Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

3. Matters Medical

The Doctor

The Doctor as Patient: Two Personalities

You have said to X that my natural bent is pessimistic. But why then is there such an ambition, such an aspiration to be pure and perfect in life as well as in literature, in my role as doctor no less than in other roles? Psychologically the doctor himself is rather a patient!

It is two different portions of your being. One wants to climb mountains, the other which stands at the foot or is climbing or rather being hauled up the first steps of the ascent, pulls back, groans, grunts, growls, wails and cries “That? all that height? Tchah! pooh! I'll never be able to negotiate one ten thousandth part of that! Let me sit down and lament.”

I am doctoring on others, but there is nobody to doctor on me. The eternal conflict is going on between something that wants to work and work and something else that likes to be inert. Any prescription from the supreme Doctor? What is his diagnosis?

Two different personalities standing in the way of each other. No remedy except “harmonisation” and that is usually done by the working of a higher Force which compels the two beggars not to interfere with each other. The business of the patient  is to take plenty of doses of the Force. The usual formula (prescription, whatever you like to call it) is “proceed with as much zeal as if all had to be done in a fraction of a lifetime and as much patience as if you had all eternity before you.” Your two parts ought to arrange that between them – one seems to plump for the first course, the other for the all-eternity. A splendid chance for harmonisation.