Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1937
Letter ID: 1815
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
January 2, 1937
Hirendranath Dutt, theosophist and philosopher, in one of his articles on Rāslīlā, asks why mystics and yogis use so much the imagery of passion, wine etc. in their description of experiences of Divine Love. Then he quotes Underhill to say “... it [human love] most certainly does offer upon lower levels a strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual consciousness unfolds itself and which form the consummation of mystic life.”
I don’t agree – unless it is a sadhana of the vital plane which then naturally expresses the vital being = love-excitement, love-quarrels, viraha1, revolt, despair, rupture etc., etc., frequent surrenders, unions, partings.
Dutt has said that according to the Ancients, pleasure of the sex-act is something akin to the Ananda of Brahman. Why? In answer to this, Ouspenski, a famous Russian philosopher, has said: “Of all we know in life, only in love is there a taste of the mystical, a taste of ecstasy.”
Leave out the “only” – and to a certain extent one can agree – but “love” – not “sex”.
The interpreter continues: “Nothing else brings us so near to the limit of human possibilities beyond which begins the unknown. And in this lies, without doubt, the chief cause of the terrible power of sex over human life... Love, ‘sex’, these are but a foretaste of mystical sensations.”
Love and sex are the same, then? There can be no love without sex? This is piffle.
He says further: “Mystical sensations are sensations of the same category as sensations of ‘Love’, only infinitely higher and more complex.”
There is much else besides in mystical experience – there are not only sensations.
He asks: “If that is so, why then is man averse to this intensely pleasurable mystical activity? Because principally he gets the taste of that mystical pleasure in the sex-act, and he is satisfied with it.”
What rubbish! Brahmananda is a substitute?
The sexual creative act is admittedly the supreme and most desired gratification of the senses.
Not to everybody.
The sexual creative act is an exact counterpart of the mental and creative processes of which, the East maintains, it is merely the reflexion.
Don’t catch on. How is sex-gratification a reflex of mental processes – e.g. of the solution of a mathematical or scientific problem or even of the creation of a poem or picture? Because there is a kind of joy in all these things? but it is not the same kind of joy.
The transient character of sex-gratification is regarded in the East as an ordinance of Nature so that man may be led to seek the more sustained delight of mental and spiritual creative effort.
In the East? by whom?
I don’t believe it for a moment. To suppose that if sex-gratification were a more prolonged business, Shelley and Shakespeare would not have cared to write poetry – is blank brutal nonsense – They had something else in them besides the mere animal.
Do you agree with all this, Guru, especially with Ouspenski’s opinion?
What a question to ask me! As if it were at all possible that I would agree to bring down all values to the level of the animal pleasure.
Love may perhaps be a foretaste of mystical sensations, but sex-love also? But people say that sex-pleasure and Brahmananda [Bliss of Brahman] are brothers.
The only truth in that is that all intense pleasure goes back at its root to Ananda – the pleasure of poetry, music, production of all kinds, battle, victory, adventure too – in that sense only all are brothers of Brahmananda. But the phrase is absolutely inaccurate. We can say that there is a physical Ananda born of Brahmananda which is far higher, finer and more intense than the sexual, but of which the sexual is a coarse and excited degradation – that is all.
If the transient nature of the sex-act is an ordinance of Nature to lead man to a more sustained delight of higher things, I fail to see why there is so much pleasure attached to it that they compare it to a foretaste of Brahmananda. You say that it is meant for procreation, but the act of procreation could have been managed without this pleasure.
Certainly, Nature gave it to encourage her aim of procreation. The proof is that the animal does it only by season and as soon as the procreation is over, drops it. Man having a mind has discovered that he can do it even when there is not the need of Nature – but that is only a proof that Mind perverts the original intention of Nature. It doesn’t prove that Nature created it only to give man a brief and destructive sensual pleasure.
I won’t lengthen my perorations and human reasonings. Will you give a satisfactory reply to all these questions tonight or tomorrow?
Well, it can’t be tonight, as there are three tons of correspondence. 
(It may be less of course in actual weight, I am giving the psychological estimate.)
[In the medical notebook:]
I have added against your notes of the 30th certain remarks which I had no time to write then. You may perhaps pass a glance over them.
1 The separation of lovers.