Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 4. Literature, Art, Music and the Practice of Yoga
Literature and Yoga

Reading and Sadhana [1]

If I intend to take literature as a work to be done for sadhana, I must read all good stories, novels, poems, dramas etc., must I not?

No rule can be made, it differs with different people.

I felt that it will be a mistake to give up all that and to want to meditate all the time or to do only such things which do not hinder me from an inner concentration on you. I felt that all our faculties and capacities have to be given to you.

It is a question of the right consciousness — no unvarying mental rule can be made for these things.

All meditation and no work is not good and helpful to sadhana, I have heard; I don’t know if it is true.

Writing and reading absorb the mind and fill it with images and influences; if the images and influences are not of the right kind they naturally turn one away from the true consciousness. It is only if one has the true consciousness well established already that one can read or write anything whatever without losing it or without any other harm.

17 May 1934