Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
The passage you have quoted certainly shows that Lawrence had an idea of the new spiritual birth. What he has written there could be a very accurate indication of the process of the change, the putting away of the old mind, vital, physical consciousness and the emergence of a new consciousness from the now invisible Within, not an illusory periphery like the present mental, vital, physical ignorance but a truth becoming from the true being within us. He speaks of the transition as a darkness created by the rejection of the outer mental light, a darkness intervening before the true light from the Invisible can come. Certain Christian mystics have said the same thing and the Upanishad also speaks of the luminous Being beyond the darkness. But in India the rejection of the mental light, the vital stir, the physical hard narrow concreteness leads more often not to a darkness but to a wide emptiness and silence which begins afterwards to fill with the light of a deeper, greater, truer consciousness, a consciousness full of peace, harmony, joy and freedom. I think Lawrence was held back from realising because he was seeking for the new birth in the subconscient vital and taking that for the Invisible Within – he mistook Life for Spirit, whereas Life can only be an expression of the Spirit. That too perhaps was the reason for his preoccupation with a vain and baffled sexuality.
His appreciation of the Ajanta paintings must have been due to the same drive that made him seek for a new poetry
as well as a new truth from within. He wanted to get rid of the outward forms that for him hide the Invisible and arrive at something that expressed with bare simplicity and directness something within. It is what made people begin to prefer the primitives to the developed art of the Renaissance. That is why he depreciates Botticelli1 as not giving the real thing, but only an outward grace and beauty which he considers vulgar in comparison with the less formal art satisfied with bringing out the pure emotion from within and nothing else.
It is the same thing which makes him want a stark bare rocky directness for modern poetry. But time is up, so I have to keep that for tomorrow.