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Nirodbaran

Talks with Sri Aurobindo


Volume 1

10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941

17 December 1940

Today Anilbaran asked through Purani: “What is the limit of transformation which the Gita speaks of?”

Sri Aurobindo: Limit of transformation? But the Gita, as I said, doesn’t speak of transformation. It goes as far as the Buddhi.

Purani: Krishna says, puta madbhavam agatah – “They come to My nature” – doesn’t this mean transformation of nature?

Sri Aurobindo: That is not transformation. Puta, being purified, you attain to My nature – the Divine nature – but such an attainment is not transformation.

Purani: When one is acting from the Divine nature, the Divine spiritual consciousness is the background. Is it not the transformed nature?

Sri Aurobindo: What is the Divine nature? Transformation does not mean the change of ordinary nature into it. At least that is not the sense in which I have used the term.

Purani: The Vaishnavas speak of getting the nature of the Divine.

Sri Aurobindo: Then is that transformation? If so, the Vaishnavas have the supramental transformation of the nature! And any change of nature can be called that. In that case, attaining a Sattwic nature is also transformation.

Nirodbaran: Most of us don’t quite understand what is meant by this transformation.

Sri Aurobindo: When there is an entire change in the basis of one’s consciousness and a radical change in the dynamic movement of one’s nature; in other words one is no longer acting from the ordinary or even the enlightened human consciousness and its ignorance.

Nirodbaran: Couldn’t people like Ramakrishna, who have attained to the Divine consciousness and been living in and acting from it, be said to have transformed their nature? He didn’t act from a human motive or from egoism or selfishness.

Sri Aurobindo: Was he correct in all his actions? Did he not commit any mistakes? At least he didn’t claim to be in such a state. He didn’t have selfishness in the ordinary human sense of the term, but was he completely free from the separative I? He himself said that the shadow or form of the I is necessary for action. In the supramental transformation the ego is not indispensable for action.

People always confuse a change of nature with transformation. If a change of nature means transformation, then many sadhaks here have got transformation.

Nirodbaran: What then is transformation?

Sri Aurobindo: Transformation is that state in which everything is based on the Truth-Consciousness; the whole instrumentality is that. One lives in that and acts from that; one has it both in its static and dynamic aspects.

It is said that Ramakrishna had a cold while travelling in a train. Somebody asked him to put his head out the window and his cold would be cured. He did that.

Nirodbaran: He was quite childlike in many such matters.

Sri Aurobindo: But was it acting from the Divine Consciousness?

Dr. Manilal: What about Buddha, Sir? Was he not transformed?

Sri Aurobindo: He had knowledge. Knowledge is not transformation. People are using the word in any sense just like the word supramental. It is I who have first used it and in the special sense I have given to it. If everybody has attained to the transformation I speak of, the supramental transformation has already been done and everybody is supramental. They don’t make the distinction between action from a spiritual consciousness which is above mind but acts through human instruments, and the supramental action from the Truth-Consciousness.

Dr. Manilal: There may be sadhaks here who act from the spiritual consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo: Who? Nirod? (Laughter)

Dr. Manilal: Yes, Nirod and Anilbaran, etc. (Laughter)

Purani: What Ramakrishna and others did came at most from the intuitive consciousness. They were open to that plane and got inspiration for action from those levels.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, their static consciousness may have been transformed, but it is the dynamic nature, too, that has to undergo transformation.

Purani: That is why they called this world Ignorance. It is Sri Aurobindo, alone, who said that Ignorance is growing knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo: If they had believed in and known about transformation, they wouldn’t have condemned the world as Maya.

People get shocked when they hear that something more has to be achieved.

Purani: Yes, they think Ramakrishna and everybody else had all the knowledge and realisation. What more can there be?

Dr. Manilal: But you have got transformation even down to the Inconscience, Sir.

Sri Aurobindo: Have I? I am glad to hear of it.

Mulshankar: If you haven’t, how can you write or know about it?

Sri Aurobindo: One can’t have the knowledge of a thing, without first getting the thing? If you are asking whether I have the experience of the Inconscience, I say I have and so I can write from my experience of it.

Nirodbaran (To Dr. Manilal): You have an idea of peace, you know about it but you haven’t got it yet.

Dr. Manilal: As I see the sea, have an idea of it and know about it without plunging into it?

Sri Aurobindo: Even seeing it, you may not know it is the sea. As some people from Punjab saw the sea and asked, “What is that blue thing?” (Laughter)

Evening

Dr. Manilal: How shall we be able to know whether one’s nature has been transformed?

Sri Aurobindo: By being transformed yourself! (Laughter)

Mulshankar: Could Buddha be said to have a transformed nature? His actions and discourses don’t seem to have been inspired from the human mind.

Sri Aurobindo: He used human reason and logic in his discourses.

Dr. Manilal: Nirod won’t agree that Buddha didn’t have a transformed nature, being a Buddhist himself. He will take the side of Buddha.

Sri Aurobindo: Well?

Nirodbaran: I didn’t say that Buddha was transformed. But as for applying human reason and logic, you also do the same with us.

Sri Aurobindo: That is because I have to speak to the human mind, so I have to apply human logic.

Dr. Manilal: By what tests or actions could one judge that one’s nature is transformed? Is there no such criterion?

Sri Aurobindo: You are asking like Arjuna in the Gita, “How does a liberated man walk or speak?” As I said, you have to be transformed yourself to know that. (Laughter)

Dr. Manilal (laughing): That is what I too said to Nirod. That shows I have become transformed.

Sri Aurobindo: That doesn’t show that.

Dr. Manilal: Are we a help or hindrance, Sir, in your work? (Laughter)

Sri Aurobindo (smiling): You are asking a delicate personal question. You may be either or both. Or your help may be a hindrance and your hindrance a help. (Laughter) You have to be transformed in order to realise that.

In the last issue of the Sunday Times there are some stories related by Europeans about incidents of their previous births. They have given corroborative proofs by which the stories have been verified. (Sri Aurobindo cited an example.)

Dr. Manilal: I also heard of a story, Sir. In our part a deputy magistrate’s grandson, who is now a student, related that he had been a parrot in a previous birth, residing in a particular banyan tree and bowing before the image of Vishnu. The wife of this magistrate, while passing beneath that tree, had seen a parrot and after hearing about its religious character prayed that it might be born as her grandson. The grandson related the story when he was only four years of age.

Appendix

À propos of Sri Aurobindo’s mention of his “experience of the Inconscience”, we may quote a sonnet of his dating to the same period as these Talks.

The Inconscient Foundation

My mind beholds its veiled subconscient base;

All the dead obstinate symbols of the past,

The hereditary moulds, the stamps of race

Are upheld to sight, the old imprints effaced.

In a downpour of supernal light it reads

The black Inconscient’s enigmatic script –

Recorded in a hundred shadowy screeds

An inert world’s obscure enormous drift;

All flames, is torn and burned and cast away.

There slept the tables of the Ignorance,

There the dumb dragon edicts of her sway,

The scriptures of Necessity and Chance.

Pure is the huge foundation now and nude,

A boundless mirror of God’s infinitude.

18 October 1939, 7 February 1940