To V. Tirupati
[10]1Sri Aurobindo
Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest
2.Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life 1911–1928
To People in India, 1914–1926
To V. Tirupati
[10]1
[c. March – April 1926]
Dear Tirupati
We answer first your letter of the 28th.
It is evident that you are suffering from a nervous reaction due to overstrain. You have allowed for a long time an excessive vital energy kept up by a concentration of vital excitement to tyrannise over your body. The body was being weakened all the time, but the vital excitement prevented you from feeling it. Now it is making itself felt. The pains you have seem to be partly rheumatic, partly due to fatigue of the nerves. If you want to recover your strength, you must consent to take plenty of rest. Do not consider long rest and repose tamasic. Sleep long at night, rest much during the day.
Do not do anything in excess. 8 to 10 miles a day walking is far too much; two to three miles is quite sufficient, enough to give you air and exercise.
Also, five or six hours meditation is quite sufficient. Ten hours is too much; it is likely to overstrain the system. Intense meditation is not the only means of sadhana. Especially when one has to deal with the physical, it is not good to be always drawn within in meditation. What you have to learn is to keep at all times the true consciousness, calm, large, full of a quiet strength, looking at all in you and around you with true perception and knowledge, a calm unmoved observation and a quiet will ready to act when necessary. No overstress, no yielding to excitement, nervous sensitiveness or depression.
Learn to occupy your time in a quiet even and harmonious way. Walk a little but not too much. Meditate, but not too much, nor so as to overstrain the body. Read and write, but not so as to tire the brain. Look out a good deal on the physical world and its action and try to see it rightly. When you are stronger, but not now, you can undertake also some kind of physical work and action and learn to do it in the right way and with the right knowledge.
You say that you do not
find it so easy to understand the “Arya” as before. But that is mostly because
you have made your body weak and the brain is easily tired. With rest and return
of physical strength this will disappear. You say too that you cannot do things
now that you were easily able to do before. But then you were keeping some kind
of harmonious balance between the mind, the vital being and the body, and all
were strong. Afterwards you went entirely into the vital and neglected and
fatigued the body; you kept yourself up only by an abnormal vital concentration
and excitement. Now you are feeling the physical reaction. But this too will
disappear with rest, calm of mind and the return of physical strength.
Therefore do not scruple to rest much. It will be good to remain quiet for long periods of time and allow the calm and quiet effect of the higher consciousness to settle unobtrusively into the body.
Your “tamasic” condition and pains are not in the least due to taking food from your people or to their atmosphere. Dismiss this kind of idea from your mind altogether; it is entirely untrue.
The sensations you have when going out into the town,
in the streets, in the market, meeting women, seeing people with illnesses are
all signs of nervous weakness and [
]2 an abnormally
exaggerated nervous sensitiveness. You must get rid of this weakness and recover
control of your nerves. You must become able to see women without any of these
reactions; dismiss from your mind the obsession of your fear of the sexual
impulse and this will become easier. The fear and abhorrence makes the sexual
attraction or suggestion itself come more persistently. Learn to be calm and
indifferent. If you observe the atmosphere of people, observe it as something
external to you, not affecting you. To be affected is simply due to a weakness
of the nervous being. At Pondicherry I am afraid you encouraged this nervous
weakness and shrinking with the idea that it was a sign of superior psychic
sensitiveness. Get rid of this idea. You may be conscious of things around you
and yet calm and strong 
to meet them without
being affected and overcome.
One other point. It is something else than the truth that gives the forms of your mother and wife to the feminine figures seen by you at the time of sexual suggestions. Do not be constantly thinking of your wife in this connection; regard her like any other woman without attachment and without repulsion or shrinking. I do not believe she has enough force to project herself into your consciousness in the way you think she does: it is your mental association that helps to [create]3 the image. Repulsion and shrinking (jugupsa) are a bad way of getting rid of things; they usually give more force to what you want to throw from you.
Before you go to sleep, do not be satisfied with prayer, but bring down and leave in the body a strong will against any sexual suggestion in sleep or its result. With a little practice the body will learn to take the inhibiting suggestion and these things will cease.
In one of your letters you speak of a voice telling you “Mira will never consent to be your Shakti”. What precisely do you mean by this phrase, “my Shakti”? It is a wrong way of putting it which may lead to a confusion of ideas. You mean perhaps that she is to you the Mahashakti and that the force which will descend on you from the supramental plane and support your sadhana and action, will come from her. That is all right; but the Mahashakti is the Ishwara’s and nobody can speak of her as “my Shakti”.
Lastly, you speak in regard to your experience of
coming here to this house of coming here “in the supermind”. What happened was
that you entered into a supraphysical consciousness and in that state some part
of you came over here. You speak too easily of any kind of supraphysical
consciousness as if it were necessarily the supermind. But there are many grades
of consciousness between the physical and the supermind and you will have
hereafter to learn to distinguish rightly between them. Moreover even when the
supramental touches or descends into the intermediate grades or into the
physical, that is merely 
a glimpse of what may
or will be; it is not the whole or the definite realisation. The realisation
must be worked out patiently afterwards. If you understand this carefully, you
will no longer be disappointed because a higher condition does not settle down
in you at once “permanently”.
I think you write your letters too rapidly; it is often very difficult, sometimes impossible to read many of the words. Write carefully so that all may be clear and legible.
1 An enthusiastic sadhak, Tirupati practised an extreme form of bhakti yoga, as a result of which he lost his mental balance. Sri Aurobindo advised him to go back to his home in Vizianagaram, coastal Andhra, to recuperate. From there Tirupati wrote a number of letters to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo wrote these twelve replies at this time.{{1}}This letter was written in reply to one written by Tirupati on “the 28th”, presumably 28 March 1926.This letter-draft was written partly in the Mother’s and partly in Sri Aurobindo’s hand.– Ed.
2 MS and
3 MS creates