Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
The Leader and the Guide
Need of the Guru’s Help
An old man of sixty began practising Yoga by reading
your books. Eventually he developed signs of insanity. His son describes his
condition and asks for advice. I am sending his letter.
As for the letter, I suppose you will have to tell the
writer that his father committed a mistake when he took up Yoga without a Guru —
for the mental idea about a Guru cannot take the place of the actual living
influence. This Yoga especially, as I have written in my books, needs the help
of the Guru and cannot be done without it. The condition into which his father
got was a breakdown, not a state of siddhi. He passed out of the normal mental
consciousness into a contact with some intermediate zone of consciousness (not
the spiritual) where one can be subjected to all sorts of voices, suggestions,
ideas, so-called aspirations which are not genuine. I have warned against the
dangers of this intermediate zone in one of my books. The sadhak can avoid
entering into this zone — if he enters, he has to look with indifference on all
these things and observe them without lending any credence, by so doing he can
safely pass into the true spiritual light. If he takes them all as true or real
without discrimination, he is likely to land himself in a great mental confusion
and, if there is in addition a lesion or weakness of the brain — the latter is
quite possible in one who has been subject to apoplexy — it may have serious
consequences and even lead to a disturbance of the reason. If there is ambition,
or other motive of the kind 
mixed up in the
spiritual seeking, it may lead to a fall in the Yoga and the growth of an
exaggerated egoism or megalomania — of this there are several symptoms in the
utterances of his father during the crisis. In fact one cannot or ought not to
plunge into the experiences of this sadhana without a fairly long period of
preparation and purification (unless one has already a great spiritual strength
and elevation). Sri Aurobindo himself does not care to accept many into his path
and rejects many more than he accepts. It would be well if he can get his father
to pursue the sadhana no farther — for what he is doing is not really Sri
Aurobindo’s Yoga but something he has constructed in his own mind and once there
has been an upset of this kind the wisest course is discontinuance.
21 April 1937