Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
You are truly very kind to suggest no stoppage even while the correspondence is stopped. Believe me I am truly grateful for such kindnesses on your part which have done not a little to endear you to me. I repeat also – taking this occasion – that I am very eager to be more grateful to you and the Divine force – only not in pure blindness if you please. (Don’t trouble to reply though to me, I am very unwilling to make you spend your time over such things. You have done enough for me in that direction.) But this Nalineshwar has been on my mind considerably of late, so I had better tell you my trouble in this connection, which will illustrate incidentally my scepticism of the Divine Force doing wonders on the body. (By the way Sahana says repeatedly her health has got from bad to worse during the last two years, Venkata’s eyes ditto, my neck ditto – the pain is truly troublesome, do send some force if you can. I don’t like to trouble you about my body, you having enough to do with my mind, but apropos my eyes too are worse – the spectacles don’t fit and are giving an appreciable trouble or rather beginning to give. Can you send any force? I am willing to try to believe à la Dayakar1, remain passive – I am not so foolish and irrational as not to avail myself of any kindly force because of my mental reservations. But then Mother’s own eyesight is not perfect – she has to put on spectacles which has fortified not a little my scepticism of the Divine Force acting on the eye. If she with her supramental receptivity can’t cure her eyesight, what chance have we? that is the line of our despair.) But to Nalineshwar: here is a fellow who stayed here about eight years. I knew him well once. Talked decently. Now he has distinctly deteriorated conversationally anyway: talks (demonstrably) foolishly. But his auguries were perfect: 1) he had lately become anti-social, 2) anti-eating, took very little, 3) yogically delicate as a 
result, is so weak that he can’t raise a small suitcase, Kanai told me.
What an ass!
4) is anti-women, anti-sex – capital!
Humbug, you mean!
Rubbish! He was as attached to his wife as a limpet to the rock. That nonsense won’t go down with me, whatever he might pretend to others.
(What more does the Divine expect for perfection?) 5) anti-laughter, 6) anti-vivacity, 7) and last but not least, pro-meditation.
What kind of meditation – fighting devils in Kalighat? This is all I know about his meditation. Of course he may have been seeing heaven as well as forthcoming hell but he never gave me the benefit of his experiences. If he confided in you perhaps you could tell me what they were. It is not by outward things like these that a man becomes a Yogi, but by inward growth and change of consciousness. [?]
Still, eight years of Yoga have passed over him with a great output of hirsute potentialities – the only thing [impressing about?] him. But truly the fellow was here away from his people and meditating all the while, yet you could do nothing [?].
I didn’t try, so far as I am aware.
I assume he is not in a capital condition – here of course I am open to correction for if you say he is getting on marvellously of course all my scepticism will be knocked off (logically) that one could put one’s finger on and a lot undesirable one could put one’s finger on, chief of which is his foolish rambling talk of which I could give you heaps of échantillons [samples]. He had, it seems to us, fulfilled a good many of the most difficult conditions anyway – as Kanai too was wondering and saying if after all this they say that he was doing nothing then he would not know where we stood any of us! Rightly, for here we laugh, have tea, tasty vegetable dishes occasionally, do a lot of talking (though alas I have become too busy of late to talk much) so if Nalineshwar’s yogic conditions (anti-social, anti-laughter, anti-food, etc. to say nothing of anti-sex to the point of misogyny) availed not – couldn’t be briefer than this – but send me a little neck-ular and ocular force anyhow. I will try to be as [?] as a Dayakar if not quite as enthusiastic as a Nirod who now says that your physical forces are doing [havocs?] of wonder. He swears all the time by Dayakar and is starting on [Rishabhchand?] again!
But what about Venkata, Sahana, Dilip and so many others?
But who told Nalineshwar to be all these things? He has done what he pleased according to his own stupid brain without taking me into confidence. The first thing I tell people when they want not to eat or sleep is that no Yoga can be done without sufficient food and sleep (see the Gita on this point). This is not Gandhi’s Ashram or a miracle-shop. Fasting and sleeplessness make the nerves morbid and excited and weaken the brain and lead to delusions and fantasies. The Gita says Yoga is not for one who eats too much or sleeps too much, neither is it for one who does not eat or does not sleep, but if one eats and sleeps suitably – yuktāhāri yuktanidraḥ, then one can do it best. It is the same with everything else. How often have I said that excessive retreat was suspect to me and that to do nothing but meditate was a lopsided and therefore unsound sadhana. Yet you cite Nalineshwar who goes against all my recommendations, as one who best fulfilled all the conditions of success in the Yoga. Everybody in the Ashram persists in putting the old ascetic ideas of Yoga on this sadhana and then challenges me with his notions as if they were mine.
As for the Force, I shall write some other time. I have told you that it is not always efficacious, but works under conditions like all forces; it is only the supramental Force that works absolutely, because it creates its own conditions. But the Force I am using is a Force that has to work under the present world conditions. It is not the less a Force for that. I have cured myself of all illnesses except three by it and those too when they come I have kept in check; the fact that I have not succeeded yet in eliminating the fact or possibility of those three does not cancel the fact of my success with the others. As for the Mother, she used formerly to cure everything at once by the same Power – now she has no time to think about her body or to concentrate on it. Even so, when she makes a certain inner concentration, she can see, read, etc., perfectly well without glasses, but she has no time to 
work out the probability which that shows. The prevalence of illness just now is a fact; it is part of the struggle that is going on in the domain of Matter. But even so there are plenty of people in the Ashram who get rid of their ills by reliance on the Mother. If all cannot do it, what does that prove or disprove? It only proves that the Power does not work absolutely, miraculously, impossibly, but it works by certain given means and under conditions. I have always said that, so what is there that is new or that annihilates the truth of the Yoga?