Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
I have always told you that you should not take what any sadhak says or thinks as authoritative or coming from me or the Mother. Even when they say that it is from me or her, it cannot be accepted, for it is often an idea of their own minds which they “think” to be ours also or a one-sided misunderstanding of what we may have said in a particular connection but which their minds apply to something with which it was not connected or to all things in general. But when they simply write to you their own ideas without referring to us at all, why on earth should you suppose or imagine that it comes from us? I know nothing of what X wrote to you, except from your own letter. What X writes is X’s, we must not be held responsible for it. For that matter no sadhak, whoever he or she may be, can stand for us in our place or speak for us. Each must be taken as speaking on his own account his own thought or feeling.
I have not the slightest idea of disowning you or asking you to go elsewhere or giving you up or asking you to abandon the Yoga or this Yoga. It is not that I insist on your finding the Divine through me and no one else or by this way only and no other; I want you to arrive and would be glad to see you do it by whichever way or with whatever help. But even if you followed another way, your place with me would remain, inwardly, physically and in every way. Even if you walked off to the Himalayas to sit in seclusion till you got the thing as I think you sometimes wanted to do, your place would remain waiting for you here. I want you to understand that clearly and not imagine all sorts of things about cutting off or displeasure or abandonment and the rest of it. Nothing could be farther from our minds or from our feeling for you.
This letter must reach you by the 7th and I am so damnably preoccupied with many issues and difficulties put by Matter before the interfering Spirit that I find it impossible to write a long letter as I used to do – I have become brief or often telegraphic by compulsion of circumstances. So I shall need time to write on the other questions involved in your letter – I hope to be able to do so when you are at Almora. I have only answered here to the main point you have raised of Sahana’s letter and our attitude.
I may add briefly that it is quite natural that you should have been able to help in the way you have described by sitting at the patient’s side and prayer – or that what you speak has a powerful effect even on sceptics. First of all there is something in you other than the outward mind which believes and knows – secondly, you have the energy and power of creation, expression, action and can easily receive the Force for these things – even if your outward mind is unaware of it. This indeed is a thing which has happened often enough to others besides you, others with less energy and vital force – they have made themselves successful instruments of the Force by a certain faith within them and a call to the Divine – nothing else is needed.