Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
A possibility in the soul or in the inner being generally remains always a possibility – at the worst, its fulfilment can be postponed, but even that only if the possessor of the possibility gives up or breaks away from the true spiritual path without probability of early return, because he is in chase of the magnified and distorted shadow of his own ego or for some other distortions of the nature produced by a wrong egoistic misuse of the Yoga. A mere appearance of inability or obstruction of progress in the outer being, a covering of 
the inner by the outer, even if it lasts for years, has no privative value, because that happens to a great number, perhaps to the majority of aspirants to Yoga. The reason is that they take somehow the way of raising up all the difficulties in their nature almost at the beginning and tunnelling through the mass instead of the alternative way of going ahead, slowly or swiftly, and trusting to time, Yoga and the Force Divine to clear out of them in the proper [?] what has to be eliminated. It is not of their own deliberate choice that they do it, something in their nature draws them. There are many here who have had or still have that long covering of the inner by the outer or separation of the inner from the outer consciousness. You yourself took that way in spite of our expostulations to you advising you to take the sunlit road, and you have not yet got out of the habit. But that does not mean that you won’t get out of the tunnel and when you do you will find your inner being waiting for you on the other side – in the sun and not in the shadow. I don’t think I am more patient than a guru ought to be. Anyone who is a guru at all ought to be patient, first because he knows the difficulty of human nature and, secondly, because he knows how the Yoga force works, in so many contrary ways, open or subterranean, slow or swift, volcanic or coralline – passing even from one to the other – and he does not use the surface reason but the eye of inner knowledge and Yogic experience.