Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Yoga

1. The Supramental Evolution

Fragment ID: 43

See letter itself (letter ID: 1380)

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

July 20, 1935

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I suppose you have not read my Riddle of this World¹, but it is a similar solution I put there. X’s way of putting it is a trifle too “Vedantic-Theistic” – in my view it is a transaction between the One and the Many. In the beginning it was you (not the human you who is now complaining but the central being) which accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance; sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its original transcendence but under conditions for which the plunge into the Inconscience was necessary. It is fundamentally a cosmic problem and can be understood only from the cosmic consciousness. If you want a solution which will be agreeable to the human mind and feelings, I am afraid there is none. No doubt if human beings had made the universe, they would have done much better; but they were not there to be consulted when they were made. Only your central being was there and that was much nearer in its temerarious foolhardiness to Vivekananda’s or X’s than to the repining prudence of your murmuring and trembling human mentality of the present moment – otherwise it would never have come down into the adventure. Or perhaps it did not realise what it was in for? It is the same with the wallowers under their cross. Even now they wallow because something in them likes the wallowing and bear the cross because something in them chooses to suffer. So? –

¹ This was the title given to the preceding long letter when it was first published in November 1933, along with some other letters, in a book bearing the same title.

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² Nirodbaran. Correspondence.- Volume 1: which

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³ CWSA, volume 28: bears

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Current publication:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.

Other publications:

[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo; Nirodbaran Talukdar. Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: The Complete Set [in 2 volumes].- 2nd ed., 3d inpression.- Volume 1.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2001.- 602 p.

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.