Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On His Published Prose Writings

Passages from The Riddle of This World [1]

In the Riddle you speak of a conversion inwards and a series of conversions {{0}}upwards.[[Sri Aurobindo, The Riddle of This World (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1973), p. 5.]] Does the upward conversion begin only after the inward conversion, i.e. the psychicisation of the lower nature, is complete?

Not necessarily.

Or do both kinds of work go on simultaneously?

It differs with different people, but the upward conversions cannot go very far or cannot be secure if the lower nature is not psychicised — for there is then always the possibility of a big or even a decisive fall if there is something seriously unpsychic in the lower nature.

29 March 1935