To
Marie Potel [2]1Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Letters
Fragment ID: 6479
(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)
Sri Aurobindo — Potel, Marie
April 1917 (?)
To
Marie Potel [2]1
Mira has shown me your letter. You seem to yield periodically to an attack of suggestions from an adverse force always of the same kind; yet each time, instead of seeing the source of the suggestions and rejecting them, you accept and are chiefly busy in justifying your wrong movements, always with the same morbid ideas and language about “méfiance” and being “misunderstood” etc. When will you discover finally that these movements and expressions of this kind are not and cannot be part of the true consciousness, that they are and can only be the expression of something small, morbid, vitally weak and petty and obscure that was in your past nature, still clings and is used by the adverse Powers to pull you back from your progress?
There can be no question of “confidence” or want of
confidence in these matters. We have only to see for ourselves what progress you
make and where you stumble and deal with your Yoga according to the truth of
what we see. You surely do not expect us to accept without examination your own
estimate of yourself and of where you are.
The questions you asked Mira had no true connection
with the vital-physical weakness of which you complain, nor can that kind of
practice help you to transmit to the physical the exact light of Truth from the
higher consciousness. It was the ignorant Mind in you which was attaching an
undue importance to this “practical occultism” and it is the same mind which
tries to connect two unconnected things. This mind in you makes the most
fanciful mistakes and likes to cling to them even when they are pointed out to
you. Thus it erected a sheer imagination about an “interior circle” from which
you were excluded in the arrangement of places, took it as a true and “profound”
impression and seems to want still to cling to its own falsehood after the plain
and simple practical reason of the arrangement had been clearly told to you. It
is because of this continued false activity of the mind that you were told to
silence the mentality and keep yourself open to the Light alone. What is the use
of answering 
that you are centred in the supermind and living in the Light and that [it] is
only the vital physical that is weak in you? You were nearer the supramental
when you discovered your mind’s entire ignorance and accepted that salutary
knowledge. That humility of the mental being and the clear perception of its own
incompetence is the first step towards a sound approach to the supramental
Truth. Otherwise you will always live in messages, approximations and
suggestions, some from the Truth, some from the many regions of half Truth, some
from the Twilight and Error and have no sure power to distinguish between them.
Nobody doubts the sincerity of your efforts or the reality of the progress you have made. But you have been warned that the way is long and the progress made is nothing in comparison to what has still to be done. If you get discouraged at each [pace]2 because your demands are not satisfied or all your sentiments respected or all your perceptions valued as definitive truth, if you admit always the egoistic demand how do you expect to make a swift or a sure advance? Each step reveals an imperfection, each stage gained makes the experience left behind seem incomplete and inadequate.3
Active surrender, by the way, does not mean to follow your own ideas or your own guidance; it means to fight against your imperfections and weaknesses and follow only the way of the Truth shown to you.
1 Marie Léon Potel (1874 – c. 1962) met the Mother in France in 1911 or 1912. She was perhaps the first person to regard the Mother as her master and spiritual Mother. Potel came to the Ashram in March 1926 and remained until March 1928.
Probably April 1927. A reply to a letter written in French by Potel. The three paragraphs beginning “Again who is the Father here” and ending “supported by the Ishwara” were struck through in the manuscript. Sri Aurobindo took up these ideas in the sixth chapter of The Mother, which he wrote towards the end of 1927.
2 MS paces
3 Sri Aurobindo wrote this sentence in the margin of the page. He apparently intended it to be inserted here. – Ed.