Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Remarks on Public Figures in India

Subhas Chandra Bose [3]

I received this post-card from Subhas in the last mail. He had written it before starting for Calcutta by aeroplane. Now he is practically a prisoner — a home-internee really — at his residence. I wonder what work he will be doing now.... He used once to meditate and see light and had a real bhakti — had even turned a sannyasi once. And now he says that seeking the Divine is useless inactive work!

I had never a very great confidence in Subhas’s yoga-turn getting the better of his activism — he has two strong ties that prevent it, ambition and need to act and lead in the vital and in the mind a mental idealism — these two things are the great fosterers of illusion. The spiritual path needs a certain amount of realism — one has to see the real value of the things that are — which is very little, except as steps in evolution. Then one can either follow the spiritual static path of rest and release or the spiritual dynamic path of a greater truth to be brought down into life. But otherwise —

12 December 1934