Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Letters

Fragment ID: 15852

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Motilal Mehta

Undated

Letter of a disciple to Motilal Mehta based on Sri Aurobindo’s oral remarks.

About your difficulty in explaining to people what A.G. is doing – it will of course be useless to tell them in the true terms because they would not understand. But you can put it in this way which they will perhaps find intelligible.

A.G. is engaged in Pondicherry in Tapasya for Yoga Siddhi which is necessary before he takes up his future work. As Gandhi believes in soul force, that is to say in an inner moral force as the one thing necessary behind all true action, so A.G. believes in a higher spiritual force as the one thing necessary – the one thing that must be at the basis of India’s freedom and greatness. It is this spiritual force which he is seeking to call down, embody and perfect in himself and others. This he has found can only be done by a long and patient Sadhana. It is when he feels it completed in himself and his whole mind, life and body capable of transmitting the spiritual knowledge and power into a perfectly effective action that he will come out from his Sadhana and begin his action. At the same time he is training a number of people to be effective instruments of the same power and centres and supports of his action. When he goes out into British India he intends to create a large centre for this spiritual training where his ideal will be embodied just as Mahatma Gandhi has done at Sabarmati for his own ideal, and with that as his basis undertake a work which will be for the world in general and specially for India. This work will embrace and will mean the spiritualising of all activities none being excluded. A.G. believes that a free India returned to her great spiritual ideal but on new and larger lines is destined to be the means of uplifting the world and initiating a new age of the general evolution and it is towards this ideal that all his work is to be directed.

Aurobindo Ghose