Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

Human Relations and the Ashram

Sexual Relations and the Ashram [6]

I am afraid X is not so forward in sadhana as you think. I suppose I had better tell you plainly that she is full of the sex difficulty — it is her special difficulty and it is so much in her nature that with all her struggles she is unable to escape from it. I am afraid she is throwing it upon you. Of course it is her imagination that yields to it; she would never consent to the act.

As for Y it is different. She has no sex desires, but before she opened to the Yoga, there was a certain kind of vital passivity in her to men and this kind of passivity is very attractive to the masculine sex instinct. As the movements in you are not mental but in sensation, it is possible that your subconscient vital has somehow felt this in her subconscient temperament and got the attraction. These movements are not vitally willed or mental — they belong to that shadowy region of submerged vital physical instinct which the psychoanalysts try to deal with in their jargon of complexes etc.

30 September 1934