Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

3. The Mother and the Practice of the Integral Yoga

Fragment ID: 19419

What is meant by being an instrument or being used by the Mother’s Force? When one acts on impulse, often it is a wrong movement – how can that be a case of being an instrument? When you wrote to X, “You are being used as an effective instrument”, did you write it as a temporary encouragement?

So long as one is not conscious of the Force working through one, one is moved by the Prakriti. The Prakriti may be used sometimes by the Divine for some work to be done, but that is not what is meant in the Yoga by being an “instrument”. I do not know to what you refer as regards X,– his poetry was inspired by us and he felt it and it certainly helped several people; to that extent he was an effective instrument for the work so long as he was in the right attitude. Naturally, it is for the work that one can be an instrument, not for things like sex which have nothing to do with the Yoga or the work. But the real instrumentality begins when the consciousness of the Force working begins within.

30 October 1935