Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 7141

Intellectual Capacity of Mystics

A great scientist has written that mystics and spiritual men the world over have in general always been men of very average intelligence, a handful of rare instances excepted.

As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men – so far as I know history both in the East and the West there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain-power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names – which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past.