Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Seven. Epistles / Letters From Abroad
Letters from Abroad [4]
The idea that the Europeans have organised enjoyment just as the Hindus have organised asceticism, is a very common superstition which I am not bound to endorse merely because it is common. Say rather that the Europeans have systematised feverishness and the Hindus universalised inertia and mendicancy. The appearances of things are not the things themselves, nor is a shadow always the proof of a substance... I admit that the Europeans have tried hard to organise enjoyment. Power, pleasure, riches, amusement are their gods and the whirl of a splendid and active life their heaven. But have they succeeded? I think that nowhere is life less truly enjoyable than in brilliant and arrogant Europe. The naked African seems to me to be happier and more genuinely luxurious than the cultured son of Japhet.1
It is this very trying hard that spoils the endeavour. What a grotesque conception indeed is this of trying hard to be joyous! Delight, joyousness, ananda either are by nature or they do not exist; to be natural, to be in harmony with the truth of things is the very secret of bliss. The garden of Eden is man’s natural abode and it is only because he wilfully chose to know evil that he was driven out of his paradise.
Earlier edition of this work: Archives and Research: A biannual journal.- Volume 3, No2 (1979, December)
1 Another version of this opening:
It is not for the first time that it has been brought home to me how much more confusing are the resemblances between opposites than the subtle distinctions between close kindred. You have heard that the Europeans have organised enjoyment, you know that my religion is to enjoy God without bondage in the manifest world no less than in Himself and you wonder at my condemnation of their culture.