Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume II - Part 1
I am rather surprised at Krishnaprem’s surprise about my statement of faith. I thought he had said once you should not hanker after experiences. As for experience being necessary for faith and no faith possible without it, that contradicts human psychology altogether. Thousands of people have faith before they have experience and it is the faith that helps them to the experience. The doctrine “No belief without proof” applies to physical science, it would be disastrous in the field of spirituality – or for that matter in the field of human action. The saints or bhaktas have the faith in God long before they get the experience of God – the man of action has the faith in his cause long before his cause is crowned with success – otherwise they would not have been able to struggle persistently towards their end in spite of defeat, 
failure and deadly peril. I don’t know what Krishnaprem means by true faith. For me faith is not intellectual belief but a function of the soul; when my belief has faltered, failed, gone out the soul has remained steadfast, obstinately insisting, “This path and no other; the Truth I have felt is the Truth whatever the mind may believe or not believe.” On the other hand experiences do not necessarily lead to faith. One sadhak writes to me, “I feel the grace of the Mother descending into me, but I cannot believe it because it may be a vital imagination.” Another has experiences for years together, then falls down because he has, he says, “lost faith”. All these things are not my imagination, they are facts and tell their own tale.
All that, however, is by the way. I have no objection to you or anybody having experiences. I am not a fool. Let everybody have as many experiences as possible. What I say is that the hankering for experiences should not be there in such a way as to replace the true attitude and bring disappointment and revolt. Bhakti is not an experience, it is a state of the heart and soul. It is a state which comes when the psychic being is awake and prominent. It is for that reason that I asked you to cleave to the psychic way and not go back to that of vital desire. I have not said that your psychic being was “in front” in such a way as to be proof against all attack. What I said was that it was becoming awake and active, giving you the right attitude and helping you towards the change of your nature. I certainly did not mean a moral but a spiritual change. Freedom from ego is not a moral but a spiritual change – a moral man may be chock full of ego, an ego increased by his sense of goodness and rectitude. Freedom from ego is spiritually valuable because then one can be centred, no longer in one’s personal self, but in the Divine, and that too is the condition of bhakti.