Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
The solution of the enigma is that the being and nature are made up of different parts and personalities. There is a being in you which is a bhakta and in potency a Yogi – it is the one that has joined to him the poet and the musician and singer and expresses himself through them, they form now a harmonious group, almost a composite person. There is another part or being in you which was drawn towards the world, society, success, fame, food – a spoilt child of Fortune and Nature (but still vitally strong, generous, full of enthusiasm, amiable, affectionate) which was rather dragged to the Yoga rather than came to it willingly, but it came because the others 
insisted and did not allow it to have the rasa of the outside life and besides promised it something that would be the divine equivalent or compensation of these vital pleasures; a spiritual vital love, ananda, enjoyment of the Divine. This part has now less attraction for the old things or none, but it wants badly the thing promised and has no taste for tapasya and the long effort of sadhana. Thirdly, there was yet another who had many defects of egoism, vanity, egoistic sensitiveness, etc. which made a tremendous row against changing. A large part of it has been modifying itself – it is perhaps what Somnath meant when he spoke of the miraculous change in your character. For he told the Mother when he used the phrase, “We all loved Dilip, but there were defects in his character of which we could not approve and now I can no longer find any trace of them – he is so miraculously changed.” It is the combination of No.2 and No.3 which has made the difficulty all along because they were mixed up together, otherwise No.2 would not have been difficult to manage. The despair, defeatism, fretfulness, gloom, angry impatience which No.3 brought into the affair was the chief cause of your despondencies, otherwise No.2 might have been eager and impatient but not in this way. In combination with No.l there might have been yearning, pangs of viraha, etc. but not the crises. There is not the slightest doubt that your nature was made for ananda and that all the other beings except the last one are naturally themselves full of it. That is what people feel when you meet them and they contact your natural self in speaking with you or your inner self through your songs, poems, music. The rest from which you suffer so much is, as I have repeatedly told you, a formation, a sort of accretion, a recurring artificial crisis imposed on you from outside and accepted by No.3 – not normal or native to the healthy soundness of your nature. The difficulty is that not being conversant with these things you take it as your own and let it have its course instead of drawing back from it as you did during the first few months when you began to follow the psychic movement. It is quite possible that if you definitely get rid of it and 
completed the psychic change, spiritual experience would come with a rush. That has happened to several and is happening to others.