Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

5. On Three Works of the Mother

Fragment ID: 20225

Last night I was reading the Mother’s prayer of 21 December 1916 and I was struck by this: “Il [mon être] sait que cet état 608 Letters on the Mother d’amour actif doit être constant et impersonnel, c’est-à-dire tout à fait indépendant des circonstances et des personnes, puisqu’il ne peut et ne doit étre concentré sur aucune en particulier” [p. 369]. This gave me a sort of key to the ever-stormy trouble in my own nature. I always expect some sort of return when I do anything for anybody. That should go. I should neither have a clinging for such returns nor any attachment to human contacts, however soothing. Without a repudiation of the human way of approach, I can never establish any harmony within which is “independent of circumstances or persons”. The difficulty, of course, is that Divine Love appears to me too impersonal and cold, that is, lacking in warmth though not a cold harmony. But perhaps Divine Love is not like that.

Love cannot be cold – for there is no such thing as cold love, but the love of which the Mother speaks in that passage is something very pure, fixed and constant; it does not leap like fire and sink for want of fuel, but is steady and all-embracing and self-existent like the light of the sun. There is also a divine love that is personal, but it is not like the ordinary personal human love dependent on any return from the person – it is personal but not egoistic,– it goes from the real being in the one to the real being in the other. But to find that, liberation from the ordinary human way of approach is necessary.

21 November 1936