Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Rules in the Life of the Ashram
General Rules and Individual Natures [1]
It is a little
difficult from the wider spiritual outlook to answer your question in the way
you want and every mental being wants, with a trenchant “Thou shalt” or “Thou
shalt not”, especially when the “thou” is meant to cover “all”. For while there
is an identity of essential aim, while there are general broad lines of
endeavour, yet there is not in detail one common set of rules in inner things
that can apply to all seekers. You ask “Is such and such a thing harmful?” But
what is harmful to one may be helpful to another,— what is helpful at a certain
stage may cease to be helpful at another,— what is harmful under certain
conditions is helpful under other conditions,— what is done in a certain spirit
may be disastrous, the same thing done in a quite different spirit would be
innocuous or even beneficial. I asked the Mother indeed what she would say to
your question about pleasures and social expansiveness (put as a general
question) and she answered, “Impossible to say like that; it depends on the
spirit in which it is done.” So there are so many things: the spirit, the
circumstances, the person, the need and cast of the nature, the stage. That is
why it is said so often that the Guru must deal with each disciple according to
his separate nature and accordingly guide his sadhana; even if it is the same
line of sadhana for all, yet at every point for each it differs. That also is
the reason why we say the Divine’s way cannot be understood by the mind,—
because the mind acts according to hard and fast rules and standards, while the
spirit sees the truth of all and the truth of each and acts variously according
to its own comprehensive and complex vision. That also is why we say that no one
can understand by his personal mental judgment the Mother’s actions and reasons
for action; it can only be understood by entering into the larger consciousness
from which she sees things and acts upon them. That is baffling to the mind
because it loses its small measures, but it is the truth of the matter.
To come down to hard facts and it may make the dictum a
little more comprehensible. You speak of retirement and you say that if it is
good why not impose it — you couple together X, Y, 
Z, A, B, C! Well, take that last name,
C, and add to it D for he also “retired” and went headlong for an
intense and solitary sadhana. X and Y profited by their seclusion,
what happened to C and D? We forbade D to retire,— he was
always wanting to give up work, withdraw from all intercourse and spend all his
time in meditation; but he did it as much as he could — result, collapse. C
never asked permission and I cannot say what his retirement was like, but I hear
he boasted that by his intense sadhana he had conquered sex not only for himself
but all the sadhaks! He had to leave the Asram owing to his unconquerable
attachment to his wife and child and he is there living the family life and has
produced another child — what a success for retirement. Where the retirement is
helpful and fits the mind or the nature, we approve it, but in the face of these
results how can you expect us to follow what the mind calls a consistent course
and impose it as the right thing on everybody? You have spoken of your singing.
You know well that we approve of it and I have constantly stressed its necessity
for you as well as that of your poetry. But the Mother absolutely forbade E’s
singing? To music for some again she is indifferent or discourages it, for
others she approves as for F, G and others. For some time she
encouraged the concerts, afterwards she stopped them. You drew from the
prohibition to E and the stopping of the concerts that Mother did not
like music or did not like Indian music or considered music bad for sadhana and
all sorts of strange mental reasons like that. Mother prohibited E
because while music was good for you, it was spiritually poison to E —
the moment he began to think of it and of audiences, all the vulgarity and
unspirituality in his nature rose to the surface. You can see what he is doing
with it now! So again with the concerts — though in a different way — she
stopped them because she had seen that wrong forces were coming into their
atmosphere which had nothing to do with the music in itself; her motives were
not mental. It was for similar reasons that she drew back from big public
displays like Udayshankar’s. On the other hand she favoured and herself planned
the exhibition of paintings at the Town Hall. She was not eager for you to have
your big audiences for your singing because she found 
the
atmosphere full of mixed forces and found too you had afterwards usually a
depression; but she has always approved of your music in itself done privately
or before a small audience. If you consider then, you will see that here there
is no mental rule, but in each case the guidance is determined by spiritual
reasons which are of a flexible character and look only at what in each case are
the spiritual conditions, results, possibilities. There is no other
consideration, no rule. Music, painting, poetry and many other activities which
are of the mind and vital can be used as part of spiritual development or of the
work and for a spiritual purpose — “it depends on the spirit in which they are
done.”
That being established, that these things depend on the
spirit, the nature of the person, its needs, the conditions and circumstances, I
will come to your special question about pleasure and especially the pleasure in
society of an expansive vital nature.
P.S. Of course there is a category of things that have
to be eschewed altogether and of things that have to be followed by all, but I
am speaking of the large number that do not fall into the two categories.
24 October 1936