Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
1. The Mother: Individual, Universal, Transcendent
There will always be doubts, upsettings and confusion of the physical mind and vital, so long as the vital approaches the 
Mother from the wrong standpoint,– e.g. if it insists on judging her by her response to its demands and ideas of what she ought to give it. Not to impose one’s mind or vital will on the Divine but to receive the Divine’s Will and follow it, is the true attitude of sadhana. Not to say “This is my right, want, claim, need, requirement, why do I not get it?”, but to give oneself, to surrender and to receive with joy whatever the Divine gives, not grieving or revolting, is the right way. Then what one receives will be the right thing for one. All this you know very well; why do you constantly allow your outer vital to forget it and drag you back towards the old wrong attitude?
As for the Mother drawing back from the old course, routine etc. of her action with regard to the sadhaks, it was a sheer necessity of the work and the sadhana. Everything had got into a wrong groove, was full of mixed movements and a mistaken attitude – and consequently things were going on in the same rajaso-tamasic round without any chance of issue, like a squirrel in a cage. The Mother’s illness was an emphatic warning that this could not be allowed to go on any longer. A new basis of action and relations has to be built up in which no further sanction will ever seem to be given to the past mistaken movements of the sadhaks which were standing in the way of the descent of the Truth into the physical (material) nature. The basis cannot be built in a day, but the Mother had to stand back, otherwise to build it at all would be impossible.
7 December 1931