Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 519

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

December 1934

I got your first letter and as I always look at yours if there is any and leave the rest aside for later reading I sat down after my daily walk and concentration to answer it. I missed your second “urgent” letter altogether and came to know of it after I had seen the third – later in the night. If I had had it, I would of course have answered at once. I am sorry you have had to wait the whole night without an answer.

I was a little taken aback by the first letter, for my remarks about X had been perfectly casual and I attached little importance to them when I wrote them. I would certainly not have written them if I had thought they were of a kind to cause trouble to you. In scribbling them I had no idea of imposing my views about X on you – I had no idea of writing as a Guru to a disciple or laying down the law, it was rather as a friend to a friend expressing my ideas and discussing them with a perfect ease and confidence. Both the Mother and myself have a natural tendency to speak or write to you in that way, expressing the idea that comes without measuring of terms or any arrière pensée, because we feel close to your psychic being always and that is the relation which we have quite naturally with you. That was why I wrote like that and I had no other intention in me.

I do not believe in human judgments because I have always found them fallible – also perhaps because I have myself been so blackened by human judgments that I do not care to be guided by them with regard to others. All this however I write to explain my own point of view; I am not insisting on it as a law for others. I have never been in the habit of insisting that everybody must think as I do – any more than I insist on everybody following me and my Yoga.

All that to brush aside what is an evident misunderstanding. Now about XYZ you should remember that what I wrote about them was not an after invention or an idea formed as a result of their going – all that I wrote about X, for instance, I had written to him long before he went – and also with the others I had not refrained from letting them know what was wrong with them, except for YZ with whom it was not necessary. I did not whole-heartedly assure and praise and encourage while they were there nor whole-heartedly damn when they were gone. Nor would I have said anything about them if I had not been questioned from every side. Why then should you think that I would attack you if you went away: you, to whom I have always spoken with encouragement and kindness, and never I think with severe disapprobation or warning as I did with XYZ? If you went away, I should write, if I had to write what I have always said to you: “Dilip had his difficulties, but he was gradually surmounting them, but his one great difficulty of doubt and self-distrust he did not meet sufficiently,” and I would add, “and in a weak moment he has allowed it to carry him away. But he will find that he can discover his soul here alone and then he will return.”

But all that is really unnecessary since you are not like the others consumed with the desire to go or feeling the call for action elsewhere. But why this constant slipping back to the idea of failure? Why this idea that I am offended? Have I ever taken offence or evinced any least idea of giving you up? How is it you still lend credence to a suggestion your whole experience of our relation contradicts. Your attacks of doubt and self-distrust are a weakness I have taken account of and I refuse to consider it as a bar to your arrival at the goal. It is in all sincerity that I affirm your possibilities.