Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
The Mother is sending the Conversations for Mohini Mohan. You will have to tell him that there are no letters, only these conversations. Recent photographs don’t exist as none have been taken for some fourteen years past and more. Those we have are still older, and the present copies can’t be given free as we have now to bring them from France at a heavy cost and they get exhausted soon and we have constantly to make fresh orders.
Your account of Bose and his father is interesting. Let us see what he makes of himself – and the self-conscious engineer also.
I feel it difficult to say anything about Raihana’s Christ and Krishna. The attraction which she says people feel for Christ has never touched me, partly because I got disgusted with the dryness and deadness of Christianity in England and partly 
because the Christ of the gospels (apart from a few poignant episodes) is luminous no doubt, but somewhat shadowy and imperfectly constructed in his luminosity; there is more of the ethical put forward than of the spiritual or divine man. The Christ that has strongly lived in the Western saints and mystics is the Christ of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa and others. But apart from that, is it a fact that Christ has been strongly and vividly loved by Christians? Only by a very few, it seems to me. As for Krishna, to judge him and his revealing tradition by the Christ figure and Christ tradition is not possible. The two stand in two different worlds. There is nothing in the latter of the great and boundless and sovereign spiritual knowledge and power of realisation we find in the Gita, nothing of the emotional force, passion, beauty of the Gopi symbol and all that lies behind it, nothing of the many-sided manifestation of the Krishna figure. The other has other qualities; there is no gain in putting them side by side and trying to weigh them against each other. That is the besetting sin of the Christian mind, even in those who are most liberal like Dr. Stanley Jones1; they cannot get altogether free from the sectarian narrowness and leave each manifestation to its own inner world for those to follow who have the inner drawing to one or the other. I have always refrained from these comparisons in my published writings in order to avoid this error. What I feel personally is for myself – I can’t ask others to conform to my measure.
The Gopis are not ordinary people in the proper sense of the word – they are extraordinary by their extremeness of love, passionate devotion, unreserved self-giving. Whoever has that, however humble his or her position in other respects (learning, power presentation, scholarship, external sanctity, etc, etc.) can easily follow after Krishna and reach Him; that seems to me the sense of the symbol of the Gopis. There are many other significances, of course – that is only one among the many.