite peace.


Sri Aurobindo: So long as the whole consciousness is not clear of doubtful stuff and the realisation of oneness conﬁrmed in the supreme purity, the expression of the all-love is not advisable. It is by holding it in oneself that it becomes a real part of the nature, established and puriﬁed by joining with it the other realisations still to come. At present it is only a ﬁrst touch and to dissipate it by expression would be very imprudent. The sex and vital might easily become active — I have known cases of very good Yogis in whom the became the, all-love becoming all-lust. This has happened with many both in Europe and the East.


Sri Aurobindo: Even apart from that it is always best to solidify and to conﬁrm rather than to throw out and disperse. When the sadhana has progressed and the knowledge from above comes to enlighten and guide the love, then it will be another matter.  My insistence on rejection of all untransformed vital movements is based on experience, mine and others’ and that of past Yogas like the Vaishnava movement of Chaitanya (not to speak of the old Buddhist Sahaja dharma) which ended in much corruption. A wide movement such as that of all-love can only take place when the ground of Nature has been solidly prepared for it. I have no objection to your mixing with others, but only under a continual guard and control by a vigilant mind and will.


Sri Aurobindo: As for turning all to the Divine, that is a counsel of perfection for those who don’t care to carry any luggage. But otherwise friendship between man and man or man and woman or woman and woman is not forbidden provided it is the true thing and sex does not come in and also provided it does not turn one away from the goal. If the central aim is strong, that is sufﬁcient.  When I spoke of personal relation I certainly did not mean pure indifference, for indifference does not create a relation: it tends to non-relation altogether. Emotional friendship need not be an obstacle.


Sri Aurobindo:  The only relation permissible between a sadhak and sadhika here is the same as between a sadhak and sadhak or between a sadhika and sadhika — a friendly relation between followers of the same path of Yoga and children of the Mother.   In a general way the only method for succeeding in having between a man and a woman the free and natural Yogic relations that should exist between a sadhak and a sadhika in this Yoga is to be able to meet each other without thinking at all that one is a man and another a woman — both are simply human beings, both sadhaks, both striving to serve the Divine and seeking the Divine alone and none else. Have that fully in yourself and no difﬁculty is likely to come.


Sri Aurobindo: Even in the world there have been relations between man and woman in which sex could not intervene — purely psychic relations. The consciousness of sex difference would be there no doubt, but without coming in as a source of desire or disturbance into the relation. But naturally it needs a certain psychic development before that is possible.    It is certainly easier to have friendship between man and man or between woman and woman than between man and woman, because there the sexual intrusion is normally absent.


Sri Aurobindo: In a friendship between man and woman the sexual turn can at any moment come in in a subtle or a direct way and produce perturbations. But there is no impossibility of friendship between man and woman pure of this element; such friendships can exist and have always existed. All that is needed is that the lower vital should not look in at the back door or be permitted to enter.  There is often a harmony between a masculine and a feminine nature, an attraction or an afﬁnity which rests on something other than any open or covert lower vital (sexual) basis — it depends sometimes predominantly on the mental or on the psychic or on the higher vital, sometimes on a mixture of these for its substance. In such cases friendship is natural and there is little chance of other elements coming in to pull it downwards or break it.


Sri Aurobindo: It is also a mistake to think that the vital alone has warmth and the psychic is something frigid without any ﬂame in it. A clear limpid goodwill is a very good and desirable thing — one has only to consider what a changed place the Asram would be if all had it for each other. But that is not what is meant by psychic love. Love is love and not merely goodwill. Psychic love can have a warmth and a ﬂame as intense and more intense than the vital, only it is a pure ﬁre, not dependent on the satisfaction of ego-desire or on the eating up of the fuel it embraces.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a white ﬂame, not a red one; but white heat is not inferior to the red variety in its ardour. It is true that the psychic love does not usually get its full play in human relations and human nature, it ﬁnds the fullness of its ﬁre and ecstasy more easily when it is lifted towards the Divine. In the human relation the psychic love gets mixed up with other elements which seek at once to use it and overshadow it. It gets an outlet for its own full intensities only at rare moments. Otherwise it comes in only as an element, but even so it contributes all the higher things in a love that is predominantly vital — all the ﬁner sweetness, tenderness, ﬁdelity, self-giving, self-sacriﬁce, reachings of soul to soul, idealising sublimations that lift up human love beyond itself come from the psychic.


Sri Aurobindo: If it could dominate and govern and transmute the other elements, mental, vital, physical, of human love, then love could be on the earth some reﬂection or preparation of the real thing, an integral union of the soul and its instruments in a dual life. But even some imperfect appearance of that is rare.  Here we do not talk of psychic love between sadhaks, for the reason that that comes usually to be employed as a cover and excuse for things that are not at all psychic and have no place in the spiritual life. Our view is that the normal thing is in Yoga for the entire ﬂame of the nature to turn towards the Divine and the rest must wait for the true basis; to build higher things on the sand and mire of the ordinary consciousness is not safe.  That does not necessarily exclude friendships or comradeships, but these must be subordinate altogether to the central ﬁre.


Sri Aurobindo: If anyone makes meanwhile the relation with the Divine his one absorbing aim, that is quite natural and gives the full force to the sadhana. Psychic love ﬁnds itself wholly when it is the radiation of the diviner consciousness for which we are seeking; till then it is difﬁcult for it to put out its undimmed integral self and ﬁgure.  P. S. Mind, vital, physical are properly instruments for the soul and spirit; when they work for themselves then they produce ignorant and imperfect things — if they can be made into conscious instruments of the psychic and the spirit, then they get their own diviner fulﬁlment; that is the idea contained in what we call transformation in this Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo:   To avoid is not the way to get rid of these feelings [ ]. The Mother allowed the relation between you because you had need of help and there was a need also of psychic and spiritual comradeship in the work, a support to each other among its difﬁculties. That something vital got into the relationship and caused the disturbances of jealousy, sense of possession etc. is true; but the remedy is not to break off but to let it grow into the true thing. It is difﬁcult to get rid of the vital mixture all at once, because these movements had created in you a habit of recurrence supported by forces that wanted to break your sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo: These forces have now lost a great deal of their power, — but the movement itself still recurs and from force of habit your nature responds and gets troubled. Do not be discouraged by this recurrence; it happens with everyone.   Keep your psychic perception and quietly stand back from the jealousy and sense of possession when it occurs, not accepting it as a thing right or natural, but not desponding either because of its recurrence. In time the growth of the psychic in you will help you to turn the relation into the true thing altogether.


Sri Aurobindo:   The ﬁrst thing you have to do is to make up your mind what you want. If you want to have a free mind and vital to pursue your sadhana, you must get rid of the attachment for left from the past; if you once do so entirely, you can either mix with him or not meet him without any reaction or inconvenience.  Till then both the impulse or need of seeing him and the recoil from it carry too much of the savour of the old relation to be effective.


Sri Aurobindo:   For a sadhak the suitable partner does not exist — and any “partner” would create a barrier between him and the Divine.  A companion, not of the same sex, is a different matter.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] is not so harmful for a woman as mixing freely with men under the vital impulse — but all mixing on the vital plane has its dangers. What you should do in mixing with women is not to give yourself vitally, to remain within yourself, but to mix with them outwardly in a quiet way — forming no vital relation with any.    The ﬁrst [] was about a complementary soul and marriage.


Sri Aurobindo: The answer is easy to give; the way of the spiritual life lies for you in one direction and marriage lies in quite another and opposite. All talk about a complementary soul is a camouﬂage with which the mind tries to cover the sentimental, sensational and physical wants of the lower vital nature. It is that vital nature in you which puts the question and would like an answer reconciling its desires and demands with the call of the true soul in you. But it must not expect a sanction for any such incongruous reconciliation from here. The way of the supramental Yoga is clear; it lies not through any concession to these things, — not, in your case, through the satisfaction, under a spiritual cover if possible, of its craving for the comforts and gratiﬁcations of a domestic and conjugal life and the enjoyment of the ordinary emotional desires and physical passions, but through the puriﬁcation and transformation of the forces which these movements pervert and misuse.


Sri Aurobindo: Not these human and animal demands, but the divine Ananda which is above and beyond them and which the indulgence of these degraded forms would prevent from descending, is the great thing that the aspiration of the vital being must demand in the sadhaka.    If that [] is your feeling about women the sooner you get rid of it the better — for it is very silly. As for shyness etc., it should be got rid of, but do not replace it by familiarity or overintimacy.


Sri Aurobindo: The inner loneliness can only be cured by the inner experience of union with the Divine; no human association can ﬁll the void.  In the same way, for the spiritual life the harmony with others must be founded not on mental and vital afﬁnities, but on the divine consciousness and the union with the Divine. When one ﬁnds the Divine and ﬁnds others in the Divine, then the real harmony comes. Meanwhile what there can be is the goodwill and unity founded on the feeling of a common divine goal and the sense of being all children of the Mother. Real harmony can come only on a psychic or a spiritual basis.


Sri Aurobindo:   To be alone with the Divine is the highest of all privileged states for the sadhak, for it is that in which inwardly he comes nearest to the Divine and can make all existence a communion in the chamber of the heart as well as in the temple of the universe.  Moreover that is the beginning and base of the real oneness with all, for it establishes that oneness in its true base, on the Divine, for it is in the Divine that he meets and unites with all and no longer in a precarious interchange of the mental and vital ego.  So do not fear loneliness but put your trust in the Mother and go forward on the Path in her strength and Grace.


Sri Aurobindo: The inequality of feelings towards others, liking and disliking, is ingrained in the nature of the human vital. This is because some harmonise with one’s own vital temperament, others do not; also there is the vital ego which gets displeased when it is hurt or when things do not go or people do not act according to its preferences or its idea of what they should do. In the self above there is a spiritual calm and equality, a goodwill to all or at a certain stage a quiet indifference to all except the Divine; in the psychic there is an equal kindness or love to all fundamentally, but there may be special relations with one — but the vital is always unequal and full of likes and dislikes. By the sadhana the vital must be quieted down; it must receive from the self above its quiet goodwill and equality to all things and from the psychic its general kindness or love. This will come, but it may take time to come.


Sri Aurobindo: You must get rid of all inner as well as all outer movements of anger, impatience or dislike. If things go wrong or are done wrongly, you will simply say, “The Mother knows” and go on quietly doing or getting things done as well as you can without friction. At a later period we will show you how to use the Mother’s force so that things may go better, but ﬁrst you must get your inner poise in a quiet vital, for only so can the Force be used with its full possible success.    There are two attitudes that a sadhak can have — either a quiet equality to all regardless of their friendliness or hostility or a general goodwill.


Sri Aurobindo:   I would ask you not to let resentment or anything else rise or dictate your conduct. Put these things aside and see that peace within and the seeking of the Divine are the one thing important — these clashes being only spurts of the ego. Turn yourself in the one direction, but for the rest keep a quiet goodwill to all.


Sri Aurobindo:   You must certainly give up all personal feelings of that kind []. Also you must not think if people differ from you and express their difference of opinion freely that that arises from personal hostility. In all things keep and, if there are differences, try to see the other’s point of view as well as yours.


Sri Aurobindo:  As for the inconveniences, you should take them as a training in samata. To be able to bear inconveniences is one of the most elementary necessities if one wants to enter into the true spirit of Yoga.   The proper thing is to see all with an unmoved calm, both the “good” and “bad”, but as a movement of Nature on the surface.  But to do this truly without error or egoism or wrong reactions needs a consciousness and knowledge that is not personal and limited.


Sri Aurobindo:  If you want to have knowledge or see all as brothers or have peace, you must think less of yourself, your desires, feelings, people’s treatment of you, and think more of the Divine — living for the Divine, not for yourself.  It is not what others think of you that matters, but what you are yourself.    When you are doing sadhana, you have not to care what others want or think or say, but only for what is right and what the Divine wants of you.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is no use listening to what people say or to suggestions. Both are things by which one must learn not to be affected. A certain samata in these matters is needed in order to get the true poise.


Sri Aurobindo: The one thing that matters is realisation of the Divine.     So long as you go on listening to what people say or listening to your own wrong imaginations or insisting on your desires, how do you hope to get peace? Nobody ever got peace in that way.


Sri Aurobindo:   To become entirely indifferent to the good and bad opinion of others, especially those who are or were near, and stand on the Truth alone is very difﬁcult; some reaction of the old nature can easily come across; but if one remains calm and ﬁrm within, these surface reactions quickly disappear and their rejection helps the remnants of the old nature to disappear.


Sri Aurobindo: If you look closely, you will see that all these things — the rudeness of one, the anger of another — are exceedingly slight things which should be received with indifference. Do not allow them to trouble you so much. The one thing of supreme importance is your sadhana and your spiritual growth. Let nothing touch or disturb that.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not good to allow yourself to be upset so much by what others say or do — whether it be or anybody else. There is a quietude and happiness which you can ﬁnd by living in yourself in contact with the Divine which you will never get from outside.    I cannot quite say how far is responsible — it is certainly always possible to get a lowering of consciousness from someone who is always gossiping or talking of her fears and difﬁculties.


Sri Aurobindo: As for being kind, there is nothing harmful in kindness itself, but there is no reason why you should allow another to invade you with things you don’t want to feel or hear. There is a measure in all things — and besides one should keep oneself inwardly free and not admit that the vital movements of others should be a cause of difﬁculties — one has enough to do combating one’s own.    Such reproaches (the stone etc.) are quite usual from those who do not understand against the sadhak when he remains ﬁrm in his path against the ordinary human vital demands upon him.  But that should not perturb you.


Sri Aurobindo: It is better to be a stone on the road to the Divine than soft and weak clay in the muddy paths of the ordinary vital human nature.  What you say about your dependence on others is true, because this dependence is accompanied by a demand on those others, the desire that they should always be occupied with you alone, think, feel and act according to your own ideas, feelings and desires. This is not possible and so this dependence brings disappointment and, if the feelings are excessive, despair.  But for this demand the remedy for this dependence, which is the character of many especially among women, would be to depend not on others but on the Divine. But here too the demand comes and spoils the dependence.


Sri Aurobindo: A dependence without demand is what is needed, then the Divine Power comes in and at every moment guides, helps and sustains the being. When the sadhana was going on in you, you had periods when you had this right attitude and could get glimpses of the true happiness and dedication. But the physical mind became active and with it there began the period of obscuration and trouble. The physical mind must become quiet and the heart open and the psychic become again active. It is for this you should aspire always and in time it will come.


Sri Aurobindo: It was not the Mother’s intention in putting you with that you should depend on him alone, but that with his help you should come to depend on the Mother. Owing to your weakness and his, it turned out otherwise.    If you wish to be free from people’s expectations and the sense of obligation, it is indeed best not to take from anybody; for the sense of claim will otherwise be there. Not that it will be entirely absent even if you take nothing, but you will not be bound any longer.


Sri Aurobindo: All attachment is a hindrance to sadhana. Goodwill you should have for all, psychic kindness for all, but no vital attachment.     Yes, certainly, there should be no attachment [ ].


Sri Aurobindo: The emotional feeling is safe only when it is governed by the psychic — for the psychic love is essentially a permanent soulsympathy which is not attached but self-existent and self-content pouring itself out but asking for nothing.  The safest course in sadhana is to turn all to the Divine and to leave any other relation till all relations can be founded in the Divine; but that is not easy for everybody — only a few seem able to do it.    Yes, that is the bother of these attachments — the reason why the Yogis were so down on them — the Vedantists especially with their insistence on the breaking of the heart-knots. They must have known from their own difﬁculties in the matter.


Sri Aurobindo:   If you expect a return for your kindness, you are bound to be disappointed. It is only those who give love or kindness for its own sake without expecting a return who escape from this experience. A relation also can be established on a sure basis only when it is free from attachment or when it is predominantly psychic on both sides.


Sri Aurobindo:   When one deals with people there can be always a projection of consciousness to them or a reception of them into the consciousness, but that does not amount to an attachment — something more is needed, a grip of the vital on the person or a grip of the person on one’s vital etc.  To concentrate most on one’s own spiritual growth and experience is the ﬁrst necessity of the sadhak — to be too eager to help others draws away from the inner work. There is also likely to be an overzeal and haste which clouds the discrimination and makes what help is given less effective than it should be.


Sri Aurobindo: To grow in the spirit is the greatest help one can give to others, for then something ﬂows out naturally to those around that helps them.    It [] is a relative and partial help, of course, but it is sometimes useful. A radical help can only come from within through the action of the Divine Force and the assent of the being. It must be said of course that it is not everyone that thinks he is helping who is really doing it; also if the help is accompanied with the exercising of an “inﬂuence”, that inﬂuence may be of a mixed character and harm as well as help if the instrument is not pure.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, it is always so with human conduct — men want to help each other with a motive behind or a feeling which proceeds from the ego.


Sri Aurobindo: The idea of helping others is a subtle form of the ego. It is only the Divine Force that can help. One can be its instrument, but you should ﬁrst learn to be a ﬁt and egoless instrument.    The idea of helping others is a delusion of the ego.


Sri Aurobindo: It is only when the Mother commissions and gives the force that one can help and even then only within limits.     The attempt to help people and clear things for others was an ego impulse. It magniﬁed the ego and brought boasting, imagination, vital ﬂattery.


Sri Aurobindo: To clear yourself was the ﬁrst necessity — afterwards to work not by one’s own initiative, but in obedience to the will of the Mother, without ego.     As for helping [], you can only be sure of that if you yourself have an assured basis, with the psychic being always prominent, full of faith and joy and strength, — then others can gather strength and faith and joy from such a one by speech or contact. But to arrive at that you must, as I have been telling you, open yourself to the Light and Force that come from myself and the Mother and.


Sri Aurobindo:   This “helping others” is a perilous business — it brings the “guru” ego or else you very uncertainly rid others of their difﬁculties and very certainly get them yourself. “Why do you have all these disciples?” said a sage to some Maratha saint (I have forgotten the names); “to have disciples means to add all their difﬁculties to your own.” “Helping others” has the same disadvantage.


Sri Aurobindo:   Of course it is the disadvantage of helping others that one comes into contact with their consciousness and their difﬁculties and also gets more externalised.


Sri Aurobindo: In “helping” one often gets part of the other’s inconvenience and many Yogis refuse to take disciples because they will have to assume others’ burdens as well as their own. There are also other dangers — growth of ego etc.   The bearing of others’ difﬁculties would, I fear, be a heavy burden for anybody and I doubt the efﬁcacy of the method. What one can do much more usefully is, if one has strength to give out of one’s strength to the other, if one has peace to shed the peace on the other etc. This one can do without losing one’s strength or peace — if it is done in the right way.


Sri Aurobindo:  There are two possible attitudes in the matter [] and each has something to be said for it. There is much to be said for’s attitude [] — ﬁrst, because until one’s own siddhi is complete, the help one gives is always a little doubtful and imperfect and, secondly, there is the danger so often emphasised by experienced Yogis of taking on oneself the difﬁculties of those one helps. But all the same to wait for perfection is not always possible.   These things [] (most of them, to take a walk or write a letter home are different) can be described as not safe. If one has the strong spiritual condition secure in its basis one can do them without invasion from outside or a stumble; if one has the divine protection and can remain in it wherever he goes because the psychic being is in front and the vital obedient, then also one will not suffer.


Sri Aurobindo: But otherwise in so acting one is opened to the inﬂuences that hang around these outside people, one enters by sympathy with them into the movement of other forces than those of the spiritual life — and then it is quite possible that there may be untoward results as with and and others too, in the physical, or in the vital, wherever there is most weakness.    To give oneself to an outsider is to go out from the atmosphere of sadhana and give oneself to the outer world forces.  One can have a psychic feeling of love for someone, a universal love for all creatures, but one has to give oneself only to the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo:   To want unwaveringly the welfare of another both in the head and the heart, is the best help one can give.     It [] is in you and when it is like that it spreads out in the atmosphere — but naturally only those can share who are open and sensitive to the inﬂuence.


Sri Aurobindo: Still everyone who has peace or love in him becomes an added inﬂuence for its increase in the atmosphere.  All change must come from within with the felt or the secret support of the Divine Power; it is only by one’s own inner opening to that that one can receive help, not by mental, vital or physical contact with others.  Whatever or whomever you have handed over to the Divine, you should not be any longer attached or anxious about him or it but leave all to the Divine to do for the best.   If your husband is in a perilous period of his life and suffering from ill-health and you feel for him, the best thing for him is still that you should tranquillise yourself and call the Divine to his help to pass through. Even in the ordinary life disquietude and depression create an unhelpful atmosphere for one who is ill or in difﬁculties.


Sri Aurobindo: Once you are a sadhak, then whether for yourself or to help others for whom you still feel, the true spiritual attitude of reliance on the Divine Will and call for the help from above is always the best and most effective course.    It is very good that the condition you speak of has settled itself — that is a great progress. As for the prayers, the fact of praying and the attitude it brings, especially unselﬁsh prayer for others, itself opens you to the higher Power, even if there is no corresponding result in the person prayed for. Nothing can be positively said about that, for the result must necessarily depend on the persons, whether they are open or receptive or something in them can respond to any Force the prayer brings down.


Sri Aurobindo: By the sympathy you get into contact and receive what is in the other — or also you may give or let go or have drawn from you part of your force which goes to the other. It is the vital sympathy which has this effect; a calm spiritual or psychic goodwill does not bring these reactions.     Yes, it is dangerous [ ], because it puts one in touch with the adverse Force that upset him and that Force at once tries to touch you and make its suggestions and contaminate by a sort of contagion or infection.


Sri Aurobindo: You need not trouble yourself much about’s ideas or attach importance to them. The only truth about it is that a vital mixture does very easily get into the movements even of the sadhana, if one is not careful. The one safeguard against that is to turn all towards the Divine and draw all from the Divine, getting rid of attachment, ego and desire. In one’s relations with other sadhaks there should be neither stiffness and hardness nor attachment and sentimental leanings.  As for the motherly feeling — it has to be transformed like everything else.


Sri Aurobindo: The danger of all these relations when they are untransformed is that they may minister in a subtle way to the ego. To avoid that, one has to make oneself an instrument merely, but without even the ego of the instrument, and to be conscious of the source, not insisting on the action or any relation, but simply allowing it to be useful whenever one can clearly feel that it is intended. Also one must be careful that no force comes through one except the right forces, those which are in harmony with the higher consciousness and help. If one does always in that spirit and with that care, then even if mistakes are made, it does not matter — the growing consciousness will set them right and progress towards a more perfect working.   The real failing of the motherlike ambition — at least as it manifests in many — is that it conceals an ego movement, the desire to play a big part, to have people depending on one, to have the motherly reputation etc. etc.


Sri Aurobindo: Most human altruism has really this ego basis. If one gets rid of that, then the will to help can take its true place as a movement of pure sympathy and psychic feeling.  Work is always best done in silence except so far as it is necessary to speak for the work itself. Conversation is best kept for leisure hours. So nobody should object to your silence during work.


Sri Aurobindo: For the rest what you should do is to keep your right attitude towards the others and not allow yourself to be upset, irritated or displeased by anything they may say or do — in other words keep the and universal goodwill proper to a sadhak of Yoga. If you do that and still others get upset or displeased, you must not mind as you will not be responsible for their wrong reaction.     I have read your letter and I understand now what it is that you ﬁnd trying — but they do not seem to us such serious things as to be rightly felt as a cause of disturbance.


Sri Aurobindo: They are the kind of inconveniences that one always has when people live and work together. It arises from a misunderstanding between two minds or two wills, each pulling his own way and feeling hurt or vexed if the other does not follow. This can only be  cured by a change of consciousness


Sri Aurobindo: — for when one goes into a deeper consciousness, ﬁrst, one sees the cause of these things and is not troubled; one acquires an understanding, patience and tolerance that makes one free from vexation and other reactions.  If both or all grow in consciousness, then there arises a mutual understanding of each other’s view-points which makes it easier to bring in harmony and smooth working. It is this that should be sought by the change within — to create the same harmony from outside by exterior means is not so easy, as the human mind is stiff in its perceptions and the human vital insistent on its own way of action. Let this be your main will — to grow yourself within and let the clearer and deeper consciousness come and have a good will for the same change to come in others so that clarity and harmony may come in the place of friction and misunderstanding.  Dispersion and sadhana are two things that cannot go together.


Sri Aurobindo: In sadhana one has to have a control over the mind and all its actions; in dispersion one is on the contrary controlled and run away with by the mind and unable to keep it to its subject. If the mind is to be always dispersed, then you can’t concentrate on reading either or any other occupation, you will be ﬁt for nothing except perhaps talking, mixing, ﬂirting with women and similar occupations.   You are mistaken in thinking that the sadhana of, and does not suffer by the dispersion of their minds in all directions.  They would have been far farther on the path if they did a concentrated Yoga — even who has an enormous receptivity and is eager for progress might have gone thrice as far as he has done.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover, your nature is intense in all it does and it was therefore quite its natural path to take the straight way.  Naturally, when once the higher consciousness is settled and both the vital and physical sufﬁciently ready for the sadhana to go on of itself, strict tapasya will no longer be necessary. But till then we consider it very useful and helpful and in many cases indispensable. But we do not insist on it when the nature is not willing. I see too that those who get into the direct line (there are not as yet very many), get of themselves the tendency to give up these mind-dispersing interests and occupations and throw themselves fully into the sadhana.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, certainly, dispersion is an inner fact. But certain outer things help the dispersion of the consciousness and if anybody like says that he is not dispersed when he is wandering about with a companion like, I would say he is either not telling the truth or he is deceiving himself. If one is always in the inner consciousness, then one can be not dispersed even when doing outward things — or if one is conscious of the Divine at all times and in all one does, then also can one read newspapers or do much correspondence without dispersion.


Sri Aurobindo: But even then though there is not dispersion, yet there is less intensity of consciousness when reading a newspaper or writing a letter than when one is not putting part of oneself into quite external things. It is only when the consciousness is quite that there is not even this difference. That does not mean one should not do external things at all, for then one gets no training in joining the two consciousnesses. But one must recognise that certain things do disperse the consciousness or lower it or externalise it more than others. Especially one should not deceive or pretend to oneself that one is not dispersed by them when one is.


Sri Aurobindo: As for the people who want to draw others to the Yoga, I should say that if they draw themselves nearer to the inner goal that would be a much more fruitful activity. And in the end it would “draw” much more people and in a better way than the writing of many letters.    To be too sensitive and upset by any contact is excessive; but to have too many contacts and be always dispersing oneself prevents the sadhana from growing and solidifying in the inner being, since one is always being pulled out into the ordinary outer consciousness.  It is true that mixing with others too closely tends to lower the condition, if they are not themselves in the right attitude and live very much in the vital.


Sri Aurobindo: In all contacts what you have to do is to remain within, keep a detached attitude and not allow yourself to be troubled by the difﬁculties that arise in work or the movements of people, but keep yourself the true movement.  Do not be caught by the desire to “help” others — do and speak yourself the right thing from the inner poise and leave the help to come to them from the Divine. Nobody can really help — only the Divine Grace.


Sri Aurobindo:   It might not be prudent to mix freely and too often. Enough to relieve any tension of the sadhana, but not so much as to dissipate its intensity.


Sri Aurobindo: Aloofness is very necessary at certain stages of the sadhana, — but it cannot be maintained all through. One must be able to mix with others and act on them.     It is right to mix a little with the others — it helps to keep the balance.


Sri Aurobindo:   You are quite right. Not to mix with others deprives of the test which contact with them imposes on the consciousness and the chance to progress in these respects. Mixing is unproﬁtable from the spiritual point of view when it is only to indulge the vital, chat, interchange vital movements etc.; but abstention from all mixing and contact is also not desirable. It is only when the consciousness truly needs a full retirement that such retirement can be made and even then it may be full, but not absolute.


Sri Aurobindo: For in the absolute retirement one lives a purely subjective life and the opportunity for extending the spiritual progress to the outer life and testing it thoroughly is not there.  It is good that you got quickly the right attitude to what had happened; that indicates a good progress in the consciousness.   To be able to remain back [], entering only superﬁcially without being involved is really the ﬁrst step towards the secret of mixing with others without lowering the inner consciousness.  That [] is a kind of vital expansiveness, it is not vital strength — this expansiveness is also expensive. For when there is this mixing, the vitally strong get strength from it but the vitally weak expend what strength they have and become weaker.


Sri Aurobindo:   I think no rule can be laid down applicable to all. There are some who have the expansive tendency of the vital, others who have the concentrative. The latter are absorbed in their own intensity of endeavour and certainly they gather from that a great force for progress and are saved the expense and loss of energy which frequently comes to the more communicative and also make themselves less open to reactions from others (though this cannot be altogether avoided). The others need to communicate what is in them and cannot wait for the full fullness before they use what they have.


Sri Aurobindo: Even they may need to give out as well as to take in in order to progress. The only thing is that they must balance the two tendencies, concentrating to receive from above as much or more than they open sideways to distribute.    has a very strong and expansive vital, so it is quite natural that if he likes anybody he can produce this kind of effect on him by meeting. But I do not know that he is conscious of what he gives or receives; it is more likely a spontaneous action. He is not accustomed to give only though, for a strong expansive vital as opposed to a strong self-contained one needs to receive as well as to give.


Sri Aurobindo:  As for living a free outer life it cannot be said that that is good for everybody at every stage any more than living a retired life is good for everybody or at every stage. The disadvantage of a free jolly outward social life without restrictions is that one becomes entirely or mostly externalised and that all sorts of vital interchanges are part of it which can hamper the inner growth or the total self-consecration to the Divine. The disadvantage of too complete a retirement is that it makes the person one-sided and shut up in himself, subjective, without the stabilising contact with earth and consequently with the danger of morbidity and self-delusion. A middle path with the rule of living more and more within, standing back from outward things but not throwing them aside, looking at them with a new consciousness, a new view and acting on them from this inner consciousness is the best way.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is need for some at some stages to minimise outward contacts without abolishing them during part of the process of this shifting of the consciousness. No absolute rule can be laid down in this matter.  Whenever one mixes with others, things are passing from one to the other. If I talk with a number of people, I bring away with me in my atmosphere many forces that were around them; they may affect me or not, but they remain for a time at least. If in that time I speak with another man, he may receive them from me.


Sri Aurobindo: It is like a man carrying germs with him from a person he has visited; he may not fall ill himself (or he may), but, even if he does not, he can pass them on to another man he visits afterwards — who falls ill. It is the same thing here in the supraphysical parts.    There is always an interchange of vital forces going on between people. If you sit near one who is weak and depressed and needs vital force, you may have your forces pulled from you by his or her need and yourself feel depressed or weak or empty.


Sri Aurobindo:   Small energies of that kind [] are always coming out from people and, if there is a connection, they can ﬂow into another person sitting near. One has to live in one’s own consciousness and reject all such interchanges, accepting only what comes from the Mother.


Sri Aurobindo:   If someone throws something on you, you should throw it away and not keep it. It is like mud thrown on the body — immediately one washes it off.


Sri Aurobindo: You have to ﬁnd that out [] for yourself. There are people you mix with who have doubts, suggestions, depressions, jealousies, dissatisfactions with the Mother’s action. They can easily throw that on you without intending it. These inﬂuences are all around in the atmosphere.  It is not sufﬁcient to avoid this or that person.


Sri Aurobindo: You have to learn to be on your guard and self-contained.     When one is with another for some time, talking etc., there is always some vital interchange unless one rejects what comes from the other, instinctively or deliberately. If one is impressionable, there may be a strong inﬂuence or impression from the other.


Sri Aurobindo: Then if one goes to another person, it is possible to pass it on to that other; that is a thing which is constantly happening.  But these things happen automatically — without the knowledge of the transmitter. When one is conscious, one can prevent it happening.


Sri Aurobindo: No, people are not conscious of these things, only a few are. The vital exchange is there, but they are not aware of it — because they live in the external mind (physical) and these things go on behind. Even if they feel more energetic after an interchange or depressed or tired, they would not attribute it to the talk or contact, because the interchange is unconscious, their external mind in which they live not being aware of it.


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t suppose people are at all aware of this occult commerce []. Some like Daudet may observe the expenditure or throwing out of forces, but not the pulling or the effect on others. The idea of mental interchange is familiar though only of the superﬁcial kind, not the silent action of mind on mind which is always going on, but the vital impacts are known only to a few occultists. If one becomes very conscious one can become aware of the forces acting in and from all around, e.g. forces of joy or depression or anger.


Sri Aurobindo:   The utility [ ] depends upon the development of an inner power based upon peace which will act upon these things and prevent them. So long as one is unconscious, one undergoes the action in the Ignorance and there is no possibility of going out of the circle because there is no knowledge. The consciousness comes with a growing inner development in the being which makes the peace, the liberation a necessity — with that one opens to a higher Force of a new consciousness which puts an end to the vital interchange and creates a new poise for the vital as well as the mental life. If one stops with the increased sensitivity and does not go farther, then of course there is no proper use of it.


Sri Aurobindo: There are some people like and who got so absorbed in the “occult” knowledge that they stopped there going round and round in it and making all sorts of blunders because the spiritual light was not there. One has not to stop there, but go on and beyond to the spiritual consciousness and the greater light, strength and poise it brings.   The consciousness of these things [ ] is intended for knowledge — a psychooccult knowledge, necessary for the fullness of consciousness and experience. It is not intended that what is felt should be allowed to become an inﬂuence, whether a good one or a bad one.


Sri Aurobindo:   There must necessarily be a difference between the vital energy of a cultured and well-educated man and of one who is rough and ignorant. If nothing else, a greater reﬁnement and subtlety in the vital substance and therefore in the energy is there. Drinking if excessive affects the substance and quality of the energy — but probably a moderate drinking and smoking would have a less perceptible effect. I don’t think people in ordinary life notice clearly, but they have often a general impression which they cannot explain or particularise.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is mainly an inner guard that you must keep. At the same time, if you feel unease in crowds it is better to avoid them — except in case of music if you feel secure there. A crowd of people engaged in purely social interchange is necessarily on a lower level of consciousness in which undesirable forces may move, if there is anyone there open to them, and one who is in a stage of consciousness opening to higher things but not yet ﬁxed in steady and self-supporting calm is safer away from it.  In sadhana one is supposed to keep outward forces at a distance or at least not to allow them to invade one.


Sri Aurobindo: If one faces a difﬁculty in the right spirit and overcomes it, naturally one progresses, but that is a different thing from letting alien forces or inﬂuences enter into the conscious being. No one need invite that, — they are only too ready to do it without being invited. One can look at and become conscious of all forces, even the worst, darkest and most hostile, provided one remains on guard and refuses all credence or support to their suggestions and rejects all claim of theirs to a place in the consciousness and nature. But all cannot do that in the earlier stages.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not necessary to be so careful as all that. Ordinary vital interchanges are of a slight character. Nobody can take away another’s vital, for the very good reason that if that happened, the person from whom it was taken would die. It is possible of course for one person to drain another’s vital forces so as to leave him limp or weak or dry, but it is only the vampire kind that do that.


Sri Aurobindo: It is possible also for one to give out too much of one’s vital forces so as to weaken oneself or exhaust of energy, a thing which should not be done, — it is only those who know how to draw or can draw freely from the universal vital Force and replenish their life energies that can give out freely. All of course draw to some extent, otherwise they would not remain alive, for expenditure of vital energy is always going on and one has to replace it; but for most the capacity for drawing is limited and the capacity for giving without exhaustion is also limited.  But the ordinary movements of interchange are harmless provided they are kept within moderate limits. What creates a difﬁculty in the sadhana is that one may easily draw in undesirable inﬂuences or pass them on to others. It is the reason why at certain stages a limitation of talk, intercourse etc. is often advisable.


Sri Aurobindo: But the true remedy is to become inwardly conscious, to know and be able to repel any undesirable incursion or inﬂuence, to be able when speaking, mixing etc. to keep a defence round one and allow to pass in only what one can accept and nothing else. Also to measure what one can give out safely and what one cannot. When one has the consciousness and the practice, this working becomes almost automatic.    As for what you say about the stimulus of vital interchange, it is true of the vital life.


Sri Aurobindo: Men are constantly spending their vital energy and need to renew it; one way to do it is by pulling from others in a vital interchange. This however is not necessary if one knows how to draw from the universal Nature or from the Divine, i.e. from above. Moreover when the psychic is active — there is always more lost than gained by the vital interchange.


Sri Aurobindo: I suppose it depends upon the person [ ] and upon your reactions to him. If he gives sex vibrations or is an appropriator of vital energy, then opening to him may not be good. But in the ordinary superﬁcial interchange one need not lose anything or what is lost is so little and so automatically repaired that it does not matter.    It is not that you have to speak to no one — that is not possible.


Sri Aurobindo: But you must keep your body free and pure and reject all vital interchanges with men — do not speak too much or freely; do not allow yourself too much freedom or laughter, be simple and quiet and straight in all your actions and behaviour.   Touch no sadhak and let none touch you. Above all, turn to the Divine only and form no relations or attachments with others.


Sri Aurobindo:   It [] gives a temporary pleasure, but that does not last and it is certainly not proﬁtable.  After a time the vital interchange can no longer satisfy and the vital itself gets tired of it and turns away elsewhere. Of course for the spiritual aim it is a great interference.


Sri Aurobindo:   A human vital interchange cannot be a true support for the sadhana and is, on the contrary, sure to impair and distort it, leading to self-deception in the consciousness and a wrong turn of the emotional being and vital nature.  It is quite possible for one person to get depressed by talking with another. Talking means a vital interchange, so that can always happen. Whether they have observed rightly in a particular case is another matter.


Sri Aurobindo:   The disturbance in talking to people comes of course because they throw their own vibrations upon you and revive your old movements. Once the true consciousness is well ﬁxed in your physical being, that effect need no longer happen.


Sri Aurobindo: To discuss with others, especially when they are in a bad state, is always a mistake. It is very easy for the disturbance in them to fall upon you while you speak even without your noticing it; it is afterwards that you feel it. That is why I told you to ignore  and what he says when he is in a bad state.    Every letter means an interchange with the person who writes it — for something is there behind the words, something of his person or of the forces he has put out or had around him while writing.


Sri Aurobindo: Our thoughts and feelings are also forces and can have effects upon others. One has to grow conscious of the movement of these forces and then one can control one’s own mental and vital formations and cease to be affected by those of others.  Talking about somebody may very well have an effect on him; it often does, for it can be an effective formulation of a thought or feeling which, so embodied, will reach him. But I don’t suppose mere mechanical thoughts or ill-formed imaginations would do that — at any rate it must be rare and need exceptional conditions or a play of forces in which a triﬂe counts.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, one’s bad thoughts and good thoughts can have a bad or a good effect on others, though they have not always because they are not strong enough — but still that is the tendency. It is therefore always said by those who have this knowledge that we should abstain from bad thoughts of others for this reason.  It is true that both kinds of thought come equally to the mind in its ordinary state; but if the mind and mental will are well developed, one can establish a control over one’s thoughts as well as over one’s acts and prevent the bad ones from having their play. But this mental control is not enough for the sadhak.