Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Forth Series

Fragment ID: 21197

Your objection was to learning languages and especially French as inimical to peace and silence because it meant activity. The mind when it is not in meditation or in complete silence, is always active with something or another – with its own ideas or desires or with other people or with things or with talking, etc. None of these is any less inactivity than learning languages. Now you shift your ground and say it is because owing to their study they leave no time for meditation that you object. That is absurd, for if people want to meditate, they will arrange their time of study for that; if they don’t want to meditate, the reason must be something else than study and if they don’t study they will simply go on thinking about “small things”. Want of time is not the cause of their no meditation and passion for study is not the cause.