Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1758

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

October 21, 1936

Jatin has sent snaps for your signature. Will you give it?

Yes.

Yesterday’s feeling I can’t locate – probably in the abdominal cavity. Today again something happened – but not any fear. It was an ingoing, perhaps, for I came out just as a fish comes out of water, with a sigh (?) or for taking air?

Don’t quite understand. Yesterday you wrote that there was no fear, but a feeling that something unpleasant might happen and you must get over it again. But if it was like a fish in water, that could not be unpleasant.

Your present description would be a going inside of the vital (abdominal cavity) into its deeper self, perhaps in search of the psychic which lies behind. If so, very useful movement.

There was no drowsiness – understandable?

[Sri Aurobindo underlined the word “drowsiness”, which was written rather badly. ]

Your writing is sometimes no more understandable than mine. It took me some time to understand whether this word was Bengali, Sanskrit or English with a mixture. But I suppose it is drowsiness?

Y has gone, but I understand, he wants to come back – to be fitted into his old place?

God knows. You must know that when he came back last time, he was only tolerated on trial owing to his own urgent insistence. Next time – well! He will have to be considerably changed before we say Yes.

He asked our opinion about his going to Calcutta for treatment. I said, “Why not ask Mother?” He replied, “I haven’t that much confidence in Sri Aurobindo and Mother, to tell you frankly.” That shows where the root of the trouble was. Was it deeper still?

According to what Mother was seeing all along, it was deeper still. A certain falsehood in his being which he refused to recognise, but kept cherished under a veil of justifying reasons, not intending to change. He never really recognised that he had been wrong at any time. Yet it was treachery to the Mother – with what she calls a strain of hypocrisy in it.

But then he was crying also because he had to go. Queer, isn’t it?

No, not queer. Very usual. A divided being. One black, one wanting to be white.

I saw your letter to him... You were almost suspecting there was some twist in his nature.

More than suspicion – a knowledge.

What could have been the cause of such a havoc? Vital desires? Attachments?

He had these; but that was not the chief difficulty.

Or was it lack of confidence and faith in the Mother?

There was that, of course – but lack of faith was not enough to produce such an upsetting. It was something in opposition and hiding itself, that got terrified when it saw its companion pulling down the Force. For after all he did pull. Mother felt him doing it even last time he came to Pranam.

I am afraid all of us have these things, to some degree. I am a little shaken because of your hint at the resistance or the lower nature’s unwillingness to change, for who hasn’t that?

That was a euphemism, as I wanted him to look at and acknowledge to himself (acknowledging to us would not be enough, as he might do it “with the end of his lips” only) and get rid of it.

Mere unwillingness to change is not enough. Everybody has that in part of his being – if it were enough to produce disaster, nobody could do Yoga.

Some light on M’s report of yesterday, please.

Obliged to postpone it again.