Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1642

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

June 3, 1936

You mean to say – “I am in Heaven. Everything is all right in the best of all possible worlds – in Sri Aurobindo Asram and with Nirod”!

Quite so. All is well, if it ends well.

But how to make you realise that I welcome the stillness etc.... but it’s not always there.

I quite realise. Don’t make such Herculean efforts to explain it.

No joy, no energy, no cheerfulness. Don’t like to read or write – as if a dead man were walking about. Do you understand the position? Any personal experience?

I quite understand; often had it myself devastatingly. That’s why I always advise people who have it to cheer up and buck up.

I asked Kanai for my diagnosis – he says some sort of trouble in the “prān”¹ positively; desire of ego. Just as a Kaviraj puts his finger on the pulse and diagnoses at once, so with this. What’s required is purification.

Diagnosis right – only should add an adjective disappointed pran and ego. No active vital row; vital and ego lying back flat and gloomy.

So, since I have to pass the time, how to do it? To bear the Cross gloomily, hoping for a resurrection?

To cheer up, buck up and the rest if you can, saying “Rome was not built in a day” – if you can’t, gloom it through till the sun rises and the little birds chirp and all is well.

Looks however as if you were going through a training in vairagya. Don’t much care for vairagya myself, always avoided the beastly thing, but had to go through it partly, till I hit on samata as a better trick. But samata is difficult, vairagya is easy, only damnably gloomy and uncomfortable.

¹ prān: vital.

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