My Pilgrimage to the Spirit

February 18, 1932

Demand and desire are only two different aspects of the same thing nor is it necessary that a feeling should be agitated or restless to be a desire; it can be, on the contrary, quietly fixed and persistent or persistently recurrent. What I wanted to say was, that demand or desire comes from the mental or the vital and psychic or a spiritual need is a different thing. The psychic does not demand or desire; it aspires; it does not make conditions for its surrender or withdraw if its aspiration is not immediately satisfied—for the psychic has complete trust in the Divine or in the Guru and can wait for the right time or the hour of the Divine Grace. The psychic has an insistence of its own, but it puts its pressure not on the Divine, but on the nature, putting a finger of light on all defects there, that stand in the way of the realization, sifting out all that is mixed, ignorant or imperfect in the experience or in the movements of the Yoga and never satisfied with itself or with the nature till it has got it perfectly open to the Divine, free from all forms of ego, surrendered, simple and right in the attitude and all the movements. This is what has to be established entirely in the mind and vital and in the physical consciousness before supramentalization of the whole nature is possible. Otherwise what one gets is more or less brilliant, half luminous, half cloudy illuminations and experiences on the mental and vital and physical planes, half truth half error or at the best true only for those planes and inspired either from some large mind or larger vital or at the best from the mental reaches above the human that intervene between the intellect and the overmind. These can be very stimulating and satisfying up to a certain point, and are good for those who want some spiritual realization on those planes, but the Supramental realization is something much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down on to the physical level.

Sri Aurobindo