Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
I was reading what you wrote to Nirod re. the uselessness of literary activities, etc. as a sadhana. I had all along felt the same, but you insisted it did help in sadhana. So I now wonder. I have been working very hard of late and 
was getting a little calm if not peace. But now your remark sets the ball of doubt rolling again in my mind. Shall I start meditation again? You write that people here don’t do sadhana like the professional sannyasis yet they expect a result. How is one to take that: we have learnt from you that work, etc. is some sort of sadhana. (I had all along suspected a bad sort but you silenced me with Gita, remember?) and I have been trying all along to take to work as a sadhana in consequence (because, as you know, it is so dull for me to meditate which I feel, once again, d’aprés vous, is sadhana proper, what?) but now it becomes all a confused wondering and marvelling and what not! Will you elucidate the mystery?
Your perplexity arises from your having taken my answer to a particular question about literature and character as a general answer about work and sadhana. Nirod’s question had nothing to do with the latter question. What he advanced was that the pursuit of literature must change a man’s character1, make him I suppose holy, jolly and wise. It is a notorious fact that it does not do anything of the kind and I said so. That is a quite different question from work (literary or any other) done as sadhana. I have always said that work done as sadhana – done, that is to say, as an outflow of energy from the Divine offered to the Divine or work done for the sake of the Divine or work done in a spirit of devotion is a powerful means of sadhana and that such work is especially necessary in this Yoga. Work, bhakti and meditation are three supports of Yoga. One can do with all three, or two or one. There are people who can’t meditate in the set way that one calls meditation, but they progress through work or through bhakti or through the two together. By work and bhakti one can develop a consciousness in which eventually a natural meditation and realisation become possible.
All that is quite different from Nirod’s idea of making oneself virtuous and self-controlled and pure by some mysterious innate power in the pursuit of literature! If he had 
asked me the question about work and sadhana, I would have answered him otherwise. Of course literature and art are or can be a first introduction to the inner being – the inner mind and vital; for it is from there that they come. And if one writes poems of bhakti, poems of divine seeking, etc. or creates music of that kind, it means that there is a bhakta or seeker inside who is supporting himself by that self-expression. There is also the point of view behind Lele’s answer to me when I told him that I wanted to do Yoga but for work, for action, not for Sannyasa and Nirvana, but after years of spiritual effort I had failed to find the way and it was for that I had asked to meet him. His first answer was ‘It should be easy for you as you are a poet. But it was not from any point of view like that that Nirod put his question and it was not from that point of view that I gave my answer. It was about some special character-making virtue that he seemed to attribute to literature.