Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
I am afraid you did not quite understand the spirit or the letter of what Mother told you on Monday. Her point was not that the Pranam was useless except to a very few, but that only some made full use of it while the others got either nothing from it or an inferior gain and that the change to Meditation had shown that many got something from this new method while from the Pranam they had drawn much less advantage. (It is a fact that many have said so – others of course have lamented the stopping of the Pranam on the ground that they felt empty and could not draw anything from the Meditation.) Under these circumstances the idea has arisen of varying the method maintained up till now and alternating between Pranam and Meditation. That was what she was trying to explain to you.
On the other point of the wrong attitude of many of the sadhaks – about her smile; in the first place agacé does not mean irritated; it is the mildest possible word to express a certain contrariety, a slight and very mild feeling of impatience at something unreasonable. Secondly, she did not say that it was people missing her smile when she did not smile that agaced her, but that it was wrong complaints, their missing or rather refusing to acknowledge her smile when she did smile and attack her therefore – for it was not usually sorrow their letters expressed but anger, revolt or displeasure. Hundreds of times it has happened like that – even when she saw that the sadhak was morally out of sorts and did her best to cheer 
him by kindness, sympathy, her sweetest smile, he or she would write that Mother had refused him or her a smile, had been hard and angry, had shown a frowning displeasure. Very often she was accused of giving the wrong kind of smile, of giving a satiric or ironic smile – an intention of which she had been utterly unconscious and had not entertained a moment – or somehow or other not the smile the sadhak had wanted. Moreover it was often added that she had smiled on everybody else, but reserved her harshness only for one alone – and sometimes several people would write that on the same day! Moreover these things were discussed, the Mother’s attitude to the sadhaks watched, estimated, slight variations made big things of, a table of intentional rewards and punishments, of the Mother’s approval or displeasure built upon that – though such an idea was as far as possible from the Mother’s mind. Now are not these things, especially when carried to excess and constantly repeated, agacant and is it so unreasonable for the Mother to feel agaced by them – to feel some contrariety or a slight impatience? Would not anybody if he got day after day a correspondence full of such confounded complaints, reproaches, expressions of anger, sometimes something like abuse, be drawn to feel some ripple of agacement? Is all that really in all cases – as in your own, which was not in question – the outcome of a feeling of the heart’s dependence on the Mother? Is it altogether (apart from any idea of self-giving) the right attitude for a sadhak in the Pranam? I thought not and that was why I sometimes said to the Mother that if that was all the use so many made of the Pranam, it might be better to stop it rather than that it should be the occasion of such self torment and revolts as were expressed in these letters. I did not stop it, however – I only wrote to many pointing out the unreasonableness of this attitude and that has had a certain effect. My suggestion of stopping was merely an expression of agacement, a momentary grumble sometimes maybe permitted even to us – it was nothing more.
I may add that Mother had not spoken of self-giving and not demanding – what she said was that people should be more concentrated to receive what she could give them than occupied wholly with such external things. Nor was she thinking at all of you as a complainant – for you have not given her this kind of trouble.
Finally, when the Mother was explaining the thing to you, she did it smilingly, not in any spirit of irritation or displeasure. So I think you will see that you need not have taken it so much to heart, still less taken it for yourself. It was not aimed at you in the least degree.
All that was said had regard to the proposed change which would vary Pranam with Meditation – not stop Pranam alto gether. It had nothing to do with the temporary rest taken by the Mother – that was absolutely indispensable. I had often asked her to take some rest before but she had refused because it might disturb the sadhaks too much – what happened made the break physically indispensable. The sadhaks ought to concede that much to her after she has laboured night and day for so many years without giving herself any real rest even at night. You yourself wrote asking her to take the rest she needed. Even so she did not fail to begin going down morning and evening and renewing interviews as soon as it was physically possible.
Your description of the Avatars is magnificent in colour – I wish it were a sober fact that the Divine refuses us nothing – if He would start doing that, it would be glorious and I should not at all insist on constant beatitude. But from his representatives, Vibhutis and Avatars he rather exacts a good deal and expects them to overcome under rather difficult conditions. No doubt they do not call for compassion – but, well, surely you can permit them an occasional divine right to a grumble? Most of them have grumbled – at least once or twice – and ours, like Mother’s about the agacement or mine about the tons of correspondence is a semi-humorous plainte [complaint].
P.S. I don’t know why you should fear the Mother will refuse you her smile at the Darshan time – she has never done 
so and has no intention of doing so. All these fears should be dismissed – it is only they that spoil things which would otherwise go all right.