Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
13. Opposition of the Hostile Forces
I must say however that it is not the push for union
with the Divine nor is it the Divine Force that leads to madness – it is the way
in which people themselves act with regard to their claim for these things. To
be more precise, I have never known a case of collapse in yoga as opposed to
mere difficulty or negative failure,– a case of dramatic disaster in which
there was not 
one of three causes – or more than one of the three at work. First, some sexual
aberration – I am not speaking of mere sexuality which can be very strong in the
nature without leading to collapse – or an attempt to sexualise spiritual
experience on an animal or gross material basis; second, an exaggerated
ambition, pride or vanity trying to seize on spiritual force or experience and
turn it to one’s own glorification ending in megalomania; third, an unbalanced
vital and a weak nervous system apt to follow its own imaginations and unruly
impulses without any true mental will or strong mental will to steady or
restrain it, and so at the mercy of the imaginations and suggestions of the
adverse vital world when carried over the border into the intermediate zone of
which I spoke in a recent message1. All
the causes of collapse have been due to these three causes – to the first two
mostly. Only three or four of them have ended in madness – and in these the
sexual aberration was invariably present; usually a violent fall from the way is
the consequence. X is no exception to the rule. It is not because X pushed for
union with the Divine that X went mad, but because X misused what came down for
a mystic sexuality and the satisfaction of megalomaniac pride, in spite of my
repeated and insistent warnings.