Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 35

Fragment ID: 8444

(this fragment is largest or earliest found passage)

Sri Aurobindo — Unknown addressee

October 12, 1935

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Spiritual and Supramental [1]

Krishnaprem has always complained (and quite naturally) that it was difficult to get the right meaning of the “technical terms” used by you.... Of course a full expounding of the difference between Spiritualisation and Supramentalisation would fatten into a volume, but is it not possible just to indicate why the one is called partial transformation and the other complete transformation? Also in what way the supramental consciousness-force is not identical with the spiritual.

If spiritual and supramental were the same thing, then all the sages and devotees and Yogis and sadhaks throughout the ages would have been supramental beings and all I have written about the supermind would be so much superfluous rubbish. Anybody who had spiritual experiences would then be a supramental being; the Asram would be chock-full of supramental beings and every other Asram in India also. As for writing about these things, I do not see the utility. I have already two philosophical essays to write and I do not find them writing themselves. If I start explaining the supramental, it would mean a book of 200 pages at least and even then you would be no wiser than before – as everything I wrote would probably be misinterpreted in the terms of mental cognition. The supramental has to be realised, not explained; I therefore prefer to leave it to explain or not explain itself when it is there and not waste my time in explaining mentally the supramental. As to technical terms, I have explained many times over in a way sufficient for those who practise this Yoga. If I have to explain philosophically to others, I must write a few more volumes of the Arya. I have no time just now.

I may say that spiritual experiences can fix themselves in the inner consciousness and alter it, transform it, if you like, one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things, one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda, but that need not transform the instrumental being. One can go on thinking with the intellect, willing with the mental will, feeling joy and sorrow on the vital surface, undergoing physical afflictions etc. just as before. The change only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, taking it as a part of nature. That is not the transformation I envisage.

12 October 1935

¹ SABCL, volume 22; CWSA, volume 28: thing, as you say my readers imagine

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² SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: stuff, useless and otiose

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³ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: Self in all and all in the Self

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⁴ This phrase is absent in volume 22 SABCL and volume 28 CWSA

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⁵ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of Nature

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⁶ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing

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⁷ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: a

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⁸ SABCL, volume 22: and suffering from the struggle of life in the body with death and disease.

CWSA, volume 28: and suffering the struggle of life in the body with death and disease.

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⁹ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: change then only

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¹⁰ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking

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¹¹ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: an inevitable part

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¹² SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature.

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¹³ SABCL, volume 22, CWSA, volume 28: envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another constitution of the physical consciousness that must come in by the supramental change.

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Current publication:

[Largest or earliest found passage: ] Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Himself and the Ashram // CWSA.- Volume 35. (≈ 26 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2011.- 658 p.

Other publications:

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga // SABCL.- Volume 22. (≈ 28 vol. of CWSA).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971.- 502 p.

Sri Aurobindo. Letters on Yoga. I // CWSA.- Volume 28. (≈ 22 vol. of SABCL).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2012.- 590 p.