Jehovah or a monster. There is the difficulty of seeing the Divine in the human and the human in the Divine. There is the difficulty that the Divine has not answered to your call. Old reiterances, all these, and of no fundamental or final value.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
Letter ID: 397
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
September 10, 1933
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It is the depression and despondency itself that have no real meaning in the truth of things – for they started from the mistake about Amiya’s segregation and, when that was corrected, they ought to have disappeared. But they have persisted – why? For no tangible and ascertainable cause. Before this happened, you were going on admirably well, expanding rapidly your instrumental capacities, purifying slowly but still steadily the vital weakness, getting much more frequent experiences than before with very promising signs of a stronger entry into the inner consciousness. Here there was no true reason for depression or despair. The reason you now allege are purely mind-made. There is the intellectual doubt about the Divine mingled with the Christian-antichristian conception of an arbitrary God who acts in the world according to his caprice and must be therefore either Jehovah or a monster. There is the difficulty of seeing the Divine in the human and the human in the Divine. There is the difficulty that the Divine has not answered to your call. Old reiterances, all these, and of no fundamental or final value.
The whole world knows, spiritual thinker and materialist alike, that the
world for the created or naturally evolved being in the ignorance or the inconscience of Nature is neither a bed of roses nor a path of joyous Light. It is a difficult journey, a battle and struggle, an often painful and chequered growth, a life besieged by obscurity, falsehood and suffering. It has its mental, vital, physical joys and pleasures, but these bring only a transient taste – which yet the vital self is unwilling to forego – and they end in distaste, fatigue or disillusionment. What then? To say the Divine does not exist is easy, but it leads nowhere – it leaves you where you are with no prospect or issue – neither Russell nor any materialist can tell you where you are going or even where you ought to go. The Divine does not manifest himself so as to be recognised in the external world-circumstances – admittedly so. These are not the works of an irresponsible autocrat somewhere – they are the circumstances of a working out of Forces according to a certain nature of being, one might say a certain proposition or problem of being into which we have all really consented to enter and co-operate. The work is painful, dubious, its vicissitudes impossible to forecast? There are either of two possibilities then, to get out of it into Nirvana by the Buddhist or the illusionist
way or to get inside oneself and find the Divine there since he is not discoverable on the surface. For those who have made the attempt, and there were not a few but hundreds and thousands, have testified through the ages that he is there and that is why there exists the Yoga. It takes long? The Divine is concealed behind a thick veil of his Maya and does not answer at once or at any early stage to our call? Or he gives only a glimpse uncertain and passing and then withdraws and waits for us to be ready? But if the Divine has any value, is it not worth some trouble and time
and labour to follow after him and must we 
insist on having him without any training or sacrifice or suffering or trouble? It is surely irrational to make a demand of such a nature. It is positive that we have to get inside, behind the veil to find him – it is only then that we can see him outside and the intellect be not so much convinced as forced to admit his presence by experience – just as when a man sees what he has denied and can no longer deny it. But for that the means must be accepted and the persistence in the will and patience in the labour.
As for the Divine and the human, that also is a mind-made trouble. The Divine is there in the human, and the human fulfilling and exceeding its highest aspirations and tendencies becomes the Divine. That is what your silly Upen could not understand – that when the Divine descends, he takes upon himself the burden of humanity in order to exceed it – he becomes human in order to show humanity how to become Divine. But that cannot be if he is himself a weakling without the Divine Forces behind – he has to be strong in order to put his strength into all who are willing to receive it. There is therefore in him a double element – human in front, Divine behind – and it is that which gives the impression of unfathomableness of which Upen complained – indulging in that the iconoclast in him who cannot bear anything he feels to be superior to himself. If you look upon the human alone, looking with the external eye only and are not willing or ready to see anything else, you will see a human being only – if you look for the Divine, you will find the Divine. That has been always your difficulty – but it can only be solved by inner experience which will open the external eye also. You were actually heading that way before this crisis disturbed you.
But it is really an unnecessary crisis that you have created by indulging this depression after its outward cause had been removed. It is because you did not reject it at once, but came back to your former habit of indulging it and feeding it with “reasons”. There is a development which takes place through crisis and one cannot always escape them, but it seems to me a wasteful process and not one I could recommend to anyone. It comes like that because some vital part in you opens to a force which wants it like that – even though your own mind does not want it. If it had been only your own difficulty, it would not have been so violent, it would have been solved long ago; but by assenting to the depression you make yourself a sort of representative of the World-vital or that part of it which is dissatisfied with life and attached to it, seeking for Yoga or spiritual release and yet revolting against it; finally crying in bitter vairāgya against both the Divine and world existence.
There is no reason at all why you should fail in this Yoga. Defeat is not truly in your nature, success and victory are in your nature. But you must lose this habit of indulging depression, of making yourself the mouthpiece for the painful feelings and defeatist reasonings of this sorrowful and dangerous World-Vital. You must give a real chance to the capacity within you to come out as it did in poetry in spite of the first outward incapacities and failures. It has shown itself whenever you got an experience and it has only to gather strength enough to push down the screen for good. But it can’t be done by the method of seeking a mournful solitude or an imitation of Bejoy’s retirement. Bejoy has made a theory of taking upon himself all the imperfections and struggles of everybody in a recurrent mass in order to digest and destroy or else transform them. I could not recommend to you his theory or the example of his solitude.
As you have decided to get over the [a word crossed out] decide also to get rid of this depression trouble. You were on the way to do it and the fits were becoming less in duration and power. Do not allow this relapse – for which there was no true rational reason – to overcome your resolution or throw you back. Attacks and crises come and they go, but the goal and the Ideal remain – for that is the Eternal.
P.S. I never thought that I would be able to write so long a reply, but by good fortune, almost a miracle, I was able to 
finish the regular work for the day at 3 a.m. instead of the usual 5.30, so I have put in two hours writing this letter. I could not find time to read the Sylhet letter you sent me, so I keep it and will send after reading.
1 CWSA, volume 28: this
2 CWSA, volume 28: illusionist
3 CWSA, volume 28: trouble, time
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip / edited by Sujata Nahar, Michel Danino, Shankar Bandopadhyay.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 1. 1929 – 1933.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 384 p.
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. The Riddle of this World: Letters.- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1973.- 72 p.