Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3. 1936-37

Fragment ID: 18373

1936-37

Do you mean that an experience is followed sometimes by a movement of the hostile or adverse forces?

Very often.

The stress of the inertia is the general obstacle; it may be overcome in one thing, it may not be overcome in another. Your physical mind applies conceptions in a much too stiff and narrow way. Mind and life do not move in set formulas. “The inertia is the obstacle in both cases, in one it has yielded, so it ought to have yielded in the other” is not a logic that can serve. The balance of conditions in the two cases can be different so as to make the inertia effective in one case while it is overcome in the other. The same with the result of the concentrations; it depends on many things what the immediate result may be.

I thought it was understood that what I wrote to you about persons was private. Experiences, one’s own or others’ if one comes to know about them, should not be talked about or made a matter of gossip. It is only if there can be some spiritual profit to others and even then if they are experiences of the past that one can speak of them. Otherwise it becomes like news of Abyssinia or Spain, something common and trivial for the vital mass mind to chew or gobble.

Sadness is of no use – it is itself a form of tamas (inertia) and therefore does not help recovery.

As for the inconveniences, you should take them as a training in samata [equality]. To be able to bear inconveniences is one of the most elementary necessities if one wants to enter into the true spirit of Yoga.

These generalisations on either side are not of much value. One does not need to get a hatred for food in order to get rid of the greed for food. On the other to develop dislike for certain things may help to reject them – but that too is not always the cure, for they may remain in spite of the dislike.