Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

14 December 1939

Satyendra: Meher Baba says that Sai Baba and others were moulding the events of the last war. But if so many spiritual figures work at the same job like that, I wonder what the result will be. Each will try in his own way and cut across the work of the others.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they may make a muddle of it.

Purani: They can’t make a worse muddle than the politicians.

Nirodbaran: But why a muddle at all if they work from intuitive insight?

Satyendra: Even so, up to Overmind everything is a play of possibilities. And one possibility will counteract another.

Sri Aurobindo: Quite so. Dayanand had the idea of establishing world peace by bringing all the nations together. He could have said he established the League and some other Yogi disestablished it.

Satyendra: Did you meet Dayanand?

Sri Aurobindo: No, I met one of his disciples, a scientist in Calcutta National College. When I wrote about the future Avatar, he said the Avatar was already there, meaning Dayanand.

Nirodbaran: Weren’t there two Dayanands?

Satyendra: Yes, the one Sri Aurobindo has written about was an Arya Samajist, while there was another, a Bengali, who used to keep nothing for the next day because he believed in never planning for the future.

Sri Aurobindo: He is the man who started Sannyasi marriages. I don’t know whether they were real marriages or spiritual ones. He had something genuine in him. Barin used to be in ecstasies over him.

Satyendra: Another Avatar is coming out from Poona. He will declare himself in 1941.

Sri Aurobindo: Who is that?

Satyendra: He is claimed by those people who dissociated themselves from the Theosophists.

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, one more of their romances!

Satyendra: Didn’t Madame Blavatsky have something real in her, something mystic?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, but the romance was also there. When one deals with mysticism one has to be very careful. There is any amount of truth and there is any amount of imagination. Nivedita spoke of the Theosophists as “woolly-headed people”.

Satyendra: The Rosicrucians too believe in the reality of mystic experiences.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, Arjava (John Chadwick) belonged to one of their groups at Cambridge, and this created a lot of difficulty for him at the beginning of his sadhana here. The Rosicrucians posit two principles in man – good and evil personas. The evil persona has to be raised up in order to be got rid of. There are already enough bad things in our nature to deal with without raising up other evil things. Europeans have no knowledge of these matters. Even the Christian mystics seem to have no clear idea.

Satyendra: I suppose it is because the Europeans don’t want to get rid of their individuality.

Sri Aurobindo: They mix up the Self and the ego. Even when they are identified with the Self, they think it is the ego that has become that. Even Blake who had some idea of identity with the Self appears to have made this mistake.

Purani (after a lull in the talk): Anilbaran says that according to Kant if one follows Reason one is free but if one follows Sense one is bound. There is also the question: Is Buddhi or Intellect an instrument of Prakriti and can a man, so long as he follows Buddhi, be free in the Gita’s sense – that is, free from Nature?

Sri Aurobindo: Does the Gita say that he can’t be free?

Purani: Well, there is a sloka which says that Sattwa, the mental Guna, binds by happiness.

Sri Aurobindo: That is quite a different thing. You are mixing up two different things. The question is whether Buddhi can help you to detach yourself from your nature and lead to the perception of the Purusha, the free Witness.

Purani: The text of the Gita will support this role of Buddhi.

Sri Aurobindo: I should think so. Otherwise what is the meaning of the Gita laying so much stress on Buddhi?

Nirodbaran: Then does it mean that Buddhi is not an instrument of Nature?

Sri Aurobindo: It is an instrument that helps one to rise to the higher nature. You have to use the lower instruments to rise to the higher.

Purani: Anilbaran does not want to admit Sisir Maitra’s contention that Kant’s idea of following Reason is the same as the Gita’s Buddhi-Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo: He is quite a controversialist. (Laughter) But in a controversy one has to see whatever truth there is in others’ points of view.

Purani: Kant, it seems, changed his mind in later life and admitted the necessity of Faith, which he deals with in his Critique of Practical Reason.

Sri Aurobindo: I haven’t read European philosophy carefully.

Purani: Besides, it doesn’t interest us, as it has no practical bearing.

Sri Aurobindo: That was Arjava’s great complaint, that here people always want something practical. They don’t want to think for the sake of thinking. (Laughter)

Purani: Kant’s notion of freedom is not the same as our Indian notion of Mukti.

Sri Aurobindo: The European idea is to arrive at the Truth.

Satyendra: They also have some idea of applying the Truth.

Purani: Yes, a sort of idealism but not spirituality. In his Practical Reason Kant maintains that Pure Reason is an abstract faculty hardly to be found unmixed in men.

Sri Aurobindo: What is it for then?

Purani: It is just an ideal hardly attainable. So Practical Reason is necessary. Kant’s opponents say that everybody follows Reason and so everybody is free. Everybody justifies his action by some reasoning. But in that case, even a thief can justify his stealing by some reasoning.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, and a very practical reasoning too. (Laughter)

Purani: Even the thief is free because he acts freely.

Sri Aurobindo: How?

Purani: He decides out of his own free will.

Sri Aurobindo: But merely by reasoning he can’t be free. If we apply the Gita, one is not free merely because one reasons about stealing, but if one can steal disinterestedly and with detachment one can be free.

Satyendra: Wouldn’t it be difficult for Europeans to grasp such ideas – for instance, that of killing people with detachment?

Nirodbaran: In the New Statesman, the French author Gide speaks of disinterested action, even criminal or any other kind of action.

Evening

Dr. Becharlal: Are trust and faith the same?

Sri Aurobindo kept silent, not giving an answer.

Dr. Becharlal: In the Words of the Mother, it is said that trust in the Divine brings the Grace. So isn’t trust the key to having the Grace?

Sri Aurobindo: There is more than one key.

Dr. Becharlal: Doesn’t trust lead to surrender?

Sri Aurobindo: Not necessarily. If you trust a friend, it does not mean that you surrender to him.

Dr. Becharlal: But as the trust increases you surrender more and more.

Sri Aurobindo: If you trust a friend in a particular matter, it doesn’t mean that you surrender to him in everything else.