Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Admission, Staying, Departure
Departure from the Ashram [5]
It is certainly the force hostile to the Yoga and the
divine realisation upon earth that is acting upon you at the present moment. It
is the force (one force and not many) which is here in the Asram and has been
going about from one to another. With some as with X, Y and Z
it has succeeded; others have cast it from them and have been able to liberate
the light of their soul, open in that light to the nearness and constant
presence of the Mother, feel her working in them and move forward in a constant
spiritual progress. Some are still struggling, but in spite of the bitterness of
the struggle have been able to keep faithfully to the divine call that brought
them here.
That it is the same hostile force would be shown, even
if its presence were not for us visible and palpable, by the fact that the
suggestions it makes to the minds of its victims are always the same. Its one
master sign is always this impulse to get away from the Asram, away from myself
and the Mother, out of this atmosphere, and at once. For the force does
not want to give time for reflection, for resistance, for the saving Power to be
felt and act. Its other signs are doubt, tamasic depression, an 
exaggerated sense of impurity and unfitness, the idea that the Mother
is remote, does not care for one, is not giving what she ought to give, is not
divine, with other similar suggestions accompanied by an inability to feel her
presence or her help, a feeling that the Yoga is not possible or is not going to
be done in this life, the desire to go away and do something in the ordinary
world — the thing itself suggested varying according to the personal mind. If it
were not this one invariable hostile force acting, there would not be this exact
similarity in all the cases. In each case it is the same obscurities thrown on
the intelligence, the same subconscious movements of the vital brought to the
surface, the same irrational impulses pushing to the same action,— departure,
renunciation of the soul’s truth, refusal of the Divine Love and the Divine
Call.
It is the vital crisis, the test, the ordeal for you as
for others — a test and ordeal which we would willingly spare to those who are
with us but which they call on themselves by persistence in some wrong line of
movement or some falsification of the inner attitude. If you reject entirely the
falsehood that this force casts upon the sadhak, if you remain faithful to the
Light that called you here, you conquer and, even if serious difficulties still
remain, the final victory is sure and the divine triumph of the soul over the
Ignorance and the darkness.
30 March 1930