Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Sadhana before Coming to Pondicherry in 1910
The
Realisation of January 1908
General Remarks [2]
I think you have made too much play with my phrase “an
accident” [in the preceding letter], ignoring the
important qualification, “it seemed to come by an accident”. After four
years of prāṇāyāma and other practices on my own,
with no other result than an increased health and energy, some psycho-physical
phenomena, a great outflow of poetic creation, a limited power of subtle sight
(luminous patterns and figures etc.) mostly with the waking eye, I had a
complete arrest and was at a loss. At this juncture I was induced to meet a man
without fame whom I did not know, a bhakta with a limited mind but some
experience and evocative power. We sat together and I followed with an absolute
fidelity what he instructed me to do, not myself in the least understanding
where he was leading me or where I was myself going. The first result was a
series of tremendously powerful experiences and radical changes of consciousness
which he never intended — for they were Adwaitic and Vedantic and he was against
Adwaita Vedanta — and which were quite contrary to my own ideas, for they made
me see with a stupendous intensity the world as a cinematographic play of vacant
forms 
in the impersonal universality of the
Absolute Brahman. The final upshot was that he was made by a Voice within him to
hand me over to the Divine within me enjoining an absolute surrender to its
will, a principle or rather a seed-force to which I kept unswervingly and
increasingly till it led me through all the mazes of an incalculable Yogic
development bound by no single rule or system or dogma or Shastra to where and
what I am now and towards what shall be hereafter. Yet he understood so little
what he was doing that when he met me a month or two later, he was alarmed,
tried to undo what he had done and told me that it was not the Divine but the
Devil that had got hold of me. Does not all that justify my phrase “it seemed to
come by an accident”? But my meaning is that the ways of the Divine are not like
that of the human mind or according to our patterns and it is impossible to
judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the Divine
knows better than we do. If we admit the Divine at all, both true reason and
bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implicit faith and surrender. I do
not see how without them there can be avyabhicāriṇī bhakti
(one-pointed adoration).
7 May 1932