Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
21 January 1939
Again Dr. Rao’s visit day. As usual he began the massage and asked Sri Aurobindo about the pain in his knee-joint.
Sri Aurobindo: The pain is still there.
Dr. Rao: That is because you are moving the leg after a long time. It will disappear when you are accustomed to it.
Sri Aurobindo: Accustomed to the pain? (Laughter)
Dr. Rao could not catch the joke and was a little embarrassed by our hearty laughter. After the massage was over, the Mother came in and we sat down to meditate for about ten minutes. After a while Dr. Rao asked Satyendra if he could stay longer. Satyendra told him he could ask the Mother. Then Satyendra himself conveyed the question to her. She smiled. Then, as it was about 7 p.m. and she got up to go for the general meditation, she said to Rao, “Are you coming? I am going to the meditation.” Rao jumped up and followed the Mother.
The talk turned to local politics and afterwards Indian politics and Gandhi and non-violence and Hitlerism.
Sri Aurobindo: If Gandhi met Hitler, Hitler would probably say to him, “You follow your inner voice, Mr. Gandhi, and I my own.” And there is no reason to say he would be wrong, for inner voices may differ and one kind of voice may be good and necessary for one person while the very opposite may be the same for another. The Cosmic Spirit may have a certain thing for Hitler and lead him in the way he is going, whereas it may decide differently in another case.
Nirodbaran: That may end in a clash between the two and the breaking of the vessels.
Satyendra: What of that? Something good may come out of it.
Purani: I am afraid this would lead to fatalism or belief in destiny.
Sri Aurobindo: It may. There have been people who have believed in fate, destiny or whatever else you may call it. Napoleon III used to say, “So long as something is necessary to be done by me, it will be done in any case and when that necessity ceases I shall be thrown by the wayside like an outworn vessel.” And that is exactly what happened to him. Napoleon Bonaparte also believed in fate.
Satyendra: Yes. When somebody questioned him why, if he believed in fate, he went on planning, he replied, “It is fated that I should plan.”
Sri Aurobindo: All men who are great and strong and powerful believe in some higher force greater than themselves moving them. Socrates used to call this force his Daemon. Daemon means divine being. It is curious how sometimes even in small things one depends on the voice. Once Socrates was walking with a disciple. When they were about to take a turn, the disciple said, “Let us go along this route.” Socrates replied, “No, my Daemon asks me to take that other.” The disciple didn’t agree and pursued his own way. After he had gone a little distance he was attacked by a herd of pigs and trodden down by them.
There are some people who don’t follow the inner voice but the inner light. The Quakers believe in that.
Nirodbaran: Do they see the light?
Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know; but someone has said, “See that your light is not darkness.”
The strange thing is that this inner voice doesn’t give any reason; it only says, “Do this” or “Do that” and “If you don’t do it, bad results will follow.” Strangely enough, when you don’t listen to it, bad results do follow. Lele used to say that whenever he didn’t listen to his inner voice he met with pain and suffering.
Purani: But there are many kinds of voices owing to the forces on different planes and it is extremely difficult to distinguish which is right, the true inner voice. There may be voices from mental, vital and subtle-physical planes. Moreover, in the same man the voices may differ.
Sri Aurobindo: Quite true. A friend of Hitler’s said about him that what Hitler said today he contradicted the next day. I also heard a voice asking me to come to Pondicherry. But it was not an inner voice: it came from above.
Satyendra: Cannot one be mistaken in obeying these voices?
Sri Aurobindo: It was impossible to make a mistake or to think of disobeying that voice which came to me. There are some voices about which there is no possibility of any doubt or mistake. Charu wanted me to go to France so that he might have no further trouble, I suppose. When I arrived at Chandernagore, he refused to receive me and threw me on to Motilal.
Nirodbaran: But why should he receive you?
Sri Aurobindo: Because as a revolutionary he was obliged to do so.
Nirodbaran: Was he a revolutionary also?
Sri Aurobindo: Good Lord, we were together in jail. But perhaps his jail experience frightened him. He was at the beginning a very ardent revolutionary.
Purani: Nolini says he was weeping and weeping in jail. The jail authorities thought that he couldn’t be a revolutionary when he wept so much, and so they let him off. (Laughter)
Sri Aurobindo: No, that was not the reason. It was by the intervention of the French Government, I think, that he got his release. At the beginning he was not only himself an ardent revolutionary but also egging others on to revolution. Barin once walked into his house, gave him a long lecture on revolution and converted him in one day!
Purani: Yes, Barin had intensity and fire at that time. Once I saw him at Baroda with my brother. They were discussing revolutionary plans. I saw that fire in his eyes. I have heard that Nivedita also was some sort of a revolutionary.
Sri Aurobindo: What do you mean by “some sort”? She was one of the revolutionary leaders. She went about visiting various places to come into contact with the people. She was open, frank and talked freely of her revolutionary plans to everybody. There was no concealment about her. Whenever she used to speak on revolution, it was her very soul, her true personality that came out. Her whole mind and life expressed itself thus. Yoga was Yoga, but it was revolutionary work that seemed intended for her. That is fire! Her book, Kali the Mother, is very inspiring but revolutionary and not at all non-violent.
She went about among the Thakurs of Rajputana trying to preach to them revolution. At that time everybody wanted some kind of revolution. I myself met several Rajput Thakurs who, unsuspected by the Government, had revolutionary ideas and tendencies. One Thakur, Ram Singh, who joined our movement, was afterwards caught and put in jail. He suddenly died there in a short time. Moropant said, “He died out of fright.” But he was not a man to be frightened. They may have poisoned him. Moropant, you know, turned afterwards a Moderate. More than one Indian battalion were ready to help us. I knew a Punjabi sentry at Alipore who spoke to me about the revolution. (Turning to Purani) Do you know one Mandale?
Purani: With spectacles?
Sri Aurobindo: Yes.
Purani: I knew him. He became a quiet man later and settled down in life.
Sri Aurobindo: It was he who introduced me through someone else to the Secret Society where I came into contact with Tilak and others.
Nirodbaran: Gandhi once criticised Nivedita as being volatile and mercurial. The Modern Review violently protested and he had to recant.
Sri Aurobindo: Nivedita volatile? What nonsense! She was a solid worker.
Once she came to the Gaekwar and told him to join the revolution and said, “If you have anything more to ask, you can ask Mr. Ghose.” But the Gaekwar never talked politics with me. By the way, he said about me, between my Swadeshi and early Pondicherry periods, “Mr. Ghose is an extinct volcano now. He has become a Yogi.”
One thing only about Nivedita I couldn’t understand. She had an admiration for Gokhale. I don’t understand how a revolutionary could admire him. On one occasion she was much exercised over a threat to his life. She came to me and said, “Mr. Ghose, is it one of your men who is doing this?” I said, “No,” She was much relieved and said, “Then it must be a free-lance.”
The first time she came to me she said, “I hear, Mr. Ghose, you are a worshipper of Shakti, Force.” There was no non-violence about her. She had an artistic side too. Khaserao Jadhav and I went to receive her at the station. Seeing the Dharamsala near the station she exclaimed, “How beautiful!” While looking at the College building she cried, “How horrible!” Khaserao said later, “She must be a little mad.”
Purani: That College building is an imitation of Eton.
Sri Aurobindo: But Eton has no dome.
Purani: It is a combination of modern with ancient architecture.
Sri Aurobindo: At any rate it is the ugliest dome possible.
The Ramakrishna Mission was a little afraid of Nivedita’s political activities and asked her to keep them separate from its work.
Purani: What about her yogic achievements?
Sri Aurobindo: I don’t know. Whenever we met we spoke about politics and revolution. But her eyes showed a power of concentration and revealed a capacity for going into trance.
Nirodbaran: She came to India with the idea of doing Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, but she took up politics as a part of Vivekananda’s work. Her book is one of the best on Vivekananda. Vivekananda himself had ideas about political work and had spells of revolutionary fervour. Once he had a vision which corresponded to something like the Maniktola Garden.
It is curious how many Sannyasins have thought of India’s freedom. Maharshi’s young disciples were revolutionaries; our Yogananda’s Guru also had revolutionary ideas; Thakur Dayanand was a revolutionary, I think, and the Sannyasin who spoke about the Uttara Yogi, the Yogi from the North, was another.
Purani: Brahmananda of Chandod spoke of driving away the British.
Sri Aurobindo: Is that so? I didn’t know it.
Purani: It is said that Nivedita wept bitterly because she found that everything the revolutionaries had done to awake the people had quieted down after the arrest of Tilak.