preserving it, it may deflect you from your true path and injure your
Sadhana.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 Barindra Kumar Ghose and Others, 1922–1928
Pondicherry,
January 1923.
My dear Krishnashashi,
I have seen all the experiences that you have written down, and sent to me and received yours and Barin’s letter.2 It is no doubt true as you say that your sadhana has gone on different lines from that of the others. But it does not follow that you are entirely right in insisting on your own ideas about it. I shall tell you briefly what I have observed about your experiences.
The first things you sent were very interesting and
valuable psycho-spiritual and psycho-mental experiences and messages. Later ones
lean more to the psychic-emotional and have in them a certain one-sidedness and
mixture and there are also psycho-vital and psycho-physical developments of a
double nature. I do not mean that all is false in them but that there are many
strong partial truths which need to be corrected by others which they seem to
ignore and even to exclude. Besides there are suggestions from the intellect and
the vital being and also suggestions from external sources which you ought not
to accept so easily as you seem to do. This mixture is inevitable in the earlier
stages and there is no need to be disheartened about it. But if you insist on preserving it, it may deflect you from your true path and injure your
Sadhana.
As yet you have no sufficient experience of the nature of the psychic being and the psychic worlds. Therefore it is not possible for you to put the true value on all that comes to you. When the psychic consciousness opens, especially so freely and rapidly as it has done in your case, it opens to all kinds of things and to suggestions, and messages from all sorts of planes and worlds and forces and beings. There is the true psychic which is always good and there is the psychic opening to mental, vital and other worlds which contain all kinds of things good, bad and indifferent, true, false and half truths, thought-suggestions which are of all kinds, and messages [which] are also of all kinds. What is needed is not to give yourself impartially to all of them but to develop both a sufficient knowledge and experience and a sufficient discrimination to be able to keep your balance and eliminate falsehood, half-truths and mixtures. It will not do to dismiss impatiently the necessity for discrimination on the ground that that is mere intellectualism. The discrimination need not be intellectual,– although that also is a thing not to be despised. But it may be a psychic discrimination or one that comes from the higher super-intellectual mind and from the higher being. If you have not this, then you have need of constant protection and guidance from those who have it, and who have also long psychic experience, and it may be disastrous for you to rely entirely on yourself and to reject such guidance.
In the meantime there are three rules of the Sadhana which are very necessary in an earlier stage and which you should remember, first, open yourself to experience but do not seek to take the bhoga of the experiences. Do not attach yourself to any particular kind of experience. Do not take all ideas and suggestions as true and do not take any knowledge, voice or thought-message as absolutely final and definitive. Truth itself is only true when complete and it changes its meaning as one rises and sees it from a higher level.
I must put you on your guard against the suggestions of
hostile influences which attack all Sadhakas in this Yoga. The 
vision you had of the European, is itself an intimation to you that
these forces have their eye on you and are prepared to act if they are not
already acting against you. It is their subtler suggestions, which take the
figure of truth, and not their more open attacks, that are the most dangerous. I
will mention some of the most usual of them.
Be on your guard against any suggestions that try to raise up your egoism, as for instance, that you are a greater Sadhaka than others or that your Sadhana is unique or of an exceptionally high kind. There seems to be some suggestion of this kind to you already. You had a rich and rapid development of psychic experiences, but so precisely have some others who have meditated here and none of yours are unique in their kind or degree or unknown to our experience. Even if it were otherwise, egoism is the greatest danger of the Sadhana and is never spiritually justifiable. All greatness is God’s; it belongs to no other.
Be on your guard against anything that suggests to you to keep or cling to any impurity or imperfection, confusion in the mind, attachment in the heart, desire and passion in the Prana or disease in the body. To keep up these things by ingenuous justifications and coverings, is one of the usual devices of the hostile forces.
Be on your guard against any idea which will make you admit these hostile forces on the same terms as the divine forces. I understand you have said that you must admit all because all is a manifestation of God. All is a manifestation of God in a certain sense but if misunderstood as it often is, this Vedantic truth can be turned to the purposes of falsehood. There are many things which are partial manifestations and have to be replaced by fuller truer manifestations. There are others which belong to the ignorance and fall away when we move to the knowledge. There are others which are of the darkness and have to be combated and destroyed or exiled. This manifestation is one which has been freely used by the force represented by the European you saw in your vision and it has ruined the Yoga of many. You yourself wished to reject the intellect and yet the intellect is a manifestation of God as well as the other things you have accepted.
If you really accept
and give yourself to me, you must accept my truth. My truth is one that rejects
ignorance and falsehoods and moves to the knowledge, rejects darkness and moves
to the light, rejects egoism and moves to the Divine Self; rejects imperfections
and moves to perfection. My truth is not only the truth of Bhakti or of psychic
development but also of knowledge, purity, divine strength and calm and of the
raising of all these things from their mental, emotional and vital forms to
their Supramental reality.
I say all these things not to undervalue your Sadhana but to turn your mind towards the way of its increasing completion and perfection.
It is not possible for me to have you here just now. First because the necessary conditions are not there and secondly because you must be fully prepared to accept my guidance before you come here.
If, as I suppose you must under the present circumstances, you have to go home, meditate there, turning yourself to me and try to prepare yourself so that you may come here hereafter. What you need now is not so much psychic development, which you will always be able to have (I do not ask you to stop it altogether) but an inner calm and quiet as the true basis and atmosphere of your future development and experience, calm in the mind, the purified vital being and in the physical consciousness. A psycho-vital or psycho-physical Yoga will not be safe for you until you have this calm and an assured purity of being and a complete and always present vital and physical protection.
Aurobindo.
1 January 1923. A young sadhak from Chittagong, East Bengal, Krishnashashi went insane while practising yoga at Barin’s centre in Bhawanipore. See also letters [4] – [9] to Barindrakumar Ghose.
2 Sri Aurobindo’s letters to Barindra Kumar Ghose on Krishnashashi’s case are published on pages 337–54. – Ed.