section
TWO
BEGINNINGS OF YOGA
AN EARLY
EXPERIENCE
Q: X says that it is written somewhere that you had a
realisation in 1890.
Is it true ?
A:
A realisation in 1890? It does not seem possible. There was something, though I
was not doing Yoga and knew nothing about it, in the year of my departure from
England; I don't remember which it was but probably 1892-93.... I don't remember anything special in 1890.
Where did he see this written?
22-8-1936
GLIMPSES
OF SPIRITUAL POSSIBILITY
Q: Is it true that only those who had, before beginning their Sadhana,
a clear knowledge of their spiritual possibility through a definite glimpse
received by the Divine Grace are able to stick to their path till the end, while
those who had no such glimpse may get some experience but will not be able to
stick to their Sadhana?
A:
At least I had no such glimpse before I started Yoga. I can't say about others —
perhaps some had — but the glimpse could only bring faith, it could not possibly
bring knowledge; knowledge comes by Yoga, not before it.
I repeat
that all one needs to know is whether the soul in one has been moved to the Yoga
or not.
5-5-1933
Do you
think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or
I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary
consciousness, one lives the ordinary life. When the awakening and the new
consciousness come, one leaves it — nothing puzzling in that.
27-4-1936
Page – 75
THE ONE THING ESSENTIAL
I do not
know what X said or in which article, I do not have it with me. But if the
statement is that nobody can have a successful meditation or realise anything
till he is pure and perfect, I fail to follow it: it contradicts my own
experience. I have always had realisation by meditation first and the
purification started afterwards as a result. I have seen many get important,
even fundamental realisations by meditation who could not be said to have a
great inner development. Are all Yogis who have meditated with effect and had
great realisations in their inner consciousness perfect in their nature ? It
does not look like it to me. I am unable to believe in absolute generalisations
in this field, because the development of spiritual consciousness is an
exceedingly vast and complex affair in which all sorts of things can happen and
one might almost say that for each man it is different according to his nature
and that the one thing that is essential is the inner call and aspiration and
the perseverance to follow always after it, no matter how long it takes, what
are the difficulties or impediments, because nothing else will satisfy the soul
within us.
If
absolute surrender, faith, etc. from the beginning were essential for Yoga, then
nobody could do it. I myself could not have done it if such a condition had been
demanded of me.
8-3-1935
THE
FIRST CONCRETE REALISATION
In a more
deep and spiritual sense a concrete realisation is that which makes the thing
realised more real, dynamic, intimately present to the consciousness than any
physical thing can be. Such a realisation of the personal Divine or of the
impersonal Brahman or of the Self does not usually come at the beginning of a
Sadhana or in the first years or for many years. It comes so to a very few; mine
came fifteen years after my first pre-yogic
Page - 76
experience in London and in the
fifth year after I started Yoga. That I consider extraordinarily quick, an
express train speed almost, although there may no doubt have been several
quicker achievements. But to expect and demand it so soon would be taken in the
eyes of any experienced Yogi or Sadhak as a rather rash and abnormal impatience.
Most would say that a slow development is the best one can hope for in the first
years and only when the nature is ready and fully concentrated towards the
Divine can the definitive experience come.
June, 1934
PERSONAL EFFORT AND ACTION OF GRACE
By the
way, what is this story about my four or five hours' concentration a day for
several years before anything came down ? Such a thing never happened, if by
concentration you mean laborious meditation. What I did was four or five hours a
day prāṇāyāma — which is quite another matter. And what flow do you
speak of? The flow of poetry came down while I was doing prāṇāyāma,
not some years afterwards. If it is the flow of experiences, that did come
after some years, but after I had stopped the prāṇāyāma
for a long time and was doing nothing and did not know what to do or where to
turn once all my efforts had failed. And it came not as a result of years of
prāṇāyāma
or concentration, but in a ridiculously easy way, by the grace either of a
temporary Guru (but it was not that, for he was himself bewildered by it) or by
the grace of the eternal Brahman and afterwards by the grace of Mahakali and
Krishna. So don't try to turn me into an argument against the Divine, that
attempt will be perfectly ineffective.
22-1-1936
What is
the use of saying things if you deliberately misinterpret what I write ? I said
clearly that the prāṇāyāma brought me nothing of any kind of spiritual
realisation. I had stopped it long before. The Brahman experience came when I
was groping for a way, doing no Sadhana at all, making no effort because I
didn't
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know
what effort to make, all having failed. Then in three days I got an experience
which most Yogis get only at the end of a long Yoga, got it without wanting or
trying after it, got it to the surprise of Lele who was trying to get me
something quite different. But I don't suppose you are able to understand, so I
say no more.
24-1-1936
Why did
not everything open up in me like the painting vision and some other things ?
All did not. As I told you I had to plod in many things. Otherwise the affair
would not have taken so many years (30). In this Yoga one can't take a short cut
in everything. I had to work on each problem and on each conscious plane to
solve or to transform and in each I had to take the blessed conditions as they
were and do honest work without resorting to miracles. Of course if the
consciousness grows all of itself, it is all right, things will come with the
growth, but not even then pell-mell in an easy gallop.
4-4-1935
It is not
that there is anything peculiar to you in these difficulties; every Sadhak
entering the Way has to get over similar impediments. It took me four years of
inner striving to find a real Way, even though the divine help was with me all
the time, and even then, it seemed to come by an accident; and it took me ten
more years of intense Yoga under a supreme inner guidance to trace it out and
that was because I had my past and the world's past to assimilate and overpass
before I could find and found the future.
5-5-1932
I think
you have made too much play with my phrase "an accident", ignoring the important
qualification, "it seemed to come by an accident". After four years
of
prāṇāyāma and other practices on my own, with no other result than
an increased health and outflow of energy, some psycho-physical phenomena, a
great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight (luminous
patterns and figures, etc.) mostly with the waking
Page – 78
eye, I
had a complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet
a man without fame whom I did not know, a Bhakta with a limited mind but with
some experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an
absolute fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least
understanding where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first
result was a series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of
consciousness which he had never intended — for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic
and he was against Adwaita Vedanta — and which were quite contrary to my own
ideas, for they made me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a
cinematographic play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the
Absolute Brahman. The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to
hand me , over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its
will—a principle or rather a seed force to which I kept unswervingly and
increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic
development bound by no single rule or style or dogma or Shastra to where and
what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little
what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed,
tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the
devil that had got hold of me. Does not all that justify my phrase "it seemed to
come by an accident" ? But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are not
like those of the human mind or according to our patterns and it is impossible
to judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the
Divine knows better than we can know. If we admit the Divine at all, both true
reason and Bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and
surrender. I do not see how without them there can be avyabhicāriṇī bhakti
(one-pointed adoration).
May, 1932
DEFICIENCIES OF THE HUMAN GURU
It is not
the human defects of the Guru that can stand in the way when there is the
psychic opening, confidence and surrender
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The
Guru is the channel or the representative or the manifestation of the Divine,
according to the measure of his personality or his attainment; but whatever he
is, it is to the Divine that one opens in opening to him; and if something is
determined by the power of the channel, more is determined by the inherent and
intrinsic attitude of the receiving consciousness, an element that comes out in
the surface mind as simple trust or direct unconditional self-giving, and once
that is there, the essential things can be gained even from one who seems to
others than the disciple an inferior spiritual source, and the rest will grow up
in the Sadhak of itself by the Grace of the Divine, even if the human being in
the Guru cannot give it. It is this that X appears to have done perhaps from the
first; but in most nowadays this attitude seems to come with difficulty, after
much hesitation and delay and trouble. In my own case I owe the first decisive
turn of my inner life to one who was infinitely inferior to me in intellect,
education and capacity and by no means spiritually perfect or supreme; but,
having seen a Power behind him and decided to turn there for help, I gave myself
entirely into his hands and followed with an automatic passivity the guidance.
He himself was astonished and said to others that he had never met anyone before
who could surrender himself so absolutely and without reserve or question to the
guidance of the helper. The result was a series of transmuting experiences of
such a radical character that he was unable to follow and had to tell me to give
myself up in future to the Guide within with the same completeness of surrender
as I had shown to the human channel. I give this example to show how these
things work; it is not in the calculated way the human reason wants to lay down,
but by a more mysterious and greater law.
23-3-1932
EXPERIENCE OF THE ADWAITIC SELF
Q: I
have read what you wrote to X the other day about the way in which you had the
experience of the Self; that such a thing could have happened seems to me almost
unthinkable!
Page - 80
A:
I can't help that. It happened. The mind's canons of the rational and the
possible do not give spiritual life and experience.
Q: But can you
not tell us what the experience was like? Was it by any chance like the one you
speak of in your Uttarpara Speech — the Vasudeva experience ?
A:
Great jumble-Mumble! What has Vasudeva to do with it ? Vasudeva is the name of Krishna, and in the Uttarpara I
was speaking of Krishna, if you please.
Q:
By the Self, I suppose, you mean the individual Self!
A:
Good Lord, no. I mean the Self, sir, the Self, the Adwaita, Vedantic, Shankar
Self. Atman, Atman! A thing I knew nothing about, never bargained for, didn't
understand either.
Q:
But didn't you begin Yoga later on in Gujerat ?
A:
Yes. But this began in London, sprouted the moment I set foot on Apollo Bunder,
touching Indian soil, flowered one day in the first year of my stay in Baroda,
at the moment when there threatened to be an accident to my carriage. Precise
enough?
31-10-1935
REALISATION OF THE SELF AND LOVE FOR THE DIVINE
Q:
Don't you think your realisation of the Self helped you in your crucial moments,
kept up your faith and love?
A:
That has nothing to do with love. Realisation of Self and love of the personal
Divine are two different movements.
My struggle has never been about the Self. All that is perfectly
irrelevant to the question which concerns the Bhakta's love for the Divine.
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Q: But the sweet memory of that experience of the Self
must have sustained you.
A:
There was nothing sugary about it at all. And I had no need to have any memory
of it, because it was with me for months and years and is there now though in
fusion with other realisations. My point is that there are hundreds of Bhaktas
who have the love and seeking without any concrete experience, with only a
mental conception or emotional belief in the Divine to support them. The whole
point is that it is untrue to say that one must have a decisive or concrete
experience before one can have love for the Divine. It is contrary to the facts
and the quite ordinary facts of the spiritual experience.
14-3-1936
THE
EXPERIENCE OF NIRVANA
I have
never said that things (in life) are harmonious now — on the contrary, with the
human consciousness as it is harmony is impossible. It is always what I have
told you, that the human consciousness is defective and simply impossible — and
that is why I strive for a higher consciousness to come and set right the
disturbed balance. I don't want to give you Nirvana (on paper) immediately
because Nirvana only leads up to Harmony in my communication. I am glad you are
getting converted to silence, and even Nirvana is not without its uses — in my
case it was the first positive spiritual experience and it made possible all the
rest of the Sadhana; but as to the positive way to get these things, I don't
know if your mind is quite ready to proceed with it. There are in fact several
ways. My own way was by rejection of thought. "Sit down," I was told, "look and
you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter,
fling them back." I sat down and looked and saw to my astonishment that it was so; I saw and felt concretely the
thought approaching as if to enter through or above the head and was able to
push it back concretely before it came inside.
In three
days — really in one — my mind became full of an
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eternal
silence — it is still there. But that I don't know how many people can do. One (not a disciple — I had no
disciples in those days) asked me how to do Yoga. I said: "Make your mind quiet
first." He did and his mind became quite silent and empty. Then he rushed to me
saying: "My brain is empty of thoughts, I
cannot think. I am becoming an idiot." He did not pause to look and see where
these thoughts he uttered were coming from! Nor did he realise that one who is
already an idiot cannot become one. Anyhow I was not patient in those days and I
dropped him and let him lose his miraculously achieved silence.
The usual way, the easiest if one can manage it at all, is to call
down the silence from above you into the brain, mind and body.
FREEDOM AND MASTERY OF MIND
All
developed mental men, those who get beyond the average, have in one way or other
or at least at certain times and for certain purposes to separate the two parts
of the mind, the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet
masterful part which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing them, judging,
rejecting, eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections and changes, the Master
in the House of Mind, capable of self-empire, sāmrājya.
The Yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master there, but even
while in mind in a way, he gets out of it as it were, and stands above or quite
back from it and free. For him the image of the factory of thoughts is no longer
quite valid; for he sees that thoughts come from outside, from the universal
Mind or universal Nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes unformed and
then they are given shape somewhere in us. The principal business of our mind is
either a response of acceptance or a refusal to these thought-waves (as also
vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or this giving a personal-mental form
to thought-stuff (or vital movements) from the environing Nature-Force. It was
my great debt to Lele that he showed me this. "Sit in meditation," he said, "but
do not think, look only at your mind; you will see thoughts coming into it,
before they can
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enter
throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence." I
had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into the mind from outside,
but I did not think either of questioning the truth or the possibility, I simply
sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became silent as a windless air on a
high mountain summit and then I saw one thought and then another coming in a
concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take
hold of the brain and in three days I was free. From that moment, in principle,
the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal Mind, not limited
to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a thought factory, but
a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being and free to choose
what it willed in this vast sight-empire and thought-empire. I mention this only
to emphasise that the possibilities of the mental being are not limited and that
it can be the free Witness and Master in its own house. It is not to say that
everybody can do it in the way I did it and with the same rapidity of the
decisive movement (for, of course, the latter fullest developments of this new
untrammelled mental power took time, many years) but a progressive freedom and
mastery of one's mind is perfectly within the possibilities of anyone who has
the faith and the will to undertake it.
5-8-1932
SILENCE
OF MIND BY DESCENT OF STILLNESS
I find
nothing to object to in Prof. Sorley's comment on the still, bright and clear
mind, for it adequately indicates the process by which the mind makes itself
ready for the reflection of the higher Truth in its undisturbed surface or
substance. One thing perhaps needs to be kept in view — this pure stillness of
the mind is always the required condition, the desideratum, but to bring it
about there are more ways than one. It is not, for instance, only by an effort
of the mind itself to get clear of all intrusive emotion or passion or of its
own characteristic vibrations or of the obscuring fumes of a physical inertia
which brings about the sleep or torpor of the mind instead of its wakeful
silence that the thing can be done — for this is only the ordinary process of
the Yogic path
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of
knowledge. It can happen also by a descent from above of a great spiritual
stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart and the life stimuli and the
physical reflexes. A sudden descent of this kind or a series of descents
accumulative in force and efficacy is a well-known phenomenon of spiritual
experience. Or, again, one may start a process of one kind or another for the
purpose which would normally mean a long labour and be seized, even at the
outset, by a rapid intervention or manifestation of the Silence with an effect
out of all proportion to the means used at the beginning. One commences with a
method, but the work is taken up by a Grace from above, from That to which one
aspires or an irruption of the infinitudes of the Spirit. It was in this last
way that I myself came by the mind's absolute silence, unimaginable to me before
I had its actual experience.
THE REAL DIFFICULTY1
Sri
Aurobindo has no remarks to make on Huxley's comments with which he is in entire
agreement. But in the phrase "to its heights we can always reach", very
obviously "we" does not refer to humanity in general but to those who have a
sufficiently developed inner spiritual life. It is probable that Sri Aurobindo
was thinking of his own experience. After three years of spiritual effort with
only minor results he was shown by a Yogi the way to silence his mind. This he
succeeded in doing entirely in two or three days by following the method shown.
There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary
movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things
around without any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego
disappeared and the movements of the ordinary
1 These remarks were
dictated by Sri Aurobindo apropos of the phrase "to its heights we can always
reach" occurring in the following passage in The Life Divine
quoted and commented upon by Aldous Huxley in his book. The Perennial
Philosophy (Chatto and Windus, London, 1946), p. 74:
"The touch of Earth is
always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical
Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really
mastered in its fullness — to its heights we can always reach — when we keep
our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing,' says the Upanishad
whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe."
The Life Divine (Centenary
Edition, 1972), Ch. II, p. 11
Page -
85
life as
well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti
alone which was not felt as belonging to oneself. But the perception which
remained saw all things as utterly unreal; this sense of unreality was
overwhelming and universal. Only some undefinable Reality was perceived as true
which was beyond space and time and unconnected with any cosmic activity, but
yet was met wherever one turned. This condition remained unimpaired for several
months and even when the sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return
to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which
resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all surface movements
and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost. At the same time an
experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity
and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative.
What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic
side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his
Sadhana and action. These realisations and others which followed upon them, such
as that of the Self in all and all in the Self and all as the Self, the Divine
in all and all in the Divine, are the heights to which Sri Aurobindo refers and
to which he says we can always rise; for they presented to him no long or
obstinate difficulty. The only real difficulty which took decades of spiritual
effort to work out towards completeness was to apply the spiritual knowledge
utterly to the world and to the surface psychological and outer life and to
effect its transformation both on the higher levels of Nature and on the
ordinary mental, vital and physical levels down to the subconscience and the
basic Inconscience and up to the supreme Truth-Consciousness or Supermind in
which alone the dynamic transformation could be entirely integral and absolute.
4-11-1946
INTELLECTUAL STATEMENT OF SPIRITUAL
EXPERIENCE
I do not
think, however, that the statement of supra-intellectual things necessarily
involves a making of distinctions in the terms of the intellect. For,
fundamentally, it is not an expression of
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ideas
arrived at by speculative thinking. One has to arrive at spiritual knowledge
through experience and a consciousness of things which arises directly out of
that experience or else underlies or is involved in it. This kind of knowledge,
then, is fundamentally a consciousness and not a thought or formulated idea.
For instance, my first major experience — radical and overwhelming, though not,
as it turned out, final and exhaustive — came after and by the exclusion and
silencing of all thought — there was, first, what might be called a spiritually
substantial or concrete consciousness of stillness and silence, then the
awareness of some sole and supreme Reality in whose presence things existed only
as forms but forms not at all substantial or real or concrete; but this was all
apparent to a spiritual perception and essential and impersonal sense and there
was not the least concept or idea of reality or unreality or any other notion,
for all concept or idea was hushed or rather entirely absent in the absolute
stillness. These things were known directly through the pure consciousness and
not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names. At the
same time this fundamental character of spiritual experience is not absolutely
limitative; it can do without thought, but it can do with thought also. Of
course, the first idea of the mind would be that the resort to thought brings
one back at once to the domain of the intellect — and at first and for a long
time it may be so; but it is not my experience that this is unavoidable. It
happens so when one tries to make an intellectual statement of what one has
experienced; but there is another kind of thought that springs out as if it were
a body or form of the experience or of the consciousness involved in it — or of
a part of that consciousness — and this does not seem to me to be intellectual
in its character. It has another light, another power in it, a sense within the
sense. It is very clearly so with those thoughts that come without the need of
words to embody them, thoughts that are of the nature of a direct seeing in the
consciousness, even a kind of intimate sense or contact formulating itself into
a precise expression of its awareness (I hope this is not too mystic or
unintelligible); but it might be said that directly the thoughts turn into words
they belong to the kingdom of intellect — for words are a coinage of the
intellect. But
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is it so
really or inevitably ? It has always seemed to me that words came originally
from somewhere else than the thinking mind, although the thinking mind secured
hold of them, turned them to its use and coined them freely for its purposes.
But even otherwise, is it not possible to use words for the expression of
something that is not intellectual? Housman contends that poetry is perfectly
poetical only when it is non-intellectual, when it is nonsense. That is too
paradoxical, but I suppose what he means is that if it is put to the strict test
of the intellect, it appears extravagant because it conveys something that
expresses and is real to some other kind of seeing than that which intellectual
thought brings to us. Is it not possible that words may spring from, that
language may be used to express — at least up to a certain point and in a
certain way — the supra-intellectual consciousness which is the essential power
of spiritual experience ? This, however, is by the way — when one tries to
explain spiritual experience to the intellect itself, then it is a different
matter.
14-1-1934
SILENCE AND ACTION
Since
1908 when I got the silence, I never think with my head or brain—it is always in
the wideness generally above the head that the thoughts occur.
17-10-1933
What you
describe is not at all a drawing away of life-energy; it is simply the effect of voidness and
stillness caused in the lower parts by the consciousness being located above. It
is quite consistent with action, only one must get accustomed to the idea of the
possibility of action under these conditions. In a greater state of emptiness I
carried on a daily newspaper and made a dozen speeches in the course of three or
four days — but I did not manage that in any way; it happened. The force made
the body do the work without any inner activity. The drawing away of the
life-energy leaves the body lifeless, helpless, empty and impotent,
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but it is
attended by no experience except a great suffering.
13-5-1936
It ought
to be possible to read with the inner consciousness looking on and, as it were,
seeing at the act of reading. In the condition of absolute inner silence I was
making speeches and conducting a newspaper, but all that got itself done without
any thought entering my mind or the silence being in the least disturbed or
diminished.
27-10-1934
When I
got the emptiness, it lasted for years. Whatever else came, came in the
emptiness, and I could at any time withdraw from the activity into the pure
silent peace.
21-9-1934
SELF-REALISATION AND SENSE OF THE BODY
Q: During the state of self-realisation
very little sense remains of my body. I do not know what it does or holds or
even where it lies.
A: That is usual. I was in that way unconscious of the
body for many years.
10-1934
YOGIC
EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIONS
Your
bells etc., mentioned by you as recent experiences were already enumerated as
long ago as the time of the Upanishads as signs accompanying the opening to the
larger consciousness, brahmaṇyabhivyaktikarāṇi yoge.
If I remember right your sparks come in the same list. The fact has been
recorded again and again in Yogic literature. I had the same experience hundreds
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of times
in the earlier part of my Sadhana. So you see you are in very honourable company
in this matter and need not trouble yourself about the objections of physical
science.
13-3-1931
I
remember when I first began to see inwardly (and outwardly also with the open
eye), a scientific friend of mine began to talk of after-images — "these are
only after-images"! I asked him whether after-images remained before the eye for
two minutes at a time — he said, "no", to his knowledge only for a few seconds;
I also asked him whether one could get after-images of things not around one or
even not existing upon this earth, since they had other shapes, another
character, other hues, contours and a very different dynamism, life-movements
and values — he could not reply in the affirmative. That is how these so-called
scientific explanations break down as soon as you pull them out of their
cloudland of mental theory and face them with the actual phenomena they pretend
to decipher.
19-2-1932
I suppose
I have had myself an even more completely European education than you, and I
have had too my period of agnostic denial, but from the moment I looked at these
things I could never take the attitude of doubt and disbelief which was for so
long fashionable in Europe. Abnormal, otherwise supraphysical experiences and
powers, occult or Yogic, have always seemed to me something perfectly natural
and credible. Consciousness in its very nature could not be limited by the
ordinary physical human-animal consciousness, it must have the other ranges.
Yogic or occult powers are no more supernatural or incredible than is
supernatural or incredible the power to write a great poem or compose great
music; few people can do it, as things are, — not even one in a million; for
poetry and music come from the inner being and to write or to compose true and
great things one has to have the passage clear between the outer mind and
something in the inner being. That is why you got the poetic power as
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soon as
you began Yoga, — Yogic force made the passage clear. It is the same with Yogic
consciousness and its powers; the thing is to get the passage clear, — for they
are already within you. Of course, the first thing is to believe, aspire and,
with the true urge within, make the endeavour.
You ask
me whether you have to give up your predilection for testing before accepting
and to accept everything in Yoga a priori —
and by testing you mean testing by the ordinary reason. The only answer I can
give to that is that the experiences of Yoga belong to an inner domain and go
according to a law of their own, have their own method of perception, criteria
and all the rest of it which are neither those of the domain of the physical
senses nor of the domain of rational or scientific enquiry. Just as scientific
enquiry passes beyond that of the physical senses and enters the domain of the
infinite and infinitesimal about which the senses can say nothing and test
nothing — for one cannot see and touch an electron or know by the evidence of
the sense-mind whether it exists or not or decide by that evidence whether the
earth really turns round the sun and not rather the sun round the earth as our
senses and all our physical experience daily tell us — so the spiritual search
passes beyond the domain of scientific or rational enquiry and it is impossible
by the aid of the ordinary positive reason to test the data of spiritual
experience and decide whether those things exist or not or what is their law and
nature. As in Science, so here you have to accumulate experience on experience,
following faithfully the methods laid down by the Guru or by the systems of the
past, you have to develop an intuitive discrimination which compares the
experiences, see what they mean, how far and in what field each is valid, what
is the place of each in the whole, how it can be reconciled or related with
others that at first might seem to contradict it, etc., etc., until you can move
with a secure knowledge in the vast field of spiritual phenomena. That is the
only way to test spiritual experience. I have myself tried the other method and
I have found it absolutely incapable and inapplicable. On the
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other
hand, if you are not prepared to go through all that yourself, — as few can do
except those of extraordinary spiritual stature,— you have to accept the leading
of a Master, as in Science you accept a teacher instead of going through the
whole field of Science and its experimentation all by yourself — at least until
you have accumulated sufficient experience and knowledge. If that is accepting
things a priori,
well, you have to accept a priori. For I am unable to see by what valid
tests you propose to make the ordinary reason the judge of what is beyond it.
You quote the sayings of X and Y. I would like to know before assigning a value
to these utterances what they actually did for the testing of their spiritual
perceptions and experiences. How did X test the value of his spiritual
experiences — some of them not easily credible to the ordinary positive mind any
more than the miracles attributed to some famous Yogis? I know nothing about Y,
but what were his tests and how did he apply them? What were his methods? his
criteria? It seems to me that no ordinary mind will accept the apparition of
Buddha out of a wall or the half hour's talk with Hayagriva as valid facts by
any kind of testing. It would either have to accept them a priori or on
the sole evidence of X, which comes to the same thing, or to reject them a
priori as hallucinations or mere mental images accompanied in one case by an
auditive hallucination. I fail to see how it could "test" them. Or how was I to
test by the ordinary mind my experience of Nirvana ? To what conclusion could I
come about it by the aid of the ordinary positive reason ? How could I test its
validity ? I am at a loss to imagine. I did the only thing I could — to accept
it as a strong and valid truth of experience, let it have its full play and
produce its full experiential consequences until I had sufficient Yogic
knowledge to put it in its place. Finally, how without inner knowledge or
experience can you or anyone else test the inner knowledge and experience of
others?
18-11-1934
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