Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1935

Fragment ID: 17147

1935

Some travellers of the overhead ranges ask: “Even we do notice ego here and there and sometimes even in greater mass than below. How is it so?”

The ego they perceive there is not the inhabitant of the spiritual heights. But the thing is, man being a mental being, when he ascends he carries with him subtly or unconsciously the ego of the lower nature. And as his consciousness is naturally heightened and cosmicised in the spiritual planes, the ego too feels extended and enlarged! But there is no such thing as “spiritual ego”.

All the same a sadhak cannot wait to be egoless before he attempts the higher flights. For it is impossible to have a complete annihilation of ego at such an early stage of sadhana.

Although there is no ego in the spiritual planes, yet by the spiritual experience the ego on the lower planes may get aggrandised through pride and wrong reception of the experience. Also one may by entering into the larger mental and vital planes aggrandise the ego. These things are always possible so long as the higher consciousness and the lower are not harmonised in the being and the lower transformed into the nature of the higher.