Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
I have read your letter of explanation of the “strange” ideas but cannot answer it now because I am busy with the harmony affair and don’t want to discontinue. I still maintain that your views on the lack of all intensity in the psychic things or in the spiritual or their inferiority to vital pleasure are strange, because they contradict all psychic and spiritual experience except that of the mere vairāgis [renunciates] and make the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. What have Ramakrishna’s cancer or the fluctuations of Vivekananda’s vital receptivity between exaltation and depression or Chaitanya’s viraha1 to do with the question in issue? These are difficulties of the body and the vital. The question was of the intensity of psychic and pure spiritual experience – psychic devotion and love, peace, Ananda. You 
cannot base a general denial on your own particular experience; because you have only the initial experiences of calm, etc. and have not got to the intensities as I have done and others before me have done. It is only when one lives centrally in the psychic with the mental, vital and physical experiences held under its rule that one knows what psychic intensity is. It is only when the higher consciousness comes down in its floods that one can know what can be the intensities or ecstasies of spiritual peace, light, love, bliss. You can say “I have not yet had these intensities,” but you cannot say in a sweeping way, “They do not exist and I shall never have them,” or “They are only tepid quiet little things soothing and more capable of lasting, but not intense and glorious like the vital joys and pleasures.” Don’t cling to these notions born of the first limitations, but keep yourself open and plastic to greater possibilities in the future.
My own experience is not limited to a radiant peace; I know very well what ecstasy and ananda are from the Brahmānanda2 down to the śarīra ānanda3, and can experience them at any time. But of these things I prefer to speak only when my work is done – for it is in a transformed consciousness here and not only above where the Ananda always exists that I seek their base of permanence.