It must be remembered that this yoga is a long journey, sometimes smooth and at other times a battle against seen and unseen forces that rise up in revolt to obstruct and block the path and deter and discourage the aspirant. Revolt, doubt and depression increase the hold of these forces, whereas faith and surrender, sincerity of aspiration and self-giving to the Mother clears the passage. All impatience, especially born of a spiritual ambition to be a yogi or a guru, all hankering after other-worldly experiences can be very dangerous and lead us straight into the hands of the adversary. The only experience worthwhile to have in the beginning and as a base is the contact and identification with the psychic being within us. All else grows spontaneously as a flower blooms under the sun. This is the straight and sunlit path as shown by Them, and it is enough to turn towards Her as a child ever new born in the flame of one’s aspiration.
As Sri Aurobindo warns us,
One may practise Yoga and get illuminations in the mind and the reason; one may conquer power and luxuriate in all kinds of experiences in the vital; one may establish even surprising physical siddhis; but if the true soul-power behind does not manifest, if the psychic nature does not come into the front, nothing genuine has been done. In this Yoga, the psychic being is that which opens the rest of the nature to the true supramental light and finally to the supreme Ananda. Mind can open by itself to its own higher reaches; it can still itself and widen into the Impersonal; it may too spiritualise itself in some kind of static liberation or Nirvana; but the supramental cannot find a sufficient base in spiritualised mind alone. If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this Yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible. If there is a refusal of the psychic new birth, a refusal to become the child new born from the Mother, owing to attachment to intellectual knowledge or mental ideas or to some vital desire, then there will be a failure in the sadhana.
[Letters on Yoga CWSA 30: 337-338]
