Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
I wrote what I wrote because you asked me whether that was the thing to do and I have often told you that it is, so I said so again. However, as you do not accept it, it can be thrown into the W.P.B. and forgotten there.
I did not say that meditation was congenitally impossible to you. I simply said that your meditation up to the present had certain elements which stand in the way of successful meditation and must take another position before it can lead to the opening – that is a thing that happens to many sadhaks before they get into the right movement and it does not prove that they are congenitally incapable of sadhana.
It is perfectly true that all human greatness and fame and achievement are nothing before the greatness of the Infinite 
and Eternal. There are two possible deductions from that, first, that all human action has to be renounced and one should go into a cave; the other is that one should grow out of ego so that the activities of the nature may become one day consciously an action of the Infinite and Eternal. But it does not follow that one must or can grow out of ego and the vital absorption at once and, if one does not, that proves incapacity for Yoga. I myself never gave up poetry or other creative human activities out of tapasya – they fell into a subordinate position because the inner life became stronger and stronger slowly – nor did I really drop them, only I had so heavy a work laid upon me that I could not find time to go on. But it took me years and years to get the ego out of them or the vital absorption, but I never heard anybody say and it never occurred to me that that was a proof that I was not born for the Yoga. These doctrines still sound strange to me. I should also be very glad to know of the swift and easy method of Yoga by which all that can be done in a few years – or else not at all, for that seems to be your alternative. What I see in this Ashram is that people catch hold of something said or written by the Mother, give it an interpretation other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a crudely extreme logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. If we protest against these crude ideas being put upon us, the “disciples” cling to their own deductions and delusions and push aside our protests as inconsistent with what we have once said, insincere or unintelligible. The Mother has long ago given up trying to correct these things, for she finds that they do not listen to her but to something in their own minds, which they follow and announce as hers. I still sometimes try, but with no great success. As for the logical conclusion drawn – well! It is natural, I suppose, and part of the game. It is much easier to come to vehement ample logical conclusions than to look at the truth as it is many-sided and whole.
As to the born Yogi, what I said was that there was a born yogi in you, and I very explicitly based it on the personality 
that showed itself in your earlier experiences in a vivid way which no one accustomed to the things of Yoga or having any knowledge about them could fail to recognise. But I did not mean that there was nothing in you which was not “born Yogic.” Everyone has many personalities in him and many of them are not yogic at all in their propensities. But if one has the will to Yoga, the born Yogi prevails as soon as he gets a chance of manifesting himself through the crust of the mind and vital nature. Only, very often that takes time. One must be prepared to give the time.
Perseverance and discipline are excellent things, but if you want that the first thing is to discipline the fretful vital and to reject perseveringly the hypnotism of the fixed conviction that nothing can be done and nothing will be done. Perseverance and discipline are indeed mighty adjuncts to the Yoga – if that is the arsenic, I have no objection to your applying any amount of it for killing the sheep – whether the sheep be the restlessness of the mind and vital or any other obstacle in the Yoga1.
P.S. I had no time to speak of the poem and I doubt where there is anything useful I can say.