Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
I am grateful to learn that I have succeeded in making you somewhat partial to Peace and even almost able to envisage Silence without horror. It is a well-nigh supramental achievement – and yet you are unwilling to believe in the supermind or in me! However what I want to remind you of is that inner peace and silence are not necessarily a passage to Nirvana and nowhere else. I have shown by my own example (and there are others) that it can be a transition and a support to an inexhaustible and unfailing activity of knowledge, production and many things else. That tears the guts out of your fixed theory and constant assertion to the contrary – but you are always calling up its ghost and making it fight on like a bhūt [ghost] of Norwegian saga or the heroes of the Hindi epic long after the life is out of it or its head and legs cut off. I hope the time will soon come when you will let it rest peacefully in its grave.
Also the psychic approach is not the thing you paint it in your letter. All these highly literary and rhetorical, swingingly forceful or pungent phrases with which you pepper it, as once you did with the supermind, are, as those were, singularly inappropriate. It need, besides, be no slower in its result than the other ways. It depends on the sustained force and earnestness which you put into it whether it fructifies sooner or later.
As for romance, you would have had your fill of it if you had come earlier here, but you would also have had all the difficulties afterwards. As it is, the Gods who preside over your evolution seem to have made up their minds that you must deserve the romance of spiritual achievement before you get it. Perhaps they are wiser than your desire.
As to meditation it was for two reasons that I discouraged it, first, because it was through your impatience dropping you into the slough of despond instead of bringing you nearer to peace – next, because there was some chance if it bore fruit 
of its bringing emptiness and silence – and then you would have stood numb with horror and perhaps sunk aghast into the arms of Inertia! But if you turn suddenly into a monument of indomitable patience and are no longer afraid of Peace and Silence – well, then of course my objections would disappear.
But still even then I maintain the equal or greater necessity of the psychic way through devotion, the conquest of ego and surrender.