Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Letters

Fragment ID: 15818

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Shah, Punamchand Mohanlal

May 15, 1928

Punamchand,

I have not been “angry” with you, but have simply been observing your state of consciousness and your action with the necessary approval or disapproval. Therefore the excessive emotions of grief and dejection you describe in your letter are out of place. What you have to realize is that your success or failure depends, first and always, on your keeping in the right attitude and in the true psychic and spiritual atmosphere and allowing the Mother’s force to act through you and move those whom you approach for this work. Or, if you cannot do that always, you must at least be able to put them into relation with her force and keep them in connection with it. They would then move in the right way without well knowing why or what moved them, but through an impulse and an interest or a psychic need created in them, and the work would be done. It is not “their movement” or your movement that matters most, but the movement of the Mother’s force. If I can judge from your letters, you take its support too much for granted and lay the first stress on your own ideas and plans and words about the work; but these whether good or bad, right or mistaken, are bound to fail if they are not instruments of the true Force.

I do not wish, however, to waste time over the past and its mistakes and failures; it is the future that matters. The two men you speak of in your letter will be tried; the Mother will put her force behind your and their endeavour. The success will depend on whether you can make your self a transmitting instrument and whether they can be receptive. You must remember that we have no physical contact with the place or with these people: you are there as a support and a means of communication; you have to be always concentrated, always referring all difficulties for solution to the force that is being sent from here, always letting it act and not substituting your own mind and separate vital will or impulse.

I cannot approve of your idea about a society with a subscription for each member and with the kind of publicity of which you speak. These are methods quite inappropriate to a spiritual action. If applied to my work they would either miserably fail or else vulgarise and distort it. If you have sympathizers and want to keep them together and have their help, you must find other means.

Your other idea that it would be well if someone likely to be very useful in the work you are doing came here to receive the touch, is better inspired. It would obviously be the right thing provided the man in question had means and influence and was capable of a psychic or spiritual opening or some other kind of openness to the Power. If already touched from a distance, so much the better. It may be in this direction that there lies the best possibility for the future. Before sending anyone here, however, you must take special permission after writing all that we should know about him.

Meanwhile proceed with your work, never forgetting the condition of success. Do not lose yourself in the work or in your ideas or plans or forget to keep yourself in constant touch with the true source. Do not allow anybody’s mind or vital influence or the surrounding atmosphere or the ordinary human mentality to come between you and the power and presence of the Mother.

Sri Aurobindo