Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
1. The Mother: Individual, Universal, Transcendent
X asked me whether Mother can materialise herself at a distance. Y seems to have said something like that.
Y probably referred to an experience in which the Mother being in Algeria appeared to a circle of friends sitting in Paris and took up a pencil and wrote a few words on a paper. Having satisfied herself that it was possible she did not develop it any farther. That was at a time when she was practising occultism 
with Théon in Algeria. Materialisation is possible but it does not happen easily – it demands a very rare and difficult concentration of forces or else an occult process with vital beings behind it such as materialises objects, like the stones that were daily thrown in the Guest House when we were there. In neither case it is a miracle. But to do as you suggest, make it a common or everyday phenomenon, would be hardly practicable and spiritually not useful, as it is not a spiritual force which gives the power but an occult mental-vital force. It would turn the Yoga into a display of occultism, rather than a process of spiritual change.
20 October 1935