Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

3. Matters Medical

Experiment, Experience, Knowledge, Intuition, Inspiration

Mother told me to practise the intuitive method, I thought.

She said that you have to stop jumping about from guess to guess and develop the diagnostic insight – seeing what comes from the intuition and then looking at the case to see if it is right. But to take the first thing that comes and act on it, is guessing pure and simple. If after a time you find that your perceptions turn out to have been automatically right each time then you can be confident that you have got the thing.

Well, there are some who after killing a few hundreds, learn to kill only a few. But that is not intuition; that is simply learning from experience.

Of course, experience is of great importance but still it is not everything.

Excuse me, you can have intuitions without book knowledge or even experience.

Experience is necessary, book knowledge is useful for the man who wants to be a perfect doctor; observation and discrimination are also excellent provided they are correct observation and discrimination; but all these are only helps for the flair to move about supported by a perfect mental confidence in the flair.

How is the outer guidance to give intuition? It only by itself supplies a ready-made course of action which the person blindly follows.

Don't you develop our intuition by outer guidance in the form of corrections and changes in our English poems?

I do SO in your English poetry because I am an expert in English poetry. In Bengali poetry I don't do it. I only select among alternatives offered by yourself. Mark that for Amal I now-a-days avoid correcting or changing as far as possible – that is in order to encourage the inspiration to act in himself. Sometimes I see what he should have written but do not tell it to him, leaving him to get it or not from my silence.

If a man has outer knowledge and capacity, will he not receive your right Force?

It does not follow. Another man may have the knowledge and receive nothing. If he receives, his knowledge and capacity help the Force to work out the details.

10.04.1937