Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

7 March 1940

Nirodbaran: A letter from Charu Ghose. Do you remember he wrote asking your blessings and you inquired, “Who is he?”

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, who is he?

Nirodbaran: He replied, “I am an ordinary man, a clerk, aged fifty-one. I have no other relation except my wife. I could get no learning.”

Sri Aurobindo: Ideal condition for Yoga. He is extraordinary in having no learning but ordinary in having no children.

Nirodbaran: Then a question comes, “Is there anything more than what I have understood after reading Sri Aurobindo’s books? I want to practise the Yoga of surrender by the help of his force and knowledge.” So what’s the answer?

Sri Aurobindo: Has he done any Yoga? He speaks of surrender. So he may know something. He can be asked what he has understood of my works.

Nirodbaran: That is a question difficult to answer.

Sri Aurobindo: I mean what he has understood practically and not philosophically of the Yoga of self-surrender.

Nirodbaran: While in England I read your book The Yoga and Its Objects. I thought, “Why, it is very easy.” (Laughter)

Satyendra: That book is merely a general statement about Yoga. It was only afterwards, when the Supermind came in that everything was made difficult. In this Yoga there is a perpetual progression, no fixed goal or end.

Sri Aurobindo: There is an end at present.

Nirodbaran: What?

Sri Aurobindo: Supermind.

Satyendra (to Nirodbaran): How do you find it now?

Nirodbaran: Well, I am paying for that facile thought about Yoga being easy.

Satyendra: For me it is still more difficult because I have been accustomed to look at the world as unreal and at Brahman as real. Now I have to accept the world, which the mind refuses to do, having been trained for such a long time in the other principle.

Sri Aurobindo: For that reason I had to write three volumes of The Life Divine. Otherwise, as Nirod says, Yoga would be easy.

Nirodbaran (to Satyendra): It is no less difficult for us. To you Brahman is real, the world is unreal and for us it is the other way round. (Laughter) So the difficulty is the same.

Satyendra: No, Sri Aurobindo has said that the denial of the materialist is not so hard to overcome as the refusal of the ascetic.

Since your talk on X in connection with politics, Dr. Becharlal has given up reading newspapers. He reads only the headlines.

Champaklal: Is that why Satyendra is always putting papers by his side?

Sri Aurobindo (laughing): I didn’t mean it for him, I myself read newspapers and enjoy whatever is interesting. For instance, Abdulla Haroon says that each minority is an independent nation. Of course Muslims first – but Harijans are also a nation. (Laughter)

Satyendra: Dr. Alam also seems to be going over to the League. He says now it is a question of distribution.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, he says the fight is now not against the Government but between Hindus and Muslims. The cake is already there; the question is how to distribute it.

Satyendra: He says that all Muslims should join the League to combat the Congress objection that the League is not the only Muslim organisation.

Sri Aurobindo: It is like the fox which had lost its tail asking others to do the same.