Page 27 - All India Magazine Mar-2025

Sri Aurobindo's Guidance to
Miss Margaret Wilson, U.S.A.

Miss Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of the war-time Ameri-
can President, was very deeply spiritually inspired by reading Sri
Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita in the New York Public Library during
1932. She wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo on 3 March 1936 praying
for his Guidance in her sadhana and inquiring if she could be allowed
to come to the Ashram to stay as his disciple. She was permitted to
join the Ashram in 1938. Sri Aurobindo gave her the name "Nishta"
(one-pointed fixed concentration on a single aim). She died in 1948
after an illness.
We reproduce below Miss Margaret's letter of 3.3. 1936 to Sri
Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo's letter of 7.9.1936 to her. (Sri Aurobindo
had made some omissions before allowing its publication.)

Miss Margaret Wilson's Letter to Sri Aurobindo
New York March 3 1936
rd

Dear Sri Aurobindo,
Your Essays on the Gita have been a source of help and in-
spiration to me ever since the summer of I932, when I first discov-
ered them. Now I am writing to you to ask you humbly for direct
help and inspiration. I know no one here in this country to whom I
can confidently turn, because I know of no one here who has had
illumination. Whenever I am tempted to join this or that school
or center I draw back in fear that their rules and disciplines will be
binding and restricting without liberating the self without con-
ducing to its liberation. Now I have the little pamphlet about your
Asram in my possession, and I am daring to hope that you will
suggest to me the disciplines that I can freely impose on myself
in order to be liberated first into the Consciousness of the self in

All India Magazine, March 2025 27