Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

French “Psychic” Romances

If and when chemistry advances and enters the supraphysical regions it will try to bring down peace in a vacuum bottle and analyse and synthetise it in some way.

If you read the French romances about “psychic” matters you will find that their highest imagination is machinery,— machines for registering peoples’ thoughts, machines for storing up the psychic energy of “a living Buddha” (a Buddha, by the way, with some hundred concubines) into which he puts his will-force so that when it is turned on millions of soldiers will march in a hypnotised trance to battle performing manoeuvres according to silent orders from the machine, etc. etc. So your suppositions are not unlikely. One of the reasons why many Americans want Yoga is that it may make them successful in all they undertake, professors, businessmen etc.

29 April 1935