Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
Will you please tell me? Yesterday I was talking with Baron and his wife [Jeanne-Marie]. I had gone there to ask him to invite Dr. G. and he asked me what I felt, etc. and I found I glowed with faith in personal contact of Gurus etc., etc. etc. – truly. Guru, I felt all that, I was not insincere – it is strange whenever I come in contact with others I glow with, even, aye, radiate faith! fancy Dilip talking of faith! Yet this morning as I was talking, doubt came back again re. the usefulness of personal contact. lam troubled and I want you to help me a little. It arose like this:
Herbert had told me yesterday that Esculap Dayashankar1 had a marvellous command of French. At tea this morning my opponent’s argument was that Dayashankar might have achieved a high inner spiritual state even though he had not offered pranam as he had done. I said it was impossible – for no matter how great a sadhak your Yoga can’t be done by withdrawing from pranam. My opponent’s argument was – it was possible temporarily. I saw his point of view when he pressed home the fact that now Mother has practically cut off all personal contact we were used to – also that Rishabhchand2 and Khirod3 (high yogis, unlike the social Dilip) don’t find time to come even to meditation. I was surely cornered. Why then did you allow pranam, why does Mother meditate? It was argued that Dayashankar had an ascetic fire to do sadhana alone basing himself on inner contact above? But did not Harm, Nalinbehari, Swasti, [?] etc. all tried that and failed as you wrote once to me adding that cutting off pranam could never be good for any sadhak no matter what he says about his spiritual need of isolation. I gathered that personal physical contact with Mother was indispensable for your Yoga – but now that pranam is discredited I am out of joint and troubled? What then? Can one say that one can gallop speedily without any personal contact with 
Mother? Then why stay here? One could establish the inner psychic contact (on which the stress was put) from far off – as “there is no distance in the psychic?” I don’t want to encourage such doubts but rather revert to my faith: the weak-kneed personal-contact-theory – but the arguments of the strong men like Dayashankar are too strong for me and I can’t rebut them. Please help Guru, as I don’t want to float on the waves of the strong psychic currents so independent of all anchors of shore-contact.
P.S. I had thought D’s case was far from reassuring – his cutting off pranam for instance? Am I wrong there? I had felt the same about Swasti. Qu’en dites-vous?
What the deuce is all this about Dayashankar’s high spiritual state and ascetic fire? Brilliance in French doesn’t imply spiritual siddhi. Dayashankar stopped coming to pranam because he was too nervous to bear the contacts of people. His abstention shows a high state of nervousness, not a high state of sadhana. Khirod and Rishabhchand don’t abstain from pranam, only they have no time to stay long because of heavy work, but they get the personal contact. You surely know that Dayashankar is unbalanced nervously and that is why he has isolated himself, it has nothing to do with sadhana. His mind is brilliant at many parts but the nervous malady is there. You need not in the least waver in your faith in personal contact, there is nothing whatever in this argument.