Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
I note the offer for the houses – a chance, but I suppose the tussle will be over the price. I hope that the idea of the just value will be pitched higher when Dhir makes the critical valuation, the idea in the mind of the seller counts for much in determining that in the mind of the buyer and the price after all is what the seller is prepared to give for the object – market or no market. However, we will see.
I don’t think you understood very well what Mother was trying to tell you. First of all she did not say that prayers or meditation either were no good – how could she when both count for so much in Yoga. What she said was that the prayer must well up from the heart on a crest of emotion or aspiration, the japa or meditation come in a live push carrying the joy or the light of the thing in it. If done mechanically as a thing that ought to be done (stern grim duty!), it must tend towards want of interest and dryness, and so be ineffective. It was what I meant when I said I thought you were doing Japa too 
much as a means for bringing about a result – I meant too much as a device, a process laid down for getting the thing done. That again was why I wanted the psychological conditions in you to develop, the psychic, the mental – for when the psychic is forward, there is no lack of life and joy in the prayer, the aspiration, the seeking, no difficulty in having the constant stream of bhakti and when the mind is quiet and inturned and upturned there is no difficulty or want of interest in meditation. Meditation, by the way, is a process leading towards knowledge and through knowledge, it is a thing of the head and not of the heart; so if you want dhyāna, you can’t have an aversion to knowledge. Concentration in the heart is not meditation, it is a call on the Divine, on the Beloved. This yoga too is not a Yoga of knowledge alone – knowledge is one of its means, but its base being self-offering, surrender, bhakti, it is based in the heart and nothing can be eventually done without this base. There are plenty of people here who do or have done Japa and base themselves on bhakti, very few comparatively who have done the “head” meditation; love and bhakti and works are usually the base – how many can proceed by knowledge? Only the few.
What the Mother spoke of was not self-analysis nor dissection. Analyses and dissection are mental things which can deal with the inanimate or make the live dead; they are not spiritual methods. What the Mother spoke of was not analysis, but a seeing of oneself and of all the living movements of the being and the nature, a vivid observation of the personalities and forces that move on the stage of our being, their motives, their impulses, their potentialities – an observation quite as interesting as the seeing and understanding of a drama or a novel, a living vision and perception of how things are done in us which brings also a living mastery over this inner universe. Such things become dry only when one deals with them with the analytic and ratiocinative mind, not when one deals with them thus seeingly and intuitively as a movement of life. If you had that observation (from the inner spiritual, not the outer intellectual and ethical viewpoint), then it would 
be comparatively easy for you to get out of your difficulties; for instance, you would see at once where this irrational impulse to flee away came from and it would not have any hold upon you. Of course, all that can only be done to the best effect when you stand back from the play of your nature and become the Witness-Control or the Spectator-Actor-Manager. But that is what happens when you take this kind of self-seeing posture.
However, since you fear it will be dry or painful (an idea of the non-understanding intellect like your old confusion of the supramental as if it were the same thing as the cold aloofness of the illusionist Brahman instead of a sublimation of light, dynamism – joy, love and Ananda), we will say no more of it. An easier method of the heart? You believe in traditional ideas of Yoga – well, according to traditional ideas also, the one easiest method is that of bhakti, reliance, self-giving, bhakti, nirbhar, samarpaṇ.
What still stands in your way – for it was and is growing towards that in you, is an old confusion in mind and vital. The heart says “I want bhakti”, the mind says “No, no, let us have reason”, the vital says, “Nonsense, I can’t surrender”. What you need is to quiet down that confusion created by the mind’s past samskaras and either fix on the one thing or harmonise. Bhakti is the basic force, knowledge, strength and joy in the Divine is the result – that is the harmony proposed in this Yoga. But in either way, if either is done, then Peace becomes easily possible.
P.S. Jayantilal’s design is excellent. Mother will tell Lalita1 about the table harmonium.