Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

6 December 1939

Nirodbaran: Dakshina has had no sleep for three nights.

Sri Aurobindo: What’s the matter with these people? Why can’t Dakshina sleep? Thinking?

Nirodbaran: No, vital restlessness. He says everything is a chaos.

Sri Aurobindo: Well, he has to build a cosmos out of it. He has to quiet the vital being.

Nirodbaran: S told me of an experience. She feels a stillness coming down upon her and she becomes perfectly still, without any vibration. Then the stillness melts and the outline of her body disappears into a void, a nothingness. She becomes unconscious of even her breath. When she comes back to the body-sense, breathing slowly, she has the feeling, “I am in the heart.”

Sri Aurobindo: Is the experience frequent and is she conscious of the nothingness?

Nirodbaran: She is conscious.

Sri Aurobindo: It is a kind of Nirvana of the personal being, where the cessation of breath usually occurs. It is not really a cessation but only apparently one.

Satyendra: Is that Shunyam [void]? And is it really what we call Nirvana?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes – (after a pause) a temporary Nirvana of the personal self.

Nirodbaran: And what is that feeling in the heart?

Sri Aurobindo: That is the return of the sense of existence felt in the psychic being – what may be called the individual spiritual existence.

Satyendra: In exteriorisation a cessation of breath also occurs.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, but here she loses the individual existence and is conscious only of nothingness.

Satyendra: Does it mean liberation from desire and ego?

Sri Aurobindo: No, unless the experience is frequent. That is why I wanted to know if she has it frequently. If the experience has become permanent – that is, if it remains all the time or can be called up any time – then one can get rid of desires or at least quiet them down.

In the Nirvanic experience you don’t feel yourself as particularly anybody, nor are you exactly nobody. Either your physical being, the normal body, is felt as a point or spot in Infinity or you feel yourself as part of the Universal. The body is felt inside you and not you inside the body.

Satyendra: According to traditional Vedanta, the experience of Shunyam precedes the experience of Self-realisation.

Sri Aurobindo: Can’t say that. It may precede or come after.

Evening

The talk started again about Meher Baba.

Satyendra: Meher Baba speaks of a latent state of consciousness which is the origin of everything. After that latent state comes the play of possibilities.

Sri Aurobindo: If it is a play of possibilities only, how does the cosmos evolve? It would remain a chaos. What decides the actuality?

Satyendra: He doesn’t say anything definite. He speaks of fourteen Shunyams: Intuition, Superconscious State, Lower Inspiration, Higher Inspiration, Insight, Illumination, etc.

Sri Aurobindo: How does he classify them? Is Intuition the Intuitive Mind?

Satyendra: He has no classification. He doesn’t have the critical mind required for that. But he doesn’t believe in the Vedantic withdrawal from life. He wants to bring down the realisation into this earth and work here – a sort of heaven on earth.

Sri Aurobindo: There he agrees with our system. This aim now seems to be followed by others also.

Satyendra: In Meher Baba’s scheme there is no place for the individual.

Sri Aurobindo: How?

Satyendra: When you realise the Divine, you act from the Cosmic Consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo: Who is this “you”?

Satyendra: I am putting it in that form. He means the individual consciousness is identified with the Cosmic Consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo: Then it is all right.

Satyendra: But it is the Cosmic Consciousness that acts through the individual.

Nirodbaran: In Europe, during his travel there, he got a bad reputation. He was called a fraud and a cheat.

Satyendra: That is the European mentality. They can’t bear anything mystic.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, Huxley and others are ridiculed for their mysticism.

Satyendra: One thing is queer about Meher Baba. He has never been in want of money. Money has simply flowed in.

Champaklal: Then he has reached God?

Sri Aurobindo (laughing): And he surely must be in the Cosmic Consciousness!

Satyendra: He is so erratic in his behaviour. Today he is going to one place, tomorrow another; he brings lady disciples here from England to go to China; then after they have made a tour of India he suddenly alters his plan and sends them back to England.

Sri Aurobindo: That obviously is his cosmic movement. (Laughter)