Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 4
First about Janak: I expressed no disapproval of your letter to Janak; what I thought and said was that it might be better not to send the letter you have written, the one containing the reference to Krishnaprem, and I said that because I thought it would not have the desired effect and might, if she took it in the wrong way, have a result of some discouragement and painful perplexity upon her. Fortunately, she took it well and your later letter was such, even if it had been otherwise, as to put things right. I do not see any chance for your persuading her not to regard you as her guru. The idea and the feeling about it are evidently rooted in her mind and heart and to pull it out would not only be impossible for her, but too painful for her to accept it at all. She feels that it is you who have brought her to us and helped and guided her; us she looks at as your Gurus and that has been her door of approach to us. It seems to me that it would be dangerous to give too rude a shock to her reliance on you and that it is not really necessary; you have helped her greatly and she needs the continuance of your helping influence. You can, of course, insist on disclaiming the position of a Guru and tell her to turn more to us, but I think the insistence need not be too peremptory and absolute. After all, you can help and have helped her and others and drawn them to the spiritual path and you have made many turn towards us who of their notion would not have thought of doing so. There is a power in you to draw others like that and it seems to me that not only Nature but the Divine has put it in you for his service and it is quite right that you should use it for him as you have done. There can be no harm in using his gifts for him when it is done in the right spirit.
It is good that you have asked her to come here away from that welter of ill-treatment and misfortunes, but this combination of maladies has an alarming appearance especially as there is tendency in her to desire or look forward to death as a release; also the diagnosis of thrombosis by your uncle is disquieting, for we know from the experience of Kshitish how the danger of it can hang around even after a temporary cure. If she goes to Calcutta, it is to be hoped that your uncle will be able to remove the danger.
But the circumstances do not seem to be favourable to her chances of getting away from her undesirable surroundings especially as her husband has taken this attitude and appropriated her money and jewels and seems determined to prevent her from any escape from his hold. There is also her own weakness and her sentimental attachment to him as well as to her children and the sense of obligation to them which she is indulging that are helping him in his purpose. These are old vital samskaras which conflict with her determination to lead the spiritual life or to come here for at least the necessary time; but these contradictions are always cropping up in the sadhak’s endeavour and they can be overcome. I will say nothing here about her spiritual experience, as that is not immediately urgent; I will answer your question about it later on in another letter.
I wrote the above before I quite realised the violence of the attack or depression from which you are suffering, otherwise I would not have written it in so easy and confident a vein; but what I have written there about you and your work for us was the expression of the feeling I have always had about it, so I need change nothing. I still do not understand why you should think that Mother and myself do not appreciate the hard work you have done for us in Bengal and the help you have given us at a moment when we very badly needed it and still need whatever help you can get at this difficult and critical juncture. It helped us to meet to some extent a very serious emergency and though that emergency still remains and is still perilous, it gave a relief in this serious trouble. I still do not understand, apart from what you say about some gesture of the Mother – I shall refer to that afterwards – why you should think that we not only did not appreciate but disregarded and disdained all you have done for us at the expense of your ease and health during your absence. I have never had that attitude towards you and your work for me and could not possibly have it; my personal feeling towards you would forbid it under any circumstances and those feelings, as you ought to know, have always been and will always be the same. As for the Mother, she too has fully appreciated your work and, whatever your depression may persuade you to think for the moment, she is entirely guiltless of any disregard for it or coldness and indifference towards you.
You also seem to have misunderstood something I said to Nirod about pressure and difficulties as indicating some unwillingness on my part to write to you; nothing was farther from my mind, I said that only to explain my remissness in writing to you before. I was not referring to the pressure caused by the necessity of hastening the publication of my yet unpublished books or those that need to be republished – there is much work of that kind pressing to be done and much else not pressing but still needing to be done while there is still time such as the Future Poetry or other works like the first part of Savitri which has to be revised for early publication in book form. All that could have nothing to do with it – I was referring only to personal difficulties of my own and the difficulties concerning the Ashram which I had to face and which owing to their gravity and even danger had too much preoccupied my mind. That I have mentioned as an explanation of my earlier remissness and not as an excuse – there could be no valid excuse. Certainly, that had nothing to do with your present trouble and the letter – the present one – which I had sent word through Nirod that I was starting to write yesterday.
It is a great pity that there should have been, especially at this time, after the good work you have done and the progress made in your consciousness, this return of the old vital upset and nervous depression to a degree which was not, I think, fully justified by the circumstances in which it arose and that it should have been pushed, largely by the wrong suggestions thrown on you by others, to an excessive violence of dejection or despair. I believe Krishnaprem’s estimate of your position in Yoga to be fairly correct: the deficiency of trust is in itself something minor and belongs to a small part of yourself and, in fact, almost wholly to the physical mind and a little part of the lower vital ego. It is no doubt, helped by the inability to feel directly that the Force working on you or in you is mine although your higher mind and vital have more than once admitted it and felt that it could be nothing else. But the response has been there and the effects of the Force, though these are strongly interrupted and may seem to be annulled for a time when these periods of darkness and upheaval take place and may be diminished when much restlessness or nervous troubles occur. It would need only some opening of the physical mind to remedy this defect of the consciousness; for the lower vital ego has lost much of its insistence by the progress of your consciousness and the strong efforts you have made to abate and get rid of its reactions.
If once an experience at that time came, it might be sufficient to remove the obstacle and you will then become able to feel directly and palpably the working of the Consciousness and the Force and recognise it as mine. Most of your difficulties would then disappear and the way would lie open to the fullness of your sadhana and the realisation of the Divine, the presence of Krishna would be possible – I would even say that it would become an early certitude. At the same time a diminution of the hold of the physical mind and its too absolute trust in the infallibility or correctness of its own impressions, reasonings and sensational reactions would diminish and a larger consciousness take its place. The ground would be largely cut away which makes these upsets recur. I understand that the very recurrence caused, I suppose, largely by the failure of your efforts at meditation and concentration to bring the results you want is principally responsible for this kind of upset and the mistaken impression that you cannot do the Yoga. It is not really so; for the growth in bhakti and your power to awake bhakti in others and the earnestness of your works of service and self-dedication to service are sufficient evidence of fitness – not to speak of certain experiences in the past which were clear proof of the capacity for what can be called occult spiritual experience. These things of themselves would in time bring about the necessary growth of the inner consciousness behind the surface which makes for successful concentration and meditation and renders all kinds of inner experience possible.
Before coming to the main point I may as well clear out one matter not unconnected with it, my articles or messages, as they have been called, in the Bulletin; for their appearance there and their contents seem to have caused some trouble, perplexity or misunderstanding in your mind and especially my speculations about the Divine Body. I wrote the first of these articles to explain about how or why sport came to be included in the programme of the Ashram activities and I think I made it clear, as I went on, that sport was not sadhana, that it belonged to what I called the lower end of things, but that it might be used not merely for amusement or recreation or the maintenance of health, but for a greater efficiency of the body and for the development of certain qualities and capacities not of the body only but of morale and discipline and the stimulation of mental energies: but I pointed out also that these could be and were developed by other means and that there were limitations to this utility.
In fact, it is only by sadhana that one could go beyond the limits natural to the lower end means. I think there was little room for misunderstanding here but the Mother had asked me to write on other subjects not connected in any way with sport and had suggested some subjects such as the possibilities of the evolution of a divine body; so I wrote on that subject and went on to speak of the Supermind and Truth-Consciousness which had obviously not even the remotest connection with sport. The object was to bring in something higher and more interesting than a mere record of gymnasium events but which might appeal to some of the readers or even to wider circles. In speaking of the Divine Body I entered into some far off speculations about what might become possible in the future evolution of it by means of a spiritual force, but obviously the possibilities could not be anything near or immediate and I said clearly enough that we shall have to begin at the beginning and not attempt anything out of the way. Perhaps I should have insisted more on present limitations but that I should now make clear. For the immediate object of my endeavours is to establish spiritual life on earth and for that the first necessity must always be to realise the Divine; only then can life be spiritualised or what I have called the Life Divine be made possible. The creation of something that could be called a divine body could be only an ulterior aim undertaken as part of this transformation; as obviously the development of such a divine body as was visioned in these speculations could only come into view as the result of a distant evolution and need not alarm or distract any one. It might even be regarded as a phantasy of some remotely possible future which might one day happen to come true.
I then come to the main point namely that the intention attributed to the Mother of concentrating permanently on sports and withdrawing from other things pertinent to sadhana and our spiritual endeavour is a legend and a myth and has no truth in it. Except for the time given to her own physical exercise and, ordinarily two hours or sometimes three in the evening on the Playground, the Mother’s whole day from early morning and a large part of the night also has always been devoted to her other occupations connected with her work and with the sadhana – not her own but that of the sadhaks, pranam, blessings, meditation and receiving the sadhaks on the staircase or elsewhere sometimes for two hours at a time, and listening to what they have to say, questions about the sadhana, reports of their work or other matters, complaints, disputes, quarrels, all kinds of conferences about this or that to be decided or done, there is no end to the list; for the rest she had to attend to their letters, to reports about the material work of the Ashram and all its many departments, decisions on a hundred matters, correspondence and all sorts of things connected with contacts with the outside world including often serious troubles and difficulties and the settlement of matters of great importance.
All this has certainly nothing to do with sports and she had little occasion to think of it at all apart from the short time in the evening. There was here no ground for the idea that she was neglecting the sadhaks or the sadhana or thinking of turning her mind solely or predominantly to sport and still less for imputing the same preoccupation to me. Only during the period before the first and second December this year the Mother had to give a great deal of time and concentration to the preparation of the events of those two days because she had decided on a big cultural programme, her own play “Vers l’avenir” [ “Towards the Future”], dances, recitation from Savitri and from the Prayers and Meditations for the first December and also a big and ambitious programme for the second of sportive items and events. This meant a good deal more time for these purposes but not any interruption of her other occupations except for one or two of them just at the end of this period. There was surely no sufficient ground here either for drawing the conclusion that this was to be for the future a normal feature of her action or a permanent change in it or in the life of the Ashram ending in a complete withdrawal from spiritual life and an apotheosis of the deity of sport. Those who voiced this idea or declared that sport would henceforth be obligatory on all were indulging in fantasies that have no claim to credibility. As a matter of fact the period of tension is over and after the second December things have returned to normal or even to subnormal in the activities of the Playground and as for the future you may recall the proverb that “once is not for ever.”
But there seems to be still a survival of the groundless idea that sportsmanship is obligatory henceforth on every sadhak and, without it there is no chance of having the Mother’s attention or favour.
It is therefore necessary for me to repeat with the utmost emphasis the statement I made long ago when this fable became current for a time along, I think, with the rumour that the Supermind was to descend on the Playground and the people who happen to be there at the time and nowhere else and on nobody else – which would have meant that I for one would never have it!! I must repeat what I said then, that the Mother has never imposed or has any idea of imposing any such obligation and had no reason for doing so. The Mother does not want you or anybody else to take to sports if there is no inclination or turn towards it. There are any number of people who enjoy her highest favour, among them some of her best and most valued workers, some most near to her and cherished by her who do not even set foot on the Playground. Nobody then could possibly lose her favour or her affection by refusing to take up sport or by a dislike of sport or a strong disinclination towards it: these things are a matter of idiosyncracy and nothing else. The idea, whether advanced or not by someone claiming to have authority to voice the Mother’s intentions, that sport is now the most important thing with her and obligatory for sadhana is absurd in the extreme. Again, how could you ever imagine that the Mother or myself would turn you away or ask you to leave us for any reason, least of all for such a fantastic one as this? All this is indeed a maze of fantasies and you should drive them from your mind altogether. Your place in our hearts is permanent and your place near us must be that also; you should not allow anything to cloud that truth in your mind or lend credence to anything or anyone telling you otherwise.
There remains the incident from which the upset started, the gesture of the Mother putting only the tips of her fingers and then, as you felt it, pushing your head away; such an incident or an identical one has been more than once at the origin of these upsets in the past; but, certainly, this time it could only have happened if the Mother had slipped into a state subconscient or half-conscious in which the body was left to itself and made a mechanical or involuntary movement in which her mind had no share. The Mother has no recollection of having on this occasion passed into such a state, but it is quite sure that she made consciously no such gesture and she had no reason for doing so. There was no indifference or coldness in her mind or feelings after your return from Bengal, but very much the contrary since she had fully appreciated the work you have done. There was also no resentment at your attitude towards sport, for she had never any idea of obliging or putting any pressure on you or anybody else for the purpose of making them join the gymnastic exercises; such an attitude was always quite foreign to her mind and never entered at all into her intention. If there was any such involuntary gesture, you should dismiss it from your mind as something the Mother herself would greatly regret; it could not have happened consciously or deliberately, for that at least you may be sure.
I believe that I have left out nothing of any importance that needed to be written. About Janak, I do not quite gather what we are to understand about her physical condition or whether she got better for a moment but has become worse again; but I will do the best I can to help her out of her difficulties of so many kinds; it is to be hoped she will not feel herself obliged to linger for any reason in the midst of what seems to be a terribly unpleasant and dangerous family atmosphere: if she can get away from it, that would give a better chance of things turning out for the best and I hope she will do it.
I shall answer more fully what you have written in your letter to the Mother, but I will do that tomorrow in the course of the day, as I don’t want to delay sending you this letter of mine in which I have tried to dissipate the mistaken impressions which have caused so much trouble. I hope it will clear the atmosphere to a large extent and put things right or at least more right than they were. But let me say at once that there is no reserve or arriere pensee [ulterior motive] in our emphatic statement about our not pressing sport as an obligation on you or anyone. As we do not press it on you now, so too we shall not press it on you hereafter. I shall write more fully about this tomorrow. Just now I want to give you the assurance that our relation of love and affection with you cannot change for any cause nor our will to help you in your long and persistent endeavour to realise the Divine and achieve the spiritual life. You have made much progress on the way and I feel sure that you will arrive.