Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1429

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

September 20, 1935

When one has a mighty pen, Sir, one can wield it in any way one likes. However, I hope you intend to succeed in making me a yogi – not out of sheer fun!

I hope so.

But, really, Sir, I never expected you to take my “overnight” as overnight.

Don’t understand your deep expressions – you did not mean that it would happen rapidly and suddenly? “Overnight” in English means that,– but if you had some extraordinary supramental meaning (beyond the mental and out of the human time-sense) in your mind – it is a different matter, and then I express my awe-struck, heartfelt, flabbergasted regrets, pleading only as excuse my inability to grasp such a deep and novel use of the language. May I ask, very humbly, what you did mean, if not a sudden and rapid development into great sadhaks?

Is it because you use only the mental? Suppose we use your expression “very near the tail of the Supramental” in our human time-sense?

I supposed that you would take it as a metaphor or as anyone reading English in the ordinary way, would do. No need of a superhuman time-sense or timeless sense to interpret the phrase, although it seems it is needed in order to understand your “overnight”.

I am not very clear about the transformation of the psychic. Doesn’t it mean a process of change from a gross lower nature to a fine and higher one? But the psychic is a part of the Divine and hence always pure, noble and high. Do you mean a greater evolution?

I fear, I shall have to stop writing altogether, since even the simplest things I write are so unintelligible even to the few “intellectuals” of the Ashram. I never said anything about a “transformation of the psychic”. I have always written about a “psychic transformation” of the nature which is a very different matter. I have sometimes written of it as a psychisation of the nature. The psychic is in the evolution, part of human being, its divine part – so a psychisation will not carry one beyond the present evolution but will make the being ready to respond to all that comes from the Divine or Higher Nature and unwilling to respond to the Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha or Animal in the being or to any resistance of the lower nature which stands in the way of the divine change.

You have said that the psychic being is at this stage a flame, not a spark. Does it apply to the human species as a whole?

I simply meant that there was a psychic being there and not merely a psychic principle as at the beginning of the evolution.

And is there a difference between the psyche of one man and that of another? Since they are portions of one Essential Divine, they should be the same in all, only the difference being that of evolution.

The difference is one of evolution. The psychic being is more developed in some, but the soul-principle is the same in all.

By the way, can’t you be a little less indefinite than saying “evolve itself out” regarding India’s Independence? When the Yogi B. Babu was asked about the date of India’s Independence he replied, “Not within 50 years.” Good Lord! Can you give a more definite date or is it again a “play of forces”?

I am not a prophet like B. Babu. All I can say is that the coming of independence is now sure (as anyone with any political sense at all can see). As you do not accept my “play of forces” explanation of things, I can say no more than that – for that is all that can be said by the “human time-sense”.

I had a temperature of 100° all day. Arjava threatens that people will lose all faith in doctors unless I cure myself quickly. I fear the Supramental gave me some severe lashes with its tail!

Not at all. You are simply “not well” – the reason you as a doctor ought to discover. Unless you have committed a secret sin (of one kind or another) and the temperature is a foretaste of the heat hereafter. But that also is for you to see.

P doesn’t seem to be willing to oil her machine with olive oil!

She wants, I suppose, to rely “only on the Mother’s force”. I suppose she does not like medicines.