Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Life and Death in the Ashram

Death [5]

I have seen your letters to X and Y. Comparing the {{0}}latter[[The letter of 5 October 1936 on pages 790 – 91. — Ed.]] to the one you wrote to me after the death of {{0}}S,[[The letter of 25 March 1935 on pages 788 – 89. — Ed.]] I find a lot of difference. Your views have changed immensely. In your letter to me there was a very optimistic, almost a certain tone regarding the conquest of death. Now you say that death is possible because of the lack of “a solid mass of living faith”.

In what does this change of views consist? Did I say that nobody could die in the Asram? If so, I must have been intoxicated or passing through a temporary aberration.

As for the conquest of death, it is only one of the sequelae of supramentalisation — and I am not aware that I have forsworn my views about the supramental descent. But I never said or thought that the supramental descent would automatically make everybody immortal. The supramental descent can only make the best conditions for anybody who can open to it then or thereafter attaining to the supramental consciousness and its consequences. But it would not dispense with the necessity of sadhana. If it did, the logical consequence would be that the whole earth, men, dogs and worms, would suddenly wake up to find themselves supramental. There would be no need of an Asram or of Yoga.

But my letters to X and Y had nothing to do with the conquest of death — they had to do with the conditions of the sadhana in the Asram. Surely I never wrote that death and illness could not happen in the Asram which was the point Y was refuting and on which I confirmed him.

A “solid mass of living faith” [p. 791]! Surely that is a very Himalayan condition you impose. Do you expect old tottering Z to have that solid mass in his liquid body?

Z was not old and tottering when he came and if he had kept the living faith he would not have been tottering now.

Or do you hope that by his sadhana he will have the conquest?

That depends on whether he is still alive and not quite liquefied and able to open physically when the conditions change.

Your letter to Y has struck terror into many hearts, I am afraid, and henceforth we shall look upon death as quite a possibility, though not as common as it is outside.

The terror was there before. It came with the death of D and the madness of A and not as the result of my letter. It was rushing at the Mother from most of the sadhaks at Pranam every day.

The physical condition of many sadhaks and sadhikas is not cheering in the least —

Far from it.

You know best about the condition of their sadhana.

Very shaky, many of them.

However, it is my impression that you have changed your front.

It is not mine.

Formerly I thought you said — faith or no faith, sadhana or no sadhana, you were conquering death, disease, i.e. everything depended on your success; now it seems a lot depends on us poor folks, in this vital matter.

[Underlining “this vital matter”:] Why vital? What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness — conquest of death is something minor and, as I have always said, the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important — a thing to be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values — it would mean that the seeker was actuated not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body — such a spirit could not bring the supramental change.

Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing that could prevent it, so far as I can see, would be my own death or the Mother’s. But did you imagine that that [my success] would mean the cessation of death on this planet, and that sadhana would cease to be necessary for anybody?

9 October 1936