Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1. 1935
Letter ID: 1380
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
July 20, 1935
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In your letter on the emanation, do you mean by a “personal relation” the impersonal person that is the psychic?
The psychic is not impersonal. You must be thinking of the universal Atman. The psychic is always personal and individual.
One may not be conscious of the Presence, but the relation? Unfortunately, I don’t feel any personal relation with the Mother. There lies the whole difficulty of the sadhana.
One has to become conscious by the awakening of the inner mind and vital – or best of all by the awakening of the psychic. It is quite possible for two persons to have a relation of which one is conscious and the other is not – his mental blindness or vital misunderstandings coming in the way. That is frequent even in ordinary life. Very often one becomes conscious of it only when he loses it (by the death of the other or otherwise) and is then full of repinings for his blindness.
A.B. writes in an article that through sorrow and suffering 
God leads us to immortality; that there is a glory, even a bliss, in their conquest. I am afraid my mystic vision and chicken heart do not see much in this theory. Conquest of sorrow and suffering is all right for brave hearts like Vivekananda’s and A.B.’s, or even for poor hearts like mine when they have a guru like Sri Aurobindo and a mother like our Mother here to do the sadhana for them; but what about the people outside who are wallowing under the weight of their crosses?
I suppose you have not read my “Riddle of this World”; but it is a similar solution I put there. A.B.’s way of putting it is a trifle too “Vedantic-Theistic” – in my view it is a transaction between the One and the Many. In the beginning it was you (not the human you which
is now complaining but the central being) which accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance. Sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its original transcendence but under conditions for which the plunge into the Inconscience was necessary. It is fundamentally a cosmic problem and can be understood only from the cosmic consciousness. If you want a solution which will be agreeable to the human mind and feelings, I am afraid there is none. No doubt if human beings had made the universe, they would have done much better, but they were not there to be consulted when they were made. Only your central being was there and that was much nearer in its temerarious foolhardiness to Vivekananda’s or A.B.’s than to the repining prudence of your murmuring and trembling human mentality of the present moment – otherwise it would never have come down into the adventure. Or perhaps it did not realise what it was in for? It is the same with the wallowers under their cross. Even now they wallow because something in them likes the wallowing and bear
the cross because something in them chooses to suffer. So?
1 CWSA, volume 28; SABCL, volume 22: who
2 CWSA, volume 28: bears
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo; Nirodbaran Talukdar. Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo: The Complete Set [in 2 volumes].- 2nd ed., 3d inpression.- Volume 1.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2001.- 602 p.
Other publications: