This is a letter by Sri Krishnaprem, the unique case of a British professor who became an Indian yogi and eventually a Guru in his own right. He had his ashram in Mirtola (Almora).

The letter is addressed to Dilip Kumar Roy, a noted devotional singer, writer, and disciple of Sri Aurobindo.

————–

28th January, 1932

My dear Dilip,

You ask me to explain why I think that modern analytic psychology and subjectivist physics are going to be a more effective veil to Reality than the old Materialism. Well, I can’t give proof — but can only make a few suggestions. Religious apologists made a great mistake in abandoning their defences and retreating to a supposedly impregnable ‘Hindenburg Line’ of subjective experiences. They relegated the truth of religion to the reign of the inner self, then largely unexplored, just as the Theosophists located their Mahatmas in unexplored Tibet. And they bolstered up their position with all sorts of pragmatic arguments such as that prayer was a reality because of the peace it brought etc. Now this was cowardly and therefore foolish….Nayamatma balahinena labhyah. In fact, except on that plane where subject and object are one, there can be nothing subjective without an objective counterpart, and so what was the result? Baffled for the moment, the attackers (and let me say it is an attack and no mere judicial investigation — whatever some may pretend: merely look at the treatment meted out to any scientist however eminent who reports favourably on psychical phenomena; “Poor old Oliver Lodge,” they will say, “he did good work once but he went potty in the end over table-turning”), the attackers, I say, then set to work to study the nature of the fortress in which the apologists had so unwisely shut themselves up. They have now developed and are still developing a technique which enables them to account so plausibly for subjective psychic or mystic experiences that most superficial thinkers are convinced.

First, the work of anthropologists of the Frazer school collected a mass of information about savage magico-religious rites (which they understood only in an exterior manner — compare, for instance, Sea-brook’s inside account of African Negro magic with the account given by any orthodox anthropologist) and then it was easy to show that the same primitive (and therefore presumably ridiculous) ideas persisted in modern religions.

And the the subjective experiences. Experiments with drugs showed that to some extent similar states (to the mystic’s experiences) can be produced in the laboratory. Other experiences are dealt with in the manner satirized in one of G. K. Chesterton’s fantasies: A man shipwrecked from his yacht found himself in the compound of a lunatic asylum and was promptly assumed to be a patient. Every explanation he tried to give of his arrival was assumed to be delusion about shipwreck. Thus, if the mystic escapes the Scylla of Freudian repressed sensuality, he is caught in the Charybdis of Jung’s ‘racial unconsciousness’ in which, for some reason, all the religious symbols of the past are supposed to be preserved like flies in amber and to issue unexpectedly, causing the appearance of mystic experience.

But I must come to the point. There is a saying in Vishva-Sara Tantra; “What is there is here, what is not here is nowhere”: yadihasti tadamutra yannehasti na tat kvachit — If God exists in the subjective world then he exists equally in the objective world. But the objective side has generally been abandoned by the defenders. If the working of the mind in mystic experiences is explained as has been the working of Nature, the the ordinary educated man will feel that the last stronghold is gone and that all farther belief is impossible. And it will be so explained away. This is quite certain. There is a universal tendency to think that when the process by which a thing happens has also been explained, then the reason for which it happens has also been explained. Why? Because the mind, as you know, is just as much mechanical (and as little if you like) as the outer world. It is merely more subtle: sukshmah: both are mere modifications of prakriti and explicable in similar ways. The real subject (and object, too) is the jivatma (soul) and that is for ever beyond the ken of mechanistic science because it is in a different dimension. (I use dimension only metaphorically). Now the modifications of prakriti form a closed circle as it were, Guna guneshu vartante, as the Gita says. Science moves in the sphere of phenomena, that is, of the gunas, and there will always be an apparent causal sequence among all phenomena in the plane of phenomena and there is small reason to suppose that the end will ever come and, even if it did, it would be back at the beginning again — the snake with its tail in the mouth. In time, science will no doubt come to admit certain apparently marvellous phenomena now denied, but they will be found also to be explicable along similar lines to all other natural phenomena. All phenomena can be explained in two ways: one in their own plane, and the other at right angles to it, as it were, that is, in a different dimension. In their own plane all phenomena follow mechanical laws. This is the mechanism by which they take place (for, after all, everything, however ‘marvellous’ has to take place in some definite way) and this mechanism is in the realm of science. The other explains the reason for which they happen and this is the sphere of the mystic or yogi. This possibility of two-fold explanation applies, I believe, to all phenomena whether ‘physical’ or ‘mental’ or ‘psychic’. (I use ‘psychic’ here in its ordinary meaning — somewhat different from that which it bears in Sri Aurobindo’s system, I believe). But when an explanation has been given along the lines of the first method there is an almost universal tendency to think that the phenomena in question have been completely explained — not to say explained away. Hence my forecast of a thickening of the veil, for it is the second method alone which brings the seeker through other planes into the region of real causation and of the Ultimate Reality. And this method requires an act of faith at the outset and an attitude of mind throughout that is quite different from that of most scientists.

I have said nothing so far about the modern tendencies in physics. The subjectivism of Jeans, Eddington and others is no doubt nearer the truth than the nineteenth-century conceptions. But the crucial point is not whether the universe is compelled of miniature billiard-balls vibrating in an elastic jelly or of geodesics in an expanding soap-bubble of space-time, but whether its basis is to be found in Sachchidananda or merely in a tenuously incomprehensible but ultimately dead square-root of minus one; and on this point physics, however subjective, can give no answer.

One last word and I have done. I think you will find in what I have said above concerning the two-fold explanation of phenomena the meaning of certain apparent paradoxes in the Gita. For instance, you will find there two sorts of statements about the way in which things happen:

Na kartritvam na karmani lokasya srijati Prabhuh

Na karmaphala-samyogam svabhavas-tu pravartate.

That is:

The Lord produces neither agency nor actions nor yet the union of action and fruit. All is a manifestation of Nature.

And then, on the other hand:

Isvarah sarvabhutanam hriddeshe’rjuna tisthati

Bhramayan sarvabhutani yantrarudhani mayaya.

That is:

O Arjuna! the Lord, seated in the hearts of all, whirls around by His maya all beings as if they were mounted on a machine.

The first couplet refers to the first type of explanation in which Sri Krishna plays no part, being outside the series; the last to the second type in which He plays the only part. Tameva sharanam gaccha, O Dilip! (Take refuge in Him alone).

Affectionately yours,

Krishnaprem