Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

1. Spirituality

The Man of Sorrows

V. Jeremiads and the Divine Force

Can one arrive at what is called “a state of grace” simply by sticking or simply because there is a soul within?

Yes, one can, plenty of people have done it.

But then the soul is there in everybody and Grace is above everybody. How is it that people have turned their backs on the Divine?

Because of rajasic ego, ambition, vanity – because they believed in their own efforts and not in the Grace.

I have never heard that Grace did everything. And, where it seems to do so, how do we know that somebody has not done sadhana in his past life? You can't deny this, can you?

You can't affirm it, can you?

I can point you at many instances in spiritual history – beginning with the famous Jagai Madhai. But it is no use against a brain that does not want to admit that 2+2=4.

Simple sticking won't do. In that case our Ashram cat Bushy would have a chance.

Of course she has – of rising to a new grade of birth with all in her favour in the next life.

I hesitate to believe much in Grace. Is not Grace something that comes down unconditionally?

It does not depend on conditions – which is rather a different thing from an unconditional surrender to any and every sadhak.

Even Ramakrishna's baby-cat type of sadhak has to make a decisive movement of surrender and compel the rest of the being to obedience, which is the most difficult thing on earth.

I never heard that the baby cat was like that – if it were it would not be a baby cat. (It is the baby monkey trying to become a baby cat who does that. ) But you have evidently so great a knowledge of spiritual things (surpassing mine and Ramakrishna's) that I can only bow my head and pass humbly on to people with less knowledge.

If anybody can do the baby cat surrender at a stroke, is it not because his “unfinished curve” in the past life has finished it in this?

Hail, Rishi, all-knower! Tell us all about our past lives.

Surely the soul instead of sleeping has to aspire etc. to call down its Lord the Grace. Where do you see that aspiration in me? If you build my spiritual castle on those one or two minutes' brief visitations of Ananda and that too once or twice only, excluding the moments of darshan of your great self, which also have been sometimes marred in these three years – and if you build my poetic mansion on little trickles, then I can only say – well, what shall I say?

Better say nothing. It will sound less foolish.

24.04.1936