Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 769

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

June 26, 1936

For the past few days I have been trying to meditate a little more, but I am dogged by a sense of never getting on. I can’t shake off this sort of certitude that I am making no concrete progress – because I feel or see no change anywhere. I have been praying to Mother for her Grace and Force and most of all bhakti for her, and will go on in this line. I have been reading your Bases of Yoga too – a most staggering book: the Himalayan conditions for success you impose – well, shall the likes of us ever fulfil a hundredth part of such countless conditions? At times I felt on the verge of despair and had to shut it up and turn to D.H. Lawrence’s letters (850 pages presented to me by my Austrian Freundin Frau Rene Fülöp Miller) published by Aldous Huxley to come to – for this is a fascinating book though Lawrence suffered enormously.

However from Lawrence’s “absorbingly beautiful” letters, to quote Aldous Huxley I had one concrete corroboration: that the world of today is not worthwhile. To quote Lawrence, “I tell it to myself – to let go, to release from my will everything that my will would hold, to lapse back into darkness and unknowing. There must be deep winter before there can be spring.... This which we are must cease to be, that we may come to pass in another being.... I am laid up ... and wonder why one should ever trouble to get up, into this filthy world. The war stinks worse and worse.... Nothing is more painful than to be plunged back into the world of the past, when that past is irrevocably gone by, and a new thing far away is struggling to come to life in one. But there will be new life. And this love which goes back into the past, but not forward into the future – like the love of the dead – is very painful....

Now like a crown in the autumn time,

My soul comes naked from the falling night

Of death, a Cyclamen, a Crocus flower

Of windy autumn when the winds all sweep

The hosts away to death, where heap on heap

The leaves are smouldering in a funeral wind.”

Aldous Huxley writes of Lawrence, “Of most other eminent people I have met I feel that at any rate I belong to the same species as they do. But this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree. Different and superior in kind – I think almost everyone who knew him well must have felt that Lawrence was this.” Well, I just write all this so that you may know what is occupying me – yoga meditation alternating with Lawrence’s engrossing letters of which I give you some lines that I liked very much. I am staving off my old arch-enemy sadness, etc. with some sort of a success I think. But that is about all I can tell of myself.

Conditions for success? But these are not conditions for doing the sadhana, but the basic conditions for the integral siddhi – they are, as it might be said, basic siddhis, realised foundations on which the total and permanent siddhi can be erected – or one may say they are the constituents of the Yogic as opposed to the ordinary consciousness. When one has arrived fully at this Yogic consciousness, one can be called a Yogi, till then one is a sadhak. So much as all that is not demanded immediately from a sadhak. From the sadhak all that is asked is “a sincerity in the aspiration and a patient will to arrive in spite of all obstacles, then the opening in one form or another is sure to come.”

“All sincere aspiration has its effect, if you are sincere you will grow into the divine life.” Again, “One cannot become altogether this at once, but if one aspires at all times and calls in the aid of the Divine Shakti with a true heart and a straight-forward will, one grows more and more into the true consciousness.” It is of course said that the success will come sooner or later – it is for that reason that patience is indispensable. But these are not Himalayan conditions – it is not putting an impossible price on what is asked for. As for the difficulty as it has also been said in the book, when one once enters into the true (Yogic) consciousness, “then you see that anything can be done, even if at present only a slight beginning has been made; but a beginning is enough, once the Force, the Power are there”. It is not really on the capacity of the outer nature that success depends (for the outer nature all self-succeeding seems impossibly difficult), but on the inner being and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the outer view and consciousness from the inner – that is the work of the sadhana and it is sure to come with sincerity, aspiration, and patience. All that is not excessively stern or exacting.

As a description of the constituents of the Yogic consciousness, the bases of realisation, I don’t think the book can be called staggering or its suggestions Himalayan – for in fact they have already been stated by the Gita and other books on Yoga and, after all, thousands of people have realised them in part at least or in the inner being – though not so well in the outer. But to realise the inner being is quite enough for a foundation – for many it is quite enough even as a last state, for those who do not seek the transformation of the outer nature. Here too, even if one puts the whole ideal, it is not alleged that it must be all done at once or as a first condition for the greater endeavour.

I suppose Lawrence was a Yogi who had missed his way and came into a European body to work out his difficulties, “To lapse back into darkness and unknowing” sounds like the Christian mystic’s passage into the “night of God”, but I think Lawrence thought of a new efflorescence from the subconscient while the mystics’ night of God was a stage between ordinary consciousness and the Superconscient Light.