Editor’s Note: We feature a few letters of Sri Aurobindo which remind us that only the Mother’s Grace can pull us out of any darkness or despondency we may fall into as we walk the sunlit path of Integral Yoga. We have added a few sub-headings to organize these letters, and have also made slight formatting revisions for the purpose of digital presentation.
Do not indulge thoughts of unfitness and hopelessness
The Mother’s help and mine are always there for you. You have only to turn fully towards it and it will act on you.
What has come across is these wrong ideas about your unfitness, about bad things in you that prevent you from receiving the Mother’s grace, about the lack of aspiration which prevents you from having realisation and experience. These thoughts are quite wrong and untrue—they are not even your own thoughts, they are suggestions thrown on you just as they are thrown on the other sadhaks and intended to produce depression.
There is no unfitness, no bad thing inside that comes across, no lack of aspiration causing the cessation of experience. It is the depression, the self-distrust, the readiness to despair which are the only cause; there is no other.
To all sadhaks, as I wrote to you, even to the best and strongest there come interruptions in the flow of the sadhana; that is not a cause for thinking oneself unfit and wanting to go away with the idea that there is no hope. A little quietude would bring back the flow.
You were having the necessary experiences, the necessary progress and it was only a coming forward of some difficulties of the physical consciousness that stopped them for a time. That happens to all and is not particular to you, as I explained to you.
These difficulties always come and have to be overcome. Once overcome by the working of the Force, the sadhana goes on as before.
But you began to entertain this wrong idea of unfitness and lack of aspiration as the cause and got entirely depressed. You must shake all that off and refuse to believe in the thought-suggestions that come to you.
No sadhak ought ever to indulge thoughts of unfitness and hopelessness—they are quite irrelevant because it is not one’s personal fitness and worthiness that makes one succeed, but the Mother’s grace and power and the consent of the soul to her grace and the workings of her Force.
Turn from these dark thoughts and look to the Mother only, not with impatience for the result and desire, but with trust and confidence and let her workings bring you quietude and the renewal of the progress towards the psychic opening and realisation. That will bring surely and without doubt the fuller faith and the love which you seek.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 29, pp. 34-35
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Believe that Mother’s Grace is always with you
You must throw all that away. Such depression can only make you shut to what Mother is giving you. There is absolutely no good reason for such an attitude.
The existence of difficulties is a known thing in the Yoga. That is no reason for questioning the final victory or the effectivity of the Divine Grace.
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Can it be believed that the Mother’s Grace is acting even when the difficulties do not disappear?
In that case everybody might say that all my difficulties must disappear at once, I must attain to perfection immediately and without difficulties, otherwise it proves that the Mother’s Grace is not with me.
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You should not yield to sorrow or despair—there is no reason why you should. The Mother’s grace has not been withdrawn from you for a moment.
Do not allow the attacks of others to shake you like this—you know well the motives from which they act—and for the rest they are not going to pursue any farther the course which a fit of passion dictated to them. The protection will be with you and you need not fear or sorrow any longer.
Put your trust in the Divine and shake off all this like a nightmare that has passed. Believe that our love and grace are with you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 32, pp. 299-300
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To practise Yoga implies the will to overcome all attachments and turn to the Divine alone. The principal thing in the Yoga is to trust in the Divine Grace at every step, to direct the thought continually to the Divine and to offer oneself till the being opens and the Mother’s force can be felt working in the Adhara.
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When a sadhak feels the Mother’s Grace coming down in him, is it by the consent of the Purusha in him?
What do you mean “by the consent”? The Mother’s Grace comes down by the Mother’s will. The Purusha can accept or reject the Grace.
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Is there any law of the working of the Mother’s Grace?
The more one develops the psychic, the more is it possible for the Grace to act.
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How to receive what the Mother gives generally?
You have only to keep yourself open and whatever you need and can receive at the moment will come.
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Some like me have exceptionally great imperfections and defects. We have no claim for any Yoga, much less for the Integral Yoga. Sheerly out of her care and grace, the Mother has managed to keep us here; but the only return we have given is to tire her out.
It is so—if the sadhaks had been different in their reaction to the Mother’s grace, the work in the physical would have been much easier and less perilously subject to hostile attacks; perhaps it would have been done by now.
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, Vol. 32, pp. 166-167
~ Design: Biswajita Mohapatra
