Chapter 3

Gospel of Sorrow

Fits of despair and darkness are a tradition in the path of sadhana – in all Yogas oriental and occidental they seem to have been the rule. I know all about them myself – but my experience has led me to the perception that they are an unnecessary tradition and could be dispensed with if one chose. That is why whenever they come in you or others I try to lift up before them the gospel of faith. If still they come, one has only to get through them as soon as possible and get back into the sun.

As for despondency, it is surely a terrible burden to carry on the way.… The Gita specially says, “Practise the Yoga with an undespondent heart”, anirvinnascetasa. I know perfectly well that pain and suffering and struggle and excesses of despair are natural – though not inevitable – on the way, – not because they are helps, but because they are imposed on us by the darkness of this human nature out of which we have to struggle into the Light.

Thirst for the Divine is one thing and depression is quite another, nor is depression a necessary consequence of the thirst being unsatisfied; that may lead to a more ardent thirst or to a fixed resolution and persistent effort or to a more and more yearning call or to a psychic sorrow which is not at all identical with depression and despair. Depression is a clouded grey state in its nature and it is more difficult for light to come through clouds and greyness than through a clear atmosphere. That depression obstructs the inner light is a matter of general experience.

To make a vada or gospel of sorrow is dangerous because sorrow if indulged becomes a habit, sticks and few things, if once they stick, can be more sticky.

The sadness you speak of is not psychic – for “painful longing” belongs to the vital, not to the psychic. The psychic never feels a sadness from disappointed desire, because that is not in its nature; the sorrow it sometimes feels is when it sees the Divine rejected or the mental, vital, physical in man or in nature turning away from the Truth to follow perversion, darkness or ignorance. However, with the reign of the Supramental even the vital external nature is bound to change and therefore there will be no chance of any feelings of this character.

The uneasiness created by the psychic is not depression – it is in the nature of a rejection of the wrong movement. If the uneasiness causes depression or vital dissatisfaction, it is not psychic.

This tendency to irrational sadness and despondency and these imaginations, fears and perverse reasonings – always repeating, if you will take careful notice, the same movements, ideas and feelings and even the same language and phrases like a machine – is a characteristic working of the lower vital nature. The only way to get rid of it is to meet it with a fixed resolution of the higher vital and the mind and psychic being to combat, reject and master it.