Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Letter ID: 543
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
January 1935
The Mother did not tell Nolini to ask you to come for a little time, so I do not see why you shall make the Mother 
responsible for his phrase and refuse to come on Monday morning. The Mother limits the time like that for many, but she has done it for you only when her mornings were heavy and full; ordinarily she has not done so and has even asked you to stay longer when you made haste to go.
It seems to me that you have very strange ideas about the psychic. I do not know why you think the psychic is unable to offer or give or that the Mother is or ought to be incapable of appreciating gifts. The whole Ashram ought to know to the contrary, I suppose. It is the very first impulse of the psychic to give. Also if the vital gives generously, freely and of itself, that has always been appreciated by the Mother.
I have always said that the vital is indispensable for the divine or spiritual action – without it there can be no complete expression, no realisation of life – hardly even any realisation in sadhana. When I speak of the vital resistance or of the obstructions, revolts etc. of the vital, it is the unregenerated outer vital full of desire and ego and the lower passions of which I speak. I could say the same against the mind and the physical when they obstruct or oppose, but precisely because the vital is so powerful and indispensable, its obstruction, opposition or refusal of co-operation is more strikingly effective and its wrong mixtures are more dangerous to the sadhana. That is why I have always insisted on the dangers of the unregenerated vital and the necessity of mastery and purification there. It is not because I hold, like the Sannyasis, the vital and its life powers to be a thing to be condemned and rejected in its very nature.
Affection, love, tenderness are in their nature psychic; the vital has them because the psychic is trying to express itself through the vital. It is through the emotional being that the psychic most easily expresses, for it stands just behind it in the heart centre. But it wants these things to be pure. Not that it rejects the outward expression through the vital and the physical, but as the psychic being is the form of the soul, it naturally feels the attraction of soul to soul, the nearness of soul to soul, the union of soul with soul are the things that are to it most abiding and concrete. Mind, vital, body are means of expression and very precious means of expression, but the inner life is for it the first thing, the deepest reality and these have to be subordinated to it and conditioned by it, its expression, its instruments and channel. I do not think that in my emphasis on the inner things, on the psychic and spiritual, I am saying anything new, strange or unintelligible. These things have always been stressed from the beginning and the more the human being is evolved, the more they take an importance. I do not see how Yoga can be possible without this premier stress on the inner life, on the soul and the spirit. The emphasis on the mastery of the vital, its subordination and subjection to the spiritual and the psychic is also nothing new, strange or exorbitant. It has been insisted on always for any kind of spiritual life; even the Yogas which seek most to use the vital, like certain forms of Vaishnavism, yet insist on the purification and the total offering of it to the Divine – and the relations with the Divine are an inner realisation, the soul offering itself through the emotional being. The soul or psychic being is not something unheard of or incomprehensible.
I may say that I am not responsible for your loss of zest in the vital. This Vairagya or loss of zest, as you have yourself said, began before you came here. I have indeed laid some stress on the conquest of sex, for obvious reasons; but I have hardly laid a compulsory stress on anything else. Certainly, I have not encouraged you to lose joy in vital creativeness; I have only held up the [?] of turning it towards the Divine and away from the ego. To keep the vital full of life and energy and to trust mainly to the inner growth and the descent of a higher consciousness for a change, using the will too but for self-mastery, not for suppression, but for subordination of the lower to the higher, has been my teaching. The turn to Vairagya, to tapasya of an ascetic kind was the impulse of something in your own nature; it insisted on its necessity just as a part of the vital insisted on its opposite: even it condemned my suggestion of something less grim and strenuous as an easy going absence of aspiration, etc. I do not say that Vairagya and tapasya are not ways to reach the Divine, but done like that they are painful ways and long; if one takes them, one must be determined and go through. For one part to push all zest out of the vital and for the other to regret and say, why did I ever do it, will never do. And it is in this kind of tapasya that perfection or at least perfect purification is demanded before there can be any realisation. I have never said that for my Yoga the only thing I insist upon is some faith, inner surrender and opening of oneself to receive – not absolute but just sufficient. Experience has to begin long before perfect purification and from experience to experience one comes to realisation and through realisation to more and more perfection; anything that can be called real perfection can only come at the end. But there is something in you that is impatient of gradualness, of small success; its motto seems to be all or nothing.
If one wants Krishna, one gets Krishna – but he is a sufficiently trying Deity and does not come at once, though he may come suddenly at any time. But usually one has to want him so badly and obstinately that one is prepared to pay any price. One has to know how to wait as well as to want – to go on insisting and insisting without taking heed of even the longest denial. The psychic can do that – but the mind and the vital have to learn how to do it also.