Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
As usual when this mood seizes you, you are erecting many quite groundless supports to justify it and others that are surely too flimsy to bear such an edifice. We have never said that music was incompatible with sadhana. Mother has never forbidden anyone to hear your music nor has she ever said that your singing would disturb or injure your sadhana or anybody else’s sadhana. One or two found themselves disturbed at concerts by the crowd or did not care to go and to them she may have said that they should not go if they did not care or were disturbed, that surely is a perfectly natural reply and is not a prohibition of singing. Neither has Mother prohibited Sahana from singing or hearing your songs; there has sometimes arisen a question of her retiring from too much outward contacts or discussions, etc. because it disturbed her poise which was still insecure. There are people who need that, just as there are others to whom it makes no difference; and each must do what is found best in his own case. But that has nothing to do with music and it is a strange and violent twist to say that it includes a prohibition of music as incompatible with sadhana. On the contrary I have always encouraged you to do whatever, poetry or music, helps the devotion and combats the false idea that there is no capacity for spiritual things in you. The very fact that people find in your music so much more than before shows that it has not been discouraged but fostered here. It is you yourself who have in your moods of despondency belittled the spiritual use of your poetry and music, it is not we who have done so.
In the same way I am surprised to see you make a tragedy out of my humorous phrase with the thrice repeated “at all.”1 I certainly did not expect you to take it in such a way or I would not have written it. I have given always in the past all the time I could give, far more than to anyone else individually in the Ashram, in this matter of writing. Nowadays I have no more time for long letters, I am obliged to be brief – 
yet I have made exceptions and mostly for you. I wrote the phrase about no time at all, but it was after devoting a good part of two nights in succession to an endeavour to give you an answer – and a fairly long one. So in this respect I do not think I have at all failed you.
As for the other complaints, e.g. about your quarrels with Sahana, surely it is a great exaggeration to quarrel about such perfectly indifferent matters as a disagreement about the merits of Moni Bagchi – whether in the Ashram or outside it in ordinary life one can differ in opinion about people or things without the difference spoiling the atmosphere for them. Certainly, liking or disliking people has nothing to do with Yoga; neither liking people, which is a very amiable quality, nor music has ever been declared by us incompatible with Yoga.
All your letter therefore is built on the void except as far as it relates to your unsuccess in meditation. But the remedy for that does not lie in throwing up but in persevering in the Yoga. It is simply an attack; for all the suggestions enumerated by you are those which usually accompany such attacks. Throw them off whenever they come instead of nursing them; it is the only way to get rid of them in a definitive way.
Kashmir? Impracticable, for it is not the season; impracticable also, because it is not the cure.