Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
I try to reply [...]1 be brief in my answer.
I fear in this case as in some others you and the others who shared your opinion judged too much from the outside appearance. A man is not sexually pure only because he does not flirt with women nor free from ambition, vanity and pride because he is outwardly humble and gentle. I do not usually care to reveal the weaknesses of one sadhak to the others – as you can understand, it would not be right for me to do so, so these wrong notions about people become current. Durgadas was not at all an ideal sadhak, he had the same weaknesses as other men, but for a long time he kept them very much shut up in himself and he followed his own 
ways in dealing with them which were not very safe. His meditations were silent and secret and he did not tell them to us as he should have done. He had ambitions and violent jealousies and a wish to occupy the first place. These things he did not exclude from his sadhana, but rather indulged them and allowed formations about them to take hold of his mind when he concentrated. For his sexual difficulty he used methods which in the opinion of the doctor (not Upendranath) who saw him in his illness were the cause of his first upsetting. The one thing that kept him right for a long time was his work which was the one way that he found for trying to form the habit of selfless surrender. But in the end he got weary of his work and wished to give it up and serve no longer. These are the facts and you will see they are very different from your idealised picture. All the theories about his breaking down under the pressure of being near the Mother, etc. are beside the mark. He broke down like Putu and Nolinbehari because he preferred to follow his own way, his own desires and imaginations instead of obeying the guidance and heeding the warnings of the Mother. He became enamoured of his own formations, allowed any Force that flattered them to take hold of him and put that up as the Mother refusing to obey or accept the guidance of the actual Mother here. If he had not done that, there is no reason why he should not have set himself right and gone straight. He had not in him the makings of a great Yogi, certainly, but he had a certain capacity for devotion and intensity of aspiration, and if he had used that for a true self-offering and surrender and if he had confided in the Mother and followed her guidance, he could have realised and come to something. But he did just the opposite and the result was as with Putu and Nolinbehari, a disaster.
I have explained the case of Durgadas, but I have no time to answer your general questionings – if this letter is to go at once – I will try to make time tonight or tomorrow.