Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1321

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

April 30, 1935

Your prescription, Sir, is splendid, but the patient is too poor to pay. I feel I am the least fitted for the path. The God-seekers whose lives I have read reveal what a great thirst they had for the Divine!

And what deserts they had to pass through without getting their thirst satisfied? The lives left out that?

Whatever you may say, Sir, the path of Yoga is absolutely dry and especially that of Integral Yoga!

One has to pass through the desert sometimes – doesn’t follow that the whole path is like that.

For this Yoga, one must have the heart of a lion, the mind of a Sri Aurobindo and the vital of a Napoleon.

Good Lord! Then I am off the list of the candidates – for I have neither the heart of a lion nor the vital of Napoleon.

You may say that when the psychic comes to the front, the path becomes a grand Trunk Road of Roses. But it may take years and years!

Does not matter how long it takes – it crops up one day or another.

And who knows one may not simply pine away in the dry desert before that?

No necessity to carry out any such disagreeable programme.

Have I the necessary requirements for the sadhana? The only thing I seem to have is a deep respect for you, which almost all people have today.

It is good that, for accuracy’s sake, you put in the “almost”.

I made the unhappy discovery that it is surely from a financial pressure outside that I jumped for the Unknown and the Unknowable.

It must have been a stupendous pressure to produce such a gigantic leap.

No escape now. Let me be roasted for somebody’s toast. Pardon my vagaries.

All this simply means that you have, metaphorically speaking, the hump. Trust in God and throw the hump off.