Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
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Krishnaprem’s
letters as usual are interesting and admirable in substance and expression –
and, in addition, there is an immense increase in comprehensiveness and
wideness. His point about the intellect’s misrepresentation of the “Form-less”
(the result of a merely negative expression of something that is inexpressibly
intimate and positive) is very well made and hits the truth in the centre. No
one who has had the Ananda of the Brahman can do anything but smile at the
charge of coldness; there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a
concentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture that it is
impossible
even to suggest to anyone who has not had the experience. The eternal Reality is neither cold nor dry nor empty – you might just as well
talk of the midsummer sunlight as cold or the ocean as dry or perfect fullness as empty. Even when you enter into it by elimination of form and everything else, it surges up
as a miraculous fullness that is truly the Pūrṇam – when it is entered affirmatively as well as by negation, there can obviously be no question of emptiness or dryness! All is there and more than one could ever dream of as the All. That is why one has to object to the intellect thrusting itself in as the sab-jāntā [all-knowing] judge; if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it. But it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the Truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance and makes its constructions a wall which refuses to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities and
scope.
*
(This is but a part of Krishnaprem’s letter to Dilip, dated February 1st, 1934. We hope this is enough to give the reader an insight into Sri Aurobindo’s remarks.)
You raise some interesting points in regard to “expression” 
and “silence”, but at the same time, you seem to have slightly misunderstood me. I was urging that poetic expression can sometimes deal with realms in which philosophy cannot breathe. To me, at least, it is a necessity which I can scarcely avoid. But I did want to emphasise that our philosophic dialectic, logic etcetera are far too coarse to deal with the higher levels of Reality. It is easy to cut things with the snip-snap of one’s philosophical arguments, but too often we are merely cutting the air. Even the scientists are now finding that reality eludes them. And what is the significance of the square root of minus one which plays so essential a part in modern physics? To my mind it suggests most emphatically that there is a fundamental suprarational element that enters in at the conversion or zero point between appearance and reality or, to be more exact, between appearance on this level and one level “higher up”. I make this last qualification because I do not believe that the absolute Reality lies, as it were, next door to the world – except in a certain very ultimate sense, but there are many grades of “reality” (or appearance) in between. To the intellect the square root of minus one has no meaning (at least none to my intellect) but certainly it must have a meaning or it would not be as useful as it is to modern physics.
You speak of the “silence” of the Buddha which you contrast with “expression”. But if Buddha had not “expressed”, then we should not have five hundred million (or whatever it is) Buddhists living today. In truth he expressed a great deal and it was only on certain ultimate problems that he remained silent because they cannot be expressed in words – not at least in logical words. Symbolism is another matter. You say: “Suppose Buddha were a formless being under a formless tree in a formless Gaya; would we feel the same thrill at his silence?”
Well, in reality, that is just what He is in one aspect. This is the meaning of the doctrine of the Dharmakāya and of the “docetism” that marked so many Mahāyāna and also 
Christian Gnostic schools. But for most this Formless remains a mere matter of words and is, consequently, a falsity. Without experience, the “formless” is an empty abstraction, cold like all such, and shot through with the falsity and unreality that pervades all our purely intellectual concepts. We must use them but they only gain significance when life flows into them. In reality, they are neither cold nor abstract. It is our process of acquiring and using them that makes them so. We abstract by a process of negation and then wonder that the result is cold and negative. Our whole process stays on the purely intellectual level. When we say that Krishna is nirākāra we have only said what He is not. But our positive statements are equally delusive. When we say that He is ānandamaya we equally miss the reality because most men do not know what ananda is. They only know pleasure. They try to understand ananda in terms of pleasure and hence you get the materialising of the spiritual that marks so much of ordinary Vaishnava thought just as from the misuse of negation you get the coldness of so much Vedantic thought. The root of the trouble is just the mistaking of intellectual concepts for reality. When a man has seen something even of the Reality – call him Krishna or Buddha or Brahman – he then knows what is meant. He knows how He is nirākāra but not cold and how He is ānandamaya but not mere pleasure. Till we get experience and knowledge we shall always be in unreality however lofty our conceptions may be. The Vedantin despises the Vaishnava for the latter’s concreteness and the Vaishnava spits at the Vedantin saying it is all cold. One says “I don’t want” and the other says “I want.” Damn all their “wants” and “don’t wants”; they are quite irrelevant. These “wants” and “don’t wants” do all the damage. It is not what we want that matters but what He wills, which is quite a different thing. All these concepts are so many suits of clothes. Unless we reach up to the Reality and fill them, they only serve for endless debate. What did the Rishi mean by saying He is nirākāra? What did the Buddha mean by anātman? What did the Vaishnavas mean by saying He is nikhilarasāmṛta mūrti?6 The answer to this question must be sought in experience, not in mere dialectic. When the light of experience streams in and fills the empty concepts, then and then only does recognition flow in like a sea and we can know why the above words are used āścaryavat paśyati kaścidenam [as wonderful, few see Him. Gita 2.29]. Then we can know why the ātma of the Upanishad means the same thing as the anātma of the Buddha and in a flash be free from the empty scholastic disputes that have filled the millennia. “Oh, but these are contradictions” – peevishly explains the intellect to which the only answer is: “Very likely they are, but you have dam’ well got to put up with them!”
I don’t mean at all to urge the contempt for the intellect which most Christians and some Vaishnavas have taught, but I do mean to say that the intellect is in itself a sort of formative or shaping machine. It can only work if it is supplied with material to shape and that material must come either from the sense-world below or from the spiritual world above.
In the meanwhile it seems to me as foolish to lose one’s emotion in the coldness of abstract negation as to fuddle one’s mind in the warmth of a (fundamentally) sensuous Goloka7.
These thoughts were suggested to me by the contrast you drew between the emotional singing of Chaitanya Deva and the silent meditation of the Buddha. Needless to say that the remarks in the paragraphs immediately above do not apply to these great Teachers but only to some of their followers.
You speak of a certain “shakiness at the idea of being immersed in a Timeless mute Akṣara Brahman”;8 but surely that is only because of our ignorance of what is meant by that experience and of a consequent misconception in terms of worldly experiences. That is where so many Vaishnavas as well as Vedantins go wrong. They quarrel furiously about words, about the expression, instead of bending their whole energy on an attempt to realise what is meant by the expression. In the words of an old Buddhist writer, “that is called confusing the moon with the finger that points to it.” (...)
In the last resort, this whole cosmos is but expression – Divine Expression, and in proportion as He, the kaviḥ purāṇah,9 is able to manifest in us, we shall ourselves automatically become centres of expression. Till then, our productions whether in the realm of poetry, philosophy or art, are but the play of children, funerals where none is dead and marriage where there is no bride. (...)
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip / edited by Sujata Nahar, Shankar Bandyopadhyay.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 2. 1934 – 1935.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 405 p.
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Second Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1949.- 599 p.