Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

18 January 1939

Nirodbaran read out to Sri Aurobindo some passages from Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means. They were on war, passive resistance, non-attachment, the Jacobins, Caesar, Napoleon and dictators in general. The last was: “More books have been written about Napoleon than about any other human being. The fact is deeply and alarmingly significant. … Duces and Führers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”

Sri Aurobindo: All that is shallow, it is mere moralising. If Caesar and Napoleon are not to be admired, then it means that human capacity and attainment are not to be admired. Caesar and Napoleon have been admired not merely because they were successful: plenty of successful people are not admired. Caesar has won admiration because it was he who founded the greatness of Imperial Rome which gave us one of the greatest periods of human civilisation. And we admire Napoleon because he was a great organiser and he stabilised the French Revolution. He organised France and, through France, the whole of Europe. His immense powers and abilities – are these things not great?

Purani: I suppose men admire them because they find in them the realisation of their own potential greatness.

Sri Aurobindo: Of course. But Huxley speaks of Caesar and Napoleon as if they were the first dictators the world had seen. There have been dictators since the beginning of the world. And they are of various kinds. Kemal, Pilsudski, all the kings of Balkan states, as well as Stalin and Hitler, are all dictators. Even Gandhi, if he were put at the head of a free India, could be a dictator. My own father can be called the dictator of Rangpur or Khulna! The dictators come in answer to the necessity of the hour. When men and nations are in conflict with their surrounding conditions, when there is confusion all about, the dictators come, set things right and pull the race out of its difficulties.

As for the Jacobins, with whom Huxley finds fault, I have been thinking of Laski’s view. Laski is perfectly right in saying that the Jacobins saved the Republic. If they had not concentrated power in their hands, the Germans would have marched on Paris and crushed the new Republic at the very start and restored the old monarchy. It was because of the Jacobins that the Bourbons, even when they returned, had to accept constitutional monarchy. Louis XVIII and all the kings in Europe were obliged, more or less, to accept the principles of democracy.

It is true that in Napoleon’s time the Assembly was only a shadow, but the full Republic, although delayed for some time, was in fact already established. Politics is only a shadow at the top: the real changes that matter are those that come in society. The social laws introduced by Napoleon have continued till this day. It was he who made for the first time all men equal before the Law. The Code Napoleon bridged the gulf between the rich and the poor. This kind of equality seems very natural now, but when he introduced it, it was something revolutionary. The laws he laid down still hold. What he established may not have been democracy in the sense of government by the masses, but it was democracy in the sense of government by the middle class, the bourgeoisie.

On the topic of war, Huxley speaks as if there were always an alternative between military violence and non-violent peaceful development. But things are never like that: they don’t move in a perfect way. If Napoleon had not come, the Republic would have been smothered in its infancy and democracy would have suffered a setback. No, the Cosmic Spirit is not so foolish as to allow that. Carlyle puts the situation more realistically when he says that the condition was, “I kill you or you kill me. So it is better that I kill you than get killed by you.”

Purani: Huxley says war is always avoidable.

Sri Aurobindo: When intellectuals talk of these things, they get into a muddle. How is war avoidable? How can you prevent war so long as the other fellow wants to fight? You can prevent it only by becoming stronger than he or (smiling), as Gandhi says, by changing his heart by passive resistance. And even there Gandhi has been forced to admit that none has understood his passive resistance except himself. It is not very promising for Satyagraha; in fact, it is a condemnation of it, considering that it is intended to be a general solution for all men. What some did in several places in India is not Satyagraha but Duragraha (obstinacy).

Nirodbaran: Huxley speaks of spirituality.

Sri Aurobindo: Spirituality is all right, but in what way is it to be got?

Purani: He speaks of the ideal non-attached men who must practise virtue disinterestedly.

Sri Aurobindo: No doubt, no doubt! But how are you to get them? And when you have got them how are the attached people to accept the non-attached? And how will the non-attached men get their decisions accepted and carried out by the attached?

It is all a solution by the mind. The mind has not been able to change human nature fundamentally. It cannot succeed so long as it works on its own principles. It accepts an ideal and tries to work it out but it is not a sovereign consciousness. You can go on changing human institutions and yet the imperfection will break through all your institutions.

Purani: The other day you spoke of the inrush of Forces during certain periods of history – the Greek and the Arab periods, for example. Can we speak similarly not of an inrush but of a descent of some Higher Force in the cases of men like Buddha and Christ?

Sri Aurobindo: Of course. It is a descent of a Higher Force, which works at first in one man, then in a group and then extends its influence to mankind. In the case of Mohammed – and here is another dictator for you! – the descent corresponded with the extension, the expansion, in life. But the descent may be just an inner one in the beginning and only gradually spread to other men and later extend outwards.

Satyendra: Many spiritual figures have come and tried to make our life spiritual. But the world remains the same.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. Here also what happens is that the new Force gets mixed up with the powers that are already there. What happens is that the powers of Falsehood try at first to resist the spiritual descent. When they fail, they accept it in order to break it. Look, for instance, at Christianity. When it came, it was much oppressed, and afterwards it in its turn became oppressive. Never has there been so much oppression and persecution. I dare say many of the Christian martyrs who died for the cause had a spirit of revenge – the feeling that if they got a chance they would take revenge for what they were made to suffer. And the Christians did take revenge when they got the power. So the passive resistance of Christianity became in the end a movement of persecution. It is the vital mixture – the mixture of the life-forces – that comes in and corrupts the whole spiritual movement.

Even Lenin had an idea of this truth. He said, “We must keep our ideal absolutely pure. So long as we with our 150,000-strong Communist Party remain pure and are faithful to our ideal, nothing can resist us.” And it was quite true; for as long as they were able to do that, Communism was really successful.

Hitler too had a glimpse of the same truth. When he killed one of his prominent followers for immorality, he was not quite hypocritical even though he had known about it before. In some vague way he felt that the Nazi Party must be kept pure if it were to succeed.

It is because of the vital mixture that I want to bring down a Power which I call the Truth-Consciousness, which will admit none of it, no compromise with the lower forces, the powers of Falsehood. By the Truth-Consciousness I mean a dynamic divine Consciousness. This Power must govern even the minutest detail of the life and action of man. The question is to bring it down and establish it on earth and keep it pure. For there is always a gravitational pull downwards. So the spiritual power must be such that it can not only resist but overcome that pull.

This is the solution that I propose. It is a spiritual solution that aims at changing the whole basis of human nature. But it is not a question of a moment or a few years. There can be no real solution unless you establish spirituality as the whole basis of life.

Satyendra: So the Truth-Consciousness will take a long time to act upon the whole world?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. But there must be a few – a race of Gods on earth – who will at first embody the new Power and then radiate it throughout the world like waves. When this force of action is established in the world, humanity will gradually turn towards it.

It was because of the difficulty of changing human nature – the crooked human nature which Vivekananda called “the dog’s curled tail” – that the ascetic path advocated fleeing from the world as the only remedy. No one thought it possible to change human nature and so everybody said, “Drop it.”

Satyendra: There is an idea among some people here that even those who have gone into Laya [dissolution] will have to come back to change their nature.

Sri Aurobindo: Why should they come back?

Purani: I believe what is meant is that Buddha, Shankara and others who went into Laya and accepted escape from Nature have not really got liberation.

Sri Aurobindo: They got the liberation of the spirit and that is what they wanted.

Purani: The question may be put like this: Could their escape be considered to be against the fiat of the Divine?

Sri Aurobindo: But why should it be so considered? If the Divine in them chose that path the question settles itself.

Purani: Could they really drop their nature? What becomes of the mind, the vital being and the physical?

Sri Aurobindo: What do you mean by “their nature”? They no longer have any nature when they enter into Laya; they drop it.

Satyendra: Cannot the human soul, the psychic being, escape?

Sri Aurobindo: As I say, if you want to escape, you may. To accept the transformation or to escape is your own affair, but if you accept my idea of the world the truth of evolution stands.

Satyendra: But the solution is very difficult, Sir – at least to me.

Sri Aurobindo: It is not at all easy. One way of looking at transformation is as the Tamil saint Nammalwar puts it: Vishnu comes down with all the Gods and takes possession of the earth. My way is the other: to change the human being by some sort of evolution into what I call a race of Gods. The Hindu vision of the last Avatar Kalki destroying everybody is an easy but rather drastic solution.

The Divine Consciousness has entered into the Inconscient by a process of involution. It is only apparently inconscient. It is also superconscient. From the Inconscience it is trying to evolve and that process thus becomes a process of manifestation. But if one does not want to manifest the Divine, it is his own affair. Someone asked the Mother about Ramana Maharshi. The Mother said, “If the Divine in him does not want to undertake the transformation, it is not necessary for him.”

Satyendra: When S.D. asked Maharshi, he said, “There is no Sankalpa [will] in me.” The Spirit can’t be compelled to choose a fixed path. Each one must follow the Divine within.

Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary for all to do this Yoga. It is a mistaken idea that I want everybody to do this Yoga.

Satyendra: They believe that Buddha or Shankara will have to be born again to do it.

Sri Aurobindo: I don’t say that they won’t be reborn, but there is no compulsion. As Ramakrishna said, the Ishwarakoti can go up and down as he chooses. It is therefore wrong to suppose that this Yoga is for everybody.

Satyendra: Your effort may also end in becoming a religion wanting to convert all. Already there are signs.

Sri Aurobindo: But I have never wanted to start a religion. I have said nothing new in philosophy. In fact, I am not a philosopher by temperament. Richard came and said, “Let us have a synthesis of knowledge.” I said, “All right. Let us synthesise.” I have written everything not from thought but from experience as it developed in my practice of Yoga. I have not cared even to be consistent or to see whether all my thoughts hung together.

Somebody has said that I have a great similarity to Hegel because I used the word “synthesis” and he speaks of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But I must confess I have no idea of what Hegel says.

Western philosophies are so mental and dry. They seem to lead to nothing, only mental gymnastics trying to find out things like, “What is judgment?” and “What is not judgment?” They appear to be written for the purpose of using the mind, not for finding or arriving at the Truth.

People speak of Platonism as a philosophy. Plato simply expresses what he thought and knew about life and men. You hear of Neoplatonism, etc., etc. I must say I got a shock when I read Adhar Das describing my philosophy as “Aurobindoism”!

Nirodbaran: It can’t be helped. It is a convenient simplification.

Satyendra: They are entitled to call you a philosopher, for you have followed the tradition of the Acharyas and written about the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, that is true.

Satyendra: Besides, each one thinks you support his own school.

Sri Aurobindo: The other day a follower of Nimbarka wrote to me that what I have said agrees very well with Nimbarka’s philosophy. Even the followers of Madhwa say that I belong to them.

Satyendra: But if they knew your philosophy properly, perhaps all of them would attack you.

Sri Aurobindo: I have said nothing new in my philosophy. I have not put my philosophy into the Gita. I have only tried to explain what seems to be the sense of the Gita in the light of my own experience. But I do admit to a new way of Yoga.

I can’t say that I like Indian commentaries on philosophies. They are very academic and pedantic, an abstract rigmarole, a maze of words, the authors trying to get rid of whatever spiritual experiences they don’t recognise. For example, Ramanuja says at one place that no such thing as consciousness exists and that nobody can experience pure consciousness! It is staggering.

Satyendra: You have made a translation of the Katha Upanishad. It is very fine. Why haven’t you republished it since it first came out?

Sri Aurobindo: It was translated when I was very young. I wanted to convey the literary merit of the original in the translation. But now a revision and many changes would be necessary.

Satyendra: This Upanishad speaks of three Nachiketa fires. What are they?

Sri Aurobindo: One is the fire in the heart. Another is above, and the two ends of the third are not known but only the middle term. This middle term is the physical, vital and mental – Bhur, Bhuvar and Swar – including the highest mind regions. I wanted to explain other things also but at present the whole matter remains pending.

Satyendra: Why did you take up the Isha Upanishad?

Sri Aurobindo: Because it agreed with my line of sadhana and experience.

Satyendra: So many paths have been tried and I believe the other Yogas also have some truth.

Sri Aurobindo: Why not? All are parts of the same Truth.

Satyendra: But several sadhaks here tend to be so exclusive.

Nirodbaran: That is because we have not got the Truth-Consciousness yet.

Sri Aurobindo: Quite so.