Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Sadhana before Coming to Pondicherry in 1910
The
Realisation of January 1908
Meeting with Vishnu Bhaskar Lele [2]
To reject doubts means control of one’s thoughts — very 
certainly so. But the control of one’s thoughts is as necessary as the
control of one’s vital desires and passions or the control of the movements of
one’s body — for the Yoga, and not for the Yoga only. One cannot be a fully
developed mental being even, if one has not control of the thoughts, is not
their observer, judge, master,— the mental Purusha, manomaya
puruṣa, sākṣī, anumantā,
īśvara. It is no more proper for the mental being to be the tennis ball
of unruly and uncontrollable thoughts than to be a rudderless ship in the storm
of the desires and passions or a slave of either the inertia or the impulses of
the body. I know it is more difficult because man being primarily a creature of
mental Prakriti identifies himself with the movements of his mind and cannot at
once dissociate himself and stand free from the swirl and eddies of the mind
whirlpool. It is comparatively easy for him to put a control on his body, at
least a certain part of its movements: it is less easy but still very possible
after a struggle to put a mental control on his vital impulsions and desires;
but to sit, like the Tantrik Yogi on the river, above the whirlpool of his
thoughts is less facile. Nevertheless it can be done; all developed mental men,
those who get beyond the average, have in one way or other or at least at
certain times and for certain purposes to separate the two parts of the mind,
the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet masterful part
which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing them, judging, rejecting,
eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections and changes, the Master in the
House of Mind, capable of self-empire, svār ājya.
The Yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master
there, but even while in mind in a way, he gets out of it, as it were, and
stands above or quite back from it and free. For him the image of the factory of
thoughts is no longer quite valid; for he sees that thoughts come from outside,
from the universal Mind or universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct,
sometimes unformed and then they are given shape somewhere in us. The principal
business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or refusal to these
thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or this giving
a personal-mental form to thought-stuff (or
vital movements) from the environing Nature-Force. It was my great debt to Lele
that he showed me this. “Sit in meditation,” he said, “but do not think, look
only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it; before they can
enter throw them away from you till your mind is capable of entire silence.” I
had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside,
but I did not think of either questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply
sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a
high mountain summit and then I saw a thought and then another thought coming in
a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take
hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle,
the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited
to the narrow circle of personal thought or a labourer in a thought-factory, but
a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free too to
choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire.
I mention this only to emphasise that the possibilities
of the mental being are not limited and that it can be the free Witness and
Master in its own house. It is not to say that everybody can do it in the way I
did and with the same rapidity of the decisive movement (for of course the later
fullest development of this new untrammelled mental Power took time, many
years); but a progressive freedom and mastery over one’s mind is perfectly
within the possibilities of anyone who has the faith and will to undertake it.
5 August 1932