Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
In your letter today there are some things that I would find a little astonishing if I did not know that when the vital mind which indulges in these depressions is predominant anything however contrary to the facts may be put forward as true. But I should like to put one or two of them right, all the same. For you say that it is clear that I want you to be indifferent (like Nolini) to be indifferent to everyone else but the Mother and you make us responsible for your becoming a stranger 
to Arjava, Moni1 and Khirode2, for a feeling of rancorous aversion that has come between you and Sahana – and you express an apprehension that the same development may come on your still existing friendship with Subhash and Harin and others, evidently as the result of my yogic influence or my demand upon you. And finally you expect me to turn upon you and reject and hate you because in spite of all I find you unworthy of the Yoga. First of all, I am utterly at a loss to imagine how I can be responsible for your becoming a stranger to Arjava, Moni and Khirode. I never asked you or them to break or get remote from each other, I never put any pressure for that or desired it – on the contrary I greatly regretted your getting estranged with Arjava, for Arjava’s sake as well as for your own; I never appreciated what good reasons there could be for the cooling down between you and Moni – as for Khirode I have still to learn why there should be any distance between you. Nobody would be more glad than myself and the Mother if there is a rapprochement between them and you. As for the other friends, well, when and where have I interfered with and discouraged your friendships with Subhash and the others? I consented to your sending my blessing to Subhash and the extracts or letters, not for his sake – for I never met him – but for yours and because of your friendship with him; I welcomed Harin as much for your sake as his. I have admitted Bindu, Pratap and others because of your love or friendship or appreciation of them; in all cases, I believe I can say, I have given my blessings to your friends Buddhadev, Ashalata, your friends in Europe because they were your friends and 
for the sake of your friendship. And I have never asked or desired you to break with a single one of them at any time. There remains the case of Sahana. I know nothing of this rancorous aversion of which you speak – there is nothing of the kind in the mind of Sahana. When she broke out against you, it had nothing to do with Yoga – she had forgotten everything about Yoga at the moment – but was an outbreak of the vital being in its crudest from and she was at the same time as angry with us as with you because we had supported you in the Maitreyi affair and taken your side. As soon as we brought her back to her proper consciousness, all that fell away from her and she has no rancour or aversion or anger against you. Is there any rancour or aversion against her in your mind? I see no good reason why these should be – if there is any, it ought not to be there and should fall away from you at once. There remains your not seeing each other for a time. What you say about all ending in a quiet friendship, is what we have always told her that we wished – but the fact remains that she has not been able to achieve it and that what does come on her after a time of reconciliation is a relapse into old passions and fierce attacks of the Adversary shaking her very body and life – not because she is separated from you but because you are going with another woman even after the old relation was practically over! Is it so utterly unreasonable of us to desire a cessation of this kind of attack and is it so difficult for you to realise that it is not from attachment to yogic principles that we are against it but out of solicitude for Sahana. Or is it not worthwhile to try what separation for a while can do since the attempt at a quiet friendship had led to results so unquiet and adverse? If we were aloof in Yogic indifference – as you say the Yogi must be – we would not care, but leave each to fight out his or her own destiny with a calm indifferent gaze upon it from the heights of Nirvana. It seems to me that it is obvious that if we do try to help and save, it is because care and love are not absolutely foreign to our nature or to the Yogic nature or to the Nature of the Divine. I do not see anything that is so cold and grim and stern in our dealings – did you really see no love or tenderness in the Mother’s attitude and dealings today with Maya and the little child (who is not a Yogi or a disciple) Esha?
As for Nolini and what he said to you, it is Nolini’s own movement, the need he feels, not something we have dictated to him – we have certainly not forced it on others. There are over a hundred disciples in the Ashram – how many follow such a principle or have no personal relation with any but the Mother? And if some have the aspiration, if they feel the necessity of turning to the Divine alone in a passion of love or surrender and if they feel that they can find that Divine in or through the Mother, what is there in that spontaneous movement that is grim and stern and cruel? Are there not people who have left all other ties for the love of a man or a woman and been glorified for it; and why should it be so harsh and bad if it is for the Divine and such a movement is welcome by the Divine? But we do not force it on anybody – there are on the contrary friendships here that we not only allow but welcome.
In fact all these ideas are the creations of your mind because you are struggling between two opposite tendencies, the vital human and the ascetic indifference and Vairagya – the old oscillation, sea-saw, tug of war which, I have told you, is not the principle of our Yoga. Ours is a third way – murāreṣṭu tritīyah panthā3. All for the Divine, but all one in the Divine – that is indeed the final realisation at the end of our endeavour. But we do not expect the sadhak to reach at one bound to that perfection.
P.S. There is more that I should have written, but my time is over. I have tried to remove the misconceptions by which you have supported your sadness – I trust that some of them at least will fall for good away from you.