Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
There would be much to say about the ideas you speak of which come so much in your way, more than I can do tonight – as I have the arrears of the week to clear off, if possible, I must leave them to another time. But surely it is rather unreasonable to accept the statement of a man like Sarat when you have so much doubt about Prithwi Singh’s. Men like Anilbaran and Prithwi Singh are not likely to pretend to have experiences they do not have. Harin’s fall after one year’s rapid progress had obvious reasons in his character which do not exist in them. But apart from that the fall of a sadhak from Yoga proves nothing against the truth of spiritual experience. It is well known to all Yogis that a fall is possible and the Gita speaks of it more than once. But how does the fall prove that spiritual experience is not true and genuine? The fall of a man from a great height does not prove that he 
never reached a great height. The experiences of Prithwi Singh have been those of many others before him and will be those of many others who do not yet have them; I fail to see why the fact of people having them or their intensity or the joy and confidence (not that Prithwi Singh is at all blind to the difficulties in himself or in the sadhana) they give should make them suspect as untrue. As for your great scientist I wonder who he had in mind as spiritual men – so far as I know history both in the east and west there have been any number of spiritual men and mystics who have had a great or fine intellectual capacity or were endowed with a great administrative and organising ability implying a keen knowledge of men and much expenditure of brain power. With a little looking up of the records of the past I think one could collect some hundreds of names – which would not include of course the still greater number not recorded in history or the transmitted memory of the past. It is like the statement of Leonard Woolf that mysticism arises only in periods of lifeless decadence, and it can only be true if intellect is considered as synonymous with a scientific or sceptical intelligence.
But what strange ideas again! – that I was born with a supramental temperament and had never any brain or mind or any acquaintance with human mentality – and that I know nothing of hard realities. Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from struggle and hardships and semi-starvation in England through the fierce difficulties and perils of revolutionary leadership and organisation and activity in India to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, internal and external. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle; the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means as well as others that are external makes no difference to its character. But, of course, as we have not been shouting about these things, it is natural, I suppose, for the sadhaks to think I am living in an august, glamorous, lotus-eating dreamland where no hard facts of life or nature present themselves. But what an illusion all the same!
I have written more than I had time for after all, but the main point I have not touched which is the real nature of spiritual life and Yoga – its reality and not the unreal image of it constructed in the minds of people.