Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 4
Mother has asked me to write to you on her behalf and to tell you that she had no feeling of coldness or indifference and no intention whatever of showing anything of the kind in her reception of you this morning or at any other time during all these days. Her feelings were just the same as before and she thought she had received you in her usual way towards you with all affection and kindness. If you had an opposite impression, it must have been a mistaken reaction, for she had no feeling or intention of coldness and indifference. I trust you will accept her disclaimer and dismiss any sense of hurt or depression created in you without any intention on her part.
As to your idea about the sports, your idea that the Mother looks on you coldly because you are not capable of taking delight in sports, that is entirely without foundation. I must have told you already more than once that the Mother does not want anybody to take up the sports if he has no inclination or natural bent for them; to join or not to join must be quite voluntary and those who do not join are not cold-shouldered or looked down upon by her for that reason. It would be absurd for her to take that attitude: there are those who do her faithful service which she deeply appreciates and whom she regards with affection and confidence but who never go to the playground either because they have no turn for it or no time – can you imagine that for that reason she will turn away from them and regard them with coldness? The Mother could never intend that sports should be the sole or the chief preoccupation of the inmates of the Ashram; even the children of the school for whose physical development these sports and athletic exercises are important and for whom they were originally instituted, have other things to do, their work, their studies and other occupations and amusements in which they are as interested as in these athletics. The idea that you should “throw up the sponge” because you do not succeed in sports or like them, is surely an extravagant imagination: there are other things more important, there are Yoga, spiritual progress, bhakti, devotion, service.
I don’t know on what you found your idea that we have changed towards you since your return from Bengal and become cold towards you. There has been no such change on our part; on the contrary we have always had a full appreciation of what you have done there for us and for your untiring effort and what you have achieved in collecting much needed contributions for the Ashram funds and still more in turning the minds of people there, previously indifferent, towards us and our work. You should throw away entirely any idea that we are so insensitive as not to have appreciated what you have done for us.
I do not understand what you mean by my giving time to sport; I am not giving any time to it except that I have written at the Mother’s request an article for the first number of the Bulletin and another for the forthcoming number. It is the Mother who is doing all the rest of the work for the organisation of the sports and the Bulletin and that she must do obviously till it is sufficiently organised to go on of itself with only a general supervision from above and her actual presence once in the day. I put out my force to support her as in all the other work of the Ashram, but otherwise I am not giving any time for the sports. As to my silence, this does not arise from any change of feeling towards you or any coldness or indifference. I have not concealed from you the difficulty I feel now that I cannot write my own letters or, generally, do my own writing but I do not think I have neglected anything you have asked for when you have written. There is the question of the interview which you want to publish, but this I have to consider carefully as to what parts can be published as soon as I have been able to go through it. At the moment I have been very much under pressure of work for the Press which needed immediate attention and could not be postponed, mostly correction of manuscripts and proofs; but I hope to make an arrangement which will rid me of most of this tedious and uninteresting work so that I can turn my time to better purposes. I am conscious all the same that my remissness in writing has been excessive and that you have just cause for your complaint; but I hope to remedy this remissness in future as it is not at all due to any indifference but to a visitation of indolence of the creative will which has extended even to the completion of the unfinished parts of Savitri. I hope soon to get rid of this inability, complete Savitri and satisfy your just demand for more alertness in my correspondence with you.