Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
I hope that you have acted according to my note on your letter written an hour or two ago and thrown away this wrong idea and wrong movement of yours about the Pranam and the Mother’s illness. What you have written in these last letters including the one in which you strangely suggest that the best way to progress in sadhana might be to cease loving the Mother because you love her in the human way, proceeds from wrong notions generated by a confusion in your vital mind misinterpreting things we may have said or written to you. I will try to set them right as clearly as possible.
And first about human love in the sadhana. The soul’s turning through love to the Divine must be through a love that is essentially divine, but as the instrument of expression at first is a human nature, it takes the forms of human love 
and bhakti. It is only as the consciousness deepens, heightens and changes that that greater eternal love can grow in it and openly transform the human into the divine. But in human love itself there are several kinds of motive-forces. There is a psychic human love which rises from deep within and is the result of the meeting of the inner being with that which calls it towards a divine joy and union; it is, once it becomes aware of itself, something lasting, self-existent, not dependent upon external satisfactions, not capable of diminution by external causes, not self-regarding, not prone to demand or bargain but giving itself simply and spontaneously, not moved to or broken by misunderstandings, disappointments, strife and anger, but pressing always straight towards the inner union. It is this psychic love that is closest to the divine and it is therefore the right and best way of love and bhakti. But that does not mean that the other parts of the being, the vital and physical included, are not to be used as means of expression or that they are not to share in the full play and the whole meaning of love, even of divine love. On the contrary, they are a means and can be a great part of the complete expression of divine love,– provided they have the right and not the wrong movement. There are in the vital itself two kinds of love,– one full of joy and confidence and abandon, generous, unbargaining, ungrudging and very absolute in its dedication and this is akin to the psychic and well-fitted to be its complement and a means of expression of the divine love. And neither does the psychic love or the divine love despise a physical means of expression wherever that is pure and right and possible; it does not depend upon that, it does not diminish, revolt or go out like a snuffed candle when it is deprived of any such means; but when it can use it, it does so with joy and gratitude. Neither of us ever said that darshan and touch in the Pranam were given as a concession to human weakness and that in the psychic way there is no place for such things. On the contrary they were given as means of approaching the Divine and receiving the Light and materialising the psychic 
contact, and so long as they are approached in the right spirit and used for the true purpose they have their place. It is only if they are misused, not rightly approached or approached with indifference and inertia, or revolt or hostility or some gross desire, that they are out of place and can have a contrary effect – as the Mother has always warned people and has assigned it as the reason why she does not like lightly to open them to everyone.
But there is another way of vital love which is more usually the way of human nature and that is a way of ego and desire. It is full of vital craving, desire and demand; its continuance depends upon the satisfaction of its demands; if it does not get what it craves or even imagines that it is not being treated as it deserves – for it is full of imaginations, misunderstandings, jealousies, misinterpretations – it at once turns to sorrow, wounded feeling, anger, all kinds of disorder, finally cessation and departure. A love of this kind is in its very nature ephemeral and unreliable and it cannot be made a foundation for divine love. There has been too much of this kind in the relations of the sadhaks with the Mother in approaching her, I suppose, as a human mother with all the reactions of the lower vital nature. For a long time it was per force tolerated – and this was the concession made to human weakness – even accepted in the beginning as a thing too prominent in the human being not to be there to some extent but to be transformed by degrees; but too often, it has refused to transform itself and has made itself a source of confusion, disorder, asiddhi, sometimes complete disaster. It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature. Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,– but this is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and nirānanda [blisslessness].
In your own case you often write in your wrong moods as if human love, even with some of these lower ingredients, were the only thing possible to you. But that is not so at all, for it contradicts your own deepest experiences. Always what your inner being has asked is Love, Bhakti, Ananda and whenever it comes to the surface it is, even if only in a first elementary form, the divine love which it brings with it. A basis of deep and intense calm and stillness, a great intensity of emotion and bhakti, an inrush of Ananda, this is in these moments your repeated experience. On the other hand when you insist too much on the love which exists by continual cravings, what comes is the other movement – fits of despondency, sorrow, nirānanda. In stressing on the psychic basis, in wishing you to conquer this other movement, I am only pointing you to the true way of your own nature – of which the psychic bhakti, the true vital love are the real moving forces, and the other is only a superficial immixture.
I had hoped to write shortly, but I have not been able to do so. Therefore, for the moment since I have promised you this letter in the morning, I can only repeat, on the other matter, that I have not said that you in any degree or the sadhaks generally were the cause of the Mother’s illness. To another who wrote something of the kind from the same personal standpoint I replied that the Mother’s illness was due to a struggle with universal forces which far overpassed the scope of any individual or group of individuals. What I wrote about the strain thrown on the Mother by the physical contacts was in connection with her resumption of work – and it concerns the conditions under which the work can best be done, so that these forces may not in future have the advantage. Conditions have been particularly arduous in the past owing to the perhaps inevitable development of things, for which I do not hold anyone responsible, but now that the sadhana has come down to the most material plane on which blows can still be given by the adverse forces it is necessary to make a change which can best be done by a change in the inner attitude of the sadhaks, for that alone now can make – until the decisive descent of the supramental Light and Force – the external conditions easier. But of this I cannot write at the tail end of a letter.