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
Meeting with Vishnu Bhaskar Lele [1]
It is not the human
defects of the Guru that can stand in the way when there is the psychic opening,
confidence and surrender. The Guru is the channel or the representative or the
manifestation of the Divine, according to the measure of his personality or his
attainment; but whatever he is, it is to the Divine that one opens in opening to
him, and if something is determined by the power of the channel, more is
determined by the inherent and intrinsic attitude of the receiving
consciousness, an element that comes out in the surface mind as simple trust or
direct unconditional self-giving, and once that is there, the essential things
can be gained even from one who seems to others than the disciple an inferior
spiritual source and the rest will grow up in the sadhak of itself by the grace
of the Divine, even if the human being in the Guru cannot give it. It is this
that Krishnaprem appears to have done perhaps from the first; but in most
nowadays this attitude seems to come with difficulty, after much hesitation and
delay and trouble. In my own case I owe the first decisive turn of my inner life
to one who was infinitely inferior to me in intellect, education and capacity
and by no means spiritually perfect or supreme; but, having seen a Power behind
him and decided to turn there for help, I gave myself entirely into his hands
and followed with an automatic passivity the guidance. He himself was astonished
and said to others that he had never met anyone before who could surrender
himself so absolutely and without reserve or question to the guidance of the
helper. The result was a series of transmuting experiences of such a radical
character that he was unable to follow and had to tell me to give myself up in
future to the Guide within with the same completeness of surrender as I had
shown to the human channel. I give this example to show how these things work;
it is not in the calculated way the human reason wants to lay down, but by a
more mysterious and greater law.
23 March 1932