Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 704

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

February 9, 1936

Krishnaprem’s letter to Dilip dated 9 February 1936:

“I fully agree with the doctrine of adhikar but that must not be confused with any former scheme of current in society or invented by the mind. It is much more subtle than that. Let sister Raihana try to impart her love for Krishna to others. In some cases she will succeed in others not and this will be only partially due to her own limitations, because even the greatest, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, could only succeed in some cases and in others could produce no effect. This is adhikar-bheda whether you like the word or not, but it has nothing to do with castes, races or creeds. At any given time some will listen to the flute and some will not – because they are not ready. But why argue? She has found Krishna. He will teach her in her heart whatever she should know.

As for your other friend Subhash, what is all this bother about? Certainly I don’t advocate blind faith. True faith is not blind though the interpreting mind may weave a tissue of partial untruths about the vision just as the same mind may weave a tissue of falsehood around the bare datum of a sense perception, e.g., mistaking a post for a man. St. Paul called faith ‘the evidence of things unseen’. Evidence, not mere mental belief. As a man gradually purifies his nature so his faith will shine more clearly, free from the misunderstandings of the mind. A sectarian believes in all sorts of silly things. It is not his faith that is at fault (I am talking of real faith, mind you) but his poorly developed mind which misinterprets the data given by his faith. We must purify our minds till they can grasp the object of our faith without covering it up with all sorts of silly superstitions. But if we abandon faith we shall be lost, for faith is just the evidence for a higher level of knowledge. It is a thread let down from that higher level and if we turn our back on it we shall just wander contentedly about on the level at which we are. That is what most so-called rationalists do. We must use faith as they do a thread in saving men from shipwreck: they fire a rocket across carrying a light thread. That having been grasped it is used to pull over a stout cord, that – a thin rope and that – a stout hawser which will carry men across.

As for Gurus as ‘incarnate Gods’ as Subhash ridicules it, well, why not? All men are incarnate Gods for one thing – only they know it not; for another, if I can see the God in some man either because he has seen It in himself or because through him a Light has shone for me, why should any one get annoyed? Presumably because he has not seen God anywhere himself, is it not?

‘Ma’ sends her love. She read the Hindi poem you sent Raihana and your Bengali translation, and liked them both very much. She says that being a Bengali she liked the Bengali version best.

Love always from yours affectionately”

Krishnaprem

Of course, Krishnaprem’s view about the canalisation of Niagara is my standpoint also. But for the human mind it is difficult to get across the border between mind and spirit without making a forceful rush or push along one line only and that must be some line of pure experience in which, especially if it is the bhakti way, one gets easily swallowed up in the rapids (did not Chaitanya at last disappear in the waters?) and goes no farther. The first thing is to break into the spiritual consciousness, any part of it, anyhow and anywhere, afterwards one can explore the country to which exploration there can hardly be a limit; one is always going higher and higher, getting wider and wider; but there is a certain intense ecstasy about the first complete plunge which is extraordinarily seizing. It is not only the bhakta’s rapture, but the jnani’s plunge into Brahma-Nirvana or Brahmananda or release into the still eternity of the Self that is of that seizing and absorbing character – it does not look at first as if one could or would care or need to get beyond into anything else. One cannot find fault with the Sannyasi lost in his laya [annulation of the individual soul in the Infinite] or the Bhakta lost in his ecstasy; they remain there probably because they are constituted for that and it is the limit of their leap. But, all the same, it has always appeared to me that it is a stage and not the end; I subscribe fully to the canalisation of the Niagara.

Adhikara is, of course, a matter of the psychology and the soul and the nature, it has nothing to do with any outer or artificial standards.

Then as to the Avatar and the symbols. There is, it seems to me, a cardinal error in the modern insistence on the biographical and historical, that is to say, the external factuality of the Avatar, the incidents of his outward life. What matters is the spiritual Reality, the Power, the Influence that come with him or that he brought down by his action and his existence. First of all, what matters in a spiritual man’s life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time (that is what historicity or biography comes to, does it not?) but what he was and did within; it is only that that gives any value to his outer life at all. It is the inner life that gives to the outer any power it may have and the inner life of a spiritual man is something vast and full and, at least in the great figures, so crowded and teeming with significant things that no biographer or historian could ever hope to seize it all or tell it. Whatever is significant in the outward life is so because it is a symbol of what has been realised within himself and one may go on and say that the inner life also is only significant as an expression, a living representation of the movement of the Divinity behind it. That is why we need not enquire whether the stories about Krishna were transcripts, however loose, of his acts on earth or are symbol-representations of what Krishna was and is for men, of the Divinity expressing itself in the figure of Krishna. Buddha’s renunciation, his temptation by Mara, his enlightenment under the Bo-tree are such symbols, so too the virgin birth, the temptation in the desert, the crucifixion of Christ are such symbols, true by what they signify, even if they are not scrupulously recorded historical events. The outward facts as related of Buddha or Christ are not much more than what has happened in many other lives – what is it that gives Buddha or Christ their enormous place in the spiritual world? It was because something manifested through them that was more than any outward event or any teaching. The verifiable historicity gives us very little of that, yet it is that only that matters. So it seems to me that Krishnaprem is fundamentally right in what he says of the symbols. To the physical mind only the words and facts and acts of a man matter; to the inner mind it is the spiritual happenings in him that matter. Even the teachings of Buddha and Christ are spiritually true not as mere mental teachings but as the expression of spiritual states or happenings in them which by their life on earth they made possible (or at any rate more dynamically potential) in others. Also, evidently, sectarian walls are a mistake, an accretion, a mental limiting of the Truth which may serve a mental, but not a spiritual purpose. The Avatar or Guru have no meaning if they do not stand for the Eternal; it is that that makes them what they are for the worshipper or the disciple.

It is also a fact that nobody can give you any spiritual realisation which does not come from something in one’s own true Self, it is always the Divine who reveals himself and the Divine is within you; so He who reveals must be felt in your own heart. Your query here simply suggests that this is a truth which can be misinterpreted or misused, but so can every spiritual truth if it is taken hold of in the wrong way – and the human mind has a great penchant for taking Truth by the wrong end and arriving at falsehood. All statements about these things are after all mental statements and at the mercy of the mind that interprets them. There is a snag in every such statement created not by the Truth that it expresses but in the mind’s interpretation. The snag here (what you call the slip) lies not in the statement itself which is quite correct, but in the light in which it may be taken by igrnorant or self-sufficient minds enamoured of their ego. Many have put forward the “own self” gospel without taking the trouble to see whether it is the true Self, have pitted the ignorance of their “own self” against the knowledge of the Guru or made it or something that flattered and fostered it the Ishta Devata¹. The snag in the worship of Guru or Avatar is a sectarian bias which insists on the Representative or the Manifestation but loses sight of the Manifested; the snag in the emphasis on the other side is the ignoring of the need of them or belittling of the value of the Representative or Manifestation and the substitution, not of the true Self one in all, but of one’s “own self” as the guide and light. How many have done that here and lost the way through the pull of the magnified ego which is one of the great perils on the way! However that does not lessen the truth of the things said by Krishnaprem, only in looking at them one must put each thing in its place in the harmony of the All which is for us the expression of the Supreme.

¹ There is no exactly corresponding English word for Jshta Devata. We may express it as – a tutelary god, a personal deity.

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