Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
□ Hide link-numbers of differed places
I have written to Nalina to set right any misunderstanding – if there is really a misunderstanding – about our consent 
to her going. That consent I consider as forced from me by her own insistence that she could not stay – the pull was too great – she must go. I reminded her of what I told her before that the only true way was to stay and fight out the difficulty – the only justification for going would be if her call was more to the family life than to the spiritual life. I have told her that we keep to that and the Mother and I do not like her going – and asked her to reconsider her decision. For it is hers not mine. You know that I dislike anyone who has a psychic call going away from here, because it is throwing away their spiritual destiny or at least postponing it. For I don’t suppose Nalina, if she persists in going, will remain always under the illusion of the family bonds – but the risk is there and the postponement is there. Mother has called her tomorrow morning and she will see what she decides.
As for the faith-doubt question, you ardently
give to the word faith a sense and a scope I do not attach to it. I will have to write not one but several letters to clear up the position. It seems to me that you mean by faith a mental belief which is in fact
put before the mind and senses in the doubtful form of an unsupported asseveration. I mean by it a dynamic intuitive conviction in the inner being of the truth of supersensible things which cannot be proved by any physical evidence but which are a subject of experience. My point is that this faith is a most desirable preliminary (if not absolutely indispensable – for there can be cases of experiences
not preceded by faith) to the desired experience. If I insist so much on faith – but even less on positive faith than on the throwing away of a priori doubt and denial – it is because I find that this doubt and denial have become an instrument in the hands of the obstructive forces and clog your steps whenever I try to push you to an advance. If you can’t or won’t get rid of it, (“won’t” out of respect for the reason and fear of being led into believing things that are not true, “can’t” because of contrary experience) then I shall have to manage for you without it, only it makes a difficult instead of a straight and comparatively easy process.
Why I call the materialist’s denial an a priori denial is because he refuses even to consider or examine what he denies, but starts by denying it, like Leonard Woolf with his quack quack, on the ground that it contradicts his own theories, so it can’t be true. On the other hand, the belief in the Divine and the Grace and Yoga and the Guru etc. (not in Bejoy Krishna or his miracles, hang it!) is
not a priori, because it rests on a great mass of human experience which has been accumulating through the centuries and millenniums
as well as the personal intuitive perception. Therefore it is an intuitive perception which has been confirmed by the experience of hundreds and thousands of those who have tested it before me.
I do not ask you to believe that the Divine Grace comes to all or that all can succeed in the sadhana or that I personally have succeeded or will succeed in the case of all who come to me. I have asked you if you cannot develop the faith that the Divine is – you seem often to doubt it – that the Divine Grace is and has manifested both elsewhere and here, that the sadhana by which so many profit is not a falsehood or a chimera and that I have helped many and am not utterly powerless – otherwise how could so many progress under our influence? If this is first established, then the doubt and denial, the refusal of faith boils itself down to a refusal of faith in your own spiritual destiny and that of Nalina and some others – does it not? I have never told you that the power that works here is absolute at present, I have on the contrary told you that I am trying to make it absolute and it is for that that I want the supermind to intervene. But to say that because it is not absolute therefore it does not exist, seems to me a logical inconsequence.
There remains your personal case and you may very well tell me, “What does it matter to me if these things are true when they are not true to me, true in my own experience?” But it does make a difference that they are true in themselves. For if your personal want of experience is held as proving that it is all moonshine, then all is finished – there is no hope for you or me or anybody. If on the other hand these things are true but not yet realised by you, then there is hope, a 
possibility at least. From the point of reason you may be right in thinking that because you have not realised yet, you can never realise – though it does not seem to me an inevitable conclusion. From the same point of view I also may be right in concluding from my experience and that of other Yogins that there is no such inevitability and that with the persistent aspiration in you and the Vairagya we have the conditions for a realisation that must come – sooner, for there are sudden liberations, or later.
In all this I have touched nothing fundamental on the question of faith – it is only a preliminary canter trying to remove certain points that are in the way. There are several others in your letter of today which I shall try to take up in my next letter. Afterwards I shall attack Bejoy Goswami, the nature of faith and the limits of its field (why it does not include B.G’s miracles, etc.) and other central matters.
Current publication:
[A letter: ] Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip / edited by Sujata Nahar, Shankar Bandyopadhyay.- 1st ed.- In 4 Volumes.- Volume 2. 1934 – 1935.- Pune: Heri Krishna Mandir Trust; Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2003.- 405 p.
Other publications:
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.
Sri Aurobindo. Letters of Sri Aurobindo: In 4 Series.- Second Series [On Yoga].- Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Sircle, 1949.- 599 p.