Sri Aurobindo
Autobiographical Notes
and Other Writings of Historical Interest
Part Two. Letters of Historical Interest
2.Early Letters on Yoga and the Spiritual Life
1911–1928
To People in America, 1926–1927
Draft of a Letter to C. E. Lefebvre1
[c. July 1926]
I have taken a long time to consider the answer [to]
your letter or rather to allow the answer to ripen and take form. It is not easy
to reply to the request implied in what you have written; for the distance
between India and America is great and, even if it were not so, guidance in Yoga
by correspondence and without personal contact is a very hampered and not
usually in my experience a satisfactory method. Ideas can be exchanged on paper,
but a spiritual influence, a psychic interchange, a vigilant control – and all
this is implied in this kind of guidance – are not so easily communicated.
However, I will try to comply with your request as best I can under these
circumstances.
First, let me say, that the absorption of ideas and the
remoulding of the mental aims and attitude is one thing and the 
remoulding of the inner life and consciousness and eventually also of
the outer life, which is the aim of Yoga, is quite another. The first can be
done to some extent by the method of dissemination you indicate. But as you
rightly see, instructions in Yoga cannot be fruitfully given on the same lines.
That can only be given successfully to a few, to each separately as an
intimately personal thing which he must assimilate and make living and true in
himself according to his own capacity and nature. That is why I am led to
believe that the work of Swami Yogananda is not only elementary but can hardly
be the true thing – Yoga cannot be taught in schools and classes. It has to be
received personally, it has to be lived, the seeker, sadhaka, has to
change by a difficult aspiration and endeavour his whole consciousness and
nature, his mind, heart, life, every principle of his being and all their
movements into a greater Truth than anything the normal life of man can imagine.
Those who can do this are not yet many, but some are to be found everywhere, and
I see no reason why those in America should be condemned to only an elementary
“instruction”. The true Truth, the great Path has to be opened to them; how far
they will go in it depends on their own personal capacity and the help they
receive.