Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

July 1934

Last two weeks what misery and wretchedness I have gone through! On close inspection I find that the only unusual thing I have done is having meals at D's place, cooked by Nishikanta.

It may have helped, but it is not likely to be the main cause. Some thing in the atmosphere probably to which you opened yourself.

Or is it not due to food at all? I have heard that at the time of Darshan all our cravings are thrown up.

There is no such inevitable rule. It is true that attacks are frequent at that time, but one need not admit them.

July 6, 1934

D was saying, "What is food-desire after all, for me? I can give it up at once." How far is this view correct? Or is the vital having its play out under this pretext?

It is a self-deception of the vital, "I have no attachment, so I can go on indulging myself!" But in practice the attachment is there, however lofty the attitude.

July 9, 1934

I don't know what I should do in order to utilise time to my best advantage. Shall I begin by stopping all reading during work? Please give me the right attitude and interest in work.

So long as work or reading either is done merely to utilise time, the right attitude can hardly come or the interest. Work must be done either for pleasure in it or with some purpose beyond itself.

July 25, 1934

Mother, there are days when I am awfully afraid to go to pranam, lest I should have the misfortune to see your grave face, with no smile at all. All my despair, melancholy, etc., is intensified after that, while your smile disperses all gloom.

All this about the Mother's smile and her gravity is simply a trick of the vital. Very often I notice people talk of the Mother's being grave, stern, displeased, angry at Pranam when there has been nothing of the kind—they have attributed to her something created by their own vital imagination. Apart from that the Mocha's smiling or not smiling has nothing to do with the sadhak'S merits or demerits, fitness or unfitness—it is not deliberately done as a reward or a punishment. The Mother smiles on all, without regard to these things. When she does not smile, it is because she is either in trance or absorbed, or concentrated on something within the sadhak that needs her attention—something that has to be done for him or brought down or looked at. It does not mean that there is anything bad or wrong in him. I have told this a hundred times to any number of sadhaks—but in many the vital does not want to accept that because it would lose its main source of grievance, revolt, abhiman,¹¹ desire to go away or give up the Yoga, things which are very precious to it. The very fact that it has these results and leads to nothing but these darknesses ought to be enough to show you that this imagination about Mother's not smiling as a sign of absence of her grace or love is a device and suggestion of the Adversary. You have to drive away these things and so give some chance for the psychic with its deeper and truer love and surrender to come forward and take up the Adhar as its kingdom.

C asks your opinion about his taking a job in the detention camp. How does he hope to get it being a police-suspect himself?

I forgot to write about this. You had better tell C that I do not look with approval on this idea of the post in the detention camp. Even if he got it, it may lead to very undesirable things.

July 28, 1934