The only books that have influenced me are the Gita and the Upanishads. What I wrote was the work of intuition and inspiration working on the basis of my spiritual experience. I have no other technique like the modern philosopher whose philosophy I consider only intellectual and therefore of secondary value. Experience and formulation of experience I consider as the true aim of philosophy. The rest is merely intellectual work and may be interesting but nothing more.
Satyendra: He seems to be influenced by the Gita.
Purani: Yes, so he wants to know if, after overpassing these Mayas, one can remain in Akshara Purusha.
Disciple: Another question is: If the Divine is already there and does everything then why do Yoga? Because Sri Krishna says to Arjuna in the Gita that you have only to become the Nimitta, the instrument. So the Christian’s criticism is that the individual becomes meaningless, without any justification or fulfilment. The Gita is preaching pure mechanism or unconsciousness.
Sri Aurobindo: But the Gita does not say that you are “compelled” to become the Nimitta. It says “Bhava” — become. It does not say that you have no existence except as the Nimitta. Even if Arjuna does not become the Nimitta, Sri Krishna says that he will do the work in his own way. Even when you find that the Divine has decreed the result, it is the _result_ that is decreed but _not_ the Nimitta, that is, anything else could have been the Nimitta.
Purani: Don’t know. They find so many things in the Koran. Even the idea of non-cooperation, they say, is found in it. That was during the Khilafat agitation. They say that Mohammed was threatened with his life and he fled and that was non-cooperation.
Sri Aurobindo: Moore has written an article against Gandhi, taking his stand on the Gita and on me. He says that if Gandhi considers himself an instrument of God and preaches non-participation, he, Moore, is also an instrument of God entitled to object to it. _(Sri Aurobindo gave us the gist of the article.)_
Purani: Kalelkar has rearranged the Gita text leaving out some of the portions which according to him are not essential. And he gives each chapter a separate name: for example, Utthapana Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo: And Kalelkar Yoga? _(Laughter)_ Nobody has so far tampered with the text of the Gita.
Purani: No, they have done so with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata but not the Gita.
Purani: Though he is a scholar in Sanskrit, he has not read Shakuntala and considers this a great virtue! He has learned Sanskrit in order to read the Gita and the Upanishads.
Sri Aurobindo: No, from all evils. Sin is a religious conception, an offence against God. Arjuna’s refusal to fight can’t be called an offence against God; it is an offence against morality, you can say. Virtue and vice are moral conceptions.
Sri Aurobindo: No, Jnan Chakravarty, the husband of Krishnaprem’s Guru, gave her the Gita’s Yoga in Paris. And she used to come in contact with Abdul Baha in Paris. As a matter of fact, it was she who was leading and organising the Bahai group in Europe. In one of their group meditations Mother had some experience which none of the others had.
Anilbaran Roy’s article “The Advaita in the Gita” had appeared in the _Calcutta Review._
Sri Aurobindo: He finds the idea of transformation of nature in the Gita and also other things contained in _The Life Divine._ I don’t see all that in the Gita myself.
Sri Aurobindo: There is no transformation there. The supramental transformation is not at all hinted at in the Gita. The Gita lays stress on certain broad lines of the integral supramental Yoga. For instance:
Disciple: It speaks of the Para Prakriti and says that advanced souls attain to the Para Prakriti.
Sri Aurobindo: The Para Prakriti there is used in general terms.
Disciple: Yes. I don’t find the transformation in the Gita. The exposition of the levels of consciousness beyond mind, their functions, a dear, rational statement of intuitive consciousness, inspiration, revelation, and the ascent of the consciousness through the Overmind to the Supermind — these things are quite new and not found even in the Upanishads.
Sri Aurobindo: I think so. The Gita only opens out the way to our Yoga and philosophy. Among the Upanishads only the Taittiriya has some general idea of the higher terms. The Veda treats symbolically the same subject.
Disciple: Suppose there is transformation in the Gita, one can ask what kind of transformation it is, — spiritual, psychic or supramental?
As the result of that action some change may come about in the nature which might amount to what may be called transformation. But in the Gita the instruments of action remain human throughout (the Buddhi etc.). It does not speak of the intuitive consciousness.
If all that is contained in _The Life Divine_ is found entirely in the old systems then it contradicts the claim that this Yoga is new, or at any rate, different from the traditional methods. Perhaps A was trying to synthesise the Gita and _The Life Divine._ (_Laughter_)
_Anilbaran in an article on the Gita has tried to bring into it Sri Aurobindo’s ideas of transformation, The Life Divine, etc. Sri Aurobindo commented on this._
Sri Aurobindo: The Gita doesn’t speak of transformation. It is his own reading of the Gita. One can say that the Gita shows the way to something further or to our Yoga. What it speaks of is the need to act from a spiritual consciousness using the instruments of the human mind, vital, etc., but not of the transformation of these instruments.
Purani: Anilbaran admits this but he says that here and there in the Gita there are hints beyond it.
Sri Aurobindo: In that case my claim that our Yoga is new doesn’t hold good, and the man who said that the Gita speaks of transformation would be right.
_Today Anilbaran asked through Purani: “What is the limit of transformation which the Gita speaks of?”_
Sri Aurobindo: Limit of transformation? But the Gita, as I said, doesn’t speak of transformation. It goes as far as the Buddhi.
Dr. Manilal: Then all that is said about Krishna and Arjuna and the Gita can’t be believed.
Sri Aurobindo: Quite so. The important question is whether the truth or principle laid down in the Gita is valid, can be verified. The rest is unessential, legendary, unimportant.
Sri Aurobindo: Then that girl from Mathura who knew all the details of her past life was also Sarvajna. When Arjuna said to Krishna, “Will you tell me again all you told me about Kurukshetra etc., etc.?” Krishna replied, “Good Lord, do I remember all that blessed lot now? At that time I was in Yoga.”
Sri Aurobindo: Where have I said that? What I have said is that the Gita was recorded as a fact in the Mahabharata, intended to be a fact of life, not an allegory. But do you mean that Hanuman’s taking the sun under his armpit and jumping into Lanka and burning Lanka by his tail-fire were all facts?
Dr. Manilal: If it was not true and if Krishna and Arjuna didn’t exist, you would not have written Essays on the Gita, Sir.
Sri Aurobindo: Why not? Whether they existed or not I would still have written the book if the truth of the Gita was there.
Nirodbaran: Sri Aurobindo himself has said in the preface that the important point is not whether Krishna and Arjuna did actually exist but whether the things said in the Gita are true.
Disciple: Through one of the four Yogas: Raja, Jnana, Karma and Bhakti. One has to see this sense-world and the Super-ego-world in the light of the Absolute Divine.
Nirodbaran: A says that he went to see someone who was a reputable astrologer, a different person from the one about whom I spoke to you some years ago. A relation of his sent him to consult this man about her son. A had your book Essays on the Gita with him, and on seeing it, the astrologer made the gesture of namaskar. On being asked why he did so and whether it was for the author or the book, he replied, “Bhagabaner boi.” He also said that he not only had your horoscope but he had received your birth chart from you.
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That is the Sankhya Purusha—the Purusha of the Gita is Ishwara also. The objection as philosophy is correct. Poetically—the opening is heavy, but the rest is good.
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There is nothing new in that either. It has always been a rule of Karmayoga that one must be ready to do any work for the Divine or with the spiritual consciousness.
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Well, one can be happy in a swing or even in the mud! The perfect sadhak should indeed be happy in all circumstances, সর্ব্বথা বর্ত্তমানোহপি as the Gita puts it.
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Self-sacrifice for the country’s sake has certainly a moral value. The “terrorism” brings in another element and assimilates it to the act of a fighter, less sattwic and more rajasic in its nature. I am not sure that I would be willing to call that a sacrifice in the moral or sattwic sense. In Bhisluna’s case the element of sacrifice came in not in fighting and killing for the sake of Dhritarashtra bul in his knowing that he must die and accepting it for his ideal of loyalty. Of course, you may say that every man who risks his life does an act of sacrifice, but then we come back to very primitive values. I took the word in Somnath’s letter in a less outward sense; otherwise my answer might have been different.
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Karmayoga does not mean the free indulgence of ego.
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Generally one likes good things and dislikes bad things. But you seem to dislike both, which is more Yogic in samata (of a negative kind) than my attitude.
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Sri Aurobindo: All are one, sir, one Brahman. Besides, the শ্রেষ্ঠ (Shreshtha), leading Man should get people to do all their work by himself doing all actions, sarva karmāṇi, the Gita says so.
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The difficulty is that most of the sadhaks are still full of desires, so their renunciation is not a thing that becomes very perceptible. If they had the inner tyaga, it would create an atmosphere that people coming here would feel.
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When one knows that it is like that and sees the play of forces one does not get disturbed. There is the inner position described by the Gita, “Whatever comes or goes, sattwa, rajas or tamas, the Yogi regards calmly and is not elated or depressed by it.”
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I suppose it is in order to liberate the consciousness more completely and prepare the turning of tamas into shama, inertia into absolute repose and peace.
