Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1936

Letter ID: 1577

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

March 19, 1936

Freed once more from the devil’s claws! Just a few words about the process: I took up H’s poem, felt like writing one after reading it, failed; then went to Pranam, there found Jatin’s letter which I enclose, waiting, read it and as soon as I sat in the Hall, lo, everything fell off my shoulders or soul, as if by the breath of an invisible wave.

Yes, of course, it was the old man of the Sea, I mean of Sorrows, who dropped off because he can’t stand anything cheerful and hopeful. The main credit goes to the letter, because it has a push in it of the psychic force which took your vital and the O.M. also by surprise and knocked him off and you up, before the said vital had time to turn round and cry, “Hélas! Hélas! Alas! হায় হায়!¹ Ototototoi!”

But I don’t know what did the job. Poetry, letter or Mother? The letter itself gave me a sense of something pleasant.

All together – Poetry first attempt, letter brought a good atmosphere (that was the sense of something pleasant), and both were the effect of a long pressure from me which you had resisted sitting firm in a Gandhian passive resistance.

This shows, Sir, you make me suffer unnecessarily; you can, at any moment, draw me out if it pleases you.

Not at all, you can’t be drawn out if something in you refuses and sticks like a badger in its hole. When that says “Oh damn it, after all let me get out and breathe some fresh air”, then it can be done.

Please read his letter. I am sure your heart will leap at the response to your Force, by at least one soul, what?

Excuse me, he is not the only one.

J’s is a most fascinating and convincing example. Alas, when will my hard crust be broken, and feel at least some fragments of what he feels!

The difference is that his mind is ready to accept and makes no resistance. If his vital is as willing,– the sex affair looks like it – then he can go very fast.

I don’t understand what my friend means by the disturbance in connection with the affairs of the world.

That is clear enough. His new consciousness makes him feel more strongly the opposite forces that one contacts when one moves in the world and has to do affairs and meet with others and he is afraid of a response in his vital which will upset his sadhana or create difficulties.

Evidently he is a man who is psychically sensitive or has become so to that thing which you blindly refuse to recognize even when you are in the midst of it – the play of forces. You can feel your friend’s atmosphere through the letter “so beautiful, so strengthening, so refreshing” and it has an immediate effect on you. But your mind stares like an owl and wonders “What the hell can this be?” – I suppose, because your medical books never told you about it and how can things be true which are not known either to the ordinary mind or science? It is by an incursion of an opposite kind of forces that you fall into the Old Man’s clutches, but you can only groan and cry “What’s this?” and when they are swept aside in a moment by other forces, blink and mutter “Well, that’s funny!” Your friend can feel and know at once when he is being threatened by the opposite forces – and so he can be on his guard and resist Old Nick, because he can detect at once one of his principal means of attack.

Please reply to all the points raised.

Will see, so hold on to the letter.

I went over his letter again – it is so beautiful, so strengthening and refreshing. And how beautifully he writes about the snow-flakelike falling of delight.

That’s his psychic atmosphere, sir. That is what the psychic feels like – to anyone who can contact it, “beautiful, strengthening and refreshing.”

Give me a beautiful “beating”, Sir, will you? Have not had it for a long time!

Have given you one or two smacks. No time to make it long.

¹ hāy hāy: alas. alas.

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