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Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 606

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

August 12, 1935

What you describe is the Darshan “complex” trying to come back – i.e. the mind putting forward the idea that something very great or at least something decisive ought to happen on the 15th, the vital putting forward its certainty or at least its overwhelming expectation that nothing would happen except indeed something very disagreeable, the physical mind helping the vital’s expectation to realise itself by discovering the something very disagreeable e.g. in the absence of a smile and my very disagreeable intention behind the refusal to smile. It is the old recurrent vital suggestion and fixed movement which used to happen with so much persistence and which by a psychic step forward you had got rid of. To allow it to return would be to go back from the psychic road to the old troubled vital movement. You should not revert to that on any ground whatever.

It does not matter if strenuous meditation leads to experiences or not. Remember what I told you that it is the psychic growth and not experiences that are the road for you just now. That means these things – 1st the drawing back from the vital ego and its perturbations to a quiet attitude of faith and surrender; 2nd the growth of something within that sees what is to be changed in the nature and gives the impulse to change it; 3rd the psychic feeling in sadhana which presses towards the growth of bhakti, feels it a joy simply to think, feel, write, speak of, remember the Divine, grows full of a quiet self-upliftment towards the Divine and lives in that more than in outward things. When the consciousness is full of these things altogether, i.e. when there is the full psychic state or opening, then experiences begin to come of themselves. The first two at least had started of themselves in you – let them grow and the third should necessarily follow. The psychic opening first, the higher consciousness and its experiences afterwards – this is the safe road and it seems to be the one your inner consciousness wants to follow. Why not follow it? To go back to the vital’s demand for experiences at this stage – whether as a right or as a reward for being good – is surely an anachronism when once the psychic has shown its head even a little.

P.S. Mother thinks she can give about half an hour to you tomorrow, but it cannot be before 12.