Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo to Dilip
Volume 4
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Please forgive me that I have to write to you so soon asking a few questions again. Had it not been absolutely necessary, I would not have written. I realised in a way I never did before the great work you and Mother have been doing, and believe me that I meant it when I told Mother day before yesterday that I wanted to be worthy of the grace she and you have all along showered on me. I have numerous faults of which I am fully conscious but insincerity, I trust, is not one of them? So when I told you and her that I wanted to dedicate to your cause not only all / have but all I am, I did mean it with all it meant and implied. So I have decided to take no more of your time than I can help, wanting only to make a return (however poor) with my entire being rather than words. This I have expressed in my poem I wrote day before yesterday, the poem I sent up to you yesterday. I will only add that I have written another at 4 a.m. yesterday morning which I will send up to you when you will have read the one I gave Nirod yesterday. I want you to read this too only because it will supplement what I wrote in the first about the nature of the inspiration and fire I have received at your hands, not because I know / have never written better poems in my life. I ask you also to note that this metre is Madhusudan’s with the rich paurush [manliness] which characterised his diction and which Tagore could not follow up because he, with all his greatness, did not have this element in his composition as my father, who had it, often used to say regretting. But I am taking your time. To resume.
The reason, I repeat, why I write to you this letter is that I want to ask you a few questions. I will leave some space below either so that you may write your answer: this, only to save time. I hope it will not take more than a few minutes at most? (Except in the last question for which I am trying to feel contrite.)
I am hard at work recording (please forgive my journalistic failing, but I can’t leave this unrecorded, nigrahah kim karisyati, don’t you know?) I put down all I could remember then and there, but my memory for which I used to congratulate myself so manfully is failing me – getting old, you see! So I have to write you as I find certain rather important things (for us, I mean) I cannot recall.
Do please help me, as I cannot capture it through your letters written to me which I have been rereading to stimulate my memory with. Please note I have taken the liberty to supplement your remarks here and there with certain relevant explanations supplied through your letters. I must, however, apologise for my inability to capture your style, though I have, indeed, tried hard to transcribe as much of your way of speaking which I hope you will allow me to retain. What I mean by this you will understand better when you see my report as to your laughter which (forgive me again) inspired me even more than your talk. Krishnaprem has written in his Katha (God bless him), “Laughter was given by the Gods to man and it was one of their choicest gifts. No animal can laugh, nor does it need to since it lives in the harmony of the purely instinctive life. It is only Man whose possession of an ego introduces stresses and strains which cannot be avoided and for the healing of which, therefore, the Gods gave him this supreme gift. Time and again it will save us when otherwise all would be lost.” I shall be very grateful if you will tell me if you find this correct. Suhrawardy told me once years ago in Berlin commenting on the dense seriousness of the German people (he loved the French and Russians) that people who couldn’t laugh were generally cruel by nature. Is this true also, substantially? I leave a little space below.
Such general statements are seldom altogether true. There are many grave and serious people who are, on the contrary, tender-hearted or compassionate. Krishnaprem’s statement has its truth, though I don’t think that is the only origin or cause of laughter. I am not sure either, that some animals don’t laugh inwardly though they can’t do the outward thing, having no machinery for it! Some certainly have a sense of humour.
Forgive me once more. But such things will not be repeated, I assure you, though my assurance reminds [me] of a villager who wrote to my grandfather on being dunned, “1 solemnly promise to repay you in a month, only, if I can’t, what can I do?”
The debtor knew what humour was, didn’t he? as my grandfather asked me with rollicking laughter. You see I have lived all my life with humorous people and don’t really remember having loved anybody who could not laugh heartily. But Yoga is long and time is fleeting. So to try again to come to the point.
I remember that you said in answer to my question whether the force you “put on me” (as you put it) was concrete.
Concrete? What do you mean by concrete? It has its own concreteness; it can take a form (like a stream for instance) of which one is aware and can send it quite concretely in whatever direction or on whatever object one chooses. (The words in brackets I add now as an illustration; I did not use it at the time.)
I forget something very important you said here. So I was trying to find if your letters could tell me and here is something you wrote (7.12.35): “A Yoga-consciousness or spiritual consciousness which has no power or force in it, may not be dead or unreal but it is, evidently, something inert and without effect or consequence... If Yoga is a reality, if spirituality is anything better than a delusion, there must be such a thing as Yoga force or spiritual force1.”
That
is a statement
of fact about
the power inherent
in spiritual consciousness
. But there is also such a thing as
willed
use of any subtle
force – it may be spiritual or mental
or vital – to secure a particular result at some point in the world. Just as there are waves of unseen physical forces (cosmic waves, etc.) or currents of electricity, so there are mind-waves, thought-currents, waves of emotion, for example, anger, sorrow, etc. which go out and affect others without their knowing whence they come or that they come at all, they only feel the result. One who has the occult or inner senses awake can feel them coming and invading him. Influences 
good or bad can propagate themselves in that way; that can happen without intention and naturally, but also a deliberate use can be made of them. There can also be a purposeful generation of force, spiritual or other. There can be too the use of the effective will or idea acting directly without the aid of any outward action, speech or other
instrumentation which is not concrete in that sense, but is all the same effective.
Can you tell me or rather write me something to this
question I put to you? You said something about the force – your force – working
concretely enough in all conscience even where the recipient was unconscious of
receiving as was obviously the case with me. You wrote also once (I am hunting
for it) that times out of number you put a concrete force on me when I was in
despair and that made me regain my balance, remember? So could you supplement it
in a few words?
About the occult phenomenon of the house and stone, etc. What was it? The details I have clean forgotten. It was in the beginning, you see, before I had quite regained my balance after the agreeable shock of seeing you talking thus like a friend. So hope to be forgiven for inattention as well as for asking you to take the trouble of writing out what you told me, specially about the disagreeable happenings stopping because Mother put her force to counteract them. You told me about her moving into the house, was it?
I gave this as one instance of actual occult experience and action in accordance with occult law and practice, showing that these things are not imaginations or delusions or humbug, but can be true phenomena.
The stone-throwing began unobtrusively with a few stones thrown at the guest-house kitchen – apparently from the terrace opposite, but there was no one there. The phenomenon began before the fall of dusk and continued at first for half an hour, but daily it increased in frequency, violence and the size of the stones and the duration of the attack till it lasted for several hours until towards the end it became in the hour or half-hour before midnight 
a regular bombardment. It was no longer at the kitchen only, but thrown too in other places, for example the outer verandah. At first we took it for a human-made affair and sent for the police, but the investigation lasted only for a very short time, when one of the constables in the verandah got a stone whizzing unaccountably between his legs, the police abandoned the case in a panic. We made our own investigations, but the places whence the stones seemed to be or might be coming were void of human stone-throwers. Finally, as if to put us kindly out of doubt, the stones began falling in closed rooms; one huge one (I saw it immediately after it fell) reposed flat and comfortable on a cane table as if that was its proper place. Finally they became murderous. The stones had hitherto been harmless in result except for a daily battering of Bejoy’s door (in the last days) which I watched for half-an-hour the night before the end. They appeared in mid-air a few feet above the ground, not coming from a distance but suddenly manifesting, and from the direction from which they flew, should have been thrown close in from the compound of the guest-house or the verandah itself, but the whole place was in a clear light and I saw that there was no human being there and could not have been. At last the semi-idiot boy-servant who seemed to be the centre of the attack and was sheltered in Bejoy’s room under Bejoy’s protection, began to be severely hit and was bleeding from a wound by the stones thrown from inside the closed room. I went in at Bejoy’s call and saw the last stone fall on the boy; Bejoy and he were sitting side by side and the stone was thrown at them from in front, but there was no one visible to throw it – the two were alone in the room. So unless it was Wells’ invisible man – ! We had been only watching or sometimes scouting around till then, but this was a little too much, it was becoming dangerous and something had to be done. The Mother from her knowledge of the process of these things decided that the process here must depend on a nexus between the boy-servant and the house and if the nexus were broken, the servant and the house separated, the stone-throwing would cease. We sent him away to Hrishikesh’s place and immediately the whole phenomenon ceased; not a single stone was thrown after that; peace reigned. That shows that these occult phenomena are real, have a law or process as definite as that of any scientific operation and a knowledge of the processes can not only bring them about but put an end to or annul or dissolve them.
Then for my last (though by no means the least) question: I read out to you the first part of my last question and you said many things about mental richness, etc. But I am afraid I can’t reproduce it without making a mess of it all. So I will type out the question here and ask you to write out your answer – O please! This I put last as it is I feel extremely interesting as well as intriguing, shall we say? Now for the question: I recognise that one has to transcend the mental questioning moods of doubt, etc. which entail a lot of avoidable pain and suffering. Yet does not this pain often engender a feeling of richness too? I remember a poem of A.E. who wrote in his poem “Man to the Angel”,
“They are but the slaves of light
Who have never known the gloom
And between the dark and bright
Willed in freedom their own doom.”
You also wrote to me that you had passed through doubts such as none had passed before. Were they not necessary then? What I mean is that deep sufferings through mental questions and doubts give one often a sense of gain which I think was what A.E. meant too. Is this sense of gain illusory, after all,– a mere ruse of Prakriti to maintain the hold other movements as against the enlightened movements of the soul? You wrote also of pain in the Life Divine, “Without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail.” One can’t help feeling that such utterances are somehow deep and profound and that chiefly because through deep pain (even physical) one feels a strange sense of fulfilment a fulfilment one might not attain without the deeper light I mean, that comes in the wake of pain and suffering.” There was more but I mustn’t take more of your time. You will understand my drift all right from this much I am sure.
I would only remind you that you said something like this that the mental was the natural leader of the being (or was it man in place of being ?) as also re. enrichment through pain, etc. “It is partly true.” But then you butted it I remember, but how I fail to recall. Will you not help ? I will expect your reply today or tomorrow morning. Please don’t shelve it; I promise once more (not like the debtor though) to trouble you no more with such questions. I enclose an extra sheet since the margin below seems to me insufficient.
I don’t remember saying anything on this subject, except that disappointed vital desire must bring about suffering. Pain and suffering are necessary results of the Ignorance in which we live; men grow by all kinds of experience, pain and suffering as well as their opposites, joy and happiness and ecstasy. One can get strength from them if one meets them in the right way. Many take a joy in pain and suffering when associated with struggle or endeavour or adventure, but that is more because of the exhilaration and excitement of struggle than because of suffering for its own sake. There is, however, something in the vital which takes joy in the whole of life, its dark as well as its bright sides. There is also something perverse in the vital which takes a kind of dramatic pleasure in its own misery and tragedy, even in degradation or in illness. I don’t think mere doubts can bring any gain; mental questioning can bring gains if it is in pursuit of truth, but questioning just for the sake of sceptical questioning or in a pure spirit of contradiction can only bring, when it is directed against the truths of the spirit, either error or a lasting incertitude. If I am always questioning the Light when it comes and refusing its offer of truth, the Light cannot stay in me, cannot settle; eventually, finding no welcome and no foundation in the [mind] it will retire. One has to push forward into the Light, not always falling back into the darkness and hugging the darkness in the delusion that that is the real light. Whatever fulfilment one may feel in pain or in doubt belongs to the Ignorance; the real fulfilment is in the divine joy and the divine Truth and its certitude and it is that for which the Yogin strives. In the struggle he may have to pass through doubt, not by his own choice or will, but because there is still imperfection in his knowledge.
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 4. 1938 – 1950 / edited by Shankar Bandopadhyay.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 269 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 Himself and the Ashram // CWSA.- Volume 35. (≈ 26 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2011.- 658 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. II // CWSA.- Volume 29. (≈ 22-24 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2013.- 522 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Second Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1949.- 599 p.