Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7654

I remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images – “these are only after-images”! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for two minutes at a time – he said, “no”, to his knowledge only for a few seconds; I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements and values – he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called scientific explanations break out¹ as soon as you pull them out of their cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend to decipher.

19-2-1932

¹ down (later edition)

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