Sri Aurobindo

Autobiographical Notes

and Other Writings of Historical Interest

Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest

3. Other Letters on Yoga and Practical Life 1921–1938

On Yoga and Fund-raising for the Ashram, 1921–1938

To Punamchand M. Shah [10]¹

Punamchand

If you wish to take your monthly expenses from the money of Vithaldas, you ought first to try to persuade him to assign separately a sum of Rs 150 for the purpose without diminishing his contribution to Pondicherry. If he is not willing, then you may take from him the sum of Rs 150 and send Rs 550 to Pondicherry, but on the following conditions.

(1) You will take this money from Vithaldas’ contribution only and you will draw on no other sum.

(2) All other sums of money contributed through you must be sent without fail and without delay to Pondicherry.

(3) There must be no expenditure for yourself beyond the amount fixed and no borrowing of money for which you will make us responsible or draw for its return on money contributed for the Asram.

(4) The Mother will enter into her accounts Rs 550 only as Vithaldas’s contribution. The Rs 150 must be considered as his help to you directly.

As regards Narangi, it was evident that he had no enthusiasm for helping you in the way you propose. He must have his own reasons for that and the Mother did not care to press him to do it. He is already doing wholeheartedly as much as can be reasonably asked from him; it is no use exacting from him what he has no heart for. It seems to me that if you can make yourself a true channel for the force, you ought to be able to succeed without his assistance.

In this connection I feel it necessary to say one thing once for all, which I have refrained from writing before because I did not think it would be of much use. The difficulties you have experienced in the work you undertook arose partly from the general opposition of the money-power to the divine call, but also and very largely from your own vital being and its desires and self-regarding attitude. This vital nature of yours was always full of demands and desires and it came to regard their satisfaction as perfectly legitimate and even the right thing to do. As respects money, it had the habit of spending loosely and freely whatever came into your hand; it had the habit too of borrowing and lending freely without regard to your capacity either to give or to repay; and, as always results from this kind of looseness, it treated whatever money came into your hands as it would have treated your own – I may give as a slight but significant example your lending to your personal friends out of the Mother’s money which was never intended for such a purpose. These habits might pass in a man freely supplied by Fortune with resources; but they were bound to have undesirable effects in your position and especially in one entrusted with your task and practising Yoga.

At first you had some, though not a large success; but, with money flowing through your hands, you could not refrain from a free and increasing expenditure on yourself, Champa and Dikshit. Instead of the Rs 70 allowed to you by the Mother, you began to spend more and more, the amount of your total expenses rising in the end to well above Rs 200 in a single month. This need created by you for yourself – of course, with all sorts of plausible reasons to back it – affected your whole attitude. The right attitude would have been to put the Mother’s work first and yourself last. Your whole and sole desire should have been to send as much money as possible to the Asram and spend as little as possible on yourself, only your actual needs and the collection expenses. If that had remained your attitude, circumstances moulded by the Divine Force would have arranged themselves accordingly and you would have had enough and to spare for your personal expenses. But in practice the position became quite the opposite. Your first care was to draw money for your expenses there; if anything remained, it could be sent to the Mother. Only express contributions marked for the Asram like Vithaldas’ and Kanta’s escaped this law – up till now. As a matter of fact except these sums and some two or three thousand rupees at the beginning, you have, acting on these lines, been unable to send money or to do anything except to meet with the sums given to you your Bombay expenses. For the consequences of this attitude were inevitable. Circumstances shaped themselves accordingly; money came in for your personal expenditure, but for the Asram it dwindled and grew less and less; only Vithaldas’ money saved it from becoming a zero. Next, the money for your expenses became more and more difficult to get and for that too you are compelled now to fall back on the contribution of Vithaldas. That was the first result; the second was that people in Bombay lost all confidence in you and in the collection for the Asram and began even to suspect your bona fides. And the last result was that your attitude came between the people you approached and us, keeping them tied to you but cut off from our influence. It was only as a result of our putting a strong force out that some change has become possible and even now the resistance is very great in the Bombay atmosphere.

I am perfectly aware that you can advance many explanations justifying your action as against what I have written. All that makes no difference. It is always the habit of the vital being to find out things by which it persuades the mind and justifies its desires; and circumstances usually shape themselves to justify it still farther. For what we have within us creates the circumstances outside us. What matters is that you should take inwardly a different position in the future. If nothing happens to prevent this arrangement of Vithaldas’s money, you must see to it that henceforward you confine yourself to the arrangement, keeping to it strictly, put all preoccupation with yourself behind and think only of the work you went for which is to get support for the Asram – that and nothing else. You have no other work in Gujerat – as you have sometimes vainly imagined. You may be right in thinking that the only thing you can do now is to get people with means interested in the Asram, but in that case you must see that they are put into direct touch without which the interest cannot be real and effective. Their money must come here and not stop in Bombay and when they are ready, they themselves must come and receive what they can of the influence.

The vision of which you give a description is the indication of a vital attack or of a vital danger throwing itself upon you. The form you saw was evidently a strong Power of the hostile vital world – a red hot copper-like bust can mean nothing else. If you thought it was your being, it must have been because something in your vital nature responded to the force which this form embodied. The serpent was the indication of the evil force contained in him. The nature of the bust would seem to indicate that the force was that of vital greed (lobha of all kinds) and desire. The fact that the blow given was on the mouth would confirm this interpretation – but that would also be consistent with the force being that of falsehood, (moha, mithyā). The grace and protection have always been with you in spite of everything, but for it to work fully you must get rid of all in you that responds to the power that threatens you. The blow and the smashing of the face or hood and drawing out and upward of the serpent are an indication that now you have a chance of getting free from this force and throwing away from your vital nature greed, egoism and desire. It is for you to fulfil the favourable end of the vision by taking the chance.

Sri Aurobindo

Pondicherry
14 September 1930

¹ Punamchand Mohanlal Shah (born 1898), of Patan, Gujarat, met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1919. Four years later he became a member of his household. Between 1927 and 1931, he spent much of his time in Gujarat trying to collect money for the newly founded Ashram. In August 1927 Sri Aurobindo wrote three letters to Punamchand on fearlessness, work and money, which were published in 1928 as chapters 3, 4 and 5 of The Mother. Here thirteen other letters to Punamchand on fund-raising and other subjects are reproduced.

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