Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Your idea that the Mother was displeased with you was an idea and nothing more. “Probably she has looked upon my sadness as a delinquency” – well, that is just the thing I want you to get rid of – imaginations like these which have no 
shadow of foundation whatever and which you yet persist in indulging each time you get out of wits – spiritually. What I want of you besides aspiring for faith? Well, just a little thoroughness and persistence in the method! Don’t aspire for two days and then sulk into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the jackal and all the rest of it. Give the Divine a full sporting chance. When he lights something in you or is preparing a light, don’t come in with a wet blanket of despondency and throw it on the poor flame. You will say, “It is a mere candle that is lit – nothing at all!” But in these matters, when the darkness of human mind and life and body has to be dissipated, a candle is always a beginning – a lamp can follow and afterwards a sun – but the beginning must be allowed to have a sequel – not get cut off from its natural sequelae by chunks of sadness and doubt and despair. At the beginning, and for a long time, the experiences do usually come in little quanta with empty spaces between – but, if allowed their way, the spaces will diminish, and the quantum theory give way to the Newtonian continuity of the spirit. But you have never yet given it a real chance. The empty spaces have been peopled with doubts and denials and so the quanta have become rare, the beginnings remained beginnings. Other difficulties you have faced and rejected, but this difficulty you have dandled too much for a long time and it has become strong – it must be dealt with by a persevering effort. I do not say that all doubts must disappear before anything comes – that would be to make sadhana impossible, for doubt is the mind’s persistent assailant. All I say is, don’t allow the assailant to become a companion, don’t give him the open door and the fireside seat. Above all, don’t drive away the incoming Divine with that dispiriting wet blanket of sadness and despair!
To put it more soberly – accept once and for all that this thing has to be done, that it is the only thing left for yourself or the earth. Outside are earthquakes and Hitlers and a collapsing civilisation and, generally speaking, the jackal in the flood. All the more reason to tend towards the one thing to 
be done, the thing you have been sent to aid in getting done. It is difficult and the way long and the encouragement given meagre? What then? Why should you expect so great a thing to be easy or that there must be either a swift success or none? The difficulties have to be faced and the more cheerfully they are faced, the sooner they will be overcome. The one thing to do is to keep the mantra of success, the determination of victory, the fixed resolve, “Have it I must and have it I will.” Impossible? There is no such thing as an impossibility – there are difficulties and things of longue haleine [long haul], but no impossibles. What one is determined fixedly to do, will get done now or later – it becomes possible.
There – that is my counter blast to your variation on Schopenhauer. To come to less contentious matters – of course Bindu can come – he will always be welcome; there is a good downstairs room – he might take that? I will consider the application of force to your tenant and your (or your father’s) translator. Tough things though – tenants and [?] translators (I suppose too both in these days of depression are short of cash) – but, well there is nothing impossible!!
Your fable and your transformation of the Sanskrit apophthegm are entertaining. I conclude – drive out dark despair and go bravely on with your poetry, your novels – and your Yoga. As the darkness disappears, the inner doors will open.