Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
23 December 1940
Dr. Manilal: Has Trikalajna no knowledge of the future?
Sri Aurobindo: It means knowledge of all past, present and future.
Dr. Manilal: But if we can change the future by effort …
Sri Aurobindo: Who says that?
Dr. Manilal: I think you have said it, Sir.
Sri Aurobindo: I! What about it then?
Dr. Manilal: Then how can one read the future completely?
Sri Aurobindo: What does “completely” mean?
Dr. Manilal: It means in every detail.
Sri Aurobindo: I didn’t say in every detail. As I said, one has the faculty of knowing.
After this there was miscellaneous talk about this and that, about the Philosophical Congress at Madras, etc. Radhakrishnan then came into the discussion.
Nirodbaran: Radhakrishnan seems to have said that he doesn’t believe there is anyone who can challenge Shankara. It was in a talk in Belur Math regarding Sri Aurobindo.
Sri Aurobindo: There have been many people who have challenged Shankara.
Purani: Yes, Vaishnavas, Ramanuja, Madhava, etc.
After this Nirodbaran referred to Professor Amarnath Jha’s lecture in the Hindu on Indian English where he has mentioned Gandhi’s prose style as simple, sincere, almost Biblical.
Dr. Manilal: I must say Gandhi has improved Gujarati literature remarkably.
On this topic Manilal had an argument with Purani. All the recent stylists of Gujarat came into it: Kanu Munshi, Musriwalla, Kalelkar, etc.
Dr. Manilal: What has happened to Kalelkar? He hasn’t come back here after his first visit.
Sri Aurobindo: Harin has frightened him away.
Purani: What about B.K. Thakore?
Dr. Manilal: Oh yes, he is a great stylist. (After a pause) He is a great drunkard, too.
Purani: I thought he had given up drink.
Dr. Manilal: Oh no, he can’t do without it. He used to go every day to a Bombay station and drink heavily in the station restaurant. Of course he didn’t get tipsy.
Sri Aurobindo: If not tipsy, how is he a drunkard?
Dr. Manilal: He drinks so heavily …
Sri Aurobindo: But drinking heavily doesn’t make him a drunkard; you can call him a heavy drinker.
Dr. Manilal: He drinks in excess.
Sri Aurobindo: What do you mean by excess? Excess for somebody else. But if the quantity doesn’t affect him, it can’t be excess for him.
Dr. Manilal: I submit, Sir.
Sri Aurobindo: In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates, Aristophanes, Agathon and others meet and discuss the nature of love, and drink wine. Everybody gets drunk except Socrates. Even after heavy drinking he keeps on discussing philosophy with some friends, while the rest fall asleep. You can’t call him a drunkard!
Evening
Dr. Manilal has wrapped a piece of cloth around his head because of the cold.
Nirodbaran: Dr. Manilal is looking like a Maharaja.
Sri Aurobindo: I thought he looked like a college professor.
Dr. Manilal: I feel cold in the head, Sir; that’s why I have put this cloth on it. Usually I catch cold in the chest and head.
Nirodbaran: In spite of so many layers of garments? He has at least five on.
Dr. Manilal: Only one is warm.
Sri Aurobindo: Even there he doesn’t hold the record. I remember in London that the strength of Sarat Ghose – one of the Christian Ghoses – was disputed in some talk. He began to take his garments off. He took off his coat, waistcoat, shirt, one vest, then another, and still another and so on – altogether eleven! (Laughter)
Purani started a talk about some evening procession of the Selvaraju family.
Dr. Manilal: Did the family ever come to you, Sir, I mean in your early days here?
Sri Aurobindo: Come to me? It is said that the father of the family tried to kidnap me into British territory, if that is what you mean by coming to me.
Dr. Manilal: I saw the Governor today. He looks absolutely like a bulldog with a ruddy face.
Purani: That is due to drink!
Dr. Manilal: He drinks?
Sri Aurobindo: He is a heavy drinker, not a drunkard (Laughter), but he goes on to the point of apoplexy.
Dr. Manilal (After a while): They speak of Gandharvaloka, Sir. Is there any such world?
Sri Aurobindo: Supposed to be.
Dr. Manilal: Have you seen it, Sir?
Sri Aurobindo: I have not been there.
Dr. Manilal: I meant: did you have any experience?
Sri Aurobindo: It is not necessary: there are many musicians in the Ashram. (Laughter)
Purani: Professor Indra Sen, who has come for the Philosophical Conference at Madras, says that nowadays anybody who has written on any subject, economics, social reform, is being called a philosopher. Gandhi and Tagore are being called philosophers.
Sri Aurobindo: Karl Marx is also a philosopher and all the communists too.
Purani: Yes. Indra Sen is asking if by the supramental descent the whole of humanity is going to be transformed and how humanity is going to be benefited by it. By a change in consciousness?
Sri Aurobindo: If he means supramental transformation, no.
Nirodbaran: I thought there would be a general heightened consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, in some persons.
Purani: I told him there would be a move towards a higher consciousness through the influence of people who have attained to that consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo: That is what I have said myself.
Purani: He wants also to know how humanity today is better fitted for the change than before. I replied that nowadays one has to conceive of the whole of humanity as one unit: one can’t think of it in separate terms or divide it into so many compartments. Nature won’t allow any such division.
Sri Aurobindo: The main question is one of the development of mind. There has been a general development more than before – of course it is nothing exceptional. I am speaking of the masses. That is the first necessary condition.
Purani: Yes, I told him how in Buddha’s time or in the classical period of the Greeks, teaching and culture were limited to a small area, the greater part of the race had no access to them. Now, communication being so easy, there is no such obstacle. One can hear Roosevelt here in India.
There was a Muslim professor who spoke in the Philosophical Congress. He spoke on Freud. He has criticised Freud’s theory that everything is due to the subconscient. Freud says that Moses turned into a prophet because of his personal sufferings, the repression in his childhood. (Laughter)
Sri Aurobindo: Repression complex.
Purani: The professor says that Freud’s theory doesn’t explain Moses.
Sri Aurobindo (laughing): Not at all. It explains Freud. (Laughter) He himself had so many complexes that he couldn’t find any other theory than that for every human action. He says that the sense of injustice in children is from their inability to retain their excrement. (Laughter) And what is surprising is that everybody in Europe believes it. His real contribution is about the subconscient. Even there some of his disciples, such as Jung, are throwing out many things.
Purani: And the professor says that the idea that in primitive races men used to kill their fathers in order to marry their mothers is not true.
Sri Aurobindo: Oh, that old thing!
Purani: Everyone didn’t kill his father.
Sri Aurobindo: Neither did everyone marry his mother.