Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

1. Spirituality

Presences and Forms

Well, sir, the Presence not finding an entrance into your waking mind easy, tried to take advantage of half sleep to do it. (Half sleep is always a favourable condition for these things. ) But your body consciousness, not being familiar with such spiritual penetrations, got into a stew – and as a stew is accompanied by heat and steam, so your body got hot and perspired.

Sir, is the Presence of a physical nature or a spiritual fact? And is the physical sense accustomed or able to see or feel spiritual things – a spiritual Presence, a non-material Form? To see the Brahman everywhere is not possible unless you develop the inner vision – to do that you have to concentrate. To see non-material forms is indeed possible for a few, because they have the gift by nature, but most can't do it without developing the subtle sight. It is absurd to expect the Divine to manifest his Presence without your taking any trouble to see it, you have to concentrate.

It simply means you have a subjective sense of Presence. But must a subjective sense of things be necessarily a vain imagination? If so, no yoga is possible. One has to take it as an axiom that subjective things can be as real as objective things. No doubt there may be and are such things as mental formations – but, to begin with, mental formations are or can be very powerful things, producing concrete results; secondly whether what one sees or hears is a mental formation or a real subjective object can only be determined when one has sufficient experience in these inward things.

Is this what you call going inward?

No, not quite – but it is evidently the result of some opening from within – for without that opening one cannot become aware of Presences or Forms that are supraphysical in their nature.

There is nothing to do but to go on concentrating and calling the Presence within and without you, the opening, the power to receive and let it come. The more the mind falls quiet during or as the result of concentration, the better (no other thought in or out) but no need to struggle for that, must come of itself by the concentration.

26.03.1937