Talks by Nirodbaran

10 June 1969

You know Ramchandra?³² He was a great homeopath, though he was erratic - all great men are. He claimed he'd cured some difficult cases by his homeopathic medicine. Sri Aurobindo said, "Yes, some due has to be given to his homeopathy, but I think the main credit goes to my power! It is by my bringing down of supramental power that the patient did not die here." So to live in the Ashram and to die in the Ashram is no joke, no ordinary matter, you see.

Once I was not very well, and I went to the Mother every morning, and Mother asked me, "How are you?" I replied, "I'm the same, no change." Next day when I went, She asked me again, "How are you?" I had to reply reluctantly: "No change." I knew she wouldn't be very pleased. Then She said, "Why don't you do yoga ?" I was foolish enough not to have asked Her what She meant. I thought I had 'understood'. Then, in one or two days, I went to the doctor and got medicine and got cured! So that was my yoga!!

I remember long ago, somebody had a fever and his temperature was hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit. The Mother asked him to go out and work in the sun! So it depends on cases. To some, She says, "Don't go to the doctors, they're hopeless," and to others - "Go." She knows who has more faith in Her and who can get cured by medicines.

Some of you may doubt this story that I am about to tell. Long ago, when the Mother was going to the Tennis Ground (which she used to do every day), a motor car was coming at terrific speed from

32Ramchandra was a Kashmiri homeopathy doctor settled in the Ashram, whom Sri Aurobindo used as an instrument or conduit for his curative action, Ramchandra had some extraordinary cures to his credit, including a Frenchman on his deathbed whom all the French doctors had given up on. Of course, Ramchandra gave all credit to Sri Aurobindo.

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the direction of the Park Guest House on the sea beach road. It was coming at what speed I don't know, but the driver could not control the car. At any moment it would crash. I was on the Beach Road, just opposite Wilfy's room; I was also going to the Tennis Ground. I saw and thought: What will happen? I cried to the Mother: Mother, Mother, Mother, save, save! And there were some people watching anxiously, hoping that the catastrophe might be avoided, and I was simply praying to the Mother. The car went to the last gate of the Tennis Ground and dashed against a lamp post. We all ran to it - the driver's leg was caught under the jammed car door. We had great difficulty in extricating it out of the debris. But apart from that, everything else seemed ail right. I had prayed in such a way as if I myself was in danger. So a cry of that sort, as Thompson says, a "cry; - clinging Heaven by the hems;"³³ a prayer of that sort can produce a miracle.

[Nirod-da reads out a Bengali story about the power of prayer.] The efficacy of prayer, of an unselfish prayer, mind you, a disinrerested yogic prayer, is always powerful and great. So let us pray, not for ourselves but for others. So pray for me also, that I may continue these talks with you.