Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7872

Q: How did your intellect become so powerful even before you started Yoga?

A: It was not any such thing before I started the Yoga. I started the Yoga in 1904 and all my work except some poetry was done afterwards. Moreover, my intelligence was inborn and so far as it grew before the Yoga, it was not by training but by a wide haphazard activity developing ideas from all things read, seen or experienced. That is not training, it is natural growth.

13-11-1936

Q: Can it be that in course of the sadhana, one may have certain intellectual or other training by the direct power of Yoga? How did your own wide development come?

A: It came not by “training”, but by the spontaneous opening and widening and perfecting of the consciousness in the sadhana.

4-11-1936