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
19111928
Extracts from Letters to the Mother and Paul Richard,
1911 c. 1922
To the Mother and Paul Richard [7]
The difficulties you find in the spiritual progress are
common to us all. In this Yoga the progress is always attended with these
relapses into the ordinary mentality until the whole being is so remoulded that
it can no longer be affected either by any 
downward tendency in our own nature or by the impressions from the discordant
world outside or even by the mental state of those associated with us most
closely in the Yoga. The ordinary Yoga is usually concentrated on a single aim
and therefore less exposed to such recoils; ours is so complex and many-sided
and embraces such large aims that we cannot expect any smooth progress until we
near the completion of our effort, especially as all the hostile forces in the
spiritual world are in a constant state of opposition and besiege our gains; for
the complete victory of a single one of us would mean a general downfall among
them. In fact by our own unaided effort we could not hope to succeed. It is only
in proportion as we come into a more and more universal communion with the
Highest that we can hope to overcome with any finality. For myself I have had to
come back so often from things that seemed to have been securely gained that it
is only relatively that I can say of any part of my Yoga, It is done. Still I
have always found that when I recover from one of these recoils, it is always
with a new spiritual gain which might have been neglected or missed if I had
remained securely in my former state of partial satisfaction. Especially, as I
have long had the map of my advance sketched out before me, I am able to measure
my progress at each step and the particular losses are compensated for by the
clear consciousness of the general advance that has been made. The final goal is
far but the progress made in the face of so constant and massive an opposition
is the guarantee of its being gained in the end. But the time is in other hands
than ours. Therefore I have put impatience and dissatisfaction far away from me.
An absolute equality of the mind and heart and a clear
purity and calm strength in all the members of the being have long been the
primary condition on which the Power working in me has insisted with an
inexhaustible patience and an undeviating constancy of will which rejects all
the efforts of other powers to hasten forward to the neglect of these first
requisites. Wherever they are impaired it returns upon them and works over and
again over the weak points like a workman patiently mending the defects of his
work. These seem to me to be the foundation 
and
condition of all the rest. As they become firmer and more complete the system is
more able to hold consistently and vividly the settled perception of the One in
all things and beings, in all qualities, forces, happenings, in all this
world-consciousness and the play of its workings. That founds the Unity and upon
it the deep satisfaction and the growing rapture of the Unity. It is this to
which our nature is most recalcitrant. It persists in the division, in the
dualities, in the sorrow and unsatisfied passion and labour, it finds it
difficult to accustom itself to the divine largeness, joy and equipoise
especially the vital and material parts of our nature; it is they that pull down
the mind which has accepted and even when it has long lived in the joy and peace
and oneness. That, I suppose, is why the religions and philosophies have had so
strong a leaning to the condemnation of Life and Matter and aimed at an escape
instead of a victory. But the victory has to be won; the rebellious elements
have to be redeemed and transformed, not rejected or excised.
When the Unity has been well founded, the static half
of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we
must see the Master and His Power, Krishna and Kali as I name them using the
terms of our Indian religions; the Power occupying the whole of myself and my
nature which becomes Kali and ceases to be anything else, the Master using,
directing, enjoying the Power to his ends, not mine, with that which I call
myself only as a centre of his universal existence and responding to its
workings as a soul to the Soul, taking upon itself his image until there is
nothing left but Krishna and Kali. This is the stage I have reached in spite of
all setbacks and recoils, imperfectly indeed in the secureness and intensity of
the state, but well enough in the general type. When that has been done, then we
may hope to found securely the play in us of his divine Knowledge governing the
action of his divine Power. The rest is the full opening up of the different
planes of his world-play and the subjection of Matter and the body and the
material world to the law of the higher heavens of the Truth. To these things
towards which in my earlier ignorance I used to press forward impatiently before
satisfying the first conditions the effort, 
however, was necessary and made the necessary preparation of the material
instruments I can now only look forward as a subsequent eventuality in a yet
distant vista of things.
To possess securely the Light and the Force of the
supramental being, this is the main object to which the Power is now turning.
But the remnant of the old habits of intellectual thought and mental will come
so obstinate in their determination to remain that the progress is hampered,
uncertain and always falls back from the little achievement already effected.
They are no longer within me, they are blind, stupid, mechanical, incorrigible
even when they perceive their incompetence, but they crowd round the mind and
pour in their suggestions whenever it tries to remain open only to the
supramental Light and the higher Command, so that the knowledge and the will
reach the mind in a confused, distorted and often misleading form. It is,
however, only a question of time: the siege will diminish in force and be
finally dispelled.
23 June 1916