Sri Aurobindo: If you consider it from the earth’s point of view. But it may be truer to say that the Avatar holds himself back and manifests as a Vibhuti in many lives till the time comes for his manifesting as the Avatar.  That would be a possession, not an Avatar. An Avatar is supposed to be from birth. Each soul at its birth takes from the cosmic mind, life and matter to shape a new external personality for himself.


Sri Aurobindo: What prevents the Divine from doing the same?  What is continued from birth to birth is the inner being.  I do not know what the devil you mean. My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on earth.  If I could do these things or if they could happen in my Yoga, it means that they can be done and that therefore these developments and transformations are possible in the terrestrial consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: How do you know that you can’t?  [] You had said it can’t be done or somebody had said it.  How do they prove their theory — when they don’t know what is or what is not latent? In such conditions the theory can neither be proved nor refuted. To say “O, it was latent” when a thing apparently impossible is done, is a mere explanation which amounts to an evasion of the difﬁculty.


Sri Aurobindo: Well, Ramakrishna himself was an ignorant, unlettered rustic according to the story.  If he were, they would say “O, it was latent in him.”  If the Divine were not in essence omnipotent, he could not be omnipotent anywhere — whether in the supramental or anywhere else. Because he chooses to limit or determine his action by conditions, it does not make him less omnipotent. His selflimitation is itself an act of omnipotence.


Sri Aurobindo: It does not prove it for a moment. It simply proves that the omnipotent unconditioned supramental force was not put out there — any more than it was when Christ was put on the cross or when after healing thousands he failed to heal in a certain district (I forget the name) because people had no faith (faith being one of the conditions imposed on his work) or when Krishna after ﬁghting eighteen battles with Jarasandha failed to prevail against him and had to run away from Mathura.   Why the immortal Hell should the Divine be tied down to succeed in all his operations? What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose?


Sri Aurobindo: What if the gentleman in question had to be given his chance as Duryodhan was given his chance when Krishna went to him as ambassador in a last effort to avoid the massacre of Kurukshetra? What rigid primitive notions are these about the Divine! And what about my explanation of how the Divine acts through the Avatar? It seems all to have gone into water.  By the way about the ass becoming an elephant — what I meant to say was that the only reason why it can’t be done is because there is no recognizable process for it. But if a process can be discovered whether by a scientist (let us say transformation or redistribution of the said ass’s atoms or molecules — or what not) or by an occultist or by a Yogi, then there is no reason why it should not be done.


Sri Aurobindo: In other words certain conditions have been established for the game and so long as those conditions remain unchanged certain things are not done — so we say they are impossible, can’t be done. If the conditions are changed, then the same things are done or at least become licit — allowable, legal, according to the so-called laws of Nature, — and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them, but he has to change them ﬁrst, not proceed while maintaining the conditions to act by a series of miracles.   The question was not whether it had been done but whether it could be done.


Sri Aurobindo: The street-beggar is a side issue. The question was whether new faculties not at all manifested in the personality up to now in this life could appear, even suddenly appear, by force of Yoga. I say they can and I gave my own case as proof. I could have given others also. The question involved is also this — is a man bound to the character and qualities he has come with into this life — can he not become a new man by Yoga?


Sri Aurobindo: That also I have proved in my sadhana, it can be done. When you say that I could do this only in my case because I am an Avatar (!) and it is impossible in any other case, you reduce my sadhana to an absurdity and Avatarhood also to an absurdity. For my Yoga is done not for myself who need nothing and do not need salvation or anything else, but precisely for the earth consciousness, to open a way to the earth consciousness to change. Has the Divine need to come down to prove that he can do this or that or has he any personal need of doing it? Your argument proves that I am not an Avatar but only a big human person.


Sri Aurobindo: It may well be so as a matter of fact, but you start your argument from the other basis.  Besides, even if I am only a big human person, what I achieve shows that that achievement is possible for humanity. Whether any street-beggar can do it or has done it, is a side issue. It is sufﬁcient if others who have not the economic misfortune of being street-beggars can do it.  What a wonderful argument!


Sri Aurobindo: Since it has not been done, it cannot be done! At that rate the whole history of the earth must have stopped long before the protoplasm. When it was a mass of gases, no life had been born, ergo life could not be born — when only life was there, mind was not born, so mind could not be born. Since mind is there but nothing beyond, as there is no supermind manifested in anybody, so supermind can never be born. Sobhanallah!


Sri Aurobindo: Glory, glory, glory to the human reason!!  Luckily the Divine or the Cosmic Spirit or Nature or whoever is there cares a damn for the human reason. He or she or it does what he or she or it has to do, whether it can or cannot be done.   What need has he to be a Sri Aurobindo?


Sri Aurobindo: He can be a supramentalised Muthu!  I have no objection to that. Plenty of the middle Narayan is needed in this Asram. This part of your argument is perfectly correct — but it is also perfectly irrelevant.  The psychic being is more than a spark at this stage of its evolution.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a ﬂame. Even if the ﬂame is covered by mist or smoke, the mist or smoke can be dissipated. To do that and to open to the higher consciousness is what is wanted, not to become a Sri Aurobindo or equal to the Mother.  But if we are the Divine, what is the harm of evolving into a portion of the Divine, living in the divine Consciousness even if in a lesser degree? No middle Narayan will then be needed for anybody’s head.


Sri Aurobindo: Certainly not, it is not intended and I never said that she could  as a practical matter .  Not at all. You are always making the same elementary baby stumble.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not because the Divine cannot manifest his greatness anywhere, but because it is not in the conditions of the game, because he has chosen to manifest his centrality in a particular line that it is practically impossible.  What is all this obsession of greater or less? In our Yoga we do not strive after greatness.  It is not a question of Sri Krishna’s disciples, but of the earth consciousness — Rama was a mental man, there is no touch of the overmind consciousness (direct) in anything he said or did, but what he did was done with the greatness of the Avatar. But there have since been men who did live in touch with the planes above mind — higher mind, illumined mind, Intuition.


Sri Aurobindo: There is no question of asking whether they were “greater” than Rama; they might have been less “great”, but they were able to live from a new plane of consciousness. And Krishna’s opening the overmind certainly made it possible for the attempt at bringing Supermind to the earth to be made.  “Peace, peace, O ﬁery furious spirit! calm thyself and be at rest.” Your fury or furiousness is wasted because your point is perfectly irrelevant to the central question on which all this breath (or rather ink) is being spent.


Sri Aurobindo: Muthu and the sadhaks who want to equal or distance or replace the Mother and myself and so need very badly Middle Narayan oil — there have been several — have appeared only as meaningless foam and froth on the excited crest of the dispute. I fear you have not grasped the internalities and modalities and causalities of my high and subtle reasoning. It is not surprising as you are down down in the troughs of the rigidly logically illogical human reason while I am ﬂoating on the heights amid the inﬁnite plasticities of the overmind and the lightninglike subtleties and swiftnesses of the intuition. There! what do you think of that?


Sri Aurobindo: However!!   More seriously, I have not stated that any Muthu has equalled Ramakrishna and I quite admit that Muthu here  has no chance of performing that feat. I have not said that anyone here can be Sri Aurobindo or the Mother — I have explained what I meant when I objected to your explaining away my sadhana as a perfectly useless piece of Avatarian ﬁreworks. So in my comment on the Muthu logic, I simply pointed out that it was bad logic — that someone quite ignorant and low in the social scale can manifest a great spirituality and even a great spiritual knowledge.


Sri Aurobindo: I hope you are not bourgeois enough to deny that or to contend that the Divine or the spiritual can only manifest in somebody who has some money in his pockets or some University education in his pate? For the rest as I myself have been pointing out all the time there is a difference between essential truth and conditional truth, and, the latter being relative and conditional and mutable. In mathematics one works out problems in inﬁnite and in unreal numbers which exist nowhere on earth and yet are extremely important and can help scientiﬁc reasoning and scientiﬁc discovery and achievement.  The question of a Muthu becoming a Ramakrishna, i.e. a great spiritual man may look to you like being an exercise in unreal numbers or magnitudes because it exceeds the actual observable facts in the case of Muthu who very evidently is not going to be a great spiritual man — but we were arguing the matter of essential principle. I was pointing out that in the essentiality all things are possible — so you ought not to say the Divine not do this or that.


Sri Aurobindo: But at the same time I was pointing out too that the Divine is not bound to show his omnipotence without rhyme or reason when he is working by his own will under conditions. For by arguing that the Divine cannot, that he is impotent, that he cannot do what has never yet been done etc., you deny the possibility of changing conditions, of evolution, of the realisation of the unrealised, of the action of the Divine Power, of Divine Grace, and reduce all to a matter of rigid and unalterable, which is an insolent deﬁance to both fact and reason (!) and suprareason. See now?  About myself and the Mother, — there are people who say, “If the supramental is to come down, it can come down in everyone, why then in them ﬁrst? Why should we not get it before they do?


Sri Aurobindo: Why through them, not direct?” It sounds very rational, very logical, very arguable. The difﬁculty is that this reasoning ignores the conditions, foolishly assumes that one can get the supramental down into oneself without having the least knowledge of what the supramental is and so supposes an upside-down miracle — everybody who tries it is bound to land himself in a most horrible cropper — as all have done hitherto who tried it. It is like thinking one need not follow the Guide, but can reach up to the top of the mountain from the narrow path one is following on the edge of a precipice by simply leaping into the air. The result is inevitable.


Sri Aurobindo: About greater and less, one point. Is Captain John Higgins of S.S. Mauretania a greater man than Christopher Columbus because he can reach America without trouble in a few days? Is a university graduate in philosophy greater than Plato because he can reason about problems and systems which had never even occurred to Plato? No, only humanity has acquired greater scientiﬁc power which any good navigator can use or a wider intellectual knowledge which anyone with a philosophic training can use. You will say greater scientiﬁc power and wider knowledge is not a change of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: Very well, but there are Rama and Ramakrishna. Rama spoke always from the thinking intelligence, the common property of developed men; Ramakrishna spoke constantly from a swift and luminous spiritual intuition. Can you tell me which is the greater? the Avatar recognised by all India? or the saint and Yogi recognised as an Avatar only by his disciples and some others who follow them?


Sri Aurobindo: I did not mean that anyone here could replace or equal myself and the Mother, much less the persons you name — or the actual Muthu equal the actual Ramakrishna. But certainly it is possible for X and Y and Z (I won’t repeat the names) to change, to throw off their present perversities or limitations and come nearer to us than they are now — if they have the sincere will and make the endeavour. I have explained my meaning to — so I do not repeat it here. Of course in my writing to, there is a certain note of persiﬂage and humorous insistence of which you must take account if you want to get the exact measure of my reasoning and its signiﬁcance.   Helps to ﬁnding out your bad logic.


Sri Aurobindo: I give instances expressed or implied in your reasonings.  Bad logic No 1. Because things have not been, therefore they can never be.  ”  ” ”


Sri Aurobindo: 2. Because Sri Aurobindo is an Avatar, his sadhana can have no meaning for humanity.  ” ” ”  3.


Sri Aurobindo: What happens in Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana cannot happen in anybody else’s sadhana (i.e. neither descent, nor realisation, nor transformation, nor any intuitions, nor budding of new powers or faculties) — because Sri Aurobindo is an Avatar and the sadhaks are not.  ” ” ” 4. A street-beggar cannot have any spirituality or at least not so much as, let us say, a University graduate — because, well, one does not know why the hell not.  ” ” ” 5. (and last because of want of space)


Sri Aurobindo: Because I [] am a doctor, I can’t see a joke when it is there.    I have brought in the evolution theory or rather fact of evolution, to disprove your argument that because a thing has not been done, it is thereby proved that it could not be done. I don’t understand your argument. If a scientist says that, he is using bad logic.


Sri Aurobindo: I have never said it can’t be done. I dare say some day in the right conditions the creation of life will become possible.  They may not be Ram or Krishna or Sri Aurobindo, but they may become a spiritualised super-Tom, super-Dick or super-Harry. I have answered about the Avatar.  It is singular that you cannot understand such a simple thing.


Sri Aurobindo: I had no urge towards spirituality in me, I developed spirituality.  I was incapable of understanding metaphysics, I developed into a philosopher. I had no eye for painting — I developed it by Yoga. I transformed my nature from what it was to what it was not. I did it by a special manner, not by a miracle and I did it to show what could be done and how it could be done.


Sri Aurobindo: I did not do it out of any personal necessity of my own or by a miracle without any process. I say that if it is not so, then my Yoga is useless and my life was a mistake — a mere absurd freak of Nature without meaning or consequence. You all seem to think it a great compliment to me to say that what I have done has no validity for anybody except myself — it is the most damaging criticism on my work that could be made.  I also did not do it all by myself, if you mean by myself the Aurobindo that was. He did it by the help of Krishna and the Divine Shakti.


Sri Aurobindo: I had help from human sources also.  All sufﬁcient to themselves — perfect and complete from the beginning, hey? Just roll, royce and ripple!  Great Scott! What a penal servitude for the great personages and the Avatars!


Sri Aurobindo: And where are they leading them? All that rubbish into Paradise? How is that any more possible than creating a capacity where there was none? If the disjointed machines cannot be jointed, isn’t it more economical to leave them where they are, in the lumber-shed?  I don’t know about Avatars.


Sri Aurobindo: Practically what I know is that I had not all the powers necessary when I started, I had to develop them by yoga, at least many of them which were not in existence in me when I began, and those which were I had to train to a higher degree. My own idea of the matter is that the Avatar’s life and action are not miracles and if they were, his existence would be perfectly useless, a mere superﬂuous freak of Nature.  He accepts the terrestrial conditions, he uses means, he shows the way to humanity as well as helps it. Otherwise what is the use of him and why is he here?  I was not always in the overmind, if you please.


Sri Aurobindo: I had to climb there from the mental and vital level.  You may not have mentioned it but it was implied in your logic without your knowing that it was implied. Logic has its own consequences which are not apparent to the logiciser. It is like a move in chess by which you intend to overcome the opponent but it leads, logically, to consequences which you didn’t intend and ends in your own checkmate. You can’t invalidate the consequences by saying that you didn’t intend them.


Sri Aurobindo: Let me remind you of what I wrote about the Avatar. There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatarhood, the Divine Consciousness behind and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature, under the conditions of Nature, and it uses it according to the rules of the game — though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatarhood is only a ﬂashing miracle, then I have no use for it.


Sri Aurobindo: If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it.  As for the Muthu affair, that was only a joke as ought to have been clear to you at once. Nobody has any intention of making Muthu a saint or an Avatar. But that is only because the Divine is not going to play the fool, not because he is impotent.  Muthu’s only business in life is to prepare himself for something better hereafter and exhaust some of his lowest tendencies in the meantime.


Sri Aurobindo: That is not the question — the question is whether as a general rule rigid and unalterable man is bound down to his outward nature as it appears to be built at the moment and the Divine cannot or will not under any circumstances change it or develop something new in it, something not yet “evident”, not yet manifested, or is there a chance for human beings becoming more like the Divine,,? If not, there is no use in anybody doing this Yoga; let the Krishnas and Ramakrishnas rocket about gloriously and uselessly in the empty Inane and the rest wriggle about for ever in the clutch of the eternal Devil. For that is the logical conclusion of the whole matter.    Can you not understand that it was the natural logical result of the statements made on either side about the unbridgeable distance between the Man Divine and the human being moving in the darkness towards the Divine?


Sri Aurobindo: If you admit the utility of my sadhana, the controversy ceases. But so long as you declare that what I have done in my sadhana has no connection with what can be done, I shall go on beating you. (What the Avatar says in the is only an explanation of the Gita; it is not a full statement of the issue. But still if you read three or four chapters there, you will get some idea of the general principles.)  For the rest I propose that all discussion be postponed till after the 21st (not immediately after).


Sri Aurobindo: This will give time for you to clear your ideas and for me to pursue my “Avataric” sadhana (not for myself, but for this confounded and too confounded earth race).     I have never said anything about how I choose people. I was answering the argument that what has not been or is not in manifestation, cannot be.


Sri Aurobindo: That was very clearly put in the discussion — that the Divine cannot manifest what is not yet there — even He is impotent to do that. He can only manifest what is either already manifest or else latent in the ﬁeld (person) he is working on. I say no — he can bring in new things. He can bring it in from the universal or he can bring it down from the transcendent.


Sri Aurobindo: For in the Divine cosmic and transcendent all things are. Whether He will do so or not in a particular case is quite another matter. My argument was directed towards dissipating this “can’t, can’t” with which people try to stop all possibility of progress.  On the back the rational and logical result of your arguments. I shall write certain irrational answers on your MS — in ink.


Sri Aurobindo: You have won all along the line. Who could resist such a lava-torrent of logic? Slightly mixed, but still! You have convinced me (1st) that there never was nor could be an Avatar, (2) that all the so-called Avatars were chimerical fools and failures, (3) that there is no Divinity or divine element in man, (4) that I have never had any true difﬁculties or struggles, and that if I had any, it was all my fun (as K. S. said of my new metres that they were only Mr. Ghose’s fun), (5) that if ever there was or will be a real Avatar, I am not he — but that I knew before, (6) that all I have done or the Mother has done is a mere sham — sufferings, struggles, conquests, defeats, the Way found, the Way followed, the call to others to follow, everything — it was all make-believe since I was the Divine and nothing could touch me and none follow me. That is truly a discovery, a downright knock-out which leaves me convinced, convicted, amazed, gasping.


Sri Aurobindo: I won’t go on, there is no space; but there are a score of other luminous convictions that your logic has forced on me. But what to do next? You have put me in a terrible ﬁx and I see no way out of it. For if the Way, the Yoga is merely sham, fun and chimera — then?


Sri Aurobindo:   You don’t say, but if your theory or description of the Avatar is right, I am not one. I am proceeding on the necessary consequences of your logic.  If they are shams, they have no value for others or for any true effect. If they have no value for others or for any true effect, they are perfectly irrational and unreal and meaningless.


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine does not need to suffer or struggle for himself; if he takes on these things it is in order to bear the world-burden and help the world and men; and if these sufferings and struggles are to be of any help, they must be real. A sham or falsehood cannot help. They must be as real as the struggles and sufferings of men themselves — the Divine bears them and at the same time shows the way out of them. Otherwise his assumption of human nature has no meaning and no utility and no value. It is strange that you cannot understand or refuse to admit so simple and crucial a point.


Sri Aurobindo: What is the use of admitting Avatarhood if you take all the meaning out of it?  Good Lord! You said most emphatically that they were all failures and that is why the Divine had to come back again and again — to “atone for his failures”.  If your argument is that the life, actions, struggles of the Avatar (e.g. Rama’s, Krishna’s) are unreal because the Divine is there and knows it is all a Maya, in man also there is a self, a spirit that is immortal, untouched, divine, you can say that man’s sufferings and ignorance are only put on, shams, unreal.  But


Sri Aurobindo: if man feels them as real and if the Avatar feels his work and difﬁculties to be serious and real?  If the existence of the Divinity is of no practical effect, what is the use of a theoretical admission? The manifestation of the Divinity in the Avatar is of help to man because it helps him to discover his own divinity, ﬁnd the way to realise it. If the difference is so great that the humanity by its very nature prevents all possibility of following the way opened by the Avatar, it merely means that there is no divinity in man that can respond to the divinity in the Avatar.  You make a ﬂourish of reasonings and do not see the consequence of your reasonings.


Sri Aurobindo: It is no use saying “I believe this or that” and then reasoning in a way which leads logically to the very negation of what you believe.  You think then that in me (I do not bring in the Mother) there was never any doubt or despair, no attacks of that kind. I have borne every attack which human beings have borne, otherwise I would be unable to assure anybody “This too can be conquered.” At least I would have no right to say so. Your psychology is terribly rigid.


Sri Aurobindo: I repeat, the Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretence. If he has something behind him which emerges always out of the coverings, it is the same thing in essence, even if greater in degree, that there is behind others — and it is to awaken that that he is there.  The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way — men need not be extraordinary beings to follow Yoga. That is the mistake you are making — to harp on greatness as if only the great can be spiritual.  Exactly!


Sri Aurobindo: Why admit any divinity then at all, if their humanity is an insuperable bar to any following in the Way pointed out by the Avatar? That was your contention that humanity and divinity are irreconcilable opposite things, that it is no use the Avatar asking others (except Arjuna) to follow in his Path — they, being human, cannot do it.  Lots of people leave things at the word of a human being like Gandhi, they do not need the word of Krishna.  If surrender, faith etc. from the beginning were essential for Yoga then nobody could do it. I myself could not have done it if such a condition had been demanded of me.


Sri Aurobindo: Let me make it clear that in all I wrote I was not writing to prove that I am an Avatar! You are busy in your reasonings with the personal question, I am busy in mine with the general one. I am seeking to manifest something of the Divine that I am conscious of and feel — I care a damn whether that constitutes me an Avatar or something else. That is not a question which concerns me. By manifestation of course I mean the bringing out and spreading of that Consciousness so that others also may feel and enter into it and live in it.


Sri Aurobindo:   We have had sufferings and struggles to which yours are mere child’s play, — I have not made our cases equal to yours. I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness — if nobody can follow the Way, then either our conception of the thing, which is that of Christ and Krishna and Buddha also, is all wrong or the whole life and action of the Avatar is quite futile. seems to say that there is no Way and no possibility of following, that the struggles and sufferings of the Avatar are unreal and all humbug, — there is no possibility of struggle for one who represents the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: Such an idea makes nonsense of the whole idea of Avatarhood — there is no reason in it, no necessity for it, no meaning in it. The Divine being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to come down on earth. It is only if it is part of the worldarrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and open the Way that Avatarhood has any meaning.  This is idiotic.


Sri Aurobindo: I have said “Follow my path, the way I have discovered for you through my own efforts and example. Transform your nature from the animal to the spiritual, grow into a higher divine consciousness. All this you can do by your own aspiration and by the force of the Divine Shakti.” That, if you please, is not the utterance of a madman or an imbecile. I have said, “I have opened the Way; now you with the Divine help can follow it.”


Sri Aurobindo: I have not said “Find the way for yourself as I did.”  Does it follow that the coating cannot be dissolved nor the mark effaced? Then stamp the stamp of the chimaera on all efforts at spirituality and catalogue as asses and fools all who have attempted to rise beyond the human animal — all who have tried to follow the path of the Christ, the Buddha; stigmatise as folly Vedanta, Tantra, Yoga, the way of the Jinas, Christ himself and Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, and any other pathﬁnder and seeker.  Does it follow that the breaking through had not to be done or was a mere triﬂing impediment? The power of the form can be exceedingly great as every thinker and observer of life can tell you.


Sri Aurobindo: Your heart not leaping up does not make my statement a falsehood, a non sequitur or a chimaera.  The fool being myself, eh? For it is my Paradise and it is I who call them to it.  [] Truly then what a humbug and charlatan I have been, making much of sham struggles and dangers — or, in the alternative, since I took them for realities, what a self-blinded imbecile!


Sri Aurobindo: At what age? But I shall say nothing about the Mother — I cannot bring her into such arguments, only myself.  Nobody asks you to go through volcanoes and earthquakes or to proceed unhelped. You are simply asked to follow the Leader and Guide with the Divine help and with courage, in the face of whatever difﬁculties come.  Would you?


Sri Aurobindo: I wish you had been in my place then! You would have been a hundred times more ﬁt than myself, if you could really have done that. And how easily things would have been done! While I did them and am still doing them with enormous difﬁculty because I lead and have to make the path so that others may follow with less difﬁculty.  The Divine in the body is not subject to death or failure?


Sri Aurobindo: Yet all those claimed to be Avatars have died — some by violence, some by cancer, some of indigestion etc. etc. You yourself say that they were all failures. How do you reconcile these self-contradictory arguments?   Like my heredity?


Sri Aurobindo: It was “pure”? But of course I am not a divine incarnation. Only why put all that upon one whom it does not ﬁt?  Who gave this message? It is your own invention.


Sri Aurobindo: The Divine does not come down in that way. It is a silly imagination of yours that you are trying to foist on the truth of things. The Divine also comes down into the cycle of rebirths, makes the great holocaust, endures shame and obloquy, torture and cruciﬁxion, the burden of human nature, sex and passion and sorrow and suffering, manifests many births before he reveals the Avatar.  And when he does reveal it? Well, read the lives of the Avatars and try to understand and see.


Sri Aurobindo: Nobody ever said there was no coating — that is your invention.   No, of course not — but it is yours, not any Avatar’s.  Jatakas are legends.


Sri Aurobindo: Did they? I know nothing about it; but if they told you that!  Anyhow one died by drowning and the other of a cancer.  [:] Krishna was a rogue and a sinner even in his Avatar life, if tales are true! Don’t you think so?


Sri Aurobindo: 3 if you please. You are terribly inaccurate in your statements. It was simply through the Divine Grace, because it had been done by thousands before me throughout the centuries and millenniums, and the Divine did not want me to waste time over that; other things in the Yoga were not so damned easy!  [:] Who told you that?


Sri Aurobindo: I was perfectly sure of release. But even so plenty of ordinary men did it before me.  Never said that, surely. Under my feet?  My career was much less brilliant than many others’.


Sri Aurobindo: They ought to have progressed then farther in Yoga than myself, e.g. Mussolini, Lenin, Tilak, Brajendranath Seal, the admirable Crichton, Gandhi, Tagore, Roosevelt, Lloyd George etc. etc. All Avatars or all full of the essential principle!  All that does not apply to me alone. There are hundreds of others. The inner consciousness is not so rare a phenomenon as all that.


Sri Aurobindo: That gives away the whole case. For mark that I have never asked the whole human race to follow me to the supramental — that is your invention, not mine.  What a waste of words and energy! Yet Krishna said “even Chandalas can follow my way.”


Sri Aurobindo: I admit that you have successfully proved that I am an imbecile.  All this is a purely personal argument concerning yourself. Up to now you were making general assertions — so was I. I was concerned with the possibility of people following the Path I had opened, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Chaitanya etc. opened theirs. You were declaring that no human being could follow and that my life was perfectly useless as an example — like the lives of the Avatars.


Sri Aurobindo: Path, life, example all useless — even Power useless because all have been failures. These are general questions. Whether X or Y is able or willing to follow the path or depends on divine Omnipotence only is a personal question.  Even if X or Y does so, he has no right to pass a general decree of impossibility against others.  It is very conceited.


Sri Aurobindo: To be a devil needs a considerable personal capacity or else a great openness to the Beyond. If you had said, I can only be an ordinary human being, that might be modest.  Of course not. It is the reverse of complimentary, since you prove me to be an ignorant and mistaken fellow of an Avatar, who merely wastes his time doing things which are of no earthly use to any human being — except perhaps Arjuna who is not here.  The Sun’s rays are of use to somebody — you say all my acts and life and laborious opening of the Way I thought I had made for spiritual realisation, are of no use to anybody —


Sri Aurobindo: since nobody is strong enough to follow the path, only the Avatar can do it.   Poor lonely ineffective fellow of an Avatar!  Who is this we? Editorial “we”?


Sri Aurobindo: Let me point out one or two facts, in a perfectly serious spirit.  (1) It has always been supposed by spiritual people that divine perfection, similitude to the Divine,,, is part of the Mukti. Christ said “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect” — the very Divine himself, mind you, not a mere Avatar or luminous projection from him. His followers strive to be Christlike.


Sri Aurobindo: Thomas `a Kempis, meditating and striving, wrote a book on the Imitation of Christ. Francis of Assisi and many others arrived at Christlikeness. [Krishna in] the Gita insists on , gives himself as an example, and tells Arjuna that many before him from ancient times reached to it. Buddha in teaching, the eightfold path, the rejection of sanskaras, gave it as an ideal to all true followers of his path, thus placing before them not only his own path but his own example. All this is trash and humbug?


Sri Aurobindo: Christ and Buddha were fools? Myself even a bigger fool? It is not a question of greatness — it is a question of acquiring a certain consciousness to which the way is laid open. It is not a question of acquiring cosmic omniscience and omnipotence, but of reaching the essential divine consciousness with all its consequences, peace, light, equality, strength, Ananda etc. etc. If you say that that cannot be done, you deny all possibility of spiritual perfection, transformation or any true Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: All that anyone can do is to be helpless and wait for the divine Omnipotence to do something or other. The whole spiritual past of man becomes a fantastic insanity, with the Avatars as the chief lunatics. That is the materialist point of view, but I am unable to envisage it as a basis for sadhana.  That example is not all, is true; I have not said it is; there is Inﬂuence, there is spiritual help — but the truth of the Way and the Example cannot be belittled in this scornful fashion.  (2) You make nothing of the Divine in man.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is no divinity in man, then there is no possibility of Avatarhood; also spirituality can just as well pass away into silence — it has no foundation here. If the divinity is there in man, it can break through its coatings. You admit that it can do it in debauchees and moral insolvents — that it can manifest in ignorant and uncultured men and women is a proved fact; the Gita itself declares that all of men and women can follow its path.  Whether X or Y does or does not do so does not depend then on these things and it is no use trying to bar the path to people because of either their ignorance or their immorality. To do so is to betray a bottomless ignorance of spiritual things.


Sri Aurobindo: As to the possibility of awakening the psychic being, on what intellectual grounds or by what ﬁxed ethical or rational rules are you going to ﬁx that and declare “No entry here for you”? You cannot  generalise in the way you try to do by an intellectual reasoning.  The mystery of the Spirit is too great for such a puny endeavour.  Who ﬁnds fault with whom?


Sri Aurobindo: I have not found fault with any Avatar. To discern what they expressed and what they did not express, is not to ﬁnd fault.  What is infallible? I invite your attention again to Rama and the Golden Deer. The Avatar need have no theoretical “Knowledge” from above — he acts and thinks whatever the Divine within him intends that he should act and think for the work.


Sri Aurobindo: Was everything that Ramakrishna said or thought infallible?  I am not concerned with what the Avatars did or are supposed to have done (though in that case Krishna seems to have done some very queer and undivine things). My business is with rising above the human consciousness and not with fulﬁlling limited human ideals; and I look at things from that standpoint.    Why should they not?


Sri Aurobindo: All that is wrong. The Avatar takes upon himself the nature of humanity in his instrumental parts, though the consciousness acting behind is divine.  Exactly.  That does not prevent the Avatar from acting as men act and using the movements of Nature for his life and work.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is not necessarily any union above before the practice of Yoga. There is a connection of the consciousness with the veiled Divinity and an action out of that, but this is not dependent on the practice of Yoga.  It is said that it was done to break Arjuna’s pride so that he might see his strength was not his, but the Divine’s alone.


Sri Aurobindo: You have only to consider what the state of humanity would have been if Krishna and others had not come. They would have been still near to the beast with no openings on the heights of the spirit.  Only to a few, according to the accounts.  I thought I had already told you that your turn towards Krishna was not an obstacle. In any case I afﬁrm that positively in answer to your question.


Sri Aurobindo: If we consider the large and indeed predominant part he played in my own sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in your sadhana could be considered objectionable.  Sectarianism is a matter of dogma, ritual etc., not of spiritual experience; the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the . If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to him, you give yourself to me. Your inability to identify may be because you are laying too much stress on the physical aspects, consciously or unconsciously.


Sri Aurobindo:   You can’t expect me to argue about my own spiritual greatness in comparison with Krishna’s. The question itself would be relevant only if there were two sectarian religions in opposition, Aurobindoism and Vaishnavism, each insisting on its own God’s greatness. That is not the case. And then what Krishna must I challenge, — the Krishna of the Gita who is the transcendent Godhead, Paramatma, Parabrahma, Purushottama, the cosmic Deity, master of the universe, Vasudeva who is all, the immanent in the heart of all creatures, or the Godhead who was incarnate at Brindavan and Dwarka and Kurukshetra and who was the guide of my Yoga and with whom I realised identity?


Sri Aurobindo: All that is not to me something philosophical or mental but a matter of daily and hourly realisation and intimate to the stuff of my consciousness. Then from what position can I adjudicate this dispute? thinks I am superior in greatness, you think there can be nothing greater than Krishna; each is entitled to have his own view or feeling, whether it is itself right or not. It can be left there; it can be no reason for your leaving the Asram.  Of course.


Sri Aurobindo: Whatever does not say ditto to the human mind cannot be divine. That is the usual maxim of judgment. “The Divine must do what I want and think as I think, judge as I judge and support my ideas, interests or feelings against others, otherwise how can he be Divine? For whatever I think, feel or want must be the.” At least that seems to be the attitude of most sadhaks in the Asram.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no necessity of the supermind for that. It is the inner consciousness that has to recognise — it is impossible for the outer mind to know it by its own reasonings.  Follow your faith — it is not likely to mislead you.


Sri Aurobindo: One thing. There is coming here in a day or two (perhaps tomorrow) a lady from Switzerland named Madame who is a friend or acquaintance of’s mother; she will put up in Boudie House, perhaps for a month, perhaps for a shorter or longer time. We know nothing of her and it is not yet sure whether her profession of seeking the spiritual Truth is really deep or genuine. Therefore till we are ﬁxed about her, Mother wishes that she should not be taken in intimately into the Asram life or told anything about inner matters of the Asram or spoken to about questions such as the divinity of the Mother or myself (for her we are simply spiritual Teachers) or shown freely messages or letters. A certain reserve is necessary until she has been thoroughly tested.


Sri Aurobindo: I write this in view of the possibility of your and other sadhaks meeting her and an acquaintance forming, so as to put you on your guard. It is not a case like or even the’s.    Do you really think it necessary or advisable to publish an exegesis of this kind? The last paragraphs are about things that concern only disciples or even only sadhaks of the Asram, it is not desirable to discuss them and publish to outsiders or the general public.


Sri Aurobindo: What you write about my books would be considered as extravagant by most readers. Also we do not usually encourage sadhaks of the Asram to write about us as divine, though one or another may have done it — there is a certain reticence in this matter which is desirable in writing for the general public.  I don’t know that the theory of satsanga can be taken so rigorously as that. Company always has an effect, but it may be less or more or even for the most part nulliﬁed by things in the person’s own consciousness or nature or by other atmospheres.   and the others were greatly inﬂuenced by company with me in the old days but it was more in the direction of mental and vital development than spiritually, for at that time I was doing my own sadhana and not putting out any spiritual inﬂuence on others


Sri Aurobindo: — only if anybody asked me, I told him what to do, the result of his effort was his own affair.  There was no error. Ordinary human minds, Europeans especially, are accustomed to regard thought as indispensable and as the highest thing — so they are alarmed at silence. V. V. S. Aiyar when he was here asked for Yoga. I told him how to make his mind silent and it became silent.


Sri Aurobindo: He immediately got frightened and said “I am becoming a fool, I can’t think”, — so I took what I had given away from him. That is how the average mind regards silence.  Certainly, it is your full right to believe that I am not infallible.  But I must also say that when you are convinced that you know the truth of things and can judge better than myself and are more eager for right and justice, that creates an attitude which makes it difﬁcult for me to help you or for you to receive my help. If you have no reliance on me as guide but rather on your own enlightened consciousness, then surely it is the dictates of your enlightened consciousness that you should follow.


Sri Aurobindo: As long as there is this, I am drawn back from intervening in any personal way in your life or sadhana. I hope that by following your inner light or by whatever guidance you will attain the realisation you desire.     I do not believe in human judgments because I have always found them fallible — also perhaps because I have myself been so blackened by human judgments that I do not care to be guided by them with regard to others.


Sri Aurobindo: All this however I write to explain my own point of view; I am not insisting on it as a law for others.  I have never been in the habit of insisting that everybody must think as I do — any more than I insist on everybody following me and my yoga.    I am to put everybody into leading strings and walk about with them — or should it be the rope in their nose? Supermen cannot be made like that — the long rope is needed.


Sri Aurobindo:   I never do that to anybody unless he gives me the occasion. A sadhak must become conscious and lay himself before the light, see and reject and change. It is not the right method for us to interfere and lecture and point out this and point out that. That is the schoolmaster method — it does not work in the spiritual change.


Sri Aurobindo: I do not know what kind of help you want from me. There are two kinds of help in the spiritual ﬁeld; the invisible help (which you can get for yourself if you know how to do it) and that which a spiritual guide gives to his disciples. The latter I give only to those whom I have accepted for my own path of Yoga.   The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciples or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you.


Sri Aurobindo: The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it — the vital brings in the suggestions of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difﬁculty that cannot be effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a selfcreated difﬁculty — a self-formed sanskara or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.  As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes usually only when the being is ready. You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or sanskara, and so the adverse force ﬁnds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the sanskara of doubt — to annul the force of its recurrence.


Sri Aurobindo: I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they came. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother’s) will be there. It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success — one’s own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.


Sri Aurobindo: I will do what is necessary to give the help you must receive.  To say you cannot would not be true, for you have received times without number and it has helped you to recover.    I am not aware of refusing help; but to receive the help is also necessary. When you are in this condition, you seem at once to shut yourself up against those from whom you seek help by a spirit of bitterness and anger.


Sri Aurobindo: That is not an attitude which makes it easy to receive or be conscious and it is not easy either for the help to be effective. All I can do is to send you the Force that if received would help you to change your condition; it is what I have always done. But it cannot act effectively — or at least not at once — if the doors are shut against it.    My dear sir, what has the omnipotence of the Divine to do with it?


Sri Aurobindo: In this world there are conditions for everything — if a man refuses to fulﬁl the conditions for Yoga, what is the use of appealing to the Divine’s omnipotence? He does not believe that the Divine is here. He regards us as Gurus. Yes, but he begins by disputing all my way of Yoga. He does not understand and does not care to understand my processes.


Sri Aurobindo: He has ideas of his own, does not want peace or equality or surrender or anything else, wants only Krishna and bhakti. He has read things in Ramakrishna and elsewhere as to how to do it, insists on following that. Rejects all suggestions I can make as unpracticable. Erects a sadhana of violent meditation, japa, prayer — for these are the traditional things, has no idea that there are conditions without which they cannot be effective. Meditates, japs, prays himself into pits of dullness and disappears.


Sri Aurobindo: Also tries in spite of my objections a wrestling tapasya which puts his vital into revolt.  Then by a stroke of good luck I succeed unexpectedly in making a sort of psychic opening. Decides to try surrender, puriﬁcation of the heart, rejection of ego, true humility etc. — tries a little of it and is really progressing. After two months ﬁnds that Krishna is not appearing — gets disgusted and drops the beastly thing.  And after all that he is always telling me “What an impotent Guru you are!


Sri Aurobindo: You are evidently able to do nothing for me.”  Evidently! That’s.  (1)  But after all, without putting forth eighteen visible arms (perhaps, since it is a symbol, by putting them forth internally) I hope to become one day so divine even in the body consciousness that I shall be able to satisfy everybody!


Sri Aurobindo: But you can’t hurry a transformation like that. I must ask for time.  Why do you always insist on cherishing the idea that I refuse all human love? I have surely written to you to the contrary. I don’t reject it, neither human nor vital love.


Sri Aurobindo: But I want that behind the vital there shall be the constant support of the psychic love (not all at once the divine), because that alone can prevent the movements which make you restless, obscured and miserable. In asking this I am surely not asking anything excessive or beyond your power.   I meant that even before I met you for the ﬁrst time, I knew of you and felt at once the contact of one with whom I had that relation which declares itself constantly through many lives and followed your career (all that I could hear about it) with a close sympathy and interest. It is a feeling which is never mistaken and gives the impression of one not only close to one but part of one’s existence. The Mother had not heard of you before you came here for the ﬁrst time, but even on that occasion on seeing you — though without any actual meeting — she had a sympathetic contact.


Sri Aurobindo: The relation that is so indicated always turns out to be that of those who have been together in the past and were predestined to join again (though the past circumstances may not be known) drawn together by old ties. It was the same inward recognition in you (apart even from the deepest spiritual connection) that brought you. If the outer consciousness does not yet fully realise, it is the crust always created by a new physical birth that prevents it. But the soul knows all the while.  Your poem is very beautiful.


Sri Aurobindo: I am aware of the terribly trying period that is upon you as upon us just now, but you must try to stand ﬁrmly until we may come through into the sunshine hereafter.    I have not time to write a long letter. I can write only this. You are not to leave Pondicherry by this morning’s train or at all.


Sri Aurobindo: You have to come and see the Mother at 9.30 and speak to her heart to heart. Both the Mother and myself have lavished much love and care on you and you are certainly not going to make a return like this — it is impossible. Do not believe all you hear or allow yourself to be driven off your balance by falsehoods of the kind that have been retailed to you. You do not belong to yourself and have not the right to do what you propose to do: you belong to the Divine and to myself and the Mother. I have cherished you like a friend and a son and have poured on you my force to develop your powers — until the time should come for you to make an equal development in the Yoga.


Sri Aurobindo: We claim the right to keep you as our own here with us. Throw away this despair — rise above the provocations of others — turn back to the Mother.  (2)  Well, why not? But it must be done in the divine way, not in the mortal.


Sri Aurobindo: Otherwise — Ummm! don’t you think there are enough people in that condition already here without the Asram doctor adding himself to the collection?  Unfortunately, experience seems to show that one must be divine oneself before one can bear the pressure of divine love.    I don’t say; it is the Gita that says it — or rather there are two separate slokas; one says that the Divine makes no difference, the other says that Arjuna is specially dear to him.  That does not stand.


Sri Aurobindo: Sometimes you might get nothing except perhaps an invisible stare; sometimes I might say “Now look here,, don’t make an immortal ass of yourself — is not the transformation wanted.” Still another time I might shout “Now! now! What the hell! what the blazes!” So it would depend on the occasion, not only on the person.  There is also St. John, the beloved disciple.  But he had love for them ( ).


Sri Aurobindo: Of course you don’t — nor does anybody. Is love a creation of the reason? or dealt out by this or that scale? Or does the Divine calculate “This fellow has so much of this or that quality. I will give him just so much more love than to that other”?


Sri Aurobindo: All that is rather beside the point. There is a universal divine love that is given equally to all — but also there is  with each man — it is not a question of more or less, though it may appear so. But even that less or more cannot be judged by human standards. The man who gets a blow may, if he has a certain relation, feel it as a divine caress; he may even say, erecting his own standard, “She loves me more than others, because to others she would not give that blow, to me she felt she could give it,” and it would be quite as good a standard as the kind treatment one — as standards go. But no standards apply.


Sri Aurobindo: For in each case it is according to the relation. The cause of the relation? It differs in each case. Cast your plummet into the deep and perhaps you shall ﬁnd it — or perhaps you will hit something that has nothing at all to do with it.  Yes, that is their aim — for it is their one short cut to success, to separate the sadhak from his soul.


Sri Aurobindo: No, the compassion does not wither with its symbol — ﬂowers are the moment’s representations of things that are in themselves eternal.  The outward touch is helpful; but the inward is still more helpful when one is accustomed to receive it with a certain concreteness — and the outward touch is not always fully possible, while the inward can be there all the time.    The outer guidance is meant only as an aid to the inner working, especially for the correction of any erroneous movement and sometimes in order to point out the right road. It is not meant except at a very early stage to satisfy mental questionings or to stimulate a mental activity.


Sri Aurobindo:   Of course not. If it were there, I would develop it and run the Dispensary myself. What would be the need of or or?  No intuition for stufﬁng infants with heterogeneous medicines.


Sri Aurobindo: What logic! Because Mother and myself are not engineers, therefore can’t develop the right intuition in engineering? or because neither I nor Mother are experts in Gujarati prosody, therefore  can’t develop the inspiration for his poems?   Oh Lord!


Sri Aurobindo: what a question! To guide internally is a million times easier than to guide externally. Let us suppose I want General Miaja to beat Franco’s fellows back at Guadalajara (please pronounce properly), I put the right force on him and he wakes up and, with his military knowledge and capacity, does the right thing and it’s done. But if I, having no latent or patent military genius or knowledge in me, write to him saying “do this, do that”, he won’t do it and I would not be able to do it either. It is operations of two quite different spheres of consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: You absolutely refuse to make the necessary distinction between the two ﬁelds and their processes and then you jumble the two together and call it logic.   Damn it, man! Intuition and revelation are inner things — they don’t belong to the outer mind.  Do you imagine that I tell you inwardly or outwardly what expressions to use in your Bengali poems when you are writing?


Sri Aurobindo: Still you write from an inspiration which I have set going.  I must point out to you that the value of your staying here does not depend on my writing to you or not, but on whether you have the true inner relation with us, whether you are able to receive anything from us and whether you can proﬁt spiritually by what you receive. All that depends in the last resort on you.    My touch is always there; but you must learn to feel it not only with the outward contact as a medium — a touch of the pen — but in its direct action on the mind and heart and vital and body.


Sri Aurobindo: There would then be very much less difﬁculty — or no difﬁculty at all.    Letters and answering of letters are not indispensable for the sadhana; the sadhak’s reception of silent help is much more important; the written word is only a minor means, and to expect answers because others have them is quite a wrong idea. The only necessity in this sadhana is to open yourself to the Divine Force; if one is open the necessary understanding or knowledge will come of itself through spiritual experience.


Sri Aurobindo: Out of one thousand mental questions and answers there are only one or two here and there that are really of any dynamic assistance — while a single inner response or a little growth of consciousness will do what those thousand questions and answers could not do. The Yoga does not proceed by but by inner inﬂuence. To state your condition, experiences etc. and open to the help is far more important than question-asking — especially the questions about why and how which your physical mind so persistently puts.  What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people do not really understand what I write — they put their own constructions on it. The inner help is quite different and there can be no comparison with it, for it recreates the substance of the consciousness, not the mind only.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is because the mind by itself cannot understand things that are beyond it. It constructs its own idea out of something that it catches or thinks it has caught and puts that down as the whole meaning of what has been written. Each mind puts its own ideas in place of the Truth.


Sri Aurobindo:  No, I don’t forget you if you don’t write. I think of you and concentrate for you every day.  It would be a great mistake for you to stop writing in the book; it is a means of direct and concrete contact with me and the help I can give you — apart from that which I always send you at all times. It is an adverse suggestion and inﬂuence which wants you to stop writing, because it wishes to cut the connection established through the book so that you might ﬁnd it more difﬁcult to feel my help coming to you.


Sri Aurobindo: It is absurd to break off because you are for the time being unsuccessful in keeping up an uninterrupted progress; the interruptions come, they have to be passed through and then the progress begins again. The difﬁculties will be got rid of, but they cannot be got rid of in a moment.   Keep the book and write in it whenever you can.


Sri Aurobindo:   There is no reason why you should stop writing letters — it is only one kind of letter that is in question and that is not a very good means of contact; you yourself felt the reaction was not favourable. I asked you to write because your need of unburdening the perilous matter in you was very great at the time and, although it did not relieve you at once, it kept me exactly informed of the turns of the ﬁght and helped me to put a certain pressure on the attacking forces at a critical moment.  But I do not believe any of these necessities now exists. It is rather a discouragement from within yourself of the source of these movements that is now the need; putting them into words would rather, as I have said, give them more body and substance.


Sri Aurobindo: It is an undoubted fact proved by hundreds of instances that for many the exact statement of their difﬁculties to us is the best and often, though not always, an immediate, even an instantaneous means of release. This has often been seen by sadhaks not only here, but far away, and not only for inner difﬁculties, but for illness and outer pressure of unfavourable circumstances. But for that a certain attitude is necessary — either a strong faith in the mind and vital or a habit of reception and response in the inner being. Where this habit has been established, I have seen it to be almost unfailingly effective, even when the faith was uncertain or the outer expression in the mind vague, ignorant or in its form mistaken or inaccurate. Moreover, this method succeeds most when the writer can write as a witness of his own movements and state them with an exact and almost impartial precision as a phenomenon of his nature or the movement of a force affecting him from which he seeks release.


Sri Aurobindo: On the other hand if in writing his vital gets seized by the thing he is writing of, and takes up the pen for him, — expressing and often supporting doubt, revolt, depression, despair, it becomes a very different matter. Even here sometimes the expression acts as a purge; but also the statement of the condition may lend energy to the attack at least for the moment and may seem to enhance and prolong it, exhausting it by its own violence perhaps for the time and so bringing in the end a relief, but at a heavy cost of upheaval and turmoil — and at the risk of the recurring decimal movement, because the release has come by temporary exhaustion of the attacking force, not by rejection and puriﬁcation through the intervention of the Divine Force with the unquestioning assent and support of the sadhak.  There has been a confused ﬁght, an intervention in a hurlyburly, not a clear alignment of forces — and the intervention of the helping force is not felt in the confusion and the whirl. This is what used to happen in your crises ; the vital in you was deeply affected and began supporting and expressing the reasonings of the attacking force — in place of a clear observation and expression of the difﬁculty by the vigilant mind laying the state of things in the light for the higher Light and Force to act upon it, there was a vehement statement of the case for the Opposition.


Sri Aurobindo: Many sadhaks (even “advanced”) had made a habit of this kind of expression of their difﬁculties and some still do it; they cannot even yet understand that it is not the way. At one time it was a sort of gospel in the Asram that this was the thing to be done, — I don’t know on what ground, for it was never part of my teaching about the Yoga, — but experience has shown that it does not work; it lands one in the recurring decimal notation, an unending round of struggle. It is quite different from the movement of self-opening that succeeds, (here too not in a moment, but still sensibly and progressively) and of which those are thinking who insist on everything being opened to the Guru so that the help may be more effectively there.    About the correspondence, I would be indeed a brainless fool if I made it the central aim of my life to con an absurd mountain of letters and leave all higher aims aside!


Sri Aurobindo: If I have given importance to the correspondence, it is because it was an effective instrument towards my central purpose — there are a large number of sadhaks whom it has helped to awake from lethargy and begin to tread the way of spiritual experience, others whom it has carried from a small round of experience to a ﬂood of realisations, some who have been absolutely hopeless for years who have undergone a conversion and entered from darkness into an opening of light. Others no doubt have not proﬁted or proﬁted only a little. Also there were some who wrote at random and wasted our time. But I think we can say that for the majority of those who wrote, there has been a real progress.  No doubt also it was not the correspondence in itself but the Force that was increasing in its pressure on the physical nature which was able to do all this, but a canalisation was needed, and this served the purpose


Sri Aurobindo: . There were many for whom it was not necessary, others for whom it was not suitable. If it had been a mere intellectual asking of questions it would have been useless, but the substantial part was about sadhana and experience and it was that that proved to be of great use.  But as time went on the correspondence began to grow too much and reached impossible proportions — yet it was difﬁcult to stop the ﬂood or to make distinctions which would not have been understood — so we have to seek a way out and as yet have only found palliatives. The easy way would be if those who have opened would now rely mainly on the inner communication with only a necessary word now and then — some have begun to do so.


Sri Aurobindo: I suppose in the end we shall be able to reduce the thing to manageable proportions.   You need not write every day but from time to time — ﬁrst, that there may be a direct control on your experiences and, secondly, a more precise help from us not only in general but in particulars.   It is because the idea came from a wrong source and was an attempt of the wrong forces to enter and disturb. It was not so much the idea in itself, but the idea as an expression of dissatisfaction and impatience. Immediately the hostiles took hold of it as a line of entry for all the old movements once associated with this kind of dissatisfaction and impatience.


Sri Aurobindo: Moreover these letters of yours and my answers have been a strong means of canalising our help and making it habitually available to you and effective — not by the words themselves alone but by the forces behind them.    Yes, power is put into them.   A useless activity of the vital mind. You should keep it quiet and receive with a silent mind waiting for light.


Sri Aurobindo: In the silent mind one can receive an answer even if I write nothing.      It is always well to write what goes on in you — but it need not be done every day.


Sri Aurobindo: The essential is to keep nothing concealed.     This I quite approve. You should certainly do so and stick to the rule.


Sri Aurobindo: I shall answer at least once a day, twice whenever I ﬁnd it necessary or an answer occurs to me.    Of course they do. It is a useless activity of the mind always trying to pass judgment on things because it does not understand them. If the sadhaks’ writing to me about their sadhana were useless would I spend half the day and more in reading and answering, putting aside much other work?


Sri Aurobindo: — if it were useless I would ask them to stop, not encourage them to write.     Either they have not that same push for the sadhana or they feel less need to lay open their difﬁculties because they have some line of positive experience which they conﬁdently follow.


Sri Aurobindo:   Yes, there are both these dangers. Those even who are not visited by serious difﬁculties, are exposed to the latter danger of remaining always on the same plane of experience. But again many do not write because they are not yet prepared for the pressure on them to progress rapidly which that would mean.


Sri Aurobindo:   It may be the inner mental, it may be the psychic.    Writing is needed by some, it is not needed or only a little by others. On the whole those who write get a more steady incentive to progress than if they did not write — some could hardly go on without this tangible support.


Sri Aurobindo: It seems to me that writing is very necessary for you still.    Questions are meant for getting light on the things that are going on in one. It is the statement of what is going on that helps to surrender.


Sri Aurobindo: No letter in the evening also, nor did Mother see you at the meditation. Whatever depression or other disturbing attack may come, do not absent yourself from pranam or evening meditation or stop writing. All attacks can be met and overcome, but it is by taking our help close and tangible that they can go quickly. I hope that you will not fail to write tomorrow (Sunday) and let us know all.


Sri Aurobindo: It was created in order that they may have some direct connection and help. It depends on how they use their opportunity.     If I have to answer fully all the points in your long letter, I fear it will take me until Doomsday — though that, according to some calculations, is not far off.


Sri Aurobindo: I will try to do it in a comparatively brief and unsatisfactory way, I have indeed written a good deal already. But as it may take me time to ﬁnish, I send an interim note.  I do not know why you should be suddenly bewildered by what I wrote — it is nothing new and we have been saying it since a whole eternity. I wrote this short answer in reference to a question which supposed that certain “perfections” must be demanded of the Divine Manifestation which seemed to me quite irrelevant to the reality. I put forward two propositions which appear to me indisputable unless we are to revise all spiritual knowledge in favour of modern European ideas about things.


Sri Aurobindo: First, the Divine Manifestation even when it manifests in mental and human ways has behind it a consciousness greater than the mind and not bound by the petty mental and moral conventions of this very ignorant human race — so that to impose these standards on the Divine is to try to do what is irrational and impossible. Secondly, this Divine Consciousness behind the apparent personality is concerned with only two things in a fundamental way — the Truth above and here below the Lila and the purpose of the incarnation or manifestation and it does what is necessary for that in the way its greater than human consciousness sees to be the necessary and intended way. I shall try if I can develop that when I write about it — perhaps I shall take your remarks about Rama and Krishna as the starting-point — but that I shall see hereafter.  But I do not understand how all that can prevent me from answering mental questions. On my own showing, if it is necessary for the divine purpose, it has to be done.


Sri Aurobindo: Ramakrishna himself whom you quote for the futility of asking questions answered thousands of questions, I believe. But the answers must be such as Ramakrishna gave and such as I try to give, answers from a higher spiritual experience, from a deeper source of knowledge and not lucubrations of the logical intellect trying to coordinate its ignorance; still less can they be a placing of the Divine or the Divine Truth before the judgment of the intellect to be condemned or acquitted by that authority — for the authority here has no sufﬁcient jurisdiction or competence.  This also I shall try to explain — it is what I have started to do in a longer letter.    I think it would need the Supermind itself to establish such a complete.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic can do much in that direction but on condition it has a complete control. Overmind and Intuition could do it on their own plane, but here they have to descend into the physical consciousness and that interferes with its immense obscurity in addition to the distortions of mind and vital.    It may be some indolence in the physical consciousness. It is always best to write at least thrice a week, even if there is nothing very special to say, so as to maintain the physical as well as the inner contact.


Sri Aurobindo:   It depends on how far the inner being is awake — otherwise one needs a physical There are some people who get the relief only after we read a letter, others get it immediately they write or before it has reached us or after it has reached but before we have read. Others get it simply by referring the whole matter to us mentally. Idiosyncracies!


Sri Aurobindo: I cannot undertake to be telling you all the time all that is not perfectly Yogic in the details of your action from morning to night. These are things to see to yourself. It is the movements of your sadhana that you place before me and it is these that I have to see whether they are the right thing or not.


Sri Aurobindo: The psychic can be connected with anything that gives room for love or bhakti.  You have explained it yourself — it is the psychic contact with what is in or behind the answers — what comes out into them from myself.     No need to cut down your letters — I am a quick reader (at least of English, provided the handwriting is not on my own model) — it is only writing that takes time.


Sri Aurobindo: So you must not mind short or at least comparatively short answers. It is quite the best to let the pen run and say everything.   I do not understand your point about raising up a new race by writing trivial letters. Of course not — nor by writing important letters either; even if I were to spend my time writing ﬁne poems it would not build up a new race. Each activity is important in its own place — an electron or a molecule or a grain may be small things in themselves, but in their place they are indispensable to the building up of a world, — it cannot be made up only of mountains and sunsets and streamings of the aurora borealis — though these have their place there.


Sri Aurobindo: All depends on the force behind these things and the purpose in their action — and that is known to the Cosmic Spirit which is at work, — and it works, I may add, not by the mind or according to human standards but by a greater consciousness which, starting from an electron, can build up a world and, using “a tangle of ganglia”, can make them the base here for the works of the Mind and Spirit in Matter, produce a Ramakrishna, or a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare. Is the life of a great poet, either, made up only of magniﬁcent and important things? How many “trivial” things had to be dealt with and done before there could be produced a or a! Again, according to your own reasoning, would not people be justiﬁed in mocking at your pother — so they would call it, I do not — about metre and scansion and how many ways a syllable can be read? Why, they might say, is [ ] wasting his time in trivial prosaic things like this when he might have been spending it in producing a beautiful lyric or ﬁne music?


Sri Aurobindo: But the worker knows and respects the material with which he must work and he knows why he is busy with “triﬂes” and small details and what is their place in the fullness of his labour.     If I said only things that human nature ﬁnds easy and natural, that would certainly be very comfortable for the disciples, but there would be no room for any spiritual aim or endeavour.  Spiritual aims and methods are not easy or natural (e.g. as quarrelling, sex-indulgence, greed, indolence, acquiescence in all imperfections are easy and natural) and if people become disciples, they are supposed to follow spiritual aims and endeavours, however hard and above ordinary nature, and not the things that are easy and natural.


Sri Aurobindo:   Not writing means trying to conceal. That is a suggestion of the vital.


Sri Aurobindo: The Mother is positively opposed to your suspending all correspondence with me, she thinks it is very dangerous at this stage and juncture of your sadhana. I am not, myself also, at ease about it. You have entered into a phase and adopted a method which may be very effective, — solitude, direct pressure for immediate realisation etc. but which can involve also serious risks. We consider it necessary at this time that you should keep me informed of what is going on in you and what you are doing.  A general support and protection may not be sufﬁcient at such a time or in such a passage.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not indispensable to write every day, but some report of these things is necessary so that I may intervene at once if that is needed or give an immediate help or an indication or direction when that is advisable. Since you have turned to me as your guru, and that quite apart from the question of identity with the Divine, and since you acknowledge your inability to go to the end unaided — very few have been able to do that, — it would be illogical and perilous to attempt to take the kingdom of heaven by violence alone and in the dark.  I am always after you with my force, even though you don’t feel it, but that may not be sufﬁcient at this time.  It depends on the circumstances. I have for a long time past eschewed politics entirely and I could not answer questions of a political character.


Sri Aurobindo: Apart from that I avoid usually racial and religious questions, especially if they are controversial, conﬁning myself to things of a spiritual or cultural character (literature, art etc.). There too I write almost entirely to disciples or seekers of the Yoga.  These are questions that anybody in the Asram could answer.  This and questions such as “what is meant by faithfulness”. It is much better if you get these things explained to you by someone in Gujarati so that you can understand and be able to apply your own understanding whenever needed.


Sri Aurobindo: If I have to answer philosophically, it would take ten pages for each question and you would understand nothing. Otherwise I have to answer offhand and such an answer also will be of no use to you. You can ask practical questions about your own experiences and I will try to answer.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not possible for me to write answers to such questions as they would have to be very long — the was written so that people might get the answers there. I can’t write them all over again.   It is better to write what is in one’s mind. Some people simply write about their experiences (dreams, visions, descents of force), but nothing precise about the movements of their mind and vital with the result that these remain pretty much as they were and there is no harmony between the inner and the outer being and as a result the inner also does not get its full or proper development.   The reason is quite clear from what you write in the next para.


Sri Aurobindo: There is something in the consciousness that wanted the letters and answers not simply for help in sadhana but as a personal satisfaction with egoistic elements in it — pride, jealousy of others (), desire to be equal with them, demand for special consideration etc. Also it wanted nice, pleasing and elaborate answers. All that is the usual wrong attitude of the vital which is the stumbling-block for so many sadhaks and prevents true psychic love from developing, replacing it by the vital kind full of demand, ego, jealousy, revolt etc. — and it has been the ruin of some. All that you had thrown out of the higher parts, and quieted it elsewhere, but it remained sticking somewhere and when correspondence was suspended, the hostile forces took advantage of the fact that you were not allowed to write every day as before to raise up these feelings and you did not repel them with sufﬁcient force to put an end to the attack. Hence they continue.


Sri Aurobindo:   An answer would mean writing several essays for which I have no time.  You [] can tell him that it would be a waste of time to think of these things now — it is only when experience comes that it would be possible to distinguish the different parts.  Quietness and calm cannot come all at once — always at the beginning thoughts come and the mind interferes with its activity. One has to persevere, to detach oneself from the mental activity till one feels oneself as separate from it.


Sri Aurobindo:   You can write whatever is in your mind — but these are outward things and you should not allow outward things to interfere with your inner opening.  I answer letters whenever I consider it necessary; I cannot bind myself to answer every letter I receive. If I did, I would have to be writing all the 24 hours without time for rest or meals or anything else!


Sri Aurobindo:   You can write whenever you like. But I told you at the beginning I cannot answer all letters — if I did that I would have to work all the 24 hours at nothing else.


Sri Aurobindo: Provided you do not expect me to answer always. People write to me not for getting mental information or answering questions but to lay before me their experiences and difﬁculties and get my help. When it is necessary, I answer questions, but I cannot be doing it all the time.


Sri Aurobindo: Continue to write letters giving your experiences and your condition from time to time. Do not however expect an answer always. When it is needed, I will answer.    If an answer is very necessary, I give it even if there is no time.


Sri Aurobindo: If there is time, I give an answer often even if it is not indispensable.    I told you at the beginning that I will not be able to answer everything you write. You are quite mistaken in thinking that I answer everything other people write in their books. Out of the ﬁfty or more books I get and the sixty or more letters I pass over more than half without any answer and even so it takes me 11 hours to deal with all that correspondence.


Sri Aurobindo: The other sadhaks do not stop writing on that account — they know that it brings help to them to write.   It is just the time when I am trying to diminish letters and books, so that the Mother has some time to rest at night and myself some time to do the real work instead of passing day and night in sending and answering correspondence. This is not the time to add fresh correspondence.  Moreover it is not worthwhile sending experiences merely to ask whether they are true. The truth has to be found out by their effect in liberating the consciousness and changing the nature, ridding you of ego etc.


Sri Aurobindo: Observe that in yourself and it will be sufﬁcient.     When what you write is correct, I say nothing — when it is your physical mind that brings in wrong ideas, I correct.


Sri Aurobindo:   You do not make the necessary distinctions. I said I don’t have any ﬁle of your immortal poems, I said nothing about your more mortal epistles.    Yes?


Sri Aurobindo: I was under the impression that I had decorated them with my indecipherable lotus handwriting.  You do not realise that I have to spend 12 hours over the ordinary correspondence, numerous reports, etc. I work 3 hours in the afternoon and the whole night up to 6 in the morning over this. So if I get a long letter with many questions I may not be able to answer it all at once. To get into such a disturbance over it and want to throw off the Yoga is quite unreasonable.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is true that the ﬂow of notebooks and letters is becoming so heavy that time is insufﬁcient to deal with them. Mother favoured the movement, but it is becoming excessive in proportions. The best thing would be for you to write each thing you have to say — then you can write every day — otherwise it is better to write from time to time, say twice a week. But the ﬁrst way would be best; if things are brieﬂy and clearly said, then there will be time.


Sri Aurobindo:   The books and letters are not going to be discontinued — but I shall have to take one day off in the week (Sunday). The volume of the correspondence is becoming enormous and it takes me all the night and a good part of the day — apart from the work done separately by the Mother who has also to work the greater part of the night in addition to her day’s work. It is this that makes the pranam later and later, for we do not ﬁnish till 7.30 or after. Also much work falls in arrears and piles up and many things that have their importance have had to be discontinued.


Sri Aurobindo: Some relief is necessary. If all the sadhaks were more discreet, it would be better. But this does not apply to you, for you keep always within the limits.


Sri Aurobindo: I have no time for anything just now — I have become a correspondence-reading and answering machine. I hope to make up when things are a little easier.    Absolutely no time tonight. I have been dealing with correspondence since 9.30 p.m. (to say nothing of the afternoon) and am likely to have to go on till 7.00 a.m. or longer.


Sri Aurobindo:   The idea of translating makes the hair stand on end!  It would be much easier for me to write 500 books. Perhaps I have done so — if all I have scribbled is to be taken into account against me.


Sri Aurobindo: But as most of it will not see the light of day — at least of public day, I may still escape establishing the record in book-production.   I have had to suppress all extra work for the last 2 or 3 days and there is a mountain of arrears awaiting me. If my eye is all right tomorrow, I shall see if anything can be done, but it is not very likely.


Sri Aurobindo: What am surprised at is that I have any eye left at all after the last two or three years of half-day and all night work. The difﬁculty for resting is that the sadhaks have begun pouring paper again without waiting for the withdrawal of the notice — not all of course, but many. And there is a stack of outside correspondence still unanswered! I am persuading my eye, but it is still red and sulky and reproachful. Revolted, what?


Sri Aurobindo: Thinks too much is imposed on it and no attention paid to its needs, desires, preferences etc. Will have to reason with it for a day or two longer.  [] It does not exist in this world — not even in the Himalayas — except of course for the inner being which can always be in absolute rest.   I have today ﬁfty letters each 2000 pages long — of course this is not a mathematically accurate statement, but it expresses the impression they make on me — so excuse brevity in my answer to your length.   It depends on the time I go to sleep.


Sri Aurobindo: If it is at 9 or 10 a.m. I may sleep beyond 12. As for poetry, I see it only at night. There is no time in the afternoon except for the letters.    Where is the reduction of correspondence?


Sri Aurobindo: I have to be occupied with correspondence from 8.0 to 12 p.m. (minus one hour), again after bath and meal from 2.30 to 7 a.m. All that apart from afternoon work. And still much is left undone. And you think I can write? You evidently believe in miracles!


Sri Aurobindo:    Your not seeing unfortunately does not dematerialise them.  Books are mainly for the Mother and there is sometimes a mountain, but letters galore. On some days only there is a lull and then I can do something.


Sri Aurobindo:   My dear sir, if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched and you would not talk about typescripts and hibernation. I have given up (for the present at least) the attempt to minimise the cataract of correspondence; I accept my fate like Ramana Maharshi with the plague of Prasads and admirers, but at least don’t add anguish to annihilation by talking about typescripts!


Sri Aurobindo: What is this transcendental rubbish?  That is not my real work. Who except the devil is going to give force to Germany? Do you think I am in league with Hitler and his howling tribe of Nazis?  Who gave you this wonderful programme?


Sri Aurobindo: Invented it all by your ingenious self? From 4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. afternoon correspondence, meal, newspapers. Evening correspondence from 7 or 7.30 to 9. From 9 to 10 p.m. concentration. 10 to 12 correspondence, 12 to 2.30 bath, meal, rest.


Sri Aurobindo: 2.30 to 5 or 6 a.m.  correspondence unless I am lucky. Where is the sufﬁcient time for concentration?


Sri Aurobindo: I fear my answers are scrappy as well as illegible, but this has been also a fell day (one letter 36 pages vernacular, 2 others each 8 pages of foolscap, others less in size (4, 2, 1 etc.) but ample in number — and this is no-correspondence period!) I have had to race against the old man Time.     Excuse me.


Sri Aurobindo: I don’t sleep on Sundays; I climb mountains of outside letters which have accumulated for want of weekday time.    Who says it is reduced? For a few days, it was — now it has increased to half again its former size and every morning I have to race to get it done in time — and don’t get it done in time.  Thousand things are accumulating; inner work delayed.


Sri Aurobindo:   Good Lord! then we shall all “have to be very careful”. Myself for instance am putting a terrible drain on the mind by answering tons of correspondence which can’t be good for my spine or for the other things either. But it gives me a great idea — why shouldn’t I take a medical stop-work from you and declare a six months’ holiday?


Sri Aurobindo: But I am afraid, if I did, I would misuse it in writing poetry myself, not to speak of trying to connect up with the supramental creators for the beneﬁt of an unprepared humanity. So it is no use.     Got your typescript, but so much overwhelmed by correspondence that no time to answer at any length — so kept.


Sri Aurobindo: This only to remove any apprehension of disappearance on the stairs.  Excuse semi-telegraphic style; when Time presses, verbs and pronouns disappear.     Apart from the eye-question, I have stopped because there are certain things I have positively to get done before I can take up any regular correspondence work again.


Sri Aurobindo: If I start now, I shall probably have to stop again soon for a long long time. Better get things ﬁnished now — that’s the idea. You must hold on somehow for the present.


Sri Aurobindo: It is time to put up a notice stopping the sending in of correspondence up to the end of August. The Mother must be free during this time at least and, for myself, there is no least chance of a book for the A.P.H. [] if some measure of that kind is not taken.  You have done well to write more brieﬂy. When you wrote ten times over the same thing, it wasted your time in writing and mine in reading. I had to glance through hastily and try to catch the meaning.


Sri Aurobindo: Now I can read carefully and see clearly what you mean — it has much more force like that.    In future when you have long letters to write, you should write not in pencil but in ink — as I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to read 10 or 12 pages so closely written in pencil in Gujarati; it has taken me 2 or 3 days to manage to read your letter. If it is only a short letter, then you can write in pencil, though ink is always the best. Also, you should write in separate letters about sadhana and about other ordinary matters to which you want an immediate answer — such as this question about and your studies.


Sri Aurobindo: You can read with since he is willing.   I don’t mind your correspondence. It is a relief. But when people write four letters a day in small hand closely running to some 10 pages without a gap anywhere and one gets 20 letters in the afternoon and forty at night (of course not all like that, but still!) it becomes a little too too.  I should like to say, in passing, that it is not always safe to apply practically to oneself what has been written for another.


Sri Aurobindo: Each sadhak is a case by himself and one cannot always or often take a mental rule and apply it rigidly to all who are practising the Yoga. What I wrote to was meant for and ﬁts his case; but supposing a sadhak with a different (coarse) vital nature unlike’s were in question, I might say to him something that might seem the very opposite, “Sit tight on your lower vital propensities, throw out your greed for food, — it is standing as a serious obstacle in your way: it would be better for you to be ascetic in your habits than vulgarly animal in this part as you are now.” To one who is not taking enough food or sleep and rest in the eagerness of his spirit, I might say “Eat more, sleep more, rest more; do not overstrain yourself or bring an ascetic spirit into your tapasya.” To another with the opposite excess I might speak a contrary language. Each sadhak has a nature or turn of nature of his own and the movement of the Yoga of two sadhaks, even when there are some resemblances between them, is seldom exactly the same.


Sri Aurobindo: Again in applying some truth that is laid down it is necessary to give it its precise meaning. It is quite true that “in our path the attitude is not one of forceful suppression,”; it is not coercion according to a mental rule or principle on an unpersuaded vital being. But that does not mean either that the vital has to go its own way and do according to its fancy. It is not coercion that is the way, but an inner change, in which the lower vital is led, enlightened and transformed by a higher consciousness which is detached from the objects of vital desire.  But in order to let this grow an attitude has to be taken in which a decreasing importance has to be attached to the satisfaction of the claims of the lower vital, a certain mastery,, being above any clamour of these things, limiting such things as food to their proper place.


Sri Aurobindo: The lower vital has its place, it is not to be crushed or killed, but it has to be changed, “caught hold of by both ends”, at the upper end a mastery and control, at the lower end a right use. The main thing is to get rid of attachment and desire; it is then that an entirely right use becomes possible. By what actual steps, in what order, through what processus this mastery of the lower vital shall come depends on the nature, the stress of development, the actual movement of the Yoga.  It is not the eating or the not eating of that is the important point — (actually when I gave what you call his permit, I was thinking of and not of anybody else). What is important is how that or any of these food matters affects you, what is your inner condition and how any such indulgence, cooking or eating, stands or does not stand in the way of its progress and change, what is best for you as a Yogic discipline.


Sri Aurobindo: One rule for you I can lay down, “Do not do, say or think anything which you would want to conceal from the Mother.”  And that answers the objections that rose within you — from your vital, is it not? — against bringing “these petty things


Sri Aurobindo: ” to the Mother’s notice . Why should you think that the Mother would be bothered by these things or regard them as petty? If  the life is to be Yoga, what is there that can be called petty or of no importance? Even if the Mother does not answer, to have brought any matter of your action and self-development before her in the right spirit means to have put it under her protection, in the light of the Truth, under the rays of the Power that is working for the transformation — for immediately those rays begin to play and to act on the thing brought to her notice.


Sri Aurobindo: Anything within that advises you not to do it when the spirit in you moves you to do it, may very well be a device of the vital to avoid the ray of the Light and the working of the Force. It may also be observed that if you open yourself to the Mother by putting the movements of any part of you under her observation, that of itself creates a relation, a personal closeness with her other than that which her general, silent or not directly invited action maintains with all the sadhaks.  All this, of course, if you feel ready for this openness, if the spirit moves you to lay what is in you bare before her. For it is then that it is fruitful — when it comes from within and is spontaneous and true.


Sri Aurobindo:   It is not a fact that all I write is meant equally for everybody.  That assumes that everybody is alike and there is no difference between sadhak and sadhak. If it were so everybody would advance alike and have the same experiences and take the same time to progress by the same steps and stages. It is not so at all.


Sri Aurobindo: In this case the general rules were laid down for one who had made no progress — but everything depends on how the Yoga comes to each person.  It is better not to show. Apart from the possibility of display it dissipates the force of the thing and brings in other currents from outside.    It is always a mistake to let another know what we have written privately to you on personal things, for it is likely, as you see, for it to be misinterpreted.


Sri Aurobindo: It is because we have had so much experience of that that we prefer that personal things should be kept private. Formerly we used to allow people to show if they wanted to, but we found that even the simplest and clearest things were liable to mental constructions and misconceptions, so we have become more prudent. But of course what you quote from what I said was in itself quite harmless.  It does not at all concern the sadhaks to know to whom the messages are addressed, and it is inadmissible to base upon them reﬂections against the character of the addressee or to assume that he has gone wrong in his sadhana. I write often to conﬁrm and encourage and not only to correct or reprove.