Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3. 1936-37

Fragment ID: 18098

1936-37

For some days I have been trying to recover my past attitude of surrender: “Give everything and ask for nothing.” But I don’t know why I meet there with a total failure.

I suppose because you are giving too big a place to your vital -that is to say the part of the vital which insists on itself as the one important thing and says, “If I am not satisfied there can be no sadhana; if I am going wrong, then all this sadhana must be false like X’s.”

Things in sadhana cannot be done in a “short time”. The vital despondency comes largely from an impatience and the unwillingness to spend a calm, steady labour on the things to be done. No great work was ever done without the patient overcoming of difficulties.