Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

1. Spirituality

The Ashram and its Yoga

III. Views about Yoga

Everything seems to be queer in this world, this yogic world included. When a fellow works hard at French, medicine, trying to improve his department and himself, and thereby serve the Divine, it is bad. Too much concentration and meditation is worse. When one follows the rule “eat, drink and be merry” it is worst. I am coming to X's view that your Yoga will always be yours.

There is where you miss the truth and he missed it also – he did not try to “improve himself” at any rate in any yogic way – he might try to aggrandise himself, but that is another matter. Self-aggrandisement does not save from collapse.

Well, I never heard that to eat, drink and be merry was one of the paths of Yoga – unless Charvak's way is one of Yoga.

It is not my Yoga that is difficult to get the head or tail of – it is your and X's and others' views about Yoga that are weird and wonderful. If a fellow is brilliant in French and Sanskrit, you think he is a wonderful Yogi, but then it is the people who are first in the Calcutta B.A. who must be the great Yogis. If one objects to spending all the energy in tea and talk, you say, “What queer Gurus these are and what queer ideas”, as if sociability were the base of the Brahman or on the contrary you think that  everybody must shut himself up in a dark room, see nobody and go mad with want of food and sleep – and when we object, you say, “Who can understand this Yoga?” Have you never heard of Buddha's maxim “No excess in any direction” – or of Krishna's injunction “Don't eat too much or abstain from eating, don't drop sleep or sleep too much; don't torture the soul with violent tapasya – practise Yoga steadily without despondency. Don't abstain from work and be inactive, but don't think either that work will save you. Dedicate your work to the Divine, do it as a sacrifice, reach the point at which you feel that the works are not yours but done for you etc. etc. Through meditation, through dedicated works, through bhakti – all these together, arrive at the divine consciousness and live in it.” Buddha and Krishna are not considered to be unintelligible big Absurdities, yet when we lay [stress] on the same thing, you all stand and say “What's this new and unheard-of stuff?” It is the result I suppose of having modern-minded disciples who know all about everything and can judge better than any Guru, but to whom the very claims of Yoga are something queer and cold and strange. Kismet!

Now about tea and butter. All these were, it seems, generously granted by you to X.

It is not butter – it is tea and talk... They were granted by me as a concession to his nature, because by self-deprivation he would land himself in the seas of despair – not as a method of reaching the  Brahman. He was trying to do what his nature would not allow. It was only if he got intense spiritual experience that he could give up tea and talk without wallowing in misery. Is it so difficult to understand a simple thing like that? I should have thought it would be self-evident even to the dullest intelligence.

Because I allowed him to talk... does it follow that talk and tea were given as part of his Yoga? If the Mother allowed butter or eggs to Y for his physical growth does it follow that butter and eggs are the bases of the Brahman? If somebody has a stomachache and I send him to the Dispensary, does it follow that stomachache, the Dispensary, Nirod and allopathic drugs are the perfect way to spiritualisation?...