Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

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Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Sat 10 Jan 2009 09:55 AM PST | Permanent Link

There is a movement of folks in Pondicherry who are so upset by the biography that Peter Heehs has written entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo that they have instigated a movement to discredit the author. Some people have even become so embolden as to try and have him ejected from the Ashram itself. The folks who have spurred this on have in the course of their attacks on Mr. Heehs openly distorted his text by decontextualizing portions of it or by a series of selective omissions to make it suit their own interpretation of events that facilitate their own story they wish to tell.

Because of this movement I have decided to post all the portions of the text that have been decontextualized or omitted and reprint them with corrections to demonstrate how the text from the book actually reads in its entire context. The portions of the text that have been lifted to suit the purposes of those with an agenda against the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo are in black, the missing portions of the text that are needed to give the entire context of the narrative are in red. As everyone will see there is a lot of red in the text.:

Extracts from The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

(arranged subjectwise)

Sri Aurobindo

Hagiography

(Preface: xii) The genre of hagiography, in the original sense of the term, is very much alive in India. Any saint with a following is the subject of one or more books that tell the inspiring story of his or her birth, growth, mission, and passage to the eternal. Biographies of literary and political figures do not differ much from this model. People take the received version of their heroes’ lives very seriously. A statement about a politician or poet that rubs people the wrong way will be turned into a political or legal issue, or possibly cause a riot. The problem is not whether the disputed statement is true, but whether anyone has the right to question an account that flatters a group identity.

Aurobindo has been better served by his biographers than most of his contemporaries have. But when I began to write articles about his life, I found that there were limits to what his admirers wanted to hear. Anything that cast doubt on something that he said was taboo, even if his statement was based on incomplete knowledge of the facts. Almost as bad was anything that challenged an established interpretation, even one that clearly was inadequate.

Figure 2 is a photograph of Aurobindo that was taken around the same time as figure 1. Note the dark, pockmarked skin, sharp features, and undreamy eyes…To me it is infinitely more appealing than figure 1, which has been reproduced millions of times in its heavily retouched form. I sometimes wonder why people like figure 1. There is hardly a trace of shadow between the ears, with the result that the face has no character. The sparkling eyes have been painted in; even the hair has been given a gloss. As a historical document it is false. As a photograph it is a botched piece of work. But for many figure 1 is more true to Aurobindo than figure 2….

Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs. Biographers must take their documents as they find them. They have to examine all sorts of materials, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events…

Such an approach is possible and necessary when dealing with public events. But what about mystical experiences? In trying to trace the lines of Aurobindo’s sadhana, a biographer can use the subject’s diaries, letters, and retrospective accounts. There are also, for comparison, accounts by others of similar mystical experiences. But in the end, such experiences remain subjective. Perhaps they are only hallucinations or signs of psychotic breakdown? Even if not, do they have any value to anyone but the subject?

Those who have had mystical experiences have always held that they are the basis of a kind of knowledge that is more fundamental, and thus more valuable, than the relative knowledge of words and things. Absorbed in inner experience, the mystic is freed from the problems that afflict men and women who are caught in the dualities of knowledge and ignorance, pleasure and pain, life and death. A mystic thus absorbed often is lost to the human effort to achieve a more perfect life. But this is not the only possible outcome of spiritual practice. Aurobindo’s first major experience was a state of mystical absorption, but he was driven to return to the active life, and spent the next forty years looking for a way to bring the knowledge and power of the spirit into the world. In this lies the value of his teaching to men and women of the twenty-first century.

Childhood

(17) As a rule, however, he kept to himself. Most of his classmates were too much older than he to be his friends. A few patronised him on account of his childishness; the rest paid him scant attention. He had few of the qualities that English schoolboys find interesting. Weak and inept on the playing field, he was also – by his own account – a coward and a liar.<Source of first statements given in footnote 26, “Government of India, Home Department Proceedings, series D, June 1908, 13: 3, National Archives of India.” Sri Aurobindo’s “own account”, not quoted verbatim and therefore not footnoted, is from a talk of 28 June 1926 recorded by A.B. Purani: “I was a most terrible liar and perhaps no greater coward on earth.” Cited by Purani in Sri Aurobindo in England, p. 18.>

Riding test

(28) Aurobindo failed to pass his medical examination the first time on account of “something found wrong with his urinary organs.”<source in footnote 83, “Government of India, Home Department Proceedings, series D, June 1908, 13: 3, National Archives of India.”>

<N.B. “urinary organs” is a Victorian euphemism for “kidneys”. For the significance of this problem in Sri Aurobindo’s life, see Lives, pages 220-221, 406, 408, 409.>

(30) In October, the ICS commissioners wrote Aurobindo asking him to fix a date to take his riding examination. He agreed to go on October 26, but did not turn up. An official then asked him to meet the riding instructor to make another appointment. He did not bother to see the man. Called to the office to explain, Aurobindo told a series of lies. <Source in footnote 93: “India Office Records L/JP/6/333, Memorandum by the Senior Examiner, Civil Service Commission Respecting the Examination in Riding, November 16, 1892; India Office Records L/JP/6/325, Hennell to Under Secretary of State, November 17, 1892.” See also quotation under (17) above.>

(32) He was rejected simply because he did not pass the riding examination. He was not given another chance to pass because he did not follow instructions, keep appointments, or tell the truth.<Same sources as above>

Marriage

(56) The usual desire for gratification, as Aurobindo has the guru call it [in his upanishadic dialogue quoted at length immediately above in the text, ref. The Upanishads, 138-139], was presumably a factor in his decision to get married, but it does not seem to have been an important one. His later writings show that his knowledge of human sexuality was more than academic, but the act seems to have held few charms for him. (see full endnote below) Consummation may have been delayed because of Mrinalini’s youth, and his own stoicism, partly innate and partly learned from philososphers such as Epictetus, would have helped him to keep his sexual tendencies in check.

(425) Endnote: For Sri Aurobindo’s general knowledge of human sexuality, see his letters to disciples on sex, which occupy more than forty pages, 1507-1549, of Letters of Yoga. For his experience of maithunanda, see Record of Yoga, 204, 300, 302, 329, 431, 464, 774, and 1456. Maithunanda means literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight, but some references, notably on page 204 (“equal to the first movements of the actual maithuna ananda”) seem to imply a knowledge of ordinary maithuna.

Sri Aurobindo never spoke directly about his experience or lack of experience of sex, but he did refer to the

subject indirectly. In 1936 he wrote to his disciple Nirodbaran, who was complaining about the difficulty of

overcoming anger and sexual desire, “I was also noted in my earlier time before Yoga for the rareness of anger. At

a certain period of the Yoga it rose in me like a volcano and I had to take a long time eliminating it. As for

sex—well. You are always thinking that the things that are happening to you are unique and nobody else ever had

such trials or downfalls or misery before.” See Nirodbaran, ed., Correspondence, 748. When Nirodbaran asked

him why spiritual teachers such as Confucius or Sri Aurobindo got married, he replied: “Perfectly natural—they

marry before the [spiritual] change—then the change comes and the marriage belongs to the past self, not to the

new one.” See Nirodbaran, ed., Correspondence, 576. A half-century later, Nirodbaran alluded to this exchange

in a talk about Mrinalini. He concluded: “Why did Sri Aurobindo marry? As far as I have understood his

philosophy of life, he was from the beginning holding the view that life is not an illusion; he refused even to accept a

yoga which rejected life. The wholeness, the integrality of the experience of life was his doctrine. . And love through

marriage playing a very important role could not be excluded from the pursuit of his avataric mission which meant

to change the world. That experience left out would not give the seal of completeness to that mission or enable him

to say to us, ‘This experience also I have had.’” See Nirodbaran, Mrinalini Devi, 28. For Sri Aurobindo’s own

views on the avatar and sex, see Nirodbaran, ed., Correspondence, 169, and N. Doshi, ed., Guidance,

280–281.

<The following discussion on pages 318-319 omitted in its entirety:

About their connubial relations nothing is known. Her father summed up the situation in a sentence: “There was no issue of the marriage.”<Footnote 25> After Aurobindo entered what he called “the sexual union dignified by the name of marriage,” [allusion to a letter quoted on page 316-317] he seems to have found the state bothersome and uninteresting. “Marriage,” he wrote later to a disciple, “means usually any amount of trouble, heavy burdens, a bondage to the worldly life and great difficulties in the way of single-minded spiritual endeavour.” Many of these difficulties, for most people at least, are related to sex and the desires that accompany it. Aurobindo appears to have had few problems in that regard. He was probably alluding to his own experience when he wrote to a disciple that there were “some who can eliminate it [the sexual propensity] decisively by a swift radical dropping away from the nature.” On another occasion he said more directly: “I for one have put the sexual side completely aside, it is lying blocked so that I can make this daring attempt” at spiritual transformation.<Footnote 26>

<Text of Footnotes 25 and 25

25. B. Bose, note on Mrinalini Ghose, in SAAA, reproduced in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research 2 (December 1978): 208.

26. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 1528, 1512; Sri Aurobindo, talk of December 13, 1923, partly published in Sri Aurobindo Circle 9 (1953): 207.>

Anger

(112) His “voluntary self-effacement” was put to the test on December 12 when an officious secretary printed his name as editor-in-chief where Pal’s name used to be. Aurobindo was furious when he saw it. It gave him publicity he did not want, and also ran counter to an earlier decision that the editor of the paper would not be named. He spoke to the secretary “pretty harshly” about it. Hemendra Prasad, who witnessed the outburst, thought Aurobindo was more than just harsh. “Well, if you take the clothes away there remains little to distinguish one human radish from another,” he noted in a Shakespearean allusion. A day later, he was more explicit: “Babu Aurobindo Ghose is an extremely strange man. And I suspect a tinge of lunacy is not absent in him. His mother is a lunatic. And it is not at all strange” – not strange, that is, that the madness in Aurobindo’s family might express itself in him as an intensity that exceeded the norm.<footnote 31>

Sri Aurobindo’s Politics

(104) When people asked to her Aurobindo speak, Pal replied “Try to assimilate what I am telling you. When he speaks, he will speak only fire.”

<para> Aurobindo’s reticence was only partly due to his temperament. He was incapable of addressing a meeting in Bengali, and had trouble understanding the East Bengal dialects.

(130) His unwillingness to compromise was his strength as well as his weakness. He was – as he wrote in a letter of 1920 – the right person to call on “when there is something drastic to be done, a radical or revolutionary line to be taken.” <Footnote 92> In the give-and-take of day-to-day politics he was less effective. He approved of but could not follow Tilak’s advice that a politician should be ready to accept half a loaf, and then demand the rest. Cotemporaries and historians questioned his right to be called an effective politician. Certainly, he was not a great builder or steady worker. But his radical interventions opened up paths that others could hardly imagine.

(149) “Without making any effort at oratory,” another listener recalled, Aurobindo managed to hold the audience with his “impassioned eloquence” – this despite his being far from impressive as a speaker: short, thin, with a drawn and angular face and a voice high-pitched to the point of shrillness.< Footnote 137>

Surat session of the Congress

(140) As the Extremists followed their leader [Sri Aurobindo] as he walked out of the room, one of Bannerjea’s lieutenants raised his fist and shouted: “Aurobindo, go eat Tilak’s shit!”<Footnote 140>

The next morning tempers were still frayed, but most of the delegates wanted to see the thing through.

(141) Years later Aurobindo observed in a letter that his advice was, in effect, “the order that led to the breaking of the Congress.” This gives too much importance to a single factor in a complex chain of events. The differences that brought about the split had been building for months. Even without Aurobindo’s “order”, Tilak’s stance and the attack against him would have led to a free-for-all.<This opinion would be supported by most if not all historians who have studied the period. It does not deny the importance of Sri Aurobindo’s order; rather it contextualizes it.>

Hinduism

(187) The Uttarpara speech has been printed and cited innumerable times since its delivery, mostly because it was the first and the last occasion that Aurobindo spoke of his spiritual experiences in public. As such, it is an important document for scholars of mysticism. But historians, political scientists, and politicians also discuss the speech. Left-wing critics hold it up as proof that Aurobindo’s nationalism was Hindu at its core, and suggest that this bias encouraged the growth of communalism, which made the partition of the country inevitable. Right-wing enthusiasts regard the speech as an inspired expression of the imperishable Indian spirit, citing passages of the speech out of context to make it seem as if Aurobindo endorsed their programs. These readings are both partial and thus both false; Aurobindo’s “universal religion” was not limited to any particular creed. It had been given classic expression in the Upanishads and Gita, but it was also at the core of such scriptures as the Bible and the Koran. More important, “its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart [of every individual] in which the Eternal has His dwelling.”<footnote 70> The true sanatana dharma was not a matter of belief but of spiritual experience and inner communion with the Divine.

<Text of Footnote 70> “Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, p. 26.” Passage quoted here for convenience: “This sanatana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of the world’s Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduct, the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga.”>

Hindu-Muslim problem

(115-116) A hundred years later, the East Bengal riots are remembered not as occasions of Hindu self-assertion, but as early examples of the communal violence – to use a term that had not yet been invented – that continues to the present day. Aurobindo and other Extremist are sometimes accused by liberal and left-wing historians of preparing the way for communalism by giving a Hindu slant to the movement.<See note in angle brackets above. For a balanced discussion of the East Bengal riots and how they are remembered today, see Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905-1947. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).>

(190) But he did not turn his back on political issues such as the Hindu-Muslim problem. In the issue of July 17, 1909 he wrote that there was “absolutely no reason why the electoral question should create bad blood between the two communities.” Union could never be achieved “by political adjustments”; it had to be “sought deeper down, in the heart and the mind, for where the causes of disunion are, there the remedies must be sought.” Sound psychology, but few Muslims were comforted by his assertion that “our Musulman brother” was an Indian as any Hindu, since “in him too Narayan dwells and to him too our Mother has given a permanent place in her bosom.” <footnote 82> Only highly cultivated men like Abul Kalam Azad could see the sense behind the Hindu imagery. Azad visited Aurobindo a few times in the Karmayogin office and was briefly in contact with one of the revolutionary groups.<footnote 83> But most Muslims stayed away from Extremist politics, which appeared to them to be dominated by Hindu interests.

<Texts of footnotes 82 and 83:

82. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, 29–31

83. A. Azad, India Wins Freedom, 4.>

(212) He tried, half-heartedly, to bring Muslims into the movement, but he never gave the problem the attention that hindsight shows that it deserved. But could anything said or done in 1907 have changed the outcome forty years later? Probably not. Still, partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it were the movement’s principal failings, and Aurobindo and his colleagues have to take their share of the blame. <If not, then all the blame falls on the British and the Muslims. No serious historian could advance this view, however comforting it might be to some.>

Aurobindo legend

(199) In an effort to explain the “marvellous change” of an “obscure school-master” into a national political leader, [Jitendra Lal] Bannerji proposed to give his readers what was needed to plumb the “secret of that mysterious personality which has drawn to itself so much love, hope and reverence.” Glowing portraits of Rajnarain Bose and Dr. K. D. Ghose were followed by a potted biography of Aurobindo that stressed his intelligence and self-sacrifice. Released from jail after a year’s confinement, he “is like gold, thrice tested in fire.” Some called him a visionary and a dreamer. Jitendra Lal had no quarrel with that: “Yes, Aravinda Ghosh is a dreamer – but he has dreamed golden dreams for his country and people – visions of glory and triumph.” <Footnote 115> This article may be said to mark the beginning of the Aurobindo legend, which would assume new forms in the years to come. But Aurobindo does not seem to have been taken Jitendra Lal’s article too seriously. In December he published a letter by a professor named Hiralal Haldar that scoffed at Jitendra Lal’s hero-worshipping tone.<Footnote 116>

<para> Critics of Aurobindo could be as zealous in detraction as Jitendra Lal was in praise. Annie Besant again proclaimed him dangerous, even fanatical on account of “his refusal to work with any Englishmen.” <Footnote 117> Members of government used the same terms to describe the man they were trying to imprison. Some added that they thought he was slightly off his head: “There is madness in his family,” wrote the Viceroy to the secretary of the state, “and he probably has a bee in his bonnet.” Minto seems to have picked up this notion from R.C. Dutt, a onetime friend of Aurobindo’s, who had been asked for information by the political agent of Baroda. “Arabindo’s mother was off her mind,” Dutt volunteered, “and Arabindo himself was eccentric.”<Footnote 118>

<Text of footnotes:

115. J. Bannerji, “Aurobindo Ghose—A Study,” 476–487.

116. Letter from Hiralal Haldar, November 5, 1909, published as “Comment and Criticism” in Karmayogin 1 (December 11, 1909): 5.

117. Besant in Central Hindu College Magazine 9 (September 1909): 210.

118. Minto to Morley, April 14, 1910, Minto Papers; Diary of R. C. Dutt, August 7, 1909, Baroda State Papers.>

Sri Aurobindo’s adesh

(204) Years later Aurobindo explained that when he heard Ramchandra’s warning, he went within and heard a voice – an adesh – that said “Go to Chandernagore.” He obeyed it without reflection. Had he given it any thought, however, he would have found good reasons to comply. Chandernagore was a French possession, one of five scattered enclaves that made up the French settlements in India. Outside the jurisdiction of the British police, it had become an important center of nationalist activity. For a man with a British warrant against him, it was the best place near Calcutta to go. The adesh also came at an opportune moment. Aurobindo had written ten days earlier that he would “refrain from farther political action” until a “more settled state of things supervenes”—something that was unlikely to happen very soon. This period of political paralysis coincided with his own wish to retire from politics and spend more time practicing yoga. In December, he had looked into the possibility of buying land outside Calcutta to found a spiritual ashram.<footnote 134> Nothing came of this idea, but his urge to leave politics remained. It was only his awareness that his party depended on him that kept him in the field. But the return of Shyamsundar and the other deportees meant that the movement would not be leaderless if he left. In addition, the arrival of his uncle Krishna Kumar Mitra meant that his last family duty—looking after his aunt and her children—had come to an end.

This is not to suggest that he thought all this through when he decided to leave Calcutta. By his own account, his “habit in action was not to devise beforehand and plan but to keep a fixed purpose, watch events, prepare forces and act when he felt it to be the right moment.”<footnote 135> The moment for his departure had come. As he sailed up the Hooghly in his little wooden boat, he probably was not looking further ahead than the next few days.

<Texts of footnotes 134 and 135:

134. Government of India, Home Department Proceedings, series A, January 1910, 141–142: 4.

135. Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, 18.>

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences

(245-247) Before continuing it is necessary to consider a question that may have occurred to some readers. In writing and speaking about his sadhana, Aurobindo made the following claims: that he saw visions, heard voices, and had other sources of knowledge independent of the senses and reason; that he could read people’s minds and had knowledge of the future; that by means of mental power he could change the course of events, cure diseases, and alter the form of his body; that he went into trance; that he felt physical pain as pleasure and experienced spontaneous erotic delight; that he had a sort of supernatural strength; that he was in touch with goddesses and gods; that he was one with God. Those familiar with Indian mythological literature will not be surprised by these powers and experiences, as they are commonplace in the epics and Puranas. ~~But~~ Those familiar with the literature of mysticism will observe that Aurobindo’s powers and experiences are similar to those that other mystics from Milarepa to Rumi to Saint Teresa are said to have possessed. But those familiar with the literature of psychiatry and clinical psychology may be struck by the similarity between Aurobindo’s powers and experiences and the symptoms of schizophrenia.

The question of the relationship between mysticism and madness has been discussed since antiquity. In the folklore of many cultures, a man or woman of exceptional ability has often been thought closer to the lunatic than to the ordinary mortal. Indian tradition offers hundreds of examples of yogis, mystics, and sufis whom others regarded, at least sometimes, as out of their minds. India assigns an honored place to the divine madman and madwoman once their spiritual credentials have been accepted. In the West, someone who acts eccentrically and claims divine influence is more likely to be considered a psychotic with religious delusions. Recent psychiatry has barely amended Freud’s idea that “religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic systems familiar to us.”<Footnote 91> A defender of mysticism would argue that the truth value of mystical experience is so much greater than the truth value of psychiatry—a discipline based on dubious assumptions—that any attempt by the latter to explain the former is absurd. But unless the defender was an experienced mystic, this would just be substituting one set of unverified assumptions for another. When I speak of Aurobindo’s experiences, my aim is not to argue for their veracity or for their delusiveness; I simply present some of the documented events of his inner life and provide a framework for evaluating them.

In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James examined the experiences of “religious geniuses,” some of

whom were considered unbalanced by their contemporaries. James insisted that such experiences had to be

interpreted “in the immediate context of the religious consciousness.” The correct criteria for judging them were

“immediate luminousness,” “philosophical reasonableness,” and “moral helpfulness.” Later writers continued on

similar lines. Anton Boisen felt that there was “an important relationship between acute mental illness of the

functional type and those sudden transformations of character” known as conversion experiences. “Certain types of

mental disorder and certain types of religious experience” were, he wrote, “attempts at [personality]

reorganisation.” When successful, such attempts can lead to a new synthesis; when unsuccessful, they lead to

insanity.<Footnote 92> Neither Boisen nor James attempted to erase the line between mysticism and madness.

They acknowledged that many people who claimed to have mystical experiences suffered from psychological

anguish that made them incapable of leading productive lives. They also noted that certain well-known mystics

passed through periods of apparent madness. Sudhir Kakar, who discussed this with reference to Ramakrishna,

felt that the distinguishing sign of psychosis in such cases was “painful or anxious affect.” In the absence of

psychological pain or anxiety, “certain types of mystical experience” could be regarded as having “their ground in

creativity, akin to the heightened fantasy of an artist or a writer, rather than in pathology.”<Footnote 93>

Most of Aurobindo’s experiences are familiar to the mystic traditions of India and elsewhere. He wrote about them

in language that is reasonable and luminous, though often hard to understand. Some of this writing is in the form of

diary notations that were concurrent with the experiences. Around the same time he also wrote more than a dozen

books on philosophy, textual interpretation, social science, and literary and cultural criticism, along with a mass of

miscellaneous prose and poetry. Numerous scholars admire these works for their clarity and consistency;

thousands of readers believe that they have been helped spiritually or mentally by them. No contemporary ever re

marked that Aurobindo suffered painful or anxious feelings as a result of his experiences. In one or two letters

written during the 1930s, he wrote that his life had been a struggle, and hinted at inner dangers and difficulties as

great as any “which human beings have borne,” but at no time did he give evidence to others of inner or outer

stress. Indeed, virtually everyone who met him found him unusually calm, dispassionate, and loving – and eminently

sane. The reports to the contrary are so rare that they can be examined individually. As noted earlier, while

working as editor-in-chief of Bande Mataram, Aurobindo sometimes was severe and occasionally angry. After

witnessing a tongue-lashing Aurobindo gave to another, Hemendra Prasad Ghose wrote in his diary that he thought

Aurobindo might have inherited “a tinge of lunacy” from his mother. R.C. Dutt, asked by the government for

information about Aurobindo, also mentioned Swarnalata’s madness and suggested that her son was “eccentric”.

After Aurobindo had spoken of his vision of Krishna in the Uttarpara speech, a few of his associates murmured

that he had lost his balance. These scattered reports by people out of sympathy with him are hardly significant in

themselves; viewed together with every other known report of Aurobindo’s character, they stand out as

exceptions. Aurobindo’s anger was remarkably rare and did not leave scars. A few months after noting down the

outburst that had surprised him, Hemendra Prasad wrote to Aurobindo that he would “always look back with

pleasure on the period of my life during which I had the privilege of working with you for a cause.”<Footnote 94>

That some of Aurobindo’s political opponents considered him eccentric or unbalanced is not surprising. When

people asked him about his claim to have seen Krishna, the calmness and lack of self-assertion of his answer

convinced them that he was anything but unbalanced.

Calm—shanti—was the first element of Aurobindo’s yoga; balance—samata—was its basis. Asked in 1926

about his ability to overcome the difficulties of yoga, he replied: “A perfect yoga requires perfect balance. That was

the thing that saved me—the perfect balance. First I believed that nothing was impossible and at the same time I

could question everything.”<Footnote 95> Record of Yoga is remarkable not only as a chronicle of unusual

experiences, but as the self-critical journal of a practitioner who was never satisfied with anything short of perfection.

<Text of Footnotes:

91. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, quoted in R. Hood, “Mysticism, Reality, Illusion, and the Freudian Critique of Religion,” 58.

92. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 24–33; A. Boisen, The Exploration of the Inner World, ix.

93. S. Kakar, The Analyst and the Mystic, 26.

94. Diary of Hemendra Prasad Ghose, July 28, 1907, in SAAA.

95. Talk of November 11, 1926, quoted in A. Purani, Life, 205.>

Sri Aurobindo as Guru

(~~331~~ 330) From 1921 on, most descriptions of Aurobindo read as though they are taken out of the Puranas or other

mythological texts. “The atmosphere round the Master was surcharged with pure vibrations of peace, light, power and

Ananda [bliss]. One could feel the fragrance of lotuses from his transparent, luminous body”; “His God-like face

radiated profound peace and serenity. His intent and faraway look indicated to me that he was not of the

earth.”<Footnote 64> Many people remarked that he was tall, though his height remained unchanged at five feet, four

inches. Much of the hyperbole may be ascribed to the charisma that was building up around the inaccessible,

mysterious Aurobindo, who was reputed, like all certified holy men of India, to possess supernatural powers. Be that

as it may, all descriptions of Aurobindo’s appearance from this and later periods lay stress on its singularity. He was,

A. B. Purani wrote, “cast in a mould of arresting majesty, of regal splendour. We saw that uncommon majesty

manifested in every look, in every gesture, in every movement of his. His deportment was kingly yet natural, his voice

was melodious yet soft, pleasing yet firm. A born aristocrat, he could be easily spotted in a crowd. He was and looked

so uncommon, so out of the ordinary.”<Footnote 65>

<N.B. It is common knowledge that to the popular mind in India a yogi is one who possesses extraordinary powers.>

<Text of footnotes:

64. T. Rao, At the Feet, 41; V. Chidanandam, “Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as I Saw Them,” 2.

65. A. Purani, “An Intimate Glimpse of the Master,” Sunday Times, December 17, 1950, 2.>

(342-343) ~~Bowing down to the~~ ~~gurus~~ Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindo’s birthdays began to be celebrated with some pomp. “From early morning,” reads one contemporary

account, the house was “humming with various activities. . All are eager to go to the Master for his Darshan [formal

viewing]. As the time passes there is a tide in the sea of rising emotion. It is ‘Darshan’—we see him every day, but

today it is ‘Darshan’! Today each sees him individually, one after another. In the midst of these multiple activities the

consciousness gets concentrated.” Climbing the staircase, they found him seated “in the royal chair in the verandah

—royal and majestic. In the very posture there is divine self-confidence. In the heart of the Supreme Master, the great

Yogin.” Those present were filled with emotion: “is it a flood that mounts or a flood that is coming down on humanity?

Those alone who have experienced it can know something of its divinity.” As they approach, “all doubts get

assurance. . Love and grace flow on undiminished. The look! enrapturing and captivating eyes! Who can ever forget?

—pouring love and grace and ineffable divinity.”<footnote 112>

<para>There is no way to know what Aurobindo thought about the outpouring of emotion. Basically British in his upbringing, he was always reticent and reserved, never encouraging demonstrations of feeling. He was familiar with the conventions of the Indian guru-shishya relationship, such as bowing down before the master <note singular number> and elaborate gestures of devotion, but he resisted attempts by his followers to practice them. He may have regarded such customs as examples of those “ancient ideas and forms” that India had such difficulty getting beyond. <The reference here is to a passage from a letter cited and discussed on page 339.> But if Aurobindo was indifferent or opposed to ceremony, Mira thrived in it. <As will be evident when the passage is read in its entirety, the “ceremony” referred to here comprised the special acts performed on Sri Aurobindo’s birthday by the disciples, which Mira (the Mother) was “happy to see”. There is no mention bowing down to her.> She was happy to see the sadhaks spending hours stringing garlands and preparing special dishes, and later, during the darshan, bowing down at Aurobindo’s feet.

<Text of Footnote 112

A. Purani, Life, 196–197. Purani places this description with events of the year 1924, but it is more likely that it belongs in 1923.>

Darshan day

(399-400) Early in the afternoon the Mother rejoined him, and they walked together to the small outer room where they sat together on a sofa, the Mother on Sri Aurobindo’s right. Here they remained for the next few hours as ashramites and visitors – more than a thousand by the end of the 1940s – passed before them one by one. “There is no suggestion of a vulgar jostle anywhere in the moving procession,” a visitor noted. “The mystic sits bare-bodied except for a part of his dhoti thrown round his shoulders. A kindly light plays in his eyes.” Sri Aurobindo looked directly at each person for a moment. “The moving visitor is conscious of a particular contact with these [eyes] as he bends down to do his obeisance. They leave upon him a mysterious ‘feel’ that baffles description. The contact, almost physical, instils a faint sense of a fragrance into his heart and he has a perception of a glow akin to that spreading in every fibre of his being.” <Footnote 147> Most visitors had similar positive experiences. But some, particularly from the West, were distracted by the theatricality of the setting and the religiosity of the pageantry. Vincent Sheean, a well-know American journalist, had read some of Sri Aurobindo’s books before coming and was deeply impressed by them. But as he stood in line to have darshan, with incense swirling around him and people throwing themselves at the guru’s feet, he was hit by “a shock of sledge-hammer quality, to see human beings worshipped in this way.” Failing to make sense of it, he at least was glad to see that “whatever others may think or say”, Sri Aurobindo did not seem to “to be deceived or befuddled by these extravagant manifestations.”<Footnote 148>

<Text of footnotes 147 and 148

147. R. Ganguli, “Pondicherry’s Mystic,” Amrita Bazar Patrika, February 22, 1950.

148. V. Sheean, “Kings,” 75.>

Avatarhood

(380)

As had been the case for years, the only time anyone could see him was during the darshan celebrations. People

now had less than a minute before him, but most went away impressed. A French professor spoke of being filled

with “a feeling of certitude, stability—an impression I had received often before on seeing a huge mountain.” He

was sure, from the first glimpse, that this “was what I had so long searched for, the solution of my

problems.”<footnote 87> A Bengali writer who had admired the political Aurobindo thirty years earlier now found

him the very picture of “the venerable ‘Rishi’ of old which we have in our mind’s eye with long grey hairs and

beard—a picture of purity, a living deity—calm, collected, serene, cheerful and loving,—at whose sight the head

stoops low spontaneously in esteem and reverence.”<Footnote 88>

Whether spontaneous or conventional, a reverential attitude was becoming the only acceptable way to approach Sri Aurobindo. Disciples took it for granted that he was an avatar, or incarnation of God. He never made any such claim on his own behalf; on the other hand, he never dissuaded anyone from regarding him in this way, and wrote openly that the Mother was an incarnation of the Shakti. She reciprocated when speaking about him with disciples, but insisted on “great reserve” when people wrote articles for the general public.<Footnote 89>

<Footnote texts [both misnumbered]: “G. Monod-Herzen, “Reminiscences of Sri Aurobindo,” 497; Sri Aurobindo, Letter of Novembe 25, 1933, in SAAA.”

(413) In the half-century since Sri Aurobindo’s death, his reputation has continued to grow. Discussed by historians,

philosophers, literary critics, and social scientists, and admired, even worshipped, by thousands of spiritual seekers, he

regularly is numbered among the most outstanding Indians of the twentieth century.<Footnote 9> Like all icons, he is

misrepresented by his admirers as well as his detractors, praised or reviled for things he never said or did. Most people

allow their opinions of him to be shaped by authorities. His followers and their spokesmen present him as an avatar or

incarnation beyond any sort of criticism. Conservative writers and politicians seize on aspects of his thought that

appear to support their agendas, ignoring or suppressing other aspects, while other writers and critics cite his works

out of context to present him as one of the causes of India’s social, political, and literary ills. Still others reject the

religiosity of the devout and the zeal of one-sided critics and admirers in an attempt to arrive at a more balanced idea

of what Sri Aurobindo was and what his legacy is and will be.

It is difficult to offer a balanced assessment of a man who is regarded by some as an incarnation of God and by

others as a social and political reactionary. To accept Sri Aurobindo as an avatar is necessarily a matter of faith,

and matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma. Besides, the term “avatar” has lost much of its glow in

recent years. Once reserved for “descents” that come “from age to age,”<Footnote 10> it now is applied to any

spiritual leader with a halfway decent following. As for the label “reactionary,” it is itself a reaction against Sri

Aurobindo’s appropriation by members of the Hindu Right, who claim his posthumous endorsement for their

backward-looking programs.

The value of Sri Aurobindo’s achievements can only be gauged by examining the historical and literary evidence

and assessing the nature and effects of his thought and action. For this, assertions of supernatural influence are no

more help than assertions of ideological certitude. Sri Aurobindo’s role in changing the course of India’s freedom

struggle is evident from contemporary sources. Before him, no one dared to speak openly of independence; twenty

years later, it became the movement’s accepted goal. His focus on freedom made him give insufficient importance

to social and cultural problems that continue to haunt the country, such as interreligious and intercaste conflict. But

there is no contemporary evidence that his actions or words exacerbated these problems. Some of his ideas might,

in fact, help to solve them—for example the idea that India’s religious and ethnic diversity was “a great advantage

for the work to be done” in the future.”<footnote 11>

<Text of footnotes 9–10:

9. See, e.g., “The 100 Indians Who Shaped Our Century,” Gentleman (February 1986); “100 People Who Shaped India in the Twentieth Century,” India Today, The Millennium Series, vol. 1 (2000); “Indians of the Century,” The Times of India (2000), originally published online at http://www.timesofindia.com/century/vote.html, archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20000301113723/http://timesofindia.com/century/vote.html, accessed July 31, 2007.

10. Bhagavad Gita 4.8.>

11. Sri Aurobindo, letter of November 17, 1932, in SAAA. See also Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, 642–643; Karmayogin, 23; The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self-Determination, 286, 288, 307–308.

Sri Aurobindo’s Writings

Songs to Myrtilla

(25) One would be ill-advised to read, as one of Aurobindo’s biographers did, as confessions of infatuations with a half-dozen girls. Still, memory may sometimes have cued his imagination. “Edith,” whom he addresses in “Night by the Sea”… was the name of Mr Drewett’s younger sister-in-law, who lived with his family in Manchester.

(50) Few people in London would have agreed that the book showed promise.

Urvasie

(50) Written in the late Victorian style of Tennyson and Arnold, it contains little of lasting interest.

<Compare Sri Aurobindo’s own later opinion of the poem:

“I don’t think I have the Urvasie, neither am I very anxious to have this poem saved from oblivion.” (Letter of 5 February 1931). “On Sunday also I shall look at the Urvasie. It is a poem I am not in love with—not that there is not some good poetry in it, but it seems to me as a whole lacking in originality and life. However, I may be mistaken; a writer’s opinions on his productions generally are.” (Letter of 5 April 1935) “But Love and Death was not my first blank verse poem—I had written one [Urvasie] before in the first years of my stay in Baroda which was privately published, but afterwards I got disgusted with it and rejected it. (Letter of 4 July 1933).” All from Letters on Poetry and Art, pp. 223-224>

Love and Death

(52) Dedicating Love and Death to Manmohan, Aurobindo spoke of it as “the first considerable effort of my powers.”<footnote 57> It certainly was the poem in which he found himself, and this meant, in part, freeing himself from his indebtedness to his brother. Other literary influences remained: Stephen Phillips’s blank verse narratives, Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, Keats’s Hyperion.<Footnote 58> It is against such poems that Love and Death must be judged. At its best, it bears comparison with them:

[Twelve lines quoted]

Although certain of the quality of Love and Death, Aurobindo was in no special hurry to have it published. Twenty years passed before it finally appeared in print. By then the shock of World War I and the beginning of literary modernism had so transformed the poetic landscape that a late Victorian blank-verse narrative had no hope of attracting favourable notice.

<Compare Sri Aurobindo’s own remarks on the recognition of his poetry:

“It is a misfortune of my poetry from the point of view of recognition that the earlier work forming the bulk of the Collected Poems belongs to the past and has little chance of recognition now that the aesthetic atmosphere has so violently changed, while the later mystical work and Savitri belong to the future and will possibly have to wait for recognition of any merit they have for another strong change.”

“I might perhaps take refuge in the supposition that the lack of recognition is the consequence of an untimely and too belated publication, due to the egoistic habit of writing for my own self-satisfaction rather than any strong thirst for poetical glory and immortality and leaving most of my poetry in the drawer for much longer than, even for twice or thrice the time recommended by Horace who advised the poet to put by his work and read it again after ten years and then only, if he still found it of some value, to publish it.” Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 349, 351>

Upanishads

(79) The language of Aurobindo’s dialogue is heavy and pedantic, the characters shallow and unconvincing, but the work shows evidence of much original thought.

Viziers of Bassora

(80) The underlying plot of this wonder tale is one that Aurobindo returned to repeatedly in his dramatic writing: a beautiful young woman, noble but in bondage, and a handsome young hero, sensitive yet strong, fall irretrievably in love. The hero must battle entrenched inferiors to gain his birthright. In the outer world of action, Aurobindo never sought help from anyone. In the imaginary world of his dramas, his protagonist was never without a partner.

Rodogune

(96) A tragedy in verse on the Shakespearean model now seems to be such a throwback that it is hard to evaluate Rodogune as literature. Viewed as drama, it is original and well-plotted, owing little to Corneille except the basic story. Viewed as poetry, it can hold its own against contemporary plays in verse by Stephen Phillips and Laurence Binyon. Its primary defect is flat allegorical characters. Antiochus never says an ignoble word or does an ignoble deed. Timocles comes across as a comic buffoon, not a tragic figure, while Rodogune is too colorless to inspire either devotion or jealousy.

Perseus the Deliverer

(106) Aurobindo turned the story into a Shakespearean romance, complete with clowns, soubrette, soldiers, monsters, royalty, and hoi poloi. Even more than Rodogune, Perseus belongs in style and conception to a bygone era. Chained to the rock, Andromeda muses:

I will not die! I am too young,

And life was recently so beautiful.

It is hard, too hard a fate to bear.

In the face of such passages, it is easy to dismiss Perseus as intolerably mawkish. But the play is not without psychological interest.

Karmayogin

(203) The philosophical articles take up, in a non-academic way, some of the classic problems of the discipline: the relation between the individual and the cosmos, the puzzle of free will and fate, the origin and significance of evil. His essays on these subjects are clear and well expressed, though not particularly original. Many of them try to harmonise the Upanishads and late Victorian science by means of evolution. Some of his arguments now seem rather quaint. A seed grows into a certain sort of tree, Aurobindo wrote, because “the tree is the idea involved in the seed.” In the light of molecular biology, this is at best a vivid metaphor.

Life Divine

(277) <The passage that follows is the only part of the author’s highly appreciative, 2800 word treatment of The Life Divine that is quoted>

How does Aurobindo rank as a philosopher? Most members of the philosophical profession – those who have read him at all – would be loath to admit him to their club. His methods simply do not fit in with the discipline as it is currently practised. Even Stephen H. Phillips, the author of a sympathetic monograph on Aurobindo’s thought, had to admit that Aurobindo wrote The Life Divine not as a philosopher, but as “ ‘a spiritual preceptor’, in a long tradition of intellectual, but hardly academic ‘gurus’.<Footnote 35> Yet this preceptorial philosopher created a synthesis of spiritual thought that bears comparison with the best of similar systems: those of Plotinus, Abhinavgupta, and Alfred North Whitehead. Even if his critics deny him the label of philosopher – a label he never claimed for himself – his philosophical writings will continue to be studied by lay and academic readers.

Synthesis of Yoga

(279) <The passage that follows is the only part of the author’s highly appreciative, 3200 word treatment of The Synthesis of Yoga that is quoted>

The Synthesis of Yoga, the work in which he presented his methods [of yoga], is almost abstruse as The Life Divine, containing no easy-to-follow techniques.<What is the problem? Compare the following well-known passage from SY 46-47: “There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga.”>

Renaissance of India

(295) Much of Aurobindo’s Is India Civilised? is starkly dualistic, positioning Indian Culture as spiritual, aesthetic, and profound and Western culture as rationalistic, mechanistic, and superficial.

(296) The Defence of Indian Culture is a polemic from the start to finish, as Aurobindo closed his eyes to the critic’s positive judgments and blasted him for the slightest negative remark.

(297) To Aurobindo, Buddhism, with its two thousand-year history in India, was just an extreme restatement of the truths of Veda and Vedanta – a characterisation that no Buddhist would accept.<This is self-evident.>

Vasavadatta

(299) From a literary point of view, Aurobindo’s plays are the least interesting of his works. Biographically speaking, they may offer insights into movements of his imaginative life. If his earlier plays suggest that he was searching for his ideal life partner, Vasavadutta seems to hint that he had found the woman he was seeking and was waiting for the moment when she would join him.

Ahana and other Poems

(301-302) A century after its publication, it is difficult to offer a balanced assessment of Ahana and Other Poems. All of the pieces in the collection, even those written in Pondicherry, bear the stamp of late-Victorian romanticism. The ideas in them may not have occurred to a Tennyson or Swinburne, but striking ideas in metrical form do not of themselves make poetry…Cousins wrote…At its best, his poetry stood “self-existent in its own authenticity and beauty”; at it worst it was “poor minted coin of the brain”.

The Future Poetry

(306) By 1920 the Modernists were changing the face of European and American literature, and many of the ideas on which The Future Poetry was based had become antiquated curiosities before any important poet or critic could read the book. Aurobindo’s own poetry, rooted deeply in the soil of the nineteenth century, was out of date before it saw print.

(307) As the Modernist movement progressed, Aurobindo became out of touch with contemporary developments in poetry. As a result his poetry and criticism must now be judged by the standards of the past, or else taken – so far with little support – as harbingers of a future yet to be glimpsed.

Collected Poems and Plays

(389-90) Collected Poems and Plays were politely reviewed in India after its August publication. The Times Literary Supplement gave the book to Ranjee G. Shahani, an Indian writer living in London. Unimpressed by Sri Aurobindo’s poetry (“his technical devices are commendable; but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there”) Shahani chose to turn his review into a consideration of the author’s entire oeuvre. “As an Indian scholar and critic he is second to none,” Shahani wrote, citing such works as Essays on the Gita and The Secret of the Veda. Sri Aurobindo’s literary judgments matched Coleridge’s and Heine’s in their “piercing and instantaneous insight,” while The Life Divine was, “it is not too much to say, one of the master-works of our age.”

Shahani, like Younghusband, began his review by lamenting that Sri Aurobindo was practically unknown in England and the United States. Both reviewers contrasted this neglect with his growing fame in his own country. Shahani added that in India “there are no criticisms, only praise, “which not infrequently rose “to a crescendo of adulation.”

Ashram journals

(393-4) A printing establishment was set up in 1945, and within a few years was producing books that set a standard for excellence in India. Before long all of Sri Aurobindo’s works were being published by the Ashram Press. Around the same time, ashram-related organizations began to bring out quarterly or annual journals. The first canto of Savitri appeared in the Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir Annual (Calcutta) in August 1946. Subsequent cantos appeared in The Advent (Madras), while poems like “A God’s Labour” and “The Infinitesimal Infinite” were published in Sri Aurobindo Circle (Bombay). The rest of the material printed in these journals – poems and essays by ashramites and other disciples – are more interesting as examples of devotional expression than as contributions to scholarship or literature. Sri Aurobindo read through some of these productions, but appears to have given little encouragement to intellectual or literary originality. His disciples’ poems simply imitate his images and rhythms; their articles summarise or plagiarise his ideas.

The Mother

Mother’s paintings

(251) Her works of the period, many of them quiet interior studies, show excellent technique and classical balance, if little originality.

Mother’s spiritual capacity

(261) There is no special mention of Mirra Richard [in a certain Record entry], nor evidence in earlier Record entries that he regarded her more than a “European yogi” of unusual attainments. <The reference here is to a letter by Sri Aurobindo cited and discussed on page 258; the key passage is: “They [Paul and Mirra] were, he wrote Motilal, “rare examples of European Yogins who have not been led away by Theosophical and other aberrations.” ” This quotation is followed by this sentence by Heehs: “As for Mirra, she seemed [to Sri Aurobindo] to have a capacity for spiritual surrender that rivaled that of the great Indian bhaktas or devotees.” Re Record of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo does not, in fact, discuss the Mother’s spiritual capacity anywhere in the earlier Record entries.> But it need not be assumed that he put down all he felt in his diary. Years later he explained that he was aware at once that Mirra’s aptitude for yoga was extraordinary, while Paul’s was at best mediocre.

The Mother’s relation with Sri Aurobindo

(326-327) After dinner those present tended to cluster in two groups: Aurobindo and Mirra on one side, Paul and the others on another. Sometimes, when they were alone, Mirra took Aurobindo’s hand in hers. One evening, when Nolini found them thus together, Mirra quickly drew her hand away. On another occasion, Suresh entered Aurobindo’s room and found Mirra kneeling before him an attitude of surrender. Sensing the visitor, she at once stood up. There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual.

<paragraph on (326) continued> Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of expressing their emotions openly. The young men, already somewhat unhappy about the inclusion of women in their circle, and the consequent erosion their bohemian lifestyle, were somewhat nonplussed by this turn of events. Paul Richard took it more personally. At times he could be heard muttering a phrase of garbled Tamil, setth ay pochi, by which he meant “the calamity has happened.”<Footnote 49>

After a while he asked Aurobindo about the nature of relationship with Mirra. Aurobindo answered that he had accepted her as a disciple. Paul inquired as to what form the relationship would take. Aurobindo said that it would take any form that Mirra wanted. Paul persisted: “Suppose she claims the relationship of marriage?” Marriage did not enter Aurobindo’s calculations, what was important to him was Mirra’s autonomy, so he replied that if Mirra ever asked for marriage, that is what she would have.<Footnote 50>

Paul took the matter with his wife. According to Mirra, recalling the events forty years later, the confrontation was stormy. Aware more than ever that Mirra had made his literary and spiritual accomplishments possible, Paul demanded that she give her primary loyalty to him. Mirra simply smiled. Paul became violent, came close to strangling her, and threw the furniture out of the window. Mirra remained calm throughout, inwardly calling on the divine. For all intents and purposes this was the end of their relationship. A year later Paul confided to the novelist Romain Rolland that it had been a time of “violent crisis” in his life. He had been forced to fight “a dreadful inner battle, which threw me, alone, face to face with death… into the immense and glorious void of the Himalayan ‘Ocean’”. In his diary, Romain translated this into more mundane language: “In fact”, he wrote, “his wife…left him.”<Footnote 51>

Mirra and her friend Dorothy Hodgson continued to live at 7 rue Saint-Martin. The monsoon was heavy that year, and the roof began to leak. One day a warehouse on the rue d’Orléans collapsed in the incessant rain. Concerned that the same thing might happen at 7 rue Saint-Martin, Aurobindo suggested that the two women move into his house, and they agreed.

<Texts of footnotes 49-51

49. Purani Talks manuscripts 9: 80; 5: 98. Richard, who knew virtually no Tamil, seems to have combined two phrases, seththup pochchi, which is colloquial Tamil for “he/she died,” and aypochchu, which means “it is over.”

50. Purani Talks manuscripts 5: 76. In the interest of coherent dialogue, I have expanded and slightly amended Purani’s notes regarding this incident, which read: “(One day P. R. came & asked him in what way he (A. G.) related to Mirra. He said she was his disciple. But what was her attitude towards him. He said in whatever way the disciple will aspire for me he will get me as such [possibly an allusion to Bhagavad Gita 4.11]—Suppose she claims relations of marriage. ‘Well she will have that’—).” In a report of what appears to be a separate conversation between Aurobindo and Richard, Purani writes that in reply to a question from Richard about Mirra “A. G. simply said she had offered herself to him & she had been accepted. It was her lookout to do what she wanted to do.—”

51. The Mother, L’agenda de Mère, vol. 2: 409; R. Rolland, Inde: Journal 1915–1943, 28.

<The following passage from page 349, two pages after the above passage, was omitted in its entirety:

The consecrated union of a human male and female is seen [by Tantrics] as a reenactment of the cosmic act of creation. Some schools of tantric yoga put so much stress on this relationship that they require male practitioners to have female sexual partners. Aurobindo made it clear that this was not the case in his yoga. “How can the sexual act be made to help in spiritual life?” he asked a disciple who posed the question. It was necessary, in the work he was doing, for the masculine and feminine principles to come together, but the union had nothing to do with sex; in fact it was possible in his and Mirra’s case precisely because they had mastered the forces of desire.<footnote 59>

<Text of footnote 59> A. Purani, ed., Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, 339.

<Also omitted (p. 359): “As for the “ugly rumours [about the ashram that had been circulated],” Sen Gupta insisted [in an article approved by Sri Aurobindo] that they were false. “An absolute mastery of the sex movements and entire abstention from the physical (animal) indulgence are the first conditions” of Sri Aurobindo’s way of yoga. Accordingly “sensual indulgence” was “absolutely forbidden” and even “such comparatively innocent habits as smoking were discountenanced.””

(381-82) Around two o’clock that morning, while crossing to the bathroom, Sri Aurobindo stumbled over the tiger skin and fell. There was a sudden flash of pain. After years of practice he had developed the ability to transform most types of discomfort into ananda or bliss, but the pain he was feeling went beyond his threshold. He tried to get up and failed, then lay back quietly. After a short while, the Mother entered. Attuned inwardly to her partner, she had felt in her sleep that something was wrong.

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Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Sat 27 Sep 2008 08:48 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thanks, Rich. Very timely. Hopefully it will restore some semblance of sanity. I am reminded of a note written by the Mother and, by her own account, inspired by the New Consciousness of 1969:

Why do men want to worship? It is much better to become than to worship! (Mother's Agenda, April 30, 1969)

As one who wants to become, I read Sri Aurobindo's books when I want to learn about the inner Sri Aurobindo, and I read Peter's refreshingly level-headed biography when I want to learn about the outer Sri Aurobindo. I don't mean this in a mutually exclusive sense. The outer Sri Aurobindo is an integral part of the inner. The hagiographies, which tell us more about their authors than about Sri Aurobindo, are for those who are content to worship — and to worship a figment of their imagination at that. No wonder they get upset if this clashes with reality.

Rationalism and the yogic life

by Debashish on Sun 28 Sep 2008 12:05 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Since the article on Peter Heehs book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" was pulled off the site by R.Y. Deshpande and with it, all its comments disappeared, I am here re-posting my comment on rationalism and the yogic life where I had tried to contextualize Peter's text and provide an example of a quote from his book which was otherwise being utilized to make the exact opposite point to that which it actually made:

I cannot agree that the author of the book in question comes away as a "rationalist" passing judgment on spiritual matters, nor that his work is one designed to flout the validity of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual experiences or achievements.

Once the intent of the work is lost sight of, misreadings are bound to occur and this is what I believe has happened in this case. However, the tenor of the postings has left little room for discussion, since the assumptions made have been pressed without any openness to the possibility of other interpretations.

The book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs is clearly intended for a particular readership with a particular mindset. The publicity machinery around the work published by a major American University Press is directed towards the mainstream western academic readership.

This readership is being presently exposed to a variety of "rationalistic" and "psychoanalytic" approaches to the works of major Indian spiritual personages. Sri Aurobindo has not featured as yet in a major way in the attention of these scholars, but there is no doubt that he will be soon be targeted and is already being referred to in a variety of misleading ways.

A biography which acknowledges the relativism of reason and provides a framework for inner experience within that relativism is very necessary if spirituality is to establish a footing as an object of serious consideration by the general modern mind and can show a way to a higher knowledge to those who grapple with the problems of the reason.

A "rational" mind which is not "dogmatically rational" cannot dismiss or reject the validity of inner experience. It can doubt it but cannot pass judgment on it. Once this is established, a place for inner experience can be made, co-existent with the rest and open to the formulation of a clear understanding and a subjective science. It is my reading that this is clearly the intent of this book and it is an admirable attempt in this direction. The extensive postings ~~[here]~~ completely obscure this purpose.

Moreover, I agree with Rich that this obscuration has been engineered through partial and decontextualized
quotations. In fact, one of the main quotes presented to make a case for the rationalist rejection of inner experience is just the opposite; it provides the grounds for a discussion on the limits of reason and psychoanalysis and the difficulties presented by mysticism, and attempts to arrive at a distinction between pathological and spiritual forms of subjectivity, particularly vindicating Sri Aurobindo's inner coherence and balance. Here I put down the complete quote. I do hope that after reading this, the intent of the author will be more clear and we can put a stop to this barrage of emotional incitement:

"Before continuing it is necessary to consider a question that may have occurred to some readers. In writing and speaking about his sadhana, Aurobindo made the following claims: that he saw visions, heard voices, and had other sources of knowledge independent of the senses and reason; that he could read people’s minds and had knowledge of the future; that by means of mental power he could change the course of events, cure diseases, and alter the form of his body; that he went into trance; that he felt physical pain as pleasure and experienced spontaneous erotic delight; that he had a sort of supernatural strength; that he was in touch with goddesses and gods; that he was one with God. Those familiar with Indian mythological literature will not be surprised by these powers and experiences, as they are commonplace in the epics and Puranas. Those familiar with the literature of mysticism will observe that Aurobindo’s powers and experiences are similar
to those that other mystics from Milarepa to Rumi to Saint Teresa are said to have possessed. But those familiar with the literature of psychiatry and clinical psychology may be struck by the similarity between Aurobindo’s powers and experiences and the symptoms of schizophrenia. "The question of the relationship between mysticism and madness has been discussed since antiquity. In the folklore of many cultures, a man or woman of exceptional ability has often been thought closer to the lunatic than to the ordinary mortal. Indian tradition offers hundreds of examples of yogis, mystics, and sufis whom others regarded, at least sometimes, as out of their minds. India assigns an honored place to the divine madman and madwoman once their spiritual credentials have been accepted. In the West, someone who acts eccentrically and claims divine influence is more likely to be considered a psychotic with religious delusions. Recent psychiatry has barely amended
Freud’s idea that “religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic systems familiar to us.” A defender of mysticism would argue that the truth value of mystical experience is so much greater than the truth value of psychiatry—a discipline based on dubious assumptions—that any attempt by the latter to explain the former is absurd. But unless the defender was an experienced mystic, this would just be substituting one set of unverified assumptions for another. When I speak of Aurobindo’s experiences, my aim is not to argue for their veracity or for their delusiveness; I simply present some of the documented events of his inner life and provide a framework for evaluating them.

"In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James examined the experiences of “religious geniuses,” some of whom were considered unbalanced by their contemporaries. James insisted that such experiences had to be interpreted “in the immediate context of the religious consciousness.” The correct criteria for judging them were “immediate luminousness,” “philosophical reasonableness,” and “moral helpfulness.” Later writers continued on similar lines. Anton Boisen felt that there was “an important relationship between acute mental illness of the functional type and those sudden transformations of character” known as conversion experiences. “Certain types of mental disorder and certain types of religious experience” were, he wrote, “attempts at [personality] reorganisation.” When successful, such attempts can lead to a new synthesis; when unsuccessful, they lead to insanity. Neither Boisen nor James attempted to erase the
line between mysticism and madness. They ac¬knowledged that many people who claimed to have mystical experiences suf¬fered from psychological anguish that made them incapable of leading productive lives. They also noted that certain well-known mystics passed through periods of apparent madness. Sudhir Kakar, who discussed this with reference to Ramakrishna, felt that the distinguishing sign of psychosis in such cases was “painful or anxious affect.” In the absence of psychological pain or anxiety, “certain types of mystical experience” could be regarded as having “their ground in creativity, akin to the heightened fantasy of an artist or a writer, rather than in pathology.”

Most of Aurobindo’s experiences are familiar to the mystic traditions of India and elsewhere. He wrote about them in language that is reasonable and luminous, though often hard to understand. Some of this writing is in the form of diary notations that were concurrent with the experiences. Around the same time he also wrote more than a dozen books on philosophy, textual interpretation, social science, and literary and cultural criticism, along with a mass of miscellaneous prose and poetry. Numerous scholars admire these works for their clarity and consistency; thousands of readers believe that they have been helped spiritually or mentally by them. No contemporary ever re¬marked that Aurobindo suffered painful or anxious feelings as a result of his experiences. In one or two letters written during the 1930s, he wrote that his life had been a struggle, and hinted at inner dangers and difficulties as great as any “which human beings have borne,” but
at no time did he give evidence to others of inner or outer stress. Indeed, virtually everyone who met him found him unusually calm, dispassionate, and loving – and eminently sane. The reports to the contrary are so rare that they can be examined individually. As noted earlier, while working as editor-in-chief of Bande Mataram, Aurobindo sometimes was severe and occasionally angry. After witnessing a tongue-lash¬ing Aurobindo gave to another, Hemendra Prasad Ghose wrote in his diary that he thought Aurobindo might have inherited “a tinge of lunacy” from his mother. R.C. Dutt, asked by the government for information about Aurobindo, also mentioned Swarnalata’s madness and suggested that her son was “eccentric”. After Aurobindo had spoken of his vision of Krishna in the Uttarpara speech, a few of his associates murmured that he had lost his balance. These scattered reports by people out of sympathy with him are hardly significant in
themselves; viewed together with every other known report of Aurobindo’s character, they stand out as exceptions. Aurobindo’s anger was remarkably rare and did not leave scars. A few months after noting down the outburst that had surprised him, Hemendra Prasad wrote to Aurobindo that he would “always look back with pleasure on the period of my life dur¬ing which I had the privilege of working with you for a cause.” That some of Aurobindo’s political opponents considered him eccentric or unbalanced is not surprising. When people asked him about his claim to have seen Krishna, the calmness and lack of self-assertion of his answer convinced them that he was anything but unbalanced.

"Calm—shanti—was the first element of Aurobindo’s yoga; balance—samata—was its basis. Asked in 1926 about his ability to overcome the difficulties of yoga, he replied: “A perfect yoga requires perfect balance. That was the thing that saved me—the perfect balance. First I believed that nothing was impossible and at the same time I could question everything.” Record of Yoga is remarkable not only as a chronicle of unusual experiences, but as the self-critical journal of a practitioner who was never satisfied with anything short of perfection." (245-247)

91. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, quoted in R. Hood, “Mysticism, Reality, Illusion, and the Freudian Critique of Religion,” 58. 92. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 24–33; A. Boisen, The Exploration of the Inner World, ix. 93. S. Kakar, The Analyst and the Mystic, 26. 94. Diary of Hemendra Prasad Ghose, July 28, 1907, in SAAA. 95. Talk of November 11, 1926, quoted in A. Purani, Life, 205.

Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by ned on Sun 28 Sep 2008 07:31 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Personally, I met Peter in New York and at Lodi and heard him speak about his book. He's a very nice person and clearly worked hard on this biography. He's also very knowledgeable.

His approach is a little too rationalistic for me and I do think that there were portions of the book where I thought he "sold out" too much to a Western audience (e.g. at one point he says that maybe all these experiences are hallucinations or schizophrenic breakdowns).

But overall, I liked the biography because it describes the human personality of Sri Aurobindo and in an odd way that strengthened me in my sadhana. It made me think that if Sri Aurobindo could rise from his "human self" to the greatness that he eventually attained, there is great hope for all of us. The biography actually reminded me of this statement from Sri Aurobindo himself:

"I had no urge toward spirituality in me, I developed spiritually. I was incapable of understanding metaphysics, I developed into a philosopher. I had no eye for painting -- I developed it by Yoga. I transformed my nature from what it was to what it was not. I did it by a special manner, not by a miracle and I did it to show what could be done and how it could be done. I did not do it out of any personal necessity of my own or by a miracle without any process. I say that if it is not so, then my Yoga is useless and my life was a mistake -- a mere absurd freak of Nature without meaning or consequence. You all seem to think it a great compliment to me to say that what I have done has no meaning for anybody except myself -- it is the most damaging criticism on my work that could be made. I also did not do it by myself, if you mean by myself the Aurobindo that was. He did it by the help of Krishna and the Divine Shakti. I had help from human sources also."

The hubbub created over the biography is clearly just an immature emotional reaction of some devotees. While I don't think that a rationalistic biography can ever do justice to a being as vast as Sri Aurobindo, I agree with Ulrich and Debashish above that there is a place for this sort of biography to make Sri Aurobindo more accessible to a Western audience that is already being misled by psychoanalytic perspectives on Eastern philosophers.

At the same time, as an unabashed devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and as someone who considers herself an "initiate" into the Vedantic tradition, I do also think that though there's no need to be apologetic or put on a facade of false humility with overly Westernized psychoanalysts or psychologists about parts of our spiritual tradition such as the guruvad. The danger is always that in our zeal to show rationalistic academic audiences the great value of spiritual teachers like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we may end up sacrificing our own integrity. That must never be allowed to happen.

Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by Debashish on Sun 28 Sep 2008 08:11 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thanks, Ned, for posting that beautiful quote by Sri Aurobindo. This is exactly why I can't see where a deified mythology of Sri Aurobindo can help anyone. Sri Aurobindo may have realized integral union with the divine, he may be an avatar etc., but his life is an example for everyone that the integral yoga can be done and that by power of yoga a struggling and helpless human ignorance and falsehood can be transformed to an integral divine consciousness.

However, you also say: "at one point he says that maybe all these experiences are hallucinations or schizophrenic breakdowns." This is one of the decontextualized statements which I address in the very posting under which you have made your comment. Please go through that post.

You also say "there's no need to be apologetic or put on a facade of false humility with overly Westernized psychoanalysts or psychologists about parts of our spiritual tradition such as the guruvad." Why is there no need? You or I may not have the need to do this or may feel no calling, but that does not mean someone else may not feel the calling to anticipate these questions and answer them within their means. If guruvad has a truth beyond that claimed by extant theories of human psychology, a dialog should be possible leading to the expansion, transformation or rejection of such theories which hold hegemony over the modern mind.

There may be other ways of doing this than what PH had done, but it is important first to see what it is intended. One of the first ground rules of textual criticism (and an basic reading skill) is to ask the question what is the author aiming at, not what is the author not aiming at or what should the author have aimed at. These are secondary questions which may be raised after the primary one is understood. But without the primary understanding of the author's intent and achievement, pressing such questions only obscures the issue.

DB

Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by ned on Sun 28 Sep 2008 09:04 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Hi Debashish -- I do see your point about the intent behind the book which I did and do appreciate. The quote I'm referring to is a slightly different one from yours though, it's in the preface on page xiv.

Also, I suppose some people have a greater emotional need to address the anxieties of Western-trained academics about the guruvad tradition. Given the failure of so many gurus in the West lately, one could also say that this is understandable.

But there's also an inordinate tendency in the Western world to bash gurus indiscriminately. If you read Geoffrey Falk's "Stripping the Gurus", Falk does a great job of criticizing people like Adi Da, Ken Wilber, and all the rest, but he gets his facts *so wrong* on Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda (relying on books by Christian missionaries to criticize him!), Sri Ramana Maharishi, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and so on. What Falk writes on these giants of spirituality is often just straight-up slander or hearsay.

I sometimes feel there is an arrogance there that also needs to be addressed. But (as you rightly point out) this is a secondary point not related to Peter's biography of Sri Aurobindo -- when I was reading the biography I may have conflated this concern with Peter's modus operandi.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by Rich on Sun 28 Sep 2008 10:19 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Ned

Your points are well taken. While there is certainly a history in the West of first valorizing and then taking a certain glee in destroying the reputations of gurus. There is also a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water and not bother to make a nuanced judgment about the positive contributions they have made to the tradition of Indian Spirituality.

Unfortunately as witnessed by the hatred directed at Peter Heehs, and you have only seen a small bit of it on SCIY because there are other documents being transferred about between a large collective of folks that besides claiming he is a "madman and a charlatan and should be ejected from the Ashram call for him being criminally charged, to lobby Penguin not to publish the book in India, to lobby Columbia U to discontinue publication aka censorship. The people making these are the very same one who pass themselves as luminaries of the yoga with claims to special lineages of authority -

But as witnessed in these character assassinations on a scholar who wrote a critical biography of a Guru, one can understand why some folks only superficially knowing the complexities of it all would reject the whole tradition entirely.

Although I personally see Sri Aurobindo as a guru, my own deconstructions -that have also been royally misunderstood- have pertained to a certain religious fervor, zealotry and fanaticism that go along with the reification of turning a spiritual practice into a Religion.

I think the self-righteous outrage and damaging actions that has been demonstrated and taken by those claiming the author of the lives of Sri Aurobindo blasphemed their guru underscores the point I have made about the all too close association that has evolved between the IY and the very worst of Religiosity.

rich

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by ned on Sun 28 Sep 2008 12:04 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Rich: total agreement with your comments here.

Peter is a great guy and it's sad that there are people in the Ashram attacking him like this.

It's also really sad how people have been taking Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's philosophy and turning it into a religion and even a political ideology.

Guruvada, the mind and the devotion

by Debashish on Mon 20 Oct 2008 09:51 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Guruvada is a concept alien to the western mind and, on the surface, repugnant to its democratic ideal. I agree that more effort is needed to explain the mystical basis of guruvada to the western mind. Sri Aurobindo has some luminous explanations for guruvada.

On the issue of the place of devotion vs. the mind in the Integral Yoga, I would like to quote this passage from P's book, which gives a historical perspective to these things:

Mind is, as he said often in The Life Divine, "an instrument of Ignorance," not of knowledge. The seeker has to rise through mind "into some kind of fusing union with the supramental and build up in himself a level of supermind." This is what he had done in his own practice and he thought at first that others could follow his example. Some tried, but lacking his experience and balance, they could not repeat his success. Eventually he realized that the transformation he envisaged would be difficult if not impossible for others without a preliminary awakening of the psychic being, a development of such qualities as sincerity, devotion, and inner discrimination. To bring about this awakening was the primary aim of the sadhana under the Mother's guidance. (pg. 358)

DB

Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by Debashish on Mon 29 Sep 2008 10:23 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Re. the present flurry of attacks against the book and its author, at the risk of over-simplification, I may add what seems obvious - that differences in cultural psychology between modern western and Indian habitus lies at the foundation of the matter. But with this as basis, certain collective formations have grown up. On the Indians' side, this has taken the form of an unconscious religiosity whose bane is the self-righteous orthodoxy of worship and the aggressive policing of largely self-created and interpreted myths and whose detrimental effect is that the growth of consciousness is obscured and the non-religious see only a stereotypical structure of hyperbole which they reject even before having a chance to see the solutions which have been offered. On the westerners' side it is an insistence on "fact" and an analysis of objective facts on the basis of reason and an infants' psychology. This is what has been happening on a large scale in western scholarship of late and it is largely to this audience that Peter's book has been addressed. In doing so, he has naturally offended the Indian sentiments and in anticipating and answering the western analytical framework, has sometimes acknowledged these approaches, which has raised eyebrows.

The problem is that though neither side is sufficiently illuminated, the religious attitude ends up building an impenetrable wall (unless one knows the right passwords for the gatekeepers, such as "avatar", "divine", "surrender", "psychic" and "falsehood of reason") and thus excludes a wider reach of the yoga. Sri Aurobindo's yoga is for the transformation of the world and unless all the different mentalities and vitalities can see what he has to offer, it cannot achieve its ends. And for this, all these mentalities and vitalities must be spoken to in their own languages. The bridges must be built. If even the attempt is stifled because of pedantic injunctions and through inquisitions and witch-hunts, what future can we expect?

DB

Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by koantum on Mon 29 Sep 2008 06:05 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Debashish,

You summed up the underlying differences very well.

The sectarian spirit, which has declared jihad on Peter, is a far greater threat to Sri Aurobindo's "image" than Peter's biography, which is no threat at all but a welcome corrective to those childish hagiographies. These jihadis prove to the world that Sri Aurobindo is at the head of a sectarian religious movement. This a disaster.

it is necessary that he [the sadhaka of the integral Yoga] should ... cast from himself that exclusive tendency of egoistic mind which cries, “My God, my Incarnation, my Prophet, my Guru”.... All sectarianism, all fanaticism must be shunned; for it is inconsistent with the integrity of the divine realisation.... (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga)

Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by Rich on Mon 29 Sep 2008 06:29 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Koantum

yes images of Salmon Rushdie did pop into my mind.
but Debashish point is very well taken regarding the underlying cultural differences at play which are sorely transparent.

And here dialog is needed rather than attacks and/or retreat to ones own xenophobic position, regardless of the side on which one identifies oneself.

Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the need to be able to hold two contrary ideas simultaneously as a feature of his yogic synthesis.

This issue before us seems to me to be an acid test as
to the success or failure of a community with common beliefs in an ideal and way of life which refers to itself as
Integral.

Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by koantum on Mon 29 Sep 2008 07:40 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Rich, you write that

Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the need to be able to hold two contrary ideas simultaneously as a feature of his yogic synthesis.

When I compiled "The Spiritual Evolution of Society" from The Human Cycle, I was struck be the following passage:

The first business of reason then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this, now that, the experience of the moment, the receding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its value. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the same individual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time that is its whole business.

Dig this: Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its value. The ability "to hold two contrary ideas simultaneously" is beyond the scope of the purely rational mind.

In each sphere of human life, in each part of our being and our action the intellect presents us with the opposition of a number of ... conflicting principles.... It seeks to fulfil each in turn, builds a system of action round it and goes from one to the other and back again to what it has left. Or it tries to combine them but is contented with none of the combinations it has made because none brings about their perfect reconciliation or their satisfied oneness. That indeed belongs to a larger and higher consciousness, not yet attained by mankind, where these opposites are ever harmonised and even unified because in their origin they are eternally one.

The message is clear: We are wasting our time trying to reach agreements while remaining at our present level of consciousness. The one thing needful is to grow beyond it, and those petty quarrels are some of the things that hold us back, if we let ourselves be drawn into them.

Re: Re: Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by koantum on Mon 29 Sep 2008 10:14 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Someone objected to my labeling the hagiographies as "childish." That person is right and I apologize. I can only speak of my personal reactions when I read some of those hagiographies many years ago. In comparison to Sri Aurobindo's own luminous writings, I found them painfully limited in their vision and comprehension. I have no such reaction to Peter's book because he deliberately limits himself to the documented externalities of Sri Aurobindo life.

Re: cultural (in)sensitivities Kripal vs. Heehs

by Rich on Wed 01 Oct 2008 08:47 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Regards the matter of cultural sensitivities. This controversy has raised the issues of other works, which
the Heehs book is being identified with has been brought up by some, particularly the work of Jeff Kripal on Ramakrishna, which is a Freudian psychoanalytic deconstruction of its subject.

I will admit to only reading synopsis of this book and issues surrounding its controversy so will limit my thoughts to the approach that the author took to his subject. And I find Kripal's approach of reducing the traditions of one culture boarders on intellectual imperialism. e.g. Hindu India, to the criteria set forth by another, in this case the Judeo-Germanic that backgrounded Freud

In this example the voice of the Western psycho-analytic tradition assumes a dominate perspective by imposing foreign interpretations on the subaltern voice that in the process denies its integrity

The great historian of Religions "Huston Smith wrote in the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin that, "I doubt that any other book — not even those of early, polemical, poorly informed, and bigoted missionaries — has offended Hindu sensibilities so grossly. And understandably, despite Kripal's protestations to the contrary in Secret Talk: The Politics of Scholarship in Hindu Tantrism, Kali's Child is colonialism updated."(Wiki) ^ a b Smith, Huston (Spring 2001). "Letters to the Editor". Harvard Divinity Bulletin 30/1: Letters.

In Fact on p27 in his book Indian Religions Heehs accuses Kripal of dogmatic Freudian interpretations

Although sexuality is discussed in the Heehs book it seemed to me that the author goes out of his way to remind us that it played a negligible role of Sri Aurobindo's life, and the matter held little interest for him.

Moreover, although the book is a Western academic style it does seem to be culturally sensitive to the subcontinental traditions and context in which the story unfolds.

Re: Peter Heeh's other book

by Rich on Thu 02 Oct 2008 07:19 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Before the controversy of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
SABDA, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press extolled his book on Sri Aurobindo called Nationalism, Religion and Beyond
Here is their review:

About Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond

Sri Aurobindo wrote extensively on political, social and cultural theory. His contributions to these fields are not always given the attention they deserve by contemporary thinkers. There are two main reasons for this. First, his political, social and cultural writings are scattered through six or seven volumes of his complete works. Secondly, the political and cultural worlds have changed greatly since he wrote. The editor of this anthology overcomes the first problem by selecting representative passages from the entire body of Sri Aurobindo's works. He deals with the second by providing historical background, and by relating Sri Aurobindo's ideas to those of modern thinkers.

REVIEW

India as a Synthesis of Cultures

Peter Heehs was the first member of the Ashram whom I could meet and talk to personally. This was in 1998 while he was attending a conference on South Asia held in Prague, Czech Republic. I travelled there from neighbouring Slovakia. By then I was already aware of Heehs's books published by Oxford University Press. Well-researched, factual and dispassionate, yet immensely readable, they help make Sri Aurobindo's thought more accessible to academic audiences. Heehs has understood and mastered the art of writing for this difficult and demanding group of readers. First and most important, he respects their right to learn about Sri Aurobindo without being pushed, directly or indirectly, out of their current and often secular world-views. Sri Aurobindo has a lot to offer even when measured by purely objective and scientific standards of achievement.

Academics tend to see each book as a sort of argument. In order that they should perceive it as valid, the book must satisfy certain professional criteria. Externally, nothing can impair its message more than a sloppy production with typographical errors, or clumsy style betraying the author's insufficient command over the language. But "internal validity" is even more important. With regard to anthologies, academics are prone to ask a whole set of inquisitive questions: Is the editor impartial? Is his selection of material truly representative and well-balanced? Are his claims justified in the light of the objective, primary evidence that he can muster in favour of his proposition? What exactly is he trying to prove?

Heehs's present anthology of selections from Sri Aurobindo's writings published by Permanent Black, an associate of Orient Longman, is aimed at well-educated and critically-minded people both in India and abroad. For many of them this would be the first detailed encounter with Sri Aurobindo's writings, and the selection of texts is therefore meant to be representative: the earliest piece is dated 1893, the latest 1949. The book is arranged in six thematic parts which are roughly chronological: (1) Cultural Nationalism, (2) Political Nationalism, (3) Religion, (4) Religion and Nationalism, (5) Beyond Nationalism, and (6) Beyond Religion. Within the general framework of "politics, society, culture" it also briefly deals with the related aspects of Sri Aurobindo's thought. The problem of society can hardly be divorced from the problem of the individual, or culture from that through which it tries to reach beyond itself: religion and spirituality.

It is a commonplace among critics that the very act of compiling is interpretive. In this sense, compilations consisting only of the compiled material without a word from the editor are not necessarily objective, but merely hide the editor's personal views without eliminating them. The established "standards of the profession" therefore require that the editor clearly explain his approach and criteria for selection. This and much more Heehs does in an extensive introductory essay where he first situates Sri Aurobindo's thought in the general trends of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and then explains its relevance for the present-day readers by relating it to contemporary social and cultural theory. For the rest of the anthology he then steps back and lets Sri Aurobindo "speak for himself". To illustrate the general drift of the anthology and its relevance even for the ultra-modern, non-religious mentality of today, we quote two substantial extracts from the first part, "Cultural Nationalism":

No, it is not in the stress of an intolerant patriotism that I turn an eye of disparagement upon Europe. The immediate past of these Western peoples I can admire more than I admire the immediate past of our Indian nations. It is their present that shocks my aspirations for humanity. Europe is full of the noise and the apparel of life, of its luxurious trappings, of a myriad-footed material clang and tread, but of that which supports life she is growing more and more empty. When they had less information, her people had wiser and stronger souls. They had a literature, a creative intellectual force, a belief, a religion good or bad, a light that led onwards, a fixed path. Now they have only hungers, imaginations, sentiments & passions....

They criticise everything subtly rather than well, but can create nothing—except machines. They have organised society with astonishing success and found the very best way to spread comfort and kill their souls.... A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual & noble.... The very churches & chapels are now only the theatres of a habitual stage performance of portentous & unnecessary dullness. With the exception of a small minority full of a grotesque, superficial but genuine passion, nobody believes, nobody feels; opinion, convention, preference and habit are alive and call themselves religion, but the heart that loves God is not to be found. Only a few of the undeveloped are really religious, the castbacks and atavists of this European evolution.

For more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have also become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern Europe.... Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.

Learning and scholarship are unendingly active over the dead corpse of creative power as in Alexandria and with the later Romans before the great darkness. Eccentricity and the hunting after novelty & paradox play in it over an ostentatious precision and accuracy. Yesterday's opinion is today exploded & discarded, new fireworks of theory, generalisation and speculation take the place of the old, and to this pyrotechnic rushing in a circle they give the name of progress....

The moral nerve is equally relaxed. Immorality which does not know how to enjoy, impotence and dullness of the capacity for enjoyment masquerading as virtue, decorum and prudery covering a cesspool, the coarseness, appetite and rapid satiety of the imperial Romans combining in various proportions or associating on various terms with the euprepeia & looseness of the Greeks. But the Pagan virility whether united to Roman coarseness or Greek brilliance is only to be seen in a few extraordinary individuals.... In a word, the whole of Europe is now a magnified Alexandria, brilliant forms with a perishing soul, feverish activity in imitation of the forms of health with no capital but the energy of the sickbed. One has to concede however that it is not altogether sterile, for all Europe and America pullulate with ever multiplying machinery.

1910 (published posthumously)

Almost a century has passed since, and is it less true of Europe today than of Europe then? Two years later, when Sri Aurobindo turned towards India in the same context, his eye was equally sharp and language equally acute:

Few societies have been so tamasic, so full of inertia and contentment in increasing narrowness as Indian society in later times; few have been so eager to preserve themselves in inertia. Few therefore have attached so great an importance to authority. Every detail of our life has been fixed for us by Shastra and custom, every detail of our thought by Scripture and its commentators,—but much oftener by the commentators than by Scripture. Only in one field, that of individual spiritual experience, have we cherished the ancient freedom and originality out of which our past greatness sprang; it is from some new movement in this inexhaustible source that every fresh impulse and rejuvenated strength has arisen. Otherwise we should long ago have been in the grave where dead nations lie, with Greece and Rome of the Caesars, with Esarhaddon and the Chosroes. You will often hear it said that it was the forms of Hinduism which have given us so much national vitality. I think rather it was its spirit. I am inclined to give more credit for the secular miracle of our national survival to Shankara, Ramanuja, Nanak & Kabir, Guru Govind, Chaitanya, Ramdas & Tukaram than to Raghunandan and the Pandits of Nadiya & Bhatpara.

The result of this well-meaning bondage has been an increasing impoverishment of the Indian intellect, once the most gigantic and original in the world. Hence a certain incapacity, atrophy, impotence have marked our later activities even at their best. The most striking instance is our continued helplessness in the face of the new conditions and new knowledge imposed on us by recent European contact. We have tried to assimilate, we have tried to reject, we have tried to select; but we have not been able to do any of these things successfully. Successful assimilation depends on mastery; but we have not mastered European conditions and knowledge, rather we have been seized, subjected and enslaved by them. Successful rejection is possible only if we have intelligent possession of that which we wish to keep. Our rejection too must be an intelligent rejection; we must reject because we have understood, not because we have failed to understand. But our Hinduism, our old culture are precisely the possessions we have cherished with the least intelligence; throughout the whole range of our life we do things without knowing why we do them, we believe things without knowing why we believe them, we assert things without knowing what right we have to assert them,—or, at most, it is because some book or some Brahmin enjoins it, because Shankara thinks it, or because someone has so interpreted something that he asserts to be a fundamental Scripture of our religion. Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived....

We preserve indeed a certain ingenuity and subtlety; we can imitate with an appearance of brightness; we can play plausibly, even brilliantly with the minutiae of a subject; but we fail to think usefully, we fail to master the life and heart of things. Yet it is only by mastering the life and heart of things that we can hope, as a nation, to survive.

How shall we recover our lost intellectual freedom and elasticity? By reversing, for a time at least, the process by which we lost it, by liberating our minds in all subjects from the thraldom to authority. That is not what reformers and the Anglicised require of us. They ask us, indeed, to abandon authority, to revolt against custom and superstition, to have free and enlightened minds. But they mean by these sounding recommendations that we should renounce the authority of Sayana for the authority of Max Muller, the Monism of Shankara for the Monism of Haeckel, the written Shastra for the unwritten law of European social opinion, the dogmatism of Brahmin Pandits for the dogmatism of European scientists, thinkers and scholars. Such a foolish exchange of servitude can receive the assent of no self-respecting mind. Let us break our chains, venerable as they are, but let it be in order to be free,—in the name of truth, not in the name of Europe....

We must begin by accepting nothing on trust from any source whatsoever, by questioning everything and forming our own conclusions. We need not fear that we shall by that process cease to be Indians or fall into the danger of abandoning Hinduism. India can never cease to be India or Hinduism to be Hinduism, if we really think for ourselves. It is only if we allow Europe to think for us that India is in danger of becoming an ill-executed and foolish copy of Europe. We must not begin by becoming partisans but know before we take our line. Our first business as original thinkers will be to accept nothing, to question everything.... The necessity of such a process not for India, but for all humanity has been recognised by leading European thinkers. It was what Carlyle meant when he spoke of swallowing all formulas. It was the process by which Goethe helped to reinvigorate European thinking. But in Europe the stream is running dry before it has reached its sea. Europe has for some time ceased to produce original thinkers, though it still produces original mechanicians.... Europe is becoming stereotyped and unprogressive; she is fruitful only of new & ever multiplying luxuries and of feverish, fiery & ineffective changes in her political and social machinery. China, Japan and the Mussulman States are sliding into a blind European imitativeness. In India alone there is self-contained, dormant, the energy and the invincible spiritual individuality which can yet arise and break her own and the world's fetters.

circa 1912 (published posthumously)

It is not easy to grasp the full depth and wideness of Sri Aurobindo's thought—not only for the public at large, but even for his admirers and followers. Dazzled by the light and vividness of his main propositions, we often fail to perceive the subtler shades of meaning in his complex arguments. Thus the piece about Europe might seem, at first glance, to justify and indirectly advocate a wholesale rejection of everything coming from the West as incurably infected with a mortal disease. Yet in the second piece written two years later he recommends the typically "European" process of free and original thinking as part of the remedy for India. What he really fights and detests is the cheap superficial imitation and uncritical acceptance of the results of European thought, since that would be the very antipode of original thinking.

But if neither Europe nor traditional India can satisfy him, what else remains, what else can be attempted? Where is he trying to point by alluding to India's "invincible spiritual individuality which can yet arise and break her own and the world's fetters"? Some – taking their cue from the many places in Sri Aurobindo's writings where he expresses his genuine admiration for the rich and flexible culture of ancient India as opposed to the increasingly narrow and rigid developments of later Brahmanism and Hinduism – would say that he is pointing to the rejuvenated "older & mightier Vedanta" which does not reject the world. After all, it was the Isha Upanishad that gave Sri Aurobindo the first glimpse of spiritual awakening, and provided him with the basis for his own system of world- and life-affirming spirituality. It can hardly be a coincidence that his magnum opus of spiritual practice is called The Synthesis of Yoga, or the institution he founded an ashram. External forms of devotion witnessed in the Ashram also trace their roots mostly to Indian tradition. No wonder many people find such an interpretation convincing. In this view, India needs to reconstruct the simpler, adaptable Vedantism of the Upanishadic times with its plastic social framework, and so reunited, vigorously "push out" of its social body first the decadent European materialism, promptly followed by whichever other systems of faith happen to be lumped with it as unwelcome intruders on the sacred Indian soil. Yet the fact remains that Sri Aurobindo has explicitly spoken and written to the contrary—not once, but many times. The social and cultural forms of the Upanishadic Vedantism simply cannot be revived. Readers of the anthology will find the reasons explained by Sri Aurobindo himself, and we assure them that those pieces are as powerful and penetrating as the ones we have already quoted. Here is what Sri Aurobindo thinks of the approaches that we have previously referred to as "pushing out":

We do not believe that by multiplying new sects limited within the narrower and inferior ideas of religion imported from the West or by creating organisations for the perpetuation of the mere dress and body of Hinduism we can recover our spiritual health, energy and greatness. The world moves through an indispensable interregnum of free thought and materialism to a new synthesis of religious thought and experience, a new religious world-life free from intolerance, yet full of faith and fervour, accepting all forms of religion because it has an unshakable faith in the One. The religion which embraces Science and faith, Theism, Christianity, Mahomedanism and Buddhism and yet is none of these, is that to which the World-Spirit moves. In our own, which is the most sceptical and the most believing of all, the most sceptical because it has questioned and experimented the most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge,—that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and future social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced turning it to the soul's uses, in this Hinduism we find the basis of the future world-religion. This sanatana dharma has many scriptures, Veda, Vedanta, Gita, Upanishad, Darshana, Purana, Tantra, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of the world's Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduct, the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga.

June 1909

Nothing and nobody then needs to be "pushed out" in order that India may realise her fullness of being. Rather the opposite—at least in Sri Aurobindo's view. He indeed speaks of Hinduism as superior to other religions but applies this attribute to a "wider Hinduism" of which the Bible and the Koran are valid scriptures and of which, therefore, Christians and Muslims are already legitimate members. Moreover, he praises this "wider Hinduism" for a virtue precisely opposite to that of "pushing out": the inexhaustible capacity to absorb, to reject nothing but to test and experience everything, and to turn it to the soul's uses. To sum up, in Sri Aurobindo's words of September 1906, "Devotion to one's own ideals and institutions, with toleration and respect for the ideals and institutions of other sections of the community, and an ardent love and affection for the common civic life and ideal of all—these are what must be cultivated by us now, for the building up of the real Indian nation. To try to build it up in any other way will be impossible."

Throughout the anthology, Heehs remains focused on the needs of readers who may view the claims of spirituality with scepticism. Therefore, as in his other books, Heehs distances himself from his subject and accepts scepticism as his starting point. Aware that his readers need to know not only what Sri Aurobindo had said but also why, he has carefully selected passages which stand as mini-arguments on their own, yet mutually support and throw light on each other, woven into the larger argument of the chapter or section. Thus the anthology takes on a whole new quality—as if the pieces, from such diverse periods, were meant to form a single book. Overall, Heehs has managed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that, however sceptical our initial approach, so long as it remains fundamentally unbiased, Sri Aurobindo will always break through as a unique and original thinker with something to offer to all, not just to those with overt spiritual inclinations. And if secularists cannot accept him in toto, yet they will surely enjoy his thought-provoking analyses of the burning social, political and cultural issues of the day. For his ideas have withstood the test of time; even after a century they resonate in us more deeply than many contemporary theories.

To conclude, I would not be surprised if the anthology were to become a highly-valued possession not only of academic institutions and scholars, but of all who are serious in their intent to study and understand Sri Aurobindo. It has every chance of becoming a "standard" one-volume reference to Sri Aurobindo's social and political thought. With a protective hard cover and 360 pages tightly packed with riveting material, it is certainly worth its price. Given its indisputable qualities, we can only wish it the best of luck on its way to readers.

— Marcel Kvassay

Marcel qualified as an electrical engineer and a teacher from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He spent several years working for Oxford University Press in the area of English Language Teaching. In August 2002 he came to Pondicherry and since then has worked at SABDA. This review is written in his personal capacity.

May 2006

Re: Re: Peter Heeh's other book

by koantum on Thu 02 Oct 2008 07:32 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Great post, Rich, but this page is getting too long. Why don't you use this post to start a new page and just link to it from here?

Re: Rationalism and the yogic life

by Debashish on Sun 19 Oct 2008 10:10 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The passage quoted above from The Lives of Sri Aurobindo has come in for some analysis by one of the leaders of what RC calls "the ex-communication movement" - an analysis which has been widely distributed and much appreciated by those who are inclined to routinely nod their heads. It is instructive to read this analysis in the context of the actual passage as carried above:

SR: "Example 3: Freudian Analysis of Spirituality Peter deliberately ignores the numerous examples of Sri Aurobindo’s experiments from the Record proving many of these powers. He dismisses as “hagiography” and “hero-worhip” the thousands of documented records and objective verifications by numerous first-hand and contemporary observers. He reduces all of Sri Aurobindo’s experiences and realisations to mere “claims”. Then on Pages 245-248 he presents these spiritual experiences as the result of psychological instabilities. Here I will analyse not so much the details of his text but the background of his justification for the discussion.

After showing the sadhana in the Record as unstable and inconclusive through selective quotations, Peter offers as mere “claims” a long list of magical “powers and experiences” of Sri Aurobindo. By misrepresenting quotations on the one hand and offering no proof for the powers on the other hand, he compels the reader to disbelieve these “claims” and almost forces us to accept instead his “rational” and Freudian explanation of mental imbalance. For this purpose he quotes lengthily from reductionist and Freudian psychoanalysts, ignoring the numerous developments in modern psychology that not only accept the reality of mystical experience, but also use them successfully in modern psychotherapy. He relies heavily on Varieties of Religious Experience by William James to justify his thought process. He tries to deceive us by referring to the 1961 edition of the book, when in fact this book was first published in 1902 and represents an outdated psychological thinking. In developing his perverse agenda, Peter throws quotations and references at us without concern for the quality and relevance of the authorities he relies upon.

The other work that Peter quotes extensively is The Analyst and the Mystic by Sudhir Kakar. This book is Sudhir’s primary plank for world-wide fame and notoriety where he attempts a Freudian psychoanalysis of Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Penguin India which is due to publish Peter’s book promotes Kakar’s book as:
Going beyond the traditional psychoanalytic interpretation of Ramakrishna's mystical visions and practices, Kakar clarifies their contribution to the psychic transformation of a mystic and offers fresh insight into the relation between sexuality and ecstatic mysticism."
-------------------------------
The analysis hardly merits consideration, but given the surprising group conformity, it would be good to pay some attention to it. In the passage quoted above, the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo presents Sri Aurobindo's claims as "the result of psychological instabilities"!? He "force us to accept his rational and Freudian explanation of imbalance"!? What kind of reading skill does this imply? The author "quote(s) lengthily from reductionist and Freudian psychoanalysts"!? Where does he even quote lengthily from anyone in this passage? And is William James a Freudian psychoanalyst? William James is an early 20th c. American psychologist, whom Sri Aurobindo had praise for and who wrote the famous book Varieties of Religious Experience. His work is still very active today in attempts to study spiritual experiences as having truth value and ontological reality in the field of comparative mysticism. Similarly Anton Boisen is no psychoanalyst but rather a theological thinker who felt a calling to "break down the dividing wall between religion and medicine." Does the author "quote extensively from Sudhir Kakar's book The Analyst and the Mystic"? He makes a short reference to this book, to make the point, in fact, about Sri Aurobindo's balance and sanity. In this group Sudhir Kakar is the only (Indian) psychologist with a Freudian background, but his work is much more open-ended than that of usual Freudians and, as the author shows, in fact serves Sri Aurobindo very positively.

DB

Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by ned on Sat 04 Oct 2008 05:19 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I just want to quickly thank Rich, Debashish, Ulrich and the others here for injecting rationality into this controversy and also for compelling me to look at my own perceptions, opinions and behavior with more integrity. I will also read Peter's book with this new perspective.

Be well, all of you.

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Sat 04 Oct 2008 05:40 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Quote of the Year:

When I hear of a righteous wrath, I wonder at man's capacity for self-deception.

- Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, p. 429 = Thoughts and Aphorisms, Jnana, # 52.

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by ned on Sat 04 Oct 2008 05:59 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Indeed -- and how easy to forget this is.

Silly humans. On Auroconf, I recently suggested we start calling ourselves Homo Absurdicus. ;-)

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Sat 04 Oct 2008 07:45 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.

- Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, p. 490 = Thoughts and Aphorisms, Bhakti, # 478.

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Sat 04 Oct 2008 09:08 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Homo Absurdicus. eh?

actually Ned, you may be closer to the truth of the matter than we would be comfortable to admit. And ironically enough it seems that someone in Auroville is currently working on Rhinoceros a play by Ionesco that comes straight out of the Theater of the Absurd.

Its critique is of the limitations of reason, latent human savagery and how easily people -especially in provincial towns- succumb to general opinion, mass movements and collective hysteria that undermine individual freedom

Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Sat 04 Oct 2008 09:17 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"provincial towns" - read "ashrams" ?

Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Vladimir on Sun 05 Oct 2008 09:07 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

One thought came to me which I would like to share with you.

At the very beginning of Auroville the sociological survey was conducted and people from different nationalities were asked a question:
“What would you not forgive your child?”
The answers were strikingly different.

The Frenchmen said that they would not forgive ‘a lie’.
The Germans - ‘disobedience to State’ (going against social laws).
The English – ‘cruelty to animals’.
The Indians – ‘disrespect to elders’.
The Americans – ‘stealing’. Etc.

We can imagine how these people could live together in search of a higher truth!

Many of our misunderstandings are based on these cultural differences. To go beyond them we should rise to a higher level of consciousness, says the Mother, from where we could see things as they are, in a state of perfect disinterestedness.

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Sun 05 Oct 2008 09:24 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Good point, Vlad, but I doubt the reliability of the survey. Being one of those German who were rightly and massively punished for their "obedience to State," the notion that Germans (let alone Germans who have made it to Auroville) would extol "obedience to State" strikes me as preposterous.

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Mon 06 Oct 2008 08:56 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Having lived in Germany for almost 6 years I would suspect that there would be regional differences as well for example between Berlin and Bavaria (where I spent most of my time)

As far as Americans go there would also be regional difference that I could attest to for example
the unforgivable offense in Texas would be:

To be ignorant and not be proud of it! ;)

r

Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rick on Sun 12 Oct 2008 07:03 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

As I understand it, in responding to an intellectual position taken by another, an
approach practiced and favored by Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother begins with this premise: Not only all forms and forces, but
all thoughts, chains of ideas and works of reason, have behind them,
are ultimately based on some truth. This truth has real existence, in
the Absolute and in the Saccidananda and, however changed, diminished,
distorted it may have grown from the original, any idea of any
coherence derives from some basis in truth. What Sri Aurobindo will
often do, in his writings, is express clearly a thought, idea, and
chain of reasoning and demonstrate what truth is trying, through such
ideas, to be expressed. There is, for example, some truth in
Materialism that is aspiring to be realized in life. Sri Aurobindo
will then go to express another truth, which may be at apparent odds
with the first (There is a truth in Spirituality that presses to materialize), showing clearly how both truths—maybe even multiple
truths—are striving for living expression, and he will proceed to
suggest a more comprehensive truth that assimilates the principal
elements in each, reaching in this way some expanded synthesis only
partially contained in the various elements of seemingly contradictory
truths. He will do this using perfectly well the outward form of
mental reasoning, but applying from behind it a wider view based on a
more comprehensive or intuitive mode of perceptive understanding.

What he will NOT do is what we human beings always seem to want to do.
We always find ourselves saying: This is wrong! I don't agree, I don't
like its expression, it's simply not true; maybe it's a deliberate
lie, on the basis of some hostile agenda, but it is most certainly
false, pernicious even. I don't accept it and I in fact question the
very motives of the person who puts forth this pernicious form of
expression.

The Mother said more than once that when we disagree with another
person's position, a healthy exercise is to identify with that
exponent and their position sufficiently so that we can express their
side of the issue. This can be a means to broaden our viewpoint, help
us not only relate to the other person but strengthen our mental
faculties, our understanding, and if we have enough aspiration, reach
a greater truth than ours or the other's alone.

I have read in full Peter Heehs's book, "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo,"
and met with him when he came to San Francisco giving readings and
discussing his work. I found he added to my understanding and
appreciation of Sri Aurobindo—not only in his life before Pondicherry, but after his great realizations: the Silent Brahman, the Cosmic Consciousness that he entered in the Alipur jail, the Parabrahman realization, the Overmental Realization and through the entire arc of his earthy life. I have a
deeper sense now how Sri Aurobindo, by the power of yoga, transformed
a human consciousness into an integral divine consciousness. And in
respect to his Integral Yoga, which is my principal focus (I was
recently co-facilitating a Synthesis of Yoga study group and plan to
resume it) the book afforded me stronger hope that humans like myself
can make progress on this difficult and thorny path. Sri Aurobindo
struggled with human problems, family problems, national problems;
found a way through Integral Yoga to surmount them for himself and
even to bring into the world a greater force so that others
individually and collectively and the nations and the earth itself
have a more certain hope, or at least the main chance, to transform
our ignorance and struggling lives into something divine. I venerate
Purani's biography, I love and enjoy what I've read of Iyengar's, have
deep respect for Van Vrekhem's, but I feel there is room for "The
Lives of Sri Aurobindo." I feel his approach to a critical, scholarly
work based on a great deal of research, directed to the scholarly and
academic community, is a potent form of inoculation against inevitable
intellectual attacks to come. After all, Sri Aurobindo and Mother are
not only for devotees, and for much-needed karma yogis; they're also
for intellectuals, those with a more mental bent—and an integral Yoga
must include in it and integrate the heart, the will, the mind and
more, in a "methodized effort towards self-perfection."

I am distressed at the personal invective in the attacks on a
hard-working scholar and sadhak whose love for Sri Aurobindo shines clearly through the work, if from under the surface.. He is a good
writer and, I feel, a sound scholar who has done much original
research. Peter's work, and that of others, in unearthing and bringing
to light the "Record of Yoga" (Sri Aurobindo's own diary of his yogic
experience) has shown the world that Sri Aurobindo experimented as
much or more than any scientist and attempted to realize (and by his
own, remarkably self-consistent account, succeeded in realizing) what
he wrote about for the sadhaks and the the public. It is so
disappointing, so dismaying to see so many luminaries whom I respect
so much attacking a sadhak who has devoted his life to needed
scholarship, and attacking him in such a personal un-Aurobindonian fashion. "I could
feel my eyes turning into dust/Like two strangers turning into dust."
I find it hard to believe what I've been seeing. We need to work
through this moment in time as an aspiring Gnostic community, however
far from a functioning collectivity we still seem to be. This chaotic
episode is an opportunity for us to begin again to try to put forward
our opinions in an Aurobindonian fashion, respecting the truth that is
expressed in another position, trying with the Mother's help to bring
it into harmony with our own positions, or showing with logic, respect
and fairness where we believe it falls short. This would be the least
we can do, as human beings discoursing with other human beings, as
well as followers of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo who aspire for a
divine life for the earth, based on liberty, mutuality and harmony.

Let me add here that I have been a grateful reader on the SCIY website
but have not yet posted. I appreciate the postings of Debashish,
Ronjon, Rich, Vladimir, Rakesh, Ned, all the many others. We all have to realize that there are real and still-potent
forces that WANT us to clash just as we've been doing, fall into an
ambush, so to speak. If we have the aspiration, if we can summon it
back, there are greater more conscious forces that are leading, even
as we speak, to a multi-poised Unity that has infinite room in it for
the diversity of our approaches.

Rick Lipschutz

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Vladimir on Tue 14 Oct 2008 12:49 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thank you Rick for your nice words and good will.
I really appreciate it.

I have finally read through all the passages with their explanations. I had to force myself to read through.

And this is what I can say about them:
I never could imagine such a profound and aggressive ignorance masking itself in ‘truth’, presenting darkness as light and light as darkness. It is not about the facts, it is about the presentation of facts, the feeling and the suggestive emphasis on a particular interpretation.

All this is about the life of the one who brought us Knowledge and Hope. I am puke-sick from this kind of pretending to be objective writings. It is a sheer Falsehood.

What about these words then? -

“Let us never forget, even for a moment, all that we owe to Thee!”

Or they are just sentiments?...

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 01:56 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladimir,

I'm sorry you had such a strong reaction from reading this and came to the conclusion "It is a sheer falsehood." (1) Evidently it has not been helpful to you and (2) you feel it cannot be helpful to anyone - quite the contrary. Since you seem to be certain about your judgment, there is nothing more to say at this point. I may have suggested reading the entire book, but the excerpt-makers have been so successful that, like many others, you are likely to say - "no more, I've had enough." Better to let it go for now. Yoga is a journey of growth. Unless you feel that your truth-perception is infallible, it is better to take one's own judgment with a pinch of salt (as the best practical light available to one at any time) and forget it. (Unless of course, you feel called upon from within to take arms and join the ranks of the truth-warriors).

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Tue 14 Oct 2008 07:24 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladimir

I am actually not sure what it is you mean here aka pro or con, this book however two comments:

on the following:
1) And this is what I can say about them:
I never could imagine such a profound and aggressive ignorance masking itself in ‘truth’, presenting darkness as light and light as darkness. It is not about the facts, it is about the presentation of facts, the feeling and the suggestive emphasis on a particular interpretation.<

Rich: Everyone will come to their own particular interpretation, even those who assert they know the "truth" it is simply (especially when they try to communicate this) merely their own interpretation of the "truth" and there is simply no escaping that

2) All this is about the life of the one who brought us Knowledge and Hope. I am puke-sick from this kind of pretending to be objective writings. It is a sheer Falsehood.<

Rich: The alternative of pretending to be objective is simply
pretending to be subjective. By the above definition they
would both be sheer falsehoods. But again this sheer falsehood would be based on ones interpretation of
what "Falsehood" is.

For me personally perpetrating violence against the author in emotional and physical forms, that has occurred (and is accelerating) to date fits my own interpretation of what falsehood is.

Rich

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Vladimir on Tue 14 Oct 2008 09:59 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Dear Rich and Debashish,

I always respected your views and thoughts on Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo's studies, you know that, but somehow I cannot lie to myself about what I have read. I was also very friendly with PH and considered him to be of the same mindset.

But to answer your question on falsehood.

Falsehood is what makes a great thing small, and a small thing great; what disorients consciousness to a degree that nothings is clear anymore, for all words sound similar but they mean different things.

I don't see any meaning in presenting Sri Aurobindo and the Mother without spiritual attitude.
For how can you speak about Sri Aurobindo, the spiritual giant of our Time, in nonspiritual manner? Is it not a falsehood? It is like making nonexistent - existent, secondary - primary, superficial - essential, where we will end then?

Being Ukrainian by origin, born between West and East, I can see both perceptions, and in many points can sympathise with the Western view on things, especially related to matter and organisation of material life, but in this case of spiritual look I am totally Indian. I feel the presence of a higher consciousness in myself and I am grateful for it to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, because I recognise their presence and influence; I feel their guidance.

What PH attempted is to make out of the Supramental Avatar an ordinary human being in the name of smaller truths. This may seem to be noble for him and others who seek humanity in human beings but it is of a loss for all those who aspire to grow beyond it, what Sri Aurobindo really represented.

Words of the Mother, Vol. 13, p. 27

My point of view is this, that anything written by a sadhak about Sri Aurobindo which brings him down to an ordinary level and admits the reader to a sort of gossiping familiarity with him is an unfaithfulness to Him and His work. Good intentions are not sufficient; it is necessary that this should be understood by everybody.

The Mother, 3 June 1939

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 11:07 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladimir,

The quotes were presented out of context - in themselves and in respect of the entire work. Unless one reads the entire work, one cannot understand the intent and the place or even the meaning of any quote. I have read the book. I disagree completely with the view that the author has tried to make Sri Aurobindo into "an ordinary human being in the name of smaller truths." The impression of the book is unmistakable to me. It is of a person extraordinary from the beginning who charted a course between credulousness and incredibility as a scientist of consciousness and arrived at a goal which is a beacon for the future.

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Tue 14 Oct 2008 07:20 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

DB wrote:

Unless one reads the entire work, one cannot understand the intent and the place or even the meaning of any quote. I have read the book. I disagree completely with the view that the author has tried to make Sri Aurobindo into "an ordinary human being in the name of smaller truths."<

RC:

Well how many of those who signed the petition against the book have actually have read the book?

I have been told it is not likely that the vast majority of the multitude who have given their signatures on these documents for the authors ex-communication
have even read the entire book.

Vlad, I agree with Deb, and I would be surprised if you did not also concur, that there has to be a minimum standard for a critical reading of a book. Merely a struggling through some pages, passages, or decontextualized fragments that have been contested, does not constitute a fair reading of any scholarly work, especially a work as complex as a biography as Sri Aurobindo's.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 08:27 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The vast majority of the multitude? I'm told by reliable sources that not even the ringleaders have read the book. And yet their opinions and quotations are "echoing and reechoing through the corridors of cyberspace" (to adapt C.R. Das' words re. Sri Aurobindo).

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Wed 15 Oct 2008 05:47 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The problems with the leaders of the ex-communication movement is also one of contradiction in that these folks are the same ones coming to the West interacting with western institutions and scholars on issues of "free progress education" working in a university system or seeking accredidation for Universities and simultaneously engaging in a conspiracy against a scholar who published through a reknown University press.

I would hope that their culpablity in these activities of censorship and engaging in conspiracies against the author of this book would also be disclosed to the international institutions they are engaged with as representatives of Sri Aurobindo

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Tue 14 Oct 2008 01:57 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladimir I have also respected your perspective as well
however to what you wrote as follows:

What PH attempted is to make out of the Supramental Avatar an ordinary human being in the name of smaller truths. This may seem to be noble for him and others who seek humanity in human beings but it is of a loss for all those who aspire to grow beyond it, what Sri Aurobindo really represented.<

RC:
Well to you he is a supramental avatar - perhaps he is to me too - this would be our interpretations based on faith
but our actual interpretations may even differ greatly from each other as to what an Avatar or supramental mean.

But to the rest of the world he is Sri Aurobindo a great philosopher yogi and a leader of a revolutionary independence movement.

But with all due respect the perspective that he should only be portrayed -even by a Sadhak- as a spiritual figure comes exclusively from a religious perspective toward Sri Aurobindo. The founder of Integral Yoga as Religion. One in which no one should dare see him as anything else than what our personal faith tells us he is.

The current controversy seems to me to be the same perspective as those Christians who see Jesus as the Son of God, and persecute those who see him rather as the Son of Man -

The current controversy also makes it perfectly clear
that Integral Yoga has become for many exclusively a religion, with charges of blasphemy against someone who
does not adhere to their orthodox conception of what a supramental Avatar is, and their willingness to censor and perpetrate violence against persons who hold different views or interpretations.

However, especially in the 21st century no one can expect, Jew, Muslim, Christian, Hindu et al that everyone else is going to buy into their particular article of faith.

This book as I understand it is written for an introduction
"to the rest of the world" particularly academics and graduate students as an introduction to his life.
I know people who have approach Sri Aurobindo from a secular perspective and having read it come to feel he was something much more than all the mere historical figure they thought he was.

Who among the orthodox has the right to prohibit one from
accessing Sri Aurobindo and taking up the yoga by entering his thoughts from this book?

To those who think Sri Aurobindo was Divine.
There is also a quote which I have come across in aphorism
or somewhere where Sri Aurobindo obviously speaking to the orthodox asks who among you is so Great that you think you can defend the Divine?

So its probably best here that we dont try to justify our actions with quotes, because they can go either way.

Best to stick to a dialog that immediately does not condemn and react with intolerance against another for not accepting their own particular way of interpreting Sri Aurobindo or their method of presenting him to an audience outside the already faithful.

There are so many levels of understanding that it is quite shocking that those professing to follow an "integral" path
seem to want to reduce them all to one particular way of seeing the world.

rich

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Vladimir on Tue 14 Oct 2008 09:35 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Rich,

one important point.

The Religion in the West was not the same as it was in India. In the West the Church was obstructing the rational thinking with religious dogma from the medieval period onwards, introducing Inquisition and other persecutions. The mind in the West had to fight against the religious dogma, burning on the stakes of Holy Inquisition. In India this contradiction between rational thinking and religious dogma was never there. On the contrary the flourishing of the scientific thought and rational thinking was always preceded by the flourishing of religious movement. The religious movement was conducive to the rational thinking, and the creation of all sciences, shastras, always had a religious support.

This, as I think, is the biggest misunderstanding between the Western and the Indian perception.

On one hand you have Abrahamic religions: Christianity and Islam with their non-ending missionaries to convert the world to their own ways of thinking and belief-system and on the other hand Hinduism, where you cannot convert anyone: you are to be born a Hindu to become a Hindu. There were never missionaries of Hinduism anywhere in the world in the history of mankind. There were rivalries among Hindus, but not against the world.

In India religion and life go together. There is no religion against life or life against religion. It is one and the same thing here. It cannot impose itself or convert others.

Another important psychological point.

In India to gratify the Guru, who supports and in some way represents your growth of consciousness, is the way to grow spiritually. It is a psychological truth. More truly grateful you are in your heart more open you become to the influence of a higher consciousness. Any belittling or vulgarizing that sacred link is considered to be suicidal for you and other seekers on the same path. Therefore you have this strong reaction, in the whole system it feels as if you are poisoned.
If you understand this, you would not try to blame this strong reaction of those who found refuge in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And this fear of Inquisition, which all Westerners have, would not have a ground here in your interpretation.

v

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Tue 14 Oct 2008 10:45 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladmir, my friend, I hate to have to correct you. Those strong reactions are the vital reactions of a rather primitive type of religiosity, not at all befitting of an aspirant toward the enlightened spirituality that Sri Aurobindo has put before us as the goal. Read these excerpts from the Human Cycle and you will understand.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Wed 15 Oct 2008 01:07 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

What happens between a seeker and his guru is entirely between them. No "other seekers on the path" have or should have anything to do with it. It is the most private of relationships. Nor can anyone have any inkling from someone's expressions, whether they have gratitude or not for their guru.

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Rich on Wed 15 Oct 2008 05:55 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Vladamir

Well you are getting at the problem here in that you are lumping integral yoga which claims not to be a religion with Indian religions and to me that is the whole problem. While I would expect to see this reaction in the tradition of Indian religion, within Integral Yoga that claims to synthesize East and West and declares itself no religion, it is a contradiction.

But I still dont know, did you read the book??? That is the issue, if you read the entire book and come to these same conclusions that the book is blasphemy then we can have a conversation. If not this whole conversation is based on hearsay.

And as a friend remarks regards "the other seekers on the same path," it is only their lack of confidence in their beliefs which is at stake when they interpret something to be a breach of "respect" in another of their group. This is no esoteric psychology, just tribe psychology. Heidegger and Derrida call it onto-theology, the supplementarity of quotations, commentaries and numbers which cover up the hollowness at the center of the experience of being. It is why in Islam, one of another faith who "disrespects" the faith is considered less dangerous than another Muslim. For the former, there is derision, but for the latter there is the fatwa.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Thu 16 Oct 2008 09:24 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

V: ...in this case of spiritual look I am totally Indian.

DB: I wonder where I could go to get my "spiritual look" authenticated?

But in a more serious vein, the issue of cultural representation is more important and interesting. There seem to be accumulated responses of taste here. During the period of the Indian nationalist struggle, this in fact became one of the major stakes for distinction of identity. The Greco-Roman Gandhara Buddha was preferred by the western critics for its naturalism. Coomaraswamy would argue that the less naturalistic, more "ideal" Mathura images were more authentic to the Indian consciousness. Sri Aurobindo's response to Archer is also keyed along similar lines. In fact, this becomes in some ways the cornerstone of his argument for national freedom from colonial rule - the right to express its own subjective tastes free from the standards and constraints of alien subjection.

Perhaps a touch of the same argument has entered into the debate here. Of course, this "debate" is marked by a host of other not so civil or reflective arguments and so I can attribute only a hint of these more thoughtful matters. But it is worth a consideration. In drawing out the difference between hagiography and biography, Peter makes use of the analogy of the divergence between touched-up photos and naturalistic ones. He makes clear his taste for the naturalistic photo. It is possible that the person claiming the "Indian spiritual look" may pitch his taste for the "subjective" touched-up one. It's interesting though, that in the genre of portrait painting, I have yet to come across a "subjective" interpretation of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. It seems here that the closer to reality the painting, the truer to the "divine image." But then, if this "reality" betrays any "physiological blemishes", it is not considered satisfying.

If there is anything to these cultural histories of taste, then we have to ask the question as to whether these are unchanging essences and "never the twain shall meet" or whether they can be related or even synthesized? And if the second is possible, is there only one way to relate and synthesize them or many?

Contemporary western art practice also grapples with issues of this kind. The mid-19th c. saw a wholesale rejection of "naturalism" in art in favor of "subjectivism." But contemporary practice has come to assert that the "naturalistic" or "illusionistic" is no less subjective than the "expressionistic." The photographic signifier hides and discloses the subjective signified. Our practices of reading have tuned to an objective-subjective taste as a result. This indeed is one kind of synthesis and I find the Lives of Sri Aurobindo very successful in this regard. I find no lack of "spiritual look" in it, just another kind of representation which bridges the eastern and western tropes in one way. Perhaps our friends with the so-called "Indian look" can try to do the same in their own way, instead of this sad rejection and aggressive hostility?

DB

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Tue 14 Oct 2008 07:58 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

At the risk of repeating myself:

When I hear of a righteous wrath, I wonder at man's capacity for self-deception. (Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, p. 429 = Thoughts and Aphorisms, Jnana, # 52.)

As long as we are angry, furious, outraged, annoyed, irritated, infuriated, incensed, resentful, indignant... we are all - everyone of us - on the side of the Falsehood. Loyalty to our Lord and Master demands staying calm, let the cyclone pass, let it go, let go... peace, peace, peace...

Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Srikanth on Tue 14 Oct 2008 08:49 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

[From "Words of the Mother Vol - 13" Page no. 27]
It is not a question of disobedience. I know nothing about your additions to the Life Sketch of the sources from which they were taken. My point of view is this, that anything written by a sadhak about Sri Aurobindo which brings him down to an ordinary level and admits the reader to a sort of gossiping familiarity with him is an unfaithfulness to Him and His work. Good intentions are not sufficient; it is necessary that this should be understood by everybody.

The Mother, 3 June 1939

The Regime of Quotation

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 11:16 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

One of the first tenets of religion is the self-justification of Ignorance on the basis of quotes. The Divine is reduced to a slot machine or ventriloquist's puppet which spits out the appropriate quote in a sonorous voice at the bidding of its master. And this becomes the "acceptable representation" with the threat of the electric chair behind it.

Re: The Regime of Quotation

by Srikanth on Tue 14 Oct 2008 12:12 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

It is pointless to want to convince everyone that the intellect is infallible. One doesn’t need to be a yogi to see how limited it can be. True, quotations can be taken out of context and misused…but the opposite is also true. Seeing them as mere quotations and as inapplicable when inconvenient or contending at all times that “the Divine” had wished to convey more (or other) than what the quotations suggest is equally an artifice and (a technically self-contradicting) conceit of the intellect. Thus, an intellectual standpoint can be as much steeped in ignorance and as intimidating when it threatens to label all those who oppose it as ignorant, unintellectual, or religious and to banish them, if not to the death-chamber, at least to the valley of the untouchables.

Re: Re: The Regime of Quotation

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 04:20 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

It stretches the imagination that someone may think this is a discussion about the infallibility of the intellect. The intellect, like all other faculties at our disposal in this discussion, is a power of the Ignorance. The entire discussion is about the arrogance of the Ignorance and in this case, the abuse of "quotations" to act as if it is a power of truth.

The utility of the shatra is entirely personal, to aid in and test our inner experience in the growth of consciousness, not to enforce on others as a weapon of the Ignorance in the name of Knowledge.

Re: Re: Re: The Regime of Quotation

by Srikanth on Tue 14 Oct 2008 10:28 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The blanket condescension towards the devoted and the religious has not exactly been hidden in any of the posts in this thread and yours are no exception. The implications cannot be easily denied. Whether the quotations are being abused or not is a subjective assessment and cannot be dismissed as "arrogance of the Ignorance". That, in essence, those who quote are not only ignorant and enforcers of the Ignorance but are also anti-knowledge is an odd conclusion that only reinforces what I already said.

Regardless, the main points being made in all these posts are insubstantial. They are only centered around a few corrections here and some substantiation there and a few demands to let people have their freedom to write a book but not for others to criticize, and around reassurances that a historian is somehow going to convince a few hard-core psychoanalysts in academia and how it will all in the end be very good for Sri Aurobindo's yoga for the world.

Re: Re: Re: Re: The Regime of Quotation

by Debashish on Mon 20 Oct 2008 09:37 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I see the use of the Mother's or Sri Aurobindo's quotation in this regard as entirely illegitimate and highly dangerous if made into a collective judgment in sadhana. A spiritual teacher's words are uttered in a context of time, place, circumstance and receipient's personality, as a force in action not as a law for the ignorant to use as a substitute for truth. Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother were automatons who would respond with the same words for all time. Unless one has identity in consciousness with them, one cannot assert their authority on the basis of words written or said in a certain context in the past. Apart from their own changes of perception, both Mother and Sri Aurobindo have spoken in several places of the fact that the external and internal conditions of the environment in question do not remain the same and actions have to deal with the circumstances of the present. The words of the past are a help only to the person who is called upon to act. S/he should ponder these words, but his/her action can only be a will directed from within and a living choice. Moreover, the proper use of these words are in personal growth and action, their use by others to dictate behavior in general or in specific cases is an instance of the abuse known as religion. Can one be sure that the Mother has not herself put the author in the place and time and given him the preparation needed to do excatly what he has done for her work?

DB

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Regime of Quotation

by Srikanth on Tue 28 Oct 2008 09:34 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I have no general disagreement with this except for the use of words such as “illegitimate” and a few of the unsupported, if not spurious, assumptions. But it has been amusing (when not galling) to see the vehemence and the certitudes that are on display elsewhere in multiple posts and threads from the ‘non-quoters’. To get back to the point - one of your editors (Ron) is always quietly providing the much-needed succour on this site with wonderful quotations from the Mother. Are you calling that an illegitimate and wasteful activity and pursuit too? Most of the posters here (except those who are spewing poison and scorn and making wild allegations) seem quite capable of judging for themselves what quotation to apply when (unless you intimately know them to do otherwise). And since it is debatable as to how many of us (if any) writing here have actually gained any "identity in consciousness with them.." no one should try to "..assert their authority" on the others and label them as wrong without considering the possibility of being wrong themselves. It is not the “quoters” who have tried to squelch the debate with their quotations (as you seem to suggest). They have only reacted to specific, incessant, angry, slights and rhetoric from a couple of non-quoters and tried to present an opposite viewpoint! The non-quoters (and sometime quoters) should be reminded that all legitimate intellectual discourse must be open to the possibility that the basic assumptions being made are faulty and the opposites might be true.

All said and done, a real, unbiased, analytical review of Heeh’s book (from multiple angles) is much needed. Not just some letters of support and votes of confidence from people who are prone to using a few distorted principles of liberalism (wrapped in confusing jargon) as their guides for understanding all issues under and above the sun!

You end by asking: “Can one be sure that the Mother has not herself put the author in the place and time and given him the preparation needed to do excatly what he has done for her work?”

The question must also be asked: Can one be sure that she has?

Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by koantum on Tue 14 Oct 2008 07:01 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Here's a one-size-fits-all quote, applicably in any context:

Do not mind the stupidity of others, mind your own. (Words of the Mother II, p. 274, 2004)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Tue 14 Oct 2008 08:10 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

You've certainly trumped me with this one.

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Surendra on Tue 21 Oct 2008 12:28 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Would like to exchange some views regarding a research topic. Could you send me your email Id?

Best wishes,

-Sam
(my email: cusaag at yahoo dot com)

Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

by Debashish on Thu 16 Oct 2008 02:38 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

See the Auroville Today interview (August 2008) of Peter Heehs: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/10/16/3932913.html

Re: Re: Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (history of discussion, editors, post etc)

by Rich on Sat 18 Oct 2008 09:30 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

In response to comments I have seen from those leading the charge to ex-communicate PH, namely, that any former editor of this forum was removed from SCIY for posting against the Lives of Sri Aurobindo, let me clarify what actually happened.

That editor (RYD) had posted for weeks both his and those of others vitriolic attacks on the character of the author of the book. In short someone described these post as character assassination. Unlike the forum used by those engaged in the hysteria against this book, we take a more civil tone here.

In fact our guidelines start out as follows:

Posts may not contain content that is: Vulgar or offensive; Inflammatory; Excessively outside of the scope of the current topic; Directed at specific individuals in an inappropriate manner; Commercial in nature; and/or Incomprehensible or extremely lengthly. SCIY Administrators are the sole arbiters and enforcers of these guidelines.

The former editor took his post down himself after it was brought to his attention that his post violated these principles. Moreover, it came to the fore that both he and the other ringleaders of the movement against the book had taken large copyrighted portions from the book and selectively omitted them quoting them entirely out of context to fuel the fires of hatred.

That is why we have posted the corrected excerpts with permission here. So if anyone wants to post passages from the book that come under "fair use" provisions of
copyright law and make their comments in a manner that respects the guidelines of this forum you are welcome to do so. But I do request that if you want to post on this book to first read it entirely, before you post
Reply

Taking Stock

by Debashish on Fri 24 Oct 2008 09:41 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

It is now time to step back a little and see what is happening. Peter Heehs wrote a biography of Sri Aurobindo published by Columbia University Press. Undoubtedly, it will get wide publicity targeted at the western academic circle. The book deals with the different phases of Sri Aurobindo's life as "jumps", not entirely discrete, but showing distinct characteristics. This is why he calls it "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo." The book brings together a lot of research on the factual details of Sri Aurobindo's outer life and also the first hand personal accounts of Sri Aurobindo's inner life. The response to the book, in the west, has so far been very positive.

This book has not yet been published or distributed in India. But a few copies have gotten to some hands. In response, there has arisen a huge furor. This furor has been spearheaded by a few who are all so-called intellectuals and teachers of Sri Aurobindo's sadhana at the ashram. At the outset, one of them, a person who runs an accredited Indian University teaching Sri Aurobindo studies, has circulated a document containing distorted and out-of-context quotes from the book to prove that the book is derogatory towards Sri Aurobindo. Another well known "authority" and "descendant" of an "authoritative lineage" has been circulating a conspiracy theory whose substance is to prove that the author of the book has interests to show Sri Aurobindo to be a madman and a sexual deviant. Both these widely circulated pieces of propaganda are spurious and mischievous. The out-of-context quotes have been disclosed in this post on sciy. But what could not be corrected is the violence done to a 500 page positive biography in pulling out quotes which give an entirely wrong impression. The insinuations of madness and sexual deviance are absurd to the point of laughter. But the huge majoritarian population of Pondicherry which has not found these laughable and has responded with signatures calling for the author's eviction from the archives and the ashram has been overwhelming. Is this "tyranny of the masses" based on well-founded judgments? Unfortunately, not one in a hundred has read the book. Nor do they think it is necessary. With their "psychic faith"in their leaders, what need is there for reading books?

The arm of the managing trustee has been twisted to force the author out of the archives and worse has been done and threatened. What does this bode for the future of the ashram and its law and order?

Now let us consider the arguments used. The arguments have distilled themselves to two. (1) Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were against writing their biographies, specially by their disciples, so we are justified in destroying this biography and expelling its author from the ranks of "the disciples." (2) The Mother has a quote where she wants it understood that anything which brings Sri Aurobindo to a low level of "gossiping familiarity" should not be indulged in by disciples, so the author, who has disobeyed this, is fair game. These quotes are repeated in large letters in post after post. Unfortunately, the word of god in the sonorous mouth of a fool does not remain any more the word of god but becomes the word of a fool, however much the fool may think he has become god as a result of voicing it.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have indeed pointed out that no one could write their true lives. But neither does this mean that all representation of their lives is a crime nor has this prevented a number of biographies from being written. There are biographies by Srinivasa Iyengar, Purani, Satprem, Nirodbaran, Georges van Vrekhem. Where were our commentators with their lynching mobs then? Two of these biographers were personal attendants to Sri Aurobindo and one of them read out the whole of his biography to the Mother and had her strong approval. In fact, the Mother felt that biography would introduce many to Sri Aurobindo, which indeed it did. Why then could it not be allowed that this biography could also conceivably do the same? Oh no, such a thing is impossible and if someone claimed to have been moved by it or to have wanted to know more about Sri Aurobindo and his teaching, we must find out who this is and hold our quotes under their eyes and force them to understand "the truth" - that this biography is the voice of the asura, the awakening of adharma.

And what about the trump card, Mother's stern admonition for bringing Sri Aurobindo to a level of "gossiping familiarity"? Is this not enough to warrant expulsion and ex-communication and worse, elimination, whatever form that may take, for the faithful cannot tolerate disobedience to such an injunction, surely? No question need be asked about context, time, place, circumstance, person spoken to, intention of the work, narrative logic, interpretations, intended audience or the consciousness of the Mother. It feels divine to assume the authority of that quote, doesn't it? We are sure of what Mother would have done to the author, aren't we? It gives us the pleasure chills!

So, what is it all about? Why the need for misrepresentation or for incitement of the "blind" masses using propaganda? Or getting strategic signatures so as to twist the managing trustee's arm and force ashram policy? Is it not clear? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are not dead. They are here - in their wise teachers and their use of quotes and the faithful multitudes. God lives, Dharma lives, Religion lives, so what if there's a suspicious smell of human manure about? That's just your imagination. This is certitude.

Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Fri 24 Oct 2008 10:47 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

The section "Sri Aurobindo to his biographers" in "On Himself" contains three statements:

It would be only myself who could speak of things in my past giving them their true form and significance.

On this basis one could argue that nobody should write history because nobody (except, I believe, Sri Aurobindo himself and the Mother) has the consciousness that would enable him or her to speak of things in the past giving them their true form and significance.

I see that you have persisted in giving a biography — is it really necessary or useful? The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.

With regard to Peter's book, my own answer to Sri Aurobindo's question would be: Yes, it was useful to me, not because it brings Him down to a low level, as some have claimed, but because it documents how the Divine brings himself down into the world of ignorant humans and how He presents himself to them. As I said before, the book would be far less interesting to me had Peter pretended to write about what has not been on the surface for men to see, as most previous biographers have done. To get to know this aspect of Sri Aurobindo, one has to read Sri Aurobindo's own writings, not anyone else's.

But why write my biography at all ? Is it really necessary? In my view, a man's value does not depend on what he learns, or his position or fame, or what he does, but on what he is and inwardly becomes.

On this basis one could argue that nobody should write anyone's biography because nobody (except, I believe, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) knows what a person is and inwardly becomes.

Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Debashish on Sat 25 Oct 2008 12:39 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

K: .... the book would be far less interesting to me had Peter pretended to write about what has not been on the surface for men to see, as most previous biographers have done. To get to know this aspect of Sri Aurobindo, one has to read Sri Aurobindo's own writings, not anyone else's.

DB: In fact what makes it even more interesting is that Peter has a lot of "this aspect" (the life not on the surface) as well - from "Sri Aurobindo's own writings."

DB

Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Sat 25 Oct 2008 11:05 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Yes indeed. If I have given a wrong impression, it must have been because these quotes were well known to me and therefore not at the focus of my attention while reading the book.

Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Sat 25 Oct 2008 11:46 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

First let me clarify my opinion that the ex-communication and violence are not things that can be excused at any cost.

To be honest with you I cannot but be skeptical about how it will have the right (not positive/negative) impact on people who don't know anything about Sri Aurobindo as yet. Neither can I pretend to go back to my earlier state where I did not know anything about Him.

From this writing - I did not get an impression of "sexual deviant" - but I cannot ignore the "madness" part. I did notice the "jumps" that is nicely presented - but still cannot ignore the high probability of bringing him down to "gossiping familiarity".

Quoting Sri Aurobindo (Life Divine) -- "But there is an essential factor in our human consciousness and its workings which, no less than the reason, distinguishes it entirely from the animal; there is not only a mental part in us which recognises the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it."...Sri Aurobindo

Leave alone ourselves - in life of the Master as sketched by PH - do you see that essential psychic part (that fire-sweet source of inspiration) that makes him essentially different from an extraordinary animal?

I am myself being swayed from moment to moment between the forces - one is finding the sharp jumps as interesting and powerful, and the other is seeing a hidden agenda of taking the focus out of "The Presence" that is supervising the jumps not merely by abstract instructions but by a substantial flow of consciousness which has a life/mind of its own, which is living.

You have commented on sciy (in response to Rakesh) - "Inner truth of guruvada is also not clearly brought out. Partiality of representation is there. This could be because of author's preference, lack of understanding or choice of introduction keeping a certain audience in mind."

Can you tell me how Truth serves its purpose by being partial, keeping certain audience in mind? If we break down the white light to get the constituent colors and partially use some of those colors for some of the audiences - should we expect the audience (of whichever kind) to reconstitute that white light from those selected colors instead of breaking the light further down leading towards greater darkness and/or confusion? Or should we be happy by assuming that, that audience would get a thrill ride out of the selected colors?

You may argue - that we don't have the consciousness to bring down the white light into the ordinary atmosphere with its original purity and entirety - that shouldn't imply that we should stop writing. My response would be - a sincere effort of "not fragmenting it" - is what my heart seeks - especially when it is about the life of The Master.

Re: Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Sun 26 Oct 2008 12:13 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Can you tell me how Truth serves its purpose by being partial, keeping certain audience in mind?

It is as impossible to write a book for all audiences as it is to write music for all audiences.

Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Sun 26 Oct 2008 01:07 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I think if you read the comment fully - you will see it has already been addressed in the last two lines of my comment "You may argue...".

I question the sincere effort considering the weight of something like Sri Aurobindo's life - by accepting the current condition of impossibility of the absolute integrality.

If we accept the impossibility to shadow our entire future - then Sri Aurobindo's mission is defeated right there.

Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Debashish on Sun 26 Oct 2008 01:04 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I sincerely wonder how many who have read the book could come out with the feeling that this is a description of an "extraordinary animal" or even someone who can be called human according to any common definition of the term. If someone who has read the book has come to this conclusion, all I can say is that it is not my experience. I have my criticisms and reservations about the book, but certainly this is not one that even entered my imagination.

I fear that one of the tragic verdicts of the future on this entire discussion - and I can guarantee that many of these words we are sharing here and their author's names will one day appear and be critiqued in some sociology of the "Sri Aurobindo movement" in the early 21st century (perhaps Robert Minor is even now sharpening his pen for this task) - will be that of the poverty of reading skills displayed by the disciples of the most eloquent spiritual personality of all time.

On the question of partiality of representation, there is nothing extraordinary about that. This is the human condition and we are expected to grow from partiality to integrality. This is quite true of the cultural history of humanity. The same being is represented by Greeks as Zeus and by the Vedic seers as Indra and each culture sees a certain set of qualities which characterizes this being. According to the cultural proclivity, this set becomes the door of more familiar entry to the being. Krishna points out in the Gita that it is impossible for humans to see the divine as the divine is. But he enters into our attempts to describe him and leads us from there into the truth of his self-experience.

DB

Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Sun 26 Oct 2008 01:32 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

By extraordinary animal - I meant in context of Sri Aurobindo's own writing of the essential psychic part that makes human beings essentially different from animals. What I really meant was the lack of addressing that essential psychic part.

That part is the future. Animal is the past. Human species is the link being in transit on the evolutionary path.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Debashish on Sun 26 Oct 2008 01:53 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I have answered this question below. The uncompromising seeking for the solution to the problems of humanity, implies, I believe, the psychic part. As such, in Sri Aurobindo's own yoga (and that of Ashwapati in Savitri through whom he writes his internal biography), though there is no doubt the psychic behind it, the emphasis was a climb beyond the uncertainties of the human mind into cosmic mind planes and from there, to supermind. Only later, after the Mother's coming and in order to make the yoga accessible to all of humanity, he laid emphasis on the psychic coming forward as preparatory to the rest of the yoga.

Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by ned on Sun 26 Oct 2008 06:05 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"I fear that one of the tragic verdicts of the future on this entire discussion - and I can guarantee that many of these words we are sharing here and their author's names will one day appear and be critiqued in some sociology of the "Sri Aurobindo movement" in the early 21st century (perhaps Robert Minor is even now sharpening his pen for this task) - will be that of the poverty of reading skills displayed by the disciples of the most eloquent spiritual personality of all time."

This really didn't occur to me before but you're quite right that this could very possibly be one of the long-term karmic consequences the IY community will have to deal with and grow through.

Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Sun 26 Oct 2008 06:56 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I fear that one of the tragic verdicts of the future on this entire discussion - and I can guarantee that many of these words we are sharing here and their author's names will one day appear and be critiqued in some sociology of the "Sri Aurobindo movement" in the early 21st century (perhaps Robert Minor is even now sharpening his pen for this task)....

Even before you wrote this, I anticipated a future book with a title like "The Crucification of Sri Aurobindo by His Devotees." (To avoid a misunderstanding: Peter in my opinion is not a devotee. And to avoid another misunderstanding: in my opinion a devotee is the last thing Sri Aurobindo ever wanted for his work.)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Sun 26 Oct 2008 08:20 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"in my opinion a devotee is the last thing Sri Aurobindo ever wanted for his work."

If the word devotee has to do with devotion - well, I am afraid Mother Herself is/was a devotee - It is not Their first meeting when Sri Aurobindo recognized Her as The Mother. But it was the very first meeting when Mother had no reservation to offer all her devotion to Sri Aurobindo.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Sun 26 Oct 2008 08:37 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I don't think it's appropriate to bring the Mother down to the level of a mere devotee. Her relationship with Sri Aurobindo was unique; there is no appropriate word for it. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted was sadhaks, not devotees.

Why do men want to worship? It is much better to become than to worship! (Mother's Agenda, April 30, 1969)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Debashish on Sun 26 Oct 2008 09:35 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Perhaps it is a matter of semantics here, or of devotion which stops at worship as against devotion which is a force in becoming. BTW, the description of devotion in the yoga in the Lives is particularly fine (chapter on The Major Works):

To the devotee, God is master, friend, father, mother, child, or, most intensely, lover and beloved. Every feeling that can prepare the heart for union is accepted by the devotee and turned to the higher purpose. In the end, the devotee experiences the delight of the divine for the sake of the divine "and for nothing else, for no cause and gain whatever beyond itself." Such delight is felt in every form of union with the divine, from complete merging and mutual presence and nearness "and other wonderful things too for which language has as yet no name. (pg. 284)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Sun 26 Oct 2008 11:04 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Thanks Deb. That was beautiful. I just opened it for replying and found this beautiful quotation you have presented.

To me - before getting SA and The Mother - seeking knowledge was the only way - though it found nothing but quantized, relative and ephemeral satisfaction.

Devotion is what found after reading Them. How can I be anything other than a devotee in spite of being very far from a true devotee? Which also has its gradation as you have rightly pointed out - it is the dynamic force at work for sadhana. Before devotion - I tried to objectivise my own subjectivity. Devotion gave me that missing link - bridged the gray area between the subject and the object.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by koantum on Mon 27 Oct 2008 06:04 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Dear Debashish,

Beautiful indeed. But how many of Sri Aurobindo's self-proclaimed devotees have this kind of devotion? And how many of those have a mental and vital development to match their psychic development? It's precisely a disbalance in this respect that makes us prone to act irrationally rather than rationally, let alone suprarationally.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Srikanth on Tue 28 Oct 2008 10:04 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

It is a pity that Dave's fitting reply to this is missing.

All physicians of intolerance must first heal themselves!

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Angiras on Wed 29 Oct 2008 06:05 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted was sadhaks, not devotees."

Anyone who searches through Sri Aurobindo's letters on Yoga to find where he mentions his and the Mother's "devotees" will be disappointed. The word "sadhak" occurs several hundred times, "disciple" much less often; "devotee" occurs a few times, but only in general contexts such as "all the sages and devotees and yogis and sadhaks throughout the ages" or with reference to traditional Bhaktiyoga ("the devotee loves Krishna because Krishna is lovable"). In all of Sri Aurobindo's writings, the only reference I can find to his own "devotees" is in an amusing open letter he wrote to the editor of the Hindu within a year after arriving in Pondicherry:

"I find myself besieged by devotees who insist on seeing me whether I will or not. They have crossed all India to see me - from Karachi's waters, from the rivers of the Panjab, whence do they not come? They only wish to stand at a distance and get mukti by gazing on my face; or they will sit at my feet, live with me wherever I am or follow me to whatever lands. They clamber on to my windows to see me or loiter and write letters from neighbouring Police-stations. I wish to inform all future pilgrims of the kind that their journey will be in vain...." (Autobiographical Notes, p. 266)

The situation is similar in the Mother's writings and talks. As in the case of Sri Aurobindo, she hardly spoke of "devotees" except in a traditional context (e.g., "devotees, saints and Rishis").

Obviously this does not mean that bhakti is unimportant in the Integral Yoga; it is essential to its ultimate integrality. But in the elementary stages - and I would like to meet someone who has gone beyond the elementary stages - it is one of several possible angles from which the Yoga can be approached, not something to be imposed on all regardless of their individual nature. Sri Aurobindo himself experienced bhakti only at an advanced stage of his Yoga. We find him writing in his diary on April 14, 1914: "Last night prayer, to which the nature has been long much opposed & then indifferent, was twice used...." In Savitri, reflecting Sri Aurobindo's own sadhana, Aswapati has a powerful experience of bhakti for the Divine Mother near the summit of his ascent through the worlds, at the end of Book Two, Canto 14. There is hardly a hint of bhakti before that.

Sri Aurobindo summed up the dangers as well as the potentiality of bhakti in the first chapter of Part Three of The Synthesis of Yoga:

"It is true that devotion without knowledge is often a thing raw, crude, blind and dangerous, as the errors, crimes, follies of the religious have too often shown. But this is because devotion in them has not found its own path, its own real principle, has not therefore really entered on the path, but is fumbling and feeling after it, is on one of the bypaths that lead to it; and knowledge too at this stage is as imperfect as devotion, dogmatic, schismatic, intolerant, bound up in the narrowness of some single and exclusive principle, even that being usually very imperfectly seized. When the devotee has grasped the power that shall raise him, has really laid hold on love, that in the end purifies and enlarges him as effectively as knowledge can; they are equal powers, though their methods of arriving at the same goal are different."

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Keka on Thu 30 Oct 2008 12:18 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

"Number of occurrences" may be more suitable method to be applied to Computer Science than to Yoga. There are number of chapters just on devotion in Sri Aurobindo's writing - in order to clarify the term with so much care instead of discarding it.

"devotees who insist on seeing me" and "devotees" - are totally different. It is like saying "people" means "people who are blind".

In the quotation you presented from Synthesis of Yoga - it clearly shows the knowledge and devotion as equal powers.

I would also like to add Sri Aurobindo's own aphorism;

"I am not a Jnani,¹ for I have no knowledge except what God gives me for His work. How am I to know whether what I see be reason or folly? Nay, it is neither; for the thing seen is simply true and neither folly nor reason."

Footnote (Mother's On thoughts and Aphorisms): ¹ One who follows the path of Knowledge (jñāna) as opposed to the path of Love (bhakti), or the path of Works (karma)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Angiras on Fri 31 Oct 2008 06:20 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

I thought I made it clear enough that I have no interest in discarding the word "devotion" - though I admit to preferring the Sanskrit "bhakti". I only question the hijacking of the Integral Yoga by people who seem to have the kind of "devotion without knowledge" that Sri Aurobindo warned against, and who claim that this is the only permissible approach.

Re: Re: Taking Stock

by Debashish on Sun 26 Oct 2008 01:20 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Maybe I was not clear enough in answering your question about the "extraordinary animal" in terms of the definition you have called to attention. The thread that ties these "lives" together, from the time that it appears as an aim, is the one-pointed exploration of consciousness for the sake of finding a solution to the problems of humanity. If there are incidental details, these are subordinated to this aim, so that what remains clear in the reader's impression on reading the book, is this endeavor, its clarity, its extraordinary effects and its white sincerity.

DB

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