Chapter 8February 28, 1961

It’s a curious thing... speaking evidently helps me follow the experience. But I can’t just begin speaking all alone up in my room! And talking to a tape recorder is useless. Up to now, it certainly flows the best with you – by far. I haven’t tried with others, although occasionally I’ve said something to Nolini, but his receptivity is fuzzy (I don’t know whether you can understand this impression: it’s as though my. words were going into cotton-wool). Once, as I told you, I spoke with R., and with him I felt that three quarters of it was absolutely lost – and as a matter of fact it was. But with you I begin to SEE, and the need to formulate makes me concentrate on my vision. And this I experience with you more than I ever have with anyone. So....

So you are bearing the consequences!

Well, then – do you need anything?... Nothing?... Petit, when I have something especially good for lunch, I always feel like giving it to you!...

I have brought you the exact text of that sentence on Sri Aurobindo I told you about the other day.78 It was in reply to a letter....

You know this mental habit (which people take for mental superiority!) of lumping everything together on the same level: all the teachings, all the prophets, all the sects, all the religions. You know the habit: ‘We are not prejudiced, we have no preferences – it’s all the SAME THING.’ A dreadful muddle!

It’s one of the biggest mental difficulties of this age. Anyway, in reply to this nonsense, I have said: ‘Your error, to be precise, is that you go to the Theosophical Society, for example, with the same opening as to the Christian religion or to the Buddhist doctrine or with which you read one of Sri Aurobindo’s books – and as a result, you are plunged into a confusion and a muddle and you don’t understand anything about anything.’

And then the reply came to me very strongly; something took hold of me and I was, so to say, obliged to write: What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme.79

It’s not from me. It came from there (gesture upwards). But it pleased me.

78See conversation of February 18: ‘Sri Aurobindo is an Action...’