Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Letters
A&R.– 1984, April, pp. 59-60
The Mother refuses to relieve you of all work – work is a necessary part of this Yoga. If you do not do work and spend all the time in “meditation”, you and your sadhana will lose all hold of realities; you will lose yourself in uncontrolled subjective imaginations such as those you are now allowing to control you and lead you into actions – like your absenting yourself from Pranam, becoming fanciful and irregular in your taking of food, coming to the Mother at a wrong time and place under the imagination that she has called you – actions dictated by error and false suggestion and not by Truth. It is by doing work for the Mother with surrender to her, with obedience to her expressed will, without fancies and vital self-will that you can remain in touch with the embodied Mother here and progress in the Yoga. Mere subjective experiences without control by us will not lead you to the Truth and may lead you far from it into sheer confusion and error.
If you do not want to do the B[uilding] Department] account and letter work, you can take up the work of keeping the gate daily from 12 to 2; but it is better if you combine this gate work with the typing of letters whenever needed. If you do not want to do the gate work, then you must go on with the work you now have. If you take the gate work only, you must hand over the typewriter to the B[uilding] Department] so that it may continue to be used for the work you were doing up till now.
I must warn you that by withdrawing into a one-sided subjective existence within and by pushing away from you all touch with physical realities, you are running into a wrong path and imperilling your sadhana. What happens to sadhaks who do this is that they make a mental Formation and put it in place of the true embodied Mother here, and then under its inspiration they begin to lose touch with her and disobey her and follow the false suggestions of their mental Formation. The first thing it does is to instigate them not to write to her, not to come to Pranam, not to act as regards food, work etc on the lines laid down by her, to disobey her – as you have disobeyed her 
with regard to coming to Pranam this morning. Another very bad sign of this false condition is when they feel not in touch with the Mother when they meet her in the body and [are] guided only by some disembodied Mother in their own egoistic consciousness – that is a sure sign that a Falsehood is getting into their sadhana. As regards their way of life, they do not wish to do like the others, but to have a special way of life of their own, governed by some Imagination within them. All this you must stop. You must come to Pranam regularly, take your food regularly, sleep regularly, do the work given you conscientiously, following the lines laid down for this Asram by the Mother, and through a right consciousness in this life you must realise her Truth in the physical existence.
Your unwillingness to come to the Pranam because that would interrupt some subjective experience is altogether out of place. No experience in formal meditation, not a hundred experiences together can be worth the touch of the Mother in the pranam. If you had the psychic being in front in the physical or even in the heart and the vital, you would feel that at once. Moreover, these experiences are not supramental as you seem to imagine. The supramental Truth could never stand behind such errors as you are making now. Moreover to get the supramental Light is not so easy as you fancy; I have warned again and again the sadhaks against the error of thinking they are already in possession of the Supermind or in touch with it. One has to go through a long and patient development through many lower stages of consciousness before one can be even within measurable distance of the Supermind.
All attachment and self-indulgence are dangerous – attachment and self-indulgence in subjective experiences and remote “meditations”, pushing aside the Truth in objective life is as dangerous as any other. Draw back from these errors and get back into the true balance of the sadhana. If you want the psychic in the physical, you cannot get it by merely sitting in meditation and having abstract experiences; you can get it only by seeking it in physical life and action, by work for the Mother, obedience and surrender in work to the Mother who is present in her own body here.