Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 4
To answer all the questions you raise with any point or adequacy, I should have to take up my unfinished letter and either recast it or finish it as it stands in spite of its deficiencies; for all arises from the condition of things spoken of there and depends upon it. Your own difficulties and those of the sadhaks whom you mention are due to the same cause, the pushing back of the higher mind and the higher vital and the psychic and what they have gained either into the background or behind a curtain and a domination by the difficulties of the ignorant and obstructing physical consciousness with its obscure and mistaken ideas, habitual reactions, irresponsive obstructions, doubts and objections and the small lower vital nature with its ego-centric reactions and revolts and disturbances. This condition is not fundamental either in your case or that of the others and it is not a proof of radical unfitness for the Yoga, but a temporary, even if persistent, condition which would disappear with the removal of its cause.
I may point out that this condition which tries to justify itself by the facts it sees – for the physical mind is always strong on apparent facts and triumphantly appeals to them and its inferences from them as conclusive and irrefutable – almost always sees wrongly or imperfectly and, even when the facts may be partially correct it misinterprets them, attributes the wrong causes and motives, draws the wrong inferences and makes of them an unreal picture. The ego-centric’s small lower vital makes use of that to justify its revolts or its despondencies and despairs and its assertions of a failure final and irrevocable. It is not true, for instance, that I have become more and more aloof and indifferent or that I am too much preoccupied with the state of the world to care about the state of the sadhaks or that I am no longer giving any help to you or to others. My “aloofness” consists in two facts, one the very ancient fact of my physical withdrawal and the less ancient still long-standing fact of my having ceased to write letters. Neither of these facts constitute a withdrawal of help or a lofty self-preoccupied indifference...