Your poem2 is a very moving one,– delicate, true and beautiful in every line.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 122
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
April 20, 1931
I think the best thing I can write to you in the circumstances is to recommend to you Nolini’s1 aphorism, “Depression need not be depressing; rather it should be made a jumping-board for the leap to a higher and happier poise.”
The rule in Yoga is not to let the depression depress you, to stand back from it, observe its cause and remove the cause; for the cause is always in oneself, perhaps a vital defect somewhere, a wrong movement indulged or a petty desire causing a recoil, sometimes by its satisfaction, sometimes by its disappointment. In Yoga a desire satisfied, a false movement given its head produces very often a worse recoil than disappointed desire.
What is needed for you is to live more deeply within, less in the outer vital and mental which is exposed to these touches. The inmost psychic being is not oppressed by them; it stands in its own closeness to the Divine and sees the small surface movements as surface things foreign to the true being.
Your poem2 is a very moving one,– delicate, true and beautiful in every line.
1 Nolini Kanto Gupta (13 January 1889 – 7 February 1984), a revolutionary. He was arrested and tried in the Alipore Bomb Case, and freed after one year. He worked with Sri Aurobindo for the magazines Dharma and Karmayogin. Six months after Sri Aurobindo’s arrival at Pondicherry, Nolini joined him. From Sri Aurobindo he learned Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, etc. Apart from articles in magazines, he published books in Bengali (52), English (38) and French (5). He was Sri Aurobindo’s “postman.”
2 This poem is Tamisrāya meaning “In the darkness,” in Anāmī. (Dilip’s note.)