Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Fragment ID: 20326
Aware of his occult omnipotent source,
Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy,
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.1
I certainly won’t have “attracted” [in place of “allured”] – there is 
an enormous difference between the force of the two words and surely “attracted by the Ecstasy” would take away all my ecstasy in the line – nothing so tepid can be admitted. Neither do I want “thrill” [in place of “joy”] which gives a false colour – precisely it would mean that the ecstasy was already touching him with its intensity which is far from intention.
Your statement that “joy” is just another word for “ecstasy” is surprising. “Comfort”, “pleasure”, “joy”, “bliss”, “rapture”, “ecstasy” would then be all equal and exactly synonymous terms and all distinction of shades and colours of words would disappear from literature. As well say that “flashlight” is just another word for “lightning” – or that glow, gleam, glitter, sheen, blaze are all equivalents which can be employed indifferently in the same place. One can feel allured to the supreme omniscient Ecstasy and feel a nameless joy touching one without that joy becoming itself the supreme Ecstasy. I see no loss of expressiveness by the joy coming in as a vague nameless hint of the immeasurable superior Ecstasy.
1937
1 These lines, to a comment on which Sri Aurobindo has replied, are the 1937 version. At present (p.79) the third line joins up with a passage immediately preceding the other two, thus:
A force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current from eternal seas of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.
And the other two begin a new passage which continues after them:
A living centre of the Illimitable
Widened to equate with the world’s circumference,
He turned to his immense spiritual fate.
But Sri Aurobindo’s remarks do not lose their essential pertinence and force or their larger general implications.