Letters to a Young Disciple

Would you kindly define the nature of Ananda?

Ananda is a thing to be felt — it cannot be defined except negatively that it is not mere joy, but something much more deep and essential.

Could you kindly say something in general about the psychic and spiritual experience and the descent from above?

You have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there is no fixed mental knowledge for these things, which vary infinitely....

There is a great mass of necessary information about the world, one’s body, the evolution of the earth, the history of the human race that one ought to learn and then also the training of the intellect to deal rightly with facts. [...] To neglect one’s studies as R and S have done is therefore a mistake.

My mind has almost lost its power of memory. Can’t remember anything.

There is very often a complaint of this kind made during the course of the sadhana. I suppose that the usual action of memory is for a time suspended by the mental silence or else by the physical tamas.

Why is my physical mind not happy with your answers to what I write?

Something in your physical mind stiffens and begins to defend its views. It is better to wait till it is more supple and plastic. Mental discussions are not good for sadhana but only for clarifying the intellect which is not so important at this stage as other things.

I am much troubled by the frequency of mechanical thoughts.

Reject always without getting disturbed by the recurrences.

If I start studying, it must be taken up as seriously as I did with the sadhana.

Study cannot take the same or greater importance than sadhana [...] If the sadhana were active then study can be done in the spare time i.e., in times not given to work or meditation.

"Y when he was here asked for Yoga. I told him how to make his mind silent and it became silent. He immediately got frightened and said, “I am becoming a fool, I can’t think”, so I took what I had given away from him. That is how the average mind regards silence."