Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 15675

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Sahana Devi

May 27, 1937

What you said about H is quite correct. It is not necessary to be always serious of face or silent in doing the yoga, but it is necessary to take the yoga seriously and silence and inward concentration have a large place. One can’t be all the time throwing oneself outward if to go in side and meet the Divine there is one’s aim. But that does not mean that one has to be grave and gloomy all the time or gloomy any part of the time, and I don’t suppose that the sadhaks here are like that. It is H’s rhetorical way of putting his difficulty – the difficulty of a vital that wants to throw itself always outward in action and emotion while another part is dissatisfied with the result and feels that its own movement is frustrated. There are two people in him, one wanting a life of vital expansion, the other an inner life. The first gets restless because the inner life is not a life of outward expansion; the other becomes miserable because its aim is not realised. Neither personality need be thrown away in this yoga; but the outer vital one must allow the inner to establish itself, give it the first place and consent to be only an instrument of the soul– and to obey the law of the inner life. This is what H’s mind still refuses to understand; he thinks one must be either all gloomy and cold and grave or else bring the bubble and effervescence into the inner life. A quiet happy and glad control of the vital by the inner being is a thing he is not able as yet to conceive.

The check on your poetry can only be a temporary one– something there needs adjustment I suppose.