Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Yoga

3. Religion, Morality, Idealism and Yoga

Fragment ID: 179

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

January 21, 1936

Vairagya is certainly one way of progressing towards the goal – the traditional way and a drastic if painful one. To lose the desire for human vital enjoyments, to lose the passion for literary or other success, praise, fame, to lose even the insistence on spiritual success, the inner bhoga of yoga, have always been recognised as steps towards the goal – provided one keeps the one insistence on the Divine. I prefer myself the calmer way of equality, the way pointed out by Krishna, rather than the more painful one of Vairagya. But if the compulsion in one’s nature or the compulsion of one’s inner being forcing its way by that means through the difficulties of the nature is on that line, it must be recognised as a valid line. What has to be got rid of in that case is the note of despair in the vital which responds to the cry you speak of – that it will never gain the Divine because it has not yet got the Divine or that there has been no progress. There has certainly been a progress, this greater push of the psychic, this very detachment itself always growing somewhere in you. The thing is to hold on, not to cut the cord which is pulling you up because it hurts the hands, to keep the one insistence if all the others fall away from you.

It is evident that something in you, continuing the unfinished curve of a past life, is pushing you on this path of Vairagya and the more stormy way of Bhakti,– in spite of our preference for a less painful one and yours also,– something that is determined to be drastic with the outer nature so as to make itself free to fulfil its secret aspiration. But do not listen to these suggestions of the voice that says, “You shall not succeed and it is no use trying.” That is a thing that need never be said in the Way of the Spirit, however difficult it may seem at the moment to be. Keep through all the aspiration which you express so beautifully in your poems; for it is certainly there and comes out from the depths, and if it is the cause of suffering,– as great aspirations are, in a world and nature where there is so much to oppose them,– it is also the promise and surety of emergence and victory in the future.