Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1437

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

October 3, 1935

Again, about the intuition! You speak of keeping oneself sufficiently open to get the intuition. If I keep myself open and intuition favours me, how shall I know that it is the true thing?

Practise and learn, learn and practise. When you have had a few thousand intuitions, you can get the knack – for there is a recognizable difference between the true ones and the imitations or half-ones.

In one or two cases my off-hand diagnosis was correct. But how far can I take it as an intuition?

It depends on how it came, what was the stuff of the perception and the light in it, and whether it bobbed up as one among potentials though dominant or seized you as an inevitable dead cert. Also whether it was a pure intuition or a mixed mental. Difficult, isn’t it?

About how to develop it, I won’t ask you – though it would enlighten us; but I suppose you will develop it some day, though a big condition of “sufficiently open” overhangs. Yes, everything one can have if one is “sufficiently open”, but there’s the rub, for one isn’t and can’t!

Well, instead of letting your Man of Sorrows sob and grumble all the lachrymose time, you should labour manfully to enlarge the opening.

P has made copies of your letters to me. Naturally, I suppose he will show them to his friends in Calcutta.

No. They must not be shown to people outside.

And R has most pathetically requested me to forward him your letters written to me. Then life becomes cheerful by their splendour.

Have you told him they are not for exhibition? It is only on that condition he can have them.