Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1906

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

April 10, 1937

I wonder why you flared up at the idea of my using the surrealist method in treating patients.

I didn’t flare up. I was cold with horror.

By “go at it” I obviously didn’t mean sending your Asram to the next world! No, not at all. I meant only this: say a case comes with pain in the stomach, loss of appetite, etc., I simply keep silent, suddenly comes to me the suggestion – gastritis, without any analysis of symptoms.

Doctors don’t mean it, when they do that kind of thing. It is not deliberate murder with them, but involuntary or, shall we say, experimental homicide.

Mother told me to practise the intuitive method, I thought “Go at it” was simply my military language! I thought this is one of the ways to develop intuition – if it can be developed. Otherwise how the deuce is it going to come? Going to open suddenly?

She said that you have to stop jumping about from guess to guess and develop the diagnostic insight – seeing what comes from the intuition and then looking at the case to see if it is right. But to take the first thing that comes and act on it, is guessing pure and simple. If after a time you find that your perceptions turn out to have been automatically right each time, then you can be confident that you have got the thing.

How do the most successful doctors have intuition, by a flash or what you call an inner sight?

Some have it by nature and develop it by experience.

Or do they get it by plenty of experience, treating, curing, killing, etc.?

Well, there are some who after killing a few hundreds, learn to kill only a few. But that is not intuition; that is simply learning from experience.

Rajangam thinks that behind their success there is plenty of experience; their familiarity with various diseases, and manifestations, shows them immediately what’s wrong with a case.

Of course, experience is of great importance, but still it is not everything.

Book knowledge will not always succeed in practice, experience will do; but experience must stand on adequate book knowledge. Since you have neither book knowledge nor experience, you have no medico – so no intuition, I suppose.

Excuse me, you can have intuitions – without book-knowledge or even experience.

You will perhaps say that there are plenty of doctors with plenty of experience, but that they are not all successful. True, but the other thing is also true that successful doctors are supported by their varied experience.

Some succeed from the beginning.

How do you solve the tangle?

What is the difficulty? Experience is necessary, book-knowledge is useful for the man who wants to be a perfect doctor; observation and discrimination are also excellent provided they are correct observation and discrimination; but all these are only helps for the flair to move about supported by a perfect mental confidence in the flair.

Then about the inner and outer guidance: of course all this trouble comes from not knowing anything about the queer action of the complex Force formula.

There is also some inability to grasp the philosophy of things.

The internal guidance is possible only when the subject has sufficient receptivity, isn’t it?

Certainly.

When one hasn’t that receptivity, outer guidance will surely be the only course.

How is the outer guidance to give intuition? It only by itself supplies a ready-made course of action which the person blindly follows.

For instance, you give me Force for English poetry – some lines corne all right, others are jumbled, wrong, etc., and these things you correct by outer guidance, i.e. by correcting, changing, etc. till I become sufficiently receptive and then only a few changes will be necessary.

I do so in your English poetry because I am an expert in English poetry. In Bengali poetry, I don’t do it. I only select among alternatives offered by yourself. Mark that for Amal I nowadays avoid correcting or changing as far as possible – that is in order to encourage the inspiration to act in himself. Sometimes I see what he should have written but do not tell it to him, leaving him to get it or not from my silence.

You say the same thing about Gen. Miaja with his military knowledge and capacity. Exactly, if he has these things, he can receive your right Force.

It does not follow. Another man may have the knowledge and receive nothing – If he receives, his knowledge and capacity help the Force to work out the details.

It seems that though you have no patent or latent military capacity, your Force has, and it wakes up in the man the right judgments etc.

Not in this life.

This is all a mystery beyond my ken.

May I ask why? Your idea is that either I must inspire him specifically in every detail, making a mere automaton of him, or if I don’t do that, I can do nothing with him? What is this stupid mechanical notion of things?

The Force having military knowledge, poetic power, healing virtues, etc., the embodiment of the Force also must have the latent general, poet, medico, etc. – sounds strange to me otherwise.

Because you have the damnably false idea that nothing can be done in the world except by mental means – that Force must necessarily be a mental Force and can’t be anything else.

The strangest thing of all is that if the Divine wills, why can’t an effective drug in a case be revealed to him, medico or no medico?

Why the devil should He will like that in all cases?

I am to induce the victims for the sacrifice? Good heavens! Do you want me to be sacrificed by your disciples? Please mark off those who are to be vaccinated, instead of the other way round.

Can’t do that.

Of course my suggestion of voluntary sacrifice was a joke. It is an official order from the Government department, and we can’t contemptuously wave it aside – we can only minimise its incidence.

As to Force let me point out a few elementary notions which you ignore.

(1) The Force is a divine Force, so obviously it can apply itself in any direction; it can inspire the poet, set in motion the soldier, doctor, scientist, everybody.

(2) The Force is not a mental Force – it is not bound to go out from the Communicator with every detail mentally arranged, precise in its place, and communicate it mentally to the Recipient. It can go out as a global Force containing in itself the thing to be done, but working out the details in the recipient and the action as the action progresses. It is not necessary for the Communicant to accompany mentally the Force, plant himself mentally in the mind of the Recipient and work out mentally there the details. He can send the Force or put on the Force, leave it to do its work and attend himself to other matters. In the world most things are worked out by such a global Force containing the results in itself, but involved, concealed, and working them out in a subsequent operation. The seed contains the whole potentiality of the tree, the gene contains the potentiality of the living form that it initiates, etc., etc., but if you examine the seed and gene ad infinitum, still you will not find there either the tree or the living being. All the same the Force has put all these potentialities there in a certain evolution which works itself out automatically.

(3) In the case of a man acting as an instrument of the Force the action is more complicated, because consciously or unconsciously the man must receive, also he must be able to work out what the Force puts through him. He is a living complex instrument, not a simple machine. So if he has responsiveness, capacity, etc. he can work out the Force perfectly, if not he does it imperfectly or frustrates it. That is why we speak of and insist on the perfectioning of the instrument. Otherwise there would be no need of sadhana or anything else – any fellow would do for any blessed work and one would simply have to ram. things into him and see them coming out in action.

(4) The Communicant need not be an all-round many-sided Encyclopaedia in order to communicate the Force for various purposes. If we want to help a lawyer to succeed in a case, we need not be perfect lawyers ourselves knowing all law, Roman, English or Indian and supply him all his arguments, questions, etc., doing consciously and mentally through him his whole examination, cross-examination and pleading. Such a process would be absurdly cumbrous, incompetent and wasteful. The prearrangement of the eventful result and the capacity for making him work his instruments in the right way and for arranging events also so as to aid towards the result are put into the Force when it goes to him, they are therefore inherent in its action and the rest is a question of his own receptivity, responsiveness etc. Naturally the best instrument even is imperfect (unless he is a perfected Adhar), and mistakes may be committed, other suggestions accepted etc., etc., but if the instrument is sufficiently open, the Force can set the thing to rights and the result still comes. In some or many cases the Force has to be renewed from time to time or supported by fresh Force. In some directions particular details have to be consciously attended to by the Communicant. All that depends on circumstances too multitudinous and variable to be reduced to rule. There are general lines, in these matters, but no rules; the working of a non-mental Force has necessarily to be plastic, not rigid and tied to formulas. If you want to reduce things to patterns and formulas, you will necessarily fail to understand the workings of a spiritual (non-mental) Force.

(5) All that I say here refers to spiritual Force. I am not speaking of the Supramental.

(6) Also please note that this is all about the working of Force on or through people: it has nothing to do with intuition which is quite another matter. Also it does not preclude always and altogether a plenary and detailed inspiration from a Communicant to a recipient – such things happen, but it is not necessary to proceed in that way, nor below the Supermind or Supramentalised Overmind can it be the ordinary, process.

[I sent a translation of C’s Bengali letter where he wrote about his lapses.]

... Well, well, I am not so bad after all, am I?

No,– I should say that compared with most people you are quite decent!

But C seems to have made a lot of progress, hasn’t he?

Can’t certify so long as the brothel walks about with him.

C writes about your letter “abortioning” him with regard to his falsehood. Can’t you abortion him of his brothel? (I suppose it is some other word, but it reads like “abortioning”.)