Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Human Relations and the Ashram

Sexual Relations and the Ashram [13]

You write [in the preceding letter], “you have... never cut with it entirely.” In what sense? Every time I have tried to cut off all contact with people, I have been overcome with imaginations. How does one cut off imaginations? Perhaps you will say that other people have conquered sex without seclusion or higher experience or much work. If so, I would like to know about them. Probably they were naturally sattwic.

There are people outside the Asram even who have got free from the sex without seclusion — even sleeping in the same bed with the wife. I know one at least who did it without any higher experience. The work of these people is ordinary service or professional work, but that did not prevent their having the sex struggle nor did it help them to get rid of it. The thing came after a prolonged struggle because they were determined to be rid of it and at a certain stage they got a touch which made the determination absolutely effective. Possibly they were sattwic, but that did not prevent their having strong sex impulses and a hard and prolonged struggle.

I meant by cutting off a determined rejection of the inward as well as the outward movement whenever it comes. Something in the nature accepts and lets itself go helplessly and something in the mind allows it to do so. The mind does not seem to believe in its power to say No definitely to inward movements as it would to an outer contact — and yet the Purusha is there and can put its definite No, maintaining it till the Prakriti has to submit — or else till the confirming touch from above makes its determination perfectly effective.

5 April 1936