Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 301
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
December 2, 1932
The difficulty of getting the inner being out on the surface is no doubt very strong as is usually the case with all who have lived very much in the active mind and in outward 
things. There are other here who are considered good sadhaks who are or were in the same case. But that can be overcome only by a long and patient pressure. The more important thing for you is to refuse to be overcome by the reaction that comes after an experience – to take it as a sign of hope rather than meet it with a reaction of disappointment and sense of failure.
As to Putu’s1 collapse, I did not intend to say anything about it just now,– for mental discussion of causes and consequences is not of much help at this juncture. I must say however that it is not the push for union with the Divine nor is it the Divine Force that leads to madness – it is the way in which people themselves act with regard to their claim for these things. To be more precise, I have never known a case of collapse in Yoga – as opposed to mere difficulty or negative failure,– a case of dramatic disaster in which there was not one of three causes – or more than one of the three at work. First, some sexual aberration – I am not speaking of mere sexuality which can be very strong in the nature without leading to collapse – or an attempt to sexualise spiritual experience on an animal or gross material basis; second, an exaggerated ambition, pride or vanity trying to seize on spiritual force or experience and turn it to one’s own glorification – ending in megalomania; third, an unbalanced vital and a weak nervous system apt to follow its own imaginations and unruled impulses without any true mental will or strong mental will to steady or restrain it, and so at the mercy of the imaginations and suggestions of the adverse vital world when carried over the border into the intermediate zone of which I spoke in a recent message. All the causes of collapse in this Ashram2 have been due to these three causes – to the first two mostly. Only three or four of them have ended in madness – and in these the sexual aberration was invariably 
present; usually a violent fall from the Way is the consequence. Putu’s is no exception to the rule. It is not because she pushed for union with the Divine that she went mad, but because she misused what came down for a mystic sexuality and the satisfaction of megalomaniac pride, in spite of my repeated and insistent warnings. For the moment that is all the light I can give on the matter – naturally I generalise and avoid details.
1 A Bengali Sadhika, Anilbaran’s relative.
2 “In this Ashram” was omitted from the excerpt from this letter that was published in Letters on Yoga (24: 1766).