The letters reveal Nirod's unique relationship with his guru. The exchanges are suffused with a special humour.
Sri Aurobindo : corresp.
Nirodbaran's correspondence with Sri Aurobindo began in February 1933 and continued till November 1938, when Sri Aurobindo injured his leg and Nirod became one of his attendants. The entire correspondence, which was carried on in three separate notebooks according to topics - private, medical, and literary - is presented in chronological order, revealing the unique relationship Nirod enjoyed with his guru, replete with free and frank exchanges and liberal doses of humour. Covering a wide range of topics, both serious and light-hearted, these letters reveal the infinite care Sri Aurobindo devoted to the spiritual development of his disciple.
THEME/S
I am feeling dry, dry, dry. But a mood of meditation creeps over the dryness.
Well, that's all right isn't it?
I find that my point of concentration usually goes between the eyebrows.
A quite useful place for concentration—O.K. so far.
Nothing happens though at times a feeling of স্তব্ধতা ।4
Better and better!
I suppose that is enough for you, but unfortunately I want a little more.
Quite enough for a beginning—only at times, is insufficient; स्तब्धता5 is quite the best ground for experiences and everything else.
Can you tell me why no experience is coming to me and why those that I had long, long ago, have stopped?
Too big a riot of mental activity and vital jumping.
If no joy is felt out of a creation after so much labour, what's the use, can you say?
The use of having no joy? It is no use.
I am thinking—after all what am I to do then? But thinking has no end either.
Quite so. Stop thinking and become স্তব্ধ ।6
Que faire? I suppose this dryness is due to your unexpected progress. That is the only consolation.
Dryness, no! that is part of your own pilgrimage. The rest may be due to Add. Ab. Quite a number of people are trying to become স্তব্ধ, wide etc. without ever having intended it. I like to think my march may have something to do with it.
Addis Ababa—how far?
Can't say. My rapidity slowed down much after D turned turtle and the correspondence avalanche restarted. However "nous progressâmes."7
Will you cast a glance at J's story—Russian Cat, which even Tagore liked?
I shall try my Herculean best—I can't promise more.
Please give me some force for poetry now—without it I don't know how to come out of this condition.
All right—shall try that also.
June 2, 1936
You mean to say—"I am in Heaven. Everything is all right in the best of all possible worlds—in Sri Aurobindo Asram and with Nirod"!
Quite so. All is well, if it ends well.
But how to make you realise that I welcome the stillness etc.... but it's not always there.
I quite realise. Don't make such Herculean efforts to explain it.
No joy, no energy, no cheerfulness. Don't like to read or write—as if a dead man were walking about. Do you understand the position? Any personal experience?
I quite understand; often had it myself devastatingly. That's why I always advise people who have it to cheer up and buck up.
I asked Kanai for my diagnosis—he says some sort of trouble in the "prān"8 positively; desire of ego. Just as a Kaviraj puts his finger on the pulse and diagnoses at once, so with this. What's required is purification.
Diagnosis right—only should add an adjective disappointed pran and ego. No active vital row; vital and ego lying back flat and gloomy.
So, since I have to pass the time, how to do it? To bear the Cross gloomily, hoping for a resurrection?
To cheer up, buck up and the rest if you can, saying "Rome was not built in a day"—if you can't, gloom it through till the sun rises and the little birds chirp and all is well.
Looks however as if you were going through a training in vairagya. Don't much care for vairagya myself, always avoided the beastly thing, but had to go through it partly, till I hit on samata as a better trick. But samata is difficult, vairagya is easy, only damnably gloomy and uncomfortable.
June 3, 1936
Vairagya! Good Lord! What next? A fellow who has always detested it, loved life and company, now undergoing a training in vairagya!! Such is life, eh? Never dreamt of Yoga, and stumbled into it—vairagya now crowns it! Why D's phantom on me? His drive towards vairagya, I understand, was due to his past life's karma. But what past life's karma in my case, please?
How do you know about your past life's karma? But perhaps it is D's karma which is afflicting you,—your karma being that of getting caught up in the swirl of his tempestuous course.
And when I look at D's suffering due to this blessed vairagya, I shudder. I am only a small pot—then why this heavy burden on me?
Well, why did you get into the track of the big pot?
And what kind of vairagya is this? It is encouraged by almost all yogis. Kanai understands by it a positive detachment from things of this life and a luminous aspiration within towards a higher spiritual achievement.
Vairagya means a positive detachment from things of this life—but it does not immediately carry with it a luminous aspiration except for a few fortunate people. For the positive detachment is often a pulling away by the soul while the vital clings and is gloomy and reluctant.
I suppose you mean a different kind of vairagya in my case, suited to my nature?
Yes, tamasic vairagya.
June 4, 1936
B.N. reported yesterday: "A snake has come out of my belly!" So he is germinating snakes now! Shall I give him santonin or rely on the Force?
He is eating dirty food outside—so it is not surprising. But give him santonin.
June 6, 1936
A poem for you. I hope you will make out in it the fall of Adam (soul) from the garden of Eden. But what is it—symbolic, mystic or cystic?
Symbolic mystic without being cryptic-cystic. Anyhow, pure inspiration and very luminous. Something undeniably original, this time, what?
A good piece of news: I find now three mules—mules, mind you, not horses—are trying to draw me on: (1) meditation, (2) silence (not of the mind but of the buccal cavity), (3) poetry.
Well, mules are very useful animals. When Badoglio's motor-lorries broke down, he bought 20,000 mules (I won't swear to the exact number) and they did the trick. You have 3 mules and not 20,000—but perhaps 3 will serve.
The buccal silence I can keep off from clashing with the other two. But the collision between meditation and poetry is inevitable unless I favour one of them.
There are three ways of meeting that situation—(1) say "Yes, yes" to both parties,—but that may create trouble afterwards, (2) Be cryptic-cystic in your answers, so that neither will be sure what you mean, (3) silence with an occasional profound "Ah, hum. Yes, eh!" "Ah hum" always sounds unfathomable depths—and if "Yes" is too positive, "eh" tones it down and corrects it. You have not enough worldly wisdom.
I shall try with all my nerves to concentrate as far as practicable—and I get also some not quite definitely pleasing sensation out of it.
Well, that is good—I hope the indefinite will soon define itself.
As poetry also has come, I wouldn't like to give it up either. But how to harmonise?
No need to harmonise by any set arrangement—only keep up the concentration. One hour of packed concentration or even a few minutes can do as much as three hours less packed. Do you say yours is not packed? Well, striped, streaked, spotted, dotted or whatever it may be.
And do you "like to think" that it is all due to your march forward?
Of course I like and it may even be true.
By the way, my "tamasic vairagya" seems to be an epidemic. J also has the same symptoms.
That kind of vairagya is not new with J, so you need not take the credit of it.
She also added that Death would be a delivery from all these troubles and a renewal of this life.
What an idea! She would have the same things to face with less favourable conditions for overcoming them.
Please ask blessed Time to stand still behind you till your pen has run a 50 mile-gallop on this sheet.
Time can't stand still, but I have tried to make the fellow trot slower instead of cantering—with no great result.
[Dilip sent my Bengali poem: ālor pākhi (The Bird of Light)9 to Sri Aurobindo, saying: O Guru, Nirod has written a fine poem—albeit in a rather sad vein. The word-music is beautiful, what? No change I found necessary. Last night's result—the moonlight, voyez-vous?]
Nirod's poem is exceedingly beautiful, full of the moonlight—he can't say any longer after that that he is not a poet.
June 7, 1936
Herewith a bhatiyāli10—I hope you know this animal, don't you? I have used some native expressions... Of course, aristocratic expressions also abound, but that doesn't matter, especially when this is a socialistic age.
Nothing original, but hope not absolutely aboriginal? How do you find the animal?
Admirable—No matter whether original, aboriginal or co-original—most good poetry is all three together. The animal is a fine animal and the plebeian spots on the aristocratic skin give it a very subtly attractive appearance.
June 10, 1936
T's pain in the finger is worse due to constant work.
As she got nervous (pain and difficulty of doing her work) we sent her to R.
June, 11, 1936
Your answer11 gave me a feeling different from other times. It didn't cheer me up; perhaps due to some atmosphere in the letter.
I don't think there was any atmosphere in my answers.
June 12, 1936
... I have analysed and analysed myself, and have found that I have no real urge for the Divine. It seems more the unfavourable external circumstances that have brought me here. Had I been happy and in plenty there, would I have chosen this path?... Where is the sincerity in me?... So wouldn't it be better for you to let me go instead of wasting so much of your time and labour on me?
Your analysis and reasonings are those of Grand'mère Depression which sees only what she allows to come to the surface for her purposes. There are other things that Madame suppresses because they don't suit her. It does not greatly matter what brought you here—the important thing is to go on till the psychic truth behind all that becomes manifest. The inertia of your physical nature is only a thick crust on the surface which goes away slowly, but under the pressure it will give way. If you had some big object in the ordinary life and nothing to hope for here it might be different, but as things are it would be foolish to walk off under the instigation of this old Mother Gloom-Gloom. Stick on and you will get the soul's reward hereafter.
June 14, 1936
... You say I could help Y. How can I do so avoiding everything personal? If I can help at all, it is in her literary work—surely not in Sadhana! But there again you doubt. Tell me precisely what I should do—not "if you want to do this, you can do" sort of thing. How is the help to be there?
I put it as something that could be done on certain conditions. These conditions do not exist at present, for neither is free with regard to the other. But the conditions can come into existence.
It is not at all necessary to break off all contact with her, and drastic methods are only necessary in extreme cases. Too much contact has to be avoided at present and it should be kept limited to surface things. The main point is to get yourself inwardly and vitally free—neither vital pull nor impatient repulsion. Understand that they have to be got rid of and quell them down and reject them when they come.
June 15, 1936
Now I find that I am only a bundle of sex and nothing else! This is yogic transformation!
Nobody can be only a bundle of sex. Even a cat or a Casanova can't be that. It is the aboriginal coming up and figuring as if the whole man. But there are other bundles there even if this one is at the top for the moment.
The Mother kept quiet about B's case and asked not to apply atropine.
Mother did not say not to treat her. She asked if it was not possible to treat her without the atropine.
June 16, 1936
But how to treat B? Her headache is due to error of refraction...
B told Mother she would never wear glasses. Has she said differently to you?
Do you suggest to try purgatives, aspirin, stopping needlework, etc. before going in for glasses?
All that does not seem very promising.
June 18, 1936
My friend J's letter—he hears your voice, feels your Power acting, his mind and vital free from sex. Is it possible that one hasn't to struggle much for purification? Force does everything?
It is quite possible if the psychic being takes the lead or is active—not so easy otherwise.
How was this conquest done so easily considering that he is a married man, having a wife not very spiritually inclined?
That is not the only "married man" instance.
While we who are here, in this atmosphere, find it so very difficult, though completely debarred from sex-life.
In his case, as it seems from what he writes, the mind decisively freed itself first. The difficulty with most is that the mind in parts lends itself to the vital under one colour or another.
He actually says that a personal effort is only a small or ineffective help!
Of course—personal effort without the supporting Force can do only a little, slowly, with much labour.
When I suffer, I don't see any Force coming and fighting my battle. I am paralysed for a time with pain etc., then the suffering disappears. I believe your Force works it out, but I want to feel, know and see.
That is the difficulty. A full faith however can command the effects of the Force even without being conscious of the action of the Force.
Lastly, he has raised some points which invite your answers, if not tonight, some night.
I don't know when, for his questions and subjects are of great amplitude.
P has two boils on a buttock which are stationary. She is constipated and feverish. I asked her to take enema as medicine, she will wait for permission, she says.
Mother has not only given permission but order—but she is not going to latrine, not taking enema, because she fears the pain caused by the boil in evacuation!
R wants Amal, Ambu, Romen—all three his patients—to be weighed from time to time. Will you take Ambu to the hospital tomorrow and arrange to have it done and also arrange for general permission so that whenever three or any of them go for the purpose, they may be allowed?
June 19, 1936
For S's constipation—I shall try tomorrow enema-tur-pentine.
What's this turpentine enema? drastic effect? or what gunas?
A has pain in the left arm. On palpation a nut-sized hard swelling was found. She says it's increased latterly. It was caused by an injection in Africa. I don't think it will be dissolved by medicines. Excision is the only way.
Operation will not leave any undesirable after-effects?
June 20, 1936
Last night S had the same trouble, dyspepisa, with no relief. Gave one alkaline powder containing Bismuth—no effect!
Bismuth is not constipative? I thought it was given for that effect. But if he is badly constipated already?
He can't tolerate any liquid nourishment. Some solid dry protein food would be good. I thought of egg.
It can be tried—as it is not a liver case.
Pomegranate or orange juice would hardly be enough.
Pomegranate juice not astringent and constipative?
S says as soon as the Mother was informed, he felt better. Why then all this medication? Make him altogether well!
If he allows. L had acutely a similar illness and T in a milder form—they were cured without medicines. But S is such a pessimist and lamenter that I don't know if his body will respond in the same way.
I am rather worried about the fellow. I have asked his mother to come and help him whenever she is free.
S has written (through Biren) asking for that on her behalf. But at the same time he writes that she doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, was weeping all night—If she does like that, how can she help him—she will only depress him farther. Otherwise it would be all right.
A's operation [of the arm] is not likely to leave any after-effects. It has to be done in the hospital...
She jibs violently against operation.
Shall I remind you about the reply to Jatin's letter?
You did, but with no effect.
June 21, 1936
Bismuth and pomegranate are astringents, no doubt, but the former is also an antacid and as the latter is nourishing too, S seems to tolerate it. Found another possibility of the cause of his disease: worms. He has suffered from it for the last 15 years!
Then of course pomegranate is the thing. But what kind of worms do you suspect? I suppose the ordinary small intestinal worm betrays its presence without microscope. What kind does he have?
By the way, if you think R had better treat him, I have no objection. Whatever is in my power, I am doing. If any danger is ahead, you may transfer him.
I don't know whether it is possible. They are at daggers drawn for a long time past and S has written very bad things against him. Will he now accept him as doctor and obey all his directions? I suppose S will get all right; if once he can be made to take sufficient nourishment, the rest is at most a matter of time.
June 22, 1936
... One part in me has written about the difficulties and asks for help, another says and laments—You fool, you could have enjoyed yourself a little. Yoga, after all, is there before you—But meanwhile do you know what sandy deserts you have to cross?...
That is of course the whole difficulty—the division in the being. But even so the true being can and surely will prevail.
We're giving S calomel and mag. sulph to stimulate the flow of bile and a purge also.
Purge quite safe for his weakness?
Please concentrate a little on his stomach.
Have been doing so—but the jaundice development (it must have been incubating from the first) is a nuisance.
Oh yes, giving also plenty of vichy water. Any comment?
Nothing much to say at present.
June 23, 1936
I would like to know if there are going to be any personal relations afterwards among sadhaks. To think that everybody will be equal to our eyes pains most of us.
Yes, it pains the outer vital, because that vital thinks it is a negative state of indifference and non-attachment, things that it hates because liking and disliking are its native atmosphere.
But with having psychic love for all, is there also going to be any pure divine love for a particular one?
But first you must realise what the "pure divine" love is!
Of course new friendships may come up and old ones break, but I am inclined to wonder whether such personal pure ties will be there or not.
But that is not the question your "inclination" asks—it is practically asking whether one can't keep up one's attachments and carry them into the higher atmosphere!
I gather from your reply to J that one will have the same deep psychic feelings for all.
Not the same psychic feelings for all, but different psychic feelings are possible.
We always think that all our relations will be impersonal. That is one of the reasons why we cling to our objects of love and desire.
That is not the reason—the reason lies in the clinging itself.
During meditation I had a vision of J lying dead in a room. Her death was accidental and not natural. Suddenly the door of the room opened and a hideous figure came in. It was so vivid that I still shudder to think of it. I was just sitting on a chair and looking at J's corpse. Is it J's mania of suicide from the subconscient?
It looks on the surface like a nightmare vision of the vital. It might refer to what you say—something shot up from a subconscient impression into form. Or, who knows, it may mean simply the old vital attachment by her lying dead and old vital Nature looking on in a horrified disapproval!
I don't think it is much use writing about personal relations in the true spiritual life (which does not yet exist here). None would understand it except as a form of words. Only three points—
(1) Its very base would have to be spiritual and psychic and not vital. The vital would be there but as an instrument only.
(2) It would be a relation flowing from the higher Truth, not continued from the lower Ignorance.
(3) It would not be impersonal in the sense of being colourless, but whatever colours were there would not be the egoistic and muddy colours of the present relations.
It appears to me that women generally are not so disturbed because they deliberately eliminate from their mind any idea of physical sex contacts.
They don't; but they don't want to face the dangers or the consequences of the vital physical impulse which they have to bear for the most part.
Also their vitals are satisfied more easily by simple vital exchanges, e.g. walking, talking, at most holding hands.
That is true of many women.
June 24, 1936
I do believe that if one person loves another sincerely it will have an influence on the person some day.
It may have, very likely, but it isn't a necessary consequence.
A tells me that 3 or 4 days ago he saw in a vision that I was jumping into the Mother's lap. How miraculously you have saved me without any trying on my part.
You called sincerely for the help, so the help came.
Jatin sends you another letter and wants a reply. Two letters. Can you reply either or both?
This one is easier to answer. I keep it also.
May I have a cup of soup for S, for a few days, from Rajangam? D.R. soup is very watery.
You mean some of our soup? I don't know how that can be arranged, but you can ask Champaklal if it is possible.
June 25, 1936
S—the pain and discomfort increased after 2 p.m. There is a tendency of salivation. Gave 2 doses of calomel.
You are giving calomel—but is there no salt in his egg or any other food? Soup has salt in it. I think calomel should be stopped.
If you ask me to cut off all medicines or some of them, and rely on the Force, I am willing to do so.
It seems a lot of medicine—but I doubt if in S's case we can rely on Force alone.
He can't digest milk, so I asked for the soup. It may be inconvenient to supply from your soup, so I can ask Dyuman to buy some soup vegetables and supply them. I think that would be best.
No, it would not be best. We are asking Rajangam to manage somehow to prepare some more soup for the purpose.
June 26, 1936
S is not tolerating the milk well. Cream or creamed milk would have been better.
Cream for jaundice? In France they actually took all cream out of the milk before allowing it!
Very little salt was given so far. I am adding a little now in the soup.
The Mother's objection was to calomel + salt food. So long as calomel is not given, it is all right.
June 27, 1936
S tells others that he's better, though to me he hesitates to admit the fact. He asked B to write to you that he wasn't at all improving. When it was contradicted by facts he replied that his forbearance only has increased. I had a hearty laugh!
He or rather B wrote to me a tragic tale. I told him this kind of illness took time to cure and meanwhile he had better practise quietness and cheerfulness—it would help the Force.
N.P. has pain near the spine, at the top of the right sacroiliac joint for the last 2 weeks.
He has sent me a wail too about jerks and sleeplessness.
Please don't forget my book; if no time let it incubate another night, provided it hatches out fully.
Had to. D took all my time with his woes and the opinions of Lawrence. It is the "Bases of Yoga" that has upset him!!! Moreover J's two letters, three urgently needed replies to sadhaks who have been waiting hungrily for weeks or days etc., etc. So—
June 28, 1936
S—after taking eggs—had the sensation of vomiting and griping pain. Egg is responsible, I suppose.
Yes, better suppress egg for the present.
He looks better but some discomfort will continue so long as the complete flow of bile is not established.
Does it not always take long in these cases?
I propose to give some bitters with nux vomica etc.
You can try.
June 29, 1936
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