Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 15601

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Sahana Devi

May 22, 1932

I think it is not necessary for me to answer the most part of what you have written in your letter – for it is written entirely from the vital plane, and your relations with us cannot be taken back to that basis. To do so would be to annul all the progress you have made and that you surely do not want. The one thing that you have to do is to get out of this sunken condition which makes you take the whole thing from the wrong end and get back into your inner self and go on in your progress with this impediment gone from the road and the burden of the old difficulty taken from your shoulders.

There is no question of your seeing more or less of X. What the Mother said was that she had given (to you both) her confidence and since all has been frankly confessed she would not take it back from you. It means of course that she would not interfere with your seeing each other, trusting fully that this element will be cast out of it hereafter.

About the other point in the Mother’s conversation with X. There is no question of truth or half-truth; she said to him in answer to what he spoke about his pressure on you that she knew that (and certainly she knows that you would not have done anything of the kind but for that pressure), but your fault was that you did not speak out although you had promised to tell everything to her. (I must say that you did not merely speak of an attempt to do this, but said more than once that it was your firm resolution and you would carry it out not allowing any-thing to prevent it). More is expected of one who has had the full psychic contact with the Mother and offered the surrender and opened herself and accepted her guidance in every matter than from one like X who had admitted and has always said frankly that he has not been able to do these things. It was what you yourself saw when you saw X’s confession made your own error rise like a mountain before you. It is the truth and I do not see why you should be so much hurt when the Mother says it.

I have said that once the mistake was confessed, that repairs the past. It applies as much to X as to you. But for him it was necessary to call him and say it and put him on the right way. You yourself should have understood it at once and looked at it from the right standpoint viz. that you had made a serious mistake but that now all that was past, and you could now go on with a firmer and more complete resolution and with, as I have said, the impediment gone from the path and the burden taken from your shoulders.

The Mother will see you on Monday at 9.30 in the morning. Meanwhile rest and recover yourself and get back into the right attitude and the right union with her. Clean out all this perilous indulgence in vital abhiman and resume your way in the sweetness of the psychic union and with the strength of the psychic surrender.