Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

15 January 1939

Dr. Rao had come and, as usual, he commented on the usefulness of slings, splints, etc. Then he remarked: “Medicines are after all not the main thing. It is Nature that cures and medicines merely help Nature.” We had a small debate on the point. The Mother also was present. After Dr. Rao had left, Sri Aurobindo started speaking.

Sri Aurobindo: It is curious that doctors after long practice come to such conclusions as Dr. Rao has stated. A medical friend of the Mother’s used to say that it is the doctor who heals and not his medicines. This is quite true. One must have an element of healing power. Medicines lend their properties to this power.

Without this power which is the main thing in a cure, medicines are of very little use.

Satyendra: The ancient system in India recognised it as vital force.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Even now in some universities in the south of France – for example, Montpelier which is a famous university there – they admit this vital force. This is because the south of France as well as Spain came much under Arab influence. The vital force theory may come back everywhere.

At one time physical science claimed to explain everything according to its laws. Now they admit they can explain nothing.

Purani: The law of causality which once allowed no exception is now said to be not absolute. The physicists can’t determine the causes of phenomena in every case because in trying to observe the phenomena they interfere with the process and thus vitiate it. This they now call indeterminacy.

Sri Aurobindo: The attempts of scientists like Jeans and Eddington to find Reality by science are futile. You can’t found metaphysics on physical science; for, when you have built your philosophy, after some thirty years or so science will change and your building will tumble down. All you can say is that certain conclusions of science agree with and correspond to certain conclusions of metaphysics. You can’t make metaphysics depend on physics.

Purani: The Continental scientists have now refused to build philosophy on science. They say it is not their business to explain but only to lay bare the process. Eddington says in his Gifford Lectures that the human mind, the subject, ultimately accepts one conclusion out of a number of conclusions not because of the nature of objective reality but because of the nature of the observing subject. That 8+8=16 and not 61 points to some correspondence in the material world to the movement of the thinking mind.

Sri Aurobindo: It is the accumulated experience – the invariable experience – that gives that sense. Man has found by putting 8 and 8 together that it makes 16.

Purani: Again, in regard to the rainbow, the scientists study the wave-lengths of light while the poets make a play of the imagination over it. We have no means of saying that the real rainbow exists for the scientist and not for the poet.

Sri Aurobindo: I should say it exists for neither. Only the scientists get excited over the process and the poets over the result.

Purani: Eddington also admits that we have no ground to say that non-scientific knowledge and experience are less real than physical science.

Sri Aurobindo: Of course not.

Purani: Did you read Spengler’s Decline of the West? It is a huge volume and deals with many things.

Sri Aurobindo: No, I haven’t read it. What is the upshot of its argument?

Purani: The upshot is that time is not a mental entity. It has a direction, a tendency. It tends to produce certain events. It points to destiny, a recurring pattern which the sum of forces inevitably leads to. On the data of human history Spengler believes that there have been cycles in the life of the human race when cultures have arisen, reached a zenith and then declined. From a study of these cultures it is possible to predict the decline of every human culture. European culture at present is full of symptoms of decline and therefore it is bound to decline. The signs of decline are the rise of big cities, impoverishment of the countryside, capitalism, etc. He says that to classify history as Primitive, Mediaeval and Modern is not correct. We must study universal history and that, too, impersonally.

Again, within the recurring pattern, a culture has its own characteristic aspects. The mathematical discoveries, for instance, that are seen in a particular culture are organically connected with that culture. The Greeks could never have arrived at the conception of the series – regularly increasing or decreasing numbers leading to infinite number. The series-idea is only possible in modern culture.

He goes so far as to maintain that even if you grant that Napoleon’s rise could have been prevented by some causes, still the events that came as a consequence of his career would have followed inevitably because they were destined.

Sri Aurobindo: I don’t quite understand. Even granting that there is destiny, why can’t it be changed? How can Spengler say that even if Napoleon had not existed the results of his rise would inevitably have followed? It is a very debatable proposition. I believe the results would have naturally varied.

If he had not risen at the time, the European powers would have crushed French democracy. What he did was to stabilise the French Revolution so that the world got the idea of democracy. Otherwise it would have been delayed by two or three centuries.

Again, as to destiny, what is meant by it? It is a word that can have several meanings. Is destiny a working of inert blind material forces? In that case there is no room for choice. You have to end up by accepting Shankara’s Mayavada or rank materialism. But if you mean by destiny that there is a Will at work in the universe, then a choice in action becomes possible.

Once more, when Spengler speaks of cycles, there is some truth in the idea but it is not possible to make a rigid rule about the recurrence of the cycles. These cycles are plastic and need not be all of the same duration. In the recent Aryan Path a Mr. Morris has written an interesting article, full of facts and based on a study of historical data. In it he tries to show that human destiny has always a cycle of five hundred years. And do you know his conclusion? He believes that there are Mahatmas who manage the world!

Besides, the extension of mathematical numbers to infinity was well known in India long ago; and I don’t understand why the classification of historical epochs into Primitive, Mediaeval and Modern is incorrect. Does he mean that there are no differences or that the differences of epochs are to be overlooked?

(After some time) In a philosopher it is not the process of reasoning that is important, for he blinds himself to everything else in order to arrive at his conclusion. Therefore what you have to do is to take his conclusions and even in taking the conclusions you have to accept the essentials and not the words or the inessentials. For instance, there is some truth, as I said, in Spengler’s idea of destiny – also in his idea of cycles. All the rest is not material to us.

What is destiny? It can’t be the work of the individual. Then you have to accept that it is the working out of a Cosmic Will. And then the question is whether the Cosmic Will is free or bound. If it is free, it is no longer a blind determinism and even when you find there is “no progress”, yet that Will is working itself out in evolution.

If, on the other hand, you accept that the Cosmic Will is bound, the question is: “Bound by whom or by what?”

There is something like a cycle. This means there is a curve in the movement of Nature that seems to repeat itself. But that too is not to be taken rigidly. It is something that answers the need of evolution and can vary.

Purani: Probably something in a man’s mind has already accepted the conclusions, unknown to the man himself, and it is by his reasoning that he seems to arrive at them.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is something unknown to the surface consciousness of course!

Then, again, the human ego comes in. It is so limited that it thinks the contribution it brings to human thought is the only truth and all who differ or conflict with it are wrong.

We can turn round and say that a man was destined to think as he thought and thus to bring his contribution to the process of evolution. But it is easy to see that the process of evolution is universal and human evolution cannot be bound down to a set of philosophical ideas or rules of practice. No epoch, no individual, no group has the monopoly of truth. It is the same with religion – Christian, Mohammedan, etc.

Purani: I don’t think such a wide view is possible unless one reaches the Universal Mind.

Sri Aurobindo: Not necessarily. One can see this much while remaining human.

Purani: Wells perhaps speaks something similar when he says that all knowledge must now become “human”.

Sri Aurobindo: That is another matter. He means “internationalism”. All science is already international and much of literature and other realms of ideas are so too.

What does Spengler say about the future – after the decline of the West?

Purani: He dismisses China and India as countries whose cultures are useless now.

Sri Aurobindo: Then we have the Arabs.

Purani: Not even the Arabs. They are also effete.

Sri Aurobindo: Then the Africans remain, and the Abyssinians.

Purani: I think his hope is in the Americans and the Africans.

Satyendra: But America goes with the West. So we are left only with the Africans. (Laughter)

Purani: It is very curious that Spengler misses the fact that there can be resurgence and reawakening.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Take China, for instance. There were always cities in China – from the most ancient times. The Chinese are a peculiar race – always disturbed and always the same. If you study their history two thousand years back you will find they were in disturbance and yet they had their culture. The Tartar king who tried to destroy their culture by burning their books didn’t succeed. And I wouldn’t be surprised if after the present turmoil you find them two thousand years hence what they are today. That is the character of the race.

When you follow the course of history you may find there is a certain destiny which represents the sum of physical forces. That is one destiny. And when that tends to go round and round in an infinite circuit you find that there is a tendency which seems inevitable in the movement.

But the question is: Are physical forces the only determinants of destiny? Or is there anything else – something more than physical that can intervene and influence the course of the movement?

We find that there have been such inrushes of forces in history and the action of these inrushes has been to change the destiny indicated by the physical forces; it has changed in fact the course of human history. Take for an example the rise of the Arabs. A small uncivilised race living in arid deserts suddenly rises up and changes completely the course of history. That is an inrush of forces.

Purani: Thinkers like Emerson and Shaw believe that human beings have not made any substantial progress in their powers of reasoning since the Greeks.

Sri Aurobindo: It is quite true. Of course, you have today a vaster field and more ample material than the Greeks had, but in the handling of them the present-day mind is not superior to the Greek mind with its more limited field and material.

Purani: Emerson writing about Plato, says that he has been the epitome of the European mind for the last two thousand years or more.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, the European mind got everything from the Greeks and owes everything to them. Every branch of knowledge in which human curiosity could be interested has been given to Europe by the Greeks – even archaeology. The Romans could legislate and fight, they could keep the state together, but they made the Greeks think for them. Of course the Greeks could fight also but not always so well. Take the Roman thinkers – Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, all owe their philosophy to the Greeks.

That, again, is an illustration of what I was saying about the inrush of forces. Consider a small race like the Greeks, living on a small projecting tongue of land. It was able to build up a culture that has given everything essential to your modern European culture and that in a span of two or three hundred years only! Of course, the Greeks didn’t create everything. They got much from Egypt, Crete and Asia.

Purani: The number of artists they produced was remarkable.

Sri Aurobindo: They had a sense of beauty. Their life was beautiful. The one thing that modern Europe has not taken from the Greeks is beauty. You can’t say modern Europe is beautiful. In fact, it is ugly. What can be said of ancient Greece can be said also of ancient India. She had beauty, which she has since lost. The Japanese are the only race that can be said to have preserved beauty in their life. But now even they are fast losing it under European influence.

The setback to the human mind in Europe is amazing. As I said, no one set of ideas can monopolise Truth and from that point of view all these efforts of Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin to bottle up the human soul in a narrow mould of ideas is absurd. We had thought during the last years of the nineteenth century that the human mind had attained a certain level of intelligence and that it would have to be satisfied before any new idea could find acceptance. But it seems one can’t rely on common sense to stand the strain. We find Nazi ideas being accepted; fifty years back it would have been impossible to predict their acceptance. Then, again, the way the intellectuals accept psychoanalysis is surprising.

Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon) is afraid that psychoanalysis will drive out or kill spirituality because it claims to explain away many spiritual things.

Satyendra: People believe anything that is uncommon.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, it is as in the old dictum: “I believe because it is absurd.”

These Nazi ideas are infra-rational. It is because they are not at all rational that they are considered as inspiration. They are even called mystical. They are really nothing but narrow-pointed impulses rising from the lower being. But perhaps this rise of the infra-rational has been necessary in order that the supra-rational may be accepted and that reason may not be able to offer any obstruction to it.

The infra-rational also has a truth; it is necessary for the proper understanding of things. You can’t know the world unless you know the part which the infra-rational plays.

Nirodbaran: Do you mean by the infra-rational all that man has inherited from the animal?

Sri Aurobindo: Not only that. Man has accused the animal for nothing. In the infrarational are also included the Rakshasa and the Asura. Man has always been speaking of the animal, the Pashu, in a superior way. But take the dog’s faithfulness and affection. These qualities are universal among dogs. But even when they are found among men, you can’t say the same.

Purani: Mrs. Pinto, the English wife of a friend, told me that she was surprised to find that the cow in India is so mild and docile. In England, it seems, it may attack men.

Sri Aurobindo: Most animals kill only for food; there are very few that are inherently ferocious. Even snakes don’t attack unless they are frightened.

There was a variety of maneless lion in America – the Puma – that would have been friendly to man. Of course it had to live and so killed animals. But the Americans have been killing it – nearly exterminating it. Most of the wild animals don’t kill man unless they find that he is dangerous. That’s what happens in Africa. Man begins to shoot them down and they turn against him. In Africa the State had to legislate to prevent the extermination of certain animals. Otherwise people would have killed them off for sport. You can’t say man kills only when he is compelled.

And yet we cannot declare man has made no progress. True, the philosopher today is not superior to Plato, but there are many who can philosophise today, also many more who can understand philosophy than in Plato’s time. And throughout the course of history a small minority has been carrying the torch to save humanity in spite of itself.