Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1938

Letter ID: 2153

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

July 22, 1938

[Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]

Can’t this intuitive faculty grow in my medical sphere and make me see both the disease and the cure?

But in medicine you don’t hook on to the intuitive source.

Self-annihilation is my own diagnosis. For, I think, N will revolt if I call him “self-centred” when he is considering himself preparing for self-annihilation.

Anyhow, is there any use of internal medication against that subconscient “No”?

His subconscient is not contradictory to medicines alone. One has to go on in the firm faith that one day it will change. T and others were also like that, but by perseverance something has been arrived at as far as treatment goes.

That word is collosal – from colloidal. I suggested that N should take up some work in the afternoon to which he replied he wrote to you and your answer was – let his eyes get better and best. Otherwise if Sri Aurobindo says, he will surely take up work. Well?

If I tell him to work in the afternoon, he will after a time say his eyes are very bad, very strained, shall he stop? What’s the use then?

... S is really extremely difficult to deal with.

He always has been.

Is it his disease that has made him so or his nature?

His nature made the disease.

His friends and his mother say that at home he was quite another person: doing sadhana so well, not caring for worldly things, etc. An admirable fellow in all respects. But something has happened, God knows what, by which he is now completely changed. What can really be the matter, may I know? What sort of difficulty in sadhana is likely to set up such a perverse psychology?

In appearance perhaps he was like that, though it seems to me that there is something of a legend in that. So long as I have known him he has always been sharp and obstinate in pursuing his own idea or interest and the claims of his ego. Maybe, in his first stage of experience, something mental-psychic was there, that gave him the appearance his friends describe, but the vital was not changed, and as always happens, the vital came up for change – and he did not change it, but allowed the old unregenerate vital ego to take hold of him. Hence constant quarrels, resentments, obstinate feuds and hatred, fancies of persecution, neurasthenia, a disorganised nervous system, devastation of the organs by his anger, etc. (liver especially affecting stomach etc.).

The other day his mother was saying that he pines for his past spiritual experiences and visions. Is that then the reason or what? and I am afraid till he or you put that right, nothing is any good.

How can he have them while he indulges and obeys his vital ego to such an excessive extent? The difficulty is that he is self-righteous and priggish in his self-righteousness. Speaks of himself as an angel of meekness and forbearance and all others as wicked devils tormenting this angel martyr. What’s to be done with an attitude like that? How can he come out if he does not recognise the necessity of change? It is not that he has not been told, but –

... He has then to shut himself up in his room to escape all disturbances. Even then he will quarrel with the air, light and trees!

Of course.

But if you ask me to do according to what he wants for his health, I will surely and ungrudgingly do it. But you understand how difficult it is!

Do the best you can, knowing that he is both physically and psychically ill.

Romen needs a pair of wooden sandals as the leather ones irritate the patches of eczema he has. Could you please sanction a pair?

[Mother:] Surely he must have. It is to be asked from Benjamin.

Romen was telling me to-day that he always feels tired, very tired, and very often he has head-ache. Is it due to liver? Can nothing be done to relieve him?