Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1938

Letter ID: 2070

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

April 3, 1938

Tomorrow I shall write D a mild, sweet letter. Alas, Guru, what you say is so true, so true! One has to be a perfect and complete Yogi – no joke, not a word in excess... Do you believe that people here are more sensitive than people outside? Some persons think that the Asram is a “rotten” place with jealousy and hatred rampant among the sadhaks.

Outside there are just the same things – The Asram is an epitome of the human nature that has to be changed – but outside people put as much as possible a mask of social manners and other pretences over the rottenness – What Christ called in the case of the Pharisees the “whited sepulchre”. Moreover there one can pick and choose the people one will associate with while in the narrow limits of the Asram it is not so possible – contacts are inevitable. Wherever humans are obliged to associate closely, what I saw described the other day as “the astonishing meannesses and caddishnesses inherent in human nature” come quickly out. I have seen that in Asrams, in political work, in social attempts at united living, everywhere in fact where it gets a chance. But when one tries to do Yoga, one cannot fail to see that in oneself and not only, as most people do, see it in others, and once seen, then? Is it to be got rid of or to be kept? Most people here seem to want to keep it. Or they say it is too strong for them, they can’t help it!

Dr. Sircar once told me, after that stove incident, that this Asram lacks “fraternity”, while the Ramakrishna Mission is ideal in that way.

I am afraid not. When I was in Calcutta it was already a battle-field and even in the post-civil-war period one hears distressing things about it. It is the same with other Asrams...¹

D was disgusted with the sadhaks here, and N also wrote about it, and many others think that the world outside is not so bad.

If so, then I suppose they will stay there?

D finds the world outside much better, to which I would reply that here we don’t believe in appearances.

D associates only with the people who like and praise him and even so he does not know what they say behind his back. For a man who has knocked about so much he is astonishingly candid and easily deceived by appearances.

– And life is precisely inner here...

Is it? If people here were leading the inner life, these things would soon disappear.

Since we have to lead a life in a concentrated atmosphere, all the ugly things become at once prominent, and add to it the action of the Force on the subconscient for purging of all dross.

No doubt. Also in this atmosphere pretences and social lies are difficult to maintain. But if things become prominent, it is that people may see and reject them. If instead they cling to them as their most cherished possessions, what is the use? How is the purging to be done with such an attitude?

¹ MS mutilated from this point.

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