Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

The Ashram and the Outside World

Contact with the Outer World [4]

It seems as if we avoid the world much more than the Mayavadin sannyasis. Some of them start hospitals and schools and do famine relief; some even joined the Satyagraha Movement. Similarly it may be that one would find more true ahimsaks among fighters and warriors than among those who shout “non-violence”.

Very probably. You are right about the Mayavadins (I mean the present-day ones) and ourselves. The former Mayavadins were often more consistent, except that they wrote books and preached and disputed and founded institutions which seems a waste of energy if all is Maya. All the energy ought to have gone to getting out of Maya. As for our own position it is that ordinary life is Maya in this sense, not that it is an illusion, for it exists and is very real, but that it is an Ignorance, a thing founded on what is from the spiritual point of view a falsehood. So it is logical to avoid it or rather we are obliged to have some touch with it but we minimise that as much as possible except in so far as it is useful for our purpose. We have to turn life from falsehood into spiritual truth, from a life of ignorance into a life of spiritual knowledge. But until we have succeeded in doing that for ourselves, it is better to keep apart from the life of Ignorance of the world — otherwise our little slowly growing light is likely to be submerged in the seas of darkness all around it. Even as it is, the endeavour is difficult enough — it would be tenfold more difficult if there were no isolation.

20 June 1935