Sri Aurobindo Ghose
(1872-1950)

The experience of an inner darkness when looking inwards
is the first reaction of a mentality
which has lived always on the surface
and has no realized inner existence...
A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness
is part of the inner spiritual experience;
of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain fear,
- for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity
and the void with cessation or non-existence:
but this silence is the silence of the spirit which is the condition
of a greater knowledge, power and bliss,
and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being,
a liberation of it from its turbid contents
so that it may be filled with the wine of God:
it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence.
Even when the being turns towards cessation,
it is a cessation not in non-existence
but into some vast ineffable of spiritual being
or the plunge into the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute.