Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7839

I used the word preface to characterise the nature of what I had written, not in a prophetic sense.

There are two things – Yoga Force in its original totality which is that of the Divine spiritual Force, always potentially all-powerful, and Yoga Force doing its work under the conditions of the evolutionary world here.

It is not a question of “can” or “cannot” at all. All is possible, but all is not licit – except by a recognisable process; the Divine Power itself imposes on its action limits, processes, obstacles, vicissitudes. It is possible that an ass may be changed into an elephant, but it is not done, at least physically, because of the lack of a process. Psychologically such changes do take place.

I have myself in my time changed cowards into heroes and that can be done even without Yoga-Shakti, merely by an inner force. How can you say what is latent in man or what is incurably absent? I have developed many things by Yoga, often even without any will or effort to do so, which were not in my original nature. I may even say that I have transformed my whole nature and it is in many respects the opposite of what I began with. There can be no question about the power to change, to develop, to awaken faculties that were not there before; this power exists already, but it can be raised to an acme by being lifted to the spiritual plane....

The rest is for the indefinable future. One day I shall certainly try to explain methodically and by examples what the spiritual force is; how it has worked on the earth-plane, how it acts and under what conditions – conditions not rigidly fixed, but plastic and mutable.

6-2-1935