Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
6 February 1939
Purani: What is the basic explanation of an attitude like Lajpat Rai’s1?
Sri Aurobindo: Generally it is Tamasic Vairagya2, if it is due to a sense of failure in life. Most people get this kind of world-repulsion when they fail to succeed in life. Failure and frustration lead to what is called Smashan Vairagya – the feeling of renunciation that comes to one in a cemetery – a temporary state of world-disgust.
But in Lajpat Rai’s case perhaps it is Sattwic and not Tamasic disgust. To the mind at this stage everything seems impermanent, fleeting, and the old motives of action are no longer sufficient. This may be the result of a spiritual development through one’s actions in life. It is the mind turning to know things. Gautama Buddha saw human suffering and asked, “Why this suffering?” and then, “How is one to get out of it?” That is Sattwic Vairagya. Pure Sattwic Vairagya is when one gets the perception of the littleness of everything personal – actions, desires, thoughts – and when one sees the vast world, eternal time and infinite space spread out before oneself and feels all human action as if it were nought.
The same truth is behind the saying, “It will be the same a hundred years hence”; and it is true so far as the personal aspect of action is concerned.
Purani: Can it be said that personal actions and other personal things have an importance in so far as through them an impersonal consciousness, or a divine purpose, works itself out?
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, in the impersonal aspect even a small personal action may have a significance. Personal actions have an importance in the evolution of the individual. But it is difficult to persuade ordinary men to take this view.
Purani: Lajpat Rai seems in his letter to doubt even the existence of God.
Sri Aurobindo: That does not matter. It only means he wants to understand the way of God’s working and the nature of this world.
There is a line in Dante which says that even eternal hell is a creation of the Divine Love. I wonder what Lajpat Rai would say to that. And what does Dante mean by it? I don’t understand it myself. One can understand being thrown into hell in order that one may rise up to heaven from it; but how can the Divine Love create eternal hell?3
Purani: Your reference to Dante reminds me of Lascelles Abercrombie’s book, The Idea of Great Poetry. There he says that poetry to be great requires vitality and intensity of experience and expression, as well as range and variety. According to him, Shelley is not equal in range to Milton.
Sri Aurobindo: Range? What does he mean by range? If he means a certain largeness of vision, then Shelley does not have it. Homer, Shakespeare, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have range. But neither Virgil nor Milton has range in the same measure. Their range is not so great. Dante’s range too is partial.
Purani: Abercrombie says that although Goethe has range, his hero Faust begins as a character and ends as an idea.
Sri Aurobindo: That is not quite correct. Faust is a character throughout the first part of Goethe’s poem. Only in the second part does he become an idea. And the two parts are really two separate books. Goethe wrote the second part in his old age. It is entirely different from the first, just as Milton’s Paradise Regained is different from his Paradise Lost. Keats also has two versions of his Hyperion: in the later version Hyperion tends to become an idea.
Purani: Abercrombie remarks about Paradise Lost that its Satan is a symbol of human will struggling against Fate.
Sri Aurobindo: Human will? I always thought it was superhuman will.
1 The following comments on Lajpat Rai are based on A.B. Purani’s record of this talk.
2 World-repulsion arising from the Guna (quality) of Tamas (ignorance and inertia) in one’s nature: the two other Gunas are Rajas (dynamism) and Sattwa (refinement and poise).
3 Sri Aurobindo’s reference is to the sentence in Canto III of Inferno, occurring among the words seen by Dante written on the gate of hell. Dorothy Sayers renders the sentence:
Justice moved my Great Maker; God Eternal
Wrought me: the Power, and the unsearchably
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love Supernal.
The attributes of the Trinity are mentioned here. Charles Williams, in The Figure of Beatrice, comments thus: “If there is God, if there is free-will, then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man free-will; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell.” But Sri Aurobindo’s point about the eternity of hell is not answered. That in the divine dispensation hell should be possible or actual is one thing; but it is quite another that the hell-gate in Dante should read:
Through me the road to everlasting woe,
and
Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.
How can the Supreme Power, Wisdom and Love condemn a soul to everlasting woe and an utter abandonment of hope to get out of hell?