{"id":2672,"date":"2013-07-13T01:43:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2672"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:43:08","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:43:08","slug":"33-problems-of-philosophy-science-religion-and-society-vol-28-letters-on-yoga-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/28-letters-on-yoga-i\/33-problems-of-philosophy-science-religion-and-society-vol-28-letters-on-yoga-i","title":{"rendered":"-33_Problems of Philosophy, Science, Religion and Society.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n\tPart Four <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tProblems of Philosophy,
\nScience, Religion and Society
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t
\n\t 
\n  <\/font><\/b> <\/p>\n

\n

\n

\n

\n\tSection One <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tThought, Philosophy, Science
\n<\/font><\/b> <\/p>\n


\nand Yoga  
\n  
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\n

\n

\n\tChapter One <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tThe Intellect and Yoga
\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tIntellectual Truth and Spiritual Experience
\n\t<\/a> <\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Intellectual truths? Do you think that the intellectual truth of
\nthe Divine is its real truth? In that case there is no need of Yoga. Philosophy is enough. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Philosophy knows nothing about peace and silence or the inner
\nand outer vital. These things are discovered only by Yoga. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas
\ndoes not bring with it any realisation. Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of
\nconsciousness, it can only bring a change of mind. And if your mind is sufficiently mobile, it will go on changing from one thing
\nto another till the end without arriving at any sure way or any spiritual harbour. The mind can think and doubt and question
\nand accept and withdraw its acceptance, make formations and unmake them, pass decisions and revoke them, judging always
\non the surface and by surface indications and therefore never coming to any deep and firm experience of Truth, but by itself it
\ncan do no more. There are only three ways by which it can make itself a channel or instrument of Truth. Either it must fall silent
\nin the Self and give room for a wider and greater consciousness; or it must make itself passive to an inner Light and allow that
\nLight to use it as a means of expression; or else it must itself change from the questioning intellectual superficial mind it now
\nis to an intuitive intelligence, a mind of vision fit for the direct perception of the divine Truth. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you want to do anything in the path of Yoga, you must fix<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\n

once for all what way you mean to follow. It is no use setting your face towards the future and then always looking back towards
\nthe past; in this way you will arrive nowhere. If you are tied to your past, return to it and follow the way you then choose;
\nbut if you choose this way instead, you must give yourself to it single-mindedly and not look back at every moment. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

My reason for wanting you to get rid of the mental concepts is
\nthat they are rigid and keep you tied to the idea and feeling of your incapacity and the impossibility of the sadhana. Get rid of
\nthat and a great obstacle disappears. <\/p>\n

You would then see that there is no reason for the constant
\nsense of grief and despair that reacts upon your effort and makes it sterile. I simply want you to put yourself, if it is possible, in that
\nstate of quietude and openness which is favourable to the higher consciousness and its action; if it is not possible at present, I have
\nstill said that I will do my utmost to help you to the experience. That does not mean that the utmost has been yet done or that it
\ncan be done in a few days. But (although people are not giving me the freedom of mind and disposal of time which I had asked
\nfor), it will be done. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

The point about the intellect’s misrepresentation of the “formless” (the result of a merely negative expression of something
\nthat is inexpressibly intimate and positive) is very well made and hits the truth in the centre. No one who has had the Ananda
\nof the Brahman can do anything but smile at the charge of coldness; there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a
\nconcentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture that it is quite impossible even to suggest to anyone who has not had the
\nexperience. The eternal Reality is neither cold nor dry nor empty \u2014you might just as well talk of the midsummer sunlight as cold
\nor the ocean as dry or perfect fullness as empty. Even when you enter into it by elimination of form and everything else, it seizes
\nas a miraculous fullness that is truly the Purnam \u2014when it is   <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

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entered affirmatively as well as by negation, there can obviously be no question of emptiness or dryness. All is there and more
\nthan one could ever dream of as the all. That is why one has to object to the intellect thrusting itself in as the sabjanta <\/i>judge
\n\u2014if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it.
\nBut it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the Truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance
\nand makes its constructions a wall which refuses to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities or scope. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

You can tell him Mother does not discuss these mental problems
\n[such as the existence of evil in the world<\/i>] even with the disciples. It is quite useless trying to reconcile these things with the
\nintellect. For there are two things: the Ignorance from which the struggle and discord come and the secret Light, Unity, Bliss and
\nHarmony. The intellect belongs to the Ignorance. It is only by getting into another consciousness that one can live in the Light
\nand Bliss and Unity and not be touched by the outward discord and struggle. That change of consciousness therefore is the only
\nthing that matters; to reconcile with the intellect could make no difference. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Yes, you need not listen to the “common sense” of others at
\nleast; usually there is much that is common in it but very little that is sense. What your inner being feels is rather to be followed
\nthan the superficial reasonings of the outer intelligence. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

How can Reason be the sole arbiter [in the quest for Truth<\/i>]? Whose reason? The reason in different men comes to different,
\nopposite or incompatible conclusions. We cannot say that Reason is infallible, any more than feeling is infallible or the senses
\nare infallible. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

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\n

\nRussell has the doubts because he has no spiritual experience, Rolland because
\nhe takes his emotional intellectuality for spirituality, Tagore \u2014<\/p>\n

If one is blind, it is quite natural
\n\t\u2014for the human intelligence which is rather an asinine thing at its best \u2014to deny light; if one’s highest natural vision is that of glimmering mists, it is
\nequally natural to believe that all high vision is only a mist or a glimmer. But Light exists for all that
\n\t\u2014and for all that, spiritual
\nTruth is more than a mist and a glimmer. <\/p>\n

\n\t <\/p>\n

\n\tIntellectual Arguments against Spirituality
\n\t<\/a>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have read Leonard Woolf’s article,1 but I do not propose to deal with it in my comments on Professor Sorley’s letter2
\n\u2014for
\napart from the ignorant denunciation and cheap satire in which it deals, there is nothing much in its statement of the case against
\nspiritual thought or experience; its reasoning is superficial and springs from an entire misunderstanding of the case for the mystic. There are four main arguments he sets against it and none of them have any value. <\/p>\n

Argument number one. Mysticism and mystics have always risen in times of decadence, of the ebb of life and their loud
\nquacking is a symptom of the decadence. This argument is absolutely untrue. In the East the great spiritual movements have
\narisen in the full flood of a people’s life and culture or on a rising tide and they have themselves given a powerful impulse
\nof expansion and richness to its thought and art and life; in Greece the mystics and the mysteries were there at the prehistoric
\nbeginning and in the middle (Pythagoras was one of the greatest of mystics) and not only in the ebb and decline; the mystic cults
\nflourished in Rome too when its culture was at high tide; many great spiritual personalities of Italy, France, Spain sprang up <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1 Leonard Woolf, “Quack, Quack! or Having it Both Ways” [a review of C. E. M.<\/i>
\nJoad, <\/i>Counterattack from the East: The Philosophy of Radhakrishnan (London: Allen<\/i>
\nand Unwin, 1932)]. “New Statesman and Nation”, vol. 6, no. 145 (2 December 1933):<\/i>
\npp. 702 \u00ad 4.<\/i>
\n2 See the letters on pages 357 \u00ad 68. \u2014Ed.<\/i>  
\n\t\t\t<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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in a life that was rich, vivid and not in the least touched with decadence. This hasty and inept generalisation has no truth in it
\nand therefore no value. <\/p>\n

Argument number two. A spiritual experience cannot be
\ntaken as a truth (it is a chimaera) unless it is proved just as the presence of a chair in the next room can be proved by showing
\nit to the eye. Of course, a spiritual experience cannot be proved in that way, for it does not belong to the order of physical facts
\nand is not physically visible or touchable. The writer’s position would amount to this that only what is or can easily be made
\nevident to everybody without any need of training, development, equipment or personal discovery, is to be taken as true. This is a
\nposition which, if accepted, would confine knowledge or truth within very narrow limits and get rid of a great deal of human
\nculture. A spiritual peace, for example, \u2014the peace that passeth all understanding
\n\t\u2014is a common experience of the mystics all
\nover the world \u2014it is a fact but a spiritual fact, a fact of the invisible; when one enters it or it enters into one, one knows
\nthat it is a truth of existence and is there all the time behind life and visible things. But how am I to “prove” these invisible
\nfacts to Mr. Leonard Woolf? he will turn away saying that this is the usual decadent quack quack and pass contemptuously on
\n\t\u2014
\nperhaps to write another cleverly shallow article on some subject of which he has no personal knowledge or experience. <\/p>\n

Argument number three. The generalisations based on spiritual experience are irrational as well as unproven. Irrational
\nin what way? Are they merely foolish and inconceivable \u2014infrarational \u2014or do they belong to a suprarational order of
\nexperience to which the ordinary intellectual canons do not apply because these are founded on phenomena as they appear
\nto the external mind and sense and not to an inner realisation which surpasses these phenomena? That is the contention of
\nthe mystics and it cannot be dismissed by merely saying that as they do not agree with ordinary experience, therefore they are
\nnonsense and false. I would not undertake to defend as unimpeachable all that Joad or Radhakrishnan
\nmay have written \u2014such as the formula that "the universe is good", \u2014but for <\/p>\n

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many or most of the statements marshalled for condemnation by the writer one can surely say that they are not irrational
\nat all. “Integrating the personality” may have no meaning to him, it has a very clear meaning to many, for it is a truth of
\nexperience \u2014and, if modern psychology is to be believed, it is not irrational since there is in our being not only a conscious
\nbut an unconscious or subconscious or concealed subliminal part and it is not impossible to become aware of both and make
\nsome kind of integration. To “transcend both consciousness and unconsciousness” gets at once a rational meaning if we admit
\nthat as there is a subconscious so there may be a superconscious part of our being. To reconcile disparate parts of our nature
\nor our perception or experience of things is also not such a ridiculous or meaningless phrase. It is not absurd to say that the
\ndoctrine of Karma reconciles determinism and free-willism, since this doctrine supposes that our own past action and therefore
\nour past will determined to a great extent the present results but not so as to exclude a present will modifying them and creating
\na fresh determinism of our existence yet to be. The phrase about the value of the world is quite intelligible once we see that it
\nrefers to a progressive value not determined by the good or bad experience of the moment, a value of existence developing
\nthrough time and taken as a whole. As for the statement about God, it may have little or no meaning if it is taken in connection with the superficial idea of the Divine current in popular religion, but it is a perfectly logical result of the premiss that
\nthere is an Infinite and Eternal which is manifesting in itself Time and things that are phenomenally finite. One may accept
\nor reject this complex idea of the Divine which is founded on a coordination of the data of long spiritual experience passed
\nthrough by thousands of seekers in all times, but I fail to see why it should be considered unreasonable. If it is because that
\nwould mean “to have it not only in both ways but in every way”, I do not see why this should be so reprehensible or a complex
\nmanifestation of a single Essence, Consciousness or Force should be considered
\nprima facie <\/i>inadmissible. There can be after all a
\nsynthetic and global view and consciousness of things which is   <\/p>\n

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not bound by the oppositions and divisions of a more analytical and selective or dissecting intelligence. <\/p>\n

Argument number four. The plea of intuition is only a facile cover for an inability to explain or establish by the use of reason
\n\u2014Joad and Radhakrishnan reason, but take refuge in intuition because their reasoning fails. Can the issue be settled in so easy
\nand trenchant a way? The fact is that the mystic stands on an inner knowledge, an inner experience
\n\u2014but if he philosophises,
\nhe must try to explain to the reason, though not necessarily always by the abstract reason alone, what he has seen to be
\nthe Truth. He cannot but say, “I am explaining a truth which is beyond outer phenomena and the intelligence which depends
\non phenomena; it is really the outcome of a certain kind of direct experience and the intuitive knowledge which arises from
\nthat experience, so it cannot be adequately communicated by symbols appropriate to the world of outer phenomena
\n\u2014yet I
\nam obliged to do as well as I can with these to help me towards some statement which will be intellectually acceptable to you.”
\nThere is no wickedness or deceitful cunning therefore in using metaphors and symbols with a cautionary “as it were”,
\n\u2014so
\nobjected to by Mr. Woolf in the simile of the focus, which is surely not intended as an argument but as a suggestive image.
\nI may observe that the writer himself takes refuge in metaphor, beginning with the famous “quack quack”, and an adversary
\nmight well reply that he does so in order to damn the opposite side while avoiding the necessity of a sound philosophical reply
\nto the ideas he dislikes and repudiates. An intensity of belief is not the measure of truth, but neither is an intensity of unbelief
\nthe right measure. <\/p>\n

\n\tAs to the real nature of intuition and its relation to the intellectual
\n\tmind, that is quite another and very large and complex question which cannot
\n\tbe dealt with in a short space. I have confined myself to pointing out that
\n\tthis article is a quite inadequate and superficial criticism. A case can be
\n\tmade against spiritual experience and spiritual philosophy and its
\n\tpositions, but to deserve a serious reply it must be put forward by a better
\n\tadvocate and it must touch the real centre of the problem which <\/p>\n

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lies here. As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guide, as there is a category
\nof truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of
\nmore subtle truths which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason but can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous but not the less real for that
\n\u2014they have immense results upon the
\nconsciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and
\nknowledge, a possibility of the overcoming of the lower animal nature, vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them
\ndo not exist. A new outlook on things arises which brings with it, if fully pursued into its consequences, a great liberation, inner
\nharmony, unification \u2014many other possibilities besides. These things have been experienced, it is true, by a small minority of
\nthe human race, but still there has been a host of independent witnesses to them in all times, climes and conditions and numbered among them are some of the greatest intelligences of the past, some of the world’s most remarkable figures. Must these
\npossibilities be immediately condemned as chimaeras because they are not only beyond the average man in the street but also
\nnot easily seizable even by many cultivated intellects or because their method is more difficult than that of the ordinary sense
\nor reason? If there is any truth in them, is not this possibility opened by them worth pursuing as opening a highest range to
\nself-discovery and world-discovery by the human soul? At its best, taken as true, it must be that
\n\u2014at its lowest, taken as only
\na possibility, as all things attained by man have been only a possibility in their earlier stages, it is a great and may well be a
\nmost fruitful adventure. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

I know it is the Russian explanation of the recent trend to spirituality and mysticism that it is a phenomenon of capitalist society
\nin its decadence. But to read an economic cause, conscious or unconscious, into all phenomena of man’s history is part of the
\n <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

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\n

<p align="left" style="line-height: 150%; <\/p>\n

Bolshevik gospel born of the fallacy of Karl Marx. Man’s nature is not so simple and one-chorded as all that \u2014it has many lines and each line produces a need of his life. The spiritual or
\nmystic line is one of them and man tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionism, by
\nspiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his
\nhighest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine. The tendency towards the search for spirituality began in Europe
\nwith a recoil from the nineteenth century’s scientific materialism, a dissatisfaction with the pretended all-sufficiency of the reason
\nand the intellect and a feeling out for something deeper. That was a pre-war phenomenon, and began when there was no menace
\nof Communism and the capitalistic world was at its height of insolent success and triumph, and it came rather as a revolt
\nagainst the materialistic bourgeois life and its ideals, not as an attempt to serve or sanctify it. It has been at once served and
\nopposed by the post-war disillusionment \u2014opposed because the post-war world has fallen back either on cynicism and the life
\nof the senses or on movements like Fascism and Communism; served because with the deeper minds the dissatisfaction with
\nthe ideals of the past or the present, with all mental or vital or material solutions of the problem of life has increased and
\nonly the spiritual path is left. It is true that the European mind having little light on these things dallies with vital will-o’-the
\nwisps like spiritism or theosophy or falls back upon the old religionism; but the deeper minds of which I speak either pass
\nby them or pass through them in search of a greater Light. I have had contact with many and the above tendencies are very clear.
\nThey come from all countries and it was only a minority who hailed from England or America. Russia is different
\n\t\u2014unlike the
\nothers it had lingered in mediaeval religionism and not passed through any period of revolt
\n\t\u2014so when the revolt came it was
\nnaturally anti-religious and atheistic. It is only when this phase is exhausted that Russian mysticism can revive and take not
\na narrow religious but the spiritual direction. It is true that
\nmysticism a revers<\/i>, turned upside down, has made Bolshevism
\n\t<p align="left" style="line-height: 150%; <\/p>\n

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\n

and its endeavour a creed rather than a political theme and a search for the paradisal secret millennium on earth rather
\nthan the building of a purely social structure. But for the most part Russia is trying to do on the communistic basis all that
\nnineteenth-century idealism hoped to get at \u2014and failed \u2014in the midst of or against an industrial competitive environment.
\nWhether it will really succeed any better is for the future to decide \u2014for at present it only keeps what it has got by a tension
\nand violent control which is not over. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tThe Valley of the False Glimmer
\n\t<\/a>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One feels here [in the letters of Krishnaprem<\/i>] a stream from the direct sources of Truth that one does not meet so often as one
\ncould desire. Here is a mind that can not only think but see \u2014and not merely see the surfaces of things with which most
\nintellectual thought goes on wrestling without end or definite issue and as if there were nothing else, but look into the core.
\n    <\/i>
\n The Tantriks have a phrase paś<\/font>yantī<\/font> vā<\/font>k <\/i>to describe one level
\n <\/i> of the Vak-Shakti, the seeing Word; here is paś<\/font>yantī<\/font> buddhi<\/i>, a
\nseeing Intelligence. It might be because the seer within has passed beyond thought into experience, but there are many who have
\na considerable wealth of experience without its clarifying their eye of thought to this extent; the soul feels, but the mind goes on
\nwith mixed and imperfect transcriptions, blurs and confusions in the idea. There must have been the gift of right vision lying
\nready in this nature. <\/p>\n

It is an achievement to have got rid so rapidly and decisively
\nof the shimmering mists and fogs which modern intellectualism takes for Light of Truth. The modern mind has so long and persistently wandered \u2014and we with it \u2014in that Valley of the False Glimmer that it is not easy for anyone to disperse its mists with
\nthe sunlight of clear vision so soon and entirely as has here been done. All that is said here about modern humanism and humanitarianism, the vain efforts of the sentimental idealist and the ineffective intellectual, about synthetic eclecticism and other kindred
\nthings is admirably clear-minded, it hits the target. It is not by   <\/p>\n

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these means that humanity can get that radical change of its ways of life which is yet becoming so imperative, but only by reaching
\nthe bedrock of Reality behind, \u2014not through mere ideas and mental formations, but by a change of the consciousness, an
\ninner and spiritual conversion. But that is a truth for which it would be difficult to get a hearing in the present noise of all
\nkinds of many-voiced clamour and confusion and catastrophe. <\/p>\n

A distinction, the distinction very keenly made here, between the plane of phenomenal process, of externalised Prakriti, and the plane of Divine Reality ranks among the first words
\nof the inner wisdom. The turn given to it in these pages is not merely an ingenious explanation; it expresses very soundly one
\nof the clear certainties you meet when you step across the border and look at the outer world from the standing-ground of the
\ninner spiritual experience. The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge
\nScience organises takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth
\nof process. I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss
\nthe all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After
\nall the triumphs and marvels of Science the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as
\nmysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast
\nand variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons,
\nidentical and varied only in arrangement and number, is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organised and rigidly determined accident, an
\nimpossibility that has somehow happened, \u2014it has shown us a
\n new, a material Maya, aghaṭ<\/font>ana-ghaṭ<\/font>ana-paṭī<\/font>yasī<\/font><\/i>, very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be
\nand yet somehow is there actual, irresistibly organised, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because Science
\n   <\/p>\n

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\n

has missed something essential; it has seen and scrutinised what has happened and in a way how it happened, but it has shut its
\neyes to something that made this impossible possible, something that it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in
\nthings if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust of manageable and utilisable appearance.
\nIt is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself
\ncan you begin to experience the true origination, significance and circles of the Lila. I say “begin” because the Divine Reality
\nis not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is Infinite and opens before
\nyou an Infinite Knowledge to which all Science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal
\nbehind things and in the light of That all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible. <\/p>\n

I have once before told you what I think of the ineffective peckings of certain well-intentioned scientific minds on the
\nsurface \u2014or apparent surface \u2014of the spiritual Reality behind things and I need not elaborate it. More important is the
\nprognostic of a greater danger coming in the new attack by the adversary, the sceptics, against the validity of spiritual and
\nsupraphysical experience, their new strategy of destruction by admitting and explaining it in their own sense. There may well
\nbe a strong ground for the apprehension; but I doubt whether, if these things are once admitted to scrutiny, the mind of humanity
\nwill long remain satisfied with explanations so ineptly superficial and external, explanations that explain nothing. If the defenders
\nof religion take up an unsound position, easily capturable, when they affirm only the subjective validity of spiritual experience,
\nthe opponents also seem to me to be giving away without knowing it the gates of the materialistic stronghold by their consent at
\nall to admit and examine spiritual and supraphysical experience. Their entrenchment in the physical field, their refusal to admit
\nor even examine supraphysical things was their tower of strong safety; once it is abandoned, the human mind pressing towards
\nsomething less negative, more helpfully positive will pass to it   <\/p>\n

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over the dead bodies of their theories and the broken debris of their annulling explanations and ingenious psychological labels.
\nAnother danger may then arise, \u2014not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake,
\non one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires
\nof the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual \u2014mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the
\npast and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the
\nmaterial darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth
\nconsciousness stands firm beyond as the one ultimate certitude. <\/p>\n

Art, poetry, music are not Yoga, not in themselves things
\nspiritual any more than philosophy either is a thing spiritual or science. There lurks here another curious incapacity of the
\nmodern intellect \u2014its inability to distinguish between mind and spirit, its readiness to mistake mental, moral and aesthetic idealisms for spirituality and their inferior degrees for spiritual values. It is mere truth that the mental intuitions of the meta
\nphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short of a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flickers, shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light. It is not less true that, looked at from the peaks, there is not much difference between
\nthe high mental eminences and the lower climbings of this external existence. All the energies of the Lila are equal in the sight
\nfrom above, all are disguises of the Divine. But one has to add that all can be turned into a first means towards the realisation
\nof the Divine. A philosophic statement about the Atman is a mental formula, not knowledge, not experience: yet sometimes
\nthe Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change
\noperated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm, equal, ineffable. One stands upon
\na mountain ridge and glimpses or mentally feels a wideness, a pervasiveness, a nameless Vast in Nature; then suddenly there
\ncomes the touch, a revelation, a flooding, the mental loses itself   <\/p>\n

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in the spiritual, one bears the first invasion of the Infinite. Or you stand before a temple of Kali beside a sacred river and see what?
\n\u2014a sculpture, a gracious piece of architecture, but in a moment mysteriously, unexpectedly there is instead a Presence, a Power,
\na Face that looks into yours, an inner sight in you has regarded the World-Mother. Similar touches can come too through art,
\nmusic, poetry to their creator or to one who feels the shock of the word, the hidden significance of a form, a message in the
\nsound that carries more perhaps than was consciously meant by the composer. All things in the Lila can turn into windows
\nthat open on the hidden Reality. Still so long as one is satisfied with looking through windows, the gain is only initial; one day
\none will have to take up the pilgrim’s staff and start out to journey there where the Reality is for ever manifest and present.
\nStill less can it be spiritually satisfying to remain with shadowy reflections; a search imposes itself for the Light which they strive
\nto figure. But since this Reality and this Light are in ourselves no less than in some high region above the mortal plane, we can in
\nthe seeking for it use many of the figures and activities of Life; as one offers a flower, a prayer, an act to the Divine, one can
\noffer too a created form of beauty, a song, a poem, an image, a strain of music, and gain through it a contact, a response or
\nan experience. And when that divine Consciousness has been entered or when it grows within, then too its expression in life
\nthrough these things is not excluded from Yoga; these creative activities can still have their place, though not intrinsically a
\ngreater place than any other that can be put to divine use and service. Art, poetry, music, as they are in their ordinary functioning, create mental and vital, not spiritual values; but they can be turned to a higher end, and then, like all things that
\nare capable of linking our consciousness to the Divine, they are transmuted and become spiritual and can be admitted as part of
\na life of Yoga. All takes new values not from itself, but from the consciousness that uses it; for there is only one thing essential,
\nneedful, indispensable, to grow conscious of the Divine Reality and live in it and live it always. <\/p>\n

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It seems to me that Krishnaprem has seen very clearly with his
\n <\/i> usual accuracy and his mind of sight, paśyantī  buddhi<\/i>, the truth
\nabout yourself and your sadhana. I think that you could not do better than accept his diagnosis and follow entirely his suggested
\ntreatment. Especially you should accept his assurance about the final result and give no room in your mind to any doubt on that
\npoint or any disposition to give up your own case as hopeless. To my eyes you seem to have been making very good progress
\nin several directions and I have no doubt about your emerging from your difficulties into the light. <\/p>\n

I do not think there is any real impasse, I mean no inescapable hold-up on the road from which you cannot get out;
\nit only seems to be to you like that because of the difficulties created for you by your intellect. It is because of its preconceptions and fixed judgments that you cannot make the equation he considers needful for you. The intellect is full of things like
\nthat and cannot by itself see truly the things that reveal their meaning fully only in the light of psychic or spiritual truth;
\nthe equation he speaks of belongs to that order. The intellect is of use for perceiving material facts and their relations but
\neven these it cannot be relied on to see rightly in their total reality; it may see rightly, but as often wrongly and always only
\npartly and imperfectly. Moreover, as the modern psychologists have discovered, it sees them coloured by the hues supplied
\nfrom its own individual temperament, its own psychological personality and from its own peculiar angle. It thinks it is seeing
\nquite objectively and impersonally but it does not so see and cannot so see; a dog might as well try to escape from its own
\npursuing tail: the human intellect’s thought and sight cannot escape from its own subjectivity and colouring personality. The
\ndeeper and more accurate view of things can be more easily attained by the mind of sight which Krishnaprem has so much
\n  <\/i>
\ndeveloped, paśyantī  buddhi<\/i>. You may say that you have got only your intellect to help you with its judgments and opinions: but
\nmental judgments and opinions \u2014well, they are always personal things and one can never be perfectly sure that one’s own are
\ncorrect and the judgments and opinions of others which differ   <\/p>\n

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widely or even diametrically from one’s own are mistaken. But you need not be always solely dependent on this fallible and
\nlimited instrument; for, although you have not developed the mind of sight as Krishnaprem has done, it is certainly there. I
\nhave always seen that when you have been in a psychic condition with bhakti or the higher part of the mind and the vital upper
\nmost in you this mind of sight has come out and your ideas, feelings and judgments have become remarkably clear, right and
\noften luminous. This has only to develop, you will then be able to see more clearly what Krishnaprem sees and many of your
\ndifficulties will disappear and the equation you want to make may become clear to you. <\/p>\n

As for surrender, you already have it initially in your will to serve for the sake of service without claiming reward or success
\nand without attachment to wealth or fame. If you extend that attitude into your whole sadhana, then realisation is sure. In any
\ncase, you should throw away all obsession of the sense of failure or the impossibility of success in your sadhana. Krishnaprem is
\nsurely right in telling you, when the Grace is on you and what he names as the Radhashakti is there to give you its unseen help,
\nthat the success of your sadhana is sure and the realisation will come. The impasse is a temporary block; your trust will become
\ncomplete and the road to realisation clear.  <\/p>\n

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