Correspondence 1934, August (III)

August 25, 1934

But, great snakes! when did I ever tell you that faith in Haradhan (!)* and his statements and the greatness of his poetry was a binding part of the Divine Law? Or that to believe every blamed thing that is said by every blessed body is a necessity of sadhana? Or that if you don’t have an implicit, a total and dogged faith in all the marvellous and miraculous things related by Bejoy Goswami’s disciples about their master, you will be shut out for ever from the Divine Grace? I am not three-fourths insane, par exemple, nor four-fourths either!

I ask you to have faith in the Divine, in the Divine Grace, in the truth of the sadhana, in the eventual triumph of the spirit over its mental and vital and physical difficulties, in the Path and the Guru, in the existence of things other than are written in the philosophy of Haeckel or Huxley or Bertrand Russell, because if these things are not true, there is no meaning in the Yoga. As for particular facts and asseverations about Bejoy Goswami or anybody else, there is room for discrimination, for suspension of judgment, for disbelief where there is good ground for disbelief, for right interpretation where the facts are not to be denied or questioned. But all that cannot be for the sadhak as it is for the materialistic sceptic founded on a fixed pre-judgment that only what is normal, in consonance with the known (so-called) laws of physical nature is true and that all which is abnormal or supernormal must a priori be condemned as false. The abnormal abounds in this physical world; the supernormal is there also. In these matters, apart from any question of faith, any truly rational man with a free mind (not tied up like the rationalists or so-called free thinkers at every point with triple cords of a priori irrational disbelief) must not cry out at once “Humbug! falsehood!” but suspend judgment until he has the necessary experience and knowledge. To deny in ignorance is no better than to affirm in ignorance. If your method has saved you from quack gurus, that shows that everything in this world has its uses, doubt and denial also, but it does not prove that doubt and denial are the best way of discovering the Truth. One can apply here the epigram of Tagore about the man who shut and locked up all the doors and windows of his house so as to exclude Error — but, cried Truth, by what way then shall I enter?

The faith in spiritual things that is asked of the sadhak is not an ignorant but a luminous faith, a faith in light and not in darkness. It is called blind by the sceptical intellect because it refuses to be guided by outer appearances or seeming facts — for it looks for the truth behind — and does not walk on the crutches of proof and evidence. It is an intuition — an intuition not only waiting for experience to justify it, but leading towards experience. If I believe in self-healing, I shall after a time find out the way to heal myself. If I have a faith in transformation, I can end by laying my hand on and unravelling the whole process of transformation. But if I begin with doubt and go on with more doubt, how far am I likely to go on the journey?

However, this is only a retort, not my reply for which I have no time tonight. My reply will come lengthier and later.

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August 26, 1934

I had written the explanation of the cryptic lines, but wrote it in the wrong place, so I did not send it. I do it now. It means — “Her name sweeter to speak (repeat) than the sweetness of pastoral poetry could make the white hand when writing it as if brighter than its wont and gave a deeper colour to the lips that uttered it (then, in these past days), but it is now a dead and forgotten thing no longer loved, unknown to men of this later time.”

I could not finish anything today, but I propose to approach Bejoy Goswami and the general question of occult phenomena miscalled “miracles” shortly.

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August 28, 1934

Yes, that is quite the right attitude, the one I want you to take. I am very glad that you resolved to take it. I shall certainly write about Bejoy Goswami and the miracles and I hope to explain also, always from the point of view of reason, certain other points, e.g. the exact nature and action of psychic and spiritual faith and the reason for faith in the Guru and how it works. Not tonight though — for I have had too much to do tonight.

The lines about which you ask have this meaning. The lover is thinking what happens after death, when love and life are over. He first thinks of the Christian myth of Hell — the first four lines refer to that and to Dante’s description of Paolo and Francesca and other guilty lovers blown round in one of the circles of Inferno—in the smoke and gurge of hell by violent winds — that is the relucent (shining back to the light of the fires) gyres [over?] a circle [sud?] of fires. Next he passes to the Greek ideas of the after-death, according to which the dead go down into the dim, lifeless underworld of Hades, lightless graves, fields no sunlight visits, alleys without any glad murmurs, waters with no flowers. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Hades from which the shades of the dead have to drink so as to forget their earthly past. Lethe, he says, could [rust] their minds (had its will), but still in the soul memories of love survive and cannot be utterly abolished. Then he returns to the obvious fact of death. “Beauty pays the gift given to her of life into the credit column of Death — she disappears leaving a brief perfume behind her, etc.”

You need not send the book any longer. I have miraculously fished out my copy.

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August 28, 1934

I have written to Nalina to set right any misunderstanding — if there is really a misunderstanding — about our consent to her going. That consent I consider as forced from me by her own insistence that she could not stay — the pull was too great — she must go. I reminded her of what I told her before that the only true way was to stay and fight out the difficulty — the only justification for going would be if her call was more to the family life than to the spiritual life. I have told her that we keep to that and the Mother and I do not like her going — and asked her to reconsider her decision. For it is hers not mine. You know that I dislike anyone who has a psychic call going away from here, because it is throwing away their spiritual destiny or at least postponing it. For I don’t suppose Nalina, if she persists in going, will remain always under the illusion of the family bonds — but the risk is there and the postponement is there. Mother has called her tomorrow morning and she will see what she decides.

As for the faith-doubt question, you ardently give to the word faith a sense and a scope I do not attach to it. I will have to write not one but several letters to clear up the position. It seems to me that you mean by faith a mental belief which is in fact put before the mind and senses in the doubtful form of an unsupported asseveration. I mean by it a dynamic intuitive conviction in the inner being of the truth of supersensible things which cannot be proved by any physical evidence but which are a subject of experience. My point is that this faith is a most desirable preliminary (if not absolutely indispensable — for there can be cases of experiences not preceded by faith) to the desired experience. If I insist so much on faith — but even less on positive faith than on the throwing away of a priori doubt and denial — it is because I find that this doubt and denial have become an instrument in the hands of the obstructive forces and clog your steps whenever I try to push you to an advance. If you can’t or won’t get rid of it, (“won’t” out of respect for the reason and fear of being led into believing things that are not true, “can’t” because of contrary experience) then I shall have to manage for you without it, only it makes a difficult instead of a straight and comparatively easy process.

Why I call the materialists denial an a priori denial is because he refuses even to consider or examine what he denies, but starts by denying it, like Leonard Woolf with his quack quack, on the ground that it contradicts his own theories, so it can’t be true. On the other hand, the belief in the Divine and the Grace and Yoga and the Guru etc. (not in Bejoy Krishna or his miracles, hang it!) is not a priori, because it rests on a great mass of human experience which has been accumulating through the centuries and millenniums as well as the personal intuitive perception. Therefore it is an intuitive perception which has been confirmed by the experience of hundreds and thousands of those who have tested it before me.

I do not ask you to believe that the Divine Grace comes to all or that all can succeed in the sadhana or that I personally have succeeded or will succeed in the case of all who come to me. I have asked you if you cannot develop the faith that the Divine is — you seem often to doubt it — that the Divine Grace is and has manifested both elsewhere and here, that the sadhana by which so many profit is not a falsehood or a chimera and that I have helped many and am not utterly powerless — otherwise how could so many progress under our influence? If this is first established, then the doubt and denial, the refusal of faith boils itself down to a refusal of faith in your own spiritual destiny and that of Nalina and some others — does it not? 1 have never told you that the power that works here is absolute at present, I have on the contrary told you that I am trying to make it absolute and it is for that that I want the supermind to intervene. But to say that because it is not absolute therefore it does not exist, seems to me a logical inconsequence.

There remains your personal case and you may very well tell me, “What does it matter to me if these things are true when they are not true to me, true in my own experience?” But it does make a difference that they are true in themselves. For if your personal want of experience is held as proving that it is all moonshine, then all is finished — there is no hope for you or me or anybody. If on the other hand these things are true but not yet realised by you, then there is hope, a possibility at least. From the point of reason you may be right in thinking that because you have not realised yet, you can never realise — though it does not seem to me an inevitable conclusion. From the same point of view I also may be right in concluding from my experience and that of other Yogins that there is no such inevitability and that with the persistent aspiration in you and the Vairagya we have the conditions for a realisation that must come — sooner, for there are sudden liberations, or later.

In all this I have touched nothing fundamental on the question of faith — it is only a preliminary canter trying to remove certain points that are in the way. There are several others in your letter of today which I shall try to take up in my next letter. Afterwards I shall attack Bejoy Goswami, the nature of faith and the limits of its field (why it does not include B.G’s miracles, etc.) and other central matters.

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August 31, 1934

(Dilip received a letter from Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan of Andhra University asking Sri Aurobindo to write a statement for a book on “Contemporary British Philosophy.”)

“My dear Dilip Kumar Roy,

“I am sending the enclosed to Sri Arabindo Ghose. You can easily understand my anxiety to have a contribution from him. I hope he will be kind enough to oblige me by contributing a statement.

“How are you getting on?”

*

(Dilip’s note:) What to answer?

*

(Sri Aurobindo wrote the following on the front page of the letter:)

Great Scott!

(For the explanation of this agonized ejaculation see the back!)

(And on the back:)

Look here! Do these people expect me to turn myself again into a machine for producing articles? The times of the Bande Mataram and Arya are over, thank God! I have now only the Ashram correspondence and that is “overwhelming” enough in all conscience without starting philosophy for standard books and the rest of it.

And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher! How I managed to do it? First, because Richard proposed to me to co-operate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!

I don’t know how to excuse myself to Radhakrishna — for I can’t say all that to him. Perhaps you can find a formula for me? Perhaps: “So occupied, not a moment for any other work, can’t undertake because he might not be able to carry out his promise.” What do you say?

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August 31, 1934

I send the last but one instalment of Nishikanta’s translation. The next portion will be completed, I hope, by tomorrow evening. This portion had to be perhaps a little free — according to your explanation — as it was a little condensed. But I think it will please you nevertheless.

(…) But your “Night by the Sea” is congenial to the temper of Bengali and I feel everyone will agree that Nishikanta’s translation is very melodious and though your subtlety one misses then it reads like an original beautiful poem. It will, I feel, remain in our language by virtue of its atmosphere of “poeticalness.”

But what about Bejoy Krishna and the māyāmṛga[1] of Rama? Let B.K. come first, māyāmṛga next week? Qu’en dites-vous? [What do you say?]

Well, I thought I had finished with Rama who after all belong to the past. The Māyāmṛga was an absolute necessity for removing Rama from the Ashram, otherwise Ravana could not have been able to carry Sita off, so the Divine or Valmiki (to whichever you like to give the credit of the incident) arranged it in that way (a very poetic way, you must admit) and the instrumental Personality accepted the veiling of the consciousness so that his work might be done, just as Krishna clean forgot all he had said to Arjuna in the Gita so that he might teach him something else. You must expect such things from the Avatar! However, Nolini has sent me all the correspondence for treatment, so I suppose I shall finish my unfinished letter soon to deal with certain points and also write something about Avatarhood in general — that means two productions. But not now, I have Bejoy Goswami in my mind and I am continually being whipped from within to complete the Harmony affair which August and Rama and Bejoy Goswami have kept in a state of uneasy and dissatisfied swoon. I shall see Nishikanta’s translation today or on Sunday. I am rather overwhelmed today.

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* (Sri Aurobindo’s note:) Haradhan owes nothing to me except his “philosophy” — in his faith in himself etc., he is his own creator — a self-made man. And do you mean to say that because faith is misused by Haradhan or others, it is not to be used at all? If electricity is bungled by an ignoramus, must electricity be rejected from use?

[1] māyānṛga: a magical golden deer which enticed Sita in the Ramayana. Sita requests Rama to catch the deer for her and in his absence, she is abducted by Ravana.