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V
1938-1940
(In the night of November 23-24, 1938, Sri Aurobindo fell down while walking in concentration and broke his right leg. In the years that followed, a small group of disciples, mostly attendants and physicians, met him every day. Two of them recorded the informal talks that ensued, which often touched on the Indian political scene, the rising threat of Nazism, and then World War II which Sri Aurobindo followed closely.
A few excerpts from these talks are presented here.)
December 23, 1938
Every time the Light has tried to descend it has met with resistance and opposition. Christ was crucified.... Buddha was denied; sons of Light come, the earth denies them, rejects them, and afterwards accepts them in name to reject them in substance.
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December 25, 1938
I have no faith in government controls, because I believe in a certain amount of freedom - freedom to find out things for oneself in one's own way, even freedom to commit blunders. Nature leads us through various errors and mistakes; when Nature created the human being with all his possibilities for good and ill she knew very well what she was about. Freedom for experiment in human life is a great thing. Without the freedom to take risks and commit mistakes there can be no progress....
[But] everything is moving towards mechanization in Europe. The totalitarian States do not believe in any individual variation and even non-totalitarian States are obliged to follow them; they do it for the sake of efficiency - but whose efficiency? It is the efficiency of the State as an organized machine, not that of the individual. The individual has no freedom, he doesn't grow. Organize by all means, but there must be scope for freedom and plasticity.
Author - Sri Aurobindo
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