Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 771

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

June 28, 1936

Mother says that you need not sing tomorrow, but you must come because she has certain things to read to you – not the Bases of Yoga (!), but French poetry. What she said about the stiffness was some time ago and there is no point in bringing that up again now, for since then she told you you had changed much and she was able at last to get through and go within you.

You feel depressed in reading the Bases of Yoga, because your mind becomes active at the wrong end, from the point of view of your obsession about inability, hopelessness, past failure enforcing future failure. The right way to read these things is not to be mentally active, but receive with a quiet mind leaving the knowledge given to go in and bear its fruit hereafter at the proper time, not ask how one can practise it now or try to apply it to immediate circumstances in which it may not fit. I have told you already that these things are the basic siddhis which constitute the Yogic consciousness – they are things towards which one has to move but cannot be established now and offhand. What has to be done now is for each the thing necessary for him at present. I have indicated what is necessary at present for you, the growth of the psychic being which had begun and the power of contact and communication which it will bring with the inner consciousness and through it with the Divine Power or Presence. But for that to grow the mind must keep more quiet, not insisting, not desponding at every moment, but steadily aspiring and letting the things of which these were indications grow from within.