object:4.2.4.11 - Psychic Intensity
book class:Letters On Yoga III
author class:Sri Aurobindo
class:chapter
I have read your letter of explanation of the "strange" ideas.
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 vairagis and make the choice of the spiritual life itself (Nirvana seekers excepted) quite inexplicable. Your arguments are not convincing. What have
Ramakrishna's excesses or the fluctuations of Vivekananda's vital receptivity between exaltation and depression or Chaitanya's viraha 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 as provinces 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." Do not cling to these notions born of the past 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 Brahmananda down to the sarra ananda, 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.
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