Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Letters

Fragment ID: 6471

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Lefebvre C. E.

July 1935 (?)

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.

¹ Undated draft, written in reply to a letter from C. E. Lefebvre dated 13 June 1926. In his letter Lefebvre identified himself as the “student” mentioned in the letter from the Advance Distributing Company dated 18 January 1926. Various internal and external references in the letters make it clear that Lefebvre also was the writer of both letters from the Advance Distributing Company. In his letter of 13 June 1926, Lefebvre spoke about the nature of spiritual seeking in the United States, concluding: “It would seem that America is only ready for elementary instruction.”

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