Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
To answer the one question in your last letter would need a Mahabharata – for you raise at one fell swoop the whole problem of life along with the whole problem of Yoga. But you have more faith than you imagine, otherwise you would not be so hard on the Divine. I did not, by the way, mean this kind of formation when I spoke of Durgadas but formations of a false value in Yoga. Doubts are an obstacle, sometimes a serious obstacle, but false values in Yoga which the sadhak is not willing to correct are a danger.
I may say about the doubts that one cannot be free from them easily so long as one judges by the intellect alone or by the appearances of things without appeal to that which is behind appearances. The very fact that one comes to Yoga is an admission that there must be something other than the appearances, a deeper and greater Truth behind. It is an admission that there is a Divine Someone or Something behind, and if so, then life simply cannot mean only what it seems to be on the surface. The surface meaning cannot be ignored – I have never ignored it and the Mother has never ignored it – the riddle, the obscurity, the suffering, the tight hold of the Asura,– but that is neither the whole nor the ultimate truth of existence. It is that one must bend one’s whole effort to get at and not dwell always in the aspects of the surface.
I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and no stranger to doubts – both the Mother and myself have had one side of the mind as positive and as insistent on practical results and more so than any Russell can be. We could never have been contented with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for gold coin of Truth. We know well what is the difference between a subjective experience and a dynamic outward-going and realising Force. So although we have faith,– and who ever did anything great in the world without having faith in his mission or the Truth at work behind him? – we do not found ourselves on faith alone, but on a great ground of knowledge which we have been developing and testing all our lives. I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane. That is why I am not alarmed by the aspect of the world around me or disconcerted by the often successful fury of the adverse Forces who increase in their rage as the Light comes nearer and nearer down to the field of earth and Matter.
If I believe in the probability and not only the possibility, if I feel practically certain of the supramental Descent – I do not fix a date,– it is because I have my grounds for the belief, not merely a faith in the air. I know that the supramental descent is inevitable – I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age.
But even if I knew it to be for a later time, I would not swerve from my path or be discouraged or flag in my labour. Formerly I might have been, but not now after all the path I have traversed. When one is sure of the Truth, or even when one believes the thing one pursues to be the only possible solution, one does not stipulate for immediate success, one travels towards the Light taking as well worth while and facing every risk of the adventure. Still, like you, it is now in this life that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter.