Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
13 December 1940
Dr. Manilal: Sir, was the Mother doing your Yoga in Europe?
Sri Aurobindo: Why my Yoga? She was doing Yoga, though the Europeans don’t call it Yoga.
Nirodbaran: There is such a striking similarity between your ideas and the Mother’s.
Dr. Manilal: Yes, that is why I ask.
Sri Aurobindo: Yoga is everywhere the same.
Nirodbaran: Yes, but what I mean is that the Mother also stressed the need of divine manifestation, of not considering the world as Maya. Did she have any teacher?
Sri Aurobindo: No, Jnan Chakravarty, the husband of Krishnaprem’s Guru, gave her the Gita’s Yoga in Paris. And she used to come in contact with Abdul Baha in Paris. As a matter of fact, it was she who was leading and organising the Bahai group in Europe. In one of their group meditations Mother had some experience which none of the others had.
Dr. Manilal: What is Bahaism, Sir? I find it mentioned in the Sunday Times too.
Sri Aurobindo: I think Abdul Baha was the son or grandson of Baha-ullah who established the Bahai sect. It is a modernised and liberalised form of Mohammedanism. They believe there is truth in every religion, and they believe themselves to have gathered all the essential religious truths. This Baha-ullah was imprisoned in Turkey for thirty or forty years. He was kept in a tower; about thirty to forty thousand people used to come to see him and he used to give them his blessings standing at the tower window.
Nirodbaran: I heard that Mother used to see you in visions, but could not make out the exact identity. She thought it might be a Chinese figure.
Sri Aurobindo: No, it was not like that. Every day somebody used to appear to her calling himself Krishna. As soon as she saw me, she recognised that it was myself.
Evening
Dr. Manilal: Could Hitler be called as great as Napoleon, Sir?
Sri Aurobindo: What? How can he be compared with Napoleon? He can’t stand any comparison with Napoleon. Hitler is a man of one idea; he has no other capacity or activity except that he is also a house-painter, while Napoleon had many sides: he was not only a military general, but also an administrator, organiser, legislator and many other things. It was he who organised France and Europe, stabilised the French Revolution. Besides being a legislator he established the bases of social laws, administration and finance which are followed even today. He is not only the greatest military genius in history but one of the greatest men, with manifold capacities. Hitler is a man of one idea, with no intellect, which he applies with strong force and violence; he has no control over his emotions. He hesitates in his policies which some call cautiousness. And all his power comes from the Asura by whom he is possessed and guided while Napoleon was a normal human being acting through the power of his brain which reached the highest development possible in a human being.
Dr. Manilal: Napoleon is said to have been immoral.
Sri Aurobindo: If you mean that he was not chaste, it is true. As I said, he was a normal human being with enormous many-sided powers and capacities which very few people have possessed.
Hitler’s idea of the Nazi order is also not his. It is the idea of a Jew whom he murdered later on.
Purani: And you can see in Europe the type of New Order and civilisation he wants to establish.
Nirodbaran: But as regards military genius they say he is as great as Napoleon.
Sri Aurobindo: How? One can say that he has developed a new technique which he has pursued with great audacity. Even that new technique is not his. It was discovered by a Frenchman and was passed on to the German generals. They hesitated to act on it while Hitler pursued it boldly, disregarding the advice of the generals.
Hitler is a new type, an infra-rational mystic, representing the dark counterpart of what we are striving to arrive at: a supra-rational mysticism. (Looking at Dr. Manilal) Do you know that in his secluded residence he has a cinema and enjoys and gloats on the horrors and sufferings he has inflicted on people? That is the story told by his maidservant who was with him all the time.