Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
I would have been surprised to hear that I regard (in agreement with an “advanced” Sadhak) Ramakrishna as a spiritual pigmy if I had not become past astonishment in these matters. I have said, it seems, so many things that were never in my mind and done too not a few that I have never dreamed of doing! I shall not be surprised or perturbed if one day I am reported to have declared, on the authority of “advanced” or even unadvanced Sadhaks, that Buddha was a poseur or that Shakespeare an overrated poetaster or Newton a third-rate college Don without any genius. In this world all is possible. Is it necessary for me to say that I have never thought and cannot have said anything of the kind, since I have at least some faint sense of spiritual values? The passage you have quoted1 is my considered estimate of Ramakrishna.
It is also a misunderstanding to suppose that I am against Bhakti or against emotional Bhakti – which comes to the same thing, since without emotion there can be no Bhakti. It is rather the fact that in my writing on Yoga I have given Bhakti the highest place. All that I have said at any time which could account for this misunderstanding was against an unpurified emotionalism which, according to my experience, 
leads to want of balance, agitated and disharmonious expression or even contrary reaction and, at its extreme, nervous disorder. But the insistence of purification does not mean that I condemn true feeling and emotion any more than the insistence on a purified mind or will means that I condemn thought and will. On the contrary, the deeper the emotion, the more intense the Bhakti, the greater is the force for realisation and transformation. It is oftenest through intensity of emotion that the psychic being wakes and there is an opening of the inner doors in the Divine.
It is very insincere for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the Supermind or even a taste of it. Such claim is usually accompanied by an outburst of superegoism, some blunder of perception or wrong condition or wrong movement. A certain spiritual humility, a serious un-arrogant look at oneself and quiet perception of the imperfection of one’s present nature, and instead of self-esteem and self-assertion a sense of the necessity of exceeding one’s present self, not from egoistic ambition, but from an urge towards the Divine, would be, it seems to me, for this finite [?] terrestrial and human composition better conditions for proceeding towards its supramental change.
Yes, you should learn not to be perturbed by talk of this kind from whomsoever it proceeds; I think I have already tried to put you on your guard against listening to “advanced sadhaks” or taking these pronouncements of theirs as authoritative statements of the aims and conditions of the Yoga. Why this claim to be an advanced sadhak and what is the sense of it? It resolves itself into an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justified so long as there is the egoism and the need of assertion accompanied, as it always is, by a weakness and turbid imperfection which belie the claim of living in a superior consciousness to the “unadvanced” sadhaks. It is time these crudities disappeared from the Ashram atmosphere.