At the feet of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

08 June 1933

MYSELF: Mother, the last two days I wake up at night with a kind of twisting pain in my chest. The feeling at that time is like this: “What has happened? Why has it so happened?” Everything appears strange. In my waking consciousness, there is no such perception of pain. It comes in sleep, and when I am awake I drive it away; but at the same time the mind keeps on thinking that still there is some attachment in the subconscient and I feel bad about it. I can’t free myself from the brooding concern that the attachment is lingering still, the result being a short period of depression. Why should this happen?

SRI AUROBINDO: YOU need not attach too much importance to it. It is an impression left in the subconscient — necessarily a strong impression because the feelings were acute — which as it can no longer affect the waking state comes up in dreams. It is a common experience that long after one has got rid of things in the waking state, e.g., sex, family attachment or any past preoccupations that no longer exist, they return from time to time in dreams. Your self-liberation is quite recent, so it is not surprising that the impression comes up in this form. You have to reject it very quietly and without concern — if it is not fed in the waking state it will die away.

MYSELF: My ego has found so much support from me in everything that it now doesn’t want to leave me so easily. It must stay either in front or behind, openly or in secret. What I see clearly, or am aware of and about which there is no doubt — even there the ego peeps! What a dismal aspect of human nature!

SRI AUROBINDO: It is so with everybody, because the human consciousness is permeated in all its past ideas with this substance of egoism. It is only by a constant quiet vigilance and increasing consciousness that it can be got out — for if it is not allowed to play openly, it conceals itself and takes subtle and disguised forms.

(8.6.33)