At the feet of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

08 November 1933

MYSELF: Mother, again everything appears off-colour even after coming from you. I feel so bad. I expected that everything would be all right, once I would see you, but quite the contrary is the effect. I feel so bad that there is a strong impulse to go away; that feeling is still active. Today your dealing with me seemed very remote and on the surface. I missed this time the intimacy I had known when I had come up to you with my last difficulty. You had put me right with the touch of your deep affection, but there was no joy of satisfaction in the recent contact; you had moved far away and this was the first time that I felt like this. For the first time I feel no ardour, eagerness or prayer for the 24th’s Darshan. God knows what will happen finally! Perhaps this movement may draw me away! Death appears to be preferable as a way of deliverance.

I don’t feel like writing even. If this continues I will have to stop writing. Have I then stumbled upon a desert-tract?

SRI AUROBINDO: It was certainly not because the Mother was different to you from other days or pushed you to a distance, but because you came rather shut up in that part of your physical being which is still shrinking from the Light. It is this part which was always fundamentally responsible for all your bad passages and painful movements even when the direct difficulty was higher up. Its nature is to cling to the old habitual pre-Yogic consciousness and to shut up doors and windows against the help that is offered and lament in the darkness when it has felt itself hurt. This is a thing that everybody must get rid of who wants to progress. Do not go on identifying yourself with this part and calling it yourself. Get back into your inner being and look at this only as a small though obstinate part of the nature that has to change. For apart from its insistence there is no reason why your way should enter into a desert. It should enter into a wideness of liberation — open to the calm and peace and power and light of a consciousness that is wider than the personal and into which the ego can happily disappear.

(8.11.33)