I agree with most of what Krishnaprem says, though one or two things I would put from a different angle. Your reasonings about faith and doubt have been of a rather extravagant kind because they come to this that one must either doubt everything or believe everything however absurd that anybody says. I have repeatedly told you that there is not only room for discrimination in Yoga, but a need for it at every step; otherwise you will be lost in the jungle of things that are not spiritual, as for instance the tangle of what I call the intermediate zone. I have also told you that you are not asked to believe everything told you by anybody and that there is no call to put faith in all the miraculous things narrated about Bejoy Krishna or another. That, I have said, is a question not of faith but of mental belief and faith is not mental belief in outward facts but an intuition of the inner being about spiritual things. Krishnaprem means the same thing when he says that faith is the light sent down by the higher to the lower personality. As for the epithet “blind” used by Ramakrishna, it means as I said, not ignorantly credulous, but untroubled by the questionings of the intellect and unshaken by outward appearances of fact, e.g. one has faith in the Divine even though the fact seems to be that the world here or at least the human world is driven by undivine forces. One has faith in the Guru even when he uses methods that your intellect cannot grasp or affirms things as true of which you have yet no experience (for if his knowledge and experience are not greater than yours, why did you choose him as a guru?) one has faith in the Path leading to the goal even when the goal is very far off and the way covered by mist and cloud and smitten repeatedly by the thunderbolt. And so on. Even in worldly things man can do nothing great if he has no faith; in the spiritual realm it is still more indispensable. But this faith depends not on ignorant credulity, but on a light that burns inside though not seen by the eyes of the outward mind, a knowledge within that has not yet taken the form of an outer knowledge.
…As for the intellect it is indispensable to man up to a certain point; after that it becomes an inferior instrument and often misleading and obstructive. It is what I meant when I wrote “reason was the helper, reason is the bar.” Intellect has done many things for man; it has helped to raise him high above the animals, at its best it has opened a first view on all great fields of knowledge. But it cannot go beyond that; it cannot get at Truth itself, only at some reflections, forms, representations of it I myself cannot remember to have ever arrived at anything in the spiritual field by the power of the intellect. I have used it only to help the expression of what I have known and experienced, …
Even in Mind itself there are things higher than the intellect, ranges of activity that exceed it. Spiritual knowledge is easier to these than to the reasoning intelligence.
6 September 1934
pp. 107-09, Vol. 2 (1934-35)
…why should a seeker, like him, after spiritual life (for a seeker he
was, was he not?) head so straight for disaster especially with you and Mother
as his gurus?
And if a man refuses to listen to his gurus and claims to be wiser and more righteous than they are?
7 September 1934
p. 110, Vol. 2 (1934-35)
I enclose Harin’s letter from
…It is not at all unnatural that the anger brought back peace and harmony; for this anger was a form of loyalty to the Divine and that put you in touch with your psychic consciousness again. Sri Ramakrishna was quite right about anger. The hostile powers are proof against gentleness and sweetness and non-resistance and soul-force, but a current of righteous anger often sends them flying…
26 September 1936
p. 170, Vol. 3 (1936-37)