Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2013 7:08:51 GMT -5
To my fellow seekers/finders
I realise this an exceptionally long posting and i hope i do not break any rules with this.
I found this and copied it for your convenience.
look it up for yourselves in the book, a free download of S.A.´s major
works.
These are some quotes from ´´letters on himself and the ashram´´ excerpts from thousands of letters Sri Aurobindo wrote to his students.Here and there I highlighted some parts of particular interest to those following the Adwaita path.When he had his first experience of total mental silence, he was on a retreat with a yogi, interrupting a very busy political campain.He continued his campain in complete mental silence.
Aurobindo was the first one to write articles in a National Newspaper, demanding the British occupiers to leave.Gandhi appeared 15 to 20 years later, but S.A. was in India then as famous as Ghandi would be later. Ghandi took over many of S.A.´s political strategy, except the non-violence one.Aurobindo was a fighter.He took up yoga because he needed Power to kick out the British occupiers.He left politics because he realised his mission was a global one, not limited to the liberation of India.He was the first to add the concept of evolution to spirituality.He never wrote from intellectual speculation but from direct experience, and if he did speculate he would always say so.
The Realisation of January 1908
General Remarks
It is not that there is anything peculiar to you in these difficulties;
every sadhaka entering this Way has to get over similar impediments.
It took me four years of inner striving to find a real Way,
even though the Divine help was with me all the time, and even
then it seemed to come by an accident; and it took me ten more
years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to find
the Way—and that was because I had my past and the world’s
Past to assimilate and overpass before I could find and found
the future. 5 May 1932
*
I think you have made too much play with my phrase “an
accident” [in the preceding letter], ignoring the important qualification,
“it seemed to come by an accident”. After four years
of pr¯an. ¯ay¯ama and other practices on my own, with no other
result than an increased health and energy, some psycho-physical
phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power
of subtle sight (luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with
the waking eye, I had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this
juncture I was induced to meet a man without fame whom I did
not know, a bhakta with a limited mind but some experience
and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an
absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the
least understanding where he was leading me or where I was
myself going. The first result was a series of tremendously powerful
experiences and radical changes of consciousness which
he never intended—for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and
he was against Adwaita Vedanta—and which were quite contrary
to my own ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous
intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant forms
240 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman. The
final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to
hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute
surrender to its will, a principle or rather a seed-force to which I
kept unswervingly and increasingly till it led me through all the
mazes of an incalculable Yogic development bound by no single
rule or system or dogma or Shastra to where and what I am now
and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little
what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later,
he was alarmed, tried to undo what he had done and told me
that it was not the Divine but the Devil that had got hold of me.
Does not all that justify my phrase “it seemed to come by an
accident”? But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are
not like that of the human mind or according to our patterns
and it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for Him what
He shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we do.
If we admit the Divine at all, both true reason and bhakti seem
to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and surrender. I
do not see how without them there can be avyabhic¯ arin. ¯? bhakti
(one-pointed adoration). 7 May 1932
*
I am rather astonished at your findingWordsworth’s realisation,
however mental and incomplete, to be abstract and vague or
dictated by emotional effervescence.Wordsworth was hardly an
emotional or effervescent character. As for an abstract realisation,
it sounds like a round square; I have never had one myself
and find it difficult to believe in it. But certainly a realisation
in its beginning can be vague and nebulous or it can be less or
more vivid. Still,Wordsworth’s did not make that impression on
me and to him it certainly came as something positive, powerful
and determinative. He stayed there and went no farther, did not
get to the source, because more was hardly possible in his time
and surroundings, at least to a man of his mainly moral and
intellectual temper.
In a more deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation
is that which makes the thing realised more real, dynamic,
The Realisation of January 1908 241
intimately present to the consciousness than any physical thing
can be. Such a realisation of the personal Divine or of the impersonal
Brahman or of the Self does not usually come at the
beginning of a sadhana or in the first years or for many years.
It comes so to a very few; mine came fifteen years after my
first pre-Yogic experience in London and in the fifth year after I
started Yoga. That I consider extraordinarily quick, an express
train speed almost—though there may no doubt have been
several quicker achievements. But to expect and demand it so
soon and get fed up because it does not come and declare Yoga
impossible except for two or three in the ages would betoken in
the eyes of any experienced Yogi or sadhaka a rather rash and
abnormal impatience. Most would say that a slow development
is the best one can hope for in the first years and only when
the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the Divine
can the definitive experience come. To some rapid preparatory
experiences can come at a comparatively early stage, but even
they cannot escape the labour of the consciousness which will
make these experiences culminate in the realisation that is enduring
and complete. It is not a question of my liking or disliking
your demand or attitude. It is a matter of fact and truth and
experience, not of liking or disliking, two things which do not
usually sway me. It is the fact that people who are grateful and
cheerful and ready to go step by step, even by slow steps, if need
be, do actually march faster and more surely than those who
are impatient and in haste and at each step despair or murmur.
It is what I have always seen—there may be instances to the
contrary and I have no objection to your being one,—none at
all. I only say that if you could maintain “hope and fervour and
faith”, there would be a much bigger chance—that is all.
This is just a personal explanation—a long explanation but
which seemed to be called for by your enhancement of my glory
—and is dictated by a hope that after all in the long run an
accumulation of explanations may persuade you to prefer the
sunny path to the grey one. My faith again perhaps? But, sunny
path or grey one, the one thing wanted is that you should push
through and arrive. June 1934
242 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
Meeting with Vishnu Bhaskar Lele
It is not the human defects of the Guru that can stand in the way
when there is the psychic opening, confidence and surrender. The
Guru is the channel or the representative or the manifestation
of the Divine, according to the measure of his personality or his
attainment; but whatever he is, it is to the Divine that one opens
in opening to him, and if something is determined by the power
of the channel, more is determined by the inherent and intrinsic
attitude of the receiving consciousness, an element that comes
out in the surface mind as simple trust or direct unconditional
self-giving, and once that is there, the essential things can be
gained even from one who seems to others than the disciple an
inferior spiritual source and the rest will grow up in the sadhak
of itself by the grace of the Divine, even if the human being in
the Guru cannot give it. It is this that Krishnaprem appears to
have done perhaps from the first; but in most nowadays this
attitude seems to come with difficulty, after much hesitation
and delay and trouble. In my own case I owe the first decisive
turn of my inner life to one who was infinitely inferior to me
in intellect, education and capacity and by no means spiritually
perfect or supreme; but, having seen a Power behind him and
decided to turn there for help, I gave myself entirely into his
hands and followed with an automatic passivity the guidance.
He himself was astonished and said to others that he had never
met anyone before who could surrender himself so absolutely
and without reserve or question to the guidance of the helper.
The result was a series of transmuting experiences of such a
radical character that he was unable to follow and had to tell
me to give myself up in future to the Guide within with the same
completeness of surrender as I had shown to the human channel.
I give this example to show how these things work; it is not in
the calculated way the human reason wants to lay down, but by
a more mysterious and greater law. 23 March 1932
*
To reject doubts means control of one’s thoughts—very cerThe
Realisation of January 1908 243
tainly so. But the control of one’s thoughts is as necessary as
the control of one’s vital desires and passions or the control of
the movements of one’s body—for the Yoga, and not for the
Yoga only. One cannot be a fully developed mental being even,
if one has not control of the thoughts, is not their observer,
judge, master,—the mental Purusha, manomaya purus.a, s ¯aks.¯?,
anumant¯a, ¯?´svara. It is no more proper for the mental being to
be the tennis ball of unruly and uncontrollable thoughts than
to be a rudderless ship in the storm of the desires and passions
or a slave of either the inertia or the impulses of the body. I
know it is more difficult because man being primarily a creature
of mental Prakriti identifies himself with the movements of his
mind and cannot at once dissociate himself and stand free from
the swirl and eddies of the mind whirlpool. It is comparatively
easy for him to put a control on his body, at least a certain
part of its movements: it is less easy but still very possible after
a struggle to put a mental control on his vital impulsions and
desires; but to sit, like the Tantrik Yogi on the river, above the
whirlpool of his thoughts is less facile. Nevertheless it can be
done; all developed mental men, those who get beyond the
average, have in one way or other or at least at certain times
and for certain purposes to separate the two parts of the mind,
the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet
masterful part which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing
them, judging, rejecting, eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections
and changes, the Master in the House of Mind, capable of
self-empire, sv¯ ar ¯ ajya.
The Yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master there,
but even while in mind in a way, he gets out of it, as it were,
and stands above or quite back from it and free. For him the
image of the factory of thoughts is no longer quite valid; for he
sees that thoughts come from outside, from the universal Mind
or universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes
unformed and then they are given shape somewhere in us. The
principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance
or refusal to these thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle
physical energy waves) or this giving a personal-mental form to
244 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
thought-stuff (or vital movements) from the environing Nature-
Force. It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me this.
“Sit in meditation,” he said, “but do not think, look only at
your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it; before they
can enter throw them away from you till your mind is capable
of entire silence.” I had never heard before of thoughts coming
visibly into the mind from outside, but I did not think of
either questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply sat down
and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless
air on a high mountain summit and then I saw a thought and
then another thought coming in a concrete way from outside;
I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of
the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in
principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence,
a universal Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal
thought or a labourer in a thought-factory, but a receiver of
knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free too
to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thoughtempire.
I mention this only to emphasise that the possibilities of the
mental being are not limited and that it can be the free Witness
and Master in its own house. It is not to say that everybody can
do it in the way I did and with the same rapidity of the decisive
movement (for of course the later fullest development of this
new untrammelled mental Power took time, many years); but
a progressive freedom and mastery over one’s mind is perfectly
within the possibilities of anyone who has the faith and will to
undertake it. 5 August 1932
*
Literature and art are or can be first introductions to the inner
being—the inner mind and vital; for it is from there that they
come. And if one writes poems of bhakti, poems of divine seeking
etc., or creates music of that kind, it means that there is a
bhakta or seeker inside who is supporting himself by that selfexpression.
There is also the point of view behind Lele’s answer
to me when I told him that I wanted to do Yoga but for work,
The Realisation of January 1908 245
for action, not for Sannyasa and Nirvana,—but after years of
spiritual effort I had failed to find the way and it was for that I
had asked to meet him. His first answer was, “It should be easy
for you as you are a poet.” 18 November 1936
*
I don’t understand why Lele told you that because you are a
poet, sadhana will be easy for you through poetry, or why you
quote it either. Poetry is itself such a hard job and sadhana
through poetry—well, the less said the better! Or perhaps he
saw within your soul the Sri Aurobindo of future Supramental
glory?
Because I told him I wanted to do Yoga in order to get a new
inner Yogic consciousness for life and action, not for leaving life.
So he said that. A poet writes from an inner source, not from the
external mind, he is moved by inspiration to write, i.e. he writes
what a greater Power writes through him. So the Yogi Karmachari
has to act from an inner source, to derive his thoughts and
movements from that, to be inspired and impelled by a greater
Power which acts through him. He never said that sadhana will
be easy for me through poetry. Where is the “through poetry”
phrase? Poetry can be done as a part of sadhana and help the
sadhana—but sadhana “through” poetry is a quite different
matter. 23 May 1938
Mental Silence
To get rid of the random thoughts of the surface physical mind
is not easy. It is sometimes done by a sudden miracle as in my
own case, but that is rare. Some get it done by a slow process
of concentration, but that may take a very long time. It is easier
to have a quiet mind with things that come in passing on the
surface, as people pass in the street, and one is free to attend
to them or not—that is to say, there develops a sort of double
mind, one inner silent and concentrated when it pleases to be so,
a quiet witness when it chooses to see thoughts and things,—the
other meant for surface dynamism. It is probable in your case
246 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
that this will come as soon as these descents of peace, intensity
or Ananda get strong enough to occupy the whole system.
16 November 1932
*
I find nothing either to add or to object to in Prof. Sorley’s comment
on the still, bright and clear mind; it adequately indicates
the process by which the mind makes itself ready for the reflection
of the higher Truth in its undisturbed surface or substance.
But one thing perhaps needs to be kept in view—that this pure
stillness of the mind is indeed always the required condition, the
desideratum, but for bringing it about there are more ways than
one. It is not, for instance, only by an effort of the mind itself
to get clear of all intrusive emotion or passion, to quiet its own
characteristic vibrations, to resist the obscuring fumes of a physical
inertia which brings about a sleep or a torpor of the mind
instead of its wakeful silence, that the thing can be done. This is
indeed an ordinary process of the Yogic path of knowledge; but
the same end can be brought about or automatically happen by
other processes—for instance, by the descent from above of a
great spiritual stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart,
on the life stimuli, on the physical reflexes. A sudden descent
of this kind or a series of descents accumulative in force and
efficacy is a well-known phenomenon of spiritual experience.
Or again one may start a mental process of one kind or another
for the purpose which would normally mean a long labour and
yet may pull down or be seized midway, or even at the outset, by
an overmind influx, a rapid intervention or manifestation of the
higher Silence, with an effect sudden, instantaneous, out of all
proportion to the means used at the beginning. One commences
with a method, but the work is taken up by a Grace from above,
by a response from That to which one aspires or by an irruption
of the infinitudes of the Spirit. It was in this last way that I myself
came by the mind’s absolute silence, unimaginable to me before
I had the actual experience. circa 1934
The Realisation of January 1908 247
Nirvana and the Brahman
I have never said that things (in life) are harmonious now—on
the contrary, with the human consciousness as it is harmony is
impossible. It is always what I have told you, that the human
consciousness is defective and simply impossible—and that is
why I strive for a higher consciousness to come and set right
the disturbed balance. I am glad you are getting converted to
silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses—in my case
it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible
all the rest of the sadhana; but as to the positive way to get
these things, I don’t know if your mind is quite ready to proceed
with it. There are in fact several ways. My own way was by
rejection of thought. “Sit down,” I was told, “look and you
will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before
they enter, fling them back.” I sat down and looked and saw
to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely
the thought approaching as if to enter through or above the
head and was able to push it back concretely before it came
inside.
In three days—really in one—my mind became full of an
eternal silence—it is still there. But that I don’t know how many
people can do. One (not a disciple—I had no disciples in those
days) asked me how to do Yoga. I said: “Make your mind quiet
first.” He did and his mind became quite silent and empty. Then
he rushed to me saying: “My brain is empty of thoughts, I cannot
think. I am becoming an idiot.” He did not pause to look and
see where these thoughts he uttered were coming from! Nor did
he realise that one who is already an idiot cannot become one.
Anyhow I was not patient in those days and I dropped him and
let him lose his miraculously achieved silence.
The usual way, the easiest if one can manage it at all, is to
call down the silence from above you into the brain, mind and
body.
*
248 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
About Nirvana:
When I wrote in the Arya, I was setting forth an overmind
view of things to the mind and putting it in mental terms, that
was why I had sometimes to use logic. For in such a work
—mediating between the intellect and the supra-intellectual—
logic has a place, though it cannot have the chief place it occupies
in purely mental philosophies. The Mayavadin himself labours
to establish his point of view or his experience by a rigorous
logical reasoning. Only, when it comes to an explanation of
Maya he, like the scientist dealing with Nature, can do no more
than arrange and organise his ideas of the process of this universal
mystification; he cannot explain how or why his illusionary
mystifying Maya came into existence. He can only say, “Well,
but it is there.”
Of course, it is there. But the question is, first, “What is
it? is it really an illusionary Power and nothing else, or is the
Mayavadin’s idea of it a mistaken first view, a mental imperfect
reading, even perhaps itself an illusion?” And next, “Is illusion
the sole or the highest Power which the Divine Consciousness
or Superconsciousness possesses?” The Absolute is an absolute
Truth free from Maya, otherwise liberation would not be possible.
Has then the supreme and absolute Truth no other active
Power than a power of falsehood and with it, no doubt, for
the two go together, a power of dissolving or disowning the
falsehood,—which is yet there for ever? I suggested that this
sounded a little queer. But queer or not, if it is so, it is so—for
as you point out, the Ineffable cannot be subjected to the laws
of logic.
But who is to decide whether it is so? You will say, those
who get there. But get where? To the Perfect and the Highest,
pu¯ rn. am? param. Is the Mayavadin’s featureless Brahman that
Perfect, that Complete—is it the very Highest? Is there not or
can there not be a higher than that highest, par¯atparam? That
is not a question of logic, it is a question of spiritual fact, of a
supreme and complete experience. The solution of the matter
must rest not upon logic, but upon a growing, ever heightening,
widening spiritual experience—an experience which must
The Realisation of January 1908 249
of course include or have passed through that of Nirvana and
Maya, otherwise it would not be complete and would have no
decisive value.
Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own
Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without
thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was
no ego, no real world—only when one looked through the
immobile senses, something perceived or bore upon its sheer silence
a world of empty forms, materialised shadowswithout true
substance. There was no One or many even, only just absolutely
That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable,
absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental
realisation nor something glimpsed somewhere above,—no abstraction—
it was positive, the only positive reality—although
not a spatial physical world, pervading, occupying or rather
flooding and drowning this semblance of a physical world, leaving
no room or space for any reality but itself, allowing nothing
else to seem at all actual, positive or substantial. I cannot say
there was anything exhilarating or rapturous in the experience,
as it then came to me,—the ineffable Ananda I had years afterwards,—
but what it brought was an inexpressible Peace, a
stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. I lived in
that Nirvana day and night before it began to admit other things
into itself or modify itself at all, and the inner heart of experience,
a constant memory of it and its power to return remained until in
the end it began to disappear into a greater Superconsciousness
from above. Butmeanwhile realisation added itself to realisation
and fused itself with this original experience. At an early stage
the aspect of an illusionary world gave place to one in which
illusion1 is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense
Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it
and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had
seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. And this was
1 In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and
unreal on the consciousness, but a misinterpretation by the conscious mind and sense
and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence.
250 Letters on Himself and the Ashram
no reimprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from
supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening
and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not
the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained
always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous
incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.
Now that is the whole trouble in my approach to Mayavada.
Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be
the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete
thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating
finale. It came unasked, unsought for, though quite welcome. I
had no least idea about it before, no aspiration towards it, in fact
my aspiration was towards just the opposite, spiritual power to
help the world and do my work in it, yet it came—without even
a “May I come in” or a “By your leave”. It just happened and
settled in as if for all eternity or as if it had been really there
always. And then it slowly grew into something not less but
greater than its first self! How then could I accept Mayavada or
persuade myself to pit against the Truth imposed on me from
above the logic of Shankara?
But I do not insist on everybody passing through my experience
or following the Truth that is its consequence. I have
no objection to anybody accepting Mayavada as his soul’s truth
or his mind’s truth or their way out of the cosmic difficulty. I
object to it only if somebody tries to push it down my throat
or the world’s throat as the sole possible, satisfying and allcomprehensive
explanation of things. For it is not that at all.
There are many other possible explanations; it is not at all satisfactory,
for in the end it explains nothing; and it is—and must
be unless it departs from its own logic—all-exclusive, not in the
least all-comprehensive. But that does not matter. A theory may
be wrong or at least one-sided and imperfect and yet extremely
practical and useful. That has been amply shown by the history
of science. In fact a theory whether philosophical or scientific is
nothing else than a support for the mind, a practical device to
help it to deal with its object, a staff to uphold it and make it
walk more confidently and get along on its difficult journey. The
The Realisation of January 1908 251
very exclusiveness and one-sidedness of the Mayavada make it
a strong staff or a forceful stimulus for a spiritual endeavour
which means to be one-sided, radical and exclusive. It supports
the effort of the Mind to get away from itself and from Life
by a short cut into superconscience. Or rather it is the Purusha
in Mind that wants to get away from the limitations of Mind
and Life into the superconscient Infinite. Theoretically, the most
radical way for that is for the mind to deny all its perceptions
and all the preoccupations of the vital and see and treat them as
illusions. Practically, when the mind draws back from itself, it
enters easily into a relationless peace in which nothing matters—
for in its absoluteness there are no mental or vital values—and
from which the mind can rapidly move towards that great short
cut to the Superconscient, mindless trance, sus.upti. In proportion
to the thoroughness of that movement all the perceptions
it had once accepted become unreal to it—illusion, Maya. It is
on its road towards immergence.
Mayavada, therefore, with its sole stress on Nirvana, quite
apart from its defects as a mental theory of things, serves a great
spiritual end and, as a path, can lead very high and far. Even, if
the Mind were the last word and there were nothing beyond it
except the pure Spirit, I would not be averse to accepting it as
the only way out. For what the mind with its perceptions and
the vital with its desires have made of life in this world, is a very
bad mess, and if there were nothing better to be hoped for, the
shortest cut to an exit would be the best. But my experience is
that there is something beyond Mind; Mind is not the last word
here of the Spirit. Mind is an ignorance-consciousness and its
perceptions cannot be anything else than either false, mixed or
imperfect—even when “true”, a partial reflection of the Truth
and not the very body of Truth herself. But there is a Truth-
Consciousness, not static only and self-introspective, but also
dynamic and creative, and I prefer to get at that and see what
it says about things and can do rather than take the short cut
away from things offered as its own end by the Ignorance.
