Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
I have just finished Jawaharlal’s autobiography. The result: I can’t meditate, I couldn’t in fact for the past week. I caught myself today praying for him – that he may have peace. Will you not send him a little of that commodity as you did to so many of my friends without even their suspecting it? Also tell me, shall I pray that he may have a little peace, yogic peace, I mean? Or will that make confusion worse confounded as he is not likely to take kindly to Yoga, for that matter to Harmony and peace either with this strange western conception of selfishness underlying it all? Still flow can I help praying for him when I have seen the concrete efficacy of prayer for so many others? O Guru, how, how I wish he did Yoga for a year at least if only to realise the Divine Harmony within him even in this age when times are so grievously “out of joint”? How I wish he too saw as you did and Sri Ramakrishna and so many others did that one gave to the world of one’s very best if one realised the Divine concretely 
within one? – Specially as I feel he would make rapid strides in Yoga with his rare sincerity and loyalty to Truth. But alas, he would perhaps resent even this wish on my part as a selfish one, as did Subhash who would not even come here once before giving his rational verdict on us, poor blind “faithists”! Still I almost felt like asking him to come and stay here in my peaceful flat overlooking the calm sea. But he will perhaps think, like Subhash, that I want to convert him. It takes the wind out of my enthusiasm’s sail. I don’t care to invite a misunderstanding once more. The burnt child in Dilip, you know, can’t help dreading the indignant flame of activism!
P.S. I send you some citations which moved me deeply notably his chapters “Desolation” and “Epilogue”.
I have not read Jawaharlal’s book and know nothing of his life except what is public; now of course I have no time for reading. But he bears on himself the stamp of a very fine character, a nature of the highest sattwic kind, full of rectitude and a high sense of honour: a man of the finest Brahman type with what is best in European education added – that is the impression he gives. I may say that Mother was struck by his photograph when she first saw it in the papers singling it out from the mass of ordinary eminent people.
But peace? Peace is never easy to get in the life of the world and never constant, unless one lives deep within and bears the external activities as only a surface front of being. And the work he has to do is the least peaceful of all. If Buddha had to lead the Indian National Congress, well! For the spiritual life there is perhaps no immediate possibility: his mind stands in between, for it has seized strongly the Socialist dream of social perfection by outward change as the thing to be striven for and has made that into a sort of religion. The best possible on earth has been made by his mind its credo: the something beyond he does not believe in, the something more here would seem to him a dream without basis, I suppose. But pray for him, of course, he is a man with a strong psychic 
element and in this life or another that must go beyond the mind to find its source.