Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 232

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

May 10, 1932

Your credo cannot be a reason for your not remaining here.

There are very few among the sadhaks here who at all concern themselves with the Supermind or know anything about it except as something which the Mother and I will bring down some day and establish here. Most are seeking realisation through meditation, through love and worship or through activity and work. Meditation and silence are not necessary for everyone; there are some, even among those spoken of by you and others as the most advanced sadhaks who do their sadhana not through meditation, for which they have no turn, but through activity, work or creation supported or founded on love and bhakti. It is not the credo but the person who matters. We impose no credo; it is sufficient if there is an established and heartfelt relation between ourselves and the disciple.

If it is the way of ahaitukī bhakti [motiveless devotion] that you count to follow, that can be no obstacle; for there can be none better. For in that way everything can be made a means – poetry and music for instance become not merely poetry and music and not merely even an expression of bhakti, but themselves a means of bringing the experience of love and bhakti. Meditation itself becomes not an effort of mental concentration, but a flow of love and adoration and worship. If simply and sincerely followed, the way of ahaitukī bhakti can lead as far as any other.

On our side, therefore, there cannot be on this ground any incompatibility or any reason why you should not be here. But on yours you must remember that this is for the Mother and myself a tense and difficult period in which we cannot expand our energies as we would wish to do – for the natural tendency of the Mother was always to throw out her energies largely in every way by means externally vital and physical as well as inward, psychic and spiritual and to multiply rather than reduce contacts. If we have been obliged to do otherwise for a time, it was not from preference. It will not do therefore to get impatient with us because of this difficult period or to misunderstand the concentrated pressure towards a new basis for expansion which it imposes on us. For that impatience can alone create a stumbling-block – not on our side, but on yours.

For on our side there can be none. Your credo can make no difference to the true basis of our relationship which is something personal and living.