Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

5 March 1940

Purani: While talking on the world situation yesterday, did you say that the Indian problem is no less complex or did you mean our Ashram problem?

Sri Aurobindo: I said nothing about the Ashram and I didn’t use the word “complex”. I said “extremely confused” and added that the Indian situation is no less so with its Muslims, Parsis, X, Y, etc.

Satyendra: When one has attained to the higher consciousness and is firmly seated in that consciousness, then one can slowly take up any activity without getting disturbed.

Sri Aurobindo: Quite so.

Nirodbaran: In the transitional stage till the mind is replaced by the spiritual consciousness, with what attitude should one do his work?

Sri Aurobindo: What work?

Nirodbaran: Say, philosophical or political.

Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary to do political work. About the philosophical, one has to reject what ought to be rejected from the nature, for example, the habit of disputation, considering one’s own idea alone as true and not seeing the truth in other’s ideas and taking up an idea because one likes it, not because it is true. That is the nature of the mind in general.

(After a pause) In my own case so long as I was in the mind I couldn’t understand philosophy at all. I tried to read Kant but couldn’t read more than one page. Plato, of course, I read. But it was only when I went above the mind that I could understand philosophy and write philosophy. Ideas and thoughts began to flow in, visions and spiritual experience. Insight and spiritual perception, a sort of revelation built my philosophy. It was not by any process of mental reasoning or argument that I wrote the Arya.

Nirodbaran: Then you didn’t try by the mind to understand?

Sri Aurobindo: As I said, I read only one page of Kant and then gave it up, because it wouldn’t go in: that is, it didn’t become real to me. I was like Manilal grappling with The Life Divine. Plato I could read, as he was not merely metaphysical. Nietzsche also because of his powerful ideas. In Indian philosophy I read the Upanishads and the Gita, etc. They are, of course, mainly results of spiritual experience. People think I must be immensely learned and know all about Hegel, Kant and the others. The fact is that I haven’t even read them; and people don’t know I have written everything from experience and spiritual perception. Modern philosophers wrap their ideas up in extraordinary phraseology and there is too much gymnastics of the mind – even then they don’t seem to have gone deeper than the Greeks in their ideas and theories. I read some of the commentaries of Ramanuja, Shankara, etc. They seemed to me mere words and phrases and at the end Ramanuja says that nobody has experienced Pure Consciousness – a most amazing statement, absurd.

Nirodbaran: In your case it was an opening then, like the one to painting?

Sri Aurobindo: Yes; but with painting, it was a moment’s sudden opening while this one was a result of spiritual experience.

Nirodbaran: Then I can hope to understand philosophy some day.

Satyendra: You want to understand Kant?

Nirodbaran: Oh, no, no!

Sri Aurobindo: It would be a sheer waste of time for him.

Satyendra: Then Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy?

Nirodbaran: Yes, and Indian philosophy. Even here there is too much complication; there are so many Purushas and Prakritis.

Sri Aurobindo: There is only one Prakriti.

Nirodbaran: Para and Apara Prakriti.

Sri Aurobindo: What is difficult there? Para Prakriti is nature higher than your own.

Evening

Nirodbaran: Will you now have time to finish Savitri?

Sri Aurobindo: Oh, Savitri will take a long time. I have to go over all the old ground.

Nirodbaran: How?

Sri Aurobindo: Every time I find more and more imperfections.

Nirodbaran: Jatin Bal is preparing some notes for you on Einstein’s relativity.

This led to a talk on relativity between Sri Aurobindo and Purani who brought in Riemann’s name as a famous mathematician.

Sri Aurobindo: Euclid was bad enough. When Riemann came in, it was time for me to give up mathematics.