Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 284

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

October 29, 1932

Khitish Sen’s sonnet is a good poem – he should write more Bengali poetry. As for the substance it expresses not so much a sign of the sceptic as the attitude of the vital man to whom unmixed happiness, joy, unity, a life without suffering, strife and unrest would seem quite unsatisfying; he complains of pain and sorrow when they come and rages against God and Fate; but if they are not there with the excited joys that are their accompaniments, he feels life dull and neutral and pale – excitement is his only stimulus enabling him to live, as the drunkard cannot do without wine.

It is not possible to answer immediately your long letter. But I do not find your argument from numbers very convincing. Your 999,999 people would also prefer a jazz and turn away from Beethoven or only hear him as a duty and would feel happy in a theatre dance-tune and cold and dull to the music of Tansen. They would also prefer (even many who pretend otherwise) a catching theatre song to one of Dwijendralal’s songs and probably Satyen Dutt’s verses to yours – which proves to the hilt that Beethoven, Tansen, Dwijendralal and yourself are pale distant highbrow things, not the real, true, human, joy-giving stuff. In the case of Yogic or divine peace, which is not something neutral, but intense, overwhelming and positive (the neutral quiet is only a first or preparatory stage), there is this further disadvantage that your millions minus one have never known Yogic peace, and what then is the value of their turning away from what they never experienced and could not possibly understand even if it were described to them? The man of the world knows only vital excitement and pleasure or what he can get of it, but does not know the Yogic peace and joy and cannot compare; but the Yogin has known both and can compare. I have never heard of a Yogin who got the peace of God and turned away from it as something poor, neutral and pallid, rushing back to cakes and ale. If satisfaction in the experience is to be the test, Yogic peace wins by a hundred lengths. However, you write as if I said peace was the one and only thing to be had by Yoga. I said it was a basis, the only possible secure basis for a fulfilled intensity of bhakti and Ananda. This is all by the way only.