Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Let us first put aside the quite foreign consideration of what we would do if the union with the Divine brought eternal joylessness, Nirānanda or torture. Such a thing does not exist and to drag it in only clouds the issue. The Divine is ānandamaya and one can seek him for the Ananda he gives; he has also in him many other things and one may seek him for any of them, for peace, for liberation, for knowledge, for power, for anything else to which one may take a fancy. It is quite possible for someone to say: “Let me have Power from the Divine and do His work or His Will and I am satisfied, even if the use of Power entails suffering also.” It is possible to shun bliss as a thing too tremendous or ecstatic and ask 
only or rather for peace, for liberation, for Nirvana. You speak of self-fulfilment – one may regard the Supreme not as the Divine but as one’s highest Self and seek fulfilment of one’s being in that highest Self; but one need not envisage it as a self of bliss, ecstasy, Ananda – one may envisage it as a self of freedom, vastness, knowledge, tranquillity, strength, calm, perfection – perhaps too calm for a ripple of anything so disturbing as joy to enter. So even if it is for something that one approaches the Divine, it is not a fact that one can approach Him or seek union for the sake of Ananda and nothing else.
That involves something which throws all your reasoning out of gear. For these are aspects of the Divine Nature, powers of it, states of his being – but the Divine Himself is something absolute, someone self-existent, not limited by his aspects – wonderful and ineffable, not existing by them, but they existing because of Him – it follows that if he attracts by his aspects, all the more he can attract by his very absolute selfness which is sweeter, mightier, profounder than any aspect. His peace, rapture, light, freedom, beauty are marvellous and ineffable, because he is himself magically, mysteriously, transcendently marvellous and ineffable. He can then be sought after for his wonderful and ineffable self and not only for the sake of one aspect or another of him. The only thing is first to arrive at a point when the psychic being feels this pull of the Divine in himself and, secondly, to arrive at the point when the mind, vital and everything else begin to feel too that that was what it was wanting and the surface hunt after Ananda or what else was only an excuse for drawing the nature towards that supreme magnet.
Your argument that because we know the union with the Divine will bring Ananda, therefore it must be for the Ananda that we seek the union, is not true and has no force. One who loves a queen may know that if she returns his love it will bring him power, position, riches and yet it need not be for the power, position, riches that he seeks her love. He may love her for herself and could love her equally if she were not 
a queen; he might have no hope of any return whatever and yet love her, adore her, live for her, die for her simply because she is she. That has happened and men have loved women without any hope of enjoyment or result, loved steadily, passionately after age has come and beauty has gone. Patriots do not love their country only when she is rich, powerful, great and has much to give them; love for country has been most ardent, passionate, absolute when the country was poor, degraded, miserable, having nothing to give but loss, wounds, torture, imprisonment, death as the wages of her service; yet even knowing that they would never see her free, men have lived, served and died for her – for her own sake, not for what she could give. Men have loved Truth for her own sake and for what they could seek or find of her, accepted poverty, persecution, death itself; they have been content even to seek for her always, not finding, and yet never given up the search. That means what? That man, country, Truth and other things beside can be loved for their own sake and not for anything else, not for any circumstance or attendant quality or resulting enjoyment, but for something absolute that is either in them or behind their appearance and circumstance. The Divine is more than a man or woman, a stretch of land or a creed, opinion, discovery or principle. He is the Person beyond all persons, the Home and Country of all souls, the Truth of which truths are only imperfect figures. And can He not then be loved and sought for his own sake, as and more than these have been by men even in their lesser selves and nature?
What your reasoning ignores is what is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine – something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is soul’s inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when “I seek you for this, I seek you for that” changes to a sheer “I seek you for you”. It is that marvellous 
and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, “Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna.” The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.
I have written all that only to explain what we mean ourselves and Krishnaprem and other spiritual seekers, when we speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else – so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to self-giving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being – for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it was really that that was drawing you from the beginning and it is that that is there behind the loneliness and emptiness and need of being filled that you increasingly feel – it is the categorical imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine.
I do not know why you suppose that we should be angry for this or that. If you can feel the Divine in the Guru so much the better, for that is an enormous help, but this is not one of the things that the reasoning mind by itself can see. Meanwhile that you should feel more and more need for the Divine in whatever way is so much to the good and we are glad that it should be so. For it is that that should grow until it calls down the response is the one thing needful.
P.S. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. Why, the self-giving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, brings in its wake an inexpressible Ananda – and it brings it sooner than any other method, so that one can say almost, “A self-less self-giving is the best policy.” Only one does not do it out of policy. Ananda is the result, but it is done not for the result, but for the thing itself and for the Divine himself – a subtle distinction, it may seem to the mind, but very real.