Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3. 1936-37

Fragment ID: 18706

1936-37

About people’s impulse to go out at present, you wrote, “It was always strong – only now we don’t contradict as strongly as before.” Does your answer mean that now there is no harm (from the spiritual point of view) if they go out and return?

No, it does not; it simply means that we can’t always be holding back people whose vital says, “I want to go, I want to go,” and they side with the vital. They are allowed to go and take their risk.

If one leads the ordinary vital life, there can be no spiritual struggles – only vital troubles. He was always on the point of going. He wanted to be immediately rid of all imperfections and struggles and have at once a perfect surrender and when he found himself upset by the smallest things in his work or otherwise, he concluded that he was unfit for Yoga and must go away. He was in fact a constant victim of the going away illness and immediate siddhi demand illness from which Z also was a sufferer.

If I said only things that human nature finds easy and natural, that would certainly be very comfortable for the disciples, but there would be no room for spiritual aim or endeavour. Spiritual aims and methods are not easy or natural (e.g. as quarrelling, sex-indulgence, greed, indolence, acquiescence in all imperfections are easy and natural) and if people become disciples, they are supposed to follow spiritual aims and endeavours, however hard and above ordinary nature and not the things that are easy and natural.