Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

1. Spirituality

The Man of Sorrows

V. Jeremiads and the Divine Force

You have often inveighed against my asking you not to use yourself as an argument against the Divine. But what is the history of your sadhana in your own words – a Herculean practice of Pranayama, concentration and what not and then, after years and years of waiting, the Grace of Brahman. Still you are pancha-mukha in the praise of Grace.

What a wooden head! what is the use of saying things if you deliberately misinterpret what I write? I said clearly that the pranayam brought me nothing of any kind of spiritual realisation. I had stopped it long before. The Brahman experience came and I was groping for a way, doing no sadhana at all, making no effort because I didn't know what effort to make, all having failed. Then in three days I got an experience  which most yogis get only at the end of a long Yoga, got it without wanting or trying after it, got it to the surprise of Lele who was trying to get me something quite different. But I don't suppose you are able to understand, so I say no more. I can only look mournfully at your ununderstanding pate.

It can mean also waiting on the Grace of the Divine! The will of the individual in this respect does not mean anything like that. If the will of the individual is towards perdition, if his ego becomes hostile to the Divine, then the Divine is not bound to show him a Grace he does not want at all and kicks at.

Take the case of X. My God, to think that after all those Napoleonic efforts in poetry, and having succeeded, one is still driven to desperation because, after all, one has obtained nothing spiritually in spite of aspiration, meditation etc. – this is blood-curdling and at once smashes your theory of Karmayoga through poetry.

Napoleonic rubbish! He was the worst poet in the world before he came here and here immediately as soon as I put my force he began writing beautiful poems. Yet it was by his Napoleonic efforts that he did it? Imbecility, thy name is ego.

I was not putting any Karmayoga theory – I was simply mocking at your absurd idea that it was by your own mighty efforts that you had succeeded in writing poetry  which any good judge (you are not one) would call genuine poetry.

Non, monsieur, – j'ai d'autres chats à fouetter. I have other cats to whip – I can't go on whipping one cat all the time. A few lashes on the margin are all I can spare for you just now. There are three main possibilities for the sadhak: 1. To wait on the Grace and rely on the Divine.

2. To do everything himself like the full Adwaitin and the Buddhist.

3. To take the middle path, – go forward by aspiration and rejection etc. helped by the Force. The first, it appears, is too easy for you to do it, the second is too difficult for you to do, the third being easy in parts and difficult in parts is as impossible for you to do it. Right? Amen!!!

24.01.1936