Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

3. The Mother and the Practice of the Integral Yoga

Fragment ID: 19234

You write: “One can feel the Divine Consciousness impersonally as a new consciousness only”¹ but that the Mother’s presence is something more. You also wrote in another letter that the Divine Presence in the heart is much more than the consciousness. In what way is the Presence more than the consciousness?

I meant that one can feel the divine consciousness as an impersonal spiritual state, a state of peace, light, joy, wideness without feeling in it the Divine Presence. The Divine Presence is felt as that of one who is the living source and essence of that light etc., a Being therefore, not merely a spiritual state. The Mother’s Presence is still more concrete, definite, personal – it is not that of Someone unknown, of a Power or Being, but of one who is known, intimate, loved, to whom one can offer all the being in a living concrete way. The image is not indispensable, though it helps – the presence can be inwardly felt without it.

2 July 1936

¹ See letter of 8 July 1935 above. – Ed.

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