Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
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I do not know why you concluded from my letter that I was displeased or had lost patience. I was answering two letters of yours in which there was nothing that could displease. I used the phrase about “calling the Divine names” very lightly and with no conscious intention in it; it was not meant in the least to convey displeasure or a reproach to you. It was used simply to point the description of a conception of the Divine, too external and summary, which seems to us to be an obstacle rather than a help to realisation. We saw that you had misunderstood what the Mother said and had taken it for an objection to your seeking for Ananda,– but it was not that at all, it was only a suggestion that in the Ananda itself when it came it was possible to feel the Divine and so open the gates to a concrete and rapturous experience. However, as I said, it was not her intention when she spoke or mine when I wrote to put it as a condition or impose it upon you. As for calling the Divine names I suppose most people have done it at one time or another and the Divine has not resented it nor has it stood in the way of His manifesting Himself to those when they were ready to receive. But I know from my own experience that the conception on which it rests belongs to a stage of misunderstanding and ignorance which one outgrows with the widening of the mind and the spirit. It was the conception as a whole which I was speaking of and this phrase was merely an ornamental detail – I never meant to lay stress on it or to suggest that it was something seriously condemnable or a cause of resentment or displeasure.
I cannot very well answer the strictures of Russell or Vivekananda (in one of his moods)
for the conception of the Divine as an external omnipotent Power who has created the world and governs it like an absolute and arbitrary monarch. The Christian or Semitic conception, the popular religious notion, has
never been mine; it contradicts too much my seeing and experience during forty
years of sadhana. When I speak of the Divine Will I mean something different,– something that has descended here into an evolutionary world of Ignorance, standing at the back of things, pressing on the Darkness with its Light, leading things presently towards the best possible in the conditions of a world of Ignorance and leading it eventually towards a descent of a greater Power of the Divine which will be not an omnipotence held back and conditioned by the Law of the world as it is, but a
full action and therefore bringing the reign of light, peace, harmony, joy, love, beauty and Ananda, for these are the Divine Nature. The Divine Grace is there, ready to act at every moment, but it manifests as one grows out of the law of the Ignorance
into the Law of Light and it is meant, not as an arbitrary caprice, however miraculous often its intervention, but as a help in that growth and a Light that leads and eventually delivers. If we take the facts of the world as they are and the facts of spiritual experience as a whole, neither of which can be denied or neglected, then I do not see what other Divine there can be. This Divine may lead us often through darkness, because the darkness is there in us and around us, but it is to the Light he is leading and not to anything else.
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip / edited by Sujata Nahar, Michel Danino, Shankar Bandopadhyay.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 1. 1929 – 1933.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 384 p.
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Second Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1949.- 599 p.