Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
There is no reason to be so much cut down or despair of your progress. Evidently you have had a surging up of the old movements, but that can always happen so long as there is not an entire change of the old nature, both the conscious and the subconscient parts. Something came up that made you get out of poise and stray into a past round of feelings. The one thing to do is to quiet yourself and get back into the true consciousness and poise. There is nothing in what you have written about what happened that has any wrong turn or mistake except the imprudence of intervening and becoming a messenger of the Ys to X; it would have been wiser to have. refused. It was not necessary for you to accept; for Y is no pardanashin woman except, as she told the Mother, when she lives with the father; otherwise, she is accustomed to a freer life, has been in England and can meet men in the society way with a perfect composure and knowledge [of] what to say or do. Besides she has been in friendly correspondence with X and had already met and spoken with him, 
so there was no reason why she should not have said what she wanted to say herself or written or sent her Secretary, as she did afterwards. Then there would have been no trouble. This however is an outside thing altogether. There must have been something not noticed by you perhaps, being off your guard, that brought you into amore exterior consciousness and caused this reaction. Always keep within and do things without involving your-self in them; then nothing will happen or, if it does, no serious reaction will come.
The idea of leaving for any reason is of course absurd and out of the question. Eight years is a very short time for transformation. Most people spend as much as that or more to get conscious of their defects and acquire the serious will to change – and after it takes a long time to get the will turned into full and final accomplishment. Each time one stumbles, one has to get back into the right footing and go on with fresh resolution; by doing that the full change comes.