1934?
I made no mistake at all. Your inner being is quite capable of Yoga and in your experiences there were plenty of proofs of it. It is your outer being that is making all the trouble and putting up a big fight against the inner destiny. But that happens to many people who turn out very good Yogis in the end. So that is no ground whatever for your not staying here. What I have written before was written on the basis of what I saw and still see. If I thought there was no chance for you I would tell you so.
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January 2, 1934
There is no other cause of these fits of despair than that you allow a certain kind of suggestions to lay hold of you instead of rejecting them and, once they get in they rage there for a time. Why not, instead of indulging and entertaining them, recognise that they are inimical to your aim, things that rush on you from outside, and refuse to give them hospitality — as you would treat now a strong sex attitude or other disturbing force? It is precisely because it is foreign to your real temperament and nature that you ought to recognise it as an enemy attack and repulse it.
You need not imagine that we shall ever lose patience or give you up — that will never happen. Our patience, you will find, is tireless because it is based on an unbounded sympathy and love. Human love may give up, but divine love is stable and does not falter. We know that the aspiration of your psychic being is sincere and the falterings of the vital cannot affect the support that we shall always give to it. It is because the sincere aspiration is there that we have no right and you have no right to disbelieve in your adhikāra [fitness] for the Yoga.
To stop coming to Pranam would be quite the wrong thing —it is a suggestion that always comes to push people away from the helping Force. Do not yield to it.
These difficulties do not last for ever — they exhaust themselves and disappear. But to reject them always when they come is the quickest way to get rid of them for ever.
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January 4, 1934
Laboured again a little at the ass, but could not finish him. Very sorry, but my Sunday this time was hardly a day of rest — all arrears, urgent questions, problems to solve — more interesting than daily correspondence, but very time-taking. Don’t fear, however, I shall be obstinate as the ass myself this time and resolutely toil to the finish.
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January 6, 1934
There is no reason why the passage about Buddhism should be omitted. It gives one side of the Buddhistic teaching which is not much known or is usually ignored, for that teaching is by most rendered as Nirvana (śūnyavāda [nihilism]) and a spiritualised humanitarianism. The difficulty is that it is these sides that have been stressed especially in the modern interpretations of Buddhism and any strictures I may have passed were in view of these interpretations and that one-sided stress. I am aware of course of opposite tendencies in the Mahayana and the Japanese cult of Amitabha Buddha which is a cult of bhakti. It is now being said even of Shankara that there was another side of his doctrine — but his followers have made him stand solely for the Great Illusion, the inferiority of bhakti, the uselessness of Karma — jaganmithyā [the world is a lie].
The review is a very good one and the account of the aims of the Yoga quite sufficient for the purpose.
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January 14, 1934
I do not find any difficulty in the flow of the poem — it seems to me to proceed throughout with a very harmonious ease. The poem is fine and original and the management of the metre seems to me very successful.
I had too much to do today in spite of it being Sunday — so I have not yet been able to read the other poem; I have to reserve it.
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January 26, 1934
The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciple or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you. The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it — the vital brings in the suggestion of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difficulty that cannot be effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a self-created difficulty — a self-formed or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.
As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes usually only when the being is ready. You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or saṁskār, and so the adverse force finds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the saṁskār of doubt — to annul the force of its recurrence. I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they come. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother’s) will be there. It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success — one’s own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.
I will do what is necessary to give the help — you must receive. To say you cannot would not be true, for you have received times without number and it has helped you to recover.
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January 27, 1934
Your idea that the Mother was displeased with you was an idea and nothing more. “Probably she has looked upon my sadness as a delinquency” — well, that is just the thing I want you to get rid of — imaginations like these which have no shadow of foundation whatever and which you yet persist in indulging each time you get out of wits — spiritually. What I want of you besides aspiring for faith? Well, just a little thoroughness and persistence in the method! Don’t aspire for two days and then sulk into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the jackal and all the rest of it. Give the Divine a full sporting chance. When he lights something in you or is preparing a light, don’t come in with a wet blanket of despondency and throw it on the poor flame. You will say, “It is a mere candle that is lit — nothing at all!” But in these matters, when the darkness of human mind and life and body has to be dissipated, a candle is always a beginning — a lamp can follow and afterwards a sun — but the beginning must be allowed to have a sequel — not get cut off from its natural sequelae by chunks of sadness and doubt and despair. At the beginning, and for a long time, the experiences do usually come in little quanta with empty spaces between — but, if allowed their way, the spaces will diminish, and the quantum theory give way to the Newtonian continuity of the spirit. But you have never yet given it a real chance. The empty spaces have been peopled with doubts and denials and so the quanta have become rare, the beginnings remained beginnings. Other difficulties you have faced and rejected, but this difficulty you have dandled too much for a long time and it has become strong — it must be dealt with by a persevering effort. I do not say that all doubts must disappear before anything comes — that would be to make sadhana impossible, for doubt is the mind’s persistent assailant. All I say is, don’t allow the assailant to become a companion, don’t give him the open door and the fireside seat. Above all, don’t drive away the incoming Divine with that dispiriting wet blanket of sadness and despair!
To put it more soberly — accept once and for all that this thing has to be done, that it is the only thing left for yourself or the earth. Outside are earthquakes and Hitlers and a collapsing civilisation and, generally speaking, the jackal in the flood. All the more reason to tend towards the one thing to be done, the thing you have been sent to aid in getting done. It is difficult and the way long and the encouragement given meagre? What then? Why should you expect so great a thing to be easy or that there must be either a swift success or none? The difficulties have to be faced and the more cheerfully they are faced, the sooner they will be overcome. The one thing to do is to keep the mantra of success, the determination of victory, the fixed resolve, “Have it I must and have it I will.” Impossible? There is no such thing as an impossibility — there are difficulties and things of longue haleine [long haul], but no impossibles. What one is determined fixedly to do, will get done now or later — it becomes possible.
There — that is my counter blast to your variation on Schopenhauer. To come to less contentious matters — of course Bindu can come — he will always be welcome; there is a good downstairs room — he might take that? I will consider the application of force to your tenant and your (or your father’s) translator. Tough things though — tenants and [?] translators (I suppose too both in these days of depression are short of cash) — but, well there is nothing impossible!!
Your fable and your transformation of the Sanskrit apophthegm are entertaining. I conclude — drive out dark despair and go bravely on with your poetry, your novels — and your Yoga. As the darkness disappears, the inner doors will open.
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January 29, 1934
Once upon a time, Guru, there was a foolish ass who lived in the neighbourhood of a wise Yogi. One day a sudden flood burst the banks of a river nearby and flooded the countryside. The wise Yogi, being wise, ran up till he reached the safe top of a hill at the foot of which he used to meditate day and night in a cave. But the ass — being foolish, not to say unmeditative — was swept away by the rushing tides. “Alas!” he brayed, “the world is being drowned!” “Don’t be an ass,” reprimanded the Yogi in high scorn from up the hill-top. “It’s only you who are being drowned — not this big world.” “But Sir,” argued the idiot, “if I myself am drowned how can I be sure that the world will survive?” And the Yogi was struck dumb and wondered, for the first time, which was the deeper wisdom — the human or the asinine! And I too have started wondering on my own, Guru! So I appeal to you to adjudicate: tell me whose is the more pitiable plight: the Yogi’s or the ass’s? And incidentally, tell me also if my mind is going off the handle because I find the foolish ass’s argument nearly as rational as the wise Yogi’s?
Your wise but not over-wise ass has put a question that cannot be answered in two lines and today is Monday when people take their revenge for Sunday’s forced abstinence. So I postpone the reply till tomorrow. Let me say however in defence of the much maligned ass that he is a very clever and practical animal and the malignant imputation of stupidity to him shows only human stupidity at its worst. It is because the ass does not do what man wants him to do even under blows that he is taxed with stupidity. But really the ass behaves like that first because he has a sense of humour and likes to provoke the two-legged beast into irrational antics and secondly, because he finds that what man wants of him is quite a ridiculous and bothersome nuisance which ought not to be demanded of any self-respecting donkey. Also the ass is a philosopher. When he hee-haws, it is out of a supreme contempt for the world in general and for the human imbecile in particular. I have no doubt that in the asinine language “man” has the same significance as ass in ours. These deep and original considerations are however by the way — merely meant to hint to you that your balancing between the wise man and the wise ass is not so alarming a symptom after all.
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