Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1935

Letter ID: 1505

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

December 23, 1935

What poem, indeed! Didn’t you say you’d send me a poem showing the force of direct prayer? You forget so easily!

Excuse me. I said I will send one day. One day may mean after some weeks, some months, or some years.

I heard that R was called to see a case outside, which has been given up as hopeless by the French doctors, including Valle.

By the best doctors in Pondicherry, Valle, Amaladasan and others. They dosed and injected and he was near to his last gasp when Valle ran to R as a last chance.

Today R comes and tells me that the patient has gone to his office!

A fact.

And that you have congratulated him on his success!!

A fact. Why should I not, when an almost dead man rises full of life and energy in a few hours?

A miracle! I am flabbergasted, really!

Well and then? It should raise you up, not cast you down.

R showed me some observations made by those doctors on blood-pressure, urine, etc. and asked me their significance. I found that the case was probably chronic interstitial nephritis.

That was reported to me by R from the first.

From a further talk I discovered that R has very little idea of what it is. And yet he goes and saves a dying man!

Do you deny the fact?

Again, it seems to me that he acted as an instrument or medium and nothing else.

What do you mean by nothing else? A human instrument without capacity can do things like that? That would be far more miraculous, impossible, incredible, surely, than a homeopath whose whole system is founded on symptomatology curing people.

R says findings of urine are not necessary. Leave the patient to nature. I said – albumin is a danger sign, it has to be eliminated through diet and medicine etc., otherwise there is a possibility of relapse. He replied, but he wants now to take meat, drink, etc.

A relapse is always possible, if, as R wrote to me, the man is a reckless bon vivant going strong and drinking. But that is his affair; his resuscitation remains a fact.

This instance has proved to me that homeopaths are concerned with symptoms, not with the disease itself, of which they have not much knowledge. If relying on symptoms alone, he has cured this man, I shall be the last person to believe it.

Because you are tied in your own system and do not understand that Nature is not so rigid as your mental ideas.

All big homeopaths I’ve heard of, were allopaths before, i.e. they knew anatomy, physiology, pathology, etc. But R is unique and his cures are unique. So I am puzzled, puzzled about the real mystery behind...

Did they cure by allopathic treatment, then? Is it not the very principle of homeopathy that it cures the disease by curing the symptoms? I have always heard so. Do you deny that homeopaths acting on their own system, not on yours, have cured illnesses? If they have, is it not more logical to suppose that there is something in their system than to proclaim the sacrosanct infallibility of the sole allopathic system and its principle? For that matter I myself cure more often by attacking the symptoms than by any other way, because medical diagnosis is uncertain and fallible while the symptoms are there for everybody to see. Of course if a correct indisputable diagnosis is there, so much the better – the view can be more complete, the action easier, the result more sure. But even without infallible diagnosis one can act and get a cure.

When all doctors have failed, how does R proclaim that he will pull a man out without knowing anything of the nature of the disease?

Because he has confidence in himself, like all who are able to do in any field big things.

He knew there was blood-pressure and he fixed his whole energy in bringing that down and did it.

Does he have an immediate intuition or does he hear voices?

Well, he believes in his intuition and his faith justified itself. I never heard that he hears voices.

If he doesn’t know that, his self-confidence, however strong and enormous, can’t make him commit himself to such an extent. It would be foolish in some places.

Why can’t it? How dreadfully downright and sweeping you are in your demands! What ground had Mustapha Kemal for his strong and enormous confidence when he defied all Europe and all the probabilities and possibilities and undertook to save three-quarters dead Turkey?

What does that matter if it succeeds in some places? Napoleon’s self-confidence and intuition tripped him up at Waterloo, but before that it had won him Marengo, Jena, Austerlitz.

Was there some extraordinary power behind R before he came here that was responsible for the marvellous results?

Certainly. It was because the Mother saw a great force in him that she accepted him in the Ashram.

I hear he is a very good medium and is a tower of vital strength.

Which means of course full of a massive vital force which can be used by the Yoga-force for its purposes and being massive can produce striking results.

Is the strength then the real cause of his success and medicine negligible? But I don’t understand how a tower of vital strength can cure a dying man! If that were possible, whatever medicine he might have administered, would have been equally successful.

Why the flabbergasts not? What’s the use of strength if it can’t do things?

You are very much behind the times. Do you not know that even many doctors now admit and write it publicly that medicines are an element but only one and that the psychological element counts as much and even more? I have heard that from doctors often and read it over reputable medical signatures. And among the psychological elements, they say, one of the most important is the doctor’s optimism and self-confidence, (his faith, what? it is only another word for the same thing) and the confidence, hope, helpful mental atmosphere he can inspire in or around his patient. I have seen it stated categorically that a doctor who can do that is far more successful than one who knows Medicine better but cannot.

You said in S’s case that the Force has to count on right medicines for rapid effects.

I did not mean that it cannot be done without medicines. But if it is to be done with the aid of medicines, then the right medicine is helpful, the wrong one obviously brings in a danger.

How does R choose the right medicine? Not by intuition; because I saw him consulting his books for the choice of medicines.

Of course. He learned homeopathic medicine in America and his ideas of homeopathy are the American ideas. But how does his knowledge prevent intuition? Even an allopathic doctor has often to intuit what medicine he should give or what mixture – and it is those who intuit best that succeed best. All is not done by sole rule of book or sole rule of thumb even in orthodox Science.

How could a patient, as good as lost, leap up, although he knew nothing of faith in yogic force?

That often happens. It is even sometimes easier to deal with a man of that kind, provided he does not know what is being done,– so that there is no room for doubt or mental resistance.

He himself admitted that he could not expect such a miraculous result from his treatment. It was the Mother’s force that did it.

Naturally.

Is it then the question of mediumship? If so, I dance in rapture thinking that yogi-doctors have a vast possibility!

Yes, provided they do not entrench themselves in doubt and rigid materialistic orthodoxy.

I am thrown out of joint at two miracles, Sir: (1) R’s treatment or yours; (2) NK’s English poetry, though Madam Doubt still peeps from behind. Anyhow, no chance for me! কপাল,¹ Sir! What to do?

Why out of joint? It ought to strengthen your joints for the journey of Yoga.

Not at all কপাল, sir. Mind, sir, mind. Madam Doubt, sir, Madam Doubt! Miss Material Intellectualism, sir! Aunt Despondency, sir! Uncle Self-distrust, sir! Cousin Self-depreciation, sir! The whole confounded family, sir!

I congratulate you for having such a fine instrument, and him as well for being so for the Divine’s action.

I will try to make it clear, but no time tonight as it is 4.40 a.m. already.

¹ kapāl: Fate.

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