Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 344
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
February 28, 1933
Your1 wail does not seem to me to have strong grounds for existence. You were beginning to go on very well with a turn towards a more consistent progress; at such periods suggestions like these come to interrupt the progress. One ought not to listen to them at all; they serve merely as disturbing factors. If the reasons alleged were sufficient to be a just ground for failure, all Yoga would be impossible for you or anybody. The persistence or the obstinate return of the old Adam is a common experience: it is only when there is a sufficient mass of experience and a certain progression of consciousness in the higher parts of the being that the lower can be really transmuted. It is that that one must allow to develop. It is quite out of place to worry about your continued predilection for Maya’s vegetables or teas or [?] laughter and thence deduce your incapacity for Yoga. It is not on these things that we have asked you to concentrate. It is the pressure of the Yoga shakti and the increase of the experiences that is wanted in your case, not this preoccupation with an external “grim” tapasya. It was coming – why stop it with these inopportune regrets and reasonings?
1 Sri Aurobindo dated this letter February 29, but 1933 not being a leap year, we assume the date to be February 28.