Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1328

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

May 10, 1935

I have again the same chronic trouble. At Pranam I felt, Mother, that you were serious with me and the reason was, I thought, you did not like my comparing the sadhaks in the way I did yesterday. I have no intention of belittling anyone. It is a quite natural human curiosity to want to know what would be the intellectual manifestation of an uneducated sadhak after realisation...

Rubbish! Mother did not think anything about it at all. Why the hell or heaven or why on earth or why the unearthly should she be displeased? You all seem to think of the Mother as living in a sort of daylong and nightlong simmering cauldron of displeasure about nothing and anything and everything under the sun. Lord! what a queer idea!

I had compared your behaviour, mentally, with others and said to myself: “If such and such a person goes on doing this and that almost all the time of the day (I had S particularly in mind), still Mother is Grace herself with her.”

And the same persons make comparisons of Mother’s behaviour with others and get into fits of revolt and abhiman, and what not! What a mad Ashram!

I feel these formations are not true but I can’t throw them away...

Why not, I should like to know?

But this resistance must go.

I quite agree with you.

If I can’t love you, give myself to you, of what use is the sadhana? For mukti? I have no appetite for such mukti. Ramakrishna used to say “I have no objection to give liberation but I will not give willingly শুদ্ধা ভত্তি.”¹

Meaning? But what is শুদ্ধা ভত্তি, then?

But even if you are serious, I don’t know why I can’t take it calmly and in the right spirit.

Quite so!

You have no personal interest to be serious. It is for my good alone.

Not at all. It is simply the vital’s imagination that the Mother is serious because of its tamas. There is not the least truth in it.

I understand all this but the emotion gets the upper hand. And you say I have a slow, deliberate mental strength!

The “emotion” is not the mind.

I says that in many cases where you were not in the least serious and smiled and smiled he had the after-feeling that you were serious with him.

That has happened at least a thousand times. Even, the Mother has seen somebody come with a gloomy face and she has poured out smiles in a river and blessed him in a most emphatic manner only to get a letter “You are displeased with me; you did not smile. You blessed me with only one finger: what wrong have I done? How can I live if you behave with me like this?” And perhaps an intimation that the outraged sadhak or Sadhika is going away or will drop herself (this is generally a feminine menace) into the sea.

I am not exaggerating in the least – it is literally true.

And supposing the Mother happens to be serious in reality? What then? Are there not a thousand reasons in this world for being serious,– why must the cause be displeasure with the Sadhika? After all Yoga itself, life itself is a rather serious affair.

But I don’t really understand this, because how can one be so blind as not to see the smile on your face, or seeing it, mistake it for seriousness?

I don’t know how, but “one” does it and not only one, but many. It is the minority who have not done it.

I want your sword, and not the pen only, to sever these impressions at their very root and let the inner being emerge with its flood of love and absolute surrender and make me your utter slave.

The sword is at your service, but for heaven’s sake use it.

¹ śuddhā bhakti: pure bhakti (devotion)

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