Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Yoga
3. Religion, Morality, Idealism and Yoga
Fragment ID: 206
See letter itself (letter ID: 438)
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
March 24, 1934
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As for your question – Tagore1, of course, belonged to an age which had faith in its ideas and whose very denials were creative affirmations. That makes an immense difference. Your strictures on his later development may or may not be correct, but this mixture even was the note of the day and it expressed a tangible hope of a fusion into something new and true – therefore it could create. Now all that idealism4 has been smashed to pieces by the immense adverse event and everybody is busy exposing its weaknesses – but nobody knows what to put in its place. A mixture of scepticism and slogans, “Heil-Hitler” and the Fascist salute and the Five-Year-Plan and the beating of everybody into one amorphous shape, a disabused denial of all ideals on one side and on the other a blind “shut-my-eyes and shut-everybody’s-eyes” plunge into the bog in the hope of finding some firm foundation there, will not carry us very far. And what else is there? Until new spiritual values are discovered, no great enduring creation is possible.
1 SABCL, volume 26; CWSA, volumes 27, 28: Tagore
2 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2: may be correct, but this mixture even was the note
Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh: too, was the note
3 Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh; Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2; SABCL, volume 26: fusion
4 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2: that
5 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2: and its weaknesses exposed
6 Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh; Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2; SABCL, volume 26; CWSA, volumes 27, 28: and Five-Year Plan
7 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2: something there
8 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- Vol. 2: big
Current publication:
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. On Himself // SABCL.- Volume 26. (≈ 35 vol. of CWSA)