Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume II - Part 3

Fragment ID: 11868

You are mistaken in two respects. First, the endeavour towards this achievement [the transformation of mind, life and body] is not new and some Yogis have achieved it, I believe – but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by Yoga-siddhi – not a dharma of the nature. Secondly, the supramental transformation is not the same as the spiritual-mental. It is a change of mind, life and body which the mental or overmental-spiritual cannot achieve. All whom you mention were spirituals, but in different ways. Krishna’s mind, for instance, was overmentalised, Ramakrishna’s intuitive, Chaitanya’s spiritual-psychic, Buddha’s illumined higher mental. I don’t know about B. G. [Bijoy Goswami] – he seems to have been brilliant but rather chaotic. All that is different from the supramental. Then take the vital of the Paramhansas. It is said their vital behaves either like a child (Ramakrishna) or like a madman or like a demon or like something inert (cf. Jadabharata). Well, there is nothing supramental in all that. So?

One can be a fit instrument for the Divine in any of the transformations. The question is, an instrument for what?