Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 20342

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Sri Aurobindo — Unknown addressee

January 15, 1937

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An evolution from the Inconscient¹ need not be a painful one if there is no resistance; it can be a deliberately slow and beautiful efflorescence of the Divine. One ought to be able to see how beautiful outward Nature can be and usually is, although it is itself apparently “inconscient” – why should the growth of consciousness in inward Nature be attended by so much ugliness and evil spoiling the beauty of the outward creation? Because of a perversity born from the Ignorance, which came in with Life and increased in Mind – that is the Falsehood, the Evil that was born because of the starkness of the Inconscient’s sleep separating its action from the secret luminous Conscience that is all the time within it. But it need not have been so except for the overriding Will of the Supreme which meant that the possibilities of Perversion by inconscience and ignorance should be manifested in order to be eliminated through being given their chance, since all possibility has to manifest somewhere: once it is eliminated the Divine Manifestation in Matter will be greater than it otherwise could be because it will combine all the possibilities involved in this difficult creation and not some of them as in an easier and less strenuous creation might naturally happen.

1937

¹ The question was in reference to a passage in the 1936 version which in the present one is much enlarged and runs from “It was the gate of a false infinite” to “None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell” (pp. 221-227): “The passage suggests that there was an harmonious original plan of the Overmind Gods for earth’s evolution, but that it was spoiled by the intrusion of the Rakshasic worlds. I should, however, have thought that an evolution, arising from the stark ineonscient’s sleep and the mute void, would hardly be an harmonious plan. The Rakshasas only shield themselves with the covering ‘Ignorance’, they don’t create it. Do you mean that, if they had not interfered, there wouldn’t have been resistance and conflict and suffering? How can they be called the artificers of Nature’s fall and pain?”

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² SABCL, volume 22; CWSA, volume 28: the luminosity of the secret Conscient

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³ CWSA, volumes 27, 28: was

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⁴ CWSA, volumes 27, 28: possibility

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⁵ CWSA, volumes 27, 28: gather

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⁶ CWSA, volumes 27, 28: be

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Current publication:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Savitri.- First edition 1950-1951. First American edition 1995.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1995.- ISBN 0-941524-80-9

Other publications:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.

[Largest or earliest found passage: ] Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Poetry and Art // CWSA.- Volume 27.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2004.- 769 p.

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.