Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
I don’t find it a noble voice at all, it is the voice of the usual defeatist suggester using any and every reasoning to instil weakness, flight and self-destruction. There is no strong reasoning either, it is the usual round of sophistries always the same and repeated to every sadhak in turn. “Give up, give up, give up! run, run, run! die, die, say die, say die.” That is always the substance of it, the rest is only skin and shell to give it a good presentation. I don’t reason with the creature; you may reason like Socrates and be as convincing as the Buddha, but after a little it will soon come back and sing the same song over again. It pretends to reason, but does not care a damn for utter truth or reason – I know too well the ways of the fellow – I have paid heavily to know. In my own sadhana I have heard his chant of death a million times and several hundreds of times from this or that sadhak. So I simply refuse to listen to him and I advise you to do the same.
Neurasthenia1 in the sense it is now given is not nervous debility – that is an antiquated definition. Nervous debility is a special thing, an illness of the physical nervous; – neurasthenia 
proper is a weakness of the vital nervous. One may be as strong as a bull and hardy as an evergreen, yet have neurasthenia. Its mark is depression, gloom, reiteration of melancholy slogans, broodings on darkness, death, despair. The bull indulges in a sorrowful lowing; the evergreen moans “Sunshine? sunshine? it is a fable – there is only cloud, mist, rain and tears!” That’s neurasthenia! Of course there are other and more exaggerated forms, but those are not in question. One can get rid of this kind, if the will is determined to do so.
All this insistence on grandeur and majesty makes me remember Shakespeare’s remarks – the greatness that is thrust on one. I am unaware, as of grimness, so of any stiff majesty or pompous grandeur – the state of peace, wideness, universality I feel is perfectly easy, simple, natural, dégagé, more like a robe of ease than any imperial purple. Between Nirod’s palpitating testimony to my grandeur and your melancholy testimony to my majesty – it appears I sit like the Himalayas and am as remote as the stratosphere – I begin to wonder whether it is so and how the devil I manage to do the trick. Unconscious hypnotism? No, for I begin to feel not like the juggler but like the little boy who has to climb his rope and perch there in a perilous and uncomfortable elevation and it seems to be rather a self-hypnotism by the spectators of the show. All the same it was a relief to find someone writing of a beautiful and “loving” darshan and others who describe it in a similar tone. From which I conclude that the quality of the object lies in the eye of the seer – nānā munir nānā mat [many sages, many views].
Evidently what you need is a dose of supramental sunshine. I hope to have the article one day in a liquid and portable form with which to anoint you. Till then you must wait, I suppose, and instead of listening to Strong Reasoner and Co. write poems like the last ones and dream in your meditations of Krishna’s dance and flute. That is the best way to bring him near you.