Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7634

By the way, what is this story about my four or five hours’ concentration a day for several years before anything came down? Such a thing never happened, if by concentration you mean laborious meditation. What I did was four or five hours a day prāṇāyāma – which is quite another matter. And what flow do you speak of? The flow of poetry came down while I was doing prāṇāyāma, not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come after some years, but after I had stopped the prāṇāyāma for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to turn once all my efforts had failed. And it came not as a result of years of prāṇāyāma or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a temporary guru (but it was not that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and Krishna. So don’t try to turn me into an argument against the Divine, that attempt will be perfectly ineffective.

22-1-1936