Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 15671

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Sahana Devi

January 17, 1937

All these suggestions that come to you were of course part of the attack on the physical consciousness,– the attack on the body is used to raise these ideas and the ideas are used to make it more difficult for the body to recover. At a certain stage attacks fall heavily on the body because the opposing forces find it more difficult than before to upset the mind or vital so they fall on the physical in the hope that that will do the trick, the physical being more vulnerable. But the sensibility of the body to attacks is no proof of incapacity, just as the former sensibility of the mind or vital to attacks was no proof –it can be in due time overcome.

As for the feelings about the Mother and that her love is only given for a return in work or to those who can do sadhana well, that is the usual senseless idea of the vital-physical mind and has no value.

There is nothing wrong in taking care of the body in regard to health and, if the liver has gone wrong, the instinct to refuse too sweet or greasy or heavy foods is aright instinct. Mother has no objection to your abstaining while the illness is there nor has she insisted on your taking dal. Her objection is only to what people often do, getting ideas about this or that food and abstaining even when there is no acute illness. During an acute state of bad liver, abstinence is often necessary. Only one must not create by wrong ideas a nervous incapacity of the stomach or a chronic nervous dyspepsia as R and others did. She had no other meaning.

I hope you will be all right soon. If the body does not right itself, you must keep me informed from time to time.

It looks as if this time it was a purely physical attack based on nothing psychological except the tendency of the material (body) consciousness to respond to the insomnia vibrations. We must try this time to get it out of this last refuge for its recurrence.

You can certainly sing J’s song to her and N.