Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume I - Part 2
Fragment ID: 9960
The moral of the condition you describe is not that Yoga should not be done but that you have to go on steadily healing the rift between the two parts of the being. The division is very usual, almost universal in human nature, and the following of the lower impulse in spite of the contrary will in the higher parts happens to almost everybody. It is the phenomenon noted by Arjuna in his question to Krishna, “Why does one do evil, even though one wishes not to do it, as if compelled to it by force?”, and expressed sententiously by Ovid, “video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor”1. By constant effort and aspiration one can arrive at a turning point when the psychic asserts itself and what seems a very slight psychological change or reversal alters the whole balance of the nature.
1 “I see the better and approve of it, I follow the worse.” «Metamorphoses» 7.20 – Ed.