Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Rules in the Life of the Ashram

Guidelines for Writing about the Ashram [2]

Here is an article by X (with some necessary corrections).

I have glanced over your monster. He will have to be beheaded and his tail cut off. Beheaded because Mother has put a prohibition on publication of her name and what she has written. The Conversations are for private circulation, the Prayers only for disciples and those who are actively interested in spiritual experience. This rule has been hammered into Y and others; you also must fix it in your cerebellum for the future. The tail will have to be docked for a reason regarding myself. Your reason for including it shows a harrowing incomprehension of the purpose of these things. The object of such special {{0}}issues[[Special issues of daily or weekly periodicals dealing with Sri Aurobindo and his work. — Ed.]] is not to exhibit me to the public and show them all sides of me, i.e. to make me go through all my possible performances on a public stage. The object is to make the reading public better acquainted with the nature of this Yoga and the principle of what is being done in the Asram. The private matters of the Asram itself are not for the public — at most only so much as the public can see. A fortiori anything personal and private about me is also taboo. I come in only so far as it is necessary for the public to know my thought and what I stand for. You will notice that my life itself is so written as to give only the grey precise surface facts, nothing more. All propensity to make me figure in the big Barnum circus of journalistic “features” along with or in competition with Joe Louis the prize-fighter, Douglas Fairbanks, H. G. Wells, King George and Queen Mary, Haile Selassie, Hobbs, Hitler, Jack the Ripper (or any modern substitute of his) and Mussolini should be strictly banished from the mentality for evermore and the day after.

24 September 1935