Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
Yes, Mother was trying to help you in the Pranam, that was why she kept you longer than usual.
Well, perhaps, the radiant Dilip is the genuine permanent Person and looks out at people through the body even when the vital is in a ferment. Now if only that happy and radiant person had come up and accepted my insistence on the sunlit path instead of allowing a non-transferable vote to be given for Tapasya, perhaps you would not have found my Yoga so terrible. For the curious thing is that my Yoga does not approve of sorrow and suffering or of taking stumbles and difficulties too seriously, as the Tapaswins do, or of viraha [separation from the Beloved] pangs as the Vaishnavas do, or of vairagya as the Mayavadis do, yet the old ideas and forces bring these things into the Ashram through the minds of the sadhaks and there they are. Well, well!
Raihana’s letter is very welcome. But she does not seem to speak of coming for darshan in the near future. Naturally when she does, she will be welcome. It was interesting to know of her experience of our presence when she was discussing with Dayabhai. Your poetic appeal to Raihana has quite a seventeenth-century ring about it.
Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance – it is unbalanced enough already – and rushed to blazes long ago. I don’t know how your Trailanga Swami managed to float on the Ganges without a sense of humour to sustain him – he must have had a terrible force of Tapasya. But perhaps it was because he got terribly tired of the un-smiling seriousness he had to keep up (was it a sort of penance?) that he finally floated off and disappeared forever.