Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
CONTENTS
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PART ONE |
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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES |
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Section One |
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Life Sketches and Other Autobiographical Notes |
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Section Two |
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Corrections of Statements Made in Biographies and Other Publications |
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General Note (referring especially to the Alipur Case and Sri Aurobindo’s politics) |
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PART TWO |
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LETTERS OF HISTORICAL INTEREST |
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Section One |
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Letters on Personal, Practical and Political Matters,1890 – 1926 |
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Letters Written as a Probationer in the Indian Civil Service, 1892 |
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Letters Written While Employed in the Princely State of Baroda, 1895 – 1906 |
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To the Dewan, on the Government’s Reply to the Letter on the Curzon Circular |
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Letters and Telegrams to Political and Professional Associates, 1906 – 1926 |
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Section Two |
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Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life, 1911 – 1928 |
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Section Three |
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Other Letters of Historical Interest on Yoga and Practical Life, 1921 – 1938 |
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PART THREE |
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PUBLIC STATEMENTS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONSON INDIAN AND WORLD EVENTS, 1940–1950 |
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Section One |
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Public Statements, Messages, Letters and Telegrams on Indian and World Events, 1940 – 1950 |
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On the Integration of the French Settlements in India, 1947 – 1950 |
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Section Two |
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Private Letters to Public Figures and to the Editor of Mother India, 1948 – 1950 |
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Notes and Letters to the Editor of Mother India on Indian and World Events, 1949 – 1950 |
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PART FOUR |
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PUBLIC STATEMENTS AND NOTICES CONCERNINGSRI AUROBINDO’S ASHRAM AND YOGA, 1927 – 1949 |
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Section One |
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Public Statements and Notices concerning the Ashram,1927 – 1937 |
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Section Two |
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Public Statements about Sri Aurobindo’s Path of Yoga, 1934 and 1949 |
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Draft Letters, 1926 1928
To an Unknown Person
Now you have seen practically all that needed to be seen with an entire sincerity and a true unsparing vision. The root was there in the lower vital; it was that one among your formations of personality on the vital level which brought in a persistent element of insincerity and vitiated precisely in the way you have described your nature and, consequently, your aspiration and sadhana. This part of the work has been well done. Now it only remains for you to cast out this thing finally with all its effects from your mind and life and physical being so that there may be clear room for the true Person to descend and occupy all the place. Do your part and the full Power and Grace will be upon you.
To and about Marie Potel
[1]
Your experiences in themselves are good and free from the old mixture; but the workings of your mind upon them are not yet correct or clear. In the last page you have tried to generalise and to philosophise your experience; immediately your old mind has come between the truth and you and the thought and expression are wrong and confused and quite full of errors. It is better to wait, to gather inner experience, to allow the sense of the truth to grow in you — in that way, the time will sooner come when a true supramental revelation (and not the mental attempt at the thing) can find its exact thought and word. When you try now, the old mind begins to play and blunder. _____
Page – 397
Why " pourtant"?The "essence" is always more easily seized by the heart and the internal sense than by the mind — for the heart is in touch with the psychic and the internal sense is the essential action of mind as opposed to its external and formal action. Both of these are nearer to a knowledge by identity or by direct communion than the active mind, and the "essence" can only be seized by identity or by direct communion. The active mind cannot do it except by falling silent and leaning on the psychic and on the internal sense. ==== The universal Mental is not the "stuff and body of the Father-Mother". No doubt what you mean is that the universal mental like the universal vital and physical is one form of the expressive substance of the Divine, but behind is another and a spiritual substance which is the true essence. If you want an image, it would be nearer the truth to say that this spiritual substance is the very stuff and body of the Divine and mind, life and matter are lesser sheaths, coverings or outer folds. == To describe the "essence" as " l'immatérielle matière" is neither very clear nor very helpful. If you mean by matter substance, in one sense or in one line of experience all is substance — spirit, being, consciousness, ananda are substance; mind, life and matter are substance. Not only so, but all are one substance in its different powers and various degrees. All these except Matter can be described as immaterial substance.Do you mean that this essence or spiritual substance is the true Material from which all is constituted? It is substance of the Self and Brahman; it is within everything, above everything and when it descends upon one as true being, as consciousness, as Ananda, it enables the soul to separate itself from mind, life and matter, to face them instead of being involved in them and to act upon them and change them. If this is what you have felt and seen, it is true; but your language does not make it clear. But mark that much depends on the power on which it is manifested. If it is only the spiritual substance within the
Page – 398 universal Mental, it can raise the mental to its own highest powers, but it cannot do more. Only if it manifests as the spiritual substance in its supramental power, can the consciousness, power, Ananda it brings effect the transformation which is the object of our Yoga. == Afterwards you mix up many different aspects of the Divine and make a great confusion. No doubt all are the One and all are the Mother, but to mix them up confuses rather than clarifies the oneness. In any case the "essence" is not the Mother uniting the Father to the human sons! It is through the spiritual substance that the Jiva feels his oneness with the Ishwara and with the Mother from whom he came and it is the Mother who shows him the oneness; but that is quite another matter. The Mother is more than the essence; Self and spirit manifest the Supreme, manifest the Mother, are their first embodying substance if you like; but they are more than self and spirit. Then what is it that is spirit of spirit and substance of substance? [Is it the "essence"?]1 But all this seems rather too much to say of any however exalted "essence"! Either you are extending your experience beyond its proper limits or you are deforming it in your language. It is the one and dual Supreme who is Spirit of the spirit — the supreme Spirit, supreme Brahman, supreme Ishwara, supreme Shakti, supreme Purusha with supreme Prakriti. The Supreme is the one Being; it would be absurd to describe him as an essence within the universal Mental. The clumsy abstract language of the dry intellect soon gets out of place when you are trying to go beyond a spiritualised mental experience of these things. You must find a more intimate and living language. == Again who is the Father here and who the Mother and what are the human sons doing in the affair? The one and dual Supreme manifests as the Supreme Shakti. She is the transcendent Mother who stands above and behind
1 Sentence cancelled without substitution in MS. — Ed.
Page – 399 all the creation and supports it and stands too above and behind each plane of the creation. She is contained in the Supreme and supported in all she does and creates by the Supreme; but she carries too the Supreme within her. Here in the creation she manifests the dual Supreme whom she carries within her as the Ishwara and the Mahashakti and also as the dual power of Purusha-Prakriti. The Mahashakti comes out of the Ishwara and does the work of the creation, supported by the Ishwara.2
Man, the ignorant embodied mental being, begins to get free from his ignorance when he draws back from half-conscious substance of mind to conscious substance of Spirit. This is an overwhelming and absorbing experience to him and he cannot get beyond it. He speaks of it as his Self and gets in it some experience of his oneness with That which is beyond him, the Supreme. Yet what the Supreme is he does not really know and, so long as he is man, he cannot know. He tries to describe it or its aspects by abstract mental terms. He regards this experience of Self or Spirit as if it were the ultimate experience. Most absurdly, he tries to get through self to the Supreme by denying or getting rid of the Mother. Or else he regards her only as a convenience for getting united to the "Father", ie an exclusive Purusha side of the supreme. All this is reflected in your language which is a confused repetition of the language of the more ignorant schools of Vedanta. The Supreme is not exclusively the Purusha. One has to go through both aspects in union to reach him. The Mother herself is not merely Prakriti; she is the supreme and universal Shakti and contains in herself Purusha as well as Prakriti. And, secondly, the self or "essence" as experienced by man, that is to say, by the spiritualised mind, is not the ultimate experience. As that which uses the body is more than the body, so more than the Self is That of which the self is the spiritual substance.
2 Sri Aurobindo struck through this and the two preceding paragraphs. Later he took up the ideas and some of the language of the second paragraph in Part 6 of The Mother. — Ed.
Page – 400 Universal Mind is not "the stuff and body" of the Father-Mother. At most it is like life and matter, one form of expressive substance, a sheath or covering. It is rather the spiritual substance that could be imaged as the stuff and body of the Divine.3 __
I presume that by your "essence" you mean the self or spiritual substance of things. But why do you call it immaterial Matter? Life and mind could as well be described in that language — they can be felt or seen as immaterial substances. __
Again what is this "own being" of yours to which you are united by your heart-centre and which unites you to the universal Mind? Is it the mental or the psychic being or what is it? All this is confused and vague in the last degree. "Thy own being" is an expression which would usually mean the Jiva who is soul and spirit and has no more special connection with the universal Mental than with universal life or Matter. __
If the "essence" is the spiritual substance in which the Divine manifests and which is the true substance of all things, the one substance of which mind, life and body are lesser degrees, then no doubt that when it pours down as true being, as consciousness, as Ananda enables not only to face the universal mental as also the universal vital and physical but to work upon them and transform them. But is this what you have seen or is it something else? __
In any case the "essence" cannot be the Mother uniting the Divine Father to the human sons. It is through the spiritual substance that the unity with the Father and Mother is felt, because out of her spiritual substance the Mother has manifested her children. But the Divine and the Mother are surely something more than a spiritual substance. __
3 This paragraph and the four that follow are reworkings of earlier paragraphs of this draft letter. — Ed.
Page – 401
[2]
Mira has shown me your letter. You seem to yield periodically to an attack of suggestions from an adverse force always of the same kind; yet each time, instead of seeing the source of the suggestions and rejecting them, you accept and are chiefly busy in justifying your wrong movements, always with the ´ same morbid ideas and language about "méfiance" and being "misunderstood" etc. When will you discover finally that these movements and expressions of this kind are not and cannot be part of the true consciousness, that they are and can only be the expression of something small, morbid, vitally weak and petty and obscure that was in your past nature, still clings and is used by the adverse Powers to pull you back from your progress? There can be no question of "confidence" or want of confidence in these matters. We have only to see for ourselves what progress you make and where you stumble and deal with your Yoga according to the truth of what we see. You surely do not expect us to accept without examination your own estimate of yourself and of where you are. The questions you asked Mira had no true connection with the vital-physical weakness of which you complain, nor can that kind of practice help you to transmit to the physical the exact light of Truth from the higher consciousness. It was the ignorant Mind in you which was attaching an undue importance to this "practical occultism" and it is the same mind which tries to connect two unconnected things. This mind in you makes the most fanciful mistakes and likes to cling to them even when they are pointed out to you. Thus it erected a sheer imagination about an "interior circle" from which you were excluded in the arrangement of places, took it as a true and "profound" impression and seems to want still to cling to its own falsehood after the plain and simple practical reason of the arrangement had been clearly told to you. It is because of this continued false activity of the mind that you were told to silence the mentality and keep yourself open to the Light alone. What is the use of answering
Page – 402 that you are centred in the supermind and living in the Light and that [it] is only the vital physical that is weak in you? You were nearer the supramental when you discovered your mind's entire ignorance and accepted that salutary knowledge. That humility of the mental being and the clear perception of its own incompetence is the first step towards a sound approach to the supramental Truth. Otherwise you will always live in messages, approximations and suggestions, some from the Truth, some from the many regions of half Truth, some from the Twilight and Error and have no sure power to distinguish between them. Nobody doubts the sincerity of your efforts or the reality of the progress you have made. But you have been warned that the way is long and the progress made is nothing in comparison to what has still to be done. If you get discouraged at each [pace]4 because your demands are not satisfied or all your sentiments respected or all your perceptions valued as definitive truth, if you admit always the egoistic demand how do you expect to make a swift or a sure advance? Each step reveals an imperfection, each stage gained makes the experience left behind seem incomplete and inadequate.5 Active surrender, by the way, does not mean to follow your own ideas or your own guidance; it means to fight against your imperfections and weaknesses and follow only the way of the Truth shown to you.
[3]
The conditions have greatly changed since she went away and are not at present such as would make her return at all useful to her or otherwise advisable. I remain in my retirement and have no intention of coming out from it at any early date. On her side the Mother is also retiring more and more. There is no longer a daily meditation and she does not now give a regular day to the sadhakas, but sees them only from time to time. This movement of retirement is likely to remain and increase until what has to
4 MS paces 5 Sri Aurobindo wrote this sentence in the margin of the page. He apparently intended it to be inserted here. — Ed.
Page – 403 be achieved on the material plane has been definitely conquered and made sure. Under these conditions her return here would be of no use to her; she must remain in Europe until we write from here that things are changed and her return advisable. Page – 404
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