Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Remarks on Spiritual Figures in India

Ramana Maharshi [3]

I quote the following remarks of Ramana Maharshi as recorded by Paul Brunton: “All human beings are ever wanting happiness, untainted with sorrow. They want to grasp a happiness which will not come to an end. The instinct is a true {{0}}one.”[[Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India (London: Rider & Company, [1934] 1943), p. 157.]]

All? It is far too sweeping a generalisation. If he had said that is one very strong strain in human nature it could be accepted. But mark that it is in human physical consciousness only. The human vital tends rather to reject a happiness untainted by sorrow and to find it a monotonous, boring condition. Even if it accepts it, after a time it kicks over the traces and goes to some new painful or risky adventure.

“Man’s real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the true self. His search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true self. The true self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end” [pp. 157 – 58].

The true Self is quite a different proposition. But what it has is not happiness but something more.

“Even they [the wicked and the criminal] sin because they are trying to find the self’s happiness in every sin which they commit. This striving is instinctive in man, but they do not know that they are really seeking their true selves, and so they try these wicked ways first as a means to happiness” [p. 158].

Who is this “they”? I fear it is a very summary and misleading criminal psychology. To say that a Paris crook or apache steals, swindles, murders for the happiness of stealing, swindling, murdering is a little startling. He does it for quite other reasons. He does it as his métier just as you do your doctor’s work. Do you really do your doctor’s work because of the happiness you find in it?

People will not seek a sorrowless, untainted, everlasting happiness, even if shown the way — because they will consider it beyond their power to attain, or so it seems to me.

It is also with many because they prefer the joy mixed with sorrow, [mānuṣer hāsikannā], and consider your everlasting happiness an everlasting bore.

About the criminals, I don’t obviously include those types who are born with a criminal instinct: idiots and imbeciles.

Why not? If your generalisation is good for all, it must be good for them also.

Ramana Maharshi also says that if you “meditate for an hour or two every day, you can then carry on with your duties. If you meditate in the right manner ...”

A very important qualification.

“then the current of mind induced will continue to flow even in the midst of your work. It is as though there were two ways of expressing the same idea; the same line which you take in meditation will be expressed in your activities.” The result will be a gradual change of attitude towards people, events and objects. “Your actions will tend to follow your meditations of their own accord” [p. 156].

If the meditation brings poise, peace, a concentrated condition or even a pressure or influence, that can go on in the work, provided one does not throw it away by a relaxed or dispersed state of consciousness. That was why the Mother wanted people not only to be concentrated at pranam or meditation but to remain silent and absorb or assimilate afterwards and also to avoid things that relax or disperse or dissipate too much — precisely for this reason that so the effects of what she put on them might continue and the change of attitude the Maharshi speaks of will take place. But I am afraid most of the sadhaks have never understood or practised anything of the kind — they could not appreciate or understand her directions.

Of course, he adds that setting apart time for meditation is for spiritual novices. You too wrote to me to meditate at least half an hour a day, if only to bring a greater concentration in the work.

It does bring the effects of meditation into work if one gives it a chance.

You know that meditations are not always successful.

You forget that with numbers of people they are successful.

Even if they were, how does this affect the whole day’s work?

It doesn’t, if one does not take care that it should do so — if one takes care, it can.

Is it something like charging a battery which goes on inducing an automatic current?

It is not exactly automatic. It can be easily spoilt or left to sink into the subconscient or otherwise wasted. But with simple and steady practice and persistence it has the effect the Maharshi speaks of — he assumes, I suppose, such a practice. I am afraid your meditation is hardly simple or steady — too much kasrat and fighting with yourself.

Ramana Maharshi seems a real Maharshi.

He is more of a Yogi than a Rishi, it seems to me. The happiness theory does not impress me,— it is as old as the mountains but not so solid. But he knows a lot about Yoga.

9 February 1936