Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
It is not surprising that you could not find out what you had done to make the Mother change her attitude towards you, and this for two good reasons,– first, that you had done nothing, and, second, that the Mother’s feeling for you and her attitude had not changed at all – not in any smallest respect, not in the least shadow of a degree. She has the same care and love as she always had and during the last few days of which you speak they were not clouded for a moment.
Then you ask, if so, why do I feel like this or like that? I can only answer that, in their origin, they were not your own feelings at all, but rather ideas, impressions, impulses pushed into your lower vital from outside; your mistake has been to admit them and identify them as your own – from want of knowledge and experience in these matters. There are certain vital forces of this lower vital plane that are constantly wandering about the Ashram and trying to push their movements now on one, now on another, now on several at a time. The processus is always the same. First, suggestions,– the Mother has done this or not done that, she has said this or not said that, she has had this or that thought about me or feeling towards me, she is displeased with me, unfair to me, partial to others, etc. etc. etc.; next, discouragement, wounded feelings, jealousy, despondency, revolt or any other kindred vital downfall or upheaval; result, the impulse to withdraw from the Mother, not to give her flowers or take 
flowers, to go away from soup1 or pranam, not to come there, to shut oneself away from her altogether, to give up the Yoga, to go away or worse. I give you the whole round in its ground plan, omitting many variations, so that you may be on your guard the next time these suggestions try to come. If you don’t want to be misled by them and to go through such quite groundless and unnecessary disturbance and trouble, you must recognise them immediately they come, cast them out by the neck or break their backs as you would a snake’s.
For they are in their nature not only irrational, but strongly mechanical. Irrational, because they have no true ground in reality. They are ready enough to seize in some (usually trifling) outward appearances and twist them this way or that in order to convince the easily deceived physical mind; they will even create circumstances and make them appear to have that colour. But if they cannot find or create, they will go on just as merrily with no other ground than imaginations or impressions which they persuade their victims to take for realities. And they are mechanical because, once they can make the mind their field, they always recur with the same inevitable round of suggestions, the same ideas, the same feelings, the same impulses, the same actions in consequence. It is like a recurrent illness with always the same series of symptoms and the same “course.” And the object is always the same, to create a distance between the sadhak and the Mother and so to break the sadhana. It is a great mistake to think, as some do, that the Mother in such cases pushes the sadhak away from her; on the contrary, it is he who pushes her away from him under the influence of these forces and believes all the time – for they have a great power of blinding the mind and clouding the judgment – that she is to blame.
To show how these suggestions mislead once one starts listening to them, I may instance the matter of your sister’s letters. The Mother and I have always accepted without reservation your sister’s coming and neither today nor at any other time had she the least idea in her mind against it. On the contrary, when you came in the midst of a hard and trying morning, she gave you full time, heard all you had to say, made her own suggestions and gave her full acquiescence. What more could she have done? And yet you have this suggestion made to you that she does not really want, that she is not frank, that she is cold to you about the matter. Why? Precisely because there was this predisposing influence at work on the lookout for any pretext to mislead you,– any, even less than a shadow’s shadow.
I must ask you therefore to dismiss this kind of suggestion, these feelings and all the cycle in future the moment they try to come. Never mind, what circumstances or justifications they may allege. Nothing is more dangerous than the inferences of the physical mind trying to build up conclusions upon outward appearances – they have nine chances out of ten of being false. One must learn to distrust hasty conclusions from surface appearances – is not that the first condition of true knowledge? – and learn to see and know things from within.
You ask how to stem these movements? To begin with, observe three rules:
(1) Keep always confidence in the Mother’s care and love – trust in them and distrust every suggestion, every appearance that seems to contradict.
(2) Reject immediately every feeling, every impulse that makes you draw back from the Mother – such as that about the Pranam – from your true relation with her, from inner nearness, from a simple and straightforward confidence in her.
(3) Do not lay too much stress on outward signs – your observation of them may easily mislead you. Keep yourself open to her and feel with your heart – the inner heart, not 
the surface vital desire, but the heart of true emotion,– there you are more likely to find her and be always near her in yourself and receive what constantly she is working to give you.