Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1383

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

July 23, 1935

If the Emanation is the Mother herself, why do we have to make a big case of our troubles and depressions, and buzz it in post-haste for your hearing? Lack of receptivity? or opening? No faith in the Emanation or in its existence? What?

Nobody has to do it. People do it because they are ignorant and unconscious.

If anyone is conscious of the Mother’s presence, he does not make a big case of his troubles. Even if one is not yet conscious, still those who have faith or are not touched by your Man of Sorrows are not making the row you speak of.

A.B. says if we see things impartially we’ll find that happiness predominates over sorrow. It is hard for me to concur with this observation.

It is fundamentally true for most people that the pleasure of life, of existence in itself, predominates over the troubles of life; otherwise most people would want to die, whereas the fact is that everybody wants to live – and if you proposed to them an easy means of eternal extinction they would decline without thanks. That is what A.B. is saying and it is undeniable. It is also true that this comes from the Ananda of existence which is behind everything and is reflected in the instinctive pleasure of existence. Naturally, this instinctive essential pleasure is not the Ananda,– it is only a pale and dim reflection of it in an inferior life-consciousness – but it is enough for its purpose. I have said that myself somewhere and I do not see anything absurd or excessive in the statement.

He is evidently speaking from the cosmic consciousness; otherwise how could he fail to find sorrows, struggles, heartbreaks, hells, perditions gaping everywhere!

Not at all. There are plenty of people, not endowed with the cosmic consciousness, who have said and written the same thing. It is no new theory or statement.

I have no statistics about the other parts of the cosmos, but just look at India: acute epidemics, sub-acute unemployment with consequent suicides, chronic famine and starvation. People, who 10 years ago were making a good business, are breaking their heads over the future – of tomorrow, sir, only tomorrow!

All that is only a feature of the present time when everything is out of order. One can’t argue from that and speak as if it were the normal existence of the human race.

Even with all this trouble and disorder are all these human beings feeling so miserable as you say? They have so much to vex and trouble them, yet they go on chatting and laughing and enjoying what they can. Why?

And still the Ananda of simply being in bone and flesh surpasses all sorrow! I would like to be an optimist, but surely not in excess!

For most people it does. All are not men of sorrows like yourself or fallen into the Byronic vein. Some of course have so miserable an existence that it stifles the innate pleasure of life – but these are after all a small minority.

You have written in The Riddle of this World that this is an unideal and unsatisfactory world strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering and evil.

That is when you look at what the world ought to be and lay stress on that. The idealists’ question is why should there be pain at all, even if it is counterweighed by the fundamental pleasure of existence? The real crux is why should inadequacy, limit and suffering come across this natural pleasure of life? It does not mean that life is essentially miserable in its very nature.

People will invite A.B. to come down from his hyper-optimism into the material earth-consciousness and see for himself

A.B. is not an ass. He knows perfectly well what is taking place in the material earth-consciousness and would be very anxious to plunge into the fray to make things better, if I allowed him – but I don’t and won’t.

I am trying to have a dash again at poetry.

Very glad to hear it.