Sri 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 [11]1
[c. March – April 1926]
Tirupati,
I have received your long, rambling, incoherent, excited letter of the 29th; it is from beginning to end a mass of almost insane nonsense.
I understand from it that you have returned to your former delusions and the lies imposed by some Hostile Force on your mind and your vital being. You are once more determined to revolt against my orders, to disobey my written instructions, to disregard the plain meaning of my letters. You are determined to deceive yourself by reading into them a “hidden” meaning, that is to say to read into them the lies of the Hostile Force which you take for inspirations and intuitions. You have decided to follow again the mad course which led you away from Pondicherry and exiled you from my presence.
You have disowned your letter of the [? ] the only letter which was entirely sound, true and sane. In that letter of the [? ] we saw the real Tirupati, the only Tirupati we know; with the other who wrote this letter of the 29th we have no connection.
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 draft-letter was written in reply to a letter written by Tirupati on “the 29th”, presumably 29 March 1926.The draft was written by Sri Aurobindo in his own hand. – Ed.