Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Help and Guidance

Outward and Inward Guidance [3]

Once I asked you to give some advice as regards the treatment of a patient. You replied: “I have no medico in me, not even a latent {{0}}medico.”[[See the letter of 1 April 1935 on page 505. — Ed.]]

Of course not. If it were there, I would develop it and run the Dispensary myself. What would be the need of X or Y or Z?

The other day, in regard to that baby, you wrote that Mother has no intuition for infants.

No intuition for stuffing infants with heterogeneous medicines.

Well then, if you have no latent medico and Mother has no intuition for infants, can you tell me how by the force of devotion, faith, surrender, etc., is one going to get guidance from you?

What logic! Because Mother and myself are not engineers, therefore A can’t develop the right intuition in engineering? or because neither I nor Mother are experts in Gujarati prosody, therefore B can’t develop the inspiration for his poems?

If the divine can’t guide me externally, which is much easier, how can he guide me internally?

Oh Lord! what a question! To guide internally is a million times easier than to guide externally. Let us suppose I want General Miaja to beat Franco’s fellows back at Guadalajara (please pronounce properly), I put the right force on him and he wakes up and, with his military knowledge and capacity, does the right thing and it’s done. But if I, having no latent or patent military genius or knowledge in me, write to him saying “do this, do that”, he won’t do it and I would not be able to do it either. It is operations of two quite different spheres of consciousness. You absolutely refuse to make the necessary distinction between the two fields and their processes and then you jumble the two together and call it logic.

If the medico can be revealed from within, why could it not be revealed from without and tell me what to do?

Damn it, man! Intuition and revelation are inner things — they don’t belong to the outer mind.

If you or Mother can’t guide me concretely, how will the guidance come later on, I wonder?

Do you imagine that I tell you inwardly or outwardly what expressions to use in your Bengali poems when you are writing? Still you write from an inspiration which I have set going.

6 April 1937