Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1. 1935
Letter ID: 1456
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
October 28, 1935
How does one get the “habit of intuitivising... honestly”? Is it by trying to have an inner silence and calm, and stopping all thoughts, as you point out in your letter?
That is the first condition, but not the whole process. I told you that one could not safely take whatever comes as the intuition and I gave you the reasons.
What I try to do now is to make my mind silent and prescribe the drug that crops up...
Umph! But how are you sure that what sits1 up is not a mental suggestion?
And what has ego to do with all this? What one has to do is to remain just silent; I don’t see how ego can come in the way unless you mean that the mind won’t tolerate being made a passive Brahman, and will assert its right.
Ego interferes in a general way – not of course in choosing medicines – and many ways, e.g. inviting pseudo-intuitions which flatter the ego. Also it may interfere when a mistake has been made and prevent you acknowledging it or even call in more pseudointuitions to justify and back up the original error. Innumerable are the tricks of the ego. Also, if you feel yourself becoming intuitive, rightly or wrongly intuitive, (more so if it is wrongly), then a too strong ego may develop in you megalomania and then you are gone. So don’t justify ego.
I understand that Intuition will be one of the outstanding features of your Supramental creation; we will only have to shut our eyes and come off with an illumined intuition! The result will be epoch-making discoveries, inventions, etc., etc. By Jove! What a grand period it will be!
Good Lord, no! At least not till you live in the gnostic Intuition as your ordinary consciousness. So long as you are only receiving all sorts of things from everywhere, you will have to be on the qui vive to see that you don’t make a pseudo-intuitive fool of yourself.
1 Perhaps Sri Aurobindo read “crops” as “sits” (the word in the question was not written clearly).