Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

24th February, 1939

Disciple : What is the part which mind plays in the cure of a disease?

Sri Aurobindo : The mental factor is much more effective than is generally known or admitted. There are cases where the surgeons have found that the mental factor has saved the patient by pulling him or her out from a critical condition. For example, Mothers wanting to see their children are saved, being pulled out of critical conditions.

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Disciple : Which method of treatment is correct – the Chinese method of pricking or opathy, Ayurvedic or allopathy etc.?

Sri Aurobindo : Nature allows you to follow along certain lines and along each she shows you what is possible. For example, they thought of electricity as wave motion and they found there was some thing that corresponded to that view. Now they think of it as made up of particles, you ind that it responds to that also.

Disciple : That is the realm of matter, but in life – for example, in the curing of a disease.

Sri Aurobindo : Mental factors determine the physical conditions much more than doctors would be prepared to grant. Cone's method succeeds and it cannot be considered useless, though it uses no medicine.

Disciple : Some disciples here believe that there is a collective Karma for which either the group, the society or the nation has to bear the consequences like the individual.

Sri Aurobindo : The collective being is non-evolutionary. It is hard to believe in the reincarnation of races.

Disciple : Somebody seems to have said that the Romans are born as Americans.

Sri Aurobindo : Very queer Romans! You may say in some sense that the English are the ancient Carthaginians! Or one may even hazard that the French are the Greeks reborn. But it won't carry us very far.

You can't take for granted that one individual is always born in the same race or nation in which he is born now. So how can the nation soul or race soul reincarnate?

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Disciple : Have the nations a soul each?

Sri Aurobindo : You can speak of it as collective or nations being or entity. It is not in evolution. It is not subject to the law of Karma.

Disciple : Can it be said that the law governing it is suprarational?

Sri Aurobindo : Yes, each collective being is a projection of the Cosmic Spirit for a particular purpose. You can speak of it as a particular Shakti.

Disciple : How does the collective being or Shakti work?

Sri Aurobindo : It identifies itself with a particular form – here of a group of individual. There is a mutual action : it acts on the individual and the individual acts on it by manifesting it.

Disciple : Suppose the collective entity is dissolved from life?

Sri Aurobindo : When the physical form of the collectivity is dissolved here the collective being withdraws into the origin.

Disciple : Can a collective being, after such a dissolution take another form – a group – for manifesting itself?

Sri Aurobindo : We have as yet no proof of it.

25th February, 1939

Disciple : There is a report about the student of the Annamalai University picketing and some of them are fasting.

Sri Aurobindo : Satyagraha is something to be applied in extreme case, but Gandhi has almost made a law of it and so there are so many wrong applications of it.

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Disciple : Here in this case the fundamental relations are contradicted e.g. the relation between teachers and students. It is not, for instance, the same as between workers and capitalists.

Sri Aurobindo : Even among workers, it makes a great difference if they are educated. For instance, in Europe, when they resort to stay in strike, the workers do not injure the machinery and they even work the important parts to keep it in order. While in India, where the labour is uneducated, you can't have it like that. They destroy the machinery and then are thrown out of employment. In the Savanne Mills they burnt the machinery and then were thrown out of employment. Similar was the case in Madras Match Factory.

If you do not have bill like the one Bombay Trade Disputes Bill, the industries will go to the pot.

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