Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

1. Spirituality

The Man of Sorrows

IV. Depression and Yoga

Freed once more from the Devil's claws! Just a few words about the process: I took up X's poem, felt like writing one after reading it, failed; then went to Pranam, there found J's letter waiting, read it and as soon as I sat in the Hall, lo, everything fell off! what then did the job – poem, letter?

Yes, of course, it was the Old Man of the Sea, I mean of Sorrow, who dropped off, because he can't stand anything cheerful and hopeful. The main credit goes to the letter, because it has a push in it of the psychic force which took your vital and the O.M. also by surprise and knocked him off and you up by surprise  before the vital had time to turn round and cry, “Hélas! Hélas! Alas! Ototototoi!”

All together – Poetry first attempt, letter brought a good atmosphere (that was the sense of something pleasant) and both were the effect of a long pressure from me which you had resisted sitting firm in a Gandhian passive resistance.

This shows, Sir, you make us suffer unnecessarily; you can at any moment draw me out if it pleases you.

Not at all, you can't be drawn out if something in you refuses and sticks like a badger in its hole. When that says, “Oh, damn it, after all let me get out and breathe some fresh air,” then it can be done.

I don't understand what my friend J means by the disturbance in connection with the affairs of the world.

That is clear enough. His new consciousness makes him feel more strongly the opposite forces that one contacts when one moves in the world and has to do affairs and meet with others and he is afraid of a response in the vital which will upset his sadhana or create difficulties. Evidently he is a man who is psychically sensitive or has become so to that thing which you blindly refuse to recognise even when you are in the midst of it – the play of forces. You can feel your friend's atmosphere through the letter “so beautiful,  so strengthening, so refreshing” and it has an immediate effect on you. But your mind stares like an owl and wonders “what the hell can this be?”, I suppose, because your medical books never told you about it and how can things be true which are not known either to the ordinary mind or science? It is by an incursion of an opposite kind of forces that you fall into the Old Man's clutches, but you can only groan and cry, “What's this?” and when they are swept aside in a moment by other forces blink and mutter, “Well, that's funny! ” Your friend can feel and know at once when he is being threatened by the opposite forces and so he can be on his guard and resist old Nick, because he can detect at once one of his principal means of attack.