Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 35
Departure from the Ashram [24]
Where will I begin again? There certainly is something fundamentally wrong – otherwise why these impulses to depart? Everything is confused. I can’t see my way, and have lost all capacity to analyse or synthesise. In addition [in the preceding letter] you are practically giving me a carte blanche to depart!
I am not telling you to go, but if I tell you the opposite it will only strengthen the suggestion that is being put on you – viz. that you are being kept here contrary to your own nature’s choice and your mind’s judgment for something that you cannot do and no longer want to do, a spiritual life that you cannot live and don’t want to live. You think it is something in yourself that says that, but in reality it is not so. Only as you cannot see that at present, I have no choice but to leave everything to your own decision so that the sense of being outrageously compelled to stay may have no ground for growing in you.
You have mentioned X’s case more than once as analogous, but his was quite opposite. He considered himself as the holder of the supramental Truth whom all ought to approach for the Truth, but that this was an Asram peopled by Asuras who refused to recognise him and all these Asuras were supported against him at every step by the Mother and me. He gave me the ultimatum that in this we must support him against the others and give him his proper position or else give him freedom to leave the Asram with which he had no longer any affinity, an impossible place for such a one as he, so that he might give the Truth to others elsewhere. No point of contact at all there with you except the Force driving him away.
What is happening just now is that there is a great uprush of the subconscient in which are the seeds or the strong remnants of the habitual difficulties of the nature. But its character is a confusion and obscurity without order or clear mental or other arrangement – it is a confused depression, discouragement, inability to progress – a feeling of what are we doing? why are we here? how can we go on? will anything ever be attained? and along with it old difficulties recurring in a confused and random but often violent and distressing fashion.
You cannot “begin” again; it would be too difficult a thing in this confusion. You have to get back to the point at which you deviated. If you can get back to the Peace that was coming and with it aspire to the freedom and wideness of the Purusha consciousness forming a point d’appui of detachment and separation from all this confusion of the subconscient Prakriti, then you will have a firm ground to stand upon and proceed. But for that you must make your choice firmly and refuse to be upset at every moment and diverted from it.
25 May 1935