A collection of articles by various authors to provide a counter to the vicious attack on Sri Aurobindo that came in the form of a distorted biography.
This book is a counter to the vicious attack on Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual stature that came in the form of a hostile biography of him by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, published by Columbia University Press in 2008.
Edited by Raman ReddyShiksha Mandir TrustFirst Edition 15 August 2017ISBN: 978-81-93199-93-0Published by Shisha Mandir Trust 875, Sector 17B Gurugram, Haryana - 122001Ph: +91124-4280241E-Mail: help.smtrust@gmail.com
This book is a counter to the vicious attack on Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual stature that came in the form of a hostile biography of him by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, published by Columbia University Press in 2008. All the articles in this book are in defence of Sri Aurobindo and many of them have been written by well-known historians and academicians. Though the book is written in support of the disciples and followers of Sri Aurobindo and their spontaneous rejection of the gross distortions of their Master’s life and teachings, the refutations themselves are based on a scholarly study of Sri Aurobindo’s works and a thorough examination of the historical facts of his life. I hasten to make here a necessary clarification with regard to the study of great spiritual personalities such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
There is a general assumption that spirituality and rationality don’t go together just as feeling and reason cannot operate at the same time. So either you believe in an “irrational” way in spiritual realities as disciples do, or you accept only things which come under the strict purview of reason, as overconfident secular scholars do. But for those of us who have outgrown this narrow attitude of looking at things, we have a mixed bag of assumptions. We believe in the truth of spiritual experience on the testimony of those who are spiritually advanced, but we also believe in the truth of reason which bases itself on material facts. And we do not see any essential contradiction in holding both positions as long as we treat them according to the laws and principles of their respective domains. This does not mean that our judgment of spiritual events is devoid of rationality, with a total suspension of logic and commonsense, or that our reason has no connection whatsoever with spirituality. For there is a lot of common ground and mutual compatibility, which often allows us to buttress faith with reason, or realise the shortcomings of faith in the light of reason, and even perceive the limitations of reason itself vis-à-vis faith and spiritual knowledge. This has of course enormously increased the scope for subjective errors in our judgment, but it has given us at the same time a much larger view of life, because it includes the vast inner domains of the Spirit as well as the material world around us. The strictly objective scholar will be horrified at this liberal attitude, but then if he rejects the truth of the Spirit only because of the complications that it may bring to his scholarship, then one day or the other the grand edifice of his erudition will crumble down with the rapidly widening horizons of spiritual knowledge in modern times.
I will give several examples of what the regular scholar and historian would consider taboo for fear of being ostracised by his peers. Take for instance the Adesh (a divine command) which Sri Aurobindo received in Calcutta to go to Chandernagore, and another one to go from there to Pondicherry. The regular historian would not even mention it; he would simply narrate the facts and conclude that he was a coward who ran away to French India in order to avoid being arrested by the British Police. Or take Sri Aurobindo’s experience of Nirvana and other spiritual experiences, it would be literally blasphemy for him to take them seriously. If he is forced to mention them, he would have to bring in the play of imaginations and hallucinations to explain them to his readers. Similarly, the topic of the Self or the Soul would have to face either a stiff silence or a severe reprobation. In the realm of spiritual associations he would see only sexual relations, and there would be no question of brahmacharya, a yogic practice with which we are familiar in India since times immemorial. As for the Supermind and the different planes of consciousness described by Sri Aurobindo in such great detail, I am sure tomorrow a super-clever scholar will map them into the various layers of the human brain. This indeed is the petty modern interpretation of spirituality, and it is because Peter Heehs had to constantly bear in mind this view of leftist scholars who have dominated India and the West, that he had to mess up his biography. Otherwise, he would have been rejected outright and even shunned by them, and he would never have gained entry into this elite group of short-sighted academicians.
But even this old school of thought is at least consistent in limiting itself to material facts and evidence and rejecting all spiritual phenomena. There is a strict criterion and discipline that these scholars and historians follow in the matter of collecting, authenticating and organising their documents, and drawing rigorous conclusions from them. Peter Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo lacks this basic discipline, although he proudly calls himself an objective scholar. He is so eager to destroy Sri Aurobindo’s image that he cannot write a fair and credible account of him even from the leftist or secular point of view. The very fact that he spends forty years of his life pretending to practise yoga in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and during that long period gathers almost exclusively negative data on Sri Aurobindo, and that too from unreliable secondary and tertiary sources, shows his plain dishonesty. He ends up being neither a straightforward leftist scholar nor an admirer of Sri Aurobindo who believes in his spiritual world-view. So then you wonder why he wrote at all a biography of Sri Aurobindo whose spiritual life was never “on the surface for men to see”, as he said once to a biographer. He should have chosen instead a run-of-the-mill politician whose life is very much on the surface to see and record!
Our refutations of Heehs’s distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life and teachings have been on perfectly rational grounds, questioning the dubious way he has handled historical evidence, his omissions and commissions, without basing ourselves merely on faith and hurt emotion. We have taken on faith only what cannot be taken otherwise, and where we are forced to assume, such as Sri Aurobindo’s account of his own spiritual experiences or his statements on spiritual realities and events, which are beyond the grasp of reason and ordinary sensory perception. But once we have assumed these, the super-structure that we have built on them is as logical as that of any objective scholar who bases himself on material facts and evidence. In general, we have paid Heehs in the same coin that he thought he would get away with. He announced that he was the founder of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives to gain public credibility; we exposed him to be a fake. He flaunted his objective scholarship; we showed how he was biased and chose flimsy negative evidence over much that was actually in favour of Sri Aurobindo. One tactic that he has frequently adopted is to quote Sri Aurobindo against himself, so that he can silence his disciples. We went to the very same texts and found that he had decontextualised Sri Aurobindo’s frank remarks on himself. For example, Heehs gleefully pounces on Sri Aurobindo’s remark of being a coward and a liar when he was a boy of ten, but he deliberately omits in the same paragraph the part on Sri Aurobindo outgrowing these defects after he commenced his Yoga. Another method of Heehs that defies common sense is to read Sri Aurobindo’s life into his works, as if what he wrote was a faithful reflection of his actual life. Sri Aurobindo’s commentary on the Isha Upanishad has thus given rise to such silly speculations by Heehs that you could almost propose him to write a novel instead of a biography. Then the book is full of insidious remarks and insinuations, nasty comments on all the major works of Sri Aurobindo which have won so much admiration from intellectual circles, a constant running down of Hindu values and practices, and a denigration if not an outright vilification of the divine personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
It was therefore incumbent on us to produce a rebuttal of this biography by Peter Heehs, without which there would be a lot of misunderstandings regarding Sri Aurobindo’s life and teachings in the public domain. Our book therefore endeavours first to clear the distortions and doubts that Heehs has sown among the disciples and followers of Sri Aurobindo. It also addresses readers who may not be so familiar with Sri Aurobindo, but are open to spiritual thought in general in order to appreciate the purport of this book, for similar attacks of this kind have been made in the recent past on other great spiritual figures of India and Hinduism in general. As a matter of fact, there is clear evidence that Jeffrey Kripal, who portrayed Ramakrishna Paramhansa as a paedophile in his book Kali’s Child, exchanged notes with Peter Heehs prior to the publication of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo in June 2008. Heehs has thus joined hands with this notorious group of Hindu bashers which Rajiv Malhotra has so well countered and responded to in his books and blogs. Our rebuttal will also be of interest to the purely academic scholar from the point of view of exposing a technically defective and totally biased presentation of historical documents, of which Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is a classic case. In other words, Peter Heehs has been very successful in showing to the academic world how a biography should not be written! The arguments that we have presented in this book are thus logically sound and based on sufficient historical evidence, and the fact that they are in outright support of a great spiritual personality should not by itself disqualify them from scholarly consideration.
Finally, by the publication of this rebuttal, we have proved that disciples, followers and admirers of great spiritual masters can retaliate intellectually instead of being only hurt and shocked by insidious attacks on their Gurus. While the general way of peace- loving Indians to leave everything to the Divine is a good long term strategy, it is necessary nowadays to pick up the gauntlet in the face of such vicious attacks on their culture and spiritual ethos. One thing we Indians ignore today is how much Westerners are strangers to our culture, and that unless we clarify and counter at every point their distorted understanding of it, we will never be able to set the record straight in the eyes of the rest of the world. A certain amount of hatred of Indian culture among Westerners stems from sheer unfamiliarity with it. The fact that Indian spirituality offers solutions to the age-old problems of man while Western thought and culture find themselves in a state of inner bankruptcy, increases all the more this ill-will instead of promoting a healthy cultural exchange. Hence we see nowadays so many clever attempts of Western scholars to appropriate the spiritual knowledge of India without acknowledging it, or, if that appears to be too blatant a cultural theft, try to show its hitherto unknown origin in the West. Indians are generally quick to absorb Western culture without any such inhibitions coming in the way, but many Westerners, if at all interested in Indian culture, can rarely overcome their cultural barriers and genuinely empathise with it. There are of course exceptional Westerners who have steeped themselves in Indian culture, but they have been marginalised by the mainstream academia. It is in these rare and genuine souls that we can hope to find one day a true synthesis of the East and the West.
The problem is multiplied by English becoming the global language of communication and creative expression. Most English speaking Westerners automatically think that the mere knowledge of English elevates them beyond the need of learning from other cultures, because everything is available in English. But what is available in English is often half-baked knowledge or poor translations, especially in the realm of spirituality, which moreover needs a preliminary awakening of the inner consciousness that no amount of mental effort can bring. It is for this reason that much stress is nowadays laid by Western scholars on the ideas and concepts of spiritual philosophy, for then they can juggle with them in an endless rigmarole of comparative studies and pretend to be experts in religious studies, without having an iota of spiritual experience. Even in the case of Sri Aurobindo, where everything indeed is available in English, the need to practise his Yoga for a long time and gain sufficient familiarity with the larger background of Hinduism, from which he developed his spiritual philosophy, cannot be simply brushed aside. It is precisely to avoid the necessity of doing so that there have been recent efforts among some Western scholars to dissociate Sri Aurobindo from Hinduism and say that he rejected it altogether in the latter part of his life. But I attribute this again to sheer arrogance and what is perceived by them as a cultural humiliation to learn from an “inferior race”, though they do not dare to say so and hide their real feelings behind sophisticated trappings. How much the world would have been better had not these extraneous considerations come in the way of mutual understanding! As for the large number of English- educated Indians who have unfortunately become stooges of these Western scholars and are eager to commit cultural hara-kiri for the sake of a so-called “global harmony” which ironically has no place for Indian culture, it is mostly the politics of self-interest that drives their actions. I would be at once accused of Western phobia and Hindu jingoism, but for once let us stop mouthing these political platitudes and look at the plain truth of the matter – Indians have never been averse to Western culture, they have always been good learners. It is Western scholars, especially the type of Peter Heehs and Jeffrey Kripal, who want to belittle Indian culture because of their morbid revulsion for it. Indians therefore have every right to defend and rebuff malicious attacks on their culture, and there is no need to be apologetic about it.
A last word on justifying the aggressive stand we have taken in our rebuttal, which most mild-mannered Indians would generally avoid, having been born in the land of the wandering Sannyasin. To this I repeat the old adage that attack is the best form of defence, especially when the enemy is bent upon eliminating you and taking full advantage of your naiveté. Such defensive aggression would also indirectly pave the way for a better cross-cultural understanding in the future, for it is only after a confrontation and a clash that Indians will be able to command respect from others. Finally, learn we must from everybody and especially from the West, which has been in the vanguard of humanity’s scientific progress for the last few centuries, but why not at the same time assure the survival of what we hold to be infinitely more precious than all the material advancements and technical innovations that the present world can offer – our spiritual heritage?
Raman Reddy
Dr. Prithwindra Mukherjee has been awarded the Chevalier: (a) in the Order of Arts & Letters by the Ministry of Culture, France (2009); (b) in the Order of Palmes académiques (“Academic Laurels”) by the Prime Minister, proposed by the Minister of Education (2015). He received from the French Academy the 2014 Hirayama Award for the totality of his publications including nearly seventy books and a considerable number of articles. An expert on the pre-Gandhian Indian revolutionary movement (1893-1918), and author of a PhD thesis supervised by Raymond Aron, he points out errors galore in Heehs’ so-called scholarship, especially with regard to Bagha Jatin (Jatin Mukherjee), who was Dr. Prithwindra’s grandfather.
Dr. J.B. Prashant More is a renowned historian based in Paris. He has published extensively on the history of South India and is a specialist in Muslim, Dravidian, and French colonial history of India. Some of his books for which he is well known are The Political Evolution of the Muslims in Tamilnadu and Madras, 1930-47 and the Rise and Fall of the Dravidian Justice Party, 1916-1946. His work on the freedom movement in the French colonies of Pondicherry, Mahé and Yanam has been acclaimed as unique and original. His book Partition of India: Players and Partners published in 2008, remains unchallenged to this day. Counting his most recent publication A Critique of Modern Civilisation and Thought: Facts, non-facts and ideas, Dr. More has authored more than 18 books and contributed 45 articles in reputed international journals.
Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty is Professor and former Head, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. He is the recipient of several national and international distinctions including the British Council, the Fulbright, the Salzburg, and the Katha awards. He has to his credit 28 books in English and in Odia. These include Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader and Cosmopolitan Modernity in Early Twentieth Century India, both published by Routledge India. He was designated the Vice Chancellor of the Central University of Orissa at Koraput in August 2015.
Sudha Sinha is a well-known writer in Hindi. Her article on “Education for Creative Thinking” received the national award for the best article in Hindi for the year 1967. She was also nominated the best writer of Bihar State for the year 1985. She has published 50 books so far and written numerous articles in various journals such as Navneet, Navbharat Times, Kadambini, Hindustan, Dharmyug & Kahaani.
Ranganath Raghavan teaches the major works of Sri Aurobindo to the students of the Higher Course of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Centre of Education (SAICE). He has worked around 15 years at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives helping in the publication of the new edition of the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). He is also one of the editors of the Mother India, a monthly journal published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Dr. Alok Pandey is a psychiatrist by profession, but is more known as a brilliant exponent of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and Philosophy. He has authored the book Death, Dying and Beyond (2006). He is an editor of NAMAH, The Journal of Integral Health and The All India Magazine, both published by Sri Aurobindo Society.
Sraddhalu Ranade is a scientist, educator and scholar at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram where he grew up in the care of the late Sri M. P. Pandit. He has been involved in various research projects including artificial intelligence based on neural networks, multimedia search and retrieval, and educational tools. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences on science and spirituality and lectures around the world on the yoga and teachings of Sri Aurobindo.
Sandeep Joshi runs the website “Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother” at https://auromere. wordpress.com.
Govind Rajesh has been associated, since its very inception, with one of the largest Sri Aurobindo Centers in U.S.A., the Sri Aurobindo Yoga Foundation of North America based in New Jersey, and currently serves as its President.
Nileen Putatunda is a social worker and a poet. Six books of his spiritual poetry have been published by the Writers Workshop, India, between 2006 and 2011. His books have been reviewed in international Vedanta journals, Prabuddha Bharata, Samvit, The Advent and The Vedanta Kesari. Annya, published by Writers Workshop in 2009, was short-listed for the Muse India Young Writer Award 2011. Nileen’s poems have appeared in journals like American Vedantist and The Mountain Path, and his articles have come out in the opinion space of national newspapers.
Sanjay Bhatt has had a long stint at editing the books of disciples who have written on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, such as Srinivas Iyengar’s lengthy biography of the Mother and Champaklal’s reminiscences. He has spent more than thirty years at the Archives Department of the Ashram helping in the publication of the new edition of the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), and gathering biographical data on Sri Aurobindo’s life.
Raman Reddy has spent forty years at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives arranging the original manuscripts and making a database of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s enormous correspondence with their disciples. His research on The History of the Ashram Main Building was published by the Ashram in 2008. He has written a number of articles on the early period of Ashram history which have been published in the Mother India and The Golden Chain.
Amal Kiran (1904-2011) needs no introduction to the disciples and admirers of Sri Aurobindo. Among the early poets of the Ashram who were fortunate to be guided and inspired by Sri Aurobindo himself, Amal Kiran’s prodigious literary output in the form of hundreds of poems, articles and books on the most varied subjects, covering literary criticism, yoga, history, philosophy, politics and even science, is unmatched by any other literary figure in the Sri Aurobindo circles. He was editor of the monthly journal Mother India for more than fifty years and was quick to rebut in it every hostile criticism of his Master.
Jugal Kishore Mukherji (1925-2009) was the author of a dozen books in English and Bengali on various aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and Yoga. He was head of the Higher Course of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Centre of Education for several decades and was an expert on the major works of Sri Aurobindo, especially The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga.
CWSA (Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo),published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry
SABCL (Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library) published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry
MCW (The Mother’s Collected Works) published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry
TLOSA (The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs) published by Columbia University Press, 2008
PH = Peter Heehs
The following Notice was put up on the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Notice Board on 23rd September 2010.
It is unfortunate that certain rumours are being circulated that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is in some way endorsing, supporting or promoting the book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” by Peter Heehs. We would like to re-iterate what has been our consistent stand since October 2008 namely:
“Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust does not approve and has nothing to do with the book entitled “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” written by Peter Heehs and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is not in any way responsible for the contents or the interpretations of the material contained therein. ”
This is to re-affirm that the stand of the Ashram Trust has been consistent and has remained unchanged. The book is not sold from any department of the Ashram.
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is fully aware of its responsibilities and its actions are determined keeping in view the vision and values it is meant to uphold.
For The Board of Trustees
Manoj Das GuptaManaging TrusteeSri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Pondicherry
23.09.2010
Our Branches & Centres have made queries regarding the controversy that has been created by the book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” by Peter Heehs, an ashramite. H.O. has been repeatedly asked as to what is the stand of Sri Aurobindo Society in this connection.
This matter was discussed in detail by the Executive Committee of Sri Aurobindo Society on 21st April 2012 and the following decision was taken:
“After having read the book ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo’ by Peter Heehs, the Executive Committee of Sri Aurobindo Society has come to the conclusion that the book, at many places, presents facts and information based on unreliable sources and contains misrepresentations and distortions of the life, work and yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The book also puts down other biographies written by scholars and devotees, which are certainly not hagiographies and have inspired a large number of devotees, seekers and scholars. All these biographies are available with SABDA, the official sellers of Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s books and other related books.
Sri Aurobindo Society strongly disapproves of the book.”
25.4.2012
ChairmanSri Aurobindo Society
(All India Magazine, June 2012)
The first impression that Peter’s book gives is one of a meticulous, scholarly and authoritative work. It deals minutely with many factual aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s life and suggests some new interpretations of Sri Aurobindo’s motives. Most statements seem to be backed with references, and for every viewpoint, an opposite view is presented giving the book an appearance of balance and objectivity.
But when we look deeper into the references we find that many quotations are used out of context. And when we look at the balance of viewpoints, we find that there is a deliberate bias to quote those who are critical of Sri Aurobindo, and to suppress the much larger body of facts and quotations that praise him. The author justifies his bias by disclaiming any praise of Sri Aurobindo as not objective or as hagiographical. Sometimes the author uses a clever mix of facts and speculation, so tightly woven that you cannot distinguish one from the other unless you personally verify the referenced sources and think for yourself. On the whole the balance is consistently tilted to harm Sri Aurobindo’s reputation and, more seriously, to misrepresent his message, his work and his teaching.
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Numerous examples of analysis in this book will reveal that the bias is deliberate and defamatory. Some of the least controversial passages of this book are found, on closer scrutiny, to be perversely deceptive.
The kinds of deceptions consistently utilised throughout the book include:
To the informed scholars of Sri Aurobindo’s life and teaching, the book is found to be full of twists – on an average of at least one per page. The entire book sustains a deliberate slant aimed at defaming Sri Aurobindo, but cunningly couched in a play of words to hide the author’s bias.
The messages and conclusions that he develops across the book include the following:
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Anybody with respect for spirituality, for Sri Aurobindo, Indian culture, or even for pure objectivity and scholarship, will be disappointed at the least, and deeply hurt for the most part.
The book has been publicised as a scholarly, authoritative and comprehensive work by its publishers who themselves have a high reputation. It will surely be quoted by mal-intentioned scholars to justify their agendas. To ignore it without refuting its falsehood would be to condone it. Its contents and conclusions will be used by interested groups to deliberately hurt and provoke devotees and genuine scholars of Sri Aurobindo for years to come. This pattern and strategy of vilification of India’s spiritual traditions is not new.
Recently there have been similar “scholarly” attacks on the integrity of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Paramahansa Yogananda, Dalai Lama, Shivaji, Sai Baba, various Hindu deities, and others.
Jeffrey Kripal is the author who published a Freudian analysis of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and declared him a homosexual with perverse relationship with Swami Vivekananda. Kripal himself is a student of Wendy Doniger who specialises in Freudian analysis of Puranic stories and is described as “rude, crude and very lewd in the hallowed portals of Sanskrit Academics. All her special works have revolved around the subject of sex in Sanskrit texts”. The same Kripal is now showering high praise for Peter’s book. Kripal is prominently listed as the first of four reviewers on the back of
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the book and on the publisher’s website. He has written the longest and most prolific praise for it. He is a strong supporter of Peter’s thesis and was given the manuscript of the book by Peter long before its formal publication so that his comments may be used for publicity.
The choice of Jeffrey Kripal, a known right-wing Christian and a notorious anti-Hindu and anti-Indian writer, as primary reviewer reveals the darker intentions behind Peter Heehs’ defamation of Sri Aurobindo. It puts Heeh in the lineage of Kripal and Doniger, and puts his book in the same category as their writings in the public eye. It suggests the influence of well-funded international groups that are behind increasing academic attacks on Indian culture, spirituality and Hinduism.
Kripal has now joined Michael Murphy in financing Peter Heehs and Richard Hartz to analyse Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga for the Esalen Institute. Kripal ‘s intentions here can be inferred from the fact that his only fields of specialisation are “comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature”. Kripal himself describes Esalen as a “metaphysical synthesis of sensuality and spirit”, and a review of Kripal ‘s book on Esalen criticises him for being “too intent on seeing everything that happens at Esalen through the mystical lenses of tantra”. The danger emphasised here is not so much of Esalen’s intentions but of Kripal ‘s perverse mind now targeting Sri Aurobindo with Heehs’ help.
Kripal’s fawning review of Heehs’ book declares that:
“His text humanizes and problematizes a historical figure whose complexity has been more or less lost to us via hagiography, piety, and now Hindutva apologetics.”
Note his inbuilt biases. Note also his glee at humanising and problematising Sri Aurobindo, as well as his need to complexify. The word problematising means “to propose problems”, “to pose problems”, “to make into or regard as a problem”. This is the intention of Peter in writing this book as revealed through his chosen reviewer, close personal friend, financier and partner in research on Sri Aurobindo!
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Heehs’ statements have larger ramifications and are part of a wider strategy of certain global interests to misrepresent and discredit Sri Aurobindo along with other spiritual giants of our age.
When Kripal’s book appeared, he was an unknown small-time scholar seeking cheap publicity. In this case Heehs emerges from the heart of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and falsely claims authority on the grounds of being one of the “founders” of the Archives. This gives the distortions in this book an aura of authority and the implied sanction of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram itself. This is the main reason why it is so important to expose the distortions in this book.
There have been other “scholars” who also have distorted Sri Aurobindo’s teaching to suit their own agendas, but they have little authority and do not claim to represent the Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s views, and hence can be ignored and allowed to fade into academic irrelevance.
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Q 1. Peter Heehs has written a “scholarly biography” of Sri Aurobindo intended “for the Western mind”. What is wrong with that?
There would be nothing wrong with that if the book was truly an honest and scholarly biography. Unfortunately, it is full of misrepresentations and deliberate distortions regarding a) facts surrounding important events, b) their historical context, c) the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, d) the nature of his own yogic practices,
e) life in the Ashram, and f) the Mother. Naturally these also lead to false interpretations and wrong conclusions. On reading the entire book, the pattern that emerges is that PH has distorted facts to force them to fit the Freudian view of spirituality.
Such a book cannot be accepted as “scholarly” since standards of scholarship demand honesty, accuracy and completeness in presenting facts. All three elements have been seriously compromised in this book.
Q 2. But PH has written for the Western mind and Western scholars. Sometimes it may be necessary to present things differently to make Sri Aurobindo more acceptable and accessible to the West! At least that is what PH and his apologists claim.
Certainly different styles of presentation are needed, and not just for the Western mind. But are we to believe that the Western mind needs to read falsehood in order to better understand Sri Aurobindo and accept him? Are we required to distort his teaching and his yoga to make him more easily accessible to a certain mindset? Surely this has nothing to do with the Eastern or the Western minds. This has more to do with truthfulness, integrity,
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honest representation and accurate portrayal – or the lack of it in this case.
By justifying the need to distort facts in order to address the Western mind, PH and his apologists are is in fact dishonouring Western cultures, values and their integrity. The argument of mindsets is intended only to deflect attention from the real issue.
Q 3. But isn’t there a clear vertical split between the views of Eastern and Western disciples of Sri Aurobindo? Isn’t the response to the book in India more sentimental and emotional?
The split in the critical viewpoints is not between the East and the West. There are Eastern disciples who found nothing wrong with the book, and there are Western disciples who found it obnoxious. In fact the split has little to do with culture and more to do with awareness. The split is between those who have read Sri Aurobindo thoroughly and those who have not; it is between those who have read other biographies of Sri Aurobindo and are familiar with the context of historical events and those who have not; it is between those who are sensitive to the perverse nuances and suggestions in PH’s book and those who are not.
At present there are enormously more disciples of Sri Aurobindo in India than there are in the rest of the world; there are also many more people in India who have read Sri Aurobindo thoroughly. These, being so many and so diverse in nature, have responded each in his own way. There are many who have expressed deep hurt and anguish on reading the kinds of distortions that PH has printed. Equally, there are many who have responded in academic refutation and intellectual discussion. PH seems to want to deliberately obfuscate issues by clubbing all the different responses in India under one category of “sentimentality” in order to justify his fantasy of an Eastern vs Western divide.
Q 4. Why was there a campaign to malign PH? Should there not be a respectful intellectual debate on differences in viewpoints?
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There has not been any campaign to malign PH. There has been academic criticism of the contents of his book from academics. There have also been letters of hurt and anger from devotees and admirers of Sri Aurobindo criticising PH’s action and intentions. If PH has the right to publish a book (even if based on falsehoods), the public also has a right to tell him that it is unhappy with such a book – all within accepted ethical and legal frameworks of response. PH and his supporters have unfortunately been applying double standards of conduct.
In any matter of differences of viewpoints or interpretations, the right way forward would be to hold discussions and debates. But these should ideally have been started by PH himself before he published the book with full knowledge of what its consequences would be. Now that the book is out, he should at least be willing to discuss and debate rather than misdirect the debate into imagined cultural differences.
Those who have opposed the book have focused their criticism on the contents of the book in an academic refutation and have not directed any criticism on the personality of PH. On the contrary, PH and his supporters are conducting a vicious campaign on the internet to malign anyone who criticises the book. They have not, so far, responded to academic criticisms in honest intellectual debate.
Q 5. Why is it so important to provide academic refutations to PH’s book? Why has not such a detailed response been offered so far to other writers who also have misrepresented Sri Aurobindo?
There have been many writers in the past and there will be many in the years to come who will misunderstand and misrepresent Sri Aurobindo, some from simple incapacity or ignorance, and others out of spite or to serve their interests. It is not necessary to refute all of them. But this book by PH is being promoted as the most scholarly, authoritative and comprehensive so far, outdating all others which have been declared by him as being merely hagiographical. Further, the book is being promoted on the false
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authority of PH as being founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and editor of Sri Aurobindo’s works. The book misuses the goodwill and trust that readers have in the Ashram and abuses the strength and authority of the Ashram itself. Readers and scholars will blindly trust its contents as being representative of the Ashram’s views and as acceptable scholarly conclusions.
It is therefore imperative that the Sri Aurobindo Ashram itself should publicly declare the book as not representative of its authority or its views. It is equally important that scholars immediately expose the distortions and the mischievous intentions prevalent in this book and refute them in detail. Allowing these false statements to go unchallenged now would be tantamount to accepting them, which will lead to great harm in the long run.
Q 6. What can be so harmful in the long run, after all this is merely a book? How can a book ever harm Sri Aurobindo or his work? Should we not simply ignore its distortions and let them fade away in time?
In the long run surely nothing can harm Sri Aurobindo or his work. But in the short term, misrepresentation can mislead those who seek his guidance, and can distort his message among those who seek to understand his teaching and his yoga.
This book by PH alleges that Sri Aurobindo’s writings have little originality and nothing much that is new. It further declares that the little that is new is quite incomprehensible in its language and presentation. On reading such conclusions, most new seekers would be discouraged from approaching Sri Aurobindo in the first place.
The book also alleges that Sri Aurobindo lied about his supramental experiences. This conclusion is made based on a complete misrepresentation of Sri Aurobindo’s descriptions of his spiritual experiences and his progress in the supramental yoga. Any reader or spiritual seeker who goes purely by the statements given in this book will be seriously and dangerously misled in this respect.
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These are only two examples of how the book can mislead. Clearly such statements can and will do great harm to Sri Aurobindo’s work, especially when seen in the context of the authority of the Ashram itself that the author has claimed. To ignore such distortions and wish them away is to accept them and promote them in academic discourse. If accepted even once in academia, it would take decades of effort and debate to clarify and remove them. The publication of this book in the USA has already caused significant damage. Interested groups who seek to bring disrepute to great spiritual leaders are already using its statements to their advantage. An early academic refutation will minimise this damage and at the very least make people aware that statements in this book are controversial, need verification, are not supported by the Ashram, and cannot be relied upon.
Q 7. Isn’t the very effort to refute the book giving it more publicity? Would it not have been better to ignore it and allow it to fade away?
It is true that the attempt to inform people that this book is unreliable gives it more publicity by creating controversy. But to ignore it would not in any way reduce the publicity for two reasons:
a) the author and his promoters are themselves publicising it in an unusually forceful campaign (unmatched by any other biography or biographer of Sri Aurobindo so far), b) eventually some scholars or readers would point to the distortions and raise the controversy in the public domain in any case. It is therefore best that the distortions are exposed as soon and as clearly as possible without fear of negative publicity.
We can also learn from the example of Jeffrey Kripal’s similar vilifying biography of Ramakrishna Paramahansa which declared him a homosexual and paedophile by mistranslation, misquotation and distortion of context. At first the Ramakrishna Mission thought it best to ignore it hoping it would fade away. Meanwhile the promoters of Kripal arranged for the book to receive a prominent award that automatically put it on the bestseller list ensuring its delivery to all universities and colleges in the USA. It was then listed as the only suggested reading in the Encyclopedia Britannica
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for years. Subsequently the promoters of Kripal went to these very educational institutions and asked for books by Ramakrishna Paramahansa to be removed from their libraries to protect children from the writings of a known paedophile!
All the while the Ramakrishna Mission did nothing hoping the problem would fade away on its own. The only refutation which was written by a senior monk appeared in an independent website unconnected with the Mission. We are now informed that the Mission will publish a refutation in the near future (mid-2009) – this is ten years after Kripal’s damaging book was first published.
The lessons for us are many and should be painfully obvious considering that one of PH’s promoters in writing this book is the very same Jeffrey Kripal. We should not be surprised if PH’s book is used in exactly the same way and follows exactly the same trajectory of an award to publicise it, followed by a formal rejection of Sri Aurobindo and his teaching on the very grounds of the misrepresentations in this book.
Q 8. But PH’s book on Sri Aurobindo is nowhere nearly as damaging as Jeffrey Kripal’s book on Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Is the comparison justified?
The difference is that Kripal states his conclusions forcefully and clearly, while PH creates a mix of viewpoints which are both for and against Sri Aurobindo. In many cases he offers a watered down positive conclusion on some minor aspect of the discussion leaving the reader with an overall negative impression from the facts (mis)represented earlier. He gets away with not stating the negative conclusions directly but leaving them as innuendo or as open issues (which they in fact are not when all facts are placed in context). He “problematises” and “complexifies” (as Kripal gleefully declares in his promotional review) things which were very clear and simple non-issues to begin with.
A detailed reading of Kripal’s books and his central Freudian thesis regarding the nature of spirituality exposes the patterns in PH’s own book – PH is trying hard to portray all facts from Sri Aurobindo’s life in exactly the framework required to justify Kripal’s
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Freudian framework. It appears as if he has put together the base material upon which Kripal or another such writer will build the final declared conclusions. This kind of layering of raw materials and conclusions is the normal pattern used by many evangelical groups when trying to academically discredit or defame spiritual or intellectual giants. Let us also remember that PH and Kripal are already working together on their next project for studying Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga for which Kripal’s only declared field of competence is “comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature”. It appears as if the worst attacks are yet to come for which the present book by PH is meant to be only a stepping stone.
Q 9. PH has claimed that the controversy has been created by a selection of quotations taken out of context from his book. Further he says that one must read the entire book to be able to properly understand and judge these quotations.
Can a factually false statement become true in any change of context? Moreover, in any well-written book a sentence should become clear in context within the paragraph, or at best within the section or chapter. If a single sentence requires the entire 500- page book to be understood in context, then clearly the book would have to be structurally defective and logically flawed.
When the selection of quotations was first circulated, PH responded by circulating the very same selections but now placed in what he himself declared to be the proper context. These he circulated as vindication of his stand that the quoted sentences were not wrong when placed in context. His own chosen context was to extend the offensive selection by one sentence before or after. He did not need to quote the entire paragraph, much less the entire book to show proper context!
The constant refrain from PH and his supporters that it is necessary to read the entire book is only a device meant to promote the book’s sales! This is only one more example of how he has been deceiving readers and deflecting debate.
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Q 10. When placed in the proper context, are not the critical sentences balanced out equally by praise? PH claims that he uses a style of argument “similar to the purvapaksha- uttarapaksha form of argument of Sanskrit rhetoric” which he says is “a form of argument used [by] Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine.”
The “purvapaksha-uttarapaksha form of argument” is relevant only when there is an argument involved. Opinions or incidents cannot form a base for purva/uttarapaksha (PU) since there is no structure of logic involved in them. PU form of argument is relevant when the first (purva) party (paksha) places its logical argument and the responding (uttara) party refutes with another logical argument. In most cases PH is quoting opinions from people who criticize or praise mixed with his own opinions. Placing a positive viewpoint against a negative viewpoint does not in any way make for a PU form of argument. PH is only trying to confuse the reader with technical terms.
On the contrary, in most of the offending passages PH lists negative comments (often out of context) in detail and follows them with vague positive observations which do not in any way neutralise the earlier negative views. The overall impression created in the reader’s mind is one of a general negative background with some positive streaks in the foreground. The real crime is the deliberate suppression of the all the positive data which is not mentioned in the book, but which is commonly available in most other biographies! This is why those who are familiar with the facts from other biographical reading are shocked at the distortion while those with no background get carried away by the list of references and believe PH is right and convince themselves that they have learnt something new. In most such examples PH’s crime is more of omission than of commission, and the crime is real because the book is promoted as the “most comprehensive” biography so far, which obviously makes such serious lapses deliberately intended.
Q 11. Some people have greatly enjoyed reading the book and have been benefited. I also heard that many who had not known of Sri Aurobindo got interested in him after reading the book. Are these not positive signs that the book has served its purpose in bringing more readers to Sri Aurobindo?
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There are several issues involved here:
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One truly wishes that these readers or “scholars” had read some other biography first! They would certainly have enjoyed more, benefited more and come away with a truer understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s life and message. Surely the same time and energy and money would have been better spent to promote Satprem’s masterpiece Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness.
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Dear All,
The recent circular titled “Integral Yoga Fundamentalism” (IYF) dated 16th April 2009 signed by David Hutchinson, Debashish Banerji and Rich Carlson has come to my notice. It is unfortunate that these three have resorted to a campaign of character assassination rather than academic response and refutation of differences.
Since you have read their letter and have very likely been inflamed by their allegations, I request you in the interest of fairness to take some time to read my response in detail and go over the facts that I have to offer in place of their wild allegations. As will become clear, their allegations are false and their circular and website totally misrepresent my views and attack me on issues that I have no concern with while completely ignoring the main concerns and criticisms that I have raised.
This note is somewhat long because it must cover all the issues that the IYF circular has raised in its accusations. While reading my response, you will come across many surprising facts, some of which might even shock you. Do keep in mind throughout, that I have factual evidence for every statement that I make here, even though I cannot present it all in this note for reasons of space. In case you need substantiation or further elaboration of any of these statements, I will be happy to provide additional facts and evidence as necessary.
Cause of Differences
The cause of my differences with the IYF group is the recent biography of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (referred to as The Lives). The book relies entirely on three decades of meticulous research conducted by dozens of researchers of the Sri Aurobindo
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Ashram’s Archives. Heehs was only one among these researchers, although in his book he takes exclusive credit for the whole research. Unlike other researchers, Heehs had full and free access to the entire body of this research as well as to all the internal and unpublished documents which most biographers of Sri Aurobindo have never seen or even known. Hence there are several factual details in The Lives which have been published for the first time – mostly of trivial interest and of no major significance. In addition The Lives is meticulously documented, as any scholarly work should be. But this is as far as the scholarship goes.
The content of the book has been arranged and slanted to force-fit Sri Aurobindo’s life and work into a Freudian framework to win accolades from Freudian scholars. For this purpose, Heehs has chosen to sacrifice fundamental norms of scholarship including
a) factual accuracy, b) honesty, and c) completeness in representing facts. All three norms have been compromised not on some occasions but all through the book, consistently and deliberately. Note that I do not criticise The Lives on grounds of objectivity, even though it seriously fails this criterion also – the book is in fact biased against Sri Aurobindo. I do not criticise his objectivity because any biography is necessarily an author’s perspective, and I see nothing wrong with Heehs or anyone else presenting his own viewpoint or interpretation of Sri Aurobindo. Everyone is free to hold his views and to express them in his own way. In spite of Heehs’ claim to objectivity, his biography too (as all others before his) is highly subjective. And I do not criticise him for that.
My primary opposition to The Lives is on grounds of a) misrepresentation of facts out of their historical and social context,
b) presentation of Heehs’ speculations and imaginations as actual facts, c) deliberate distortion of actual quotations, d) factually incorrect and fallacious criticism of Sri Aurobindo, his views and his actions, e) factually wrong statements about the Mother, the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, and life in the Ashram, f) deliberate bias towards criticising Sri Aurobindo and intentionally concealing facts or accounts to the contrary.
In essence, my criticism of his book is on account of its deliberate distortion of facts and nothing more. Where is the
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fundamentalism in this? Factual accuracy should be the foundation of any scholarly work; otherwise it must be withdrawn or reclassified as a work of fiction. And that is all that I and others have demanded.
More seriously, these factual distortions are intended to lead readers to conclusions which seriously damage the reputation and integrity of Sri Aurobindo and his message. Some of the damaging conclusions promoted by The Lives include:
Deliberate Deception
Had any of these views been supported by real facts, no one would have complained. My criticism is that Heehs brings the reader to these views dishonestly by factual distortion, deception, innuendo and fallacious logic. Moreover, if these distortions were unintended, accidental or out of sheer ignorance, one might still forgive them, and possibly Heehs himself might have offered to withdraw the book. But the body of evidence consistently points to deliberate intent in promoting these distortions.
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True to the style of scholarly writing, every paragraph or major statement in The Lives has an endnote with a reference. Readers naturally assume that the reference will justify the statement, although most readers do not or cannot verify each reference for accuracy. But The Lives has entire passages which are completely a product of Heehs’ speculative imagination, where the references do not support the statements he has made! This is unacceptable abuse and betrayal of readers’ trust, and combined with other factual distortions amounts to academic fraud. Yet, this fraud is justified by Heehs on grounds that he has to make compromises in order to reach out to “Western scholars” in “non- hagiographical”, “new” and “objective” “interpretations”. In my understanding, factual distortion cannot be justified under any circumstances, and it speaks poorly of Heehs’ understanding of the Western mind and its needs.
Let me restate my position on the book: I have no objection to Heehs publishing any new facts, viewpoints or interpretation of Sri Aurobindo for any particular type of audience; but I unhesitatingly criticise any kind of fraudulence published in the name of academic research, and I consider it the responsibility of all who respect Sri Aurobindo and genuine scholarship to actively expose factual distortions irrespective of whether they are used to promote Sri Aurobindo or to demote him. In cases of fraud, one cannot remain neutral as some have attempted, because silence or neutrality in the face of a crime amounts to acceptance and support of the crime. We can only differ on what actions we should take to expose and undo the fraudulence.
On the positive side, the book also has some passages which are factually accurate and well presented. Supporters of Heehs conveniently quote these portions to “prove” that Heehs has praised Sri Aurobindo and raised his stature in public eyes. But the numerous deliberate distortions on major issues are sufficient in themselves to damage the integrity of the entire book. Even if these are changed, the rest of the book is still found to be replete with innuendo and negative bias on minor issues that leave the well-informed scholar with a bitter after-taste. On the whole the
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entire book is suffused with a dishonest bias and is factually unreliable.
(Quick example: Manoj Das, the renowned historian and scholar of Sri Aurobindo’s life and thought, and winner of several of the most prestigious literary awards, had identified over 60 offensive and harmful passages from The Lives that he read out to the Ashram Trust board in October 2008.)
Perceived East-West Divide
The reason why many readers from the West (and fewer from the East) have praised the book and have been unable to see through these distortions is that they simply do not know the facts and have trusted Heehs’ representations and presumed that his statements and references are factually accurate. Their blind trust in the author has misled them. It is not their fault, as it is normal for readers to trust an authoritative writer especially when he claims to be “founder” of the Ashram Archives and “editor” of Sri Aurobindo’s writings.
This difference in awareness is the main reason why there are extreme and opposite views on the book. Those who already know the actual facts are appalled at the distortions; those who do not know better are carried away by the engaging style of narration and blindly accept every statement of the author. There are no in- between views. This is why there is far greater criticism of the book:
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The only readers who immediately and unconditionally praise the book are those people who are coming in touch with Sri Aurobindo’s life for the first time, for whom every little detail they read in The Lives is new and therefore unverifiable.
(Quick example: François Gautier’s review of 13 April 2009 declares with great excitement that Heehs has shed “new light” when he finds that the Congress was originally founded by an Englishman. But this fact is known to every 8th Standard student in India for the last 50 years! When I asked Gautier how many other biographies of Sri Aurobindo he had read, Gautier frankly admitted that The Lives is his first biography of Sri Aurobindo, and he only vaguely remembers reading “something about his life long ago”.)
This difference in factual awareness of readership groups and their cultural profiles has been exploited by Heehs’ propagandists to invent the twin fictions of “East-West divide” and “a cultural misunderstanding” in order to obfuscate the real issues. In fact the division is only between those who already know the facts and those who do not.
Long-Term Consequences
If Heehs’ deliberately distorted conclusions are accepted by academia and the general public as facts, then in the long run it would cause enormous harm to Sri Aurobindo and his work, and would eventually threaten the survival of the Ashram and Auroville. For, if Sri Aurobindo lied about the supermind and the supramental transformation, then we would all be chasing a pipe dream which is destined to fail!
Fortunately for us, Heehs’ “proof ” that Sri Aurobindo lied about his supramental experiences rests on factual misrepresentation and deceptive quotations. What is more serious is that Heehs uses suggestion and innuendo to lead a first-time reader to the impression that Sri Aurobindo never even reached the supermind!
(Quick example: Julian Lines narrates by letter dated 15 October 2008:
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“Another scholar who had not read Sri Aurobindo in depth was eager to know after reading Lives if he had attained the Supramental Consciousness before his passing. She became engaged not in history or biography, but his spiritual life in a positive way from reading this book.”
The lady Julian has written about is no ordinary reader, but an established scholar with a trained mind. Her comment illustrates the perverse impression that The Lives creates for the first-time reader – doubt about whether Sri Aurobindo ever “attained” the supermind. In fact, Sri Aurobindo had already attained the supermind when he wrote about it well before 1920. There were further degrees and finer distinctions of grades that he subsequently mapped out in detail, all of which he fully attained and wrote about from his own experience. Do you think The Lives really helped Julian’s scholar-friend to better understand Sri Aurobindo? Most certainly it did her a great disservice by creating the very opposite impression of what happened to Sri Aurobindo on a matter of utmost importance.)
Heehs’ claim to present Sri Aurobindo to the “Western” and “scholarly” mind is untenable on account of his many factual distortions. Rather, the practical result of The Lives is to seriously harm Sri Aurobindo’s reputation and put in question the spiritual foundations of the Ashram and Auroville.
Impersonation as “Founder” of Archives
The damage is further exaggerated because Heehs promotes his book on the falsely claimed authority of being “one of the founders” of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s Archives, giving his distorted views the seal of the Ashram’s authenticity.
In their promotional campaigns, Heehs and his supporters prominently claimed his authority as “founder” for nearly eight months. In January this year, soon after a case of impersonation was filed in Orissa courts, Heehs made an abrupt volte-face and publicly announced that he had never claimed to be “founder” and that the designation was affixed by “a writer at the publisher’s publicity department, who based herself on a biographical sketch
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I [Heehs] had submitted”. Heehs wants us to believe that he is not responsible for the false claim, even though the claim is taken from a bio-sketch that he has himself submitted. Even so, Heehs only reveals a half-truth. The other half of the truth is that CUP published this claim in the book’s blurb and its publicity campaigns with Heehs’ full knowledge and approval.
Heehs not only commits academic fraud in The Lives, but then he goes on to promote it by impersonation. His lie has been widely publicised to promote the book, to exaggerate its authority, and to seal with finality its conclusions; his lie misuses the public’s goodwill and trust in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in order to harm Sri Aurobindo himself. Heehs turns around and bites the very Person and Institution from whom he draws his claim to authority! If not for the cases in court, his lie would never have been exposed.
Academic Refutation
The simplest way out would have been for the Ashram Trust to publicly dissociate itself from the book and its conclusions. All the confusions and ongoing controversies would have been avoided had this been done early enough. But for internal reasons, the Ashram Trust did not make a public statement, although it privately expressed its “displeasure” and even disgust at the contents and conclusions of The Lives. Consequently the responsibility came upon the devotees and disciples of Sri Aurobindo to expose its distortions so that they would not pass unchallenged into wider academia.
Several scholars and writers felt impelled to contribute, and going beyond the basic criticism of factual misrepresentation, each one wrote also of derived and related issues, developing a richly diverse discussion and criticism of The Lives. The scholars that I am associated with (including Alok Pandey, Ananda Reddy, R Y Deshpande, Raman Reddy, Ranganath Raghavan and Sachidananda Mohanty) have limited their criticism to the book and its contents in a dignified language, writing mostly within the framework of academic refutation in all their public statements which were circulated by emails and are now placed on a dedicated website. They also wrote freely of their feelings of hurt and anguish in
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personal or private correspondence, some of which was subsequently made public by Heehs’ group and unfairly exploited for crude personal attacks on grounds of “sentimentality”, “devotionalism” and “religiosity”. None of us has ever criticised Heehs or his group on a personal level in dignified recognition of our human differences, and out of respect for those that we continue to view as co-travellers on the Way.
But in return, Heehs’ supporters have retaliated not by academic response but with ad hominem personal attacks of ridicule and character assassination for all these months. Their latest circular dated 16th April 2009 and their hate-filled website called “IYFundamentalism” is only their latest desperate move in a seven- month-long hate-campaign. While our writings have sought to academically expose factual distortions, their emails have been classic examples of well-orchestrated slander spanning multiple email groups and blogs, shouting down and insulting anybody who differs from them, threatening authors and deleting posts that expose Heehs’ academic fraud. Their latest website claims to offer “annotated” copies of our early letters to the Ashram Trust. But their annotations are ad hominem, self-contradictory, factually incorrect, and sidetrack the discussion into irrelevant issues and personal abuse.
Instead, I invite you to visit our website www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com which is dedicated to an academic critique of The Lives and is “committed to objective, academic, respectful and honest discussion”. You will find that it focusses on real issues and exposes factual distortions in a clean atmosphere free of personal attacks and hate-mongering. The site is still under development as we add more critiques and expose more distortions with factual refutations every week.
Freedom of Speech
Heehs’ group (and IYF in particular) have accused me of suppressing freedom of speech, censorship, etc. From all of the above, you will appreciate that I have never questioned the right to free speech, opinion or interpretation. Even as Heehs has the right to publish his views, we also have the right to expose his
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distortions – all in a civil, objective and academic exchange. But freedom of speech does not mean license to commit academic fraud. Even if we stretch our standards of tolerance and offer Heehs the “right” to commit fraud, he remains publicly accountable for his fraud and his impersonation, and must face the natural consequences of his actions. In this case the demand for accountability is much more grave because the fraud has put the entire communities of the Ashram and Auroville at risk.
Recall that when the BBC had broadcast a program alleging paedophilia by Aurovillians, we did not keep quiet in the name of “freedom of press”. We went ahead and made all attempts to compel them to withdraw the program on grounds of factual inaccuracy. Consider how much more serious the situation would have been if the program was promoted as being authored by “one of the founders” of Auroville and researched by the Working Committee! Would we have tolerated such fraudulence? Would we have allowed the impersonator to continue in the Committee or even within Auroville? This hypothetical example should give you some idea of the seriousness of Heehs’ fraud and the anguished reaction within the Ashram community. There was a spontaneous and widespread surge of disgust and even anger at Heehs for having betrayed the entire community’s trust simply to win a few dubious personal accolades.
Track Record
The reaction was all the more firm because this is not the first time that Heehs has committed such a fraud. Heehs has a track record of academic fraud and deliberate misrepresentation of Sri Aurobindo going back at least 30 years, which is well-known to all within the Ashram community, although few people outside the community are aware of this background. Heehs himself has enjoyed his notoriety, and cultivated the image of a rebel and renegade by frequently making provocative and controversial statements both in public and in private. Twenty years ago he publicly branded Sri Aurobindo a “terrorist” in his published writings, and proudly declared to his critics that he was “here” to break the “myths”, “idols” and “devotionalism” of the Ashram community.
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Over three decades he has persisted in writing numerous articles doubting, questioning, and “debunking” Sri Aurobindo’s written statements regarding his own life, by misrepresentation, fallacious logic, presumption, crude psychoanalysis, and presenting personal opinions and speculations as actual facts – the very same patterns of academic fraud that he now repeats and amplifies in The Lives.
(Quick example: In one such piece of “research” in 1984, Heehs lists six occasions when Sri Aurobindo consistently made the same statement in writing over a period of several years. Heehs then counters it with an opposite statement from a private diary note of a sadhak written from his memory of an oral interaction. Heehs then spends all of his “scholarly” creativity to try to “prove” how Sri Aurobindo’s repeated assertions in writing must be wrong, and the single diary note of a secondary source relying on his memory of an oral interaction must be right! After a crude attempt to psycho-analyse Sri Aurobindo, Heehs offers us his “authoritative” conclusion: Sri Aurobindo either lied in order to “conceal” something or he suddenly “forgot” the facts about his own life. This piece of creative Freudian research was published by Heehs way back in 1984 in the Ashram’s own Archives journal! Can you spot the many similarities between the article then and the distortions in The Lives now? Little has changed through the intervening 24 years. Incidentally when the discrepancy was shown to the sadhak, he simply stated that he had made a mistake and that “Sri Aurobindo’s words were not recorded correctly”!)
Heehs also has a track record of impersonation going back at least 20 years. He has creatively impersonated himself variously as “Director” and “Curator” of the Ashram Archives, “Director of Historical Studies”, etc, all of them printed and signed on the official letterhead of the Ashram. These were intended to gain personal privileges with various public and private institutions all over the world, and to misuse his fake authority to get his articles published more easily in their journals on the strength of the Ashram’s reputation. Heehs’ such actions have legal implications that have repeatedly put the Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s public goodwill at risk.
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Over three decades, there have been many controversies, debates and discussions within the Ashram community over Heehs’ subversive tendencies and his abuse of the Ashram’s goodwill and patience. Through all these years, Heehs was repeatedly scolded, rebuked and seriously warned by Jayantilal Parekh (the real and only founder of the Archives) as well as by the Ashram management.
You may ask why his misbehaviour was tolerated for so long. I can only offer this as proof of the patience, indulgence, compassion and forgiveness of the Ashram community which, until recently saw Heehs as merely a rebellious and ambitious personality struggling with his own inner problems, and let him be. But with The Lives, Heehs has made his most “comprehensive” and direct attack on Sri Aurobindo so far, and the 30 years’ patience of the community has worn thin. It is obvious to all that Heehs has made no effort to change his ways; that he is indifferent to the sensitivities of his community; that he has little respect for the Mother and Sri Aurobindo around whom the Ashram life is organised; and that he intends to insult and harm.
For those of you unfamiliar with his 30-year track record, the sharp reaction in the Ashram community may have appeared extreme. But when you review now the situation in the light of Heehs’ repeated excesses and the numerous warnings he was served over three decades, you will surely appreciate the patience and tolerance of the community; and then it will become clear that the present (re)actions towards The Lives emerge from a much wider context than just this one book.
For those of you who have called for Heehs to be forgiven and reinstated at the Archives, we can only ask, “how many more times?” Earlier in March 2009, on the suggestion of the Ashram management, an informal poll was conducted within the Archives to see how many wanted Heehs back. The “overwhelming majority”, comprising both Westerners and Easterners, rejected his return and deemed his presence unnecessary for the work.
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Larger Conspiracy
The situation gets still more serious when we consider the interests of the main promoters of The Lives. Heehs is promoted by Jeffrey Kripal who is none other than the author of the infamous Kali’s Child, in which Kripal “proves”, with years of meticulous “research”, that Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a paedophile and homosexual having perverse relations with Swami Vivekananda and other disciples. When the book first came out, the Ramakrishna Mission treated it as an aberration and kept silent expecting it to fade away. Kripal’s promoters arranged for the book to receive the “History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995” and overnight it spread into every college and university library in the USA. Subsequently right-wing religious groups backing him prevailed on these colleges to discard Ramakrishna’s books to “protect” students from a “proven” “paedophile”. Eventually, Kali’s Child was listed as the only piece of recommended reading on Ramakrishna in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopaedia for years, and as recommended reading on Hinduism in general. The damage caused by that one book to the spiritual Master’s reputation and teaching is unimaginable and will take decades more to undo. The Ramakrishna Mission has only now woken up to the seriousness of its impact and plans to issue a formal academic refutation some time during this year – fourteen years too late!
More recently Kripal has been assigned by Michael Murphy to study Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga under the overall umbrella of funding from Esalen. Michael Murphy’s interest in Sri Aurobindo may be genuine, but he has seriously erred in choosing Kripal as his research-head for studying Sri Aurobindo, considering that Kripal is a Freudian reductionist whose only field of specialisation is “comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature” and who proudly claims, “All of my books are about sexuality and spirituality”.
There is evidence to show that Kripal is attempting to do to Sri Aurobindo what he did to Ramakrishna. To this end, Kripal has engaged Peter Heehs and Richard Hartz of the Ashram’s Archives and is financing them to research specific themes centering on Sri
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Aurobindo’s Record: Heehs has been asked to correlate experiences in the Record with those of other saints (for which he has already slanted many passages in The Lives), while Hartz has been asked to find correlations between the Record and Sri Aurobindo’s other published works (in particular to show differences as this better serves Kripal’s thesis). Both Heehs and Hartz have formally denied receiving finance for this work, when in fact Murphy has publicly declared it twice. You will find a brief expose of this nexus in my original note to the Ashram Trust on our website www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com. That note only outlines Kripal’s connection with Heehs. More detailed evidence is available and, if necessary, can be brought out in a more elaborate expose.
It is my opinion that Heehs and Hartz are being used by Kripal, and that, in his desperation for academic fame, Heehs may not fully realise his limited role as a pawn in Kripal’s larger game-plan. Kripal’s alliance with Heehs and Hartz has already gained him access to unpublished raw materials from the Archives for his study, including certain unpublished passages from Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga. This alliance is presumably the most significant influence in Heehs’ decision to give a Freudian twist to The Lives.
Heehs has been in touch with Kripal since Kali’s Child was published 14 years ago and has been working very closely with him for the last few years. The two have been exchanging notes in close coordination both for Kripal’s latest work on Esalen and for Heehs’ work on The Lives. Many passages in The Lives reveal the distinctive influence of Kripal’s language and his pet ideas. On Kripal’s request, Heehs revised and made corrections to an entire chapter of Kripal’s book on Esalen, all of which Kripal “accepted”. Heehs considers that chapter to be “quite inoffensive” and a “good summary of some aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s teachings”. And yet, that very chapter declares that Sri Aurobindo’s “doctrine” of the supermind consists of “exaggerated public ‘overbeliefs’” where “mythology has overtaken phenomenology” and that “the descent of the Supermind appears to be a mythologization of the phenomenology of shakti-pata … whereby a palpable occult (and often erotic) force is felt to ‘descend’ into the devotee’s body…”. I cite this text to show you that Heehs’ association with Kripal is
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not innocent, and that Heehs shares in many of Kripal’s perverse beliefs, including his rejection of the supermind. This nexus of interests and beliefs explains why Heehs needed to “prove” that Sri Aurobindo lied about the supermind; most of his other distortions also align perfectly well with Kripal’s thesis.
Kripal’s thesis centres on the idea that Ramakrishna taught differently from what he himself practised, and that his “secret” practices were all sexual and tantrik in nature. Kripal views Sri Aurobindo similarly as a “right-handed tantrik”. There are numerous passages in The Lives which appear strange, unnecessary or even digressive to the informed reader as they serve no purpose in the narration of Sri Aurobindo’s biography. When seen in the context of Kripal’s thesis, they suddenly acquire immense value. From this point of view, The Lives appears designed to serve as a first-level database of raw material and references upon which Kripal and others will subsequently construct further layers of “studies” to justify their insidious theories. Layering of such research is a normal process in academia, and is used by groups such as Kripal’s to strengthen their ground when attempting to discredit established spiritual figures.
This is a serious issue with dangerous long-term consequences for the Ashram and Auroville. Unfortunately, for lack of space, I am able to offer here only an outline of how The Lives relates to Kripal’s larger designs on Sri Aurobindo. This issue is quite independent of the issues of academic fraud and impersonation, although it complements them by revealing some of Heehs’ motivations to compromise facts. But all three issues are factually independent of each other.
Legal Issues
There is a fourth serious issue: that of Heehs’ violation of international copyright and intellectual property laws in publishing The Lives. This also, like the earlier issues, is found to be deliberate.
Columbia University Press (CUP) has strict requirements regarding copyright permissions which Heehs has violated. Heehs has illegally published numerous passages from personal diary notes
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of Ashram sadhaks to which he had exclusive and free access at the Ashram Archives, and which are absolutely not intended for publication. With this single action Heehs has violated a) international copyright laws, b) CUP’s copyright regulations, and
c) the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust’s copyright permission. By this triple breach, Heehs legally pits CUP against the Ashram without himself taking direct blame, because he has already handed over copyright ownership of The Lives to CUP which is now placed in direct violation of the Ashram’s copyright permission!
Heehs is also in violation of international intellectual property rights (IPR) conventions. The entire body of the Ashram’s research database developed by many researchers over decades has been utilised without permission of the Ashram which is the legal owner of this intellectual property. Worse still, Heehs has claimed personal ownership of this entire research database. Practically, this amounts to theft of the Ashram’s intellectual property. As an equivalent example consider what happens if a software engineer sells the entire research database of his employer as his own work for personal profit and for personal academic accolades. That such theft has taken place from the Ashram Archives and relates to the life of Sri Aurobindo, does not in any way diminish its gravity.
In 2003, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust put out a circular refraining all those working at the Archives from publishing any internal documents without specific written permission of the Trust. With The Lives Heehs has violated this circular in letter and spirit on multiple counts. In consequence, the Ashram management issued a new circular in October 2008 with even more stringent regulations for the Archives staff and formed a special committee to review internal security issues; but the damage is already done.
IYF’s Charges
With the above background covering four major issues compromising The Lives, we can quickly go through the main charges that Heehs’ group and IYF authors have raised against me and my colleagues.
Court cases: Neither Alok nor I have the competence or the resources to handle court cases. Contrary to IYF’s claims, neither
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of us is responsible for them, and neither do we have a say in their withdrawal. The IYF campaign to slander us as “initiators” of court cases is another attempt to misdirect attention from Heehs’ multiple crimes of academic fraud, impersonation, copyright and IPR violations.
But if Heehs has broken international laws, should he not face the consequences of his actions? And, even if not now, the consequences will eventually catch up with him one way or another. Or are we to consider Heehs to be somehow above the law? On the other hand, if he has not committed any crimes at all (as IYF claims) then what does he have to fear, and why is IYF suddenly so desperate to have the cases withdrawn? Why not instead factually validate himself and prove that he has done no wrong – in academia as well as in court.
Having said that, I personally am open to support any effort to stop publication of The Lives in India and assist its withdrawal in the USA, primarily because of its academic fraud, and secondarily for the other three issues cited above. My main objective in such support would be to ensure that the factual misrepresentations about Sri Aurobindo should be publicly exposed, and should not pass unchallenged in academia. I am also acutely aware that with the publications of The Lives, the damage to Sri Aurobindo’s reputation is already done (as with Kripal’s book) and the false conclusions have already entered the public domain. Any efforts on our part can only minimise the harm but cannot undo it.
Scholarship of Heehs: Heehs exposes his intentional academic compromise in The Lives by his letter of October 2008:
“The charge that I have insulted Sri Aurobindo comes mainly from certain critical remarks I made about some of Sri Aurobindo’s literary works, political life, etc. … I made these minor critical remarks to show my (academic) readers that I (as author of the book, not as a human being, a sadhak etc.) was not devoid of critical balance. This concession permitted me to praise Sri Aurobindo’s later poetry and philosophy at great length.”
Through a roundabout play of words, Heehs accepts that his critical remarks were not warranted, but that he needed to abuse
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Sri Aurobindo in order to improve his own “academic” credentials. Crudely stated, he raises his own stature in academia by abusing Sri Aurobindo! Even more shocking: Heehs wants us to believe that by abusing Sri Aurobindo extensively on all aspects of his life and work he somehow earns the right to praise him on some limited parts of his life. What a perversion of academic standards!
It is the content of one’s work that makes for a scholar, and not the number of publications he can produce. In view of his track record of academic fraud, impersonation, copyright violations and intellectual property violations, Heehs has forsaken the right to claim himself either a scholar or a historian. Heehs is a fine writer with an engaging and sometimes entertaining style. He would surely have made a good writer of fiction. In my opinion, The Lives had the potential to serve as an interesting biography with a different approach, but Heehs’ many distortions and compromises have wasted that opportunity and gifted us instead with a serious problem. I share with you here the most perceptive review of The Lives that I have come across, and which is highly rated on Amazon:
“Touted as an academic biography, this book fails on both expectations: academic and biographical.
It does not stand as a faithful biography because it misses the very things that made Sri Aurobindo a giant of our age. It disregards some of the most important incidents and achievements of Sri Aurobindo’s life, and instead overwhelms the reader with irrelevant and peripheral historical information.
The book fares even worse on its claim to scholarship. The author’s declared bias to discount anything that exceeds material and sensory data leaves us with the hollow shell of Sri Aurobindo’s outermost form. The inner and real Person is forcefully and sometimes crudely discarded leaving the reader with a bitter aftertaste.
All in all, a boring read. The only purpose the book might serve is as a limited database of historical references to Sri Aurobindo’s life.
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Religious fundamentalism: My colleagues and I have only criticised the deliberate distortion of facts and quotations in The Lives with factual evidence to support our criticism. There is neither religion here nor fundamentalism. We have invited dialogue and debate in a spirit of academic discussion. In return we have only received ad hominem abuse and insult from Heehs’ group, IYF, SCIY, and through every possible internet forum that Heehs’ abusive friends have got on to.
The choice of SCIY as their main platform to promote and defend Heehs is revealing. Consider that SCIY ridicules Sri Aurobindo’s vision of physical transformation as “naïve” and “post-romantic” and therefore obsolete using exactly the same misleading arguments as Heehs in The Lives in an article written by none other than Rich Carlson, signatory of the IYF circular! Not one among Heehs’ group on SCIY – including Debashish Banerjee, Richard Hartz or Ulrich Mohrhoff – has refuted those charges or exposed their deception (in fact Debashish Banerjee praises it highly!), implying their full acceptance and participation in such ridicule of Sri Aurobindo through factual and logical misrepresentation. It is therefore not surprising that these very people are now desperate to defend Heehs’ academic fraud and will go to any extent of indecency and more lies to protect their own compromise.
The newly created IYF front has taken their earlier campaigns of character assassination to new lows by raising the bogey of “religious fundamentalism” – globally the popular flavour of the season. Ask yourself who is muzzling academic debate by targeting people and ignoring real issues and refusing debate. Ask yourself why at all they need to resort to personal attacks when they could easily have offered academic responses and settled the issues factually. The harsh reality is that they are unable to justify Heehs’ academic fraud, and hence in desperation can only attack us personally and spread outrageous rumours to divert public attention away from their fraud.
In the early phase of the controversy, last year, Heehs informed the Ashram Trust by a letter dated 13 October 2008 that he had
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“heard” “reports” that “Vijay Poddar all but threatened to take over the Ashram if you do not do his will, perhaps using a Bajrang Dal type of organisation and methods.” He further demanded that the Ashram management should support the “rule of law prevailing in India”. Although he began with such hysterical and bizarre allegations, his group’s latest charge is no less fanciful: IYF’s threat of “religious fundamentalism in the Integral Yoga community” is only part of their continuing strategy to promote fear and hysteria by outright fabrication in order to gather sympathy for Heehs, and to cover up his indefensible fraud through creative diversions.
IYF claims to want to save the IY community from fundamentalism. Step back for a moment and reconsider who the real fundamentalists are!
“Conflict” with Ashram Management: IYF wants you to believe that I am in some kind of conflict with the Ashram management, but that Heehs has its full support. They deceive you with more lies and get away with it by concealing the enormous amount of documented criticism against Heehs which was in circulation most of last year.
Here are the facts through selected extracts (with my highlights) of statements of the Ashram Trust board-members and other respected and senior Ashram inmates:
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“Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust does not approve and has nothing to do with the book entitled “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” written by Mr Peter Heehs, and Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is not in any way responsible for the contents or the interpretations of the material contained therein.
“No inmate of the Ashram having access to any privileged material in relation to the work assigned to him/her by the Ashram, should make use of that material for any other work whatsoever except for the one assigned to him/her by the Ashram.”
Note that the second paragraph relates to Heehs’ theft of intellectual property.
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“I asked myself a very simple question: ‘Would I be happy to offer this book to the Mother, would the Mother be happy to receive it, with all that has been written in it about Sri Aurobindo and Her?’ My personal answer was a very emphatic No. In fact, after reading some of the things which are written, being only human, my personal reaction was of sadness, of great pain and hurt, even disgust and anger….
“The only solution, I believe, is for the Ashram to openly and publicly dissociate itself from the book, to declare that it does not convey the right picture, that no permission had been sought for and given for printing many of the privileged documents, including the personal diaries of the sadhaks, that there are several errors of facts, presentations and interpretations. Once such a bold decision is taken, with full conviction, then with a combined effort we have to block completely the printing of the Indian edition and explore what can be done to stop the distribution of the American edition.…
“Another point to be noted is that this is not something which has happened all of a sudden and for the first time. If we look at the history of the last twenty years, there have been enough indications and warnings which were given. But as no actions were taken, each time the things got worse leading to the most unhappy situation in which we find ourselves now.”
Do you find any differences between my stand and that of the Ashram management and its senior members? Does Heehs really have their support? Ask yourself why IYF is promoting ideas of an imagined conflict between me and the Ashram management. The answer will surprise you. Sometime in early December 2008, an anonymous online petition appeared on the Internet attacking
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the Ashram Trust. The petition was subsequently taken down by activism from the Ashram school’s alumni. The IYF group ran a nefarious campaign of rumour and innuendo to convince the SAAT that I had initiated the petition in order to harm the Ashram. By the time I came to know of their campaign in late January 2009 the damage was done and they had successfully sown seeds of doubt within the Trust against me. Ultimately their attempt failed when I showed the Trust an email that I had circulated in December 2008 criticising and warning against that very same online petition within days of its appearance.
I have described this incident in detail to show you how the IYF group has made, and continues to make, deliberate attempts to engineer conflicts and divisions between me and the Ashram Trust. Their latest circular to Auroville and the USA Centres targeting Alok Pandey and I is similarly intended to create divisions and misunderstandings within the community of devotees, a) by dividing the Ashram from Auroville, b) by dividing Westerners from Indians, and c) by dividing the USA Centres from each other, all this by deliberately mis-stating our position and misrepresenting our actions.
Heehs’ Shifting Grounds of Defence: Heehs’ group (SCIY/ IYF/others) has sought to defend him on shifting grounds. Over the last six months their defence of the book has drifted through the following paraphrased positions (with my parenthetical annotations of each):
(After reading within the context as offered by Heehs, most people remained unconvinced. R Y Deshpande, the most senior contributor of SCIY was threatened and forced out for not falling in line with the SCIY “fundamentalist” view. All his blogs were deleted. Many other contributors of SCIY
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left. Critical comments were deleted from all blogs and only a sanitised pro-Heehs version survives today with no significant voice of opposition.)
(A ridiculous claim because the context should normally be clear within a paragraph. Heehs himself did not feel the need to quote anything more than a line before or after to set the context. This strategy was adopted to promote the book’s sales and to overwhelm new readers with a mass of facts in which the offensive passages were diluted and submerged. Some fell for it. But most people returned with more criticism after reading the full book.)
(A rather arrogant position to take. Not surprisingly it was hastily abandoned as damaging to Heehs’ public relations.)
colonial viewpoint.)
(Still a colonially biased view. Many were carried away by this theory of the East-West divide. But as I have shown earlier in this note, the divide is not cultural but one of a difference in awareness of facts regarding Sri Aurobindo’s life.)
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(Do Western academic standards accept factual distortions? Do they need to pervert Sri Aurobindo in order to find him more easily acceptable?)
(Does scholarship require bargaining as in a business deal? Cannot positive facts stand on their own without needing equal or greater negative criticism? Does the criticism have to be factually incorrect?)
(“Argument and counter-argument” applies to philosophical positions which are debated by logic. It does not apply when countering one opinion with another opinion as Heehs does through most of the book.)
(This lasted barely a week. When Heehs’ group studied the accusations, they found them undefendable and quickly dropped this claim. They then focussed almost entirely on ad hominem attacks and character assassination.)
(Rather, should not the book be withdrawn for its falsehood? Has not Heehs tarnished Sri Aurobindo’s reputation in the first place? And what about Heehs’ earlier demand that the Ashram should support the “rule of law prevailing in India”?)
(Vague enough to mean anything.)
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Alok Pandey and Sraddhalu Ranade from stepping onto American soil which remains the last bastion of “freedom of speech, religious tolerance, democracy and pluralism” and the “Free World”. They should not be allowed to speak at the AUM Conference. Their visas should be cancelled, and all American Centres should boycott them.
(This is where we stand now. Can you spot how they are promoting censorship and division in the name of freedom and by appealing to nationalist sentiments!)
While Heehs’ defence has shifted through over a dozen different positions, all along our stand has been consistent: factual distortion to abuse Sri Aurobindo is unacceptable. I personally could go so far as to say that Heehs is free to abuse Sri Aurobindo if he does find a genuine and factually verifiable cause for such abuse. But we cannot stand by passively and watch him falsify facts and quotations in order to misrepresent and defame Sri Aurobindo.
Summary and Conclusions
The Lives misrepresents Sri Aurobindo, his life and his teaching by factual distortions amounting to academic fraud. Had it been published by some unknown writer, we might have ignored it entirely. But it has been widely promoted by impersonation as representing the authority of the “founder” of the Ashram’s Archives. Heehs’ alliance with Jeffrey Kripal is dangerous and has already influenced The Lives in a harmful way. The Lives has violated copyright agreements both with CUP and with the Ashram Trust, and its publication involves theft of the Ashram’s intellectual property.
IYF authors and the Heehs-group in general have concocted false charges against us by deliberately misrepresenting our position and then criticising it. They have not yet offered any academic refutation of our factual criticism of Heehs’ academic fraud, and have instead shifted through more than a dozen untenable excuses to cover up his fraudulence. Their campaign of character assassination is unfortunate and is intended to sideline discussion from the real issues. They have sown seeds of division in the IY
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community by false charges and have orchestrated hate campaigns for nearly eight months. They claim support of the Ashram management but are in fact in direct conflict with the Ashram Trust’s position on The Lives.
If not for IYF/SCIY’s ad hominem campaigns of character assassination, there would have been no divisions, conflicts or confusions, and right now all of us would have been discussing the factual errors in the book in a clean academic framework.
We have nothing personal against Heehs. He is free to pursue his own career interests with any kind of compromises that he chooses to make (although he can never evade public accountability for them). But in the light of his 30-year track record of consistent factual abuse of Sri Aurobindo, we would all be relieved if he turned his sights to some other area of interest. Until then, it is our responsibility to expose factual distortion in the spirit of academic refutation.
You are invited to visit our growing website www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com for more information, for more examples of distortions in The Lives, and for academic discussion and debate.
Having read this note I hope you will better appreciate our perspective regarding The Lives. There is much that will be new and possibly shocking to you from the revelations here. You may wish to re-read the entire text to better assimilate the full range of facts and the complexity of the situation. May I also request you to forward this email to all those who would have earlier received the IYF mail (from you or from others) to help set the record straight in their mind also, and to help reunite the Integral Yoga community.
As mentioned earlier, I will be happy to clarify any of the statements above and offer further factual elaboration as and when necessary.
Thank you for your time. Sraddhalu Ranade
May 1st, 2009
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Biographies, especially of great men, are written so that men of later generations can derive inspiration from it. Though sometimes professional psychologists and sociologists discuss the various forces that may have gone in the moulding of a great man, the prime objective is not a voyeuristic curiosity in the petty personal details of his life. If this is true of a great figure of repute and honour, we need to be even more careful when we touch the life of a saint or sage, of a national hero in whom not only the present but future generations will take pride and draw inspiration from. In India, at least, we draw the necessary distinction between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the commonplace. We do not, and for good reasons, mix up the two in an indiscriminate manner. We do not, for example, discuss the reason behind the marriage of a great spiritual Master and, after much tortuous deliberation, end up with the commonplace statement that “it must be due to the usual desire for physical gratification”. We do not, to give another example, discuss whether he was a madman or a genius of the spirit, but leave that for the coming generations to decide. True disciples, those whom the biographer of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo calls hagiographers, may exaggerate sometimes the achievements and qualities of a great Master. But it is also true that critics do just the same with a bias and a swing on the opposite side. They minimise and belittle the actual importance, because it
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threatens their own smallness and invites them to undertake an adventure which attracts and frightens them at the same time. To reduce the Master to the same level as they are, to bring him down to the littleness of our mortal state gives to these critics a vicarious and perverse pleasure.
And when this perversity becomes public, then they do incalculable harm, not only to themselves but to those who may be ready for the climb and feel inspired to do so. That indeed is the true purpose of writing the life of a great saint. Apart from the factual details, we must be careful in our expression when we are describing the life of a great public figure, for we cannot write about anyone in any way. Truth must be attired in appropriate language; that is why when we address the jury in uncouth language, it becomes contempt of court. Even in the ordinary life, we do not address our mother as our father’s wife or say that we were born because our parents had sex! These things are like unwritten laws that distinguish us from being mere animals and are a necessary part of our cultural and social behaviour.
We must also understand that books are not just creative ventures of an individual. They also mean big money that a writer and the publishing house earn by selling them to the consumer. The reader has a right to the product which should be what it declares to be. We cannot advertise for one thing and sell another to the unwitting customer. The reader who goes through a book absorbs its atmosphere, drinks through his mind the poison or the nectar contained in it and rejoices or suffers, feels strengthened and rejuvenated or weakened and sick in his inner being. It is one thing to sell poison as poison – that is dangerous enough. But it is far more dangerous to sell poison as a refreshing drink, as in the case of this book. If laws do not exist to prohibit and restrict such unbridled licentiousness masquerading under the garb of intellectual freedom, then perhaps it is time to make some landmark judgments in this regard. Freedom, whether vital or physical, emotional or social has its limits, and these limits are decided either by our ethical and moral or our aesthetic and spiritual sensitivities. Once that is settled, then laws and regulations are framed to enforce
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the same. This book, to say the least, is a poison deftly concealed with the colour and artificial flavour of words strung together by a cunning and diabolic expertise. It must be stopped, not only for people in the present times, but more for the future generations. We do not want our children to be told that our national heroes were second hand imitators of western thought and that they have left us a legacy of doubt, and that all their high dreams and aspirations had a touch of lunacy when they were not mere figments of imagination. Let the scientific circles debate and discuss this with the experts in their fields, but till such things as consciousness and the nature of spiritual experience are settled beyond doubt, it would be ill-advised for humanity to discard faith and take the blind road of so-called scientific objectivity – more so when the term is being simply used to give the lie and justify a bluff, when all the while there is nothing but personal opinion and subjective bias.
The question is whether anyone can write anything about anyone and simply let it pass in the name of freedom of expression, or should there be a preliminary requirement, a qualification needed to write in an authoritative manner and not in a fictional vein. The crux of the matter should be what is known as adhikara bheda, the deserving candidate, and this applies to every field. Not everyone can write about physics. Not everyone can write on the subtle field of human psychology, nor on art and music, or dance. A little knowledge and practice is not enough. One must “be” and “live” in some good measure what one is writing about. An ape does not become a pianist by imitating the movements of a human hand that moves through the piano keys and creates music! One must have first the appropriate capacity, the appropriate consciousness and, above all, have music within oneself to write about it. This adhikara bheda is lost in today’s times under the plea of intellectual freedom. This has led to an increase of confusion in every field. Yet, while it is easier to detect fraud in other fields, it is much more difficult to do so in the spiritual. For the human consciousness in the mass has little knowledge and experience in this sphere, and therefore the chances of confusion are much more if the unprepared consciousness reads or writes about things which
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cannot be truly understood or rightly perceived as long as it lives in the ego and is besieged by desires. Not only will such an attempt be a failure, but it will cause much misunderstanding. Its apparent success itself will end in failure, for we cannot go beyond the limits of our own consciousness. In trying to measure the Immeasurable by our own yardsticks, we will be causing great confusion, for then what would be left out of our ambit would often turn out to be far more important than what has been included. Only the like knows the like, only a yogi can recognise a yogi. To write about the life of an Avatar, one must either be a yogi who can “see” and “feel” or, at least, a devotee with a consciousness full of faith and inner purity. The inner meaning and significance of an Avatar’s life can only be revealed, to an extent, to the inner eye of a yogi or else to the devotee, who is so full of love and adoration that he identifies himself with the consciousness of the Master and knows it through His Grace. But when a small mind attempts to write about him, it ends up trivialising high truths and flattening the heights while glorifying and exaggerating the small and unnecessary potholes.
Peter Heehs lives in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which is co-located within the Indian setup. Many of the activities of the Ashram carry the stamp of an Indian ethos, which is very natural, not only because of its geographical location but also because of its founder and Master, Sri Aurobindo, who was not only an Indian by birth, but also drew much from Indian roots, from the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. Even though he went beyond the Indian ethos and never restricted his teachings to any specific culture or religion, he duly acknowledged the spiritual role of India in the past and future evolution of mankind. The Mother paid the highest tribute to the Indian temperament by stating in Her reminiscences that though She was “French by birth and early education”, She was an “Indian by choice and predilection”, and that India was her “true country”, the country of her “soul and spirit”. Like Sri Aurobindo, She showed us the way to surpass all divisions of colour, caste, creed, religion and nationality, and arrive
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at a truth that is founded upon certain core values and central principles, which are the very soul and sustenance of this evolutionary growth. “All are welcome here” does not mean that anybody and everybody are welcome here. It is after all a place for a spiritual evolution, a work founded upon spiritual truths, and even though the sadhaks carry their inherent deficiencies of human nature, they are constantly struggling to overcome and change them. While these human deficiencies are only natural because we are an imperfect species, there are certain deep shadows in human nature that are not merely deficiencies but serious obstacles to spiritual life. While these too have been accepted by the Master, these problems are best tackled individually if they have the faith and the will to change. But the individuals harbouring these difficulties are generally not permitted to be part of the collective life since they vitiate the general atmosphere and create serious problems for the group.
It is in keeping with the unique nature of this collective life that certain general rules, though few, have become part of the conditions for living at the Ashram. Some of these rules relate to our outer conduct; for example, the sadhaks admitted to the Ashram are forbidden to drink alcohol, to smoke or take drugs, to keep away from politics and not to indulge in sex. While few individuals can be entirely free from these defects, especially from the last one, yet most sadhaks struggle to be free of them and succeed to the extent of their sincerity. There are equally certain inner and more important conditions for living at the Ashram, the foremost of which is faith in the Mother and Sri Aurobindo: to aspire, live and act for the Divine, to be open to the Grace, grow in sincerity and in one’s capacity to surrender, surmount one’s egoism, and most of all to dedicate one’s life unconditionally to the service of the Divine. In other words, there are four main foundations of the Ashram life and the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo as taught by him and practised by the disciples and devotees all over the world, for the Ashram now is no more a limited geographical unit but an ever growing movement. There are besides many branches and centres of the Integral Yoga all over India and the world, which, though far from Pondicherry, try to follow the same
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cardinal principles of yogic life. These can be summarised as follows:
It is important to consider the Ashram connection of this book to have a true and fair assessment of its potential for damage. Peter is an American who has neither any natural nor any temperamental sympathy with Indian thought and culture. In fact, he has contempt for it as is reflected in many of his remarks to his colleagues and his statements in this book. He resides in an Ashram, but has neither faith nor devotion. He writes about history and passes judgments on literature and psychology, but is not professionally trained and is therefore ill-equipped to speak about them. He had neither any direct contact with Sri Aurobindo, the subject of this book – he even admits that he does not understand much his writings. Yet he takes pride in giving his strong, judgmental opinions on his works in a condescending manner. In short, he is the least qualified to write a biography of the great Master of Yoga, who has a world-wide following. And yet the mere fact of his living in the Ashram and working at the Ashram Archives gives him great credentials in the eyes of the credulous public. To make
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it worse, he has declared himself to be the founder of the Archives, which he never was!
The mischief of Peter Heehs has to be seen in the context of the Ashram, as it is this single fact of his being an Ashram inmate and worker at the Archives that lends an undue credence to his book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. It is in this context that one has to see and evaluate the damage done by him through this book and his other works. In other words, he has perpetrated not only academic fraud but intellectual theft, and misused his privileged access as an Archive worker to steal and vandalise Sri Aurobindo’s writings. Yet one must admit, somewhat ruefully, that a phenomenon such as Peter Heehs does not happen in a day. The author of this controversial and defamatory book has a track record of creating and courting controversies since his arrival at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the year 1971. No one knows exactly how and why he landed here and continued to stay without having any faith or devotion for Sri Aurobindo. A self-proclaimed historian, whose academic and professional credentials are shrouded in mystery even as the purpose of his being here, who suddenly comes from a far off country without any specific interest and stays on because he is given the task of “arranging Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts”!
I might not have stayed if I had not been asked to do two things I found very interesting: first, to collect material dealing with his life; second, to organize his manuscripts and prepare them for publication. (Lives, x)
It is strange that someone who has neither any love for India nor any respect or faith in Sri Aurobindo and is rather critical of him in many ways, stays on simply because he is given the work of arranging Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts. Strange, because it is not a practice at the Ashram to ask an unwilling person, that too someone who is neither a devotee nor a disciple, to stay on and take up work, leave alone such an important task. Or did he manipulate his way to the nerve center of the Ashram by pleasing and impressing gullible Ashramites? Or did he use some other means
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that we will never come to know, since the person responsible for encouraging and facilitating his stay, Shri Jayantilal Parekh, has passed away, albeit feeling bitter and unhappy about his decision to keep this young man, who was, before coming here, “a taxi driver, a stock boy and a yoga center assistant, in New York”? He also describes his “brief return to college”, but does not mention what were his qualifications and what was the course he was engaged in. It may be interesting for us to know about it since he poses as a professional and has the audacity to write the biography of a national hero and belittle and denigrate him – an act that requires prior clearance in India from the Information & Broadcasting and Home Ministries.
But leave aside all that. Let us simply take a look at the nature of the work he was engaged in, apart from what was really given to him, i.e., collecting material dealing with Sri Aurobindo’s life and organising his manuscripts for publication. How does this mean criticising and rectifying what Sri Aurobindo said and wrote and approved during his own lifetime? This was certainly not part of his assignment! This kind of activity may have been accepted at some department of history in a university but certainly not at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, since the Ashram is meant to safeguard Sri Aurobindo’s works for posterity and not to interpret and re-interpret them. Sri Aurobindo, a perfectionist in the highest sense of the word, had already made the necessary corrections to the details of his life so that his biographers do not “murder him in cold print”. The Mother had further cautioned his prospective biographers; when someone wrote about Sri Aurobindo in terms that were not acceptable, She wrote:
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.1
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These words of the Mother are like unwritten laws that have been incorporated in the ethos of Ashram life and every disciple is supposed to accept and adhere to them, not as a creed or a dogma but as a natural rule of spiritual living.
Sri Aurobindo himself discouraged his biographers, knowing the limitations of human ignorance in which we live and labour:
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 man to see.2
But Peter would insist on going beyond the work assigned to him. One could understand this if it were over enthusiasm to serve the Master or the Ashram as an institution, which sustains him materially and gives him a financial guarantee for his visa. Under such circumstances, most persons would feel grateful to the institution that supports them financially and spiritually, grateful to the Master in whose Name the institution runs. If someone is not happy with either the institution or its way of life, the logical thing would be to go away. After all, it is not a government organisation with minimum years of compulsory service. But the last thing that one would do (unless one is an idiot or a madcap) is to denounce the founder of the institution that has given him refuge. Peter is certainly not an idiot, at least, not in the way clinical psychology recognises. He very well knows the consequences of his actions.
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 revised 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
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anyone has the right to question an account that flatters a group identity. (Lives, xii)
He continues in this vein, showing us his real intent through a cunning veil:
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. (Lives, xii)
He starts his mischief by implanting the suggestion that Sri Aurobindo has been rather generously hyped up by his biographers. He also sets the tone of challenging “the established interpretations and cast doubts”. What are these established interpretations that he must doubt except for Sri Aurobindo’s greatness as a revolutionary leader, a poet and a philosopher, a yogi and a mystic who gave a new vision and way of life? Indeed, throughout the book, he continues to challenge them even though he has inadequate knowledge of the facts, or deliberately conceals them to prove his point. He goes on with this craft of playing a double game, saying one thing but meaning another, slipping in a suggestion through the backdoor while we are busy and engaged at the front door. He uses this trick all through the book. What follows next in the Preface can be taken as an example.
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. As far as I know, it did not appear in print before 1976, when I published it in an ashram journal. 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
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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. In later life, his complexion became fair and smooth, his features full and round. Figure 2 thus falsifies the “real” Aurobindo. It is the task of the retoucher to make the photograph accord with the reality that people want to see. (Lives, xii, xiv)
Sounds very objective but the game of deception has already begun. For the two photographs that Peter compares are both different in terms of time scale. A right comparison would have been to compare the same photograph, untouched and retouched. But the author quickly passes on the lie to us with the sleight of words, so that while we are focusing on the verbal argument, we do not even realise that he has already offended our sensibilities with regard to a photograph people love and associate their very soul with. It is a double disfigurement that he engages himself in a most cunning way, professing one thing but meaning another. That he does it knowingly, acknowledging himself that there are limits to what people can hear about their heroes, makes his offence worse, a thing conscious and deliberate. He is going to give us a revised version of Sri Aurobindo’s life, something that his admirers will not like to hear. All other subsequent pleas of innocence fade before this first statement which clearly gives away his real motives.
These motives were never really hidden from Ashram inmates. Right from the beginning, he has courted controversies, the aim of which has been to raise doubts about Sri Aurobindo’s statements on his own life, his English, his works, his yoga, on the Mother, and so on and so forth. All these controversies have landed the Ashram into bitter debates and even legal disputes; they have always been a force of division that have led to a polarisation of opinion along racial and other lines. This of course is due to his ingrained strong bias against India, Indian tradition and culture, and his favouring the Western views of life as superior to any other. This colonial bias is reflected everywhere in his book and raises once
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again the unanswered but pertinent question, – why is he here in India that he is so critical of? Is it some kind of compulsion? As was rumoured earlier, was he a drug addict? Or was he part of a more sinister design of certain groups whose sole purpose is to denounce and debunk, denigrate and belittle Indian culture and its heroes under the guise of admiration for it? These adverse theories of Indian culture have been advanced with very strong arguments from Macaulay and Max Muller to even some present day scholars who have come to India and gone back to start their own independent schools without acknowledging the source of their inspiration. We need not go into the details of this U–turn theory. For our present purpose, it is enough to turn our attention on this single person and question his real motives.
He does not mention why at all he landed here, since he “could not understand” Sri Aurobindo’s writings though “the shorter ones made a lot of sense” to him. He does not mention whether, after coming here in 1971, he met the Mother and had an audience with Her, as the Mother was then physically present. If anyone had any true and genuine interest in Yoga or had some aspiration for inner life, one would have most certainly wanted to have a glimpse of the Mother, who was the spiritual head of the Ashram. It is a mystery as to why he really came, whom he met and what really made him stay at a place which neither seems to have attracted nor inspired him. No wonder, time and again, people have raised questions about the real motives of his coming here. Was his so-called interest in arranging archival material simply a guise to gain admittance into the Ashram whose Light and Power was radiating out to the world and which had been the centre of unparalleled spiritual effort? And what could be the reason for this admittance if it were not to bathe himself and be illumined by that Light? Was it, as some suspect, to subvert the work from within? We may never know, though such a thing is not unknown in the outer as well as in the inner life. Sri Aurobindo often mentions that wherever there is a collective spiritual effort of such a magnitude, there is a risk of intrusion of the forces and powers of Darkness masquerading as persons coming to help the work, but always holding within their heart the intention of distorting and falsifying the Truth that is manifesting itself upon earth.
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We cannot say for sure whether Peter and his work fall into this category, but his approach and his attitude do raise strong doubts about the real intent of this biography. The declared purpose of his biography is to make Sri Aurobindo available to the academia in the West, but many things seem to contradict this avowed purpose. In fact, the very issue of writing a biography for the academia is a strange one. For the academia is primarily interested in the written works rather than the person. It is only the historian and the psychologist who are interested in the biography of a well-known person. But the interest of a historian hardly goes beyond the superficial details of a person’s life and the psychologists have their fixed lens with which they see and judge human nature. As to the significant outer events of Sri Aurobindo’s life, there is already enough historical data available. As for the psychologists, any attempt to look at human nature through a third party account available through so-called “documentary evidence” has no meaning at all. One cannot rely upon the accounts of others, whether of detractors or sympathisers. For who can really know about another human being, leave alone someone as deep and intense, vast and many-sided and sublime as Sri Aurobindo. Even those who lived and moved with him closely hardly knew him! To take the cue from Indian thought, when Arjuna is suddenly confronted with the vision of the cosmic being of Krishna (Vishwa Rupa) granted to him by a special Grace, he rues how he had not known the Lord at all despite being his closest companion, friend and playmate, he who was now sitting by his side in the humble role of a charioteer. He then laments his ignorance, seeks forgiveness from Krishna and is filled with gratitude and adoration. But Peter has neither seen Sri Aurobindo nor has any special interest in him. As for the divinity of Sri Aurobindo, he has not the least interest in it by his own admission. His interest, if any at all, is in the man who wrote so profusely and on so many subjects, which again, as per his admission, he finds difficult to understand.
Then he is associated with writers such as Jeffrey Kripal, notorious for his damaging book on the life of Sri Ramakrishna, in which the author tries to perversely analyse the gigantic spiritual genius of India. Is it a mere co-incidence that the very same Jeffrey
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Kripal praises this biography in words no less diabolic – he says that the author of the Lives “humanizes and problematizes” the life of Sri Aurobindo. And Peter includes him in the list of his acknowledgements, though there is none whatsoever to the One whose disciple he claims to be and whose life he has ventured to write in such a casual and insensitive manner, without any care or respect – you would not do this to even an ordinary human being to whom you owe your material sustenance. So what really was his intent in writing this biography and what are his credentials? Could this man be the type who comes near the Light only to cast a shadow and spoil the work from inside, to subvert a truth by joining it rather than by openly opposing it? Whatever he may be, here are some of the controversies surrounding him:
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In all these controversies his main role has been to challenge and somehow to prove by clever arguments that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were wrong.
All this is directly connected with his intent and cunning nature, the degree of his insensitivity to everything that is around him – the ethos in which he lives and breathes, the country whose culture has accepted him as one of its own, the very soul and spirit of the Ashram that feeds him, whose services he enjoys and whose atmosphere nourishes and nurtures him. This insensitivity is not due to any ignorance, but due to his arrogance and utter disregard and disrespect for everyone else, whom he treats as his inferiors, like some outdated colonialist. His colleagues describe him as vain and arrogant, someone who takes great glee in looking down upon India and its glorious traditions, not by the way of any higher enlightenment but out of superior pride that exults in its self-adulatory and inflated self-esteem. On more than one occasion, several of his colleagues have approached the Trustees after finding his activities suspicious and feeling that such a person would be unfit to work at the Archives. Not only the average devotee but a disciple of unquestionable integrity (Jugal Kishore Mukherji) and the closest aide of the Mother (Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya) voiced their concern to the Trustees about the nature of this man. Several others raised the alarm in a similar vein, among them the well-known exponents of Sri Aurobindo’s teachings and yoga such as Amal Kiran, Nirodbaran, Chotte Narayan Sharma and R. Y. Deshpande.
The book is already being promoted as the first of its kind and the best. The rest are works of piety and hagiography. What is this but a breach of professional ethics whereby all the other biographers are dumped as hagiographers, some of them remarkable personalities such as K. R. Srinivas Iyengar, former VC and acclaimed the world over as a man of letters, Satprem, the French sadhak whose unique biography of Sri Aurobindo titled The Adventure of Consciousness deeply influenced the West, and many other big names such as Dilip Kumar Roy, A. B. Purani, Navajat
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Poddar, Kireet Joshi and George Van Vrekheim. All these are now hagiographers who have been rather generous towards Sri Aurobindo. This is the audacity of his claim.
It is necessary to know all this background in order to understand why the Ashramites and devotees all over the world have been extremely hurt and anguished by this book. If his previous acts of transgression were like abrasions or bruises on the word-body and life of Sri Aurobindo, this book is nothing short of deep stabbings, and these wounds are unlikely to heal in a short time. Worse so because, like Judas, he came posing as a disciple lending false credence to a work that is at best an academic fraud, and at worst something dangerously diabolic. The very first few pages give you the wrong impression of unusual credibility, which is exactly what this man wants us to believe and be thus misled, and so would someone who is not conversant with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings. The fraud starts from the very first page where he describes himself as the founder of the Archives. In some of his other writings, he describes himself as Director of the Archives and Historical research, a mythical non-existent department!
The intent of all these statements is obvious enough. It is to lend credence and authority to his work, over and above all other biographies. His purpose through this jugglery of words is to attack the very foundations of yogic life by instilling doubt and confusion in the minds of devotees, by belittling the Master and trivialising His work, by demeaning the disciples and, most dangerous of all, reinterpreting the yoga in his own way. In reality the whole book is like a deceptive river full of weeds and a black, poisonous undercurrent that keeps surfacing all through, on every page, in one way or the other. At the end of it, the reader is left confused about the exact nature of Sri Aurobindo’s life, his work and his yoga; he is left with nothing but doubts. While the more mature devotee will be able to see the lie and brush aside the weeds that arise from its occult bed, the neophyte will most certainly get confused and even likely to turn away from spiritual life. This seems to be the underlying purpose of the book.
Having given the lie to previous biographers, he starts on his diabolic mission to give the lie to Sri Aurobindo himself, indeed to spiritual seeking, to all mystic effort, to all that is beautiful and sacred and true in India. But the method adopted is the most cunning and evil one. Shakespeare spoke of the devil quoting the scriptures; the truth of these words begins to appear as one browses through the pages of The Lives. On the face of it, it is about Sri Aurobindo’s many-sided life and the narration seems to run from his life as a son to a scholar and a revolutionary, then onto a yogi and a philosopher, and finally to that of a spiritual Guide. But all through, there is an undercurrent that follows the narrative like a dark shadow which analyses and criticises him. Indeed, there are not one but many shadows that are let loose under the seemingly innocuous cover of writing about Sri Aurobindo’s life with the ostensible purpose of making him available to the western audience. Had the author been more honest of his intention and method, one could at least say that he was not pretending. But under the deceptive cover of historical narration run several dark themes, which can be categorised as:
Sri Aurobindo was a liar.
Sri Aurobindo was a coward.
Sri Aurobindo was an imbalanced person, if not outright mad. Sri Aurobindo was an unhappy child.
Sri Aurobindo was a failure in his early life, and even right up to the middle of his life.
Sri Aurobindo was an immature writer, both in prose and poetry.
Sri Aurobindo was a poor philosopher, one who borrowed his ideas from the West.
Sri Aurobindo was a person who encouraged an unrestrained and licentious life.
Sri Aurobindo was a failed mystic with doubtful achievements.
Sri Aurobindo’s mysticism was an effort to reintegrate the conflicting elements of his personality.
Not satisfied with his onslaught on Sri Aurobindo, the writer goes on to attack Indian thought and civilisation as something outdated and lacking in originality, the Ashram community as a bunch of poor imitators who are hardly engaged in sadhana, the Indian revolutionary movement as having failed, and so on. At many places, he attempts to clearly rewrite history by supporting the British as in the case of the partition of Bengal, or taking the side of William Archer – the most biased anti-Indian colonial writer in whose refutation Sri Aurobindo wrote a whole book. It is interesting to note that posing as an authentic biographer of Sri Aurobindo and as one who has lived in the Ashram for nearly forty years, where no distinction is made of any caste or creed or race, this man suddenly takes strongly the side of William Archer, and tries to prove that Sri Aurobindo’s criticism was not only unjustified and unfair but biased and inappropriate. One really wonders whose biography he is writing and what his real intent is!
Finally and most dangerously, by selective quoting, he gives a very different tilt to Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. He does this by a very crafty, very subtle and ingenious way of falsifying documents. To take one example, he writes,
Tantrism, in fact, provides the general foundation of the yoga of self-perfection. (Lives, 285)
What Sri Aurobindo said is however very different, almost the reverse:
In the method of synthesis which we have been following, another clue of principle has been pursued which is derived from another view of the possibilities of Yoga. This starts from the method of Vedanta to arrive at the aim of the Tantra. In the Tantric method Shakti is all-important, becomes the key to the finding of spirit; in this synthesis spirit, soul is all-important, becomes the secret of the taking up of Shakti.
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The Tantric method starts from the bottom and grades the ladder of ascent upwards to the summit; therefore its initial stress is upon the action of the awakened Shakti in the nervous system of the body and its centres; the opening of the six lotuses is the opening up of the ranges of the power of Spirit. Our synthesis takes man as a spirit in mind much more than a spirit in body and assumes in him the capacity to begin on that level, to spiritualise his being by the power of the soul in mind opening itself directly to a higher spiritual force and being and to perfect by that higher force so possessed and brought into action the whole of his nature. For that reason our initial stress has fallen upon the utilisation of the powers of soul in mind and the turning of the triple key of knowledge, works and love in the locks of the spirit... 3
Note the clever inversion. A reader who is unfamiliar with Sri Aurobindo’s yoga may simply accept it at face value. Though Sri Aurobindo has given us a very different understanding of Tantra and Vedantic yoga, a casual reader may well take this as a hankering for spiritual powers, or as the psychoanalysts look at it, as a sublimated hedonism justified under the spiritual garb. In fact, a careful reading of the book shows this clear psychoanalytic tilt throughout, as if the writer was providing fodder to the psychoanalysts. In the chapter on Sri Aurobindo’s childhood, he exaggerates the issue of Swarnalata’s (Sri Aurobindo’s mother’s) madness, her fits of unprovoked anger when she beats one of her sons with a candle stick, seeing which Sri Aurobindo left the room; his father’s supposed infidelity and Sri Aurobindo’s scant memory of his childhood days except the sudden darkness rushing into him. This is again repeated when he analyses Sri Aurobindo’s plays and other writings:
From a literary point of view, Aurobindo’s plays are the least interesting of his works. Biographically speaking, they may offer insights into movements in 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
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woman he was seeking and was waiting for the moment when she would join him.” (Lives, 299)
We see the double mischief again at play. In one sweeping statement he has made three suggestions, none of which is substantiated by any argument. They are indeed his personal opinions which he is not qualified to give as a non-professional. The first sweeping suggestion is that Sri Aurobindo’s plays are hardly interesting. The second is that they could be used to analyse his inner life and private world. So far, we can agree or disagree, but then he strikes a sharp blow – “he [Sri Aurobindo] had found the woman he was seeking and waiting for the moment when she would join him.” This is in 1915, soon after the Mother’s first arrival and subsequent departure for the next four years. One is immediately led to think that Sri Aurobindo was waiting for her like a romantic lover for a woman of his dreams even while he was deeply engaged in yoga and had withdrawn from politics for this purpose. Peter keeps colouring our mind and imagination with his own imaginative romantic colouring, disregarding the fact that Sri Aurobindo himself called Her the Mother.
There are innumerable instances of such deliberate misquoting that would mislead a casual or even not so casual reader, and give an entirely wrong meaning to the yoga itself. Take another example, where he writes under the seemingly mantric title of “All Life if Yoga”, a phrase Sri Aurobindo used to describe the uniqueness of his yoga that reintegrates God and World, Soul and Nature. But Sri Aurobindo clearly and throughout has cautioned that this integration is possible only after one has gone through an inner and outer purification and transformation of nature. It is certainly impossible to have this as long as we are still struggling with the lower nature and its ego and desire. Here are two quotes from Sri Aurobindo and Peter Heehs to show the deviant turn given to this phrase.
Sri Aurobindo writes:
No synthesis of Yoga can be satisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected
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human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both. For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower. To avoid the life which is given him for the realisation of that possibility, can never be either the indispensable condition or the whole and ultimate object of his supreme endeavour or of his most powerful means of self-fulfilment. It can only be a temporary necessity under certain conditions or a specialised extreme effort imposed on the individual so as to prepare a greater general possibility for the race. The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is Yoga.”4
Peter presents it:
Life and Yoga
In the early years of Aurobindo’s residence in Pondicherry, while he was writing, doing research, corresponding, receiving visitors, balancing the budget, exercising, and feeding the dog, he was also deeply involved in yoga. That “also” may give the wrong idea. The motto of Aurobindo’s spiritual practice was “All life is Yoga.” Expanding on this in 1914, he wrote that people who followed the traditional paths of yoga, which aim at absorption in the Absolute, tended “to draw away from the common existence and lose [their] hold upon it.” His own path aimed instead at reuniting “God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life.” It relied on methods that “not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both.”
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Aurobindo expressed this aim and method in his daily practice. Rejecting the ascetic life, he did yoga as a “householder.” He avoided fixed techniques, spent much of his time reading and writing (and not only about “spiritual” subjects), and passed an hour or two in the evening talking and joking with friends. He lived in a rented house, wore ordinary clothes, observed no dietary restrictions, smoked, and occasionally drank. It became a matter of principle not to reject any human activity, but to incorporate all of life into his yoga. He liked to quote the Latin maxim nihil humani alienum, “nothing human is alien to me.”
Before he came to Pondicherry, his yoga had proceeded along fairly traditional lines. But by 1912 he could write to a friend of “a new system of Yoga” that had been “revealed” to him. He stressed the unorthodoxy and unexpectedness of his yoga when he told D.L. Purohit that his was “not the conventional method of Patanjali [the author of the Yoga Sutras],” but “the natural method” he had “stumbled upon in his meditations.” This makes the discovery seem almost accidental. In a letter to Richard, Aurobindo gave himself more credit by speaking of “the theory and system of yoga which I have formed.” (Lives, 238-39)
In three small paragraphs and within half a page, he has implanted and advanced several suggestions:
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There are other suggestions as well that we may disregard for the moment. But what the writer however does not say is that Sri Aurobindo during this phase of his sadhana was working upon all the difficulties of human nature as much as a scientist would, taking the burden of humanity on himself to study the disease and find the remedy. What is also not mentioned is the remedy he finds and the method of surrender and self-giving to the Divine and the transformation of the lower nature by which all life can be turned into yoga.
Let us take another example:
Taking an almost Nietzschean view of conventional morality, he wrote that from an evolutionary viewpoint “good and evil are…shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value.” To those incapable of venturing beyond established standards, “this truth may seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish only chaos.” But “if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better,” we lose not our moral bearings, but “only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant virtue”. (Lives, 281)
There are three suggestions implied here apart from the illegitimate mixing up of quotes which the author frequently does as if it were the accepted norm. The first is that one has to transcend both good and evil. This is correct, but when placed out of context, it can be a dangerous concession. Secondly, virtue is an intolerant thing. This too is correct, but again misrepresented, as we shall see when we read the full quote below. By stringing together the two statements, Peter suggests that Sri Aurobindo had echoed and borrowed his ideas from Nietzsche. This is a clear lie. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother refuted this suggestion a number of times, stating how their thought differed from the German philosopher’s, though there was an apparently similar usage of certain words and concepts, such as the “superman”. The
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Nietzschean superman, in Sri Aurobindo’s view, was a cold and heartless Asura given to will for power alone. He transcended the conventional standards of good and evil and followed the one and only law, the law of power and might. Sri Aurobindo’s superman, in contrast, follows the one and only true freedom, the freedom of the Divine Being. He acts in union with this divine source of Knowledge and Wisdom out of compassion and love, even while he is powerful and strong. In other words, he transcends the duality of good and evil, but does not fall below it. Here is the full quote from Sri Aurobindo:
If we are to be free in the spirit, if we are to be subject only to the supreme Truth, we must discard the idea that our mental or moral laws are binding on the Infinite or that there can be anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even in the highest of our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher temporary standards as long as they are needed is to serve the Divine in his world march; to erect rigidly an absolute standard is to attempt the erection of a barrier against the eternal waters in their onflow. Once the nature-bound soul realises this truth, it is delivered from the duality of good and evil. For good is all that helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness, and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection. But since the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good and evil are also shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value. This thing which is evil now and in its present shape must be abandoned was once helpful and necessary to the general and individual progress. That other thing which we now regard as evil may well become in another form and arrangement an element in some future perfection. And on the spiritual level we transcend even this distinction; for we discover the purpose and divine utility of all these things that we call good and evil. Then have we to reject the falsehood in them and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that which is called good no less than in that which is called evil. For we have then to accept only the true and the divine, but to make no other distinction in the eternal processes.
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To those who can act only on a rigid standard, to those who can feel only the human and not the divine values, this truth may seem to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish only chaos. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that result for man in his ignorance. But even on the human level, if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant virtue. In its place we gain openness and a power of continual moral progression, charity, the capacity to enter into an understanding sympathy with all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that charity a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the end where the human closes and the divine commences, where the mental disappears into the supramental consciousness and the finite precipitates itself into the infinite, all evil disappears into a transcendent divine Good which becomes universal on every plane of consciousness that it touches.5
But for our author, this is mere repetition, in which “clause follows clause” until “the point of the statement is lost in a maze of qualifications”! (Lives, p 328)
Another example of this mischief is the misuse of the diary of Sri Aurobindo known as the Record of Yoga. These records have been later published as part of the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo despite the Mother’s instructions to the contrary. The very fact that they were not published as part of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Volumes speaks of Her Will. She did not want them to be made public, for first they were his personal diary notes, and second they are not likely to be understood by the average immature reader. Peter quotes from this work often and uses it to show that Sri Aurobindo had to struggle a lot for his yoga:
The most remarkable discovery was a diary he had kept for
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more than nine years, in which he noted the day-to-day events of his inner and outer life. Most biographies of Aurobindo have made his sadhana, or practice of yoga, seem like a series of miracles. His diary made it clear that he had to work hard to achieve the states of consciousness that are the basis of his yoga and philosophy. (Lives, xii)
* * *
What about the assertion that Aurobindo was an avatar? I can’t say that the question interests me very much. Aurobindo never claimed the distinction for himself, and I don’t think anyone alive is in a position to say one way or the other.6
Both these statements are misrepresentations of truth. Sri Aurobindo did admit in the following two letters that he was a pathfinder, the Avatar who came to open the way for humanity:
We have had sufferings and struggles to which yours is a mere child’s play,– I have not made our cases equal to yours. I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness – if nobody can follow the Way, then either our conception of the thing, which is that of Christ and Krishna and Buddha also, is all wrong or the whole life and action of the Avatar is quite futile. X seems to say that there is no way and no possibility of following, that the struggles and sufferings of the Avatar are unreal and all humbug, – there is no possibility of struggle for one who represents the Divine. Such an idea makes nonsense of the whole idea of Avatarhood – there is no reason in it, no necessity for it, no meaning in it. The Divine being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to come down on earth. It is only if it is a part of the world-arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and open the Way that Avatarhood has any meaning.7
For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear
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the burden of humanity to the full and experience not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path. But it is not necessary nor tolerable that all that should be repeated over again to the full in the experience of others. It is because we have the complete experience that we can show a straighter and easier road to others...8
The fact is that Sri Aurobindo’s major experiences of traditional yogas such as Nirvana and seeing the One Divine everywhere did come spontaneously and naturally; it was only the further opening of the path for earth and humanity that took a long time, mainly because the earth nature was not ready and had to be worked upon. The Record of Yoga is primarily related to this aspect of his sadhana, his working on human nature and not the Vedantic side which he had realised much earlier. The Record is for the path-finder who has to walk through the forest and the swamp full of snakes and pits, it is precisely the path that Sri Aurobindo did not want us to take.
Going back to his association with the likes of Jeffrey Kripal, one wonders about his real intentions as opposed to the declared ones. It would have been honest if he had named the book “A critique of Sri Aurobindo’s life and work” or else “Sri Aurobindo’s life, – a psychoanalytic perspective”. But he knows that he cannot do this, for then he will be immediately challenged and taken to task as he is neither a literary critic nor a psychologist. He admits this openly in a private letter to a Ph.D. Psychology student, who questioned the veracity of his sweeping statements on certain psychological issues that fly in the face of professional knowledge.
It is this constant deception that underlies his work. He is trying to be someone which he is not, masquerading now as an expert in literary criticism, now as an exponent of yoga, now as an authority in psychology, but all the time his eye is on the one single goal, – to distort and misrepresent, belittle and denigrate Sri Aurobindo, his life and his yoga, Indian culture in general and re-establish
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once again another form of imperialism – the intellectual supremacy of the West, and prove it not on its own merits but by a selective misuse of documents. It is the relic of a colonial mind at its mischievous best, – to sow seeds of doubt within the Indian mind about its innate abilities and strength, to vulgarise and trivialise the sacred and the great, and to create confusion and division between the Hindu and the Muslim, the East and the West, the devotee and the philosopher.
In fact Peter has hijacked the Sri Aurobindonian platform to project himself as some sort of an authority, a myth that got perpetuated due to his total and unrestricted access to archival sources. He not only misused his office to the fullest by theft of intellectual property and academic fraud, but also changed Sri Aurobindo’s own words under the pretext of rectifying certain errors. It is strange that this man, who so vociferously promoted the changes in Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri and even engaged the Ashram in a bitter legal battle dividing the devotees over the issue, has this to say about the epic poem, which, in many ways, represents the greatest gift of Sri Aurobindo to the world:
The Savitri legend, Aurobindo later explained, “is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death.” But it seemed to him that it originally belonged to “one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle.” His reading of the Rig Veda had shown him that legends like the killing of Vritra had an outer ritualistic and inner spiritual meaning. In a similar way, the legend of Savitri could be read as a celebration of wifely duty and as a key to the world of yoga. Toward the end of Aurobindo’s poem, Death gives Savitri the chance to enjoy “deathless bliss” in a world of celestial beauty. She refuses. Death answers in lines that give expression to a defining characteristic of Aurobindo’s yoga:
Because thou hast rejected my fair calm I hold thee without refuge from my will; And lay upon thy neck my mighty yoke. Now will I do by thee my glorious works.... For ever love, O beautiful slave of God. (Lives, 299-300)
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Because his talks entirely ceased and his correspondence virtually so, there are no first-hand accounts of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana after 1941. One is tempted to mine Savitri to make up for the lack. Sri Aurobindo’s accounts of Aswapathy’s voyage through the worlds of matter, life, and mind before reaching “the kingdoms of the greater knowledge,” and Savitri’s transit through the “inner countries” until she reaches the inmost soul certainly are based on his and the Mother’s experiences; but the poem is a fictional creation, and Sri Aurobindo said explicitly that “the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with” its plot. (Lives, 398)
Compare this to the Mother’s statements to see how very subtly Peter falsifies and distorts things:
Savitrithe supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision.
(About Savitri)
1. The daily record of the spiritual experiences of the individual who has written. 2. A complete system of yoga which can serve as a guide for those who want to follow the integral sadhana. 3. The yoga of the Earth in its ascension towards the Divine. 4. The experiences of the Divine Mother in her effort to adapt herself to the body she has taken and the ignorance and the falsity of the earth upon which she has incarnated.
(Message for “Meditations on Savitri”, an exhibition of paintings by an Ashram artist, drawn in collaboration with the Mother)
The importance of Savitri is immense. Its subject is universal.
Its revelation is prophetic.
The time spent in its atmosphere is not wasted.
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Take all the time necessary to see this exhibition. It will be a happy compensation for the feverish haste men put now in all they do.9
What is even more surprising is that he chooses to quote a few lines from the first draft while all the while he has harped upon textual accuracy. It is as if he is deliberately choosing only those passages that would suit his hypothesis, those that may be the weakest links, those that are most liable to be misunderstood and can create confusion.
It is out of this deep concern for a misrepresentation of yoga in the future, of a misrepresentation of Indian thought and culture taking its cue from this book, which will be quoted as an authority, that some devotees have gone to the court of law to seek justice. They have not gone there for themselves alone, nor for mere emotional redressal but for the good of posterity, so that the coming generations are not fed with this poisonous milk that is being branded and sold under the first and best feeding formula. Whether the coming generations would listen or not is not for us to decide, but we must do our little bit and act on our part, so that it is clear that we have tried to counter the falsehood and screened attack. We have now done our bit and will continue to pursue it in the best way possible. The issue now is in the courtroom of Law and Justice, and if justice is about the upholding of truth over everything else, if its concern is to see that the average citizen is not fooled or deceived by the misuse of knowledge and power, if through law can be facilitated the good of all beings and not just of one or two persons, then surely the honourable and responsible authorities will see the point of this petition and help, not only for our sake but for the sake of the generations to come.10 I wish to close with these lines from Sri Aurobindo which indicate the subtle nature of the attack and the dark cunning that works through this man’s body and brain:
But he alone discerned that screened attack. A veil upon the inner vision lay, A force was there that hid its dreadful steps; All was belied, yet thought itself the truth... It was a space where nothing could be true, For nothing was what it had claimed to be: A high appearance wrapped a specious void. Yet nothing would confess its own pretence Even to itself in the ambiguous heart: A vast deception was the law of things; Only by that deception they could live.... The Fiend was visible but cloaked in light; He seemed a helping angel from the skies: He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law; He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul And led to perdition by the heavenward path. A lavish sense he gave of power and joy, And, when arose the warning from within, He reassured the ear with dulcet tones Or took the mind captive in its own net; His rigorous logic made the false seem true. Amazing the elect with holy lore He spoke as with the very voice of God. The air was full of treachery and ruse; Truth-speaking was a stratagem in that place... Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth... Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen... Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care, For all that guarded proved a deadly net... Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak And hurt the heart of darkness with her light Or bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme The settled anarchy of established things.11
27 October 2009
Notes
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Peter Heehs. The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, 528 pages, Illust., Biblio., Index
In this thick book, the author has attempted to trace the life history of Sri Aurobindo. He has divided Sri Aurobindo’s life chronologically into various compartments like birth, childhood, youth, adulthood, retirement and death. He has also divided his life as life in Bengal, life in England, life in Baroda, life in Calcutta and life in Pondicherry. He again divides his life into school life, revolutionary life, conjugal or sexual life and spiritual life. That is why the author seems to have chosen the title of this book as ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo’. The author uses several archival sources, interviews and secondary sources in order to describe the various or varied lives of Sri Aurobindo as he understands it.
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The author was an office assistant, stock boy and even taxi driver in New York before he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in 1971, where he was entrusted with the job of arranging and organising the archives related to Sri Aurobindo. He seems to claim that he stayed in the Ashram because he was given the job at the Archives which he liked and not because of his devotion to Sri Aurobindo (p.x). With the new-found job in the Ashram and the prestigious title of archivist of one of the most notable figures of modern India, Peter Heehs without any known academic qualification or experience, took to writing about Indian history. His first book was a slim volume on India’s freedom struggle from 1857 to 1947. That came out in 1988 after staying in India and the Ashram for about 18 years. That was the beginning of his positioning himself as a scholar, with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as base.
A year later, he brought out a short work titled Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, using the archival material at his disposal. In the Preface to this book, he differentiated between two types of readers – the students of history/social sciences and spiritual aspirants. He identified only four biographers in about two dozen, who based their works, partly at least on original research: A.B. Purani, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Monod-Herzen and Raychaudhuri. For him, the rest of the biographies were simply rewritings of that of Purani, with some additions. He then wrote that even among these four, the first three were biased in favour of Sri Aurobindo. According to him, none of the three sought out and analysed variant accounts, though he conceded that they enjoyed direct access to Sri Aurobindo. He wrote that his short work was just a beginning and more critical study of Sri Aurobindo’s life will follow. Nobody took care of these words then. Nobody really paid attention to the fact that the author had wilfully run down the previous biographers of Sri Aurobindo in many respects. Nobody ever questioned how such a person who had run down all previous biographers could be still in such a vantage point as the archives of Sri Aurobindo. Two years later, Heehs brought out another book Modern India and World History, which went unnoticed.
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In 1993, he brought out ‘The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900-1910’. Once again in this book, he took on academic historians, especially of Bengal, who have produced a lot on the subject. He accused them mainly for being uncritical and unduly commemorative about the revolutionary events related to this period. However, he made a distinction between those including Sri Aurobindo who took to violence or inspired violent acts, and the terrorist violence (mainly Islamic) of today. In this way, he endeared himself to the unsuspecting reader, while at the same time he sought to discredit the established historians in the subject, using some primary archival sources. In 1989, he wanted to teach others about how to write the biography of Sri Aurobindo by running down his previous biographers. In 1993, he sought to do the same to established academic historians.
After 1993, Heehs produced at least three anthologies of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, culled from the Ashram archives. He thus established a reputation for himself as a specialist of Sri Aurobindo, his writings and philosophy.
Another fifteen years passed since Heehs published his Bomb in Bengal. Meanwhile he seems to have fabricated his own ‘bomb’ which came out in the form of ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo’ in 2008, published by the renowned Columbia University Press. Once again, in this work, he dons the garb of a scholar and teacher, giving lessons about how to write biographies in general and the biography of Sri Aurobindo in particular. This time he ignores all of Sri Aurobindo’s previous biographers and treats them as mere hagiographers (p.xiv). The work literally caught off-guard the devotees and followers of Sri Aurobindo, who never expected anything from the pen of their fellow Ashramite Heehs, that could raise question marks on the life of their guru and avatar. It also shocked the others, both scholars and laymen for the unconventional matter it contained and the way it was used by the author.
At the very outset, his objective seems to be to magnify wherever possible, what he considered to be blemishes and pockmarks in Sri Aurobindo’s life. It starts with the wilful comparison of two
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photographs of Sri Aurobindo, one ‘retouched’ he says to suit the devotee’s taste for radiance and fairness and the other ‘real’, with dark, pockmarked skin and undreamy eyes (pp. xi-xiv).He never seems to have realised that ‘retouching’ of photographs was quite common in those days. Besides he ignores the historical fact that the ‘real’ images of past gurus or saints like Jesus Christ or Buddha have never come down to us. This superfluous obsession with Sri Aurobindo’s colour and image appears off and on throughout the book. He then goes on to portray Sri Aurobindo as born to a mother suffering from bipolar disorder (p. 8, 33). Later he deliberately portrays him as ‘weak and inept in the playing field’. He then claims that Sri Aurobindo himself had admitted that he was ‘a coward and liar’ in his schooldays. Heehs chooses to believe this. But strangely he would not believe any other reason given later by the same Sri Aurobindo for not passing the I.C.S., just because he did not find it in the British records (p. 32,17). Using such statements pronounced in different contexts, Heehs insinuates that Sri Aurobindo’s later day behaviour of dissimulating certain facts, especially when he was in the thick of politics (pp. 34, 126- 129,133,134,162, 175, 179), was conditioned by his early school life.
Regarding Sri Aurobindo’s early life as a revolutionary in England and Baroda, there is a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to portray Sri Aurobindo as a man with a violent streak, with a penchant for terrorist violence. Things like his admiration of France and the French revolution and his support for the ‘racist’ Boers against the British and even his worship of the fiery Kali are used to rub in the idea that Sri Aurobindo was indeed violent- prone and radical (pp. 23, 24, 30, 39, 40, 61, 67, 118, 156,182). At the same time in the same book, it is also shown that Sri Aurobindo believed in passive resistance and not aggressive violence and that his revolution was a long-drawn out one which would take at least thirty years to fructify (pp. 62, 92, 99, 117, 118, 119, 151, 182, 210). The same Sri Aurobindo is also shown at one instance as not doing anything to prevent the violent activities of his brother and friends, mainly on the basis of unreliable second-hand sources, and statements quoted out of their context (pp. 119, 130,134,135,
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141,142, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158). It is also admitted that Sri Aurobindo’s guru, Lele had never preached violence (p. 151). These contradictions become quite obvious when we read the chapters dealing with them quite closely.
Besides, the author has significantly failed to implicate Sri Aurobindo directly in any sort of terrorist violence, though he wracks his nerve to trace all terrorist violence in Bengal to Sri Aurobindo. He also demonstrates that the latter pursued simultaneously his literary activities and spiritual experiences, even after leaving Baroda and even in Alipore prison (pp. 62-74, 76-78, 81, 82, 84, 142-145,148,164, 165, 168, 173, 174, 177, 178,183, 187)
The British too never found any incriminating evidence against Sri Aurobindo, either when he was at the service of the Gaekwad in Baroda or after when Bengal was divided and he threw in his lot with the extremist faction of the Congress, led by Bepin Chandra Pal and Tilak. At this time, Sri Aurobindo preferred political independence rather than social reforms or addressing Muslim communalism (pp. 93, 102, 103, 116, 117) But somehow Heehs tries to put the blame for all terrorist-related violence on Sri Aurobindo by arguing and even insinuating that he inspired all of them. He even goes to the extent of asserting hastily without any solid evidence that Sri Aurobindo was responsible also for the Hindu-Muslim divide, the partition of India in 1947 and the accompanying blood-letting due to his nationalistic activities which lasted (as Heehs himself says) only for about two and half years, roughly from 1907 to 1910 (pp. 116, 210, 212, 315) Besides, Heehs wonders at one stage how Sri Aurobindo who participated so little in politics is hailed as one of the protagonists of the freedom movement and one of the founding fathers of the Indian nation. But in the same breath he accepts that Sri Aurobindo was the first to call for independence, which was adopted by the Congress 23 years later in 1929 and that he succeeded in infusing the will for freedom to a whole generation. He ends up affirming somehow that Sri Aurobindo was not cut out for active political leadership, without trying to know or understand whether he really wanted such leadership or not (pp. 211, 212, 314, 321-322). All this only shows that Heehs lacks historical depth and training, which is a requisite for coherence in historical or biographical writing.
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Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and spiritual experiences and the stupendous quantity of literature produced by him, have never been the focus of the book. Instead, Heehs devotes more attention on Sri Aurobindo’s school and revolutionary lives rather than his spiritual life. It actually occupies more than 200 pages of the text in the book. It is actually based more on his previous works like the Bomb in Bengal than any genuinely new material. Of course, Heehs gives a twist to all this by levelling harsh, doubtful, petty and trivial criticisms on certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s lives in England, Baroda and Bengal. To conclude, he even adopts a paternalistic benevolent attitude towards pre-1947 Indian nationalism as justified by comparing it with the havoc caused by European nationalisms, without realising that Indians had never indulged in colonialism in their long history and had never sought to ‘blotting out individual peoples and effacing outward distinctions’, to use the words of Sri Aurobindo himself (pp.189, 211). Their treatment of the menial class Sudras or Untouchables had indeed degenerated to inhumanity, as Heehs notes (p. 296). But Heehs might well remember that they belonged to the same mixed racial and cultural stock as the other Indians and they were never subjected to extermination or deportation in their long history. It was the same Brahma who generated the Brahmin and the Untouchable or Sudra according to Hindu belief.
The second phase of Sri Aurobindo’s life started in 1910 with his decision to quit politics and Bengal for Pondicherry and spirituality. Heehs does not commit himself on whether Sri Aurobindo went to Pondicherry due to a divine call or because he feared arrest (p. 219). In Pondicherry Sri Aurobindo continued with his sadhana and wrote a lot. It is true that Sri Aurobindo preferred solitude and silence. He is also believed to possess various spiritual and ‘siddhi’ powers, similar to many other Hindu, Christian and Muslim saints who preceded him. But Heehs does not cite one instance when Sri Aurobindo performed miracles with these powers, in order to attract followers and disciples towards him like many others before him. These ‘siddhi’ powers were based on the individual experience and knowledge of Sri Aurobindo. Silence, solitude and ‘siddhi’ powers were part of Indian spiritual tradition
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and behaviour, largely incomprehensible and abnormal to outsiders. One either believes in it and experiments with it or does not believe in it. It is not possible to assume gratuitously like Heehs even for the sake of argument or scholarly purposes that Sri Aurobindo suffered from schizophrenia or was under spells of hallucinations due to his behaviour. This is not the first time that modern scholars have treated an Indian stalwart as schizophrenic. Gandhi himself was viewed as a schizophrenic due to his abnormal activities like fasting, etc. The miracle-working Jesus Christ himself would become a schizophrenic if we apply some of these dubious modern psychiatric yard scales! The height of Heehs’ indecency becomes obvious when he relates Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences to his mother’s bipolar disorder (p. 247). More generally, by questioning Sri Aurobindo’s mystic powers, Heehs seems to question India’s entire yogic and Sufic traditions (pp. 226, 227,228, 230, 231, 238-246). Whether Heehs has the necessary qualifications, knowledge or experience to do that is highly doubtful. By wilfully doing it, he has no doubt overstretched himself.
Naturally, Sri Aurobindo’s literature, philosophy and spiritual experiences, which constitute a great part of his life is treated summarily by Heehs in the book (pp. 264-287). It lacks depth and range and appears rather superficial. For instance, Sri Aurobindo stood ultimately for a synthesis and union of the East and West, on a spiritual basis that preserved the diversity of its units. He did not want a union on any mechanical or material basis. But Heehs never dwells at length on this crucial topic. Instead, he asserts hastily that Sri Aurobindo neither understood the nature of the international order before and during the First World War nor did he understand the advent of modernity and the religion of humanity, which Heehs seems to hold as absolute (pp. 288-289, 295, 296, 306). Besides, Heehs devotes very little attention to Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus, The Life Divine, where the pathway to divine life on earth has been set out. Instead he dismisses it (as well as Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga) unceremoniously as abstruse (pp. 279). He even regrets that both have failed to give any easy technique to reach nirvana (pp. 279, 287). This desire for a short-cut to nirvana on the part of Heehs seems to be conditioned
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by his pre-Ashram background. Earlier he defended Sri Aurobindo’s Uttarapara speech as non-sectarian and all comprehensive (p. 187). But Heehs asserts in the same breath that Sri Aurobindo, influenced by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Tilak and Hindu sacred literature, was convinced of the superiority of the Indian (Hindu) spiritual culture compared to that of the west (pp. 42, 57, 67, 189, 260, 293, 295).
More generally, Heehs finds fault with Sri Aurobindo’s style of writing English and his poetical and other ideas whenever he gets a chance. He considers them as out of step with the new modernism of the west (pp.78, 299, 301-302, 306, 307, 328) He also seems to question Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual powers (pp. 374, 381, 387, 396, 406, 407). He even finds fault with Sri Aurobindo for not having read much of Western and Eastern philosophy and much of Hindu sacred literature, apart from the Gita, Upanishad and Rig Veda. He never seems to realise that Sri Aurobindo became a yogi and philosopher by discovering the ‘ultimate’ truths through his own spiritual experiences and not by reading any sacred or secular text or by logical arguments (pp. 276-278). Sri Aurobindo later found justification for his experiences in literature like the Vedas, Gita and Upanishads. This is also the case of many other yogis in India. Some other yogis of India have hardly read any sacred literature in their lives. Besides, Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of integral yoga or Divine Life on earth is based on his own spiritual experiences and understanding. Sankara’s philosophy of Advaita, Ramanuja’s Dvaita and Buddha’s Nirvana are based respectively on their individual experiences and understanding. But western philosophy, to use the words of Sri Aurobindo is a ‘game of words’ (p. 341), not based on any individual experience. This is a fundamental difference between Indian and western philosophies, which Heehs has simply overlooked or has not understood.
In Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo enjoyed the hospitality of some Tamils (pp. 218, 226) He came into contact with Paul Richard and his wife Mirra, interested in occultism. Together, they founded the Arya. By the 1920s Mirra becomes the Mother. She also becomes the sole intermediary for Sri Aurobindo, who himself is seen as a guru or avatar by his disciples. In fact, Heehs hardly tells us anything
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about Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry which we do not know already. At times he is repetitive, especially when he writes about the spiritual descent and ascent. Besides, he tells us only things which he wants to tell and which suits his temperament and predilections. For example, he seems to give special importance to Paul Richard’s sexual penchants, which do not have much to do with Sri Aurobindo (pp. 314, 341, 345, 353, 354, 355, 366, 375, 380) In
order to offset such glaring shortcomings and attract attention to his book, Heehs has employed the unworthy tactics of maligning certain facets of Sri Aurobindo’s life by stooping low sometimes through unverifiable insinuations and ill-concealed, and largely unsubstantiated allegations (cf. pp. 315, 326).
Strangely, Heehs seems to be obsessed with the sexual life of Sri Aurobindo right from his school days up to his meeting with Mirra, without giving the least thought that Indian spiritual tradition and culture in which Sri Aurobindo was immersed does not attach much importance to carnal pleasures. In fact, it demands the renunciation or transcending of sexual life. This is not fully comprehensible to Heehs, steeped in the sexual psycho-analytical theories of Freud, in the manner of a Wendy Doniger or a Dennis Hudson or a Jeffrey Kripal. Heehs has actually met and talked with Jeffrey Kripal while writing the present book. So he strives unconvincingly to pin down Sri Aurobindo by insinuating off and on that the latter did have some sexual adventures and desires and even insinuates that he was attracted to sexual tantrism, though Sri Aurobindo had outrightly denied it. Besides, he asserts casually, (as if he has some special power to gauge the minds of the immediate disciples of Sri Aurobindo) that the latter’s disciples even had sexual daydreams. He even seems to insinuate off and on that there was even a physical side to the relationship between Mirra and Sri Aurobindo, though the latter always considered the former as the indispensable divine Shakti in his quest for the higher truths (pp. 25, 56, 261,326, 329, 373). Heehs however gives no clear indication about the sources of his information in order to support his affirmations and claims. Besides he admits at times that in the Ashram sexual abstinence was a must. On the other hand, he condemns Sri Aurobindo for not being a good husband
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to his wife, knowing fully well that in the revolutionary and spiritual inclinations of the latter’s mind there was very little or no place for a sexual or a conjugal life. He does not seem to realise that in the Indian tradition distancing oneself from material and conjugal life in search of the Ultimate was not uncommon (pp. 55, 87, 89, 318, 319, 359).
Strangely, Heehs devotes less than hundred pages to the last 25 years of Sri Aurobindo’s life in Pondicherry. This creates a serious imbalance in his attempt to cover the various lives of Sri Aurobindo in the book. Heehs has hardly much to say about the interaction of Sri Aurobindo and the Ashram with the wider Indian society and also the local Pondicherry society, both French and Indian, as Pondicherry was still a French colony when Sri Aurobindo passed away in 1950. He has nothing much to say of Gandhi’s visit to Pondicherry in 1934. His understanding of the events that led to the partition of India is shallow, superficial and second-hand. Of course, Heehs has consulted some hitherto unused records related to the early life of Sri Aurobindo in the archives in London, Kolkata, Dacca, Baroda, and Delhi, but somehow he has missed the Pondicherry State and National Archives, though he has been a resident of Pondicherry since 1971. In France, he has just consulted one file in the National Archives of Paris. He has missed the Overseas Archives in Aix-en-Provence where all records related to the French colony of Pondicherry are stored. The consultation of the Overseas Archives and the Pondicherry Archives is a must for understanding certain facets of Sri Aurobindo’s life in Pondicherry, especially his last 25 years. This is one of the reasons why his book has become lop-sided and imbalanced. Generally Sri Aurobindo had a very good opinion of France and the French civilisation, and considered Pondicherry as a meeting place of the East and West. Heehs of course could not appreciate this predilection of Sri Aurobindo for France for reasons that we do not know.
Though Heehs had taken the pain to consult the various archives for primary sources, incurring probably heavy expenses, there is nothing drastically new in what he puts forward. What is new is
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his penchant to use such sources to tarnish certain facets of Sri Aurobindo’s life, on the pretext that he is being objective, scholarly and so on. All throughout this book until the last pages, there is a barely unconcealed intention to somehow hurt Sri Aurobindo’s reputation and run down at the same time certain aspects of indigenous spiritual culture and tradition. This is not the hall mark of a great biography. Instead it is the trade mark of those who count upon controversy to sell their wares.
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To
The Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry 605 002
Sub: Peter Heehs’s book:
The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Columbia University Press, 2008
Dear Sirs
I do not quite know in what capacity I am writing this letter. Technically, I am an “outsider”, but ideologically and spiritually, I consider myself a member of the larger Ashram community. I had the good fortune to be admitted by the Mother into the SAICE, and my career there spanned from 1966-1975. Currently, I am the Professor and Head, at the Hyderabad Central University. As someone who sees his life deeply connected with the upbringing he received at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, allow me to share my thoughts regarding the sense of dismay many have felt following the publication of the above mentioned biography by Peter Heehs. Perhaps as an academician, my comments may be germane to the discussion at hand.
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I shall divide my response to the present issue into three parts. I shall avoid what other correspondents have already said in their letters to the trustees. In Section I, I shall respond briefly to the academic side of the question since this seems to constitute the main line of defense of Peter Heehs, and his apologists. In Section II, I shall suggest some correctives to the impasse, and finally, I shall offer some reflections for the future well being of our community. I believe the last is a collective responsibility.
I am aware of Peter Heehs’ work in Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research. I have read his authored and edited volumes. I have also gone through some of his articles in professional journals. Most of these are on Sri Aurobindo and related subjects. I have liked some aspects of his work and benefited from them, while I have had reservation about some others. Some of these I had pointed out to Manoj Das, Vijay Poddar and Manoj Das Gupta as far back as 1996. There was no action taken. At any rate none of the three whom I hold in high esteem got back to me.
I have had some experience in the area of textual and archival research. I worked, for example, at The Humanities Research Centre, Texas, Austin and Beineke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University, on a Fulbright Scholarship. Nearer at home, I carried out archival research that resulted in two pioneering studies Early Women’s Writing: A Lost Tradition, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005 and Gender and Cultural Identity in Colonial Orissa, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2008.
In addition, I have edited three volumes dealing with the vision of Sri Aurobindo. My most recent work in this area, Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader, New Delhi: Routledge, 2008, attempts to offer a reading of Sri Aurobindo’s international vision. Incidentally, both Sage and Routledge are international publications.
I am thus broadly aware of the current scholarship in this area. I am basically a literary and cultural critic. I believe I am in a position to offer critical comments on some of the key assumptions of Peter Heehs in his latest book.
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The modest familiarity I had with archival research gave me a valuable perspective, namely that critical judgement of men and matters is an extremely difficult task. The editor/ biographer’s comments have to be balanced, nuanced and tempered, and not sweeping or opinionated. After all, the dead cannot come back to defend their honor or point of view. One must approach the study of the lives of great personalities in a spirit of modesty and understanding. There is a big difference between subservience and sympathy and every scholar worth his/her salt knows the difference. To cite one example, Aldous Huxley’s introduction to The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is marked by such a critical temper. He remains therefore for me, a good role model in this sense.
Mr. Heehs’ reading of the narrative of Sri Aurobindo is in keeping with a currently accepted practice of reading against the grain. Fair enough! However, his claim of an overriding “objectivity” must also be seen carefully against the prevalent view on the subject. The very choice of a subject of research, for instance, the selection and arrangement of “facts” and “evidence”, all come invariably through the prism of the subjective self of a researcher. Words and comments themselves, including those used by Heehs in his latest book, are not value neutral. The decision to rely on one set of evidence to form one’s judgement rather than on some other, is also a deeply subjective act. Rather than claiming the high-moral ground of objectivity, the current practice, especially in the post-colonial context, is to be upfront about one’s approach and unpack one’s ideological predilections in a self reflexive manner at the outset for the reader to see. This is absent in Peter Heehs’ biography of Sri Aurobindo, although he seems to indicate some of his preferences now and then. On the whole, however, one finds that evidence is not offered in a neutral a manner for the readers to judge. Quite the contrary, Mr. Heehs interprets events quite constantly while claiming objectivity. Clearly, he cannot have it both ways.
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As a counterpoint, one can see the interesting and insightful manner spirituality, ethics and politics intersect in Chicago-based, post-colonial critic Leela Gandhi’s fine and nuanced study of colonialism and the politics of friendship in her path breaking work: Anti-Colonial Thought: Affective Communities and Politics of Friendship, Duke University, 2006; Permanent Black, 2006. We may contrast this study, part of which deals with the creative encounter between Mirra Alfassa (the Mother) and Sri Aurobindo, with the somewhat prurient account offered by Heehs (pp. 326-327) and come to our own conclusions.
Every genre (and the biographical mode is one such) must deal with the textual tradition of a given work. And thus, in dealing with a biography of a primarily spiritual figure such as Sri Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi or Sri Aurobindo, one can legitimately use approaches and modes of analysis that are innate and integral to that particular genre. This by itself does not turn the work in question automatically into a hagiographic account. For instance, the distinction between faith and dogma, religion and spirituality that Sri Aurobindo makes in his world view is fundamental to understanding his oeuvres. Peter is thus far off the mark when he asserts as a generalization, “matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma” in deciding about the entire question of Avatarhood. As a general proposition, this seems to be valid, although, in the Aurobindonian context, the distinction is of vital importance. Sri Aurobindo, it must be noted, devotes considerable space in his writings to explain the centrality of faith as distinguished from regression and obscurantism. We may see the truth of this aspect in his essay “True and False Subjectivism” in The Human Cycle. Peter adduces no convincing reasons for dismissing alternative approaches to what is generally considered a purely “secular” or non-hagiographic reading. For instance, there could well be a non-secular and non-hagiographic reading of a spiritual figure. Why are we ruling these out? I have for instance, in my book on Sri Aurobindo, by Routledge (2008) attempted such an alternative (non-devotee) approach.
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Clearly, this is a myth. While book banning and book burning are abhorrent acts and are counterproductive, every author/ editor, it is well known, is bound by trade disciplines, contractual agreements and obligations and copyright regulations. Further, a writer writes in a cultural and political context. His/her affiliations to communities and organizations are often cited as “authoritative” or “authentic” texts by publishing houses. Peter’s affiliation with the Ashram’s archive, as evidenced in the jacket covers/back page blurbs of his published books, or fliers/ promotional literature, are cases in point. For the very same reason, sentiments of a given community, whether one likes them or not, are also important factors that authors and publishers must take into account.
As an insider, one must write with care and sensitivity, and not in a spirit of disdain and dismissal. As a custodian of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, one is surely expected to uphold the trust bestowed upon oneself by the institution.
(4) In case Peter Heehs wishes to write against the grain, the logical and honorable course for him would be to severe his institutional linkages that he has had so far, and write as an independent scholar, something which many writers do. It must be said that most institutions in the modern world are guided by written and unwritten regulations. This is as true in writing the institutional history of the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission or the Central Sahitya Akademi, as the history of the Ashram or its Founders. I have had direct experience of this as a writer and a critic. There is no such thing as absolute freedom in life. Neither is there in literary creativity.
In the light of the above discussion (I have refrained from repeating arguments already advanced by others) I would suggest the following:
(1) Professionally and ethically, Mr. Peter Heehs should dissociate himself voluntarily from Sri Aurobindo Ashram and its
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Archives if he feels convinced about the correctness of his approach. There are fundamental differences between his approach and world view and that of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an institution. Again, his view clashes essentially with that of a philosopher whose vision, in the final analysis, rests upon faith and transcendence, on the reality of the inner world and the mystical domain rather than on the touchstone of empirical reason. This will be an honorable course for Mr. Heehs the author to adopt. This will also be perfectly in line with his cherished beliefs and world view.
In the first instance, therefore, the Ashram authorities ought to offer such an option to Mr. Heehs.
(2) Institutionally, as a corollary, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust would be justified in distancing itself from Peter Heehs, his present book and its publisher(s). The proper line to adopt is to maintain that Heehs’ book is one more reading of Sri Aurobindo but that it has no backing of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an institution.
Next, since archives are a crucial storehouse of institutional memory, and contributes vitally in determining its future, it would be logical and ethical for the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an institution to demand the withdrawal of Peter Heehs as a professional from the Archives. Free speech and anarchism - whatever their appeal to utopian and idealistic thinking - are always balanced in real life by a carefully constructed self-image that a community has for itself. As I have argued so far, in the present case, this self-image must be anchored vitally and substantially to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of terrestrial evolution, which remains, in the final analysis, an Ideal.
What are the lessons?
First, we need to strengthen the academic/intellectual side of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education. We must fashion out a way of intellectual training of the young students
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and critics that fits into Sri Aurobindo’s injunction about the office and limitation of Reason, expounded in Human Cycle and elsewhere. The Mind, Sri Aurobindo says, most emphatically, has to be developed as an instrument, and open itself to higher Truths of Life. If we do not do this, we cannot blame others who are not attuned to this approach, from taking over and filling the void, as it has regrettably happened now. In this regard, we must be prepared to take the help of the ex-students of the Ashram who have had considerable training in this regard in the outside world. We must remember that either we move forward or go backward. There is no third alternative.
Clearly, as spirituality enjoins upon us, the best way of living within in our context, is to immerse ourselves in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. While dogma and religiosity are to be shunned at all costs, we must internalize the Aurobindonian view of life which alone can safeguard us against aberrations and pitfalls. When a sufficiently large number of a community practise an ethical and spiritual life (ethics is not a bad word), then they would generate a force that alone can act as an effective antidote to darkness and ignorance.
Conclusion: Clarity of vision leads to a clarity of action. Those that are at the helms of affairs of a community must have a larger vision and discharge their responsibilities without fear and favor. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded upon spiritual Realizations. As ordinary mortals, we can at least have conviction in the basic Truth of the Founders!
Is this too much to expect!
17 September 2008
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Nileen Putatunda is a social worker and a poet. Six books of his spiritual poetry have been published by the Writers Workshop, India, between 2006 and 2011. His books have been reviewed in international Vedanta journals, Prabuddha Bharata, Samvit, The Advent and The Vedanta Kesari. Annya, published by Writers Workshop in 2009, was short-listed for the Muse India Young Writer Award 2011. Nileen’s poems have appeared in journals like American Vedantist and The Mountain Path, and his articles have come out in the opinion space of national newspapers. This article was published in “The Statesman”, Perspective page, 17th November, 2012.
Earlier this year, former New York taxi driver Peter Heehs, based in India since the 1970s, was in the news for his controversial book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by Columbia University Press. There was an attempt made by devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were outraged by this book, to deny Heehs an extension of his Indian visa. Some supposedly-eminent Indians rushed to the rescue of Heehs by appealing to the Prime Minister and the Home Minister, and Heehs was allowed to stay on.
Being a humble admirer of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother over many years, and having delighted in attending a monthly reading session here in Kolkata of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, I got hold of a copy of Heehs’ book to see what the din was about. Having read every word of the book, I must say that I was disappointed with the scholarship in this part-serious, part-frivolous effort by Heehs which pop historian, Ramachandra Guha has described as: “The product of a lifetime of scholarship, its empirical depth and analytical sharpness is unlikely to be surpassed. For Heehs knows the documentary evidence on and around Aurobindo’s life better than anyone else.”
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How Guha arrived at this judgment bewilders me, for the same Guha in an interview with The Indian Express admitted last year that the word “spirituality” meant “nothing at all” to him and that it was “a meaningless term”. Surely, Guha is clueless about veterans in the Aurobindonian movement who have seen, interacted with, studied and written about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, something Heehs never managed. Guha also suffered from acute myopia when he left out Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose but included Jinnah and Nehru in his book Makers of Modern India where he profiled 19 Indians whose ideas had a defining impact on the formation of our republic. By way of explanation, Guha wrote: “I have also not included spiritualists such as Swami Vivekananda and Dayanand Saraswati, who represented a muscular brand of Hinduism that sought to meet the challenge of the West by breaking down caste barriers and consolidating the community as one. Both were, in their own day, quite influential; yet (as with Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo) their influence has passed.” Guha is unaware that Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Mission has 176 branch centres all over India and the world, including all continents save Antarctica. If Vivekananda’s influence had indeed passed, would Mr. Pranab Mukherjee have gone to Chicago earlier this year to establish the Vivekananda Chair at the University of Chicago, or would the Prime Minister choose to be the chairman of a national committee for the celebration of the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda?
In his book, Peter Heehs made ample efforts to focus on the trivial: in four places, he refers to supposed pockmarks on Sri Aurobindo’s face. In five places, he describes Aurobindo as short – around five feet, four inches – and in a way that is disparaging. Should Sri Aurobindo, whose praises were sung by seers and scholars of the calibre of Rabindranath Tagore, Dilip Kumar Roy, Chittaranjan Das, Netaji Bose, Romain Rolland, Aldous Huxley, Pitirim Sorokin, Tan Yun-Shan among others, be reduced to such physical scrutiny in the name of bashing “hagiography”?
Heehs proceeds to pry into a mystic’s (i.e. Sri Aurobindo’s) diary and fathom his spiritual journey. He is brazen enough to write:
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“Through Record of Yoga we can trace the outlines, if not understand the details, of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana between 1912 and 1927. For the next twenty-three years, we have to depend on scattered notes and letters.” Heehs dismisses what Sri Aurobindo had clearly said to a devotee, “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.” Heehs takes great pleasure in finding fault with Sri Aurobindo’s literary works. Heehs is no Kalidasa and has no formal degrees, and I would much rather place my trust in the accolades for Sri Aurobindo from Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1945), Pearl Buck (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1938), and my own joy in his writings over years.
Heehs descends to mischievousness when he tries to portray a romantic relationship between Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual collaborator, the Mother. These parts of the book suffer from being drawn from completely unreliable sources in addition to Heehs’ much too fertile imagination. Earlier in the book, he speculates on Sri Aurobindo’s conjugal life. Heehs also attempts to paint Sri Aurobindo with a communalistic brush which is far from the truth. In a message given at the request of All India Radio for 15 August 1947, Sri Aurobindo had mentioned some of his dreams for India and the world, the first of which was “a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India…But the old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems now to have hardened into a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that this settled fact will not be accepted as settled for ever or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled…”
Heehs’ book has been praised by Jeffrey Kripal, author of that ridiculous book Kali’s Child. But that’s more to Heehs’ discredit than anything. Kripal’s book has been countered point by point in Pravrajika Vrajaprana and Swami Tyagananda’s Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited. In the foreword to their book, Huston Smith, the great scholar and author of The World’s Religions wrote: “To put the best face I can on Kripal’s unfortunate book,
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perhaps it can serve as an object lesson on the way cross-cultural discussions should not proceed.”
When Heehs’ visa was finally extended, he told a newspaper that he was looking forward to being forgotten. His book should meet the same fate if we are to follow the prescription of the great English essayist and critic of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb, who said: “Make me respect my mind so much that I dare not read what has no meaning or moral. Help me to choose with equal care my friends and my books, because they are both for life.” If we are to understand Sri Aurobindo, we would be wise to read Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s (author of at least 25 scholarly books and vice-president of the Sahitya Akademi in the 1970s) biography, the first two drafts of which were seen by Sri Aurobindo himself. A.B. Purani’s biography is also recommended.
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Peter Heehs has a crisp and racy style; he comes straight to the essential points and there is a skilful weaving of historical data which hitherto has never been done in a biography of Sri Aurobindo. But that is about all that can be appreciated in this book, for he sets the ball rolling in the wrong direction right from the Preface. The reader is soon taken aback at the innate hostility behind his clever presentation, or rather, misrepresentation of facts.
He says in his Preface that he is against hagiography and expresses a strong dislike for the literature produced by the disciples in admiration for Sri Aurobindo; the result is that he swings to the other extreme and indulges in open or covert hostility towards him. He takes the example of two photographs of Sri Aurobindo, one dated circa 1915-1916 (this is the beautiful photograph of Sri Aurobindo placed in the Meditation Hall downstairs in the Ashram main building) and the other dated 1915, and compares the retouching of the first with hagiography, which, he says, always distorts historical truth. He finds that “the dark, pockmarked skin, sharp features, and undreamy eyes” of the second one make it “more true to Sri Aurobindo” than the first one, which has been heavily retouched with “the result that the face has no character”.1
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Now these are tough statements to digest and one wonders why he is so delighted at the pockmarks! But then you find out later that this is part of the methodology he follows, finding first the most damaging negative evidence on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and then weighing it half-heartedly against flimsy positive evidence in the name of objectivity. In doing so, he carefully avoids the highly positive evidence which has been used until now by the devotees and disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. You might not even notice this clever balancing of evidence in favour of the so-called academic view of spirituality, which generally considers Sri Aurobindo’s experiences to be hallucinations or psychotic delusions. Or the so-called academic view of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy which finds it not logical enough, so that “most members of the philosophical profession … would be loath to admit him to their club.”2 And before you realise the slow poison he is injecting through these apparently even-handed discussions, he has given a certificate of sanity to Sri Aurobindo! After discussing at length the possibility of Sri Aurobindo inheriting a tinge of lunacy from his mother, he says, that all said and done, Sri Aurobindo was “eminently sane”.3 It is clear enough that genuine devotion and sincere admiration for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is anathema to Heehs. So in order to steer clear of hagiography, he has replaced it with outright hostility. Objectivity is a mere pretence to discuss only the “pockmarks” visible in Sri Aurobindo’s outer life, and he uses even a magnifying glass to discover the hidden warts and moles.
Let us take the most obvious example of Heehs’ misrepresentation – his portrayal of the relationship of the Mother with Sri Aurobindo after her second and final arrival in Pondicherry in 1920:
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 in 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.
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Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of expressing their emotions openly. The young men…were somewhat nonplussed by this turn of events. Paul Richard took it more personally…After a while he asked Aurobindo about the nature of his 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 into 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.
Paul took up the matter with his wife. According to Mirra, recalling the events forty years later, the confrontation was stormy…Paul became violent, came close to strangling her, and threw the furniture out of the window… 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.” (Lives, 326-27)
On reading this, most people who are not familiar with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga and philosophy will conclude that Paul Richard left the Mother (then addressed as Mirra) because of her growing affection for Sri Aurobindo. For those who are familiar with their teachings, it will sow the seeds of doubt regarding the nature of their relationship. The facts are apparently clear and Heehs, who has long standing experience with original documents, will not risk misquoting; he can only do his mischief, as I will show, by misrepresenting. The method followed here is to totally neglect the spiritual dimension on the basis that it cannot be proved. I present the following conversation of the Mother from the Agenda, which speaks volumes on her spiritual relationship with Sri Aurobindo:
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When I first began to work… well, I had a series of visions (I knew nothing about India, mind you, nothing, just as most Europeans know nothing about it: ‘a country full of people with certain customs and religions, a confused and hazy history, where a lot of “extraordinary things” are said to have happened.’ I knew nothing.) Well, in several of these visions I saw Sri Aurobindo just as he looked physically, but glorified; that is, the same man I would see on my first visit, almost thin, with that golden-bronze hue and rather sharp profile, an unruly beard and long hair, dressed in a dhoti with one end of it thrown over his shoulder, arms and chest bare, and bare feet. At the time I thought it was ‘vision attire’! I mean I really knew nothing about India; I had never seen Indians dressed in the Indian way.
Well, I saw him. I experienced what were at once symbolic visions and spiritual FACTS: absolutely decisive spiritual experiences and facts of meeting and having a united perception of the Work to be accomplished. And in these visions I did something I had never done physically: I prostrated before him in the Hindu manner. All this without any comprehension in the little brain (I mean I really didn’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it – nothing at all). I did it, and at the same time the outer being was asking, ‘What is all this?!’
I wrote the vision down (or perhaps that was later on) but I never spoke of it to anyone (one doesn’t talk about such things, naturally). But my impression was that it was premonitory, that one day something like it would happen. And it remained in the background of the consciousness, not active, but constantly present….
I came here But something in me wanted to meet Sri Aurobindo all alone the first time. Richard went to him in the morning and I had an appointment for the afternoon. He was living in the house that’s now part of the second dormitory, the old Guest House. I climbed up the stairway and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs....
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EXACTLY my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked (gesture of instantaneous shock), the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion – the decisive shock.
But this was merely the beginning of my vision. Only after a series of experiences – a ten months’ sojourn in Pondicherry, five years of separation, then the return to Pondicherry and the meeting in the same house and in the same way – did the END of the vision occur I was standing just beside him.
My head wasn’t exactly on his shoulder, but where his shoulder was (I don’t know how to explain it – physically there was hardly any contact). We were standing side by side like that, gazing out through the open window, and then TOGETHER, at exactly the same moment, we felt, ‘Now the Realisation will be accomplished.’ That the seal was set and the Realisation would be accomplished. I felt the Thing descending massively within me, with the same certainty I had felt in my vision. From that moment on there was nothing to say – no words, nothing. We knew it was THAT.4
Heehs has left the reader blissfully ignorant of this spiritual dimension, which is not only obvious in the above document but in numerous others used by the “despicable hagiographers” of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The same action of the Mother holding the hand of Sri Aurobindo can now be understood as a fervent clasp of the Master’s hand by not merely a disciple, but one who became his equal in Yoga:
Mother was doing Yoga before she knew or met Sri Aurobindo; but their lines of sadhana independently followed the same course. When they met, they helped each other in perfecting the sadhana. What is known as Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga is the joint creation of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; they are now completely identified – the sadhana in the Ashram and all arrangement is done directly by the Mother, Sri Aurobindo supports her from behind. All who come here
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for practising Yoga have to surrender themselves to the Mother who helps them always and builds up their spiritual life.5
Why did the Mother marry Paul Richard? I quote again from the Agenda:
I [Mother] have done my best, all these years, to try to keep him [Paul Richard] at a distance. He has a power – a terrible asuric power. Between you and me, I saw him like that from the start – that’s why I became involved with him. I never intended to marry him (his family affairs made it necessary), but when we met, I recognized him as an incarnation of the ‘Lord of Falsehood’ – that is his ‘origin’ (what he called the ‘Lord of Nations’); and in fact, this being has directed the whole course of world events during the last few centuries. As for Theon, he was....
It was not by choice that I met all the four Asuras – it was a decision of the Supreme. The first one, whom religions call Satan, the Asura of Consciousness, was converted and is still at work. The second [the Asura of Suffering] annulled himself in the Supreme. The third was the Lord of Death (that was Theon). And the fourth, the Master of the world, was the Lord of Falsehood; Richard was an emanation, a vibhuti, as they say in India, of this Asura.6
The Mother wanted to transform Paul Richard, who was an incarnation of the Lord of Falsehood. This was the essential reason why she married him, though outwardly there was a certain legal necessity, as she recounts later in the same conversation:
Then the divorce stories began: he [Paul Richard] divorced his wife; they had three children and he wanted to keep them, but to do so he had to be legally married, so he asked me [Mother] to marry him – and I said yes. I have always been totally indifferent to these things. Anyway, when I met him I knew who he was and I decided to convert him – the whole story revolves around that.7
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Heehs will say that all this is inadmissible because it refers to things unverifiable and too occult to be discussed intellectually: “How can we discuss about Asuras and Lord of Nations and God knows what?” But why does he then write about spirituality at all? Why quote the occult experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, why not simply refute them straightaway as unbelievable nonsense? Had he been a straightforward materialist, I would have appreciated his stand. But no, he quotes spiritual experiences and practices where it suits him – what is after all the Record of Yoga, most of which is simply beyond normal comprehension? There he wants to catch the attention of the world as a great researcher of spirituality. But when it comes to the Mother’s own life, he deliberately neglects her spiritual dimension in order to prove that Sri Aurobindo gave no special place to her in his Yoga. He is so quick to say:
There is no special mention of Mirra Richard, nor evidence in earlier Record entries that he regarded her as more than a “European yogi” of unusual attainments.8
Later on, he quotes with great reluctance (since it may damage his prestige as an objective historian) the following three well-known affirmations of Sri Aurobindo to a disciple with regard to the true identity of the Mother:
Do you not refer to the Mother (our Mother) in your book, “The Mother”?
Yes.
Is she not the “Individual” Divine Mother who has embodied “the power of these two vaster ways of her existence” – Transcendent and Universal?
Has she not descended here (amongst us) into the Darkness and Falsehood and Error and Death in her deep and great love for us?
Yes.9
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The one thing that Sri Aurobindo stressed in his letters to disciples after 1926 is surrender to the Mother, opening the consciousness to her and receiving her Force. In fact, his whole Yoga can be described as Mother-centric, and there was no doubt as to which Mother he was referring to. Neither there were any doubts in the letters and statements of the Mother as to who she considered Sri Aurobindo to be, though both were averse to public propaganda about their Avatarhood.
Why did Paul Richard go away? Heehs makes him a spiritual hero, who was forced to fight “a dreadful inner battle, which threw [him], alone, face to face with death into the immense and glorious void of the Himalayan Ocean”10 because his wife Mirra left him. She was indeed the culprit of this domestic quarrel because of which poor Richard had to face a spiritual crisis. The order of facts in Heehs’ narration is intended to suggest this, though he might deny it. At this point, one might remind this puffed-up historian that there is no such thing as “no position” in life, or in academic terms, “pure objectivity”. You always end up taking or even beginning with a certain position or bias in life, whether you like it or not. In historical work, the selection of material, the order in which you present the facts and even the words you use matter immensely, and they immediately show your academic position or political slant. You cannot pretend to consider negative and positive evidence without defining your position; otherwise you run the risk of either contradicting yourself or not even consciously knowing what stand you have taken. In any case, the reader will place you immediately somewhere in the spectrum of various world-views ranging from spirituality to materialism, and these two views are so different from each other, that you will be classed as either supporting or defending one or the other.
Heehs has so conveniently left out Paul Richard’s remarkable confession to Dilip Kumar Roy in 1927 on why he left Pondicherry in November 1920. It was not Mirra’s betrayal as Heehs presents it, but Richard’s own ego which had stood in the way of accepting Sri Aurobindo’s light.
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‘Yes, I [Paul Richard] should have had the humility to accept the light he [Sri Aurobindo] had won and could give others who really aspired to it. I should have enlisted under the banner of subservience. That is why I had to leave his mighty aura of the new creation where the rule of mind is going to be replaced by the Supermind, le nouveau Dieu. Oui, c’est un nouveau Dieu qu’il faut adorer – a new Divinity claims our allegiance, as I wrote once, since we have long outgrown the old. And Sri Aurobindo is the only man who has won through to this vision and, what is more, has got the power to translate it in life by ushering in a new era of the Supramental apocalypse … Yes,’ he added after a pause, ‘he and no one else has the key of the world to be, and my tragedy is that my love of self-will forced me leave his aegis and choose the alternative of living a pointless life away from the one man whose society I rate over that of all the others put together. Do you wonder now why I should be constantly harping on suicide?’11
There was also a very material reason for Richard’s departure. He was not given the “sole copyright of the [Arya] series to come” and asked to be a “mere contributor” to it:
‘And yet my [Paul Richard’s] faith has not stood me in good stead and I refused to collaborate with the Author of this Purpose because He didn’t acclaim me as his sole editor, because I was not entrusted by Him with the sole copyright of the series to come – in a word, because I was too self- willed to be a mere contributor of His Book of Life. I had no humility. That’s why I had to fare like a high peak, where no seed can bear, despising the fertile low lands which,’ he gave me [Dilip Kumar Roy] a quick look, ‘Sri Aurobindo had wanted me to be.’12
Now what sort of a man was Paul Richard? In the Mother’s own words:
He was a pastor at Lille, in France, for perhaps ten years; he was quite a practicing Christian, but he dropped it all as soon as he began to study occultism. He had first specialised in
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theological philosophy in order to pass the pastoral examinations, studying all the modern philosophy of Europe (he had a rather remarkable metaphysical brain). Then he became a lawyer and entered politics (he was a first-class orator and fired his audiences with enthusiasm) and was sent to Pondicherry to help a certain candidate who couldn’t manage his election campaign single-handed.13
This man clearly led a rather loose life. Right after he left here [in 1920] he spent some time in the Himalayas and became a Sannyasi. Then he went to France and from France to England. In England he married again – bigamy! I didn’t care, of course (the less he showed up in my life, the better), but he was in a fix! One day I suddenly received some official letters from a lawyer telling me I had ‘initiated divorce proceedings against Richard.’ It seems I had a lawyer over there! A lawyer I had never asked for, whose name I didn’t know, a lawyer I didn’t even know existed – ‘my lawyer’! The trial was taking place at Nice, and ‘I’ was accusing Richard of abandoning me without any means of support! (That was nothing new – I had paid all the expenses from the first day we met!14
He remarried two or three more times. By now (I believe) he is the father of quite a large family, with grandchildren and perhaps great-grandchildren. He lives in America.15
Paul Richard was certainly not the hero that Heehs has turned him into. Not only did he lead a “rather loose life” but he did not even pay his bills, apart from being an emanation of the Lord of Falsehood. Now this is characteristic of Heehs, he has the habit of praising or defending the wrong person. Let us now come to the last days of Richard in Pondicherry as described by the Mother:
Here in Pondicherry, those last days might have become tragic (but of course it was impossible). There was the great argument (for he was perfectly aware of who I was): ‘But after all,’ he would tell me, ‘since you are the eternal Mother, why have you chosen Aurobindo as Avatar? Choose me! You must choose me – me!’ It was the Asura speaking through
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him. I would smile and not discuss it. ‘That’s not how it’s done!’ I would tell him (laughing). Then one day he said, ‘Ah, so you don’t want to... (gesture to the throat). Well, if you don’t choose me, then....’ He was a strong fellow with powerful hands. I kept quite calm and said inwardly, My Lord, my Lord.... I called Sri Aurobindo and I saw him come, like that (gesture enveloping Mother and immobilizing everything). Then Richard’s hands loosened their grip.
There were marks on my neck.
A few days later, it was the same scene again. It was always the same scene Then he would take the furniture (it wasn’t ours, we had rented a furnished apartment) and start throwing it out of the window into the courtyard! 16
The circumstances turn out to be very different from what Heehs has narrated. He has mentioned in his story that Paul Richard threw the furniture from the window and attempted to strangle the Mother who called on the Divine for help – she actually called on Sri Aurobindo for help according to the above passage. But why has he kept silent about the spiritual tussle between the Asura (speaking through Richard) and the Mother, and Richard’s insistence on her accepting him as the Avatar instead of Sri Aurobindo? Heehs would of course maintain that it is not appropriate for an academic to speak of such things. We come back to the same old face-off between spirituality and materialism and the simple-minded disciple with plenty of common sense will retort: “Do you believe in spirituality or not? If you do not believe in it, why talk about it? But if you do, don’t talk nonsense on subjects where you have no authority at all!” That is why it is better to declare one’s position first, and then get down to the job of collecting data and interpreting it.
Now that we know the full spiritual context of Richard’s departure, we are in a better position to judge the following passage of Heehs which has pained so many devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I quote it a second time for the sake of clarity:
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After a while he [Paul Richard] asked Aurobindo about the nature of his 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 into 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. (Lives, 326-27)
When Sri Aurobindo replied to Paul Richard that he would marry Mirra if she ever asked for it, he was defending her from an emanation of the Lord of Falsehood, who would soon attempt, or perhaps had already attempted to kill her – we don’t know the exact chronological sequence of the events. He was also speaking the language of the Bhagwad Gita which Heehs refers to in the endnote of the above passage. The translation of the verse from the Gita reads:
As men approach Me, so I accept them to my love; men follow in every way my path, O Partha.
I quote Sri Aurobindo’s paraphrase of the verse:
Nor does it matter essentially in what form and name or putting forward what aspect of the Divine he comes; for in all ways, varying with their nature, men are following the path set to them by the Divine which will in the end lead them to him and the aspect of him which suits their nature is that which they can best follow when he comes to lead them; in whatever way men accept, love and take joy in God, in that way God accepts, loves and takes joy in man.17
The context of the Gita would have made an enormous difference in the presentation of events had Heehs included it in the main text instead of relegating it to an obscure place in the endnotes. Sri Aurobindo also answered Paul Richard’s hypothetical question under the pressure of stormy circumstances and qualified it with a big “if ” – “if Mirra ever asked for marriage, that is what she would
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have”. The question of marriage in the ordinary sense would never have actually arisen given the nature of relationship of Mirra with Sri Aurobindo. Fortunately, our learned scholar does conclude that Sri Aurobindo’s answer was to ensure Mirra’s autonomy than his wish to marry her. But he explains it after giving a sufficiently wrong picture of it in the beginning so that he can do a classic damage control exercise at the end.
It can be contested that I am merely imagining these flaws in Heehs’ presentation, and that my criticism of him is more biased than he is with regard to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But lo, new evidence pops up again at the end of the book to confirm my criticism of Heehs. When Sri Aurobindo stumbled over the tiger skin and broke his leg in the early hours of 24 November 1938, Heehs writes about the Mother’s waking up in the following passage:
Around two o’clock that morning, while crossing to the bathroom, Sri Aurobindo stumbled over the tiger skin and fell…Attuned inwardly to her partner, she had felt in her sleep that something was wrong. (Lives, 381-82)
The word “partner” seems innocently woven into the text, but you perceive the mischief on closer inspection. According to the Oxford dictionary, a partner is a “spouse” or “a member of a couple who live together or are habitual companions”, or “lover”. The word is hardly appropriate to describe the spiritual relationship of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for which there is ample evidence in Sri Aurobindo’s own words:
Sri Aurobindo: In my own case it [a Shakti] was a necessary condition for the work that I had to do. If I had to do my own transformation, or give a new yoga, or a new ideal to a select few people who came in my personal contact, I could have done that without having any Shakti. But for the work that I had to do it was necessary that the two sides must come together. By the coming together of the Mother and myself certain conditions are created which make it easy for you to
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achieve the transformation. You can take advantage of those conditions.
But it is not necessary that everybody should have a Shakti. People have a passion for generalisation.
Disciple: I wanted to say that we are not as great as you.
Sri Aurobindo: It is not a question of great or small. It is a question of your being less complex than I am.
And before you can have a Shakti, you must first of all deserve a Shakti. The first condition is that you must be master of Kama.18
The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness – if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers.19
The Mother and myself stand for the same Power in two forms – so the perception in the dream was perfectly logical. Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti are only the two sides of the one Divine (Brahman).20
Can it happen that one who is open to Sri Aurobindo is not open to the Mother? Is it that whoever is open to the Mother is open to Sri Aurobindo?
The Mother proposition is true. If one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo.21
I have quoted extensively on the spiritual relationship of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in order to dispel once for all the doubts that Heehs wishes to sow in the minds of their devotees and disciples. He would of course pretend innocence and laugh it off as the reactions of the oversensitive Indian psyche. But it only
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shows his own lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others. It is as if a part of the inner being is missing in him despite his practising the Integral Yoga for so many years, as he claimed in a recent interview.
I end with a summary of Heehs’ so-called objective method of analysis of historical facts, which is only a clever garb for denigrating the divine personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He generally sticks to the narration of what he would call the hard facts of their external lives and leaves out the spiritual dimension whenever it suits his purpose of misrepresentation. He comes out sometimes with stinging and highly opinionated statements on Sri Aurobindo’s works, his political actions, his spiritual experiences and the Mother’s life and her work in the Ashram, especially with regard to their Darshans. The one thing that comes out as clear as daylight is his morbid distaste for devotion and faith, which are the master keys of this Yoga; hence the insistence on not being hagiographic at all cost, with the result that he has replaced it with sheer hostility. I finish with a well-known quote from Sri Aurobindo’s letter to Dilip Kumar Roy in 1930, which so befits the occasion:
First of all what matters in a spiritual man’s life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time (that is what historicity or biography comes to, does it not?) but what he was and did within; it is only that that gives any value to his outer life at all. It is the inner life that gives to the outer any power it may have, and the inner life of a spiritual man is something vast and full and, at least in the great figures, so crowded and teeming with significant things that no biographer or historian could ever hope to seize it all or tell it.22
7 October 2008
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Sandeep Joshi runs the website “Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother” at https://auromere.wordpress.com.
The quandary with the latest biography of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, is that many times we get caught up in vitanda (which means, it is wrong because you are saying it—and using quotes to justify your side) and kutarka (wrong logic). Every argument is taken up, twisted and compared with some other argument. The rational mind keeps moving between various arguments never knowing where conclusion lies!
Assuming this book was written with honest intent, then there is one fundamental question which must be answered: Is this book useful for spreading the message of Sri Aurobindo?
To me, this is a question, above all, of vibratory power. This book vacillates and comes across as insipid and inconclusive. It doesn’t drive home the argument that, yes, I can improve my life by taking up the Integral Yoga. If this is supposed to be a primary biography written by an Ashram inmate and follower of the Path, then it must be held to a high standard.
(1) Except for the chapter on Major Works, Pondicherry, 1914- 1920, Chapter 7, pp. 264-307, most of the other chapters of the Lives come across like a soap opera, kind of “they met; he felt like this; she said that”—stuff. Even in this chapter there is no scholarly depth or insight expected with such a long association with the writings of Sri Aurobindo.
(2) The constant use of double quotes through the text seems to indicate a lack of grasp of the subject matter. The plain question is: if you are an acclaimed expert, then why not write in your own words?
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(3) The work fails to present the basic theory of Integral Yoga forcefully in a concise manner. Isn’t that is what Sri Aurobindo important for? It miserably fails to state that Sri Aurobindo was doing sadhana for the Earth. All we have are statements here and there like “he came down into the physical; he told someone the tail of the supermind has descended; by their own account, they never lost touch of the higher planes of consciousness.” People might turn aside with a smile if they read some of this gibberish. Shouldn’t the book try to explain what these statements mean in terms of the ancient Scriptures? Why is Sri Aurobindo different from other Sages and Rishis who lived in the past centuries?
(4) The life of a Saint or a Yogi or a Rishi should be judged by the people he affected. Yet, there is little or no information about the major disciples like Nolini, Nirodbaran, Amal Kiran, Pavitra, Amrita, Purani, Dilip Roy, Champaklal, Anilbaran, and many others. How did Sri Aurobindo change the lives of others? I presume, if I’ve to put it from the author’s point of view, this information cannot be included in the biography because these people cannot be regarded as (trustworthy?) primary sources. So there is a basic conflict with the approach of the biographer and the life of the person he seeks to represent.
(5) The epilogue is disappointingly incomplete. No information is given on various centers and institutions which have sprung up and the wide variety of people who embrace the philosophy and continue the work. Again, all we have are some ambiguous statements like the following: “We are now in the second generation after Sri Aurobindo’s passing. His work continues… A superficial look at the organizations he inspired might give the impression that they constitute a movement of the sort he warned against in The Human Cycle. But a deeper look, not at organizational forms but at the practice of individuals, might give a different impression. And in the end any attempt to transform human society must begin with the individuals.” (p. 415) In support of this statement a quotation from Sri Aurobindo follows to close the book. The obvious suggestion is the failure of the Aurobindonian attempt towards the transformation of human society.
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(6) The Mother has been excluded—as if the author has a strong aversion towards her, a psychological barrier in accepting or acknowledging her contributions. Sri Aurobindo exits the stage and we are supposed to move on as if nothing happened after that.
(7) The author has spent 35-40 years in the Ashram Archives. He must know for sure that Vivekananda visited Sri Aurobindo in Alipore jail. Yet here we find this strange statement, “Years later, he wondered whether its source was actually the spirit of Vivekananda.” (p. 178) There is no reference for this statement as far as the primary sources are concerned. Evidently, meticulous scholarship also has its limits, but it is bad when it gets manipulated. On this same page, we also read that Sri Aurobindo heard “all sorts of voices”. He has picked this phrase from a letter written by Sri Aurobindo to a disciple who had a breakdown and come into contact with the intermediate zone of consciousness “where one can be subjected to all sorts of voices”.1 It is not something that he said about himself. These kinds of statements create doubt in the mind of the reader about Sri Aurobindo’s sanity. Actually, what happened after the Nirvana experience with Lele in December 1907 is that Sri Aurobindo heard only the voice of the Divine which spoke at various times and guided him.
(8) A rumour about kidney trouble as the cause of Sri Aurobindo’s illness and death has been included (p. 406). Is this another example of meticulous scholarship? It creates doubt in the mind of the reader that perhaps Sri Aurobindo had kidney trouble all his life, in spite of his assertions to the contrary. It is worthwhile to go through the accounts of the doctors who actually attended on Sri Aurobindo.
(9) There were all kinds of mischievous statements about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother made by strong lobbies in Pondicherry of those days. In order to dismiss such impressions, Jatindranath Sen Gupta, friend of one of the members of the Ashram, offered to write a piece for the daily Hindu of Madras, published in May 1927 (p. 358). Our author considers it more an “exercise in public relations than an example of balanced reporting.” But, historically speaking, we must understand that people in that age in India had no idea about marketing; Sri Aurobindo always made decisions based on spiritual motives. The author’s mind is trying to judge these things based on his own upbringing, missing the perspective of space and time.
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1. Letters on Yoga-III (CWSA), Vol. 30, p 303
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Dr Prithwindra Mukherjee has been awarded the Chevalier : (a) in the Order of Arts & Letters by the Ministry of Culture, France (2009); (b) in the Order of Palmes académiques (“Academic Laurels”) by the Prime Minister, proposed by the Minister of Education (2015). He received from the French Academy the 2014 Hirayama Award for the totality of his publications including nearly seventy books and a considerable number of articles. An expert on the pre-Gandhian Indian revolutionary movement (1893-1918), and author of a PhD thesis supervised by Raymond Aron, he points out errors galore in Heehs’ so-called scholarship, especially with regard to Bagha Jatin (Jatin Mukherjee), who was Dr. Prithwindra’s grandfather.
A recent enterprise in the West is to discredit India’s spiritual message by a vulgar and charlatan process of psychoanalysis, reducing age-old images of sanctity into clinical cases of sexual perversion, libelling spiritual experiences as “subjective (…), only hallucinations or signs of psychotic breakdown. Even if not, do they have any value to anyone but the subject ?”1 While exploring Sri Aurobindo’s political career, drawing benefit from the light and shade of the secret societies that had cropped up under the Leader’s radical influence, one such biographer took himself to be the dispenser of the Destiny presiding over Indian historiography and suppress some significant militants, while ushering into limelight minor or undeserving dramatis personae.
In The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs, singling out blatant instances of such a dishonest manoeuvre that are directly related to a topic on which I have been working since 1955 – pre-Gandhian
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freedom movement in British India (1893-1918) – I bring them to the notice of interested readers. The book was to be re-printed by Penguin India in November 2008, before it was stopped by a red signal from the Orissa High Court. Some of the conclusions, as mentioned in the petition are: “Aurobindo’s character, life, writings and thoughts did not hold integrity”, “He possesses a morally loose character”, “his claims to spiritual expression and realization [are] questionable and irrelevant” and that “his spirituality emerges from a streak of inherited madness.” 2
“Hagiographers deal with documents the way retouchers deal with photographs.”(Lives, p. xiv)
Invited by the late Jayantilal Parekh to visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives that he had just launched, and introduced to Peter Heehs – one of his assistants , - I was to know the latter off and on, for about twenty years. Heehs had consulted me about material in my possession, concerning the relationship between Sri Aurobindo and Jatindra Nath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin), my grandfather. In April 1995, Heehs had presented me a copy of his The Bomb in Bengal (1993 edition) with a friendly and generous acknowledgment : “To Prithwin/ from whose work/ I benefitted (sic!) in writing/ this, in the hopes that/ it will be of some/ use to him.” I was amused to see that his usual “Prithwin-da”3 had already turned into “Prithwin” while dedicating this work.
On returning to Paris, I sent him a detailed letter on 8 May 1995, congratulating him for an overall happy result of his painstaking research. At the same time, I took the liberty of suggesting some minor changes, such as : (a) his classifying Kanailal Datta among the weaver-caste (p.192) : Datta – with its variants Dutta, Dutt - is a respectable name from the Kayastha caste (to which Sri Aurobindo belonged) ; (b) Minto’s friend “Rasbehari Bose” : it should have been Ghose (p.220); (c) notes 27 and 29 on p.295 referred to the Bengalee, February 1908 : it was 1909. More to Peter’s displeasure, I reminded him that unlike the American usage, the English noun ‘practice’ usually becomes ‘practise’ as a verb
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whereas – I pointed out to him - on p.72, footnote, he chose “to practice” and a few lines above he wrote “Aurobindo began practising”, just as on p.136 “to practise yoga”, before falling back to “practicing yoga”.
The other notes – certainly according to his expectation - concerned obviously Jatindra Nath Mukherjee. Verifying with and referring to “most authoritative sources” including some of my publications, Heehs had mentioned him altogether seven times :
Item 1 (p.52) :
Sri Aurobindo “had a more significant meeting with Jatindra Nath Mukherjee. A handsome young man whose ‘stature was like that of a warrior’, Jatin excelled in physical activities and was practically fearless. He earned his nickname, ‘Bagha Jatin’, by single- handedly killing a leopard (chitra-bagha) with a knife… After his meeting with Aurobindo and Jatin Banerjee [in 1903], Jatindra Mukherjee became one of the most active revolutionaries in Bengal.”
The very first point I raised was about “the leopard”: Peter in his Bibliography (Secondary Sources) had included Two Great Indian Revolutionaries (1966) by Uma Mukherjee. I informed Peter that no blood relation of Jatindra’s and somewhat biased against him, this author had, however, investigated honestly on Jatindra’s “courageous feat of killing a Royal Bengal Tiger with a dagger” (p.167): in a footnote she admitted clearly, “The skin of the striped Bengal tiger (not leopard)… as well as the dagger with which it was killed was presented to Dr Suresh Prasad Sarbadhikari… Dr Kanak Sarbadhikari, son of Dr Suresh S. and at present Principal of the Calcutta Medical College, has stated… that his father who was then the leading surgeon of Calcutta took upon himself the responsibility for curing that fatally wounded patient whose whole body had been poisoned by the tiger’s nails.” (p.168) 4
I ignore if Heehs – grown whimsically fond of his chitra-bagha
- ever cared to modify his idiosyncrasy even apropos of this minor historical fact in the light of such irrefutable data. I was warned, all the same, that – as it will be seen later - the great Historian Laureate suffers from an acute allergy to all critical observation.
Item 2 (p.195) :
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The “revolutionary swami” [Jatin Banerji] kept his interest in the struggle, advising in later years “terrorists (sic!) like” Jatindra Mukherjee et al. I thought it charitable to inform Heehs that JB was hardly one year older than JM. Sorry for the injustice Barin Ghose had done to JB, out of sympathy and esteem JM had been in touch with this senior colleague and, in return, desirous to extend the Jugantar into a Pan-Indian movement, had derived timely collaboration from JB who commanded a great influence in Upper India.
Item 3 (p.221):
Released from prison, Sri Aurobindo published the Karmayogin in June [1909]: drifting from their initial spiritual slant, his speeches and writings became more explicitly political. Quoting an official document, Heehs wrote: “Simultaneously, he began quietly to rebuild the revolutionary network, encouraging leaders like Jatin Mukherjee and Satish Bose to continue recruitment, training and, when possible, action.”5 Facts as they stand cannot justify, however, this bringing together of Jatin Mukherjee and Satish; the latter no more played any active part at this crucial turning point.
Item 4 (p.227):
[On 24 January 1910] the “hated detective” Shamsul Alam was shot dead by Birendra Nath Dattagupta. I may remind the readers that as an adequate counterpoint to the more and more fierce series of repressions from the Government, and to secure adequate defence for the patriots under trial, in Calcutta as well as in the districts, Jatindra enacted like a fireworks pageant a successive number of daring assaults in broad daylight : quite a few “outrages” (in 1908 : on 2 June and 29 November; in 1909 : on 27 February,
23 April, 16 August, 24 September and 28 0ctober), an attempt to murder the Lt Governor of Bengal (7 November 1908).6 After the successful assassination of the Prosecutor Ashutosh Biswas (10 February 1909) came the turn of the Deputy Commissioner Shamsul Alam : both these officers were known for their zeal to get the capital punishment for most of the accused, including Sri Aurobindo.
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In fact, few historians have attached enough importance to the fact that on 21 January 1910, Shamsul had received green light for arresting or re-arresting all those who were accused by Benga, a well-informed revolutionary turned approver, bought over by Shamsul. Taking into consideration a sample of some of Heehs’ “inadvertent” versions of presenting facts, I shall have to reiterate often an obvious example : Jatindra’s directing Satish Sarkar (who had accompanied Birendra) to tell Sri Aurobindo that the mission was over. Heehs’s Version 1 held: “According to Nolini Kanta Gupta, Aurobindo was ‘very happy’ when he received the news.”7 Taken into custody and tortured, Birendra, the young excutor of Jatindra’s will for the Shamsul mission, made a clean breast of it and realised the blunder too late, shortly before he was hung. Jatindra was arrested.
Readers may remember that Sri Aurobindo, in his Bengali reminiscences of the prison days (Karakahini), mentioned that on the very first day of his arrest (2 May 1908), he was to be acquainted with “Maulavi” Shamsul Alam of the detective Police, who was not yet as influential and zealous as he was going to be; he had candidly discussed with the distinguished prisoner about the common essence of Hinduism and Islam, such as A-U-M and A- LA-M, which mean the same principle. This preaching was interspersed with innocent professional remarks like, “It has not been very clever of you to have accepted that your younger brother transformed the garden into a bomb factory.” Alam quoted the most valuable words of his father which had been serving him as guidance during his moral and financial career : “Never neglect the meal that has been served.” Sri Aurobindo narrated it with the comment that the way Alam had been ogling at him led to an impression that Sri Aurobindo himself was that meal. Behind this subtle humour, Sri Aurobindo revealed the course of Shamsul’s ambitious ascent that he had intuitively anticipated.
Item 5 (p.242):
Jatindra Nath Mukherjee – with “more capable hands” than Barin - was the “greatest exponent” of the “loose organisation type” of secret society. Dattagupta mentioned Jatindra Mukherjee
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and other unnamed leaders (“Aurobindo obviously being one”) as the organiser of the murder plot. Jatindra Mukherjee and forty-six associates were prosecuted in the Howrah Conspiracy Case, a sequel to the Alipore Case. Eventually Jatindra was discharged after a complex trial. Admitting the efficiency of Jatindra Mukherjee’s policy of a decentralised party, Heehs followed the conclusion - already published 8, - and wrote that only six of the forty-six men sent up were convicted : “The Government’s purpose in instituting proceedings was to break the back of the West Bengal organisation. As it turned out this strategy backfired.”(p.245). Heehs explains it as follows :
Item 6 (p.245) :
“During his year-long confinement as an under-trial prisoner, Jatin Mukherjee was able to bring together the ‘disjointed threads of the organization’, becoming after his release the ‘unchallenged leader of a more coherent party’.”9 In his Report on Revolutionary Organisation, J.C. Nixon mentions how the earliest known attempts in Bengal to promote societies for political or semi-political ends were associated with Barrister P. Mitter, Miss Saralabala Ghosal and a Japanese called Okakura : their activities commenced in Calcutta somewhere about 1900, “and are said to have spread to many of the districts of Bengal and to have flourished particularly at Kushtia, where Jatindra Nath Mukherjee was leader.”10 Contrary to data available in Nixon’s Report, Heehs maintained an enigmatic silence : (a) about Jatindra Mukherjee’s perfect command over the violence he had initiated [where Gandhiji was to fail, in Chauri Chaura], by suspending all ‘Actions’ for three years following his release; (b) about Jatindra Mukherjee’s “very early” intuition that the imminent outbreak of the War was making ‘the possibility of a revolution a much more tangible thing’; (c) about Jatindra Mukherjee’s meeting the German Crown Prince on visit to Calcutta in 1912 and obtaining the promise that arms and ammunition would be supplied for the planned insurrection.11
Item 7 (pp.248-249) :
After his release, Jatindra Mukherjee set himself up as a “law- abiding contractor.” “For the next two (sic!) years he and his
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associates worked quietly to rebuild the Jugantar organization. Under Jatin’s direction, revolutionaries like Amarendra Nath Chatterjee (a man previously associated with Upendranath Banerjee and Aurobindo Ghose) ) set up dummy (sic!) enterprises in Calcutta and the districts to serve as fronts for the transmission of funds and information. After (sic!) the War broke out Jatindra and his friends laid plans for procuring German money and arms…” On 9 September 1915, the battle at Balasore took place: Jatindra fought and died. He was recognised by the Government as “perhaps the boldest and the most actively dangerous of all Bengal revolutionaries.” / “The discovery of the wartime conspiracies prompted the imperial government to pass the Defence of India Act, under which hundreds of suspected terrorists were interned without trial for the duration of the war.” (The Bomb, p.249)
At this stage, as a conclusion, I learnt that in order to be eligible as informant of an objective historian, one has to be introduced by a respectable channel and – judging from Heehs’ eloquent silence, I presumed - has to prove how helplessly one lacks in all critical faculty.
“Biographers must take their documents as they find them.” (Lives, p. xiv)
Eager to see the consequences of my lèse majesty before the wrath of a learned champion of objective history, I had to await the Brief Biography of Sri Aurobindo by Heehs, brought out in 1999 by the same Oxford University Press. Requested by the well-known French publishing house Desclée de Brouwer, in 2000 I published my long expected Sri Aurobindo, released enthusiastically by Shri
K. Sibal, India’s Ambassador in France. As a fatal irony, an erstwhile Aurovillian was prompted - by God knows who - to rush, translate into French and push-sale the Brief Biography by Heehs, scrubbing all other previous books on Sri Aurobindo as “hagiography”. Did not this sort of spirited exclusivity cause the destruction of the grand library at Alexandria ?
Confirming my apprehension, in his Brief Biography, Heehs - in a masterly hocus-pocus, - felled much of the critical supports of
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his previous book (The Bomb), in contempt of all available evident facts. As far as my specialised field was concerned, I realised how a turn-coat (“objective”) history-maker could cynically inform his readers – for instance, Heeh’s Version 2 12 – about the killing of Shamsul Alam by “revolutionaries indirectly (sic!) connected with Aurobindo”.13 By this blatant lack of cautious esteem for a well- known subject as this (very often badly treated), he proved how unworthy he was of any respect from his readers. And he proved also how glibly – probably apropos of other topics as well - he could dismiss facts as fiction, and entertain fiction as fact.
In quest of a reply to Heehs’ having hastily condemned Jatin Mukherjee as “indirectly connected with Aurobindo”, I brought together several adequate references found in the official British Indian archives; among them was W. Sealy’s most point-blank observation, which seemed to be a thumping slap meant for Peter’s cheeky face : it recorded that Jatindra Nath Mukherjee “worked directly under Arabinda Ghosh” 14. The coup de grace came from the reminiscences of Suresh Chakrabarti (Moni) : he narrates that shortly before the Shamsul incident, Sri Aurobindo had been learning Tamil. One day, at the Karmayogin office, amused like a school-boy, Sri Aurobindo asked : “Do you know what is Piren-tir naat tattakoptaa ?” He told his dumb-founded listeners: “That is ‘Birendranath Dattagupta’ in Tamil.”15 Most logically, this statement leads to the hypothesis that Sri Aurobindo was already familiar with the name of the one who was commissioned by Jatin Mukherjee to kill Shamsul Alam. Heehs himself had admitted that Birendranath’s “accomplice Satish Sarkar ran to inform Jatindra Nath Mukherjee, who had arranged the shooting. Jatin directed Satish to the Karmayogin office to tell Aurobindo (…)”16
Let us recall that F.C. Daly, DIG, Special Branch (Bengal), in his Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal has described Charu Ch. Dutt, Subodh Mullick’s brother-in- law and a Judge of the Bombay Civil Service, “as one of the prime movers of the conspiracy and one of the chief advocates of assassination. It was said by [F.C. Daly’s] informant that in 1907 he took Prafulla Chaki (…) to Darjeeling to throw a bomb at the
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Lieutenant-Governor, but they were unable to accomplish the deed for want of a suitable opportunity.”17 As a complementary item, Moni’s book further states that while at Darjeeling, his friend Prafulla Chaki had approached Jatin Mukherjee for killing the Lt Governor. “That was the first occasion he had of meeting the famous revolutionary Jatindranath. Jatindranath promised him : ‘In the future I shall personally help you in this mission. Don’t regret. Go back.’ Appointed at the Secretariat of the Lt Governor, Jatin Mukherjee had been then posted at Darjeeling.”18
(This split) “marked the end (sic!) of the Bengal secret society. The groups in Calcutta that survived acted alone and without vigour.” (Lives, p. 77)
Speaking about the wrangling between Barin and Jatin [Banerji], Heehs informs that in autumn (1904) Sri Aurobindo and Barin went to Deoghar… Letters arrived with fresh complaints against Jatin [Banerji]. Fed up, Aurobindo told Barin : “I can see that nothing will ever come of Bengal.” In The Lives the Jatin who has been mentioned about half a dozen times is Banerji, the unfortunate object of Barin’s hostility. He was fortunate otherwise not to have a grandson who would challenge the miscreant ventures of the historian Heehs. With some success, Sri Aurobindo had tried to “get to the bottom of the conflict”. After this split, the historian Heehs claimed not only the ominous end of the secret society in Bengal but decreed further with self-sufficient authority: “The groups in Calcutta that survived acted alone and without vigour.”19 Before examining such a bombastic and cynical statement (which is an oversimplified misinformation reeking with malice), the very first question that disturbs us is “Was it really the end of the Bengal secret society?”
Two other questions arise :
Ample documents prove that – sensing the anti-Partition agitation in 1905 - Barin went back to Bengal and joined the secret society thriving under Jatin Mukherjee’s men who were neither
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alone - as far as official records reveal, - nor deficient in vigour. On deputation to the Central Criminal Intelligence Department,
G.C. Denham, says in his report on Revolutionary Activities in Benares, that he followed Hrishikesh Kanjilal to Calcutta, in March 1906, when the publication of Jugantar was settled “upon the approval of Barin [Ghose], Bhupen [Datta], Jotin [Mukherjee] and others.”20 Heehs may ignore how Nixon’s Report recorded that in the early part of 1906 there existed, other than the Jugantar: (1) The Calcutta Anushilan Samiti (with its branch in Dacca, under Pulin Das); (2) The Chhatra Bhandar; (2a) The Chhatra Bhandar mess; (3) the Atmonnati Samiti.21 Nixon gave an interesting picture of how these groups came to exist and thrived.
The central secret society is recorded to thrive as well and had at last its successive headquarters at the Jugantar office in Calcutta
: (1) in the area called Champatola : 27 Kanailal Dhar Lane (March 1906 to October 1907); (2) in the area called Maniktola 22
(November 1907 to April 1908); (3) in Deoghar : Seal’s Lodge 23 (January to April 1908); (4) in the area called Bhawanipore 24 (March to April 1908); (5) in the area called Shyambazar : 15 Gopimohan Datta Lane (April 1908). Sri Aurobindo had knowledge of all these centres.25
W. Sealy in his Connections with Bihar and Orissa, described Barin Ghose’s bomb factory at Seal’s Lodge near Deoghar and added : “Jatin Mukharji 26 visited the place also and left his family there on one occasion.”27 Jatin Mukherjee’s close associate Bhavabhushan Mitra led there a very active life, as a link between Jatin and Barin. Hemendra Prasad Ghose (Sri Aurobindo’s cousin), too, was a member of the centre in Deoghar where Jatin and Barin worked with their associates. Even Barin’s mother, Swarnalata Devi, volunteered to keep a watch on the bomb factory inside her cottage, with a sword.28 It is further known that as “Sri Aurobindo’s direct contact” Jatin organised and led secret societies in the districts, up to Darjeeling.29 The same source also confirms that Jatin Mukherjee backed the publishers of the Jugantar.30 The List of Political Suspects in Bengal, upto 1912 records at this juncture four addresses for Jatindra Nath Mukherjee : (1) Koya, Kumarkhali, Nadiya; (2)
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Carstairs Town, Deoghar, Sonthal Parganas; (3) 59 Beniatola Street, Calcutta; (4) 275 Upper Chitpur Road, Calcutta.31
Nixon in his Report on Revolutionary Organisation identified the Maniktola Garden as the centre of the Jugantar party towards the end of 1907, “with its network of branch societies throughout Bengal… Of these branch societies, it is necessary to mention four (…): (1) Midnapore, led by Satyendra Basu; (2) Kushtia, led by Jatindra Nath Mukharjee; (3) Bankura, led by Ram Das Chakrabarti; (4) Chandernagore, led by Charu Chandra Ray.
“…The approaching Indian national Congress to be held at Surat in December 1907 was probably the immediate cue which led to the crop of outrages which now followed.”32
Truly speaking, in December 1906, at Raja Subodh Mullick’s house, during the session of the Congress in Calcutta, there was a historic conference of the revolutionary leaders, presided over by
P. Mitter and attended by Sri Aurobindo. In addition to Subodh Mullick, were present Abinash Chakrabarty, Bhupendra Nath Datta (Vivekananda’s brother), Indra Nandi, Annada Kaviraj; among the important leaders who represented the districts figured Jatindra Nath Mukherjee and his uncle Lalitkumar Chatterjee (Nadia), Jnan Basu (Midnapore), Bireshwar Mukherjee (Jessore), Paresh Lahiri (Mymensingh), Nikhil Ray Maulik and Pulin Das (Dacca). Sri Aurobindo “explained the necessity of money” and admitted that it “could, then, be secured through only dacoity”. He said that money thus obtained “should be regarded as loan from the victims” of such a levy, “to be repaid after independence”. The suggestion was accepted unanimously. A similar conference was held in 1907 in the same house.”33
Nixon continued his survey of the situation in and around Calcutta and stated : “Besides the prominent parties already described, there existed many smaller gangs and samitis mostly owning a nominal attachment to one of the bigger parties and all proud to emulate their examples.”34 Equally known as Sri Aurobindo’s man and Jatin Mukherjee’s close associate, Nanigopal Sengupta led the “Howrah Gang” “operating in the districts of
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Hooghly, Howrah and the 24 Parganas, and which had a fair membership towards the end of 1907. It claimed to be directly attached to the main Jugantar party.”35
Nixon located at Bhowanipore [Bhavanipore], early in 1908, a party under Bimala Charan De, “which considered its leader to be Jatindra Nath Mukherjee… It was this party which later in 1915 led the revolutionary movement (…)”36 He located “still another party during 1908, at Bhatpara, associated with the name of Jogen Thakur. Under his influence, Bipin Ganguli and the Atmonnati members commenced a series of dacoities in 1913.37 F.C. Daly,
D.I.G. of the Special Branch, in his Report, noted that a new gang commenced operations on the Eastern Bengal State Railway, from June 1908 (soon after the arrest of the Maniktola conspirators) till April 1909. Bombs used were all cocoanut shells “with a mixture of sulphide of arsenic and chlorate of potash… highly dangerous… Bits of broken glass, nails, pins of jute combs, etc. were stuffed into the bombs (…) A gang of Brahmins of Bhatpara, near Naihati… [was] led by a person named Norendra Nath Bhattacharji.”38 Recruited by the restless Vedic scholar Mokshada Charan Samadhyayi, Norendra turned out to be one of the close associates of Mokshada’s friend Jatin Mukherjee; he was to become
M.N. Roy, known all over the world. Shortly before the arrests in the Alipore case, under the patronage of Munsif Abinash Chakrabarti and Jatin Mukherjee, Nikhilesvar Ray Maulik took over the control of the Jugantar newspaper and shifted the Press at 68 Maniktola Street, where he lived with Kartik Datta, one of the chief workers of the paper. With Keshab Chandra De, he was the brain behind the throwing of vitriol on the Police during the E.I. Railway strike in 1906. On 23 June 1908, when Nikhilesvar was arrested, Kartik took over the control of the party, issued the Jugantar leaflets containing detailed methods of manufacturing picric acid bombs. He shifted the Press to 28 Shampukur Street and took a house in Chetla for the rendez-vous of the party members. Mokshada acted as its adviser. In September they moved to a house near Chandernagore.39
With the break up of Kartik Datta’s group, the Howrah party led by Nanigopal Sengupta came into prominence.
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It has been pertinently observed that the arrest of the Maniktala group and the punitive “measures only made the terrorists (sic!) change their policy. Though the samitis had been carrying on their legally objectionable activities in secret, they had flourished openly as patriotic associations till the end of 1908. From 1909 they went wholly underground and their history became shrouded in a darkness…”40 According to Nixon, at about 1910, the Province was said to be divided up as follows:
(1) Calcutta (led by Indranath Nandi); (2) 24 Parganas, Howrah & Huughli (Nanigopal Sengupta); (3) Rajshahi, Nadia, Jessore & Hooghly (Jatindra Nath Mukherjee); (4) Nator, Dighapatiya & Jamalpur (Satish Sarkar); (5) Mymensingh, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Jamalpur & Cooch Behar (Amaresh Kanjilal); (6) Berhampur & Murshidabad (Suren Chakabarti).41
Disapproving Barin’s centralised organisation (pattern to be followed by the Dhaka Anushilan) and his untimely terrorism in a spirit of showdown, Jatin Mukherjee had developed a loose confederation of regional groups which proved its merits during prosecutions like the Howrah Gang case. For instance, while managing the groups in Natore, Dighapatiya and Jamalpur under Jatin’s leadership, Satish Sarkar 42 did not know that Amaresh Kanjilal was playing exactly the same role in Mymensingh, Dinajpur, Rangpur, Cooch Behar. “Secrecy was absolute in those days – particularly with Jatin.”43
As a wise conclusion, aware of this internal arrangement, Nixon admitted : “Although a separate name and a separate individuality have been given to these various parties (…) it is very clear that the bigger figures were in close communication with one another and frequently accepted members of two or more of these samitis.”44 This became evident during the consequent Howrah Case (1910-11), which began in 1908.
In the light of these details, can any reader rely on Heehs’ judgment concerning the split between Barin and Jatin Banerji as the end of the Bengal secret society? Or can anybody believe that the groups in Calcutta that survived were “doomed to act
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alone and without vigour” ? We learn that the punitive murders arranged by Jatindra Mukherjee “served some purpose.” The District Magistrate of Khulna was struck by the “fear shown by the great majority of the witnesses… It was obvious that many of them spoke with reluctance while a considerable number … made but the slightest effort to identify any of them… The demeanour of the witnesses was a striking testimony to the terror which the gang has inspired.” 45 Let us not forget that on 25 January 1910 (the day after Shamsul was assassinated), Viceroy Minto declared : “A spirit hitherto unknown to India has come into existence (…), a spirit of lawlessness which seeks to subvert (…) British rule…” 46 Overwhelmed, he left the Indian scene. Arrested on 27 January with forty-six major suspects, in the teeth of severe trials in the Howrah Case, Jatin and most of the co-accused got released on 21 February 1911. The newly appointed Viceroy, Hardinge, singling out Jatin as “the real criminal”, regretted the dismantling of the seditious 10th Jat Regiment and wrote : “Nothing could be worse (…) than the condition of Bengal and Eastern Bengal. There is practically no Government in either province…”47
“(Biographers) 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.” (Lives, Preface, p. xiv)
Recently a well-wishing reviewer of The Lives has used information borrowed from Heehs which claims that Sri Aurobindo “supported armed insurrection” till around 1910 only. By then, “British repression had all but crushed the movement.” 48
In spite of my audacity for proposing alterations in The Bomb, Heehs has granted, however, one single mention to Jatin Mukherjee in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, (pp.201-202) : “Since his release from jail, Aurobindo had little to do with the revolutionaries. He advised leaders such as Jatindranath Mukherjee when they
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approached him, but his position as the country’s most visible Extremist made more active involvement impossible.” After Shamsul’s assassination – Version 3 49, - “Rather rashly (sic!), Jatindranath told Satish to go to the Karmayogin office to inform Aurobindo. He was, Satish later recalled, ‘very happy’ to hear the news.” Does not the process of retouching photography come to our mind by this artifice of light and shade - rhetorically introduced
- by Heehs with his crisp adverbs sugar-coated by an efficient alliteration (“Rather rashly”) ? Forgetful of my interview with Satish (that Heehs had himself mentioned earlier in a footnote referring to an official document 50, he adds that the information concerning Satish’s mission was given to him by Nolini Kanta Gupta. Memory is indeed selective. Even Heehs nods (out of contempt for his own golden rule that looks down on hagiographers).
Let us not forget, however, that in The Lives a similar feat of compassion, on p.390, had led Heehs-the-David to deign cite only once his redoubtable Goliath of a “biographer” : K.R.S. Iyengar.51 Several others, less fortunate, have been deprived of this immortality : trivial “hagiographies” by Diwakar, Keshavmurti, Pramode Kumar Sen, Rishabhchand, Sisirkumar Mitra never counted for Heehs-the-Great. Similarly, henceforth deciding to strip Jatin Mukherjee of all possible credit, The Lives has scrupulously dropped all references to such publications as by Arun Chandra Guha52[56], Jadugopal Mukherjee, Uma Mukherjee. Unable to resist the temptation of including Sri Aurobindo’s timely advice to Bhupendra Kumar Datta (which determined the Jugantar attitude towards Gandhi in 1920), Heehs has overlooked my publications before finding a second-hand reference.53 He has altogether kept clear of the track of Yogendra Vidyabhushan who had accommodated Sri Aurobindo in 1903 and had arranged for Jatin Mukherjee’s meeting with him. According to Hemendraprasad Ghose (K.D. Ghose’s nephew and Sri Aurobindo’s colleague on the Bande Mataram staff), Jatin led the Jugantar movement for over a yuga [twelve years].54
While Jatin Mukherjee was an under-trial prisoner since January 1910, before leaving Bengal for Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo had
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left his instruction with Motilal Roy to follow Jatin Mukherjee.55 Momentarily dejected after his failed attempt to assassinate Viceroy Hardinge in December 1912, Rash Behari Bose with a medical leave had gone to Chandernagore in August 1913 and, immediately, accompanied Motilal to the flood relief in Burdwan, to work under Jatin Mukherjee’s guidance.
Motilal in his description of Jatin Mukherjee’s eagerness to listen to the account of Sri Aurobindo’s last days in Bengal showed how receptive Jatindra was to the Leader’s instruction.56 Contact with Jatindra Mukherjee “added a new impulse” to Bose’s revolutionary zeal. In Jatindra Mukherjee, he “discovered a real leader of men.”57 Several meetings between the two at one of Jatin Mukherjee’s headquarters (the Shramajivi Samavaya 58, a Nationalist enterprise run by Amarendra Chatterjee) led to “a plan of armed rising, modelled on the Rising of 1857, with the help of the British Indian Army.” Contrary to Peter’s pooh-poohing libel (“dummy enterprises”) 59, this group of stores had an immense success since the anti-Partition agitations, as we shall see. Thanks to his emissaries like Panchu Gopal Banerjee and Nikhileshwar Ray Maulik of the Chhatra Bhandar 60, Jatin Mukherjee had a long contact with officers of several regiments and, during the Howrah Case, as we have already mentioned, the entire 10th Jat regiment was dismantled, and some of the officers court-martialled for having tampered with the loyalty of soldiers.
Bose requested Motilal Roy “to pay a personal visit to Pondicherry in order to obtain the blessings of Sri Aurobindo for the contemplated armed rising. Roy left for Pondicherry in September and returned in November 1913 “with the latter’s moral sanction to the cause.”61
Three months later, in February 1914, commissioned by Sri Aurobindo, Nolini Kanta Gupta, Saurin Bose (Mrinalini Ghose’s cousin) and Suresh Chakrabarty (Moni) went from Pondicherry to meet Jatindra Mukherjee at the Shramajivi : they were received by Amarendra Chatterjee. On seeing Jatindra coming down the stairs, impatient, Moni greeted him : “Dada, Sri Aurobindo wants you to take advantage of the War and do something.” Quick in
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observing that the boys from Pondicherry were dogged by two very active CID agents, Jatindra in mock anger cried out : “Go and tell Aurobindo Ghose that Jatin Mukherjee is still in Bengal and does not care for anybody’s advice!” Startled by this unusually histrionic voice and the unexpected choice of words designating Sri Aurobindo, Jatindra’s right-hand man, Atul Ghose, rushed down to appraise the situation.
In October 1963, when I interviewed Atul Ghose in presence of Bhupendra Kumar Datta, Atul explained the situation and wanted me to inform Nolini Kanta about the fact. On getting back to Pondicherry, when I informed Nolini Kanta about the incident, he appreciated the gesture and regretted that he would have liked to learn about it before 1950. Did he mean that the report of this mission could have astonished Sri Aurobindo ? Both Nolini Kanta and Moni in their respective reminiscences were to acknowledge that before they left, Amarendra presented them with a woollen shawl each; Nolini did not forget Amarendra’s affectionate comment : “Payable when able.” Moni was to remember that the one he had received was deep green.62
In spite of such a fallacious transmission, however, Sri Aurobindo remained attentive to the developments leading to an armed insurrection under Jatindra Mukherjee, which was going to be the culmination of one of his cherished projects. Nirodbaran confirmed it : “The Force has withdrawn !, commented Sri Aurobindo, following the nirvana of Jatin Mukherjee.”63
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), better known as dreamer of human unity and founder of an integral yoga aiming at the Life Divine, was however unanimously, father of a militant nationalist politics which helped the Congress Party wriggle out of its Moderate and loyal practice of petition before demanding a self-rule (Swaraj). Labelled as Extremists, the trio Lal-Bal-Pal 64 supported this revolutionary turn. In 1905, the entire country rose against the Government’s decision to divide Bengal into two provinces in order to minimise the Bengali influence in the colonial administration.
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Sri Aurobindo seized this opportunity : in addition to an open challenge of boycotting everything British and of passive resistance, he added the dimension of a secret society crowning the movement with an armed insurrection. In 1910, he retired to Pondicherry for concentrating on experiments in spiritual living. In 1914, a French disciple joined him and was recognised as The Mother of the Ashram that developed around them.
Source: Prithwindra Mukherjee, The Asianists’ ASIA, Vol.5 (2008) http://stateless.freehosting.net/menupage.htm
Bagha Jatin is a loving nickname people gave to Jatindra Nath Mukherjee (1879-1915), a fearless revolutionary leader. As a college student, desirous to be a monk, Jatindra had approached Vivekananda and had learned that even an honest family man can lead an ideal life : engaged in social relief, under the Master’s influence, he came to work for India’s political freedom as an indispensable condition for man’s spiritual progress. Among founders of secret societies, he took a creative part in Sri Aurobindo’s nationalist programme since 1903, inventing the ‘Extremist’ Jugantar movement.65 While awaiting shipments of German arms on the coast of Orissa, he was surrounded by a detachment of armed police. Promoting the revolutionary endeavour from the phase of individual martyrdom to the guerrilla, he with his four associates fought and fell in 1915, leaving behind them suitable conditions for an imminent mass movement.
Source: Prithwindra Mukherjee, Bagha Jatin, National Book Trust, New Delhi, 2010, launched by H.E. Pranab Mukherjee who considered this biography to be a gist of India’s armed struggle for freedom.
Jayantilal Parekh was born near Surat in 1913. His father was a banker. Jayantilal had an inborn artistic talent. After a year in the Bombay School of Architecture, he entered the art school of Vishwabharati (founded by Rabindranath Tagore) as a student of Nandalal Bose. While travelling the South in Tagore’s entourage, he visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. After finishing his course in Vishwabharati in 1935, he settled in the Ashram where - along with work of different sorts,- the Mother encouraged him to
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continue drawing and painting. Jayantilal played a significant role in the development of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, and was the guiding force behind the publication of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library. In 1973 he established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, which continues the work of preserving and publishing the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In 1995 he initiated the publication of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. In January 1999 he died of a cancer. Jayantilal quietly produced lasting results.
Source: Internet site, https://savitriera.wordpress.com/.../ jayantilal-parekh/
Peter Heehs, after a brief college life, lived in a New York Yoga centre as a stock boy and taxi driver. He reached Pondicherry in the early 1970s. Asked by Jayantilal “to collect material dealing on the life of Sri Aurobindo, to organise his manuscripts and prepare them for publication.” Making full use of this springboard, Heehs gained momentum as historian, while preparing a so-called authentic biography of the most revered contemporary spiritual figure : Sri Aurobindo. His motivation behind this enterprise becomes obvious when we are told that the very first and warm review of this “biography” was published by one notorious Jeffrey Kripal who seems to be a personal friend of Heehs’.
Source: Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
Jeffrey Kripal’s 1995 book from University of Chicago, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a psychoanalytic study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. He argues that “Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic.” The book Kali’s Child …caused intense controversy among both Western and Indian audiences which still persists unresolved. The deductions of the book Kali’s Child have been disputed and argued to have been built on mistranslations, distortion of sources, misuse of tantra, misuse of psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics.
Source : Wikipedia
Prithwindra Mukherjee (Historian, Musicologist, Poet) : b. Calcutta, 1936. Brought up : Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
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(1948-1966). *Studies : (a) “Higher Course”, Pondicherry (1958);
(b) Docteur d’Université, Paris Sorbonne (1970); (c) Docteur d’Etat, Paris (1986).
*Experience : (a) 1955-66 : Teaching languages & literature at Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education; (b) 1974-81 : Lecturer : (i) on Indian Civilisation, University of Paris-INALCO
; (ii) on Indian Philosophy, University of Paris XII (c) 1971-81 : Part-time Research Scholar at Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris ; (d) 1973-81: Author-Producer of Features, Radio-France;
(e) 1981-2003 : Full-time Research Scholar at National Centre of Scientific Research, Human & Social Sciences.
*Publications: more than 60 books, 400 articles & papers in Bengali, French & English. 12 LPs & CDs, 2 Documentary Films.
*Distinctions: (a) French Government Scholarship (1966-70); (b) Fulbright Scholarship (1981); (c) Medal from the Society of Encouragement to Progress, UNESCO (1983); CNRS Bronze Medal, Paris (1986); Sri Aurobindo Award from the Governor of West Bengal (2003); CNRS Special Medal (2003). Chevalier : (i) in the Order of Arts & Letters, Ministry of Culture, France (2009);
(ii) in the Order of Palmes académiques (Academic Laurels), Ministry of Education, (2015); (iii) 2014 Hirayama Award of the French Academy for the totality of his publications.
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my conversation with Satish Sarkar.
17 Amiya K. Samanta (ed.), Terrorism in Bengal : A Collection of Documents, Vol. I, 1995, pp.16-17
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It should be first pointed out that Peter Heehs has criticised practically all the major and minor works of Sri Aurobindo, subtly or overtly, as if he were an authority on all the subjects that have been dealt with—yoga, philosophy, Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Indian culture, social and political thought, poetry and drama. In fact, it is hard to find any works of Sri Aurobindo that have not been criticised by him! A biographer who goes berserk in this way with his biased and caustic comments on a great spiritual figure is not really worth serious consideration. Yet these ill-motivated assertions need to be answered and rebutted at once. Below are some of the objectionable extracts from the Lives on the major writings of Sri Aurobindo, followed by my comments.
The Life Divine
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 practiced. 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’.” 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
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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. (Lives, 277)
Do philosophers have to be admitted to a club to be acknowledged for their greatness? If this is how Heehs judges the value of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, then I can very well imagine which club he wants to join to become famous (or rather infamous!)— obviously the Chicago club of erotic psychopaths led by Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal.
Taking his criticism more seriously than it deserves, it is common knowledge that there is a fundamental difference between Indian and Western philosophy. The former bases itself on spiritual experience while the latter on the analytical knowledge of the mind. This does not mean that Indian philosophy has no logic, but that its basic assumptions are different, which does not prevent it to be logical within its own framework. By refusing to rank the author of the Life Divine as a philosopher, Heehs shows his ignorance of this fundamental difference known to every student of Indian philosophy, for he has not only dismissed Sri Aurobindo but all Indian philosophy at one sweep.
By the way, Heehs’s claim of his “highly appreciative, 2800 word treatment of the Life Divine” is nothing but a good summary of the book almost entirely in Sri Aurobindo’s words, without a single word of appreciation coming from him. At the end of the summary, he prepares the reader for a condemnation of the book by saying that Sri Aurobindo did not study enough of European philosophy, implying that he did not have the necessary philosophical background when he wrote the Life Divine. I quote from an autobiographical note of Sri Aurobindo in which he explains how he wrote his philosophy:
My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was
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never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.1
It is strange that Heehs quotes part of the above passage on pp. 276-277, for it contradicts his later statement on not considering Sri Aurobindo a philosopher at all! For, after correctly informing the reader that Sri Aurobindo wrote his philosophy from the plane of the Higher Mind, how can he resort to the silly criticism of The Life Divine not being mental enough to be considered philosophy? It means he rejects it on the ground that it was written in a superhuman way and with a higher inspiration than the rational mind! Heehs perhaps does not know that the higher inspiration can come with the necessary logic to express itself in intellectual terms, as it did in the case of Sri Aurobindo, and that philosophy need not be always produced by the slow laborious mind. It was because Sri Aurobindo found European philosophy “a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real” that he did not care to study it thoroughly, not because of any inability of the logical and philosophical mind, as Heehs suggests. For when the time came to express his spiritual experience in intellectual terms, Sri Aurobindo could easily muster his logical faculties and write his magnum opus The Life Divine.
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It is by constantly switching his position between the larger spiritual vision and the small and ignorant perspective of the materialistic mind that Heehs manages to confuse the reader. He then lays undue stress on the negative criticism of Sri Aurobindo gathered from the research of small-time scholars like Stephen Phillips and perfunctorily fulfils his duty of presenting the greatness of Sri Aurobindo by saying “a few nice words” on him. The subconscient reason that prevents him from doing full justice to Sri Aurobindo is of course his inordinate fear of being counted among the other “hagiographers” of the past and not being accepted by the current academia in the West and India, which mostly judges things from the materialistic point of view.
I will now show how Heehs proceeds in his deceptive presentation. The paragraph below from the Lives, as I have mentioned before, prepares the reader for an outright condemnation of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy on the basis that he had not studied enough of European philosophy to be able to write his own.
Aurobindo had little interest in philosophy and read few of the major Eastern or Western philosophers. At Cambridge he read a few Platonic dialogues as part of his study of Greek literature. He tried to acquaint himself with Hume, Kant, and Hegel, but retained little of the little he read. In general, European philosophy seemed to him to be “a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key.” Most of the ideas that he absorbed were “picked up desultorily” in his general reading. This included the works of the English Romantic poets, some books by Friedrich Nietzsche, and secondhand accounts of the theory of evolution. His study of Sanskrit literature led him eventually to the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda, but he did not study the dialectics of Vedanta or other Indian philosophical systems; only some “general ideas” stayed with him. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to say that he was innocent of philosophy when he began to write The Life Divine. The books he read were enough to introduce him to the classic
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problems of the discipline and to acquaint him with some of the leading schools. (Lives, 276)
Note the supreme conceit in the sentence “Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to say that he was innocent of philosophy when he began to write The Life Divine”, as if Heehs were a philosopher of some standing in order to pass such comments on Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge of philosophy. On what does he base his comments? On Sri Aurobindo’s own remarks (!) and perhaps on the lists of books he had ordered, as if they are a faithful record of all that he had read. But why don’t we simply judge Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy on its own merit than by the academic background with which he wrote, which is anyway so difficult to determine now? Mark also how he exploits Sri Aurobindo’s own words against him, which is a standard practice in this book. Sri Aurobindo’s own remark on his lack of interest in Western philosophy has been used here to suggest that he was incapable of philosophy.
In the next paragraph, Heehs switches on to what I have called “the spiritual view” of his subject. As this is what is expected from the biography of a great spiritual personality, I have no cause for complaint.
The only works that Aurobindo regularly cited in The Life Divine were the Gita, Upanishads, and Rig Veda. His philosophy, he explained, “was formed first” by the study of these works, which were also “the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy.” But his experience was not confined to confirming the insights of ancient sages. He once wrote in a personal note that as he sat in meditation, ideas from the intuitive levels linking mind and supermind “came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from an experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience.... All sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.”(Lives, 276-77)
But he has to switch again his position from the spiritual to the ordinary view of things in order to cater to the academician:
These ideas and their synthesis were self-validating for Aurobindo, and most of his followers accept them as unquestionable truths. But if a philosophical system is to merit acceptance as philosophy, it has to be defended by logical arguments; otherwise it joins other infallible revelations that depend on faith for acceptance and persuasion or coercion for propagation. In other words, it becomes a religion. Aurobindo did not want his teaching to be regarded as a religion and therefore used logic to present and defend it— but not, he stressed, to arrive at it. In reaching his conclusions, he owed nothing, he said, “to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others.” If the spiritual value of Aurobindo’s system can only be gauged by one who has had the same experiences, its philosophical value is measurable by the usual critical means: studies of sources, arguments, and conclusions, and evaluations of rhetoric and style. (Lives, 277)
Heehs has definitely got his arguments wrong here. Even Western philosophy bases itself on some fundamental assumptions, such as the existence of Matter or Mind. Even the concept of Matter in modern Science is so complex that an ordinary person has to have faith in the highly trained scientist to accept it. So if Sri Aurobindo bases his philosophy on his spiritual experience, which not everybody can easily verify for himself, how does it become less philosophic or less scientific than other systems? The acceptance of the spiritual field is as legitimate as any other assumption, be it Matter or Mind, and it surely does not preclude logic. Then why does Heehs fall back to the old world paradigm of spirituality versus science or religion versus intellect?
Final assessment of Heehs:
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 practiced. 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’.” (Lives, 277)
Mark the words, “loath to admit him to their club” which has infuriated (to say the least) admirers of Sri Aurobindo’s Life Divine. I wonder how the corrected extracts 2 or even reading the entire book mitigates the maliciousness of this remark! The only defence Heehs can offer for such a remark is that it is not his own but that of “members of the philosophic profession” whom he quotes. If that is so, it is an insult to the philosophic profession to underestimate The Life Divine, for I wonder how many people have understood it. Secondly, Heehs is responsible for his presentation, which depends on his selection of material from various sources, so he cannot get away by saying that he leaves the reader to form his own judgment. When he makes others pass such a devastating remark on Sri Aurobindo, it means he either endorses it or thinks that it is worth mentioning in his presentation.
In the next two sentences, there is however a desperate attempt to appreciate Sri Aurobindo after disqualifying him as a philosopher:
Yet this preceptorial philosopher created a synthesis of spiritual thought that bears comparison with the best of similar systems: those of Plotinus, Abhinavagupta, 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. (Lives, 277)
Heehs makes up for the severity of his previous remark, but, mind you, he does not concede ground, and the final assessment of Sri
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Aurobindo is that he is a “preceptorial philosopher” as opposed to a true one, whatever that means. But why should not precept go with philosophy? Why should philosophy be necessarily abstract and unconnected with the aim and purpose of life? This would mean that all spirituality goes against logic and any mention of the Divine is unacceptable to mainstream thought.
Accordingly, in the prospectus of the Arya, he said that he would publish “practical methods of inner culture and self- development.” Readers hoping for a step-by-step guide to nirvana were destined to be disappointed. The Synthesis of Yoga, the work in which he presented his methods, is almost as abstruse as The Life Divine, containing no easy-to-follow techniques. Aurobindo explained why in an article published at the end of the Arya’s first year:
Our second preoccupation has been with the psychological disciplines of Yoga; but here also [as in The Life Divine] we have been obliged to concern ourselves with a deep study of the principles underlying the methods rather than with a popular statement of methods and disciplines. But without this previous study of principles the statement of methods would have been unsound and not really helpful. There are no short-cuts to an integral perfection. (Lives, 279)
Heehs quotes Sri Aurobindo’s note in the Arya explaining why he could not publish what he had promised his readers—”practical methods of inner culture and development”, and why he had to first present the “principles underlying the methods”. But then why does Heehs come back to the same unsound criticism of The Synthesis of Yoga after he finishes summarising it. On p. 287 he concludes:
The Synthesis of Yoga is a formidable piece of work even in its incomplete state. It surveys familiar and unfamiliar systems of yoga and points out how they can be harmonized. What it gives remarkably little of is what the author promised in the
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prospectus: “practical methods of inner culture and self- development.” It occasionally offers a technique of thought control or a tip about the development of intuition. But there is very little how-to advice. (Lives, 287)
It was amply clear on p. 279 that the Synthesis was not meant to be a book of “easy-to-follow techniques”. Why did he then raise up the same issue if not to leave the reader with a negative impression of it? This is another tactic of Heehs. First he gives the overall true picture and then passes his own negative comments elsewhere.
It must be noted that Sri Aurobindo deliberately avoided “easy to follow techniques” in order to cater to the infinite variation of individual natures. His Integral Yoga is wide and open and includes all possible approaches to the Divine. He gives us only the broad outlines and goes so far as to say that each individual has his own path of Yoga!!
As for practical guidance in Yoga, that was fulfilled by the thousands of letters Sri Aurobindo wrote in the late twenties and thirties, long after the Arya period during which he wrote the Synthesis. At that time, he was not a Guru except for a few disciples who accepted him as such. After the Ashram was founded in 1926, the necessity of practical guidance inevitably arose with the coming of the disciples.
Sri Aurobindo’s accounts of Aswapathy’s voyage through the worlds of matter, life, and mind before reaching “the kingdoms of the greater knowledge,” and Savitri’s transit through the “inner countries” until she reaches the inmost soul certainly are based on his and the Mother’s experiences; but the poem is a fictional creation (Lives, 398)
Savitri-lovers will not be very glad when they are informed that Sri Aurobindo’s magnum opus in the field of poetry is only a “fictional creation” with no spiritual truth whatsoever!
Toward the end of Aurobindo’s poem Death gives Savitri the chance to enjoy “deathless bliss” in a world of celestial beauty.
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She refuses. Death answers in lines that give expression to a defining characteristic of Aurobindo’s yoga:
Because thou hast rejected my fair calm I hold thee without refuge from my will; And lay upon thy neck my mighty yoke. (Lives, 300)
Not many Savitri enthusiasts would have noticed that Heehs has replaced here “Supreme” with “Death”! Towards the end of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem, it is not Death but the Supreme that gives Savitri a chance to enjoy deathless bliss. Savitri conquers Death with her light and power and the latter disappears to reappear transfigured as part of the Supreme’s fourfold being. If he had remained Death, it means that Savitri has not been victorious over Death, or that the Supreme was after all none other than Death. This mistake seems almost a typo, but it is actually deliberate and well-thought out, considering the reference that Heehs provides to the very first draft of Savitri, which is not in the public domain for readers to check.
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. (Lives, 295)
The Defence of Indian Culture is a polemic from start to finish, as Aurobindo closed his eyes to the critic’s positive judgments and blasted him for the slightest negative remark. (Lives, 296)
Why should not Sri Aurobindo blast Archer when the latter made the most demeaning remarks on Indian culture? Heehs himself quotes one such remark:
But he [Archer] found little to admire in India’s social and cultural life, sprinkling his book with supercilious remarks such as “I do not think it important to decide whether India is the most forward of barbarous, or the most backward of civilized, nations.” (Lives, 294-95)
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How do you expect a soft response after this outright attack on Indian culture? Do you expect a balanced response such as, “You may be partly right! But, you know, there is also the good side of our culture, etc…” Anybody with some sense of national pride would naturally counter attack! But the counter attack itself should not discredit Sri Aurobindo’s defence of Indian culture. The Foundations of Indian Culture (now renamed Renaissance of India) presents the essence of Indian culture (of which all Indians can be proud) as against the worst (not the best) of Western culture. The purpose was to defend Indian culture against stupid rationalistic critics like Archer, and not to balance the good points of the West with those of Indian culture. What has actually rankled Heehs is the attack on Western culture, which he has taken personally, instead of seeing it in the actual context of Sri Aurobindo’s argument.
Sri Aurobindo himself explains the reason for the aggressive style of his rebuttal:
Sir John Woodroffe invites us to a vigorous self-defence. But defence by itself in the modern struggle can only end in defeat, and, if battle there must be, the only sound strategy is a vigorous aggression based on a strong, living and mobile defence; for by that aggressive force alone can the defence itself be effective.3
Aggression must be successful and creative if the defence is to be effective 4
Certainly we must repel with vigour every disintegrating or injurious attack 5
Years later he told a potential translator: “The ‘Secret of the Veda’ is not complete and there are besides many imperfections and some errors in it which I would have preferred to amend before the book or any translation was published.” (Lives, 266)
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It is misleading to quote Sri Aurobindo in this manner without explaining the context of his remark. This is something that Heehs constantly does—quote Sri Aurobindo’s words against Sri Aurobindo, so that the disciples are silenced. If we read the context of this particular remark, we see that Sri Aurobindo was thinking in terms of perfecting his work on the Veda, by which he meant establishing his conclusions on a more scholarly basis. This does not imply (as Heehs presents it) that there were basic errors in his interpretation or that he did not discover the secret of the Veda. It only shows he was a thorough scholar and not satisfied with his work when he viewed it retrospectively after many years. This sense of perfection can be seen, for example, in the number of drafts he made for his poem Savitri.
In the letter quoted above, Sri Aurobindo actually grants permission to Purani for translating it into Gujarati. He also later instructed Kapali Shastri to write a commentary on the Veda “keeping close to his line of interpretation and using the clues that he had provided to unveil the symbolic imagery for arriving at the inner meaning”6 of the Veda.
The sense that Aurobindo extracted from the Gita was thus of a piece with his own philosophy. (Lives, 270)
Does it mean that Sri Aurobindo read in the Gita his own philosophy? This is tantamount to saying that either Sri Aurobindo misread it, or that it has no independent meaning and that each one is free to interpret in the way he likes. Moreover, if the sense Sri Aurobindo extracted from the Gita were of a piece with his own philosophy, why did he write in a letter that the Gita does not give the “whole base”7 of his message to humanity? He should have simply said that his philosophy is the same as the Gita’s.
The language of Aurobindo’s dialogue is heavy and pedantic, the characters shallow and unconvincing, but the work shows evidence of much original thought. (Lives, 79)
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What conceit! As if Peter Heehs’ opinion counts among the great critics of the world! It is typically the case of the mole measuring the mountain.
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. (Lives, 306)
A typical case of a negative assessment without explaining the basis or the details of the reasoning that has led to it. Does the reader have to accept this conclusion merely on the basis that Peter Heehs has said so? Besides, what is meant by “outdated” poetry? Are Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley outdated because they wrote centuries ago? If that is the case, all the classics are outdated and one should stop reading them.
I quote below a stanza from Heehs’s own poem “Seeker” which should be called ultra modern poetry:
I seek not Peace but only relaxation, Not Love and Beauty but sex and sensation, Not closeness to the presence of the Mother But a place where I can feel that I belong.
(Devotion—An anthology of spiritual poems, compiled by Lloyd Hofman & Vignan Agni; published by Integral Enterprise, Auroville, India; First Edition 2004, p 128)
Hurrah for modern poetry of this kind!
The crux of the difficulty that Heehs faces is the age old antagonism between spirituality and materialism and his wanting to please both parties in order to promote his book. On the one hand, he is supposed to expound the larger spiritual point of view
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of Sri Aurobindo, which does not reject Matter but explains it in spiritual terms. On the other hand, he has to reflect the ignorance of the materialistic critic, who does not understand spirituality at all, for otherwise how can he expect the latter to take him seriously? This could have been done by first presenting the materialistic point of view and countering it with the larger spiritual truth, as Sri Aurobindo has himself done in the Life Divine. But Heehs does the reverse; he presents the spiritual truth and counters it with the materialistic view, so that he ends up downplaying Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual philosophy and criticising his works in a hostile manner for the sake of gaining the attention of the materialist. Not that he does not appreciate or present the spiritual view of Sri Aurobindo, but he always tilts the final balance against him. The prime consideration that seems to have been always at the back of his mind, almost to the point of becoming a phobia, is to avoid praise at all cost, so that he never gives the appreciation Sri Aurobindo rightfully deserves.
The two questions of institutional allegiance and spiritual capacity of Heehs should also be raised in connection with his shameful attempt to gain overnight fame by denigrating Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram. Heehs joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram with the pretext of being a scholar and a seeker, familiarised himself intellectually with the Integral Yoga over four decades and thought he was ready to write a book on his Guru as “a critical insider”. But how can he judge his Guru when he has not made any spiritual progress at all, which is evident from his very conduct? One can understand the advantageous position of “a critical insider” in a political or educational organisation, but how can you be one in the Ashram of a Guru whose yoga begins where the old yogas end? The sheer degree of difficulty of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga should mostly dissuade us from taking it up, and of even finding ways and means to survive on the path if we have been somehow drawn to it, forget about finding faults in the Master and his teachings! It is this fundamental error of arrogance that Heehs has perpetrated, of attempting to overreach beyond his range of competence and obstinately trying to probe with his puny mind into what is essentially beyond him.
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In the matter of institutional allegiance, nobody will deny that Heehs has flouted the basic norms of collective living. Which secular organisation will bear the denigration of its founder from its own office members, however well-placed and useful they are to its functioning? Which business house will allow statements that will erode its credibility in the public mind? In the case of a spiritual institution, it is all the more serious, because not only people have invested their money but their whole life to it. Disciples surrender their whole being to their Master—heart, mind and body—so that they come in contact with the divine force that acts through him. So when a senior archivist of Sri Aurobindo Ashram slings mud at his Guru claiming that it is the “objective truth”, it cuts the very ground underneath the disciples’ feet. For, even if the negative appraisal of their Guru were true and based on sufficient evidence, it is highly irresponsible for an inmate to issue such a statement. Heehs’s disclaimer note that the opinions expressed in his book are his own and not the institution he serves hardly makes any difference. Honesty demands that he should have distanced himself from the institution before passing such a statement. For what is the use of serving an institution whose ideals he has lost confidence in? Why accept Sri Aurobindo as a Master when he finds so many faults in him? Why stay in his Ashram at all? The problem with Heehs is that he wants to avail of the basic amenities of the Ashram and enjoy a cushy life (which would never have been possible without the hard work of hundreds of dedicated disciples) and at the same time expect them to keep quiet when he insults their Master. What he simply needs is a base to launch his writing career by speaking adversely of their Guru, which is the kind of literature that will readily sell in the market nowadays. It is this duplicity that is highly objectionable, claiming to belong to the institution insofar as he is benefited, and betraying it in the name of freedom of speech for the sake of his writing career. In short, he spits on the hand that feeds him.
Finally, Heehs’s negative appraisal of Sri Aurobindo would have been less offensive had he based himself on solid evidence and honest research. But he does not! For a close scrutiny of the book uncovers the academic fraud behind the whole façade of objective
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history. The book is full of negative statements (without much basis) and caustic personal comments of a pretentious scholar, who thinks he is master of all subjects and expects us to simply believe whatever he says.
Another ploy of Heehs is quoting Sri Aurobindo’s negative remarks on himself while omitting his positive observations in the same context. Heehs takes full mileage of such remarks by decontextualising them, adding them to his store of negative assessments of Sri Aurobindo’s political enemies and hostile officers of the British Govt. and projecting an overall negative picture of Sri Aurobindo. In the process, he generally brings up the positive content only to alleviate the destructive blows that he delivers, and grudgingly finishes with a conciliatory note in order to put up a show of objectivity.
But the most serious objection to his biography is the sheer bad taste he brazenly displays often to the point of indecency. This itself should disqualify him from being considered a serious biographer, for a mature writer would never, without sufficient reason, write about “urinary organs”; or mention sentences such as “go eat Tilak’s shit”; or “Well, if you take the clothes away there remains little to distinguish one human radish from another.” Use of such atrocious language would be avoided even in penning the biography of an ordinary person, leave alone an extraordinary yogi such as Sri Aurobindo. It is not that these statements are unsupported by documentary evidence, but what was the need of quoting them at all except to wilfully malign Sri Aurobindo in the public domain?
The last point I would like to discuss is Heehs’s declared intention to show Sri Aurobindo’s growth from the human to the divine. This is an outright lie of the author to cover up his real motive to run down Sri Aurobindo whenever he has an occasion to do so. I challenge the author to give me one instance in his book where he has shown how Sri Aurobindo grew from the human to the divine. It is rather the opposite that he constantly attempts to show—how the divine was pretty much human. There
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are umpteen presentations of Sri Aurobindo’s human defects, mostly decontextualised or gathered from secondary sources, for example, of him being a “coward and a liar”, explosive in temper, having married for “physical gratification”, etc. But where has he shown that Sri Aurobindo overcame these defects after he commenced his Yoga? In fact, his spiritual experiences are doubted as schizophrenic delusions and so many sarcastic remarks are made on his later days as a Guru that the lay reader would begin to doubt as to whether he was a Yogi at all!
12 August 2010
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I start by giving a brief history of the Extracts for the benefit of the reader who is not familiar with the circumstances in which they were compiled.
The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs was published by the Columbia University Press in New York in April 2008. A couple of months later, a few copies of the book turned up at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, of which Peter Heehs is a long standing inmate. Heehs, who works as an editor at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, had taken many years to write this biography. But the book could hardly be said to have been written in the spirit of a disciple or an inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, which is a spiritual institution and not a debating centre where you can question its very founder. A murmur of protest arose when a review of the book was published in Auroville Today in August 2008. Soon there was a demand and curiosity to know what exactly was objectionable in the book. There was also the practical question of whether the book could be put up for sale in the Ashram’s bookshop, and the more serious consideration of taking administrative action against the author. It was under these circumstances that the Extracts from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo were compiled, so that the reader at once knew the worst that Heehs had written. The compiler never intended them to be representative extracts of the book in order to get a brief introduction to it.
The Extracts caught on and before long most of the Ashramites were seething with anger, for, all said and done, they were Heehs’s own words, and he had dared to denigrate Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram. Had he written the same book as an outsider and not as a member of the Ashram, nobody would have cared for it. But he had written in his position as senior editor and researcher of the Ashram Archives, which
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is the repository of the most valuable documents of Sri Aurobindo. Not only was there a lack of basic allegiance to the institution that had fed him for 37 years and facilitated his research in every way, but his curt dismissal of Sri Aurobindo’s works and denigrating statements on him were detrimental to the very spiritual well-being of the Ashram. People began circulating the Extracts by making xerox copies, sending emails and posting them on the Net, and soon the whole Sri Aurobindonian community was convulsed with waves of resentment and anger. Thenceforth the discussions that followed between Heehs’s critics and supporters often referred back to the Extracts, as still not many copies of the book were available in India.
Around this time a strange theory was put forward by Heehs’s supporters who said, “Yes, if you read only the Extracts, you get a bad impression of the book. But read the whole book, and you will not feel that the book is so bad. In fact, you will not only start appreciating it, but find it wonderful.” Heehs himself argued that the Extracts were decontextualised and provided a corrected version of them. He filled in the footnotes, phrases and sentences passed over in the Extracts and claimed that he had restored the original content to its full glory. The objectionable portions then, according to him, became unpalatable but true statements, and his denigration of Sri Aurobindo came to be termed as the human side of the Avatar. Heehs’s unwarranted criticism became academic objectivity and Sri Aurobindo’s disciples had to be taught the superiority of his intellectual assessment over what they all felt deeply in their hearts about the greatness of their Master. It is then that I felt it was necessary to write a defence of the Extracts, which have so well exposed the mischief behind Heehs’s biography. For mischief it is, and there is no point in saying that he insulted the Master only a few times, or arguing that there is plenty of good research in his book in order to spare him the severe reprobation he deserves..
There has been some ongoing debate over the “Extracts from The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs”. It has been contended by the author and his earnest supporters that the Extracts are a deliberate misrepresentation of his book, which actually deserves much praise for its scholarship. The Extracts shock you, they say,
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– I am glad that this is acknowledged – because they are decontextualised. Had they been presented in their proper context, that is, (1) with the missing footnotes which give references to the sources that Heehs has quoted, and, (2) with the deleted text before, in between and sometimes after the selected portions of the Extracts, they would not have been reprehensible at all. On the contrary, you would have marvelled at the objectivity of the presentation. Someone even dared to compare the Lives with the Life Divine of Sri Aurobindo, reading portions of which you might get the impression that he supported the materialist or the Mayavadin. Now this comparison deeply pains me, especially after what Heehs has said on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, which I quote below in order to start my discussion:
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. (Lives, 277)
Let us consider some of the arguments presented by Heehs and his defendants to the objections of the admirers and disciples of Sri Aurobindo to the above passage. Their first line of defence is that the above is not the author’s own assessment, but that of “most members of the philosophical profession”. It is not what Heehs thinks, but what others think, and Heehs is simply presenting their views, so that he is absolved of any personal involvement with the opinion expressed. Now no man with some common sense is going to believe in this argument. When Heehs quotes, or for that matter, when anybody quotes, be it a writer, an administrator or a politician, there is a definite purport behind the quoting of authorities. In politics, for example, this aspect comes out as clearly as daylight. Politicians hide behind quotations, statistics and reports to convince the public, and, as so often happens, take them for a ride. You quote in order to prove more effectively your point of view, and you necessarily quote only those authorities that buttress it. You have simply to pay a visit to the courts to see how lawyers file numerous documents in order to win their clients’ cases. Selectivity of material is thus a basic fact of life, which overrides all pretensions to objectivity. Even in the
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realm of historiography, it is well-known that pure objectivity does not exist. Thus the argument that Heehs’s presentation is objective without any personal involvement is an insult to common sense. His book is going to be indisputably taken as a reflection of his personal understanding and assessment of Sri Aurobindo and his philosophy, and Heehs, not others, will get the credit or discredit of the readers’ reaction and judgment.
Another argument presented by the followers of Heehs in favour of this so-called objectivity is that, after quoting both the negative and positive opinions on Sri Aurobindo, he ends always on a positive note. He should thus be cleared from the blame of the initial and unavoidable damage that he perpetrates on Sri Aurobindo’s reputation by raising questions regarding, say, his mental sanity, or the logical inadequacies of his philosophy. But then Heehs has to take the responsibility of the final balance of evidence which invariably tilts towards the negative side, for his account generally begins with a good dose of negative statements on Sri Aurobindo and ends with grudging admiration for him. It is perhaps a technique to force some admiration from hardcore academicians of the materialistic and Freudian school, but it leaves the admirers and disciples of Sri Aurobindo cold and angry. Now Heehs has every right to express his freedom of speech and has surely the right to denigrate Sri Aurobindo, but then why does he not publicly admit it? For he cannot disown the final impression of denigration that he passes on to his readers and, at the same time, say he is free to write whatever he wants. Freedom of speech goes hand in hand with bravely acknowledging his opinion, especially when it has been expressed in the public domain. Neither can he say that he wrote in this way to please the academicians and that, in the near future, he would recast the same book to please the devotees of Sri Aurobindo. First of all, you do not expect that of a serious author who has spent thirty-seven years researching his subject. Secondly, the devotees are not so foolish that they would not see through the game. They would immediately realise that he has toned down his book because he does not deem them intellectually fit to know his true opinion.
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Let us take for granted that Heehs stands by the final negative balance of his statements and come back to the passage that we were discussing— that of Sri Aurobindo not being a philosopher at all because his methods “simply do not fit in with the discipline as it is currently practised”. There is at once the need to clarify basic definitions, which Heehs deliberately does not. It is true that Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is not logically thought out as most Western philosophy is, and that he uses the intellect to expound the truth of his spiritual experience rather than to arrive at it. The logical intellect plays a secondary role not only in Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, but in all Eastern philosophy which is based on spiritual experience. Truth contains logic, but is not contained by it, explains Sri Aurobindo in an essay on Philosophy.1 Logical conclusions necessarily depend on the premises you begin with, and you can logically arrive at different and even contradictory conclusions by assuming different premises. Spiritual experience is given the primary place in Indian philosophy because it is the fundamental experiential premise, or rather, the foundation of the philosophical superstructure that is built on it. Materialism and other philosophies of the West build in the same way by accepting Matter and Mind as the fundamental premises, which are very much in the domain of man’s sensory or mental experience. The fact that spiritual experience needs an extraordinary inner opening or long yogic training does not place Indian philosophy at an inferior level. Nor the fact that the intellect plays a secondary role in it makes it logically unsound.
Now all this is common knowledge for scholars who have read Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy. So why does not Heehs discuss these basic issues before passing his arrogant judgments? Especially in this era of global acceptance or clash of different cultures, he should have first focussed on the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western philosophies. But he assumes instead the intrinsic superiority of Western analytical philosophies to Eastern spiritual philosophies, and passes summary judgment on Sri Aurobindo. Moreover, even from the point of view of sheer logic and structural complexity, I wonder how you can remain
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unimpressed by the breath-taking world-view that Sri Aurobindo presents us in the Life Divine. You stand aghast at Heehs’s curt dismissal of Sri Aurobindo as merely “a spiritual preceptor in a long tradition of intellectual, but hardly academic gurus”.2 Such overconfident dismissals obviously make you suspect Heehs’s own credentials and you start doubting as to whether he is sufficiently conversant with Indian philosophy in general and Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy in particular. Has he at all studied the world-views of the great scholar-saints of Indian philosophy, such as Shankaracharya, Madhvacharya and Ramanujacharya, where the same bias to spiritual philosophy would apply? The one authority he quotes on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is an obscure American scholar who happens to be his friend and mentor in this particular field. I wish Heehs had more respect for the more well-established scholars in this field such as Amal Kiran, Arindam Basu and S.K. Maitra, especially the last who has probably done the best comparative study on Sri Aurobindo and Western philosophers.
In short, Heehs deliberately and systematically keeps us ignorant of the deeper aspects of the subject he is dealing with, be it Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, psychology, poetry, politics, or his Yogic personality and association with the Mother. In the realm of psychiatry and spiritual experience, his ignorance has been thoroughly exposed by a young Ph.D. scholar from Delhi University. With a little effort, the same can be done in other subjects. One of Heehs’s worst misrepresentations is with regard to the relationship of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I need not go into the details of it, but any disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother will immediately notice the complete lack of the spiritual dimension in the narration on pages 326-327 3 of the book. In the Extracts, the passage begins “Sometimes when they were alone”. In the Extracts corrected by Heehs, it begins, “After dinner those present”, and is in fact more painful to read despite his corrections. But to somebody who is not familiar with the spiritual personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the passage would appear quite harmless, and he would walk away with the impression of an ordinary romantic affair in which the Frenchman Paul Richard
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loses his wife to an Indian Yogi. And why not, he would say, what is wrong about it? But introduce the spiritual dimension into the narration of the same events, that is, mention (1) that during the Mother’s first meeting with Sri Aurobindo, she had experienced the complete silence of the mind, which is a considerable Yogic achievement; (2) that she considered Sri Aurobindo to be the Lord himself who had come on earth to bring down the truth of the Supermind; (3) that Richard was an emanation of the Lord of the Nations, one of the four big Asuras yet to be conquered by the Divine power; (4) that later, in his confession to Dilip Kumar Roy in France, Richard deeply regretted to have left Sri Aurobindo in 1920; — and you get a very different picture. Even the same outer gesture of the Mother taking Sri Aurobindo’s hand in hers, puts on an altogether different meaning, a spiritual meaning this time, unlike what you get in the Hollywood style presentation of Heehs, which has dragged down an extraordinary spiritual relationship to the level of an ordinary one.
Heehs has thus deliberately omitted the larger spiritual context of the life and philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, thus decontextualising him in the eyes of his admirers and disciples. It is not the Extracts that have decontextualised his book, but the book that has decontextualised Sri Aurobindo. His accusation that the Extracts have been mischievously compiled to denigrate his scholarly work can be turned back on him. It is he who has denigrated Sri Aurobindo by writing his biography in a decontextualised and biased manner. Finally, the only concession that can be made to Heehs’s frustration as to how a few extracts brought down the house of cards that he had so painstakingly built over the years, is that they could have been given a different title. The term “Extracts” could have been qualified by the word “objectionable” for the sake of clarity and the title changed to “Objectionable Extracts from The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs”. If this alteration offers any solace to Heehs, then so be it, but no further regrets need be expressed about this compilation that has so thoroughly exposed his shoddy scholarship.
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I would like to present here one argument which Heehs and his supporters have never cared to consider, — the argument against intellectual argument in an Ashram meant for Yoga. Any sadhak who has followed a spiritual path will accept that sadhana is best done when you base yourself on something higher or deeper than the mind. In fact, you try to quieten the mind in order to come into contact with this part of the being, which Sri Aurobindo called “the psychic being” or more loosely termed as “the soul”. We begin the Yoga by “a psychic call” and we try to bring forward the psychic being into the outer activities of our life. It is true that most disciples can hardly claim themselves to be guided by it, but most of them develop what I would call “a sacred space” within the deeper precincts of their heart, to which they refer in order to resolve the deeper issues of life. In fact, not only the disciples of Sri Aurobindo Ashram but most Indians constantly refer to this deeper aspect of the being, and this is perhaps the greatest strength of our nation. Intellectual development has nothing to do with it, though it can play a very useful secondary role by giving reasons for what this inmost part of the being automatically knows or feels to be right or wrong.
Now the disciples who have been deeply pained by reading the Extracts have reacted spontaneously with their inner being, though the anger and revulsion which have followed in its wake need not be inspired by it. They have lost sleep the day they have read the Extracts, or have been terribly disturbed for a few days, and, in a few cases, have taken ill. For the information of Heehs and his supporters, some of them have not even read them and have merely heard about them from others, yet there was no dearth of emotional suffering caused to them. The Extracts have in fact hit the life of the common uneducated disciple harder than the more vocal intelligentsia, who have put up a mental defence and have countered them with logical arguments. But why, one could ask, such mindless anguish for something they have not even read? It is because Heehs has dared to break into that “sacred space” of their hearts and malign the one whom they adore and have surrendered their lives
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to – Sri Aurobindo. If this is supposed to be only emotion, so be it, but then I would call it “spiritual emotion”, and it is our bounden duty to respect it and not dismiss it as mere religious sentiment.
At this point I may remind Heehs and his supporters the reason for the very existence of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and why around 1500 disciples have dedicated their lives to it. Ask any new entrant to the Ashram and he will tell you at once that this is the place where he inwardly feels at ease, as opposed to the restless and egoistic life in the ordinary world. Sri Aurobindo’s force and ideals permeate the atmosphere of the Ashram in Pondicherry and he is happy to do any work that is assigned to him by its authorities. But why does he come here and not go anywhere else? It is because he has chosen Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as his Gurus. He need not, and generally does not, discuss the various arguments for and against his choice, though he may justify himself later with good reasons. He simply feels that this is the place he wants to spend the rest of his life and this is the Yoga he wants to follow. A certain unity is felt with the other disciples of the Ashram because they are also trying to fulfil the Yogic aim of the institution. Every disciple, be it sweeper or scholar, mechanic or manager, clerk or computer programmer, is thus linked with the life of the community he serves, whether he meets them daily or not. Any spiritual institution functions in this way. People join it voluntarily with great good will and gratitude for the founder of the institution who has shown them the spiritual path. If, after some time, they do not find the Yoga congenial to their nature, they voluntarily leave it and are encouraged to do so for their own good. Many have gone back to the ordinary life or to other Ashrams with other aims and ideals, where they have settled comfortably for the rest of their lives. But people generally do not criticise the founder and his Yoga, and yet expect to remain in the very institution that sustained them both materially and spiritually.
Is there any scope for questioning the views of the very founder of a spiritual institution? If you say “No” to this question, you could be branded as a religious fundamentalist. If you say “Yes”, you are destroying the very purpose for which the institution was
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formed. But it is essentially a practical question, which has more to do with the occupation of “limited physical space or territory in the real world” than of competing ideas in the abstract world of theories. In the intellectual world of universities, there is room for every kind of discussion, because at the end of the day it makes hardly any difference to anybody’s life, especially to the inner life.4 In the world of spirituality (and even in business or politics),5 a definite choice has to be made between the various alternatives offered to you, and it makes all the difference to your life. A community such as Sri Aurobindo Ashram works on a common aim and a common way of life. Every member of the Ashram, from the most humble sweeper to the teacher of philosophy, is united in a common purpose which is the practice of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. This does not mean there is no individual liberty, but the liberty is in the details of the practice, not in the essential principles of the Yoga. It is therefore absurd for an inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram to seriously entertain the objections of Materialism and Freudian thought to Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. Freud and Materialism should be rather judged and evaluated in terms of Sri Aurobindo’s world-view and not the reverse, at least, in his Ashram. Sri Aurobindo cannot be judged from their point of view, which is diametrically opposite to his spiritual philosophy. So when somebody trips in saying that Sri Aurobindo may have inherited a streak of madness from his mother and that perhaps his spiritual experiences could be hallucinations, it is a serious breach of trust and collective discipline. Or when he says that bowing down before the Gurus (now in front of their Samadhi) is a theatrical ritual, it cuts the very ground under the disciple’s feet, and makes him stop the work he was so diligently doing. Neither can you simply laugh it off when the same person justifies his stand and wants to be taken seriously as an objective researcher. Intellectual research has and had always a secondary place in the Ashram. The primary stress has been on Yoga, mainly through work, though intellectuals, artists and poets did form part of the multitudinous life of the Ashram.
When Heehs went against the very grain of Ashram life by criticising the Guru, very few members thought of evaluating his
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book like literary critics do. The primary concern was whether he had written anything against Sri Aurobindo, whether there was anything in the book inimical to the spiritual life of the Ashram, whether it was spiritually beneficial to the newcomers, and could it be prescribed to the students of the Ashram School without giving them a wrong impression of Sri Aurobindo. The Extracts proved it with a thumping No! That is why they caught on, not only in the minds of the disciples of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, but even outside. For, after all, there are lakhs and lakhs of devotees and admirers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother living in India and abroad, who look towards the Ashram as the beacon of their lives. So there was a ripple effect of revulsion and anger spreading out from the Ashram as its epicentre, a kind of psychological tsunami which has been rarely witnessed in this part of the world.
But the unique thing about this phenomenon is that not many would have cared to protest had Heehs written the same book outside the Ashram. There have been far worse publications in the past on Sri Aurobindo, which showed no understanding whatsoever of his greatness. Sri Aurobindo has been called a coward because he “ran away” to Pondicherry at the height of the freedom struggle. His Yoga has been deemed impractical and his Ashram a total failure. His poetry has hardly been appreciated and literary critics have desisted from even reading his epic poem Savitri. These so-called authoritative opinions only show the dense ignorance of his critics, and most disciples and admirers of Sri Aurobindo are quite familiar with this attitude. They know that it needs a small psychic spark to bridge this gap of incomprehension, and it is only the Grace that grants initiation into the higher knowledge that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother represent. So they have never raised a rumpus over these publications, except in a few cases. But when somebody tries to question and evaluate Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram, which until now has been so carefully preserved for the exclusive fulfilment of his Yogic ideals and practice, and when that person even justifies his criticism in the name of objective interpretation, he is certainly asking for trouble. You surely cannot expect Sri Aurobindo’s disciples to take
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it lying down and be meek pacifists or nod their heads in intellectual agreement and discuss the finer points of his book. They will naturally say, “Look here, Mr. Intellectual, the world is wide, there are plenty of materialists and hedonists out there, please join their blissful and argumentative company and fight each other till the end of time. But leave us alone, for God’s sake! Do not disturb this peaceful community which wants to dedicate its life to Sri Aurobindo’s ideals in the way Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have showed us, and not as interpreted by a few nutty scholars without an iota of spiritual experience. If you still insist on your so-called scholarly opinion, then you are free to start your own Ashram, where you can lay down your own rules and interpretation of Yoga. You will perhaps one day realise the damage you have done after a similar “Peter Heehs” under a different name raises his voice of dissent in your Ashram — assuming that it ever takes off. At that point of time, let us see if you still talk of competing interpretations and plural views of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and philosophy.”
28 December 2008
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I quote below Heehs’s “corrected extract” on Sri Aurobindo’s riding test in the ICS examination:
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. (Lives, 30)
Where is the evidence of “the series of lies” Sri Aurobindo is supposed to have told when he was called to the office of the Civil Service Commission? Deliberately missing appointments or going late to them, not receiving letters and not promptly replying to them is evasive tactics which any lawyer would be familiar with; it is certainly not telling outright lies (see Appendix 1). You may not receive letters by staying away from your house and not acknowledging their receipt to the postman. You may go to a house without calling on the door and ringing the door bell. You may fail to keep an appointment by going so late that the other person walks away in exasperation. These are the kind of manoeuvres Sri Aurobindo adopted without resorting to open lying. Not that Sri Aurobindo could not have fibbed a couple of times, but why make such a big deal about it? These are laughable matters now that we know his intention was to fail in the ICS examinations without going against his father’s wishes. In fact, Heehs himself writes in a paragraph which follows the above quoted lines:
Aurobindo’s rejection from the I.C.S was much commented on during his lifetime and has been much analyzed since. Trying to clear up the controversy fifty years after the event,
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he wrote that he managed “by certain manoeuvres,” to “get himself disqualified for riding without himself rejecting the Service, which his family would not have allowed him to do.” This is consistent with his behavior in October and November 1892, in particular his failure to go to Charing Cross. He spent that afternoon, he explained on another occasion, “wandering in the streets of London to pass the time.” Returning home, he announced to Benoybhusan: “I am chucked.” Benoy proposed playing a game of cards. When Manmohan came in, he found his brothers thus engaged. Learning what had happened, he began to berate them for playing cards when such a calamity had happened. But it was not a calamity to Aurobindo, who was, he later wrote, “greatly relieved and overjoyed by his release from the I.C.S.” (Lives, 31-32)
The source of the above information is picked from Sri Aurobindo’s corrections and clarifications of statements made in biographies written on him during his lifetime:
Biographer: At the end of the period of probation, however, he did not choose to appear for the departmental Riding examination; a something within him had detained him in his room…
[The last phrase altered by Sri Aurobindo to:] prevented his arriving in time.
Sri Aurobindo: Nothing detained him in his room. He felt no call for the I.C.S and was seeking some way to escape from that bondage. By certain manoeuvres he managed to get himself disqualified for riding without himself rejecting the Service, which his family would not have allowed him to do.
Biographer: [According to Aurobindo’s sister Sarojini, Aurobindo was playing cards at his London residence when he was to have gone to appear for the writing examination.]
Sri Aurobindo: Sarojini’s memory is evidently mistaken. I was wandering in the streets of London to pass away time
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and not playing cards. At last when I went to the grounds I was too late. I came back home and told my elder brother, Benoybhusan, that I was chucked. He with a philosophic attitude proposed playing cards and so we [sat] down playing cards. [Manmohan] came [later] and on hearing about my being chucked began to shout at our playing cards when such a calamity had befallen [us].1
If the above information is agreed upon, why does Heehs nail down Sri Aurobindo’s guilt as if he were the senior examiner of the ICS Commission and not a biographer who has the advantage of hindsight? Or is it that Heehs poses himself as the senior examiner of Sri Aurobindo’s character and is bent on proving that he was a liar? There is actually a contradiction here in the presentation, which is Heehs’s usual writing style. First Sri Aurobindo is depicted as an outright liar; then he is excused on the basis of the intention behind. The next paragraph comes up again with another insinuation:
To these accounts dating from the 1940s must be added an earlier one that is less well known. Asked about his rejection by a newspaper reporter in 1909, Aurobindo replied candidly: “I failed in the final for the Civil Service… because I could not ride.” He added: “If I was not actually glad, I was certainly not disappointed because the Civil Service was barred to me. I have never been fond of constraint of any sort and I was really not sorry to forego the service.” This suggests that Aurobindo’s “manoeuvres” may have been less premeditated than they appear in his later accounts, but it supports his assertion that he had no desire to join the ICS. (Lives, 32)
What Heehs implies in the above paragraph is: (1) that not only Sri Aurobindo lied to the senior examiner of the Civil Service Commission but also to his disciples when he told them he had got himself disqualified “by certain manoeuvres”; (2) that he actually did not know how to ride a horse, so he would have failed the riding test even if he had appeared for it in time; (3) that he was actually covering up his inability to ride a horse with the explanation of manoeuvres; and finally (4) that there was no
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premeditation but rather helplessness which made Sri Aurobindo fail in the Civil Service Examination. More could be construed in this negative manner, but I would stop here and appeal to common sense and simple logic. If Sri Aurobindo was really serious about joining the Civil Service and enjoying the lucrative career of a Govt. official, why would he not have learnt horse-riding? The fact is that he was essentially unwilling to join the Civil Service. It is true he may not have had sufficient practice in riding to pass the test because he could not afford to pay for the riding lessons, which were costly in Cambridge. It could also be that he was not endowed with exceptional riding skills to learn from the few lessons that he could afford from his careless teacher, but all these factors come under the ambit of the overall reluctance he felt for joining the ICS. They were thus deliberately used by him as excuses than being the actual causes of his failure in the riding test. This can be inferred by the following remarks of Sri Aurobindo in the Evening Talks:
It was father’s fault that I failed in the riding test. He did not send money and the riding lessons at Cambridge then were rather costly. The teacher was also careless; so long as he got his money he simply left me with the horse and I was not particular. I tried riding again at Baroda with Madhav Rao but it was not successful. My failure was a great disappointment to my father because he had arranged everything for me through Sir Henry Cotton. A post was kept for me in the district of Arrah which was considered a fine place. All that came down like a wall.
(After a pause) I wonder what would have happened to me if I had joined the civil service. I think, they would have chucked me for laziness and arrears of work! (Laughter) 2
Thus Sri Aurobindo’s candid reply to the newspaper reporter, “I failed in the final for the Civil Service… because I could not ride,” does not contradict what he said about “certain manoeuvres” by which he got himself disqualified. Yes, he perhaps could not ride, but then he deliberately did not procure enough money (which he surely could have) from his brothers and friends to get enough training. He did not have money even to pay for his travel expenses,
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but he deliberately did not borrow the money in time and arrived late for his appointments. It is as if he put himself into a predicament without any willingness to come out of it. (See Appendix 2)
So what am I trying to prove if Sri Aurobindo’s manoeuvres were pre-meditated? Was he acting out of a yogic impulse? Certainly not! I quote from the Evening Talks:
Disciple: But why then did you appear in the ICS? Was it by some intuition that you did not come for the riding test?
Sri Aurobindo: Not at all. I knew nothing of yoga at that time. I appeared for ICS because my father wanted it and I was too young to understand. Later I found out what sort of work it is and I had disgust for administrative life and I had no interest in administrative work. My interest was in poetry and literature and study of languages and patriotic action.3
The motives behind the manoeuvres were “disgust for administrative life” and interest “in poetry and literature and study of languages and patriotic action”. The motives were not yogic, but neither were they ordinary. From this point of view, the manoeuvres were understandably human and the tactics of evasion he adopted in the given circumstances are excusable by normal standards of conduct. So why make such a big fuss about it? Sri Aurobindo was certainly not a yogi at this point of time, but neither was he an outright liar and a coward as Heehs is so eager to prove.
In the next paragraph, Heehs again wants to prove how Sri Aurobindo was wrong in partly attributing his failure in the ICS to having been black-marked by the authorities for delivering “revolutionary speeches” at Cambridge. This is what Sri Aurobindo wrote on himself in the third person:
It was in England while at Cambridge that he made revolutionary speeches at the meetings of the Indian Majlis which were recorded as a black mark against him by the India Office.4
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At the age of eleven Sri Aurobindo had already received strongly the impression that a period of general upheaval and great revolutionary changes was coming in the world and he himself was destined to play a part in it. His attention was now drawn to India and this feeling was soon canalised into the idea of the liberation of his own country. But the “firm decision” took full shape only towards the end of another four years. It had already been made when he went to Cambridge and as a member and for some time secretary of the Indian Majlis at Cambridge he delivered many revolutionary speeches which, as he afterwards learnt, had their part in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service; the failure in the riding test was only the occasion, for in some other cases an opportunity was given for remedying this defect in India itself.5
How does Heehs present the same event? I quote below from the Lives:
When Aurobindo became famous as a revolutionary politician, many Britons assumed that it was his rejection from the ICS that “turned him against government.” This certainly was not so. His opposition to British rule took form long before he was rejected. Equally unfounded is the claim that his radical views contributed to his rejection. Aurobindo was once informed that the “revolutionary speeches” he made at Cambridge “were recorded as a black mark against him by the India Office” and “had their part in determining the authorities to exclude him from the Indian Civil Service.” There is no hint of any such black mark in the India Office correspondence. 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. That said, it must be added that few men in Whitehall wanted “natives of India” to join the ICS. Less than a year after turning down Aurobindo’s petition, Lord Kimberley wrote: “It is indispensable that an adequate number of the members of the Civil Service shall always be Europeans.” Lord Lansdowne, the incumbent Viceroy, agreed with him on “the absolute necessity of keeping the government of this widespread Empire in European hands, if that Empire is to be maintained.” (Lives, 32)
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On what basis does Heehs say Sri Aurobindo was wrong that “his radical views contributed to his rejection” from the ICS? On not having found any papers related to it in the India Office correspondence? As if it would certainly have been recorded there, and as if all the papers would have survived. Read the next few sentences in which he proceeds with supreme confidence to show how Sri Aurobindo was mistaken about what he had heard, in spite of admitting that there was a bias towards Indians in the India Office. Actually, if there was a bias against Indians, there is all the more reason why Sri Aurobindo would have been right! Finally, Heehs puts on the gown of the Civil Service Commissioner and delivers his sentence in retrospect:
He [Sri Aurobindo] was not given another chance to pass because he did not follow instructions, keep appointments, or tell the truth. (Lives, 32)
Is this objective history or a fake historian too eager to prove the “defects of Sri Aurobindo’s character”? It is very likely the latter!
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Appendix 16
CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION, WESTMINSTER.
Case of Mr Arvinda A. Ghose
Memorandum by the Senior Examiner, Civil Service Commission respecting the Examination in Riding.
Ordered to be examined with the other probationers on August 9th. Did not attend. Sent medical certificate on August 11th to explain why. Was asked on 15th August to say when he would be ready to be examined. Question repeated on 30th August, as no answer had been received. Question repeated a third time on 17th October, answer requested by return of post. Answer received dated 18th October saying he would prefer the following Tuesday or Wednesday. Colonel Brough fixed the Wednesday (October 26th) at 12.30 at Woolwich. Ghose was ordered by letter on 22nd to attend at that time: the letter was sent to same address as that of 17th October. On 26th October, Colonel Brough wrote to say the candidate had not appeared. A messenger was sent to Ghose (same address) and asked to bring back an answer: the answer was that Ghose had not received the letter making the appointment. Ghose was directed to attend here in person on Monday 31st October at 12 noon. He came at 12.40 and repeated his statement that the letter above-mentioned had never reached him. I gave him a letter to Colonel Brough asking the latter to arrange with Ghose a date for his Examination and told Ghose to lose no time in going down to Woolwich and presenting the letter in person: to go down that afternoon if he had no other engagement. I also wrote a line to Colonel Brough telling him of this. Colonel Brough wrote on 5th November saying Ghose had never appeared, and returning the Marking Form supplied for this report. Colonel Brough added that he would prefer not to examine Ghose. After a note from me, he agreed however, to do so, if someone from this Office were present (Nov. 9th). Ghose ordered to call here at noon on the
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10th. He came at ten minutes to one. He explained (as also in his letter of the 9th instant received on 10th) that he had twice been to see Colonel Brough but had not found him. I asked him whether he went to the Office of the Riding Establishment. He said “No – to Colonel’s house” (this is close by). He posted the letter I gave him, to Colonel Brough, instead of leaving it for him. Colonel Brough has returned this letter to me, together with Ghose’s undated letter accompanying it. I then showed Ghose Colonel Brough’s latest letter fixing the 15th November for the Examination, and naming the train 2.22 from Charing Cross. I also copied this on a slip of paper, which I gave into Ghose’s hand, and told him to meet me, without fail, at 2.15 on the platform at Charing Cross Station. I explained to him that if he again failed us, the Commissioners would not be able to give another chance, as this state of things could not be allowed to continue. He took away the memorandum and also promised verbally to meet me on the following Tuesday the 15th November. I went there yesterday and kept a look-out, but no Ghose appeared. I went on to Woolwich by the 2.22 train, in case Ghose should be going from any other station or by a different train. But he was not at the Riding Establishment. Colonel Brough and I waited from 20 minutes to half an hour, and then I returned. While waiting at Charing Cross station, I had sent a message to Mr Bonar, saying the candidate had not yet appeared and asking him to send a messenger round to his house to enquire. Mr Bonar did this, sending also a note to ask Ghose to go down to Woolwich and be examined. The messenger brought word that Ghose was out and was not expected till 6 p.m.
Colonel Brough’s servant says no one called as Ghose had asserted: he would have noticed an Indian gentleman—none such had appeared at Colonel Brough’s house on any of the days named.
16th November 1982
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CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION,
17th November 1892
Sir,
With reference to Mr Lockhart’s letter of the 24th August last,
I am directed by the Civil Service Commissioners to acquaint you for the information of the Secretary of State for India in Council, that although several opportunities have been offered to Mr A. A. Ghose of attending for examination in Riding, with a view to proving himself qualified in that respect, he has repeatedly failed to attend at the time appointed, and that the Commissioners are consequently unable to certify that he is qualified to be appointed to the Civil Service of India.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient servant, John Hennell
The Under Secretary of State, India Office
Appendix 27
Sri Aurobindo’s Letter to the Secretary of State for India
The Right Hon the Earl of Kimberley Secretary of State for India.
6 Burlington Rd Bayswater W
Monday. Nov. 21. 1892 May it please your Lordship
I was selected as a probationer for the Indian Civil Service in 1890, and after the two years probation required have been rejected on the ground that I failed to attend the Examination in Riding.
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I humbly petition your Lordship that a farther consideration may, if possible, be given to my case.
I admit that the Commissioners have been very indulgent to me in the matter, and that my conduct has been as would naturally lead them to suppose me negligent of their instructions; but I hope your Lordship will allow me to lay before you certain circumstances that may tend to extenuate it.
I was sent over to England, when seven years of age, with my two elder brothers and for the last eight years we have been thrown on our own resources without any English friend to help or advise us. Our father, Dr. K. D. Ghose of Khulna, has been unable to provide the three of us with sufficient for the most necessary wants, and we have long been in an embarrassed position.
It was owing to want of money that I was unable always to report cases in London at the times required by the Commissioners, and to supply myself with sufficiently constant practice in Riding. At the last I was thrown wholly on borrowed resources and even these were exhausted.
It was owing to difficulty in procuring the necessary money, that I was late at my appointment on Tuesday Nov 15. I admit that I did not observe the exact terms of the appointment; however I went on to Woolwich by the next train, but found that the Examiner had gone back to London.
If your Lordship should grant me another chance, an English gentleman, Mr. Cotton, (editor of the Academy) of 107 Abingdon Road, Kensington. W. has undertaken that want of money shall not prevent me from fulfilling the exact instructions of the Commissioners.
If your Lordship should obtain this for me, it will be the object of my life to remember it in the faithful performance of my duties in the Civil Service of India.
I am
Your Lordship’s obedient servant Aravinda. Acroyd. Ghose
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I quote below a few more “corrected extracts” of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs and point out how the author grossly misrepresents Sri Aurobindo to the gullible public mind.
Sri Aurobindo’s Childhood
As a rule, however, he kept to himself. Most of his classmates were too much older than he to be his friends. A few patronized 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. (Lives, 17)
Note the phrase, “he was also — by his own account — a coward and a liar”. In order to show how Heehs uses Sri Aurobindo’s own account against him, I give below the full quotation from the Evening Talks:
I was feeling completely bored. Then a priest approached me and put me some questions. I did not give any reply. Then they all shouted out, “He is saved, he is saved,” and began to pray for me and offer thanks to God! I did not understand anything. Then the priest came to me and asked me to pray. I was never in the habit of praying but somehow I did it in the manner in which children recite their prayers before sleep— in order to keep up an appearance. That was the only thing. But I never used to attend Church. I was then about ten years old. The old lady’s son, Mr. Drewett, never used to meddle in these affairs because he was a man of common sense. But he went away to Australia.
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When we were staying in London this old lady used to have daily family prayers and reading of some passage from the Bible. One day Manmohan said something about Moses which made her wild. She said she did not want to live under the same roof with unbelievers, and went to live somewhere else. I felt infinitely relieved and grateful to Manmohan. We were then entering upon the agnostic stage in our development.
I was a great coward virtually and I was weak physically and could not do anything. Only my will was strong. Nobody could have imagined that I could face the gallows or carry on a revolutionary movement. In my case it was all human imperfection with which I had to start and feel all the difficulties before embodying the Divine Consciousness.1
Sri Aurobindo referred to his “human imperfection” in the larger context of his yogic development and finally “embodying the Divine Consciousness”. If no mention is made of this final success and only the defect his of character highlighted with the help of further negative evidence from the reports of hostile British officials, what impression would the reader get? That Sri Aurobindo remained a coward and liar all his life! Moreover, Sri Aurobindo was speaking of his school days when he was a boy of ten (at Manchester) or twelve (when he went to London with Mrs. Drewett), and was living in a foreign country far away from his parents. Even from an ordinary point of view, you could sympathise with his situation and understand the reason behind his timidity. Only a biographer bent on finding faults in his subject will unsparingly expose a young boy for his cowardice!
Sri Aurobindo’s Medical Test
According to a classmate, Aurobindo failed to pass his medical examination the first time around on account of “something found wrong with his urinary organs.” (Lives, p. 28)
Note added by Heehs in the Corrected Extracts:
N.B. “urinary organs” is a Victorian euphemism for “kidneys”. For the significance of this problem in Sri Aurobindo’s life, see Lives, pp. 220-21, 406, 408, 409
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Is this the kind of thing that a biographer of a spiritual personality has to focus on? This is plain indecency, from every point of view! The definition of the word “euphemism”, according to the Cambridge dictionary, is “a word or phrase used to avoid saying an unpleasant or offensive word”. So how could the term “urinary organs” be a euphemism for “kidneys”? Nobody, not even Peter Heehs himself, would appreciate someone writing about his “urinary organs” whereas he would not mind the word “kidneys” instead. Secondly, “urinary organs” and “kidneys” are not interchangeable terms; the former comprises not only the kidneys but other parts of the urinary system, including the urethra through which the urine is discharged from the body. There is every likelihood of the organs of the reproductive system (the genital organs) being confused with those of the urinary system, with which it works in close conjunction and proximity. Besides, how reliable can be the report of the classmate who surely was not a medical practitioner, and how do we know that he meant “kidneys” when he said “urinary organs”? If there is any such Victorian euphemism, I would like to know the source of it. Heehs is merely covering up his gross indiscretion by connecting it with Sri Aurobindo’s kidney problems in his last days.
Sri Aurobindo’s Anger
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 that 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,
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that the madness in Aurobindo’s family might express itself in him as an intensity that exceeded the norm. (Lives, 112)
Another unpardonable case of bad taste! I wonder whether those who support the book have at all understood this sentence: “Well, if you take the clothes away there remains little to distinguish one human radish from another.” It is a reference to the male sexual organ! And if this is passable, then I wonder what is not passable, and you might as well start writing for a porn magazine. I don’t see at all the necessity of quoting this highly offensive sentence from Hemendra Prasad’s diary except to denigrate Sri Aurobindo. Heehs of course will say he has quoted it in order to show Sri Aurobindo’s temper before his yogic attainment, how the human became the Avatar, but that is plain deception. For where has he shown the positive side of Sri Aurobindo which is so well-known to everybody, his coolness and almost inability to scold anybody.
28 February 2011
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Embedded deep in the endnotes of Chapter 3 of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs is a highly objectionable definition of a term used by Sri Aurobindo in his spiritual diary entitled Record of Yoga. I am referring to endnote 76 on page 425 in which the term maithunananda has been defined by Heehs as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight”. His logic is simple: maithuna in Sanskrit means “coitus” and ananda means “bliss”, therefore maithunananda means the bliss of coitus or erotic delight. So what is wrong about it? Why make such a big fuss about an apparently simple and straightforward conclusion? Because, by this very simplification, truth has been turned into falsehood, for which you can pardon a newcomer to Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga, but not someone who has spent 37 years studying it. And if, in spite of so many years of research, this self-styled scholar has come up with this definition, then his credentials should certainly be questioned.
But first about the definitions, or rather the lack of them in The Record of Yoga, and in particular with regard to the Sharira Chatusthaya, which makes it so difficult for us to understand Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual diary. Sri Aurobindo wrote the Record for himself and mostly did not bother to explain the terms he used except in the barest outlines. These are often incompletely stated, and even when stated, don’t make much sense to us because we don’t have the corresponding experience. For example, what do we understand by tivrananda, vaidyutananda, vishayananda and raudrananda, which are the four anandas of the body other than maithunananda, according to the classification quoted below? And
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mind you, even this bare classification is from the scribal version of a disciple which is published in the appendix of the Record of Yoga – the Master himself did not care to list them in his own hand, leave alone elaborate on them:
Kamananda:
We do get a notion of these various anandas from the diary notations in the Record, but, beyond a certain point of fascination, one has the strong sense of being outsiders to this unfamiliar realm of spiritual experience. Thus apart from a certain authentication of data for those who are not ready to believe in such spiritual experiences, the Record does not seem to serve any purpose for the ordinary seeker who is looking for practical spiritual instructions within his reach. Not that it is not interesting in itself as the diary of a supreme Yogi, not that it should not have been published, nor that it might one day be of interest to us when we are equally spiritually advanced (God knows when!), but because it is always good to remind ourselves of our inherent limitations when we study it. More so, when certain minds are too eager to distort the meaning of the terms used by Sri Aurobindo on the basis of the popular dictionary, knowing well that he gave them an entirely different significance.
So what is the exact meaning of the word maithunananda in the Record of Yoga? Sri Aurobindo himself did not define it, and in the absence of such a definition, you would naturally proceed to find one for kamananda of which maithunananda is an intense form, according to the ten occurrences of the term in the Record. The term kamananda occurs around 600 times and the one thing that catches your attention is the slow and victorious consolidation of this siddhi in Sri Aurobindo’s body. But again we don’t have any description of it either, though we do have two short definitions
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in the scribal version of the Sapta Chatusthaya. Describing the four elements of the Sharira Chatusthaya which are Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya and Ananda, the scribal version provides us the following two definitions under Ananda:
Ananda referred to here is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual etc. 2
Kamananda – Physical Ananda, Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure. 3
We note that Kamananda is defined here as Physical Ananda, which does not oppose the classification that has been previously quoted from page 1456. But we are a little confused when Sri Aurobindo uses the term a number of times in the sense of being one of the five anandas of the body and not as synonymous to Physical Ananda. I quote one such instance:
Motions of contact are now commencing in which, starting with the vishaya and the tivra, all the five physical anandas manifest together raudra, vaidyuta and kama following each other or rather developing out of each other.4
Kamananda in this case should be classified with the four other anandas under Physical Ananda, and maithunananda would be a sub-classification of kamananda and not one of the five anandas listed under kamananda as on page 1456! The matter gets more complicated when we note that these five anandas can follow or even develop out of each other. “How can they develop out of each other when they are different?” would cry our intellects in despair, but this is what happens when we try to mentally understand spiritual experiences without having any real knowledge!
But let us proceed to the next stage in our quest for definitions. Keeping in abeyance the above confusion between Kamananda as synonymous with Physical Ananda or as one of its five constituents, let us ask the question: What does Physical Ananda mean? Or, as Ananda is the fourth element of the sharira Chatusthaya, what does sharirananda mean? Unfortunately, here
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also Sri Aurobindo has given us only the barest outline:
The sharirachatusthaya, likewise, need not be at present explained. Its four constituents are named below.
Arogyam, utthapana, saundaryam, vividhananda iti sharirachatushtayam.5
The scribal version is not as disappointing in description:
IV. Sharira Chatusthaya Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya, Ananda
Arogya is the state of being healthy. There are three stages:
Utthapana is the state of not being subject to the pressure of physical forces. There are also three stages here:
Saundarya is the state of being beautiful. There are also three stages here:
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Ananda referred to here is Physical Ananda or Kamananda. This is of various kinds, sensuous, sensual etc. 6
The explanatory notes throw some light on the first three elements of the sharira Chatusthaya – Arogya, Utthapana and Saundarya – but we are no wiser than before on the fourth element – Ananda. In fact, I have already quoted the last two sentences to define kamananda and, due to a scarcity of definitions, I am forced to repeat the same for sharirananda.
Let us now look up The Synthesis of Yoga which was written around the same time as the Record. Even here, there is only one paragraph on the sharira chatusthaya in the “Elements of Perfection” (Chapter 10 of the Yoga of Self-Perfection). In this chapter, Sri Aurobindo briefly describes the first six chatusthayas before taking them up in greater detail in the chapters following it. As he never finished this task and went up to only the first three chatusthayas before he wound up the Arya in which he was serialising the Synthesis, all that we are left with is the paragraph below on the sharira chatusthaya:
The gnostic perfection, spiritual in its nature, is to be accomplished here in the body and takes life in the physical world as one of its fields, even though the gnosis opens to us possession of planes and worlds beyond the material universe. The physical body is therefore a basis of action, pratistha, which cannot be despised, neglected or excluded from the spiritual evolution: a perfection of the body as the outer instrument of a complete divine living on earth will be necessarily a part of the gnostic conversion. The change will be effected by bringing in the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members. Pushed to its highest conclusion this movement brings in a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body.
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For behind the gross physical sheath of this materially visible and sensible frame there is subliminally supporting it and discoverable by a finer subtle consciousness a subtle body of the mental being and a spiritual or causal body of the gnostic and bliss soul in which all the perfection of a spiritual embodiment is to be found, a yet unmanifested divine law of the body. Most of the physical siddhis acquired by certain Yogins are brought about by some opening up of the law of the subtle or a calling down of something of the law of the spiritual body. The ordinary method is the opening up of the cakras by the physical processes of Hathayoga (of which something is also included in the Rajayoga) or by the methods of the Tantric discipline. But while these may be optionally used at certain stages by the integral Yoga, they are not indispensable; for here the reliance is on the power of the higher being to change the lower existence, a working is chosen mainly from above downward and not the opposite way, and therefore the development of the superior power of the gnosis will be awaited as the instrumentative change in this part of the Yoga.7
I have marked the sentences in bold which describe the method of the gnostic conversion of the body. Sri Aurobindo says that the change will be effected by “the law of the gnostic Purusha, vijnanamaya purusa, and of that into which it opens, the Anandamaya, into the physical consciousness and its members”. This will bring about “a spiritualising and illumination of the whole physical consciousness” leading eventually to “a divinising of the law of the body”. I quote one more passage to give a better idea of the entire range of Ananda in the being of which Kamananda (or sharirananda) is only one segment. The following passage is from the scribal version of the Siddhi Chatusthaya and comes under its third element “Bhukti”:
Bhukti is the Delight of existence in itself, independent of every experience and extending itself to all experiences. [It has three forms:]
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Kamananda – Physical Ananda, Vishayananda, i.e. sensuous pleasure
Premananda – Getting delight by positive feeling of Love (Chitta)
Ahaitukananda – Delight without any cause (Manas) Chidghanananda – Ananda of the Chit in the object full of the gunas (Vijnana)
Shuddhananda – Ananda of the Beauty of everything (Ananda)
Chidananda – Ananda of pure consciousness without the gunas (Chit-tapas)
Sadananda – Ananda of pure existence apart from all objects and experiences (Sat) 8
Even here, the explanation of Kamananda in the above passage has already been quoted separately. The paucity of definitions thus suggests that Sri Aurobindo hardly cared to provide explanations of his experiences in the Record of Yoga.
So I come back to the point from where I began to enquire about the source of Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. I have subjected my reader to this tedious search for definitions precisely to show that the source of Heehs’s definition is not from Sri Aurobindo, but the popular Sanskrit dictionary! This is ludicrous because surely the spiritual context of the Record of Yoga has to be taken into account for the exact denotation of the word. I quote again Heehs’s definition:
Maithunananda means literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight. (Lives, 425)
Heehs does make a qualification to the term in the context of the Record of Yoga, but it hardly changes the basic meaning of the dictionary. “Spontaneous” or not and whatever be the “intensity”,
maithunananda is defined by him as “erotic delight” or more plainly “sexual bliss”. It is with regard to this plain dictionary definition that I express my objection. Not because the dictionary is wrong, but because the term has an entirely different meaning in the Record of Yoga.
Let me now analyse Heehs’s definition of maithunananda. My first objection to it stems from sheer common sense and not at all from a scholarly study of definitions. The first occurrence of this term in the Record is in the diary notation of 15 January 1913. Let us figure out how many years of Yoga Sri Aurobindo had completed at this point of time. If he had begun his Yoga in 1905, he would have spent 8 years from his practice of Pranayama to the two important realisations of Nirvana and the cosmic consciousness, and further on to the “prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours”9 in Pondicherry around August 1912. Now it is hard to believe that after so many years of Yoga and so many major spiritual experiences, Sri Aurobindo was still in the process of attaining “spontaneous erotic delight”! Personally, I would be flabbergasted at this conclusion!
I would ask Heehs one simple question: “What is the necessity of having ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ when just plain sex would do or bring about the same net result? Or is it that ‘spontaneous erotic delight’ comes after many years of difficult yogic practice in spite of it being perfectly useless for man’s physical health?” The next grand conclusion that you can perhaps expect from him is that it is indeed the highest consummation of Yoga! It is precisely because of this eventuality that I would like to alert readers beforehand that they are being taken for a ride. It is dangerous to commit mistakes of this kind in spirituality because by the time you realise that you have gone astray, you would have ruined your life for good. Traditional wisdom (apart from plain common sense) has been repeating it from hoary times not to mix sex with spirituality, and Sri Aurobindo has been uncompromisingly clear on this issue. His Yoga can be practised in spite of sex, but not through sex, and he forbade his disciples from any immixture of it. The sexual energy, however, has to be sublimated and transformed into the “pure divine Ananda in the physical”, of
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which sexual pleasure is “a coarse and excited degradation”.10 I quote at length from a letter of Sri Aurobindo:
The whole principle of this Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody and to nothing else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother Power all the transcendent light, force, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ananda of the supramental Divine. In this Yoga, therefore, there can be no place for vital relations or interchanges with others; any such relation or interchange immediately ties down the soul to the lower consciousness and its lower nature, prevents the true and full union with the Divine and hampers both the ascent to the supramental Truth- consciousness and the descent of the supramental Ishwari Shakti. Still worse would it be if this interchange took the form of a sexual relation or a sexual enjoyment, even if kept free from any outward act; therefore these things are absolutely forbidden in the sadhana. It goes without saying that any physical act of the kind is not allowed, but also any subtler form is ruled out. It is only after becoming one with the supramental Divine that we can find our true spiritual relations with others in the Divine; in that higher unity this kind of gross lower vital movement can have no place.
To master the sex-impulse,– to become so much master of the sex-centre that the sexual energy would be drawn upwards, not thrown outwards and wasted – it is so indeed that the force in the seed can be turned into a primal physical energy supporting all the others, retas into ojas. But no error can be more perilous than to accept the immixture of the sexual desire and some kind of subtle satisfaction of it and look on this as a part of the sadhana. It would be the most effective way to head straight towards spiritual downfall and throw into the atmosphere forces that would block the supramental descent, bringing instead the descent of adverse vital powers to disseminate disturbance and disaster. This deviation must be absolutely thrown away, should it try to occur and expunged from the consciousness, if the Truth is to be brought down and the work is to be done.
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It is an error too to imagine that, although the physical sexual action is to be abandoned, yet some inward reproduction of it is part of the transformation of the sex- centre. The action of the animal sex-energy in Nature is a device for a particular purpose in the economy of the material creation in the Ignorance. But the vital excitement that accompanies it makes the most favourable opportunity and vibration in the atmosphere for the inrush of those very vital forces and beings whose whole business is to prevent the descent of the supramental Light. The pleasure attached to it is a degradation and not a true form of the divine Ananda. The true divine Ananda in the physical has a different quality and movement and substance; self-existent in its essence, its manifestation is dependent only on an inner union with the Divine. You have spoken of Divine Love; but Divine Love, when it touches the physical, does not awaken the gross lower vital propensities; indulgence of them would only repel it and make it withdraw again to the heights from which it is already difficult enough to draw it down into the coarseness of the material creation which it alone can transform. Seek the Divine Love through the only gate through which it will consent to enter, the gate of the psychic being, and cast away the lower vital error.
The transformation of the sex-centre and its energy is needed for the physical siddhi; for this energy is the support in the body of all the mental, vital and physical forces of the nature. It has to be changed into a mass and a movement of intimate Light, creative Power, pure Divine Ananda. It is only the bringing down of the supramental Light, Power and Bliss into the centre that can so change it. As to the working afterwards, it is the supramental Truth and the creative vision and will of the Divine Mother that will determine it. But it will be a working of the conscious Truth, not of the Darkness and Ignorance to which sexual desire and enjoyment belong; it will be a power of preservation and free desireless radiation of the life-forces and not of their throwing out and waste. Avoid the imagination that the supramental life will be only a
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heightened satisfaction of the desires of the vital and the body; nothing can be a greater obstacle to the Truth in its descent than this hope of glorification of the animal in human nature. Mind wants the supramental state to be a confirmation of its own cherished ideas and preconceptions; the vital wants it to be a glorification of its own desires; the physical wants it to be a rich prolongation of its own comforts and pleasures and habits. If it were to be that, it would be only an exaggerated and highly magnified consummation of the animal and the human nature, not a transition from the human into the Divine.11
The above letter should settle this argument and I would refer the reader to the full chapter of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on the subject in his Letters on Yoga, pp 1507-1549. Strangely, references to the same letters have been given by Heehs in this very endnote, which all the more shows his confused state of mind. You don’t have to hunt for references to rebut him, because he himself provides them to his critics. Of course, in this case he provides them with great glee to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” (I take up this issue in Part 2) without realising that those who are going to read them attentively will at once challenge his definition of maithunananda in his endnote. For how can maithunananda (as mentioned in the Record) mean mere sexual delight when Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga (as explained in the above letter) aims at transformation of sexual desire into the “pure divine Ananda”?
But the argument is not over and I anticipate a few more objections from his side. “Why did Sri Aurobindo use the word maithunananda if not to indicate its relation to sexual bliss?” would be the next short-sighted question. Yes, relation there is, but the relation of the higher to the lower, in which case you interpret the lower in terms of the higher and not the reverse, that is, misinterpret the higher in terms of the lower as Heehs has done. What difference does it make? It makes a world of difference! It is the difference between “spontaneous erotic delight” and “pure divine Ananda”: erotic delight or sexual bliss is a coarse degradation of that pure divine Ananda and not its consummation. It is the difference
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between brahmacharya which turns retas into ojas, for which many lives of yoga are necessary, and plain simple bhoga, which requires none at all. In short, it is the difference between man and the next stage of evolution and it will result in either spiritual progress or an evolutionary regress to a stage below the present mental man. Sri Aurobindo used the word maithunananda because of the unavailability of terms to describe the higher Ananda – a frequent problem with spiritual experience – and certainly not in the sense of the definition in the popular dictionary. The same problem occurs with Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the term “superman”, which is likely to be misunderstood as “a highly developed mental man”. According to him, the difference between man and superman is not merely in degree but in the very nature and substance of the consciousness embodying them, and the difference between them is more than that between man and animal. So is the word “psychic” and a number of other terms to which Sri Aurobindo has assigned his own significances which do not match with the meanings commonly given to them.
“Why does Sri Aurobindo then refer to sexual ‘emission’ or ‘effusion’ when he speaks of maithunananda?” is perhaps the final defence of this sort of mind bent upon finding some textual support for the satisfaction of sexual desire in Yoga. I quote two instances of this term in the Record where this confusion can occur:
Kamananda, usually intense only in isolated touches more or less rapidly repeated, became yesterday intense to the point of maithunananda with continuously repeated touches, but owing to the fear of effusion, it was stayed before it could develop. Nevertheless the habitual intensity is now much greater & keener than formerly, but varies in continuity. (Record of Yoga, 300)
In the fourth, it is now evident that what is being prepared by the apparent reaction towards asiddhi of continuity in the kamananda, is the ability of the body to bear the high intensity of maithunananda without emission and its distribution as ananda throughout the body. (Record of Yoga, 302)
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Sri Aurobindo does not speak here of emission as a positive effect of the divine Ananda that he was experiencing in the body, but as a negative mechanical response of it due to its inability “to bear the high intensity of maithunananda”. He surely did not mean that maithunananda ends in emission or that it consummates in “spontaneous erotic delight” without emission. I quote a portion from the Evening Talks which supports my statement, even though the term being discussed is kamananda. Recall that Sri Aurobindo’s usage of the word maithunananda in the Record indicates that it is an intense form of kamananda, in which case the remarks below should apply to it as well.
Disciple : Barin, I heard, had a lot of experiences.
Sri Aurobindo : They were mere mental and he gathered some knowledge, much information or understanding out of them. I heard that when he had begun yoga he had an experience of kâmânanda. Lele was surprised to hear about it. For he said that experience comes usually at the end. It is a descent like any other experience but unless one’s sex centre is sufficiently controlled it may produce bad results such as emission and other disturbances.12
Now that all textual arguments have been answered, I suppose our scholar will resort to diversionary tactics by shouting at us, “Why do you make such a big fuss about sex as if you are above it? All of us have to go through it. So why be so prudish? In any case, I am free to draw my own conclusions!” I won’t respond to the issue of freedom of speech because it has been already answered at length by my colleague, Alok Pandey. As for being above sex, no, none of us have made such tall claims. All that we insist upon is that Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga should not be misinterpreted under the guise of academic research. Neither are we forcing our interpretation on others because Sri Aurobindo has amply expounded his Yoga. As for being a prude, it is not a question of moral restraint as much as accepting a yogic discipline once you are serious about it. Nobody compels you to take it up; it is your own choice. And if you fall on the way, you simply pick
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yourself up, change your life style or carry on quietly instead of reading your limitations in the Master’s life and works in order to justify your failures!
I would like to make one more observation. The endnote over which I have spent so much time is not as innocuous and harmless as it appears to be. In fact, most readers will not even read it and, even if they do, will accept on faith the definition of maithunananda provided by Heehs. First time readers of Sri Aurobindo will automatically conclude that Sri Aurobindo not only approved of sex in his Yoga, but gave it an important place. It is only those who are sufficiently familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga who will raise their eyebrows, check for the actual connotation of the term as used by Sri Aurobindo and realise the dangers of the wrong definition. It is precisely this first layer of falsehood which prepares the public mind to absorb greater twists in the future until it can make a veritable U-turn and interpret the Integral Yoga in exactly the opposite way to what Sri Aurobindo meant. In fact, it is by basing himself on this definition of maithunananda and a few other statements made by Heehs that the infamous Jeffrey Kripal writes in his book on Esalen that Sri Aurobindo “associated the way of Ananda with the left-handed path of Tantra”.13 How far can you stray from the Truth on the basis of one wrong definition and a couple of crazy conclusions!
It is true that Sri Aurobindo integrated in his Yoga some of the elements of the Tantric tradition such as the worship of the divine Shakti or the ascent of the consciousness through the various centres of the subtle body, but there is not a single iota of evidence to show that he ever associated himself with the sex-rituals of the left-handed path of Tantra. He spoke of Tantric kriyas in his letters to Motilal Roy, but there is no mention of what sort of kriyas they were. If it be concluded on the basis of (or the lack of) such evidence that they were indeed sexual kriyas, and that they were not mentioned because of social compunctions as Kripal suggests, then no logic on earth can convince such a perverted mind! Moreover, why would Sri Aurobindo hide facts from others when he was writing his private spiritual diary (Record of Yoga) if he had
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found these sex rituals useful to his Yoga? In the Record, the term “Tantric kriyas” is used only twice in the sense of “mechanical means” or “special processes” by which you employ siddhis such as Aishwarya, Ishita and Vashita.
The fact that Sri Aurobindo smoked cigars and partook of meat and wine during the pre-1926 period of his life in Pondicherry has also led to some fanciful speculation about his attitude towards sex and sadhana. The injunction against sex always remained firm both for himself and his disciples till the end. This is what he said in September 1926 in one of his evening talks:
Disciple: In our Yoga we have to discontinue the lower movement of nature as being an obstacle to Sadhana, but the Tantrics – specially the Vira sadhaks – turn these obstacles to account and, taking help from these, they build up spiritual life.
Sri Aurobindo: How?
Disciple: That is my question.
Sri Aurobindo: I have no objection to taking fish and even you can take wine, if it suits you, but how can the sexual act be made to help in spiritual life? In itself the sexual act is not bad as the moralists believe. It is a movement of nature which has its purpose and is neither good nor bad. But, from the yogic point of view, the sexual force is the greatest force in the world and if properly used helps to recreate and regenerate the being. But, if it is indulged in the ordinary way, it is a great obstacle for two reasons. First, the sexual act involves a great loss of vital force, it is a movement towards death, though this is compensated by creation of new life. That it is a movement towards death is proved by the exhaustion felt after it; many people feel even a disgust. 14
5 March 2010
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Comment by Sona Singh Gill on TLOSA blog:
What intelligence Peter has? If erotic Ananda were possible with Yoga or is related to Yoga, then people of the world will stop looking for women and do yoga because it would save a lot of time and energy!
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Part Two – Marriage and Brahmacharya
Let us now take up the passage on pages 55-56 of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo to which endnote 76 on page 425 (discussed in Part 1) is attached. I will first draw the attention of the reader to the desperate attempts of Heehs to prove what he calls Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex”. Apart from the most uncouth manner with which he treats this subject, which so many have already objected to, I would like to point out a few glaring deficiencies in his so- called scholarship. He quotes a long passage from an early commentary of Sri Aurobindo on the Isha Upanishad in which an imaginary Guru describes the scale of human love to his student. The passage begins:
If sensual gratification were all, then it is obvious that I should have no reason to prefer one woman over another and after the brute gratification liking would cease; I have seen this brute impulse given the name of love; perhaps I myself used to give it that name when the protoplasmic animal predominated in me.1
He then concludes on the basis of this evidence that it was “the usual desire for gratification” that was presumably a factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to get married. Now is this scholarship or speculation? I thought historians base themselves on concrete evidence and not on what imaginary characters say in Vedantic commentaries. If the teacher in the commentary speaks as if he has had marital relations, does it prove that Sri Aurobindo went through the same experience in real life? Extend that argument to other authors in their respective fields and you can come to
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ridiculous conclusions. How many novelists would be accused of committing murder, robbery and rape just because they have described them convincingly in their crime thrillers! Good writers are precisely distinguished by their creative imagination, their ability to identify themselves with the world around them and the capacity to convey their stories realistically to their readers.
Even admitting for the moment that the passage from the commentary has some connection with Sri Aurobindo’s married life, we need not hunt for material to counter Heehs’s conclusion. I quote the very next two sentences in the same paragraph quoted by Heehs from the Isha Upanishad commentary:
If emotional gratification were all, then I might indeed cling for a time to the woman who had pleased my body, but only so long as she gave me emotional pleasure, by her obedience, her sympathy with my likes & dislikes, her pleasant speech, her admiration or her answering love. But the moment these cease, my liking also will begin to fade away. This sort of liking too is persistently given the great name and celebrated in poetry & romance.2
By the same method of direct inference from what the teacher says, emotional gratification also must have been a factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to get married and not merely physical gratification, as Heehs presents it. The teacher in the commentary discusses next aesthetic and intellectual gratification, so they too must have been contributory factors. Why were not all these factors taken into consideration and only the first highlighted as if it was all that mattered? Because Heehs has never the patience to follow a line of argument to its logical end; he stops midstream as soon as his purpose is served, which is to publicly denigrate Sri Aurobindo. He will of course say that there was no scope for intellectual gratification with Mrinalini, so the text does not apply in that case. But then who decides when and where the text applies or not? Logically, if it does not apply in one case, it need not apply in the other cases too.
The teacher concludes by telling us the sublime reason why a man’s love for a woman does not cease even after the cessation of
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the above-mentioned four gratifications – physical, emotional, aesthetic and intellectual. I quote from the same commentary:
Whence then comes that love which is greater than life and stronger than death, which survives the loss of beauty and the loss of charm, which defies the utmost pain & scorn the object of love can deal out to it, which often pours out from a great & high intellect on one infinitely below it? ... That Love is nothing but the Self recognizing the Self dimly or clearly and therefore seeking to realise oneness & the bliss of oneness.3
He then discusses the same with regard to friendship and concludes similarly that even the love of a friend is actually based on the recognition of one’s universal Self in him:
What again is a friend? Certainly I do not seek from my friend the pleasure of the body or choose him for his good looks; nor for that similarity of tastes & pursuits I would ask in a mere comrade; nor do I love him because he loves me or admires me, as I would perhaps love a disciple; nor do I necessarily demand of him a clever brain, as if he were only an intellectual helper or teacher. All these feelings exist, but they are not the soul of friendship. No, I love my friend for the woman’s reason, because I love him, because in the old imperishable phrase, he is my other self. 4
So does the love of the patriot for the nation, the love of the philanthropist for mankind and the love of the whole world by great beings such as the Buddha, depend on this essential unity of the Brahman, by which you see “your Self in all creatures and all creatures in your Self ”. The teacher is in fact explaining the sixth verse of the Isha Upanishad which Sri Aurobindo translates:
But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught.5
I need not further summarise this long commentary as I have given a sufficient idea of the sublime topic discussed by the teacher as opposed to Heehs’s attention which is riveted only on one aspect of it – sensual gratification. Heehs then quotes in his endnote the
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occurrence of the term maithunananda in the Record of Yoga to prove Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” and refers to his letters on Yoga as additional material to prove the same. Now is this genuine scholarship or a mania for sex which reflects his own psychological abnormalities? I am reminded of the hilarious example of a psychopath who saw sex not only in the image of a goat, but a circle, a triangle, a hexagon and even a square.6 I may add that, in this case, Heehs seems to see it everywhere like the Self in all existence. I would not be surprised if one day he solemnly declares to the world that the Self is nothing but a personification of Sex!
Why is he so desperate about proving Sri Aurobindo’s “knowledge of sex” as if his disciples would not believe it at any cost? Had it been true and authentic information on it was available, I don’t think they would have had any objection to it. For instance, don’t they hold the Mother in equal esteem as their Master despite her marriage and the birth of her son? All that they would insist upon is that the subject be dealt with deference and dignity and not in the repugnant manner that Heehs has done. Even the biography of an ordinary person deserves more discretion and respect for privacy in these matters.
Let us see what the documents have to say on the subject of Sri Aurobindo’s married life. I quote four documents below which Heehs has deliberately left out; these are what a writer on this site has called “active omissions”, a frequent trick played by Heehs in order to deceive his readers.
Document 1:
One day I had asked him in the course of conversation, “Chief, you knew that you were going to plunge into the vortex of revolutionary politics. Why did you marry? Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.” He thought for a moment and replied very slowly, “Well, Charu, it was like this. Just then I was very despondent and felt that I was destined to lead the life of a pedagogue. Why, then, should I not marry?” Aurobindo married, be it noted, in April 1901.
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(Charu Chandra Dutt, “My Friend and My Master”, Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1952, p. 137)
Document 2:
In 1909, after his acquittal, I once invited Sri Aurobindo for lunch....
We discussed whether one can maintain brahmacharya after marriage. I was of the opinion that one can’t. He was explaining how it was in fact possible. I was curious to know whether Sri Aurobindo himself maintained it but could not muster the courage to ask him. After a while he told me, “I can see what is in your mind. You are eager to know whether I have sexual relations with my wife or not. I don’t,” he declared. “I have been able to maintain my brahmacharya even after marriage.”
(Manomohan Gangopadhyaya, Shruti-Smriti, Part 1, 1927, p. 13)
Document 3:
I asked Sri Aurobindo one day: “Sejda, on the one hand you practise the austerities of yoga and on the other you sleep in one bed with your wife. What kind of austerity is that?” Smiling sweetly he said: “It is not simply by sharing one’s bed with one’s wife that brahmacharya is lost. To form a group of naked ascetics is not my intention. We have thirty-three lakhs of such ascetics in India. I want ‘grihasta sanyasis’ – men leading the full life in the world who when the need arises will renounce everything at the call of duty.” (Abinash Bhattacharya, Galpa-Bharati, 829-50)
[This conversation took place early in 1908 around the time Lele visited Calcutta.]
Document 4:
He never slept on a soft cotton-bed, as most of us do, but on a bed made of coir (coconut fibres) on which was spread a Malabar grass-mat which served as a bed-sheet. Once I asked him why he used such a coarse hard bed and he said with his
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characteristic laugh, “My boy, don’t you know that I am a Brahmachari? Our shastras enjoin that a Brahmachari should not use a soft bed, which may induce him to sleep.” I was silenced but I thought myself that he must be a great man….
One day … in the beginning of 1905, Messrs. Arvind Babu, Deshpande and Jadhav went to Chandod, a small town on the bank of the Narmada, a place of pilgrimage. There they passed a day with a Yogi and then proceeded to Ganganath, a place a few miles distant from Chandod. There is a beautiful Ashram there where Swami Brahmanand spent his life. At that place they passed another day, discussed some spiritual problems with the disciple of Brahmanand Swami and then returned to Baroda. After this trip I saw a marked change both in Arvind Babu and Deshpande. Both of them changed their life altogether. They started worshipping the Goddess and taking only one meal – a pure vegetarian meal – a day; both started living a life of austerity. But between the two I saw a greater change in Arvind Babu. He was never as free with me as he used to be before. He looked serene and calm with the gravity of a man of ripe old age.
(R.N. Patkar, quoted in A.B. Purani, Life of Sri Aurobindo, 1978, pp. 62-65)
[The date 1905 in the second paragraph obviously refers to the period of Sri Aurobindo’s brahmacharya mentioned in the first paragraph.]
According to Document 1, the reason why Sri Aurobindo got married was to overcome his despondency and avoid the prospect of being a lonely pedagogue. It is obviously an understatement but nevertheless suggests that Sri Aurobindo was looking for companionship and all that goes with it in married life. In that case, physical gratification would be only one of the factors in his decision to get married and not the only one as Heehs seems to be obsessed with. But what happened after the marriage? Documents 2–4 show that he lived the life of a brahmachari! Do these documents contradict each other? No, because it matches with what he wrote to Nirodbaran in 1936:
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So we don’t understand why they [Confucius, Buddha, Sri Aurobindo] marry and why this change comes soon after marriage.
Perfectly natural —they marry before the change — then the change comes and the marriage belongs to the past self, not to the new one….
I touch upon a delicate subject, but it is a puzzle.
Why delicate? and why a puzzle? Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life – when the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it – nothing puzzling in that.7
Sri Aurobindo began his Yoga in 1904-1905, after which you would expect him to have taken to Brahmacharya. As both years have been separately mentioned by him, let us for the moment consider 1905 as the year he commenced his yoga on the basis of his famous letter to Mrinalini regarding his three madnesses, which I quote below:
The second madness has recently taken hold of me; it is this: by any means, I must have the direct experience of God. The religion of today, that is, uttering the name of God every now and then, in praying to Him in front of everybody, showing to people how religious one is—that I do not want. If the Divine is there, then there must be a way of experiencing His existence, of meeting Him; however hard be the path, I have taken a firm resolution to tread it. Hindu Dharma asserts that the path is there within one’s own body, in one’s mind. It has also given the methods to be followed to tread that path. I have begun to observe them and within a month I have been able to ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma are not untrue. I am experiencing all the signs that have been mentioned by it. Now, I would like to take you also along that path; you would of course not be able to keep up with me as you have not yet acquired so much knowledge, but there is nothing to prevent your following me. Anybody can have the
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realisation by following the path, but it is left to one’s will to choose to enter the path. Nobody can force you to enter it. If you are willing, I will write more on the subject….
Now I ask you: What do you want to do in this matter? The wife is the shakti (the power) of the husband. Are you going to be the disciple of Usha and adulate the sahibs? Would you be indifferent and diminish the power of your husband? Or would you double his sympathy and enthusiasm? You might reply: “What could a simple woman like me do in all these great works? I have neither will power, nor intelligence, I am afraid even to think of these things.” There is a simple solution for it—take refuge in the Divine, step on to the path of God-realisation. He will soon cure all your deficiencies; fear gradually leaves the person who takes refuge in the Divine. And if you have faith in me, and listen to what I say instead of listening to others, I can give you my force which would not be reduced (by giving) but would, on the contrary, increase. We say that the wife is the shakti of the husband, that means that the husband sees his own reflection in the wife, finds the echo of his own noble aspiration in her and thereby redoubles his force.8
In this letter dated 30 August 1905, Sri Aurobindo is very clear about his resolution to tread the path of Yoga and is, in fact, exhorting his wife to help him in his aspirations. The turning point in his life seems to have been recent. Note the sentence, “I have begun to observe them [yogic methods] and within a month I have been able to ascertain that the words of the Hindu Dharma are not untrue.” After this, you surely cannot expect him to have led an ordinary married life.
But what happened during the interim period between the time he got married in April 1901 and his decision to take up Yoga in 1905? First of all, Mrinalini hardly stayed with him during this period, because she went away to her parents’ place unable to bear life in Baroda. Sri Aurobindo took leave from his service in April 1902 and left her in Bengal, from where she proceeded to her home town in Assam. Heehs himself writes that “the separation
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between husband and wife was meant to be brief, but it lasted at least a year and a half, perhaps twice as long as that.” That leaves only one year or thereabouts of conjugal life, if there was any at all. Keeping also in mind that there was no progeny, the weight of evidence thus tilts towards Brahmacharya even during this short interim period. However, in the absence of genuine first-hand evidence on Sri Aurobindo’s conjugal life (which you surely cannot expect to get), historical discipline as well as sheer discretion and public decency dictate us to be silent about it.
Let us now take Heehs on his own ground of speculation. He seems to assume that speaking authoritatively about sex or giving yogic advice on it necessarily implies its experience in real life. The hypothesis at first seems quite convincing, but is it really so? Are not sexual thoughts and impulses so natural to man that they really don’t need any outward support? Are not sex-emissions inbuilt in his physical constitution so that they can occur without any external agent? It is precisely because of this reason that it takes ages to overcome sex in Yoga. Brahmacharya is not accomplished by mere celibacy, but by the expunging of all sex-thoughts and corresponding physical and psychological reactions in your being. Sri Aurobindo says that when sex-thoughts are driven away from the mind, they take refuge in the vital. Driven away from there, they take shelter in the physical being, and pushed away from there, they go into the subconscient and inconscient from where they can rise up in dreams or once again invade the waking state. There is thus a whole range of operations which are not taken into account by Heehs’s naive approach to sex. In fact, the outward act is only the tip of the iceberg visible to us while the real forces behind are invisible in the various levels of our consciousness.
How do you explain, for example, the frequent phenomenon of bala brahmacharis in India who impart yogic advice on overcoming sexual desires? Where does their “knowledge of sex” come from if they have been celibates all their life? Going by Heehs’s logic, they should be ignorant of sex if they haven’t gone through the actual physical act. Extending that argument, the best way to escape from the problem of sex would be thus to simply
avoid it from the very beginning and remain celibate all your life. How easy would Yoga have been if it merely depended on such a cloistered life! Indeed, that was the purpose behind the ancient practice of going to the forest where you could be alone with God. But we are speaking here of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo which accepts life and aims at its transformation instead of escaping from it. Our consciousness is therefore constantly subjected, whether we like it or not, to the thousand and one pulls of the environment around us.
It is evidently because Heehs is overwhelmed by his own limitations with regard to brahmacharya that he is unable to accept it in the case of Sri Aurobindo’s married life. Now, had the author frankly expressed his personal hesitations with regard to the matter, people would have been more sympathetic with him. This is a standard difficulty of our present state of mind which cannot look beyond its own parameters, especially so with Westerners who have had no spiritual background. Not that Indians have to be patted on their back, but, because of long standing spiritual traditions, they have no fundamental difficulty in admitting the extraordinary and supernormal without being mentally bound by their own limitations. Spiritual experience and Yogic attainment precisely belong to this realm which is reached by the few who are great and chosen by destiny to guide humanity to the next stage of evolution.
I quote two more replies of Sri Aurobindo, the references to which have been given by Heehs in his long endnote:
Does your above answer mean that the Avatars too satisfy the vital desires, cravings, lust etc. as a layman?
What do you mean by lust? Avatars can be married and have children and that is not possible without sex; they can have friendships, enmities, family feelings etc. etc. – these are vital things. I think you are under the impression that an Avatar must be a saint or a yogi.
The Avatars can of course be married and satisfy the vital movements. But do they really indulge them as ordinary people? While satisfying their outer being do they not remain conscious of their union with the
Divine above?
There is not necessarily any union above before the practice of yoga. There is a connection of the consciousness with the veiled Divinity and an action out of that, but this is not dependent on the practice of yoga.9
Though Heehs has referred to these replies of Sri Aurobindo in order to prove Sri Aurobindo’s conjugal life, they do not necessarily support his assumption. As we see from the first reply, Sri Aurobindo had no moral inhibitions about an Avatar’s experience of ordinary life, in which case you could suppose that he himself might have gone through it. At the same time, he says in the second reply that the divine consciousness behind the Avatar may influence him even when he is not practising Yoga. Applying that to his own case, he may have thus avoided the conjugal life without having formally commenced his spiritual practice. The inner consciousness behind the external one could have kept him away from it even though he might have not yet decided to practise Yoga, which obviously cannot go with sex. Moreover, he had spiritual experiences long before his marriage in April 1901. A “vast calm” had descended upon him the moment he stepped on Indian soil at Apollo Bunder in 1893. A few months later he had the “vision of the Godhead surging up from within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda”.10 He had read the Upanishads and was sufficiently familiar with the Hindu traditions not to know of the yogic benefits of Brahmacharya. All these indicate that the power of the “veiled Divinity” was acting long before he formally began his spiritual practice in 1905 and may very well have influenced his external life despite his decision to get married in 1901. I may add that we see this happening not only with great men but seekers of a lesser order. Yoga often begins and proceeds for a long time in a half-conscious way before the mind gives its conscious support.
Thus a very different picture of Sri Aurobindo’s married life emerges from practically the same documents used by Heehs, not counting, of course, the crucial omission of the four documents on his Brahmacharya. These documents have been deliberately
omitted so that the balance of evidence does not tilt in favour of his Brahmacharya. This is a standard strategy of Heehs who omits or downplays positive evidence, makes numerous negative statements based on secondary evidence or even on purely conjectural grounds to please skeptic scholars, and throws in finally a few positive statements on the scale in order to appease the disciples. It is like trying to please your enemies at the expense of displeasing your friends. The result is that you often end up displeasing both parties or falling on that side of the fence where you never wanted to be.
Let me sum up my article with a short analysis of the objectionable passages on Sri Aurobindo’s marriage. Heehs begins by a speculation based on the questionable assumption that if Sri Aurobindo wrote about sex and advised his disciples on sexual problems, he would have necessarily gone through a conjugal life. I quote what I consider to be one of the most distasteful passages in this biography:
The usual desire for gratification, as Aurobindo has the guru call it, 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. Consummation may have been delayed because of Mrinalini’s youth, and his own stoicism, partly innate and partly learned from philosophers such as Epictetus, would have helped him to keep his sexual tendencies in check. (Lives, 56)
The speculative nature of the passage is only matched by the state of confusion in the writer’s mind! If the “desire for gratification” was not an all-important factor in Sri Aurobindo’s decision to get married, then what made him take the decision? And why did he quote such a long passage from the Isha Upanishad commentary to prove that it was precisely because of this desire for gratification that he wanted to get married? Replace Sri Aurobindo by an ordinary person in this passage and you will easily understand what I am trying to point out. Next, if Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge was
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not merely academic but profound enough to make him write “more than forty pages” on overcoming sex to his disciples, how is it that “the act seems to have held few charms for him”? How could he advise on the very propensity that never really affected him? What did he then derive his knowledge from? The presentation of these apparently contradictory statements without giving an adequate yogic explanation puts the new reader of Sri Aurobindo’s writings in a fix. He would carry home the impression that Sri Aurobindo was a bundle of contradictions instead of being made aware that he went through the lower nature in order to master it, and it is because of this mastery that he had profound knowledge of it. He rose so fast and so far above human nature that he had an aerial view as it were, by which he could see and explain things better than the person who was entangled on the ground. It is because of this missing Yogic background that the presentation becomes false, by default as it were, even if the facts and statements mentioned may have been correct.
There is a repetition of this unwanted speculation and confusion on page 318:
About their connubial relations nothing is known. Her father [Mrinalini’s father, Bhupal Bose] summed up the situation in a sentence: “There was no issue of the marriage.” After Aurobindo entered what he called “the sexual union dignified by the name of marriage,” he seems to have found the state bothersome and uninteresting. (Lives, 318)
If nothing is known about their connubial relations, how does Heehs say that the consummation may have been delayed by Mrinalini’s youth and Sri Aurobindo’s stoicism? How I wish he had simply kept his mouth shut in these matters! Further damage is done by quoting Sri Aurobindo’s description of marriage as if it were his own: the phrase “sexual union dignified by the name of marriage” is actually from a letter of Sri Aurobindo written to Nolini Kanto Gupta in 1919, in which he humorously dissuades the latter from getting married.11
Lastly, the worst and most subtle distortion is in endnote 76 on page 425, which is attached to the passage I have quoted from
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Page 56. He defines the term maithunananda used in the Record of Yoga as “a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight”. As I have already consecrated the first part of my article on this definition, I will note here only the implications of this wrong interpretation. What is indirectly suggested, without openly stating, is that it is because Sri Aurobindo found conjugal life “bothersome and uninteresting” that he sought yogic satisfaction in “spontaneous erotic delight”. It implies that his yoga has ample space for erotic delight of a subtle kind and not of the gross type. Nothing can be farther from the Truth than this conclusion. You have only to read the first four of the forty pages of Sri Aurobindo’s letters on sex or even the long letter that I have quoted in Part 1 to know his stand on it. Sri Aurobindo certainly did not advise suppression for those who are not ready for the yogic life, but he made it unambiguously clear that sex of whatever kind has no place whatsoever in the spiritual life.
For those who are disappointed by my conclusion because they are attached to sex and cannot ever conceive of conquering it, I will only say the following. Let us not mix up the issue of yogic capacity with the goal of Integral Yoga. Let us be at least mentally clear as to what the goal is despite our inability to follow the straight and high road to it. And indeed most of us need to take detours and diversions and have to often end up blind alleys in order to be convinced about the right direction. Sri Aurobindo never told us to eschew the experience of life if it is necessary; neither did he put life in opposition to Yoga, but he certainly insisted on the eventual transformation of life. He also gave considerable freedom for each one to walk on his own path, but this means that there are many paths leading to the summit of the same mountain of Truth. It does not mean that there are many mountains of Truth with different paths leading to their respective summits. If that were the case, there would have been no necessity for Sri Aurobindo to come to this god-forsaken earth and discover for humanity the supramental Truth that unites all the lesser truths that have been discovered until now.
Finally, the best thing about his Yoga is that it provides various stages in a gradual scale of progression for those who are willing
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to participate in this evolutionary process. This aspect particularly comes out in his letters to disciples written in the late twenties and thirties during the first expansion of the Ashram. It is all the more evident in the Mother’s practical application of his yoga to life in the forties and after Sri Aurobindo passed away in 1950. How the life of a community of about 1500 members consisting of a large number of school children got organised around such a high ideal is a marvel that has still to be fully appreciated by those who have never experienced it. From this point of view, the founding of Auroville in the sixties with no yogic restrictions should be considered as a step farther in this direction than an abandoning of the original spiritual aim. Of late, the large scale positive response to Sri Aurobindo’s ideals first in Orissa and now in Tamilnadu, apart from the hundreds of centres that have sprung up all over India and abroad, shows that Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is not limited to only a few serious sadhaks but has a considerable influence on the masses. All this has not diluted the ideal despite the slow progress of his disciples and followers, for the ultimate goal of supramentalisation will remain in the distance like a beacon showing the general direction of the spiritual evolution of man for a long time to come.
24 February 2010
Additional Document on Sri Aurobindo’s Marriage
[The document below is from Charu Chandra Dutt’s reminiscences of Sri Aurobindo. I have provided it here as an appendix in order to show Sri Aurobindo’s relation with his wife.]
One afternoon, subsequently to Rabindranath’s visit to Aurobindo above described, Bhupal Babu, Aurobindo’s father-in-law, came to see us in the Wellington Square house. The Chief had not as yet returned from his college. Bhupal Babu said to us, “Charu, Subodh, I have to ask Aurobindo to come and dine with me this evening. My daughter, Mrinalini, has come to Calcutta to meet him, if possible. So I would like Aurobindo to stay the night in our house and return to you tomorrow morning. Do send him along.” We
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were all tremendously excited over the invitation. When Aurobindo came home about 5 p.m., he could see that something out of the common had occurred. We gave out a loud yell on seeing him and all spoke together. He laughed and said, “One at a time, please.” Then I said, “My dear fellow, this sort of gala occasion comes but once in a blue moon! Aurobindo is going to visit his spouse this evening.” He said with a suppressed smile, “Yes! Go on.” It was Subodh’s turn to speak. He said, “Bhupal Babu came to invite you. You are to dine with him this evening and spend the night in his house. It appears that Mrs. Ghose has come down to Calcutta expressly for the purpose of congratulating her lord on his acquittal.” Aurobindo said merely, “I see.” Then my wife started, “There is nothing to see. Please get ready quickly and put on the clothes I have laid out for you. They have all been properly pleated and crinkled by Subodh’s bearer.” No reply from the other side; nothing but a shy twinkle in the eye. My wife, encouraged by the twinkle, went on, “And, look here, Ghose Sahib, Subodh’s wife and I are weaving two beautiful garlands of Jasmine – one for you and one for our Didi. I shall instruct you about them later on. The poor philosopher quietly capitulated. He had not a chance of speaking. After tea, he was hustled into the dressing room for being valeted by Subodh’s bearer. He did not protest. After all, who was going to listen to him that evening, our great Chief though he was. When he came out, he looked gorgeous in his fine dress, but there was also a simple shy smile on his face. We had all been waiting to greet him. Lilavati stepped forward with the two garlands and said, “One of these you are going to put round Didi’s neck and the other she is going to put round yours. Please don’t forget.” The Chief with a tender smile replied, “It shall be done, Lilavati.” As he was getting into the carriage Subodh called out, “And please don’t come back till tomorrow morning.” Turning to the Durwan he ordered. “Lock the gate at 10 p.m. Ghose Saheb is not coming back tonight.”
Next morning, quite early, a servant came upstairs and said to Subodh, “Ghose Saheb wants know, sir, if you are all coming down to tea.” “Ghose Saheb? When did he come back?” “He returned about 11 p.m.” We all trooped downstairs. There he sat in his arm-
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chair, quietly smiling to himself. We fired a volley of questions at him. He replied calmly, “Well, I had a superb dinner and returned here about 11 p.m. Lilavati, your instructions regarding the garlands were carried out to the letter.” Lilavati asked plaintively, “But why did you come away so soon?” The Chief ’s reply was, “I explained things to her and she allowed me to come away.” I suppose these explanations were later on embodied in the famous letters. (Charu Chandra Dutt, “My Friend and My Master”, Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1952, pp. 137-38)
[The document can be dated circa September 1907. Sri Aurobindo was acquitted from the Bande Mataram case on 23 September 1907.]
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Dubious Documentation
This is what Hannah H. Kim writes in a review on the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs:
The Lives allows readers to come to an understanding of Aurobindo that is not predetermined by Heehs… by providing the right amount of context that allows the historical materials to largely speak for themselves.1
I wonder how University scholars can be so naïve and make such facile observations! If there is one thing that Peter Heehs’s book demonstrates, it is how you can juggle with evidence to produce the wrong impression or put the reader’s mind in a state of utter confusion. In order to do this successfully, you need to be either highly motivated to misrepresent your subject, or be yourself enough confused to be able to confuse others. In the case of Heehs, I find both these traits. I will first give an example of the former trait – deliberate and wilful misrepresentation of facts. I quote below two controversial paragraphs from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo:
When he had finished the day’s work, a dozen or more people—members of the household, the Richards, visitors from out of town—came to his study for talk and meditation. On Sundays he and other members of his household visited the Richards for dinner and talk. At some of those meetings, people noticed a surprising development. 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 in 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. 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 [of] 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.”49 After a while he asked Aurobindo about the nature of his 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 into 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.50
Paul took up 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, Rolland translated this into more mundane language: “In fact,” he wrote, “his wife . . . left him.” 51 (Lives, 326-27)
Endnotes:
Inde: Journal 1915-1943, 28. (Lives, 453)
I have also quoted the corresponding endnotes so that the reader knows the documents that have been sourced in the above passages, because what follows is a discussion regarding their authenticity.
Endnote 49 gives the following reference: “Purani Talks manuscripts 9:80; 5:98.” Now the reader will assume that A.B. Purani (author of the notes used in the first paragraph) was present at that time, i.e., in 1920 in Pondicherry. But he was not! A.B. Purani, though an early disciple of Sri Aurobindo, did not settle in the Ashram until 1923. He first came to Pondicherry and met Sri Aurobindo in 1918. Then he came in 1921, after Paul Richard left Pondicherry towards the end of 1920. One has only to read the introductory chapters of his Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo to know these dates. (The “Purani Talks manuscripts” are the original manuscripts of the Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo.) Thus A. B.
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Purani’s notes with regard to the above events cannot be considered as primary evidence. The data must have been collected from other early disciples through hearsay – we don’t even know from whom and whether they themselves were present at that time! How can such a stray note be treated as historical evidence?
Secondly, seththup pochchi means “he/she died” in Tamil. How can that be translated as “the calamity has happened”? Death is certainly a calamity, but nobody died in this case, unless you say that Mirra had symbolically died for Paul Richard. But whose interpretation is that, Paul Richard’s (who did not know Tamil and so did not know what he was saying), or the person who conveyed it to Purani, or Purani’s own? This is not mentioned in endnote
49. So Paul Richard muttered something “in his garbled Tamil”; this is picked up by someone (who perhaps did not know Tamil either) and passed on to A.B. Purani, who jotted it down as a juicy piece of gossip! And this is authenticated as history by Peter Heehs!
Endnote 50 refers to – “Purani Talks manuscripts 5:76.” Let me again remind the reader that A.B. Purani was not present at the time when these events occurred, because it makes all the difference between a primary and secondary source, between history and mere hearsay!
Further, the notes are so fragmentary that Peter Heehs has to expand and amend them “in the interest of coherent dialogue”! But why use such an incoherent and incomplete jotting? Mark his phrase, “what appears to be a separate conversation”, which means we are not sure as to whether there was only one or two conversations between Sri Aurobindo and Paul Richard with regard to Mirra. This further complicates matters from the point of view of the context of Sri Aurobindo’s replies. Was it the same question of Paul Richard to which Sri Aurobindo replied the second time? Or was it a different one? As there is no question of Paul Richard mentioned in the second conversation, we don’t know. But the inattentive reader will definitely club the two because of their juxtaposition. In any case, how can snatches of conversation like these be taken as historical documents?
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Then the whole conversation is based on the supposition of Mirra’s marriage with Sri Aurobindo – “suppose she claims relations of marriage”. Both Paul Richard’s questions to Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo’s answers to him are based on this supposition, so the reader is left guessing as to what really happened afterwards. In the absence of any information, the reader naturally tends to think that marriage is what finally happened between Sri Aurobindo and Mirra. Now is this history? Paul Richard’s question with a big “if ”, is followed by Sri Aurobindo’s answer qualified by the same “if ” and finally leaving it on Mirra to decide, as if he would have agreed to the marriage if she had proposed it. How can so many “ifs” make up history? An honest historian would come up with well-ascertained facts and not mere suppositions.
Heehs tries to correct the insinuation that Sri Aurobindo and Mirra were married by saying that Sri Aurobindo had accepted her as a disciple, and that he had spoken to Paul Richard of the possibility of marriage in order to preserve her autonomy. But that does not really tilt the balance of evidence to the other side. The balance still leans heavily towards the normal conclusion that any reader, unfamiliar with the facts of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s life, will draw – that their relation was that of marriage and not a spiritual association. This is exactly what our so-called historian wants, leaving things in uncertainty, so that he can perpetrate damage without being accused of projecting a false picture. Note also the reference to Mirra (Mother) as Sri Aurobindo’s “partner” on p 382, which clearly shows Heehs’s intention to convey the wrong impression to the reader.
There is one more thing to which I would like to draw the reader’s attention. Heehs often inserts his own sentences in the middle of paraphrased documents, so that the division between the document and his own comment disappears. This is deliberately done, so that the reader takes his comment to be part of the document. For example, the following sentence is his interpolation and not part of the original text of Purani’s note quoted in endnote 50: “Marriage did not enter into Aurobindo’s calculations, what was important to him was Mirra’s autonomy.” I am not contesting here the content, but the method – the content actually suits a
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spiritual interpretation of the relationship. But the question is why does Heehs think it necessary to insert this sentence? Obviously to mitigate and qualify what otherwise is only gossip from the grapevine! But if he had found this note worth historical consideration, he should have presented it as it is, objectively, without making any qualifications. Why did he not do it? – Because then no reader will then take him seriously! The unqualified content of the note would immediately expose his intention to denigrate Sri Aurobindo and Mirra in the public domain.
That is why Purani’s notes quoted in endnotes 49 and 50 have to be rejected in toto. Not that the information in them may not be partly correct, but because they are so fragmentary, decontextualised and go so much against the well-established facts of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s life, that it is better to set them aside and treat them as unusable. That is why A.B. Purani himself did not include them in his biography of Sri Aurobindo. Heehs claims that his narrative is based on well-researched facts as opposed to previous biographies written by Sri Aurobindo’s admirers and disciples, but this is not true. Well ascertained facts are always welcome in the public domain when they are corroborated with unquestionable evidence and presented in an unbiased manner. Heehs has failed here on both counts: neither the above notes merit serious historical consideration, nor they have been presented objectively.
Endnote 51 has the following reference: “R. Rolland, Inde: Journal 1915-1943, 28.”
I quote the sentence from the Lives which refers to endnote 51: In his diary, Rolland translated this into more mundane
language: “In fact,” he wrote, “his wife . . . left him.51 (Lives, 327)
Let me now quote the full text of Romain Rolland’s sentence, which is a mere footnote in his book:
In fact, his [Paul Richard’s] highly intelligent Jewish wife Myriam left him to marry his friend and collaborator, Aurobindo Ghose.2
December 1921
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Why did not Peter Heehs quote the full sentence? Because it would expose Romain Rolland’s ignorance of the facts of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s life, and this in turn would reflect on Heehs’s choice of documents. Romain Rolland does not even know her name – he refers to her as Myriam! And of course he has no hesitation whatsoever to say that she had left Paul Richard to marry Aurobindo Ghose. But what is his source of information? – Two letters from Paul Richard written to him in 1921 after he left Pondicherry in a spirit of revolt against Sri Aurobindo. So Romain Rolland gets a one-sided account from Paul Richard and makes a hero of the man who almost strangled his wife to death. It is true that Romain Rolland appreciated Sri Aurobindo’s writings in the Arya, but he hardly knew of the spiritual association of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, and remained ignorant of it long after Mirra was addressed as “Mother” by Sri Aurobindo’s disciples. He wrote in his diary 16 years later in June 1937:
Aurobindo communicates with them [his disciples] through letters and by the intermediary of his wife – “the Mother”3
This has been considered as a “historical document” by Peter Heehs to write his so-called objective history!
From the point of view of documentation, the Lives is not an honest work of history. A lot of labour has gone into it — the author is said to have spent around four decades of his life at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives. But he has wasted his time in collecting the wrong kind of data from the wrong sources because of his wrong attitude. It is true that wrong or right is a very subjective matter, but there are some common sense rules in the selection of authentic sources and their presentation in the public domain. One is that you give more importance to primary evidence than secondary or tertiary ones. The second is that they should not be so fragmented that you have to complete them for the sake of coherent reading – this can be done by a novelist but not a historian. The third is that there should be a minimum consideration of the credibility of the document you would like to present. These fundamental rules have been haughtily disregarded by our so-called objective historian. He has too often given more importance to
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secondary sources because he was desperately looking for negative evidence to counteract the wealth of positive evidence favouring Sri Aurobindo. For the same reason, unusable snatches of conversation (such as A.B. Purani’s notes) have been literally resurrected from the dust of archival shelves, and obviously biased and ignorant remarks (such as Romain Rolland’s notes) have been sanctified at the altar of historical truth.
Doubting Method
We need to dispel the wrong impression in some quarters that Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s relationship was that of marriage. The fact that she did not even have a physical relation with Paul Richard (her second husband) should already speak for itself. They had come together due to their common interest in occultism and spirituality, and she had agreed to go through the formalities of a marriage on his request so that he could keep custody of his three children from his first wife. That they had no physical relations is recounted by Paul Richard himself in his memoirs edited by his son, Michel Paul Richard.
Although Mira had no inhibitions or moral objections about the full exchange of love and creative forces between human beings, she believed that the animal mode of reproduction was only a transitional one and that until new ways of creating life became biologically possible her own motherhood would have to remain spiritual. My nature, however, was deeply patriarchal; I believed that one should never refuse to share with another human being the joy of creation and the duty of the living to the unborn, and I never concealed my thoughts on the matter. So, with her full consent and even encouragement, I had a new child at that time, a daughter who was named Genevieve, and that child was not hers.4
If Mirra was so averse to physical relations when she was married to Paul Richard, why would she seek the same with Sri Aurobindo? Incidentally, the above document has been used by Heehs on pp 254 and 314 of his Lives! But why did he not consider its relevance to his presentation on pp 326-27, where the reader is likely to
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conclude that Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s relationship was that of marriage? In fact, there are more than half a dozen passages in the Lives which contradict this conclusion of marriage. I quote them below:
As for Mirra, she seemed to have a capacity for spiritual surrender that rivaled that of the great Indian bhaktas or devotees. (Lives, 258)
Leaving Pondicherry was more of a shock to Mirra than to her husband. Over the last ten months, she had felt fulfilled in her inner life as never before. Now she was deeply shaken. What did the divine intend for her? After long meditation, she came to understand that “the time of repose and preparation was over”; it was time for her to “turn her regard to the earth.” She accepted this, but was still convinced that her place was in Pondicherry. And surely (she told herself) Aurobindo thought so too. (Lives, 260-61)
Mirra also was striking but in a less showy way: “an exceptionally beautiful woman of medium height,—with a face lit up with power and intelligence and [a] very graceful and active body. Her movements were quick, yet rhythmic and in full control. Her smile was of rare sweetness, which broke out as she looked at you.” Though outwardly affectionate and even motherly, she seemed to be holding something back: “Her depth of culture, rare intuitive intellect and yogic powers were seldom manifest to a casual observer.” Especially when Mirra and Paul were present, the conversation turned to the fulfillment of Aurobindo’s ideal, “the great future when man would bridge the gulf between matter and spirit, by divinising even his body.”(Lives, 323)
One thing is clear, however: the arrival of Mirra Richard had an enormous impact on his [Sri Aurobindo’s] practice. With her help, he told Barin, he completed ten years of sadhana in one. Her assistance was especially important in turning his sadhana outward. If he had been concerned only with his own transformation or with transmitting his yoga to a limited number of people, he could have done it on his own. But for
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his work to have a lasting effect in the world, he needed a
shakti, a female counterpart.
Shakti, as Aurobindo explained in The Synthesis of Yoga, is the conscious power of the divine. “By this power the spirit creates all things in itself, hides and discovers all itself in the form and behind the veil of its manifestation.” Systems of yoga that aim at liberation regard shakti as, at best, a force that can help the individual obtain release from the limitations of mind, life and body. But systems aiming for perfection, such as tantric yoga or the way of the siddhas, see shakti as the power needed to transform oneself and the world. Tantrics and siddhas worship shakti in the form of goddesses such as Kali; some also worship women as embodiments of the divine force. This is the rationale behind the esoteric sexuality of certain forms of tantrism. The consecrated union of a human male and female is seen 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. (Lives, 328-29)
For two or three years after her arrival in 1920, Aurobindo’s spiritual relationship with Mirra was invisible to those around them. (Lives, 329)
Besides, it was becoming obvious that if anyone in Pondicherry was going to become Aurobindo’s chief disciple, it was Mirra Richard. (Lives, 334)
Mirra and Datta were the only full-time women, though the wives of two or three of the men were also allowed to stay on the condition that they and their husbands renounced sex. (Lives, 335)
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Three days after the descent, Aurobindo asked Barin to tell the sadhaks two things. First: “the power has descended into the unconscious,” but it was necessary to work things out in detail “by the help of that power.” Second: “Mirra is my Shakti. She has taken charge of the new creation. You will get everything from her. Give [your] consent to whatever she wants to do.” (Lives, 345)
The above passages from the Lives show the deep and sublime relation of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, which hardly goes with the stormy break and marital rearrangement that is presented on pp 326-27. In fact, this passage, when read with the others, seems totally decontextualised and stands in stark contradiction to them. It is this method of constantly doubting and contradicting himself that is faulty, to say the least. Peter Heehs will argue saying that he is presenting the pros and cons of the topic under discussion, but, on a closer scrutiny, you find that the negative and positive statements he makes contradict each other because of the enormous difference of the fundamental notions of life you generally assume before making any statement. If you assume the truth of spiritual and occult realities, all your facts get organised around that belief. You can then freely speak of divine love and spiritual association, occult action with physical effects, spiritual experiences and all kinds of things recorded in various spiritual traditions of the world. If you adopt, on the contrary, a strictly materialistic point of view, you will not only refrain from mentioning spiritual truths, but will rather interpret them according to what you think they actually are. So spiritual experience becomes hallucination for the materialist, occult action becomes mere imagination, and divine love and spiritual association only euphemisms for marriage and sex. Now you cannot adopt simultaneously both these world-views, straddle as it were the spiritual and the material worlds and narrate the same facts (or facts related to the same issue) without being logically inconsistent and intellectually dishonest.
Take this particular case. Heehs writes eight wonderful passages on the spiritual relation of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, which he
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ought not to have written at all, if he did not believe in it. At the same time, he makes one opposite statement from the materialistic point of view, which demolishes or nullifies the content of the eight. The overall effect on the reader is such that he is likely to dismiss the content of the eight passages. The conclusion he will draw is that despite all the talk on bhakti, physical transformation and freedom from sex, Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with Mirra was that of plain marriage, and, in that respect, was not much different from that of any other married couple. But then why did Heehs write the eight passages corroborating their spiritual association, because that too does not go with sex and marriage?
Heehs compares Mirra’s capacity for spiritual surrender to that of the great Indian bhaktas (on p. 258), how she felt fulfilled in her inner life as never before during her first visit to Pondicherry (p. 260), how deeply she was interested in Sri Aurobindo’s ideal of divinising the body (p. 323), how she had mastered the sexual desire (p. 329); had a spiritual relationship with Aurobindo (p. 329); was going to become his chief disciple (p. 329); that the very condition for staying in Sri Aurobindo’s house was a total renunciation of sex (p. 335) and that she took charge of the new creation after the descent of the overmind in 1926 (p. 345). How can all these be compatible with the passage on pp. 326-27 where Heehs presents the coming together of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra as an ordinary marital rearrangement? Further, how do you explain the use of the word “partner” (which has a clearly sexual connotation) in referring to her on p 381? This is surely not an objective presentation of facts! It is rather self-contradiction and duplicity.
Let us take a hypothetical case, which has a close parallel in the Lives (read the discussion on the possibility of Sri Aurobindo’s madness on pp. 245-47). Say you write a description of the experience of Nirvana basing yourself on the testimony of a realised person. Would you, in the same breath, question the very possibility of spiritual experience and ask whether it was a self- delusion? Either you believe in the truth of spiritual experience, in which case you will never express such fundamental doubts, or
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you don’t believe in it, in which case you will not even care to write about it. And, if you do write, it will only be to prove that it was a hallucination. But the worst thing to do is a flip flop between the two opposite stands and pretend to be on both sides, for that shows a complete lack of sincerity. Just as in real life you are expected to take a stand, failing which you will be considered unstable, confused or devious, so also genuine scholarship demands a forthright position which you consistently adopt. On reading the Lives, you get the impression of a monkey who plays to the audience by constantly jumping from one branch of learning to another without assimilating anything. The monkey often breaks some of the branches in a fit of rage, sometimes the very branch on which it was sitting a few minutes ago, and is so restless that it cannot settle anywhere on the tree!
But why on earth does Peter Heehs perform such antics? Because he wants to cater to all kinds of readers (which is simply not possible), and at the same time protect himself from criticism. He protects himself from the followers of Sri Aurobindo by making a sufficient number of positive statements on him, and he panders to the materialistic academia by making a sufficient number of negative statements and scathing remarks which will get him a certificate of objectivity from them. For, according to this kind of academia (which cares a hoot for spirituality), you have to scorn all spiritual phenomena, otherwise you are branded as superstitious and relegated to the Middle Ages. It is this horror of being rejected by this academia which is at the root of Peter Heehs’s antics. He has to strut about with the air of an agnostic (who is smart enough to question and spurn spiritual truths) while writing a whole book on a spiritual man, whose importance lies in the spiritual philosophy he has propounded, on the spiritual techniques he has practised, and on the spiritual events that have occurred in his inner life, all of which are invisible to the outer eye and have no material proof. But why write the biography at all when you want to question the very fundamentals of spirituality? Write instead a book of philosophy and discuss the age-old issues concerning spirituality and materialism, for after all they are the oldest enemies in human civilisation. But biographical narrative and philosophy can hardly
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go together. Coherent narration implies a definite philosophical stand that you have already taken with a “willing suspension of disbelief ”. Therefore the biographer’s job is only to present facts within the framework of notions he has chosen to operate, and his responsibility is only to ascertain and corroborate them with sufficient documentary evidence. That is all. If he starts interpreting them each time from various standpoints, he will be hamstrung at every step and will never be able advance in his narration.
I do admit the problem of writing a biography of a great spiritual figure, especially when you are addressing readers who do not believe in the truth of spirituality, though the problem might not practically arise because they might not even touch your book. Those who do read will necessarily have some interest in spirituality, which implies a readiness to believe in it. But even with those who do not believe in it, the problem is not as insurmountable as Peter Heehs makes it appear. Thousands of books on spiritual figures have been written both by Westerners and Indians without adopting this “monkey method”. Most authors are quite comfortable in functioning on two different levels for the material and spiritual facts and events. The material facts of life (birth, death, marriage, outer achievements) are covered by referring to various institutional and personal records. The spiritual events, such as the realisation of the Brahman, are taken on the testimony of the spiritual person, for the biographer is usually not in a position to verify them. All that he can do is to check whether they are well-documented and at the most compare them with similar accounts of others. So depending on the various shades and degrees of belief or disbelief in spiritual phenomena, he will either mention or not mention them in different ways. But he does not constantly vacillate like Heehs between the spiritual and materialistic views, pit them against each other and contradict himself by interpreting the same facts from both points of view.
To sum it up, Heehs’s “doubting method” in the Lives has proved to be his undoing. He has wrecked his own boat at mid-sea, and you wonder why at all he set sail on this long voyage and waste forty years of his precious life in an Ashram that did not suit him.
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A University would have been a more appropriate place for him, but even there he would have been pulled up for his doublespeak and dishonest approach. For whether you are an atheist or a believer, an agnostic or a materialist, a rationalist or a mystic, you are expected to be consistent with the view you have adopted and have a certain fidelity to the stand you have taken. Heehs lacks this fundamental honesty required of a true scholar, especially of a historian who is supposed to provide authentic information to the public. He thought he would impress everybody with his intellectual fireworks, but the outcome of it is a book that has bombed at the very outset of its publication.
17 December 2011
Comment by Diane on TLOSA blog:
For, according to this kind of academia (which cares a hoot for spirituality), you have to scorn all spiritual phenomena, otherwise you are branded as superstitious and relegated to the Middle Ages. It is this horror of being rejected by this academia which is at the root of Peter Heehs’s antics.
This does not only apply to Peter Heehs, as there is a small coterie of western intellectuals in the IY community that hold similar fears. The enlightenment group, as I tend to label them, share a refusal to recognise that the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is at the highest reaches of spirituality and this is combined with persistent attempts to drag Sri Aurobindo and the Mother into the mire of western scientific rationalism and reductionist thought. This is of course their right, but personally to me it reeks of white male privilege and unconscious adherence to19th century class structures and beliefs
I cannot comment on the book as I have not bothered to read it, but it is good to see this article and the earlier one. I have been waiting for some years for the Indian community to develop a thorough critique, rather than flapping their hands about and singing woe is me. Western males unfortunately are bullies, and more unfortunate still, totally unaware of it, as self reflection is
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not part of their tool kit. A final comment, beware of the big fish in little ponds, self-aggrandisement is common.
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In the paragraph below from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (pp. 381- 82), Peter Heehs gets one of the most basic facts wrong in the life of Sri Aurobindo, namely, the fracture of his right leg in the early hours of 24 November, 1938. Heehs, disregarding the factual accounts of Nirodbaran and Champaklal (the two disciples who personally served Sri Aurobindo during his last twelve years), writes that it was “a fracture of the left thigh close to the knee”! I wonder how he got his facts so wrong despite all the hagiographic fanfare about his 40 years of research on Sri Aurobindo. Either he must have got some fresh evidence (perhaps the lost X-ray plates that Nirodbaran mentions in his account), in which case he should have given a clear reference to it in his endnotes. But endnote 94 of this portion refers to two sources, A.B. Purani’s introduction to his Evening Talks of Sri Aurobindo and Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, both of which don’t corroborate Heehs’s remarkable discovery. Nirodbaran writes of “a fracture of the right femur above the knee” and there are at least half a dozen references to the right leg from the day of the fracture to Sri Aurobindo’s recovery a couple of months later. Champaklal, the closest attendant of Sri Aurobindo during this period, also recounts the incident in detail and describes how Sri Aurobindo “slipped on the leopard skin on the threshold and his right knee hit the leopard’s head”. How did Heehs confuse the right leg with the left leg and how did this mysterious switch take place? My guess is that he got it wrong because he presumes (as he himself says in his Preface) that the version of the disciples should be necessarily doubted. So he naturally went overboard by questioning even the facts narrated by them as first-hand witnesses and replaced them with his own version of events. This is what happens when so- called historians go overboard with too much self-confidence!
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I reproduce below the paragraph relating to Sri Aurobindo’s accident in the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs on pages 381- 82, followed by extracts from the first chapter of Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo and ending with a quote from Champaklal Speaks on p 101.
Peter Heehs, Lives of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 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. Seeing him on the floor, she went quickly to her room and rang the emergency bell. A.B. Purani rushed up and met her at the head of the stairs. “Sri Aurobindo has fallen down,” she told him. “Go and fetch Dr. Manilal.” Manilal Parekh, a distinguished physician of Baroda, had come to Pondicherry for the darshan. Within a few minutes he was at the patient’s side. Each time the doctor turned the injured leg, Sri Aurobindo uttered a short “Ah!” The diagnosis was not long in coming: a fracture of the left thigh close to the knee. Sri Aurobindo heard the verdict in silence. [emphasis added]
Other doctors arrived. Putting Sri Aurobindo’s leg in a temporary cast, they transferred him gently to his bed. He lay there motionlessly, giving no evidence of the pain he must have been feeling.94
Reference to Endnote 94 on page 458 of TLOSA:
94. A. Purani, ed. Evening Talks, 12-13; Nirodbaran, Twelve Years,
1-5.
Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo by Nirodbaran
Breaking the profound silence the emergency bell rang from the Mother’s room. Purani rushed up and found the Mother at the top of the staircase. She said, “Sri Aurobindo has fallen down. Go
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and fetch Dr. Manilal.” Fortunately, he had come for the Darshan from Gujarat. Soon he arrived and saw that Sri Aurobindo was lying on the floor in his bedroom. On his way to the bathroom he had stumbled over a tiger skin. The doctor made a preliminary examination and suspected a fracture of the right thigh bone; he asked the Mother to send for assistants. It appears that Sri Aurobindo while passing from his sitting-room to the bathroom (probably revolving some lines of Savitri) fell with his right knee striking the head of a tiger. (p. 3)
When we other doctors came up, we saw Dr. Manilal examining Sri Aurobindo’s injured leg. The Mother was sitting by Sri Aurobindo’s side, fanning him gently. I could not believe what I saw: on the one hand Sri Aurobindo lying helplessly, on the other, a deep divine sorrow on the Mother’s face. But I soon regained my composure and helped the doctor in the examination. My medical eye could not help taking in at a glance Sri Aurobindo’s entire body and appreciating the robust manly frame. His right knee was flexed, his face bore a perplexed smile as if he did not know what was wrong with him; the chest was bare, well-developed and the finely pressed snow-white dhoti drawn up contrasted with the shining golden thighs, round and marble- smooth, reminiscent of Yeats’s line, “World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras”. A sudden fugitive vision of the Golden Purusha of the Vedas! (pp. 3-4)
The radiologist arrived with his X-ray machine at about 11 p.m. and stirred us into action. He was quite a smart young man carrying a confident air and went about his business in a formal manner. He took a few films and developed them at once which was a great relief to us. But the diagnosis came like a stunning blow. The Mother was shown the pictures revealing an impacted fracture of the right femur above the knee, two fragments firmly locked together. (p 9)
Then there was the right foot that drew our attention. It had shrunk and shrivelled up, due to impeded circulation and inactivity, to almost half its size. The skin of the sole had become dry like parchment. The Mother brought some fine white cream and asked
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me to apply it, Sri Aurobindo sat up, his right leg extended and the Mother stood by, watching the application. (p. 22)
The first day he got up to use the crutches was a memorable one for us. In the presence of the Mother we made him stand up, handed him the crutches and showed him how to use them. He fumbled and remarked, “Yes, it is easy to say.” Two or three different pairs were tried out, but as he could not handle them properly, the Mother proposed that he had better walk leaning on two persons – one on either side; It was certainly a bright suggestion, for Sri Aurobindo walking on crutches would have reminded us of his own phrase about Hephaestus’ “lame omnipotent motion”, – an insult to his shining majestic figure. Purani and Satyendra were selected by Dr. Manilal as his human supports, much less incongruous than the ungainly wooden instruments! That was how the re-education started. The paradox of the Divine seeking frail human aid gave food to my sense of humour. However, both men proved unequal in stature; the Mother made Champaklal replace Satyendra on the left side. Now the arrangement was just and perfect and Champaklal had his aspiration fulfilled. His was the last support Sri Aurobindo was to give up. For, as his steps gained in strength and firmness, he used a stick in the right hand, and Champaklal on the left. Finally he too was dropped. (p. 24)
(Nirodbaran, Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, pp 3-24)
Champaklal Speaks, p. 101
In the salon, often till late in the night, Mother and Sri Aurobindo replied to letters from sadhaks. Then Mother retired and Sri Aurobindo went for his bath. Before retiring Mother would keep his dinner ready in that corner room. At the same time I would bring tea, milk and soup from my room and keep them also there for Sri Aurobindo’s dinner. After his bath Sri Aurobindo went there for his dinner. While he ate, I cleaned and wiped the bathroom; and after he finished I carried the dishes to my room in Library House for cleaning.
The accident to his leg took place immediately after I had gone to my room. The Mother had retired to her salon and Sri
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Aurobindo was alone. While going back to his room he slipped on the leopard skin on the threshold and his right knee hit the leopard’s head.
17 April 2012
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Peter Heehs writes in the Lives on the issue of Sri Aurobindo’s Avatarhood:
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. (Lives, 380)
The first sentence suggests that there was a social pressure from the disciples to make the general public regard Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar. Not only is this factually wrong but it is a deliberately misleading statement. Sri Aurobindo himself was exceedingly discreet about making any public statements with regard to his Avatarhood and discouraged his disciples from doing the same. There is in fact a long standing practice in the Ashram not to stress on this personal aspect of Sri Aurobindo in their interaction with outsiders. Moreover, some of the disciples themselves regarded him as their Guru only or a great Yogi, without elevating him to the status of an Avatar, and this neither interfered in their Yoga nor irked their Master. So there was never any question of the disciples exerting a psychological pressure on the public or even on fellow disciples to make them believe in Sri Aurobindo’s Avatarhood. What seems to have peeved Peter Heehs must be the enthusiasm of Sri Aurobindo’s disciples in expressing among
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themselves their faith in the Master’s Avatarhood, which is but natural and expected of a community which believes in his spiritual greatness! After all, Peter Heehs, who has been a member of the same community from the last forty years, cannot expect other members of that community to subscribe to his own disbelief in the Master’s Avatarhood. Thus what has been presented as a general observation in the first sentence is actually a very personal reaction and frustration at not being able to convince others within the community to his own view.
The second sentence gibes at the disciples’ belief in Sri Aurobindo’s Avatarhood. The phrase “Disciples took it for granted that he [Sri Aurobindo] was an avatar, or incarnation of God” implies that they were stupid in taking it for granted and that they should have looked for more scientific proof in order to believe in it. This shows a fundamental ignorance of spirituality and a total reversal of values. If faith and spiritual experience along with the confirmation of spiritually realised persons (such as the Mother) are not sufficient for the disciples to be convinced about their Master’s greatness, I wonder what other proofs can be found! Do you need experimental proofs in a scientific laboratory to establish the Avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo? The peculiarity of Heehs’s case is that he asks for physical evidence in a spiritual domain where the basic laws are different and verification of truth has its own methods. And yet he thinks himself to be very clever in passing such a smug statement!
The third sentence brings in another insinuation. Here he resorts to the argument of Sri Aurobindo not being an Avatar because “he never made any such claim on his own behalf ”. The instance of the over enthusiastic disciple who forces his conviction on others is well-known, but here is someone who tries to do the reverse – persuade the disciples not to believe in Sri Aurobindo’s Avatarhood by saying, “Look, your own Master did not claim to be an Avatar, so how can you claim it for him?” It is true that Sri Aurobindo did not claim to be an Avatar, but could not that be out of divine humility and public discretion? I quote below what he himself has written on the Avatar proclaiming himself to be an Avatar. Though
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he wrote in general terms with particular reference to Krishna (whom he considered an Avatar), the quote below could very well apply to him:
Why should the Avatar proclaim himself except on rare occasions to an Arjuna or to a few bhaktas or disciples? It is for others to find out what he is; though he does not deny when others speak of him as That, he is not always saying and perhaps never may say or only in moments like that of the Gita, “I am He.”1
I quote another letter to show his public discretion in this matter. He instructs a disciple not to speak about the divinity of the Mother and himself to a lady coming from Switzerland. This reticence “about inner matters of the Ashram” had to be observed until she was “thoroughly tested” – which implies that Sri Aurobindo would have no objection after she was tested and made familiar with life in the Ashram.
One thing. There is coming here in a day or two (perhaps tomorrow) a lady from Switzerland named Madame X who is a friend or acquaintance of Y’s mother; she will put up in Boudie House, perhaps for a month, perhaps for a shorter or longer time. We know nothing of her and it is not yet sure whether her profession of seeking the spiritual Truth is really deep or genuine. Therefore till we are fixed about her, Mother wishes that she should not be taken in intimately into the Asram life or told anything about inner matters of the Asram or spoken to about questions such as the divinity of the Mother or myself (for her we are simply spiritual Teachers) or shown freely messages or letters. A certain reserve is necessary until she has been thoroughly tested. I write this in view of the possibility of your and other sadhaks meeting her and an acquaintance forming, so as to put you on your guard. It is not a case like Z or even the A’s.2
So, if Sri Aurobindo did not claim himself to be an Avatar, it does not necessarily mean that he was not one, but that he did not do it out of public discretion. Also the fact that he did not dissuade
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anyone from regarding him in this way could be actually taken as further proof that he was an Avatar, for why would he not dissuade them if that were not the case? Thus there are good reasons apart from good faith in accepting Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar. I will provide more such reasons in this article, good only for those who believe in his spiritual greatness and are willing to think for themselves within the framework of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual world-view.
Who is an Avatar, or rather, what constitutes an Avatar, according to Sri Aurobindo? The Avatar, he says, “is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness”.3 I quote from two other letters:
The Avatar is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution. The Avatar is a special manifestation, while for the rest of the time it is the Divine working within the ordinary human limits as a Vibhuti.4
Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development -- Krishna opens the possibility of Overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.5
I further quote extensively from the Essays on the Gita on the purpose of Avatarhood:
But it is to assist that ascent or evolution the descent [of the divine incarnation] is made or accepted; that the Gita makes very clear. It is, we might say, to exemplify the possibility of the Divine manifest in the human being, so that man may see what that is and take courage to grow into it. It is also to leave the influence of that manifestation vibrating in the earth- nature and the soul of that manifestation presiding over its upward endeavour. It is to give a spiritual mould of divine manhood into which the seeking soul of the human being can cast itself. It is to give a dharma, a religion, – not a mere creed, but a method of inner and outer living, – a way, a rule and law of self-moulding by which he can grow towards divinity. It is too, since this growth, this ascent is no mere isolated and individual phenomenon, but like all in the divine world-activities a collective business, a work and the work for the race, to assist the human march, to hold it together in its great crises, to break the forces of the downward gravitation when they grow too insistent, to uphold or restore the great dharma of the Godward law in man’s nature, to prepare even, however far off, the kingdom of God, the victory of the seekers of light and perfection, sâdhûnâm, and the overthrow of those who fight for the continuance of the evil and the darkness. All these are recognised objects of the descent of the Avatar, and it is usually by his work that the mass of men seek to distinguish him and for that that they are ready to worship him. It is only the spiritual who see that this external Avatarhood is a sign, in the symbol of a human life, of the eternal inner Godhead making himself manifest in the field of their own human mentality and corporeality so that they can grow into unity with that and be possessed by it. The divine manifestation of a Christ, Krishna, Buddha in external humanity has for its inner truth the same manifestation of the eternal Avatar within in our own inner humanity. That which has been done in the outer human life of earth, may be repeated in the inner life of all human beings.
This is the object of the incarnation…6
Sri Aurobindo had long and interesting arguments with Dilip Kumar Roy over whether Rama was an Avatar. He says in the following letter why he thought Rama was an Avatar:
As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for Rama first because he fills a place in the scheme and seems to me to fill it rightly — and because when I read the Ramayana I feel a great afflatus which I recognise and which makes of its story
—mere faery-tale though it seems — a parable of a great critical transitional event that happened in the terrestrial evolution and gives to the main character’s personality and actions a significance of the large typical cosmic kind which these actions would not have had if they had been done by another man in another scheme of events. The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is — any of these or all — a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races.7
We can easily replace “Rama” by “Sri Aurobindo” in the above sentence marked in bold, for the same applies to him. Like Rama, Sri Aurobindo also fills a place in the cosmic scheme, we feel “a great afflatus” in his major works (especially in his epic poem, Savitri), and mankind at present is in the throes of a critical transition in which he certainly has a key role to play. If Rama was the Avatar who represented the ideal of the sattwic mental man, then Sri Aurobindo is the Avatar who has shown the path to the next stage of man’s evolution – the superman. And if the difference between man and superman is greater than that between animal and man, what objection can you have in accepting Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar? In fact, it is rather foolish to accept the possibility of the superman (as defined by Sri Aurobindo) without accepting the possibility of him being an Avatar!
Mutual Recognition, Not Mere Reciprocation
I come to the next insinuation in the same paragraph on page 380 of the Lives. Heehs says Sri Aurobindo “wrote openly that the
Mother was an incarnation of the Shakti” and that “She reciprocated when speaking about him with disciples.” The facts are correct, but the use of the verb “reciprocated” suggests that Mother called Sri Aurobindo an Avatar because Sri Aurobindo called her the Divine Shakti. It would mean that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aggrandised each other, thereby tricking their disciples into believing that they were both Avatars. If you think that I am reading too much into what could be a harmless statement of fact, and that Heehs actually believes (!) in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Avatarhood, I quote from another paragraph from the Lives on page 413 of the Epilogue:
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,” it now is applied to any spiritual leader with a halfway decent following. (Lives, 413)
It is clear from the above paragraph that Heehs does not believe in Sri Aurobindo being an Avatar, for the word Avatar “now is applied to any spiritual leader with a halfway decent following”, and that Sri Aurobindo may be one such unexceptional spiritual or religious leader. He even disparages faith, for “matters of faith quickly become matters of dogma”. Then he himself confesses that it is difficult to offer a balanced assessment of Sri Aurobindo between those who consider him “a social and political reactionary” and those who regard him as an Avatar. We come here to the crux of the problem with Heehs, because he is always confused about his own position. He never says that he is an outright materialist (which would have been so honest of him), nor does he reject his insider status of being a disciple of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from the last forty years. How remarkably foolish of him to have stayed there for such a long time with so many fundamental doubts about his Guru!
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I take up the issue of the Mother calling Sri Aurobindo an Avatar. If there was one big change after the Siddhi Day (24 November 1926) apart from the fact of Sri Aurobindo’s own retirement, it was the Mother’s coming forward to take charge of his disciples, not only materially as head of the Ashram, but also as their spiritual guide. Sri Aurobindo put her in front and thenceforth acted from behind, silently and invisibly through his spiritual force, and verbally and materially in the form of innumerable letters to his disciples. The whole sadhana became Mother-centric and Sri Aurobindo advised his disciples to open themselves to her force. The first book that he wrote and published after the Siddhi Day was the book “The Mother”, which explains the various aspects of the Divine Shakti. Of late, there has been a tendency to downplay this fact and dissociate the Divine Mother from the physical Mother, that is, Mira Alfassa, who came to be known as the Mother by the disciples of Sri Aurobindo. But Sri Aurobindo made the connection between the Divine Shakti and the individual Mother amply clear and, except for a few, most of his disciples accepted her as such and derived great spiritual benefit. I quote first from the book The Mother in order to give the context of the questions that follow it:
The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence… The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates….
There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe. Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme. Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces. Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us
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and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.8
Do you not refer to the Mother (our Mother) in your book The Mother?
Is she not the “Individual” Divine Mother who has embodied “the power of these two vaster ways of her existence” ¯ Transcendent and Universal?
These three short Yes’s are the shortest and clearest answers of Sri Aurobindo on who the Mother is. After reading the above, his disciples need not be at all apologetic about accepting the Mother as the embodiment of the divine Shakti. In fact, this has been the tradition in the Ashram since the late twenties and early thirties. The disciples regarded her as the Divine Shakti and offered their work to her inwardly while obeying her external directions, without creating a rift between the physical and spiritual reality.
Sri Aurobindo even wrote about the spiritual identity of his and the Mother’s consciousness:
Mother and I are one but in two bodies; there is no necessity for both the bodies to do the same thing always. On the contrary, as we are one it is quite sufficient for one to sign, just as it is quite sufficient for one to go down to receive Pranam or give meditation.10
Is there any difference in your working and the Mother’s working – I mean any difference in the force or effectivity?
No, it is a single Power.11
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Very often Sri Aurobindo says one should allow the Mother’s force to govern. Does it mean that there is a difference between the two forces? There is one force only, the Mother’s force — or, if you like to put it like that, the Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Force.12
Consequently, why should there be any hesitation about accepting Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar when the Mother herself speaks of it? Identity of their consciousness would in fact give further authenticity to her statements on Sri Aurobindo. So not to believe in Sri Aurobindo’s Avatarhood because he did not “claim” to be one is rather illogical, that is, if you have faith in his spiritual authority. It is absolutely fine if someone does not care for Sri Aurobindo or even rejects spirituality in toto, but once you place him in a position of spiritual authority, how can you pick and choose from what he says, for example, accept the truth of the Supermind and not accept the divinity of the Mother? Thus when Sri Aurobindo considered the Mother to be the embodiment of the supreme Shakti, and She declared Sri Aurobindo as an Avatar, it is not only right but plain common sense to accept both statements as true.
Indirect Suggestions of being an Avatar
It is true that Sri Aurobindo discouraged his disciples from discussing his own Avatarhood, but he often hinted it in his letters, implied or tacitly accepted it and just fell short of confirming it, or phrased it in general terms without specifically using the word “Avatar”. It should also be noted that his disciples mostly had an attitude of implicit faith and trust in his and the Mother’s divinity, even when they asked questions relating to their Avatarhood. Thus any intelligent disciple (who does not make such a big issue of Sri Aurobindo not being an Avatar) can easily conclude on the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s own words (and not merely on the basis of blind faith) that he was an Avatar. For example, in the letter quoted below, Sri Aurobindo ought to have denied his Avatarhood if he had disagreed with what his disciple had stated in the question.
We believe that both you and the Mother are Avatars. But is it only in this life that both of you have shown your divinity? It is said that
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you and she have been on the earth constantly since its creation. What were you doing during the previous lives?
Carrying on the evolution.
I find it difficult to understand so concise a statement. Can’t you elaborate it?
That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.13
“Carrying on the evolution”, mind you, does not mean carrying on the evolution as Avatars, because Sri Aurobindo says that he and the Mother were not Avatars in their previous lives:
Since you and the Mother were on earth constantly from the beginning what was the need for Avatars coming down here one after another?
We were not on earth as Avatars.14
So what were they in their previous incarnations? I won’t go into this complex question, which would sidetrack the main issue. But the implication that they were Avatars in this life is pretty clear. I quote another letter:
The common mass of mankind in the past may not have recognised your presence amongst them, especially when outwardly both of you may have had personalities like those of ordinary human beings. But how is it that even Sri Krishna, Buddha or Christ could not detect your presence in this world?
Presence where and in whom? If they did not meet, they would not recognise, and even if they met there is no reason why the Mother and I should cast off the veil which hung over these personalities and reveal the Divine behind them. Those lives were not meant for any such purpose.15
Sri Aurobindo is certainly not squeamish of the phrase “reveal the Divine behind them”. This was of course meant for the disciples and not for the general public. The closest that he came to
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mentioning his own divinity was when he wrote on the identity of his and the Mother’s consciousness:
The opposition between the Mother’s consciousness and my consciousness was an invention of the old days (due mainly to X, Y and others of that time) and emerged in a time when the Mother was not fully recognised or accepted by some of those who were here at the beginning. Even after they had recognised her they persisted in this meaningless opposition and did great harm to them and others. The Mother’s consciousness and mine are the same, the one Divine Consciousness in two, because that is necessary for the play. Nothing can be done without her knowledge and force, without her consciousness — if anybody really feels her consciousness, he should know that I am there behind it and if he feels me it is the same with hers. If a separation is made like that (I leave aside the turns which their minds so strongly put upon these things), how can the Truth establish itself — from the Truth there is no such separation.16
Note that he speaks of his own divinity in the context of some of his disciples not recognising the Mother as divine while accepting him as such. So he was forced, as it were, to speak of his own divinity to make them accept hers. I take this as an example of Sri Aurobindo speaking of his own Avatarhood in general terms. He does not use the word “Avatar”, but what else could “the one Divine Consciousness” mean! I quote from another letter of the same kind:
You say that this way is too difficult for you or the likes of you and it is only “Avatars” like myself or the Mother that can do it. That is a strange misconception; for it is, on the contrary, the easiest and simplest and most direct way and anyone can do it, if he makes his mind and vital quiet, even those who have a tenth of your capacity can do it. It is the other way of tension and strain and hard endeavour that is difficult and needs a great force of Tapasya. As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier
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burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure, ways to cleave through impenetrable morass and desert and forest, hostile masses to conquer – a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the Leader of the Way in a work like ours has not only to bring down and represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity to the full and experience, not in a mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled and hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the Path.17
The double quotes around the word “Avatar” cannot be taken as a proof that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were not Avatars, because what follows in the last sentence (in bold) is precisely a description of their Avataric work. For who else could “bring down and represent and embody the Divine” and “represent too the ascending element in humanity and to bear the burden of humanity”! The quotes convey irony and protest from Sri Aurobindo with regard to the disciple’s wrong conclusion and not surprise at being called “Avatars”.
Nirodbaran’s correspondence with Sri Aurobindo has a long and hilarious sequence of letters exchanged between the Master and disciple on the same topic. The disciple complains that the Yoga can be done only by Avatars like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and not ordinary mortals like him:
We are a little puzzled when you give your own example to prove your arguments and defend your views, because that really proves nothing. I need not explain why: what Avatars can achieve is not possible for ordinary mortals like us to do....
I don’t know what the devil you mean. My sadhana is not a freak or a monstrosity or a miracle done outside the laws of Nature and the conditions of life and consciousness on earth. If I could do these things or if they could happen in my Yoga, it means that they can be done and that therefore these
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developments and transformations are possible in the terrestrial consciousness.18
Sri Aurobindo writes the next day:
When you say that I could do this only in my case because I am an Avatar(!) and it is impossible in any other case, you reduce my sadhana to an absurdity and Avatarhood also to an absurdity. For my Yoga is done not for myself who need nothing and do not need salvation or anything else, but precisely for the earth-consciousness, to open a way to the earth-consciousness to change. Has the Divine need to come down to prove that he can do this or that or has he any personal need of doing it?19
Note the exclamation mark within parentheses after Avatar – obviously Sri Aurobindo doesn’t like to be addressed as an Avatar. But the next sentence in the first person most aptly describes the work of an Avatar, “to open the way to the earth-consciousness to change”. Then follows the last sentence describing the work of the Divine in the third person! Now even if you give the benefit of doubt to Sri Aurobindo not being an Avatar, why has he switched over from the first to third person as if they referred to the same person and as if it did not make any difference to his own status?
At the end of this most interesting topic, Sri Aurobindo writes: Let me make it clear that in all I wrote I was not writing to
prove that I am an Avatar! You are busy in your reasonings with the personal question, I am busy in mine with the general one. I am seeking to manifest something of the Divine that I am conscious of and feel – I care a damn whether that constitutes me an Avatar or something else. That is not a question which concerns me. By manifestation, of course, I mean the bringing out and spreading of that Consciousness so that others also may feel and enter into it and live in it.20
I consider the above letter a very important one because it brings out the essential attitude of Sri Aurobindo to his own Avatarhood. He is least interested in proving that he is an Avatar and cares a
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damn if his work of manifesting the Divine would make him one. However, his own lack of interest in being recognised as an Avatar should not be taken as a proof of his not being one, for that is a question which should be settled by others and not by him. Moreover, in this particular case, Sri Aurobindo’s confirmation of being an Avatar would have hardly helped the disciple in his sadhana. First of all, the disciple already believed in it, so there was no need to confirm it. Secondly, the latter was actually misusing his belief, because he justified the difficulties of his sadhana on the basis that they could only be overcome by Avatars like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and not mortals like him. This not only provided him an excuse for not doing the Yoga but also the occasion to merely pay lip service to his Master without following his path. Then it nullified the very purpose of Avatarhood, for what is the use of the Avatar when humanity cannot profit by his example? It is in this context that Sri Aurobindo naturally discouraged “the personal question” and focused on the general question of the feasibility of his Yoga. Thus in most cases it was not necessary for Sri Aurobindo to speak of his own Avatarhood to his disciples.
But in a few cases, he did speak of his divinity when it helped the disciple in his sadhana. I quote a letter where he directly suggests his Avatarhood without using the word Avatar (see sentence in bold):
I thought I had already told you that your turn towards Krishna was not an obstacle. In any case, I affirm that positively in answer to your question. If we consider the large and indeed predominant part he played in my own Sadhana, it would be strange if the part he has in your Sadhana could be considered objectionable. Sectarianism is a matter of dogma, ritual etc., not of spiritual experience; the concentration on Krishna is a self-offering to the ishta-deva. If you reach Krishna you reach the Divine; if you can give yourself to him, you give yourself to me. Your inability to identify may be because you are laying too much stress on the physical aspects, consciously or unconsciously.21
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If giving oneself to Krishna (who is considered an Avatar by millions of Indians) is giving oneself to Sri Aurobindo, the implication of his own Avatarhood automatically follows. In this instance, it was necessary for Sri Aurobindo to mention his divinity because it cleared the mental block of the disciple with regard to him (Sri Aurobindo) as opposed to Krishna who was the disciple’s ishta-deva, thus enabling the latter to surrender to the Divine through both without any hesitation.
I quote one more letter which is perhaps the best refutation of Heehs’ statement on Sri Aurobindo never writing on his own Avatarhood:
I have a strong faith that you are the Divine Incarnation. Am I right?
Follow your faith – it is not likely to mislead you.22
If somebody still objects and says that the word “Avatar” has not been used in the above letter, then he is being merely argumentative. For what else can “Divine Incarnation” mean and what further confirmation do you need than the above answer of Sri Aurobindo!
Common Objections and Misunderstandings
Let me now discuss some of the common objections that people have with regard to calling Sri Aurobindo an Avatar:
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Your psychology is terribly rigid. I repeat, the Divine when he takes on the burden of terrestrial nature, takes it fully, sincerely and without any conjuring tricks or pretence. If he has something behind him which emerges always out of the coverings, it is the same thing in essence, even if greater in degree, that there is behind others — and it is to awaken that that he is there.
The psychic being does the same for all who are intended for the spiritual way,– men need not be extraordinary beings to follow Yoga. That is the mistake you are making, to harp on greatness as if only the great can be spiritual.23
So if the difference is in degree and not in essence, why should there be an objection to Avatarhood per se?
What is the difference between the Avatar and the ordinary man? The Avatar, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in his Essays on the Gita, is “a direct descent [of the Divine] into the stuff of humanity and a taking up of its moulds” and “not an evolution or ascent like the ordinary man”.24 Elsewhere, he says, the Avatar “is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action”25 as opposed to the evolutionary human being who achieves the same consciousness in the course of many lives. However this does not prevent the Avatar from taking up the burden of terrestrial nature and fully assuming the difficulties of man in order to be able to show him the path to the next stage of evolution. There is therefore in him “a double element –
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human in front, divine behind”, and if you look with the external eye only, you will see a human being, but “if you look for the Divine, you will find the Divine”.26
This double element of the Avatar causes two common misunderstandings. The first accepts the divinity of the Avatar, but is not ready to concede any human imperfections to him. It instals the Avatar on such a high pedestal that it disconnects him from his human moorings and makes him irrelevant to humanity. This is the mistake typically represented by Nirodbaran’s complaint in his correspondence with Sri Aurobindo, which resulted in the Master’s mock fury and a thorough drubbing of his doctor disciple. The second common mistake is to see only the human front of the Avatar and refuse to see the Divine behind him. It treats him at the most as an extraordinary human being and proceeds to explain him in terms of normal human behaviour. Heehs basically represents the latter type of misunderstanding which applies a materialistic set of principles in a domain where they don’t apply. How can you apply, for example, Freudian psychology on someone whose goal was the transformation of sexual energies? Or for that matter the laws of insane behaviour on spiritual experiences of a high order? His friends would of course pat him on the back and say that he has “successfully humanised and problematised” the life of a great Yogi. But the truth is that he has only vulgarised the life of a great Yogi and created problems where there were actually none. He has consistently ignored the deeper spiritual element of Sri Aurobindo which would have explained many of the outer events of his life in the right perspective. For after all, as Sri Aurobindo wrote to a prospective biographer, “what matters in a spiritual man’s life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time but what he was and did within” and “it is only that that gives any value to his outer life”.27 An “objective biography” of a spiritual person based on “verifiable evidence” (as Heehs claims to have written) is thus a contradiction in terms.
I wind up the discussion by reminding the reader that I have argued basically from the standpoint of a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and within the framework of their spiritual
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philosophy. My aim was certainly not to prove that Sri Aurobindo was an Avatar to people who have no regard for him or his spiritual view of life, or even to disciples of other Gurus who are considered as Avatars in their own right. The occasion for a rebuttal came up when Peter Heehs attempted to ridicule the private beliefs of the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and argued that he was not an Avatar because he had “never made any such claim on his own behalf ”. It would have been absolutely fine, I repeat, had Peter Heehs said that he did not believe in the Avatarhood of Sri Aurobindo, because there was never any question of forcing upon others such a sacred and personal conviction. It is only when he had a nasty dig at the faith of the concerned disciples in what he claimed to be the “first objective biography on Sri Aurobindo” (while still pretending to be a disciple of the same Guru), that a reply became necessary. It is this duplicity that had to be exposed in public.
Finally, from the disciple’s point of view, does he not have the right to defend the values that he cherishes most – spiritual values that the rest of the world might not believe in, but which have made him leave his kith and kin and settle in a remote Ashram in South India? Among these deep seated values is certainly the faith that Sri Aurobindo was a divine incarnation and that his spiritual work will one day be recognised as path-breaking and lead to a new age in the history of mankind. It is true that Time will finally decide as to whether the disciple’s faith has been right or wrong, but meanwhile he surely has the right to object (with the rest of the community) when a fellow “disciple” suddenly loses his head for some reason and throws insinuations at their Master, and still expects to remain as the chief editor of the Master’s Collected Works! I wonder which spiritual institution in this wide world will allow this to happen!
May 2011
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I quote two paragraphs from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs:
The “psychic being” was a new element in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. In earlier writings, he used the words “self ” or “spirit” for the self-existent being that is one in all individuals—what the Upanishads and Gita call the atman. He used the word “soul” for the divine element in each person, something similar to the jivatman of the Gita. But the jivatman, like the atman, neither changes nor evolves. Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary cosmos requires an evolutionary being, a soul that “enters into the body at birth and goes out of it at death,” retaining the essence of each incarnation and developing “a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience.”26 Up to 1926 Sri Aurobindo had no name for this evolutionary soul. The Mother provided him with one. Théon, her teacher in occultism, had distinguished the centre divin or divine center from the être psychique or psychic being.27 When she mentioned the latter term to Sri Aurobindo, he took it up and adapted it to his needs.
Before 1926 Sri Aurobindo emphasized the role of the mind in yoga. “The thinking mind,” he wrote in 1915, “is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self-organisation of our internal existence.”28 But he was aware that mind by its very nature could “never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit.” 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
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himself a level of supermind.”29 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 realised 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. (Lives, 357-58; emphasis added)
The substance of the two paragraphs quoted above might at first seem quite acceptable, but, on a closer scrutiny, you find that Peter Heehs undermines the very foundations of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga by downplaying the importance of the psychic being. The underlying suggestion is that the psychic transformation can be dispensed with and replaced by a mental Yoga, which Sri Aurobindo himself had practised. It is further implied that he never taught the mental Yoga to his disciples because they were not ready for it, and therefore the Mother had to guide them on the facile path of the psychic. Not only this conclusion is absurd, but it shows an ignorance of the very fundamentals of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. Let us first analyse the second paragraph.
Before 1926 Sri Aurobindo emphasized the role of the mind in yoga. “The thinking mind,” he wrote in 1915, “is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self-organisation of our internal existence.”28 (Lives, 357)
The quoted sentence is from a letter (see endnote 28) which Sri Aurobindo published in the Arya in answer to a correspondent’s query on meditation and not on his Yoga in general. The letter begins in the following manner:
What exactly is meant by meditation in Yoga? And what should be its objects?
The difficulty our correspondent finds is in an apparent conflict of authorities, as sometimes meditation is recommended in the
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form of a concentrated succession of thoughts on a single subject, sometimes in the exclusive concentration of the mind on a single image, word or idea, a fixed contemplation rather than meditation. The choice between these two methods and others, for there are others, depends on the object we have in view in Yoga.
The thinking mind is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self- organisation of our internal existence. But in most men thought is a confused drift of ideas, sensations and impressions which arrange themselves as best they can under the stress of a succession of immediate interests and utilities.1
Sri Aurobindo goes on to discuss the topic in a very general manner without any specific reference to his Integral Yoga. He refers more to the methods of concentration practised in Rajayoga and the Yoga of Devotion and finishes his reply by saying that the Integral Yoga “would harmonise all these aims”. What he states is a very obvious fact, that the thinking mind is the highest instrument at present in man’s disposal – he says it in all his major works and gives mind its due place and importance; but this does not mean that he did his own Yoga only through the mind and would have recommended that method to his disciples had they not found it difficult.
But he was aware that mind by its very nature could “never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit.” 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.”29 (Lives, 357-58)
If the seeker has to rise through the mind “into some kind of fusing union with the supramental”, it means he cannot rely on the mind anymore to supramentalise his nature. Now this contradicts the earlier statement of relying on the mind because it is “the one instrument we possess at present”. As both the letter on meditation and the above quoted text from the Synthesis were
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written during the Arya period, you cannot argue that Sri Aurobindo changed his opinion on the mind’s usefulness in Yoga at a later date. In this respect, Sri Aurobindo always downplayed the mind’s role, whether in The Life Divine (which was considerably revised in the thirties and forties after it was first serialised in the Arya in 1914-1921) or in the “Yoga of Self-Perfection” in the Synthesis (this particular section was never revised after its publication in the Arya). The difference of twenty years between the two periods of publication hardly made any difference to his basic assessment of the mind’s incapacity to achieve the supermind.
What can be said however is that, according to Sri Aurobindo’s own descriptions of his spiritual experiences in the early period of his Yoga, he seems to have begun by the experience of the spiritual planes above the mind (not through the mind!) from where he proceeded downwards to transform and divinise his human nature. I remind my readers that Sri Aurobindo had achieved complete silence of the mind when he had the experience of Nirvana in January 1908, and this silence remained with him for the rest of his life – he never “thought” again as we do. I quote from a letter to a disciple:
Since 1908 when I got the silence, I never think with my head or brain – it is always in the wideness generally above the head that the thoughts occur.2
So if he did not deem the mind to be a fit instrument for Yoga, then through which medium was the divine Shakti to act in the human being? In Chapter 19 of the Yoga of Integral Perfection, Sri Aurobindo suggests using the intuitive mind as a transitional means for the supramental action. I quote:
The supermind in the lower nature is present most strongly as intuition and it is therefore by a development of an intuitive mind that we can make the first step towards the self-existent spontaneous and direct supramental knowledge.3
Later, in Chapter 21 of the same section, he explains the other gradations of the higher planes of consciousness which eventually will take over the functions of the intuitive mind, namely, the
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supramental reason and the Supermind itself, which is the culmination of his Yoga.
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 realised 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. (Lives, 358)
It is true that Sri Aurobindo advised the psychic path (or what he called “the sunlit path”) to his disciples in order to facilitate their sadhana. But the context in which he said it was certainly not his disciples’ incapacity for a strenuous mental Yoga, as Peter Heehs suggests. If it were so, the supramental yoga would have been fulfilled long ago by the eminent intellectuals of those times at the Ashram, such as Amal Kiran, Anilbaran Roy, Dilip Kumar Roy and A.B. Purani – there was no dearth of intellectuals in the early days. The difficulties of the disciples were mainly due to the obstacles created by the lower vital and physical nature of man, and they were unable to advance further without a psychic preparation of the being and the spiritual help of their Gurus. Psychicisation became indispensable at the point when the collective sadhana descended into the physical after 1926. By collective sadhana, I mean the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother leading the best of a representative humanity in the collective endeavour of physical transformation. Their spiritual effort was naturally linked to the consciousness of their disciples, so that the latter felt the ripple effect of the spiritual effort of their Masters. The advice of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to follow the path of the psychic was given to others after they themselves bore the “burden of humanity to the full” and found the “straighter and easier road”4 of the psychic being.
The above quote also implies that Sri Aurobindo did his own sadhana in a certain way and taught something else to his disciples
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through the Mother, which is not only false but absurd. It means that Sri Aurobindo had formulated two Integral Yogas, one which he wrote and practised himself in the earlier period of the Arya (1914-1921), and one which he wrote and taught to his disciples after 1926. Now where has he mentioned this in his writings? For, he always expounded his Yoga, both in the early and later periods, in an impersonal way, as if it applied to everybody.
Moreover, common sense expects the Master to have taught his disciples what he himself would have discovered to be the best method of practising his Yoga. He would perhaps not have taught, or rather not have had the occasion to teach the more advanced lessons of his Yoga because the disciples were still in the preliminary stages. But one would surely expect his spiritual guidance in the preliminary stages to reflect his final or mature wisdom gained by his highest realisations. So if Sri Aurobindo stressed the importance of the psychic being and the Mother’s Force after 1926, it means that he arrived at this method after a considerable advancement of his own sadhana and not because he wanted to write “An Idiot’s Guide to Integral Yoga”. I quote below a letter of Sri Aurobindo written in July 1937 on this very topic:
How is it that in the Arya you never laid any special stress on the psychic centre and considered the centre above the head the most important in your Yoga? Is it because you wrote under different conditions and circumstances? But what exactly made you shift your emphasis?
You might just as well ask me why in my pre-Arya writings I laid stress on other things than the centre above the head or in the post-Arya on the distinction between overmind and supermind. The stress on the psychic increased because it was found that without it no true transformation is possible.5
Mark the last sentence: “The stress on the psychic increased because it was found that without it no true transformation is possible.” The word “increased” also implies that the knowledge of it was already there, even in the earlier period. I quote another letter:
In this Yoga, the psychic being is that which opens the rest of the nature to the true supramental light and finally
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to the supreme Ananda. Mind can open by itself to its own higher reaches; it can still itself and widen into the Impersonal; it may too spiritualise itself in some kind of static liberation or Nirvana; but the supramental cannot find a sufficient base in a spiritualised mind alone. If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the mind or any other part) it is impossible. If there is a refusal of the psychic new birth, a refusal to become the child new born from the Mother, owing to attachment to intellectual knowledge or mental ideas or to some vital desire, then there will be a failure in the sadhana.6 [emphasis added]
The above letter not only stresses the need of opening the psychic being in this Yoga, but says that the spiritualised mind is not enough to give “a sufficient base” for the supramental transformation. So is Sri Aurobindo writing here for his disciples or for himself, or for both? Admitting that he wrote the above letter only for his disciples, why should he then discourage the Yoga through the mind, which supposedly was his own method, according to Peter Heehs?
Let us take up now the first paragraph from the Lives, which is the foundation of the absurd conclusions drawn in the second paragraph:
The “psychic being” was a new element in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga. In earlier writings, he used the words “self ” or “spirit” for the self-existent being that is one in all individuals—what the Upanishads and Gita call the atman. He used the word “soul” for the divine element in each person, something similar to the jivatman of the Gita. But the jivatman, like the atman, neither changes nor evolves. Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary cosmos requires an evolutionary being, a soul that “enters into the body at birth and goes out of it at death,” retaining the essence of each incarnation and developing “a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world-experience.”26 Up to 1926 Sri
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Aurobindo had no name for this evolutionary soul. The Mother provided him with one. (Lives, 357)
Note the double stand of our so-called historian. The “psychic being” was a new element in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga; at the same time, it was a new name, because it had no name before – which means that it was an old element without any name. A scholar is supposed to be at least clear of what he says in such crucial matters. So was Sri Aurobindo aware of the “psychic being” in the earlier period of his Yoga before 1926, say, when he wrote in the Arya between 1914 and 1921? Yes, he was surely aware of the psychic being and he did mention it in the Arya, though not as often and as distinctly and forcefully as he did in the later period after 1926. Though the term “psychic” had a different connotation in the earlier writings and was used “in the sense of anything relating to the inner movements of the consciousness”,7 he described “the psychic being” (in the sense used later on) in different words, such as in the following examples from his earlier writings:
So also there comes a time when the soul becomes aware of itself in its eternal and mutable movement (268)
What we are is a soul of the transcendent Spirit and Self unfolding itself in the cosmos in a constant evolutionary embodiment (303)
The continuous existence of the soul in rebirth must signify an evolution if not of the self, for that is said to be immutable, yet of its more outward active soul or self of experience. (358-59) 8
The soul in its “mutable movement” as opposed to the eternal and immutable self is undoubtedly the psychic being. What is described in the quotations below from the unrevised parts of the Synthesis (as published in the Arya) is also a reference to the same:
But the real soul, the real psychic entity which for the most part we see little of and only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instrument of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow-creatures. (351)
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And yet the true emotive soul, the real psyche in us, is not a desire-soul, but a soul of pure love and delight (649)
Behind all the action of the chitta and manas there is this soul, this Purusha (665)
The pure psychic being is of the essence of Ananda, it comes from the delight-soul in the universe; but the superficial heart of emotion is overborne by the conflicting appearances of the world and suffers many reactions of grief, fear, depression, passion, short-lived and partial joy. (737)9
Compare the above four quotations with the one below on the psychic being from Sri Aurobindo’s later revisions of The Life Divine (the revisions can be traced by comparing the version of The Life Divine as published in the Arya with the revised version published in 1939-40, which is more or less the present edition):
So too we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man, he has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say of him, he has no soul.10
The descriptions of the psychic being in both the earlier and later texts match on two counts: (1) The psychic being is “a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being” (Life Divine) or is “a soul of pure love and delight” and “is of the essence of Ananda” (unrevised Synthesis). (2) It is generally covered by, or has to be distinguished from, and not be confused with the “desire-soul” (same term used in both the Life Divine and unrevised Synthesis). Actually, with the following criteria in mind, we can find many more references to the psychic being in the earlier writings, not to mention the ones where it is indirectly implied. There are also
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general references to the soul of man which could apply to both the Self and psychic being, without distinguishing them from each other – the distinction was not made because it was probably not necessary at that time.
So it is not that Sri Aurobindo was not aware of the psychic being during the period of the Arya, but that he did not emphasise its importance at that time. Just as it became necessary to clearly distinguish the Overmind from the Supermind at an advanced stage of the physical transformation, so also the importance of the psychic being was felt when the sadhana descended into the physical after 1926. I quote from a letter written to a disciple:
The psychic has an insistence of its own, but it puts its pressure not on the Divine, but on the nature, placing a finger of light on all the defects there that stand in the way of the realisation, sifting out all that is mixed, ignorant or imperfect in the experience or in the movements of the Yoga and never satisfied with itself or with the nature till it has got it perfectly open to the Divine, free from all forms of ego, surrendered, simple and right in the attitude and all the movements. This is what has to be established entirely in the mind and vital and in the physical consciousness before supramentalisation of the whole nature is possible. Otherwise what one gets is more or less brilliant, half luminous, half cloudy illuminations and experiences on the mental and vital and physical planes, half truth, half error or at the best true only for those planes and inspired either from some larger mind or larger vital or at the best from the mental reaches above the human that intervene between the intellect and the Overmind. These can be very stimulating and satisfying up to a certain point and are good for those who want some spiritual realisation on these planes; but the supramental realisation is something much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down on to the physical level.11
Mark that the supramentalisation of the whole nature is not possible without a preliminary preparation of the nature by the psychic being. You can get other realisations with the help of the larger
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mind or vital, but not the supramental realisation, which is “the most difficult of all to bring down to the physical level”.
What happened then to Sri Aurobindo’s earlier method of working from above the mind? It remained an essential part of his Yoga as there is no incompatibility of the spiritual movement with the psychic transformation. In fact, he says, both are mutually complementary and one cannot be complete without the other:
Neither of these two movements, the psychic and the spiritual, is complete without the other. If the spiritual ascent and descent are not made, the spiritual transformation of the nature cannot happen; if the full psychic opening and connection is not made, the transformation cannot be complete.
There is no incompatibility between the two movements; some begin the psychic first, others the spiritual first, some carry on both together. The best way is to aspire for both and let the Mother’s Force work it out according to the need and turn of the nature.12
Thus both the elements got included in Sri Aurobindo’s later formulation of his Yoga, and more stress laid on the psychic preparation than in the earlier period. The “psychic being” was therefore not a new element but a new term introduced by the Mother to Sri Aurobindo at the time when the psychic transformation became indispensable in their Yoga of physical transformation. I quote from another letter which states this synthesis of both these methods:
The bindu seen [in vision by the correspondent] above may be a symbolic way of seeing the Jivatman, the portion of the Divine; the aspiration there would naturally be for the opening of the higher consciousness so that the being may dwell there and not in the ignorance. The Jivatman is already one with the Divine in reality, but it may want the rest of the consciousness to realise it.
The aspiration of the psychic being is for the opening of the whole lower nature, mind, vital, body to the Divine, for
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the love and union with the Divine, for its presence and power within the heart, for the transformation of the mind, life and body by the descent of the higher consciousness into this instrumental being and nature.
Both aspirations are necessary for the fullness of this Yoga.13
In a way, the psychic and spiritual methods of Yoga can be compared with the yogic action of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who represent a duality in oneness. Their apparent separation or even incompatibility is due to the rigidity of the inexperienced mind which cannot follow their integral unity. I quote from a letter written by Sri Aurobindo to a disciple in March 1926 in which he refers to himself as “A.G.” and to the Mother as “Mira”:
It will be a mistake if you make too rigid a separation between
A.G and Mira. Both influences are necessary for the complete development of the sadhana. The work of the two together can alone bring down the supramental Truth into the physical plane. A.G acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind; he represents the Purusha element whose strength is predominantly in illumined (intuitive, supramental or spiritual) knowledge and the power that acts in this knowledge, while the psychic being supports this action and helps to transform the physical and vital plane. Mirra acts directly on the psychic being and on the emotional, vital and physical nature through the illumined psychic consciousness, while the illumined intuitions from the supramental being give her the necessary knowledge to act on the right lines and at the right moment. Her force representing the Shakti element is directly psychic, vital, physical and her spiritual knowledge is predominantly practical in its nature. It is, that is to say, a large and detailed knowledge and experience of the mental, vital and physical forces at play and with the knowledge the power to handle them for the purposes of life and of Yoga.14 [emphasis added]
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Note that Sri Aurobindo “acts directly on the mental and on the vital being through the illumined mind”, “while the psychic being supports this action and helps to transform the physical and vital plane”. And that the Mother “acts directly on the psychic being and on the emotional, vital and physical nature through the illumined psychic consciousness, while the illumined intuitions from the supramental being give her the necessary knowledge to act on the right lines and at the right moment.” Both work from the two ends of the being, one from above, the other from below, and supported by each other. In Sri Aurobindo’s case, the influence from above is supported by the psychic action from below, and in the Mother’s case, the psychic action below gets the right knowledge from above. Sri Aurobindo represents the Purusha element while the Mother represents the Shakti element and “both influences are necessary for the complete development of the sadhana.”
Where then is the scope for pitting Sri Aurobindo against the Mother or the spiritual against the psychic movement? Where is the possibility of two Yogas, one for the Master’s personal use and one for the disciples under the Mother’s guidance, one requiring psychic qualities such as sincerity and surrender and the other a lofty effort of the mind which few can emulate? I have refuted at great length to what is obviously a wrong conclusion because of Peter Heehs’s claim of having done considerable research to arrive at it. Here I have to first caution the uninformed reader not to be deceived by this false coating of research provided by Heehs to his wrong conclusions and misrepresentations. For anybody sufficiently familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s writings can easily see through the game. Of course, a little research is needed to penetrate this deceptive coating and see the truth for oneself by going back to the sources and checking the context of the quotations that have been used by him. Unfortunately, most people do not have either the patience or the time to do it, and therefore take things for granted. This is especially the case with new readers, including academicians who might be good in their own domain but have no knowledge or experience in the spiritual field. It is for these readers that I have taken the trouble to write this long refutation. As for any genuine disciple of Sri Aurobindo’s
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Yoga, who generally has plenty of common sense and sufficient inner sense, the above conclusions of Peter Heehs would appear so ridiculous that he will simply shrug them away and give you a broad smile of condescension if you happen to mention them to him.
20 September 2011
Notes:
March, 1926
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The main defence of Peter Heehs has been the argument of decontextualisation. Time and again he has accused his critics of quoting extracts from his book without the surrounding context. But did the adding of the context by him in his revised version of the Extracts change anything? No! Readers remained unaltered in their negative assessment of his book. Why? If the Extracts were really decontextualised, then they would have changed their opinion. But let me get into the nitty gritty of this oft-repeated argument of decontextualisation.
Peter Heehs himself quotes the Life Divine where Sri Aurobindo presents the argument of the materialist. Now if you read only this portion, you would certainly be under the impression that Sri Aurobindo was a materialist. But if you read the entire chapter, then you realise that he presents the materialistic argument only to refute it. He does the same with the ascetic denial of the world and thus disproves Shankaracharya’s philosophy. Thus quoting Sri Aurobindo out of context and presenting him as a materialist or an ascetic would be called decontextualisation.
In the case of Peter Heehs, this is not the case. The negative statement remains negative despite the mild palliative it is generally given at the end of the presentation. In fact, the ruse employed by Peter Heehs is that he says things without actually saying it! That is he presents the context in such a way that anybody will deduce or extrapolate the negative statement that he wants to project. For example, he discusses the possibility of Sri Aurobindo’s madness in such way that the ordinary reader will certainly begin to doubt his sanity, even though Peter considers him finally as “eminently sane”. He discusses the relationship of Sri Aurobindo with the Mother in such a way that the reader will certainly presume an
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ordinary romantic relation between them. So he keeps making implications and insinuations without actually saying them! He argues by saying that he is merely presenting the pros and cons of the story and letting the reader decide for himself what is true. But what he actually does is to get away without being caught insulting Sri Aurobindo in the open! This is what has confused so many people, but that is what he has been perfecting from the last forty years of his so-called historical research – the art of spreading confusion on Sri Aurobindo’s life.
10 April 2012
Exchange of Comments on TLOSA Blog between Vladimir Latsenko and Raman Reddy:
Vladimir: Context driven meaning – some thoughts on PH Book.
Mind never works by a thesis alone. It needs an antithesis for its clarification and direction. In the linguistic department of St. Petersburg University we had an anecdote, which may clarify my point here:
“A lecturer presents a book written by X and says at the end of his presentation: “If somebody tells you that this book is written not by X but by Y, you should not believe it! You should be totally sure that this book is by X! Do you have any questions?” And there is a question from the audience: “Is the book written by X or by Y? Tell us straight!”
The context influences and even defines the meaning. It shadows out light in a particular way and gives it a new color, as it were. When something is spoken, the meaning is not exclusively derived from what is said but also from what is not said and mainly from the context in which it is spoken. So Sri Aurobindo’s Life is now given a new context in PH’s book, which is of the western approach to life. And here lies the problem.
So, instead of trying to see our modern life in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s, PH, as a historian, brings Sri Aurobindo into our own western context, and even tries to defend and justify him in
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it, sometimes with a partial success. After such a presentation we discover that Sri Aurobindo is a quite healthy individual, and not some kind of schizophrenic, reasonable poet and writer, a good philosopher (again it’s a matter of opinion) and quite an honest seeker for knowledge, to say the least. In other words: a good guy.
For the Indian mind it is a misplacement of all the issues, for the western it is a true and honest account.
Raman Reddy: The issue is not whether the perspective of Peter Heehs is Indian or Western, but whether it is spiritual or materialistic, and it is obviously leaning towards the latter. The issue is also about which set of values you would like to support and cherish, and put into practice in your own life. Simply putting on a show of wide-mindedness and saying that both Indians and Westerners are right in their own way won’t do. You have to take sides in life, you have to choose between materialism and spirituality. I trust that many Westerners in Ashram and Auroville have made a conscious spiritual choice; otherwise they would not have flown ten thousand miles to settle in a remote corner of Tamilnadu. If they simply wanted to follow the current materialistic trend, they would have remained in the West.
The problem with Peter Heehs is that he wants to please everybody (somewhat like you), please the spiritual-minded by making a few positive statements on Sri Aurobindo and please the academic by deconstructing him from the materialistic point of view. This is plain dishonesty. I don’t mind him being a downright and unpretentious materialist condemning Sri Aurobindo, though I, as well as you, would then object to his staying in a spiritual Ashram and being the chief editor of Sri Aurobindo’s works. But this kind of jumping from one world-view to a diametrically opposite one and then jumping back to the first position can only be termed as theatrics or rather monkey tricks. What this kind of behaviour actually reflects is his inability to do the Integral Yoga, and instead of simply saying that he is not fit for it, he has to bring down Sri Aurobindo to his level to justify his own failure. Well, nobody made Yoga compulsory for him!
I repeat again that this is not an Indians vs Westerners issue as
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has been presented by many supporters of Peter Heehs, because there are Indian materialists and Western spiritual seekers. It is true that Indians take to Yoga more easily and that Westerners are better at material organisation, but there is no essential difference between them. The Integral Yoga is common to both and there are no separate directions for Westerners. The truth is that Peter Heehs has found more supporters on the issue of his deportation from India and not with regard to the actual contents of his book. Westerners are a minority here, so they are obviously going to defend him on this issue because of the underlying concern for their own visas.
Vladimir: When there is a fight of the extreme points of view, then subtleties are not felt anymore. The sarcastic tone of my remarks is lost and I seem to protect PH, according to the general editor’s remarks, which is in fact quite the opposite.
Raman Reddy: “After such a presentation we discover that Sri Aurobindo is quite a healthy individual, and not some kind of schizophrenic, reasonable poet and writer, a good philosopher (again it’s a matter of opinion) and quite an honest seeker for knowledge, to say the least. In other words: a good guy.”
The above text can only be understood as an appreciation of Peter Heehs’s book! “A good guy” cannot become “a bad guy” despite all the subtleties of semantics. If Sri Aurobindo has been portrayed as “a good guy” by Western standards (meaning that he is not a madcap but reasonably cool or “eminently sane” as Peter puts it), then there is nothing more to argue about. My only problem is that many of us think that he is much more than that and that he has something to say with regard to the future evolution of man. So simply proving that Sri Aurobindo is not a madcap does not really add anything to his greatness. You might as well praise somebody by saying that he is not a thief, not a lunatic and not a pervert! Or take somebody to the police station to declare that he is not a criminal! Why take him at all to the police station?
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Another trick played by our now “world-famous historian” is the deliberate omission of positive historical evidence in favour of Sri Aurobindo. One such glaring omission is the practice of brahmacharya by Sri Aurobindo almost immediately or within a very short time of his marriage with Mrinalini Bose. A number of documents (mostly in Bengali) testify this in Sri Aurobindo’s own words as recorded by his contemporaries. His own letter to his wife on his three madnesses shows his firm resolve to tread the path of yoga in 1905 and the practice of brahmacharya is implied, as he exhorts his wife to follow him and increase his shakti than diminish it.
Why was such an important fact of Sri Aurobindo’s early spiritual life omitted in Peter Heehs’s biography? Is it because Peter Heehs does not believe in brahmacharya? Or is brahmacharya simply not possible because he himself had attempted it in his early days in the Ashram and miserably failed, and is now quite happy about not making such a big fuss about celibacy? And when it was so difficult for Peter Heehs the sadhak (if that anomaly exists), so it must have been for Sri Aurobindo in his pre-Pondicherry days, and that too, shortly after his marriage! Ergo, if Peter Heehs has failed, how could Sri Aurobindo have succeeded? But there are also other reasons for this deliberate omission.
On page 56 of his book, Peter Heehs makes one of those profoundly stupid statement on Sri Aurobindo’s marriage, “The usual desire for gratification was presumably a factor in his decision to get married”. But then he says that the consummation of Sri Aurobindo’s marriage “may have been delayed” because of Mrinalini’s age and his own stoicism. (Don’t ask me from where our “historian” picked up this highly private piece of information.)
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Heehs goes on to say on pages 245 & 425 that Sri Aurobindo had experienced a “spontaneous form of erotic delight” (maithunananda) implying that this made up for the loss of his marital life, which means that Sri Aurobindo did not transform the sexual energies according to the ancient practice of brahmacharya, but only found an alternative means of satisfying sexual desire. A smart lady on the Internet promptly responded to this silly implication, “Then all the guys won’t run after girls but will take up Yoga instead so that they can have hassle free sexual satisfaction!”
Peter Heehs’s deliberate omission of Sri Aurobindo’s practice of brahmacharya is actually necessary for building the larger theme of Yogic bliss being the result of sexual dissatisfaction! But I suppose this is what his academic mentors (Jeffrey Kripal, Wendy Doniger et al) want him to say!
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Most readers are not aware of the basics of historical documentation, though all seem to have a vague idea of it. The first rule of sound historical documentation is that it should be first hand evidence, that is, the event should be recounted by a person who has witnessed it himself and not heard from others. If a person (who was not present at the time of the event) merely reports on the basis of what others (who were present) have said, the source is considered secondary. This has some value, especially when that person is no more, but there is always a chance of distortion when the story is passed from one to another. When the story is relayed through several persons, there is of course more chance of distortion, and one can hardly rely on these tertiary sources for writing accurate history. But when you quote a person who was not there at the time of the event and who scribbles something on the basis of what he has heard from others (whose identity he himself does not know or does not reveal), then you are going against the very fundamentals of historical documentation. The point is not whether such hearsay seems correct or plausible or probable, but that you have not followed the rigor of the historical discipline, and that you merely want to write a good or a bad story but not history. The reports of A.B. Purani used by Peter Heehs to misrepresent Sri Aurobindo’s relation with the Mother fall in this category of unusable documents. A.B. Purani was not present in Pondicherry in 1920 when Paul Richard left for the Himalayas in a mood of revolt and the Mother joined Sri Aurobindo in his spiritual endeavour. He neither named the source of his information nor the time when he jotted down his diary notes. The time of the diary notation is important because the farther you are in time from the occurrence
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of the event, the more likely you will misreport, for memory always plays tricks. The sooner you note down the description of the event, the more accurate it is likely to be. Diary notations thus form the best evidence of past events. In the case of A.B. Purani’s diary notes, all these factors discredit their authenticity. Finally, the snippets of conversation between Sri Aurobindo and Paul Richard which have been recorded by him do not amount to anything substantial; they remain fragments of a puzzle which can be filled in any way you like. This is exactly what Peter Heehs has done in the passage on pp 326-27 of the Lives.1 He has pieced together these various snippets into a story with a number of insinuations on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s relationship. Therefore the impression that Peter Heehs has revealed the truth much to the embarrassment of the disciples of Sri Aurobindo is totally false. It is actually he who ought to be embarrassed when the truth of his bogus scholarship is disclosed to the public!
13 April 2012
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Peter has filled his biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (TLOSA) with insidious suggestions about Sri Aurobindo, speculating about lurid and sensational topics such as his sexuality or apparent lack of it, his seeming inadequacy as a husband, his inaptitude as a politician, his potentially scandalous legitimisation of a possible marital relationship with his spiritual collaborator, the Mother (to describe whom Peter conveniently uses the ambiguous word ‘partner’, which has very well-known connotations in common parlance). The list goes on and on. On page after page in the book, Peter’s convoluted mental prism distorts the life and image of Sri Aurobindo into a pock-marked caricature of itself.
Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo’s literary work is diminished into a poor and pitiful shadow of the true puissance and sublimity one experiences when it is encountered and imbibed directly in its original form. In his inadequate, uninformed and uninspired treatment of these works, Peter distorts and devalues them by inserting misleading criticism or deviant perversions, even ridicule, into otherwise harmless descriptions that serve as a shell of neutral scaffolding around the negative kernel, betraying not only his lack of understanding when it comes to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and system of spiritual discipline, but also a kind of latent, perhaps
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even subconscious, hostility that manifests itself in the core of his critical pronouncements and disparaging judgments.
In fact, this is a well-known literary device called an “Oxford Sandwich”, which W.W. Robson in his book “The Definition of Literature and Other Essays” describes as follows “you begin by praise, then say something quite lethal, and round it off by praise again” (p. 133). This literary device could be a perfect allegory for the book as a whole, and is precisely what makes it so contentious. While seeming to present a façade of objectivity and even positivity on the surface, the book, in fact, bristles with insidious suggestions designed to worm their way into the minds and hearts of readers and fill them with perverse distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life and works. One of the most egregious examples of this literary perfidy can be found on pages 283-284 of TLOSA where Peter makes short shrift of the section on the Yoga of Love (bhakti yoga) in Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga. The extremely short section starts harmlessly enough with a paragraph full of partial quotes from Sri Aurobindo. However, within the second paragraph itself the treatment quickly takes a turn for the squalid. Peter speculates, “The ineffability of the states makes it difficult to write about bhaktiyoga, and Aurobindo gave less space to it in the Synthesis than to the other paths.” The statement that the ineffability of bhakti yoga makes it difficult to write about it, at least in the case of Sri Aurobindo, is quite patently absurd, and can only be made by someone who has neither carefully studied the “Yoga of Love” section of Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga nor his other major works. If difficulty in expressing the verities of a particular yoga were to determine the extent to which one could write about it, then all the sections of the book should have been equally small, since no Yoga is easy to express or describe in words. The fact that Sri Aurobindo is able to write hundreds of pages on the other equally ineffable karma yoga and jnana yoga is an indication that it is not just the ineffability of any particular yoga that determines or restricts the length of its description.
Furthermore, while the “Yoga of Love” section in Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga is smaller than the other sections, it
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consists of 52 pages and 8 chapters packed densely with the deepest, most profound expression of this path of yoga. To assert that it has somehow been given less space than it warrants (it is less in length since it is incapable of being easily expressed in words), is to subtly induce readers to devalue this section in relation to other more voluminous sections of the work. Finally, the integral element of bhakti yoga is found interwoven throughout the book, in all its sections, and also forms a central part of other major works such as Sri Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita. However difficult it may be for the average man to give expression to the verities of bhakti yoga, Sri Aurobindo, at least, has managed to give the most prolific expression to bhakti yoga in the English language so far, both in prose and poetry.
But this statement about the apparent ineffability of bhakti yoga coming in the way of Sri Aurobindo being able to fully describe it in this section of the Synthesis, is not itself Peter’s primary concern. The main thing is rather the suggestion that follows, and for which this prior false proposition is meant only to lay the groundwork. In seeming ignorance or utter disregard of Sri Aurobindo’s prolific writings on bhakti yoga, Peter uses the apparent inexpressibility of bhakti yoga to inject a completely misleading and perverting suggestion. Peter continues, “The suggestive language of aphorism may have been more apt to express the intensity of the path of love, as in this example from his posthumously published collection Thoughts and Aphorisms:
What is the use of admiring Nature or worshipping her as a Power, a Presence and a goddess? What is the use, either, of appreciating her aesthetically or artistically? The secret is to enjoy her with the soul as one enjoys a woman with the body.
The first thing to note is that there are a total of one hundred and thirty-three aphorisms that have been categorised in the Bhakti section of Sri Aurobindo’s Thoughts and Aphorisms. Why does Peter pick only this one? What is so special about this aphorism that lends itself to the suggestion that Peter is trying to implant into the minds of the reader by using the supposedly “suggestive language” of this aphorism? What is this notion of “intensity”
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that the scholar seeks to communicate? To the average reader it is clearly the sexually suggestive element in the enjoyment of the physical act of sexual intercourse that this aphorism apparently contains. For Peter, this sexually suggestive element is what can aptly express the “intensity” of bhakti yoga. In fact this is a gross perversion of a spiritually symbolic aphorism that Peter tries to turn into something suggestive of sexual eroticism.
Most readers, unfamiliar with the spiritual symbolism behind this aphorism, can hardly be expected to understand that it refers to the relationship between Purusha and Prakriti, Spirit and Nature respectively, which is a fundamental tenet and experience of Indian spirituality. The essential notion here is that Purusha, while it ignorantly identifies itself with Prakriti, remains its unconscious subject, trapped in the dualities of pleasure and suffering. This same Purusha, when it liberates itself from ignorance, becomes fully self-conscious, is the great lord of Prakriti, her conscious supporter and ENJOYER: bhartaa, bhoktaa, maheshwara. Prakriti here is the female principle while Purusha is the male principle, and the union of the two represents creation itself. In fact, the use of conjugal imagery to communicate the spiritual verity of this union is quite common in India, for example, in the Lingam-Yoni symbol that is found in every corner of the country. Clearly Sri Aurobindo, in his aphorism, was in no way being sexually suggestive, but rather using spiritual symbolism via the aphoristic medium to express the delight of existence, the ananda of Prakriti experienced by one who is possessed of the free Purusha consciousness.
It is here that we find Peter most deviously misleading. In his description of the jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge) section of Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis (that just precedes Peter’s description of the section on bhakti yoga and indeed on the same page 283), he mentions, but only in passing, the dual principle of Purusha- Prakriti in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s description of the Supermind. However, while citing this “sexually suggestive” aphorism, on the very next page, Peter makes no attempt whatsoever to elucidate the spiritual symbolism in terms of the
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Purusha and Prakriti principle, thus ensuring that the average reader is left holding mentally the now sexually “suggestive” imagery, without the saving explanation of the spiritual symbolism behind it.
To understand the full extent of the perversion being attempted here by Peter, we must come back to the falsehood that the aphoristic medium is somehow a more suitable vehicle for expressing the intensity of bhakti yoga. As explained before, there is no real basis for such a speculation, and the statement sounds like a kind of forced attempt to insert the “suggestive” aphorism into the section on the yoga of Love. Secondly, even if Peter genuinely believed this to be the case, then there were one hundred and thirty-two other aphorisms in the bhakti section of Thoughts and Aphorisms, many of them dealing directly with bhakti yoga, the union of the individual soul with the Supreme Soul through the spiritual discipline of love. Peter ignores all these other aphorisms to insert here the one that seems, on the surface, to use sexual imagery, an aphorism representing not the relationship between the Bhakta and Bhagavan, but rather the relationship between Purusha and Prakriti. The absurd takes its plunge into the insanely ridiculous here. In order to support his claim that aphorisms are a more suitable vehicle to express bhakti yoga, Peter cites an aphorism that is only remotely related to bhakti yoga, thus failing to establish his own tenuous claim of the aphoristic medium as being more apt to express the “intensity” of bhakti yoga!
As patent as this illogical absurdity may be to those who have a little bit of prior knowledge of the subject, the net effect in the minds of the average reader is nothing short of a perversion of the notion of Sri Aurobindo’s approach to bhakti yoga as a kind of spiritual sexuality or a sexual spirituality. This is the meaning of the “intensity” of bhakti yoga that Peter attempts to insert into the minds of the gullible reader via the technique of perverse suggestions, cleverly couched in between innocuous sounding scaffolding. It is hard to imagine that this sort of perversion is the result of a mere accident, particularly when the rest of the book is filled with other such instances.
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Given the forced insertion of the Purusha-Prakriti aphorism into the passage one is justified in concluding that it is Peter’s deliberate intention to distort and pervert the place and significance of bhakti yoga in Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. The mischief is further confirmed by the use of the very same aphorism by Jeffrey Kripal, with whom Peter has collaborated, in Kripal’s book on Esalen, in which he gives a fanciful and perverse sexual twist to Sri Aurobindo’s yogic sadhana.1
There is one possibility, however, that we must admit. This may not be so much an intentional fabrication as a perversity that Peter genuinely subscribes to. It is common enough for those with an irrepressible sexual urge or libido to project these lower movements onto the Divine and to incorporate them into their personal “spiritual” practices. This obsession with sexuality has led to the dark vital-physical and psycho-sexual perversion of Tantra by dabblers in modern pop-spirituality and pseudo-gurus. It is quite possible that Peter is only displaying symptoms of this inner disease. One would sympathise with him were it not for the fact that the book attempts to project his own condition onto his spiritual preceptor and to legitimise the attempt in the name of authoritative scholarship. In any case, the perversion stands and the book, as well as the author, fall with it.
A final but very important point on his style. It should be clear from this example that Peter’s method is to suggest rather than to propose. This is the tactic used by Peter throughout the book wherein, rather than making outright assertions, Peter surreptitiously implants insidious suggestions into the minds of the credulous. A frank and forthright claim in matters such as these would have left Peter dangerously exposed to criticism, with no cover of possible alternate interpretations and explanations. The Integral Yoga collective itself, fractured into those indifferent, supportive and opposed to Peter, would also have been unanimous in rejecting and opposing the book, had it been written in the form of a direct thrust, rather than an extremely well-disguised series of indirect cuts against Sri Aurobindo and his Yoga.
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Even if all evidence is set aside to assert that Peter simply erred in degrading the spiritual symbolism in the aphorism, there is no denying the perversion itself. The best defence for Peter in this case would be that he had no clue as to what bhakti yoga really meant, to the extent that he could just randomly pick up the most misleading aphorism classified under the “bhakti” section of the Thoughts and Aphorisms and quote it without any explanation whatsoever for the reader. This incompetence plea, as implausible as it appears, is probably less offensive than the charge of deliberate and malicious distortion. However, it also means that Peter had no business publishing books on Sri Aurobindo in which he pretends to write authoritatively about his yogic practices or literary works. An ignorant mind presumptuously serving up slime in place of the sublime is as dangerous as a deliberately malicious intellect that willfully intends to inflict damage by its influence.
Whether intentional or unintentional, the perversion is very much there and can be perceived with only a bit of foreknowledge and a little care in the reading. Such disfiguring and debasement, contorting out of recognition the central bhakti aspect of the Integral Yoga of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and suppressing the spiritual symbolism in the aphorism, is an unmistakable indicator of the low level of thinking and consciousness that this book embodies. How such a work can issue from an institute established by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to fulfil their vision and work is a mystery that the ages will toil to unravel, particularly when the author seems so clearly unqualified to write about the core aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga like love and bhakti, things that seem to be too transcendent and pure for his murky and sullied comprehension to understand, let alone explain authoritatively to others. Not surprisingly, in his ill-conceived attempt to do so in the TLOSA book, Peter ends up injuring both his readers and the great subject of his book.
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In many places in the book, Peter Heehs, having mentioned something positive, proceeds to concoct a negative side. Some of these negatives are phony because they have been inferred by craftily using Sri Aurobindo’s words against him. By that I mean he takes Sri Aurobindo’s quotes out-of-context to potentially mislead uninformed readers. There is a certain procedure which has to be followed in order to uncover such deceptions. When you find a negative remark, you should look up the citation and read the original source. Then you must search for alternative sources, at which point you will realize that the negative remark is not really negative at all.
One instance is the passage on page 266 of the Lives. After some general remarks on Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the Vedas on pages 264-65, Peter proceeds to present the negative side on page 266. We begin with the first quote in which Sri Aurobindo tells about the ‘Secret of the Veda’
It is misleading to write in this manner without explaining the magnitude of the errors. If we read the context in which the remarks were made (text follows), we see that Sri Aurobindo is actually thinking of perfecting his work while acknowledging the imperfections in it. He does not imply that there are basic errors
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in his interpretation, since he does grant permission to Purani for translating it into Gujarati. Look up also reference # 9 on p 448 of the Lives (Letter of 1920, published in Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, The Secret of the Veda, 602-603) which further proves that he wanted to perfect it and not go back on his interpretation. Strangely, the publishing notes in the CWSA have been written by Heehs himself, which shows that his mind accepts contradictions without any qualms of conscience.
Feb 21. 1920
Dear Purani,
...The “Secret of the Veda” is not complete and there are besides many imperfections and some errors in it which I would have preferred to amend before the book or any translation of it was published. Perhaps, however, it does not matter so much in a Gujerati translation which will not come under close criticism such as would meet a book on the subject in English. It would be better, however, whenever there is question of a translation of a book—as opposed to an article or chapter here and there—to let me know first so that I may see whether there is any modification needed or indispensable change.1
Secondly, if we read Kapali Sastry’s preface to his Collected Works, Volume 10, we can see that Sri Aurobindo specifically instructed Kapali to keep close to his (Sri Aurobindo’s) line of interpretation while continuing the work of interpreting the rest of the Veda.
Nearly ten years ago some friends here asked me to give word- for-word meaning in simple Sanskrit for Rig Veda hymns so that they could be rendered easily in Hindi afterwards. I thought it could be done but thought also that it would not be acceptable to scholars in the absence of necessary explanations, grammatical notes, justification for departure where necessary from old commentaries or modern opinion. So I placed the matter before Sri Aurobindo with my submission that I could undertake the task only if he would be pleased to go through what I write. This he graciously
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agreed to do and added that I could write the commentary keeping close to his line of interpretation and using the clues he has provided to unveil the symbolic imagery for arriving at the inner meaning that is the secret of the Veda.2
Next, we have the following remark.
The first statement is not true. Sri Aurobindo did not become less confident about his theory as we can easily decipher from the instructions he gave to Kapali Sastry.
The second statement is an out-of-context remark if you follow the citation in the Lives on page 448 Reference # 10. Sri Aurobindo did not make this remark in the context of his work on the Vedas, but in relation to only one passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Next to the source of the citation is Peter’s personal note justifying the usage of this remark to ALL the work done by Sri Aurobindo on the Vedas. A naïve reader who doesn’t read the references at the end of the book may never notice this trickery.
Then we read the following:
Peter is dismantling Sri Aurobindo’s claim by using a quote from Jose Luis Borges. The complete quote from Borges is: “Every writer ‘creates’ his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future”. Is this quote by a literary
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critic applicable in this context? Did Sri Aurobindo interpret the Vedas in the role of a mere writer? To truly understand how Sri Aurobindo came upon his unique interpretation, a true “scholar” would cross-reference the Record of Yoga, which reveals how he progressively uncovered the real meaning of the Vedas. Here is a sampling of jottings from the Record illustrating the manner in which Sri Aurobindo unveiled the secret.
The Secret of Veda is now fixed & exact confirmations occur frequently. (p. 120)
Today’s experience has thrown a clear light on many expressions in the Veda especially in relation to Indra and the Rudras. (p. 148)
The Bhashya in Veda increases in force & the Vedantic interpretation is now almost entirely confirmed. (p. 158)
(June 23, 1914) Reference to Veda for indicative Vak….
Intimation that this Sutra which had long baffled the mind, would this time yield up its whole secret. Immediately fulfilled, with a constant play of the illumined ideality in its fourfold powers. (p. 508)
Dec 28 1913: Sortilege. RV I. 93 O Agni (lord of divine Tapas) and Soma (lord of Ananda), hear perfectly my call, take joy in the things perfectly expressed in me, become Ananda to the giver (of the sacrifice of action). (p. 365) 3
Then another out-of-context remark by Peter:
Peter makes it seem here as if Sri Aurobindo was supportive of Borges’ theories. Not true. This was picked out-of-context from SABCL, Foundation of Indian Culture, Vol. 14, “Indian Culture and
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External Influence”, page 393. As you can clearly see from that passage given below, Sri Aurobindo is writing about the integration of culture and the impossibility of going back to the past forms of one’s traditions. The passage cannot be used in connection with the interpretation of old texts.
Any attempt to remain exactly what we were before the European invasion or to ignore in future the claims of a modern environment and necessity is foredoomed to an obvious failure We cannot go backward to a past form of
our being, but we can go forward to a large repossession of ourselves in which we shall make a better, more living, more real, more self-possessed use of the intervening experience... Again, we cannot be “ourselves alone” in any narrow formal sense, because we must necessarily take account of the modern world around us and get full knowledge of it, otherwise we cannot live. But all such taking account of things, all added knowledge modifies our subjective being. My mind, with all that depends on it, is modified by what it observes and works upon, modified when it takes in from it fresh materials of thought, modified when it is wakened by its stimulus to new activities, modified even when it denies and rejects; for even an old thought or truth which I affirm against an opposing idea, becomes a new thought to me in the effort of affirmation and rejection, clothes itself with new aspects and issues.4
Yet another remark:
Yep. Instead of enlightening the audience on this difficult topic, Peter leads them astray with a string of negative out-of-context remarks and then expects them to understand the significance on their own.
But now we come to the most interesting part. What might be Peter’s personal opinion on the Vedas? To find that, we must turn
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to his published paper “Shades of Orientalism”5 which I chanced upon quite by accident.
In this paper, he confidently observes:
“Given the millennia that separate us from the texts, and the paucity of non-textual supporting materials, it is unlikely that we will ever know what the Vedas meant to their creators.”
Sages can recover meanings of old texts because books exist as records in the mental worlds but Peter probably does not understand such occult matters. He clearly does not accept that Sri Aurobindo could have arrived at a genuine interpretation of the Vedas and he has carefully expressed the same opinion in the biography as you can see from the very parallel (out-of-context) quote on page 266, “It is impossible to say what they were referring to in those days…”.
Therefore, what you see on page 266, do not seem like innocent mistakes. Rather, he is trying to express his own opinion, but deceitfully makes it look as if that is Sri Aurobindo’s opinion. Throughout the whole paragraph, he makes it seem as if Sri Aurobindo is disowning his own work on the Vedas. For a clear explanation of Sri Aurobindo’s discovery of the secret of the Vedas, you have to turn to Satprem who knew how to explain such subtleties.
“Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo had had certain “psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta,” and which “the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light. . .” And it was through these experiences of his “own” that Sri Aurobindo came to discover, from within, the true meaning of the Vedas (and especially the most ancient of the four, the Rig-veda, which he studied with special care). What the Vedas brought him was no more than a confirmation of what he had received directly. But didn’t the Rishis themselves speak of “Secret words, clairvoyant wisdoms, that reveal their inner meaning to the seer” (Rigveda IV, 3.16)” [Antimatters Vol. 1, No 2 (2007)]
Comment by Raman Reddy on TLOSA Blog:
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What could have Sri Aurobindo meant by the “many imperfections” that had to be amended before publishing the book? What was the dissatisfaction due to? I quote the passage on the Secret of the Veda in the foreword of the SABCL edition of Hymns to the Mystic Fire:
“The interpretation I have put forward was set out at length in a series of articles with the title “The Secret of the Veda” in the monthly philosophical magazine, Arya, some thirty years ago; written in serial form while still developing the theory and not quite complete in its scope or composed on a preconceived and well-ordered plan it was not published in book-form and is therefore not yet available to the reading public. It was accompanied by a number of renderings of the hymns of the Rig Veda which were rather interpretations than translations...But to establish on a scholastic basis the conclusions of the hypothesis it would have been necessary to prepare an edition of the Rig Veda or of a large part of it with a word by word construing in Sanskrit and English, notes explanatory of important points in the text and justifying the interpretation both of separate words and of whole verses and also elaborate appendices to fix firmly the rendering of keywords like rtam, sravas, kratu, ketu, etc. essential to the esoteric interpretation. This also was planned, but meanwhile greater preoccupations of a permanent nature intervened and no time was left to proceed with such a considerable undertaking.”6
As the second paragraph shows, he was a thorough scholar to be easily satisfied with the work he had done. He had to do a “word by word construing in Sanskrit and English” in order to be satisfied with it. It is because of this that he filled manually the pages of so many registers with words from different languages in order to arrive at the lost meaning of the words used in the Veda. How fortunate he would have been had computers been available those days!
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We can also guess what were the “greater preoccupations of a permanent nature” that had intervened; they must have had something to do with his Yoga and the Supramental descent. It is in this larger picture that the “imperfections” in the Secret of the Veda have to be understood, not in the way of this pretentious scholar who always wants to score points over Sri Aurobindo.
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The purpose of this article is to correct some misinterpretations in the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (referred to as LOSA hereafter) regarding the Mother Mirra Alfassa’s trip to Japan.
We find the following descriptions in LOSA
Leaving Pondicherry was more of a shock to Mirra than to her husband. Over the last ten months, she had felt fulfilled in her inner life as never before. Now she was deeply shaken. What did the divine intend for her? After long meditation, she came to understand that “the time of repose and preparation was over”; it was time for her to “turn her regard to the earth.” She accepted this, but was still convinced that her place was in Pondicherry. And surely (she told herself) Aurobindo thought so too. If he asked her to stay, she would have done so without hesitation; but far from doing this, he “even appeared to wish that I should go away.” When the final order came from Paris, Mirra packed her bags along with Paul. On February 22, 1915 the couple left for Madras. A day or two later, as they boarded their steamer in Colombo, Mirra declared “with great feeling and assurance ‘We shall come back.’” As far as Paul could remember, “from that point on, all our thoughts turned towards Europe in the throes of war.” Mirra’s diary shows that her heart was elsewhere. “Bitter solitude!” she wrote on March 3, “and always that strong impression of having been thrown headlong into a hell of darkness. At no other time, in no other circumstance, have I ever felt myself living in surroundings so totally opposed to all that I am conscious of as true, of all that is the essence of my life.” (Lives, 260-61)
Another passage on the trip to Japan:
Mirra’s illness came toward the end of an unhappy four- year sojourn in Japan. Paul’s commercial mission had come to nothing, and he and Mirra earned their livelihoods by teaching French. Resigned to remaining in Japan until the
end of the war, Mirra spent her time painting, learning a little Japanese, and meditating with a circle of friends. She also wrote a few pieces for publication. “Woman and the War,” a mildly feminist article, appeared in a Tokyo newspaper in Japanese translation in 1916. “Impressions of Japan,” written in English, was published in India the next year. Mirra admired the Japanese for their “perfect love for nature and beauty” but regretted their lack of spirituality. The artist in her was in a constant state of wonder in Japan, but the seeker in her lived in a spiritual vacuum. The dominant mood of her diary was withdrawal and expectation. (Lives, 319)
If you actually read Prayers and Meditations, you will realise that:
In this selection of entries from her diary Prayers and Meditations, we observe how she was first despondent, then waited patiently for further Divine guidance, and gradually regained her communion with the Divine. At the end she discovered the hidden purpose behind this unexpected six-year detour.
(March 3, 1915): Solitude, a harsh, intense solitude, and always this strong impression of having been flung headlong into a hell of darkness! Never at any moment of my life, in any circumstances, have I felt myself living in surroundings so
entirely opposite to all that I am conscious of as true, so contrary to all that is the essence of my life. Sometimes when the impression and the contrast grow very intense, I cannot prevent my total submission from taking on a hue of melancholy, and the calm and mute converse with the Master within is transformed for a moment into an invocation that almost supplicates, “O Lord, what have I done that Thou hast thrown me thus into the sombre Night?” But immediately the aspiration rises, still more ardent, “Spare this being all weakness; suffer it to be the docile and clear- eyed instrument of Thy work, whatever that work may be.”
For the moment the clear-sightedness is lacking; never was the future more veiled.1 [emphasis added]
Despite the harsh solitude, she was still sustained by the luminous puissance of the psychic being. There was no spiritual vacuum as asserted in LOSA.
(March 4, 1915): Always the same harsh solitude… but it is not painful, on the contrary. In it more clearly than ever, is revealed the pure and infinite love in which the whole earth is immersed. By this love all lives and is animated; the darkest shadows become almost translucent to let its streams flow through, and the intensest pain is transformed into potent bliss.
Each turn of the propeller upon the deep ocean seems to drag me farther away from my true destiny, the one best expressing the divine Will; each passing hour seems to plunge me again deeper into that past with which I had broken, sure of being called to new and vaster realisations; everything seems to draw me back to a state of things totally contrary to the life of my soul which reigns uncontested over outer activities; and, despite the apparent sadness of my own situation, the consciousness is so firmly established in a world which passes beyond personal limitations on every side, that the whole being rejoices in a constant perception of power and love.2
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(March 7 1915): I am exiled from every spiritual happiness, and of all ordeals this, O Lord, is surely the most painful that Thou canst impose: but most of all the withdrawal of Thy will which seems to be a sign of total disapprobation. Strong is the growing sense of rejection, and it needs all the ardour of an untiring faith to keep the external consciousness thus abandoned to itself from being invaded by an irremediable sorrow….
But it refuses to despair, it refuses to believe that the misfortune is irreparable; it waits with humility in an obscure and hidden effort and struggle for the breath of Thy perfect joy to penetrate it again.3
In the subsequent entry, we read of the state of immobility that she was in.
(March 8 1915) For the most part the condition is one of calm and profound indifference; the being feels neither desire nor repulsion, neither enthusiasm nor depression, neither joy nor sorrow. It regards life as a spectacle in which it takes only a very small part; it perceives its actions and reactions, conflicts and forces as things that at once belong to its own existence which overflows the small personality on every side and yet to that personality are altogether foreign and remote.4
Even as she was plunged in hardship, she was being bathed by the coruscating waters of a Higher consciousness.
(July 31 1915) Thy power in me is like a living spring, strong and abundant, rumbling behind the rocks, gathering its energies to break down the obstacles and gush out freely in the open, pouring its waters over the plain to fertilise it. When will the hour of this emergence come? When the moment arrives, it will burst forth, and time is nothing in Eternity. But what words can describe the immensity of joy brought by this inner accumulation, this deep concentration, of all the forces that are submissive to the manifestation of Thy Will of tomorrow, preparing to break over the world, drowning in their sovereign flood all that still persists in wanting to be the expression of Thy will of yesterday, so as to take possession
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of the earth in Thy Name and offer it to Thee as a completer image of Thyself.5
Here, she discusses how she adapted herself to the difficult situation she found herself in.
(June 7 1916): This return to activity meant a completely new adaptation of the vital instrument, for its natural tendency is always to resume action with its old habits and methods. This period of adaptation was long, painful, sometimes obscure, though behind, the perception of Thy Presence and perfect surrender to Thy Law were immutable and quite strongly conscious for any disturbance to shake the being.
Gradually the vital being grew accustomed to find harmony in the intensest action as it had in passive surrender. And once this harmony was sufficiently established, there was light again in all the parts of the being, and the consciousness of what had happened became complete.
Now in the heart of action the vital being has discovered the perception of Infinity and Eternity. It can perceive Thy Supreme Beauty and live it in all sensations and all forms. Even in its every sensation, extended, active, fully developed to feel contrary sensations at the same time, always it perceives Thee.6
(Jan 23, 1917): Thou didst fill my being with so complete, so intense a love and beauty and joy that it seemed impossible to me that this would not be communicated. It was like a glowing hearth whence the breath of thought wafted far many sparks which, entering the secrecy of men’s hearts, kindled other similar fires, fires of Thy divine Love, O Lord, that Love which impels and draws all human beings irresistibly to Thee. O my sweet Lord, grant that this may not be only a vision of my enrapt consciousness, but indeed a reality, effectively transforming all beings and things.7
In the next item, she questions the purpose behind her unexpected ordeal. In the life of saints, the Divine Grace can sometimes veil itself without revealing the deeper purpose behind apparently
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superficial events. This is something worth highlighting in a biography which purports to “humanize” its subject(s).
(Sept. 24, 1917): Thou hast subjected me to a hard discipline; rung after rung, I have climbed the ladder which leads to Thee and, at the summit of the ascent, Thou hast made me taste the perfect joy of identity with Thee. Then, obedient to Thy command, rung after rung, I have descended to outer activities and external states of consciousness, re-entering into contact with these worlds that I left to discover Thee. And now that I have come back to the bottom of the ladder, all is so dull, so mediocre, so neutral, in me and around me, that I understand no more….
What is it then that Thou awaitest from me, and to what use that slow long preparation, if all is to end in a result to which the majority of human beings attain without being subjected to any discipline?8
As we see from the following entry, she was subjected to such adversity because she had to overcome her dread for conflict.
(June 22, 1920): After granting me the joy which surpasses all expression, Thou hast sent me, O my beloved Lord, the struggle, the ordeal and on this too I have smiled as on one of Thy precious messengers. Before, I dreaded the conflict, for it hurt in me the love of harmony and peace. But now, O my God, I welcome it with gladness: it is one among the forms of Thy action, one of the best means for bringing back to light some elements of the work which might otherwise have been forgotten, and it carries with it a sense of amplitude, of complexity, of power. And even as I have seen Thee, resplendent, exciting the conflict, so also it is Thou whom I see unravelling the entanglement of events and jarring tendencies and winning in the end the victory over all that strives to veil Thy light and Thy power: for out of the struggle it is a more perfect realisation of Thyself that must arise.9
Therefore, contrary to the conclusions in LOSA, she did not live in a spiritual vacuum, and the mood in the diary was not of
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withdrawal and expectation. Recall that Datta (Dorothy Hodgson) had accepted the Mother as her spiritual guide and came back with her from Japan to Pondicherry.
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In this short note, we cover another distortion in this book which no one seems to have caught. This is the passage on page 253:
During their three-month stay, Mirra underwent a profound inner development, but this was due more to Théon’s wife that to Théon himself. Madame Théon was “a marvellous woman from the point of view of experience,” though her intellect was rather ordinary. Théon, on the other hand, had comparatively little experience, but an encyclopedic knowledge of things occult. A few lines from him was enough to inspire his wife to write pages and pages of what today might be called channeled writings. But these revelations, according to one French critic, were “written in such a bizarre manner that even the most cultivated men (unless of course they were themselves ‘Cosmic’) quickly abandoned the attempt to read them.” Mirra was aware of the deficiencies of Madame Théon’s writing, but she felt that this extraordinary woman was in contact with genuine sources of knowledge.” [emphasis added] (Lives, 253)
In this passage, Peter Heehs, via the opinions of some French critic, has effectively dismantled Madame Théon’s revelations. Did the Mother actually think Madame Théon’s writing was deficient? Let us go back to the primary source, which in this case is the Agenda:
Theon’s wife dictated it in English while she was in trance. Another English lady who was there claimed to know French like a Frenchman. ‘Myself, I never use a dictionary,’ she would say, ‘I don’t need a dictionary.’ But then she would turn out such translations! She made all the classic mistakes of English
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words that mustn’t be translated like that. Then it was sent to me in Paris for correcting. It was literally impossible.1
So the deficiency was in the French translation, which was being undertaken without the use of a dictionary. There was nothing wrong with Madama Théon’s revelations. So much for meticulous scholarship!
Rule of thumb while reading the book: Every negative remark in this book conceals a wealth of positive information. One must be prepared to go back to the primary sources to uncover the distortions.
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In this short note, we discuss the incorrect conclusion drawn on page 203 of the biography.
His essays on these subjects are clear and well expressed, though not particularly original. Many of them try to harmonize 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. (Lives, 203)
This “seed-tree” argument has nothing to do with molecular biology. Peter inadvertently exposes his lack of knowledge when he criticizes Sri Aurobindo’s thought. If you search the web for “seed tree vedanta” (go ahead, try it) you will discover that many other spiritual masters have used the same analogy to explain the circle of life. The Seed-tree principle is called Bija-Vriksha Nyaya in Vedanta. (Bija = Seed, Vriksha = Tree, Nyaya = illustration or principle)
Osho discusses it:
Ends and means are not two things. Don’t divide. The end is just the flowering of the means, the end is just the realization of the means. The end is hidden in the means, just like the tree is hidden in the seed. The seed is the tree. Don’t look at the seed as if the seed has some secondary importance and the tree is meaningful and significant, and you can avoid the seed. If you avoid the seed the tree will never be there. Take
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care of the seed, love the seed, give soil to it, prepare the ground, and help the seed to grow. It will become the tree. It is already the tree unmanifest.1
Swami Vivekananda discusses it:
The seed produces the tree. The tree dies, leaving only the seed. Again it comes up as another tree, which again ends in the seed, and so on. Look at a bird, how from the egg it springs, becomes a beautiful bird, lives its life and then dies, leaving only other eggs, containing germs of future birds. So with the animals; so with men. Everything begins, as it were, from certain seeds, certain rudiments, certain fine forms, and becomes grosser and grosser as it develops; and then again it goes back to that fine form and subsides. The whole universe is going on in this way.2
Swami Sivananda discusses it. In fact the link given below tabulates 20-30 Nyayas which are commonly used in Vedanta to illustrate various phenomena.
The seed is the cause of the tree and the tree is the cause of the seed. It cannot be said which is the cause of which. This is to illustrate that every question and statement has got a counter-question and counter-statement, that every this is also every that, that the whole world is bound in relativity, and that the Ultimate Truth is Silence, which Dakshinamurti followed.3
Sri Aurobindo has also discussed the seed-tree principle in several places in the Life Divine.
One begins to understand also how arrangement of design, quantity and number can be a base for the manifestation of quality and property; for design, quantity and number are powers of existence-substance, quality and property are powers of the consciousness and its force that reside in the existence; they can then be made manifest and operative by a rhythm and process of substance. The growth of the tree out of the seed would be accounted for, like all other similar phenomena, by the indwelling presence of what we have called
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the Real-Idea; the Infinite’s self-perception of the significant form, the living body of its power of existence that has to emerge from its own self-compression in energy-substance, would be carried internally in the form of the seed, carried in the occult consciousness involved in that form, and would naturally evolve out of it. There would be no difficulty either in understanding on this principle how infinitesimals of a material character like the gene and the chromosome can carry in them psychological elements to be transmitted to the physical form that has to emerge from the human seed; it would be at bottom on the same principle in the objectivity of Matter as that which we find in our subjective experience,— for we see that the subconscient physical carries in it a mental psychological content, impressions of past events, habits, fixed mental and vital formations, fixed forms of character, and sends them up by an occult process to the waking consciousness, thus originating or influencing many activities of our nature.4
And another remark from Purani’s Evening Talks on the same topic:
Sri Aurobindo: That is like the question which someone put the other day: whether “the egg is first or the hen” and I had to say: “Both together and the cock.” (Laughter) There must be the collective personality for the individual to be and vice versa! 5
Ain’t nothing quaint here as you can see...
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On page 178 of the biography, Heehs surreptitiously debunks the well-known fact that Sri Aurobindo received guidance from Swami Vivekananda in Alipore jail. It is astonishing that so many people have read the biography, but not one seems to have noticed this glaring inaccuracy. Perhaps it is because while reading people tend to gloss over the incidents in Sri Aurobindo’s life that they are already familiar with, or they trust that the author is telling the truth, or they have not bothered to investigate and determine what the primary sources actually contain.
Anyway, here is the passage from the biography:
Faced with this problem, he heard a voice within that he took to be that of Swami Vivekananda. The voice said “certain things about the processes of the higher truth consciousness,” in particular the workings of the level of consciousness that Aurobindo later called the intuitive mind. This was something completely new to him. After two or three weeks, the voice fell silent, having “finished all it had to say on that subject.” When Aurobindo began to apply what he had learned, he found that it was “precise even in the minutest details.”
Aurobindo heard “all sorts of voices” while meditating in jail, but he was careful not to follow them all. An inner discrimination helped him distinguish helpful from unhelpful or even deceptive influences. The voice of Vivekananda seemed to him worth heeding because it offered verifiable knowledge and seemed to come from a trustworthy source; the sense of Vivekananda’s presence carried conviction. He might still have doubted what he heard, for “one can always doubt”; on the other hand “one can’t get very far
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like that.” So he went forward, cautiously, and discovered that the voice had not misled him. Years later he wondered whether its source was actually the spirit of Vivekananda. It might, he thought, have been “a part of my own mind separating and taking [another] form.” In any case, what the voice told him proved to be very valuable. (Lives, 178)
The source of the statement: “He might still have doubted what he heard, for “one can always doubt”; on the other hand “one can’t get very far like that.” is still unknown. Let’s ignore that for now.
We will focus on the remark: “Years later he wondered whether its source was actually the spirit of Vivekananda. It might, he thought, have been “a part of my own mind separating and taking [another] form”. I am told the source of this quote is Chidanandam’s Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk. Let’s see what it says:
What gave guidance to me in the jail may be Vivekananda or it may be a part of my own mind separating and taking form. Many of these things are mere thought-images. At that time I was opening up the vital plane and all sorts of voices used to come. The voice of Vivekananda spoke to me about the Supermind, not the highest but the preliminary phases. At that time I did not know anything about it and it gave me a tremendous push.1
All of Chidanandam’s Evening Talks have been recorded before the Siddhi Day of 24 November 1926. This is the editorial note to Chidanandam’s Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk published in Mother India September 1969, p 544:
These Notes were not taken on the spot. They are recollections of the talks at which their author, V. Chidanandam, was present. Whatever in these talks seized the young aspirant’s mind was jotted down the next day. Neither complete continuity nor absolute accuracy could be maintained. But in reconstructing from memory the author sought to capture something of the language no less than of the thought-
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substance. In places, later editing has been found necessary in order to clarify notations which have served merely as signposts.2
A few points to consider while evaluating Chidanandam’s recording:
A historian is expected to judiciously evaluate and synthesise disparate primary sources, but in this case Peter has ignored the plethora of information (presented below) where Sri Aurobindo always affirms that he had indeed received guidance from Swami Vivekananda.
Source 1 : Letter to Motilal Roy dated August 1912 or after : Remember also that we derive from Ramakrishna. For myself it was Ramakrishna who personally came & first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore jail gave me the foundations of that knowledge which is the basis of our sadhana.3
Source 2 : Letter from Sri Aurobindo to Pavitra (Philippe Barbier Saint Hilaire) dated 13th Sept, 1946, offering clarifications on Lizelle Raymond’s biography of Nivedita : It is a fact that I was hearing constantly the voice of
Vivekananda speaking to me for a fortnight in the jail in my solitary meditation and felt his presence, but this had nothing to do with the alleged circumstances narrated in the book, circumstances that never took place, nor had it anything to do with the Gita. The voice spoke only on a special and limited but very important field of spiritual experience and it ceased as soon as it had finished saying all that it had to say on that subject.4
Source 3 : Nirodbaran’s version of the Evening Talks dated 18 December 1938:
It was Vivekananda who, when he used to come to me during meditation in Alipore Jail, showed me the intuitive plane. For a month or so he gave instructions about intuition. Then afterwards I began to see the still higher planes.5
Source 4 : Nirodbaran’s version of the Evening Talks dated 23 November 1939:
Dr Manilal: You said Vivekananda came to you in jail.
Sri Aurobindo: When he came he could not yet have taken birth again.6
Source 5: Purani’s version of the Evening Talks, dated 18 December, 1938:
It was Vivekananda — who used to come to me in Alipore Jail — who showed to me the Intuitive plane. For about two to three weeks, he gave me instructions regarding Intuition. Afterwards I began to see the still higher planes.7
So we have five primary sources, four of which are dated much later than Chidanandam’s notes, which unequivocally confirm Swami Vivekananda’s guidance to Sri Aurobindo, but Peter gives the false impression of finality when he declares: “Years later he wondered whether it was the voice of Vivekananda...”. He is concealing from the reader the fact that “years later, he was still convinced”. Reading page 178 makes you wonder if Sri Aurobindo was actually experiencing the cosmic consciousness or going insane.
Comment by Govind Rajesh on TLOSA Blog:
There is a reference in Purani’s Life of Sri Aurobindo (p. 209) which is dated 10th July 1926, the same time as when V. Chidanandam was present. The exact text is provided below.
“Vivekananda came and gave me the knowledge of the intuitive mentality. I had not the least idea about it at that time. He too did not have it when he was in the body. He gave me detailed knowledge illustrating each point. The contact lasted about three weeks and then he withdrew.”
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On page 318, Peter Heehs falsely alleges that Sri Aurobindo engaged in “sexual union dignified by marriage”.
The remark is as follows:
After Aurobindo entered what he called “the sexual union dignified by the name of marriage,” he seems to have found the state bothersome and uninteresting. (Lives, 318)
We are told to accept these sorts of remarks because Sri Aurobindo is being “humanized”. Has anyone bothered to inquire into the source of this conclusion? It is derived from the previous page (page 316) where Sri Aurobindo asks his disciple Nolini whether he wishes to engage in “sexual union dignified by the name of marriage”. That passage is as follows:
Two of Aurobindo’s attendants, Nolini Kanta Gupta and Saurin Bose, went to Bengal in the summer of 1919. Both ended up getting married. Before Nolini took the step, Aurobindo sent him some tongue-in-cheek advice:
Do you really mean to perpetuate the sexual union dignified by the name of marriage, or don’t you? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you—to quote the language of the spider to the fly? (Lives, 316-17)
One wonders what kind of stupid historical research this is. If you ask someone a question, does that mean you engaged in the same activity before? If I ask someone “Are you watching a movie because you are bored?” does that mean I also watch movies because I am bored? Are all questions I ask derived from my self- experience? By this criterion, every journalist would be guilty of several heinous crimes.
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The other remark which bears correction is this one, again from page 318:
According to her father, Aurobindo “lulled her with the hope that someday ... he would return to Bengal.” Later he stopped writing, but “Mrinalini never ceased to hope.” (Lives, 318)
It is misleading to quote her father verbatim (“lulled her”) without offering any interlocution. Her father was not fully aware of the changed circumstances under which Sri Aurobindo was living in Pondicherry. The book should have explicated at this point that there is indeed evidence that Sri Aurobindo did not willfully mislead his wife. Even after her death, he was still thinking of returning to India, although these plans never came to fruition. As the following passage from the Agenda indicates, there are letters that Sri Aurobindo wrote after his wife’s death hinting at his possible plans to return to Bengal or British India.
They have found some letters — some old letters1 — from Sri Aurobindo to Barin and the lawyer [C.R. Das] – extraordinary! They are incredible. They give the measure of Sri Aurobindo as a man of action. Even in 1920, he intended to undertake an action. To organize centers all over India, the world, oh!... a plan!... And that was before the liberation of the country!
He says that he has completely withdrawn to find his yoga, but once he had found it, he is going to start his action.2
And in 1928, about ten years after the death of Mrinalini, he still expressed the desire to return to India in a conversation with Tagore who was visiting him. Tagore assumed it would happen soon, which led Sri Aurobindo to issue the following clarification:
I am surprised at Tagore’s remark3 about the two years; he must have greatly misunderstood or misheard me. I did tell him that I would expand only after making a perfect (inner) foundation here, but I gave no date. I did give that date of two years long before in my letter to Barin,4 but I had then a less ample view of the work to be done than I have now — and I am now more cautious about assigning dates than I was
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once. To fix a precise time is impossible except in the two regions of certitude — the pure material which is the field of mathematical certitudes and the supramental which is the field of divine certitudes. In the planes in between where life has its word to say and things have to evolve under shock and stress, Time and Energy are too much in a flux and apt to kick against the rigour of a prefixed date or programme.5
The following conclusion, also from page 318, is partly incorrect.
More than once her father proposed taking her to Pondicherry. Aurobindo replied that he could not receive her until his finances were more secure. Then the war intervened, making travel impossible. ….Aurobindo had a good deal of affection for his wife, but he hardly could be called a good husband. He failed to provide for her even when they were together, and made her suffer the indignity of being taken care of in his absence not by his relatives, as custom required, but by her father. (Lives, p. 318)
Firstly, Sri Aurobindo left a well-paying job in Baroda in 1904 and moved to a low-paying job in Calcutta/Kolkata, so that he could dedicate his life to the freedom struggle, of which he was to become a popular leader. Under the circumstances, one must ponder how a biographer can expect a man whose father was dead and mother unwell, who had little income of his own and who later was borrowing money from Motilal Roy and others, to take care of his wife?
Secondly, the passage ought to mention that it was in fact the British government which prevented her father from bringing her to Pondicherry, as can be seen from this document:
Her father made a serious attempt after his retirement from Government service in 1916 to take her to Pondicherry but the attitude of Government at the time prevented him from realising this wish. 6
Overall, there is a certain spiritual discernment lacking in the remarks on this page. It fails to explicate that Sri Aurobindo had been guided by Divine visions to go to Pondicherry in order to
perfect himself in Yoga and that he did not have the complete knowledge of what the future held for him. Long after his wife’s death, he continued making tentative plans to return to India but these plans never came to fruition. Sri Aurobindo’s neglect of his wife was not wanton neglect, but initially the byproduct of shouldering the greater responsibility of the freedom struggle and later on the inevitable side-effect of his spiritual transformation. As he wrote in a letter to Mrinalini in 1907, he had become a “puppet of the Divine”:
I was to come on the eighth of January, but I could not come; this did not happen of my own accord. I had to go where the Lord led me. This time I did not go for my own work, I had gone for His work. The state of my mind has at present undergone a change; about that I would not reveal in this letter. Come here, then I will tell you what I have to say. The only thing that can be stated for the moment is that henceforward 1 am no longer subject to my own will: I must go like a puppet wherever the Divine takes me; I must do like a puppet whatever He makes me do. At present you will find it hard to grasp the meaning of these words. But it is necessary to tell you about it lest my activities cause you regret and sorrow. You may think that I am neglecting you and doing my work. But do not think so. … I hope the Lord will show you the light of His infinite Grace which He has shown me, but that depends on His will. If you want to be the co-partner of my dharma, then you must try most intensely so that He may point out to you the path of His Grace by the sheer force of your concentrated will. Do not allow anyone to see this letter for what I have written is extremely secret. I have not spoken about it to anyone but you. That is forbidden. This much for today.7
The following exchange with Nirodbaran sheds further light on the unexpected turns that can come in the lives of mystics:
Nirodbaran: Somebody writing the biography of Confucius in Bengali says: “Why do the Dharmagurus marry, we can’t understand. Buddha did and his wife’s tale is hriday-vidârak [heart rending]?
Sri Aurobindo: Why? What is there vidârak in it?
Nirodbaran: He goes on: Sri Aurobindo, though not Dharmaguru, has done it too, and can be called dharma-pâgal. Well, Sir?
Sri Aurobindo: Well, it is better to be dharma-pâgal than to be a sententious ass and pronounce on what one does not understand....
Nirodbaran: “So we don’t understand why they marry and why this change comes soon after marriage.”
Sri Aurobindo: Perfectly natural — they marry before the change — then the change comes and the marriage belongs to the past self, not to the new one....
Nirodbaran: “If married life is an obstacle to spirituality, then they might as well not marry.”
Sri Aurobindo: No doubt. But then when they marry, there is not an omniscient ass like this biographer to tell them that they were going to be dharmaguru or dharma-pâgal in any way concerned with any other dharma than the biographer’s....
Nirodbaran: I touch upon a delicate subject, but it is a puzzle. Sri Aurobindo: Why delicate? and why a puzzle? Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life — when the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it —nothing puzzling in that.8
As the above passage makes it transparently clear, ordinary people tend to misinterpret the lives of mystics by judging them according to their own standards. Mystics experience a Dwijanma (second birth) or “change of Ashrama (stage of life)” after which they begin to live by the Divine Will. When the consciousness changes, Karma changes as well, and the obligations and duties which previously existed towards the family have to be dropped in favour of a greater life. When Ramana Maharshi’s mother found him in his cave and began fervently beseeching him to return home, he curtly informed her that he doesn’t belong to her anymore. The following passage is from Arthur Osborne:
One of them, Pachaiyappa Pillai, said to the Swami: “Your mother is weeping and praying; why do you not at least give her an answer? Whether it is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ you can reply to her. Swami need not break his vow of silence. Here are pencil and paper; Swami can at least write what he has to say.”
He took the pencil and paper and, in utterly impersonal language, wrote:
“The Ordainer controls the fate of souls in accordance with their prarabdhakarma (destiny to be worked out in this life, resulting from the balance sheet of actions in past lives). Whatever is destined not to happen will not happen, try as you may. Whatever is destined to happen will happen, do what you may to prevent it. This is certain. The best course, therefore, is to remain silent.”
In essence, this is the same as Christ’s saying to his mother:
“Woman, what have I to do with you? Don’t you know that I have to be about my Father’s business?”9
December 1, 1922 to Barin Ghose (Ibid., pp. 332-35).
(2002), p. 39
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The word “Preface”, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is a preliminary statement usually written by the author introducing his book and explaining its scope, intention and background. The Oxford Dictionary defines it along similar lines as an introduction to a book, typically stating its subject, scope and aims. It sets the tone of the book, so to say. Let us examine what kind of note the author has written to start the biography of a ‘Person’ whom many in India and outside consider their Spiritual Master, and in whose Ashram the author himself has lived for over thirty-five years as a disciple.
Meaning of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
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The author seems to be drawing a parallel between the story of India and her “political, cultural and spiritual leaders” and the story of USA and its founders. This is quite natural since the author is an American citizen and has America as his standard. But to a perceptive reader, it shows the limitations of the author in understanding India, a fact that will reflect time and again through the pages of his book. Thus he begins by making a wrong comparison between the histories of the two nations. India does not owe her greatness only to half a dozen great men of the previous century but to a plethora of Seers and Sages, Saints and Heroes and Avatars who are woven into the very fabric of Indian life. An Indian breathes their consciousness from his very birth and the great and luminous seers of yore still shine in his soul. Their words inspire his thoughts and their life is a constant example before him. By clubbing Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda with a few modern political figures and a national poet, the author shows his shallow understanding of the true greatness of India.
It sounds at first good when the author says that Sri Aurobindo had many sides to His life. But we are soon disappointed when we see him mention these many sides. First of all, one does not understand how Part One on the “Son” reflects an aspect of Sri Aurobindo’s life. It is a role or a stage, but certainly not an aspect of his life. There is surely something that the author is trying to tell us when he devotes a full chapter to this phase of Sri Aurobindo’s life, while the other chapters are not marked stage-
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wise but aspect wise, even though these aspects follow to some extent the stages of his life.
But what are these aspects? In the author’s arrangement, the aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s life consist of his being a Scholar, Revolutionary, Yogi and Philosopher, and finally a Guide. The choice of words is indicative. The author does not feel it necessary to devote a separate section to Sri Aurobindo the Poet, the aspect that is actually closest to the subject of his study. One understands later why he does not do it. For in dealing with Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, he finds in it nothing more than an imitation of Arnold in an outdated Victorian style. But Sri Aurobindo himself preferred to be called a poet rather than a philosopher!
The other observation one can make is that the author seems to make no distinction between a Yogi and Philosopher. While it is true that Indian philosophy is born of Yoga, the terms cannot be used interchangeably. These are some of the natural expectations one would have from an Ashram author who has spent forty years editing Sri Aurobindo’s works. One would expect, for instance, that he would bring out certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo that other disciples have missed out, such as the Linguist, the Educationist and Journalist – Sri Aurobindo gave some truly novel and creative insights in the field of languages (especially in Sanskrit), Education (in National education), writing and reporting of political events with the touch of a deeper truth and wider angle of vision in the Bande Mataram and the Karmayogin. I leave aside the fact that Sri Aurobindo was not just one more spiritual leader, but someone who gave to earth an entirely new perspective of Spiritual Life and a brand new path of Yoga; that Sri Aurobindo was not merely a revolutionary who laid down the large lines by which India walked towards freedom, but also among the foremost political thinkers of his time who gave mankind the roadmap towards World-Unity in a very methodical manner; and that he not only embodied the spirit of the Indian Freedom movement but was also the soul of Indian Renaissance. All these and much more would have been truly worth writing by such a long standing disciple with free and unlimited access to Archival documents.
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But alas, there seems to have been a different agenda behind the façade of a good beginning. The author quickly and almost abruptly jumps to his personal experience with the subject of his biography, and to his strange and hostile attitude towards Sri Aurobindo that gets reflected again and again through the pages of the book. Let us then analyse the Preface which, after the first two paragraphs, hurls sarcasm and innuendo at the previous biographers, whom he calls hagiographers.
Priming the Readers: A sarcastic and suggestive remark
The author makes a nasty and unwarranted comment on Sri Aurobindo’s photograph. He says that the distinctive features of Sri Aurobindo such as “the peaceful expanse of his brow, his trouble free face and fathomless eyes” are due to the retoucher’s art and do not belong to the Master. This is an unnecessary comment, like someone who takes a perverse pleasure in needling others for no particular reason. After all, there is nothing wrong or unusual about retouching photographs in those days when the quality of photographs was poor. Incidentally, this photograph is kept in many people’s rooms as a symbol of divinity and is a source of strength to them. What a perverse way to start a book on one’s Master! This attitude of diminishing the stature of the Master will continue throughout the book.
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books by “realized beings” of the East and West. Most of them consisted of what I now would call spiritual clichés. This is not to suggest that bits of advice like “remain calm in all circumstances” or “seek the truth beneath the surface” are not valid or useful. But if they do not form part of a coherent view of life, they remain empty verbiage. (Lives, x)
So here is a hypothesis in the making – the words of “realised beings” mostly consist of spiritual clichés and empty verbiage! It is dismissive right from the start about what realised beings say. Is he implying that realized beings have nothing much to offer except bits of advice that are mostly clichés? What is the relevance of this here except to mock at the spiritual experiences of a galaxy of spiritual beings to whom the world has turned in times of crisis for succour, support and guidance? What he dismisses as “spiritual clichés” are eternal truths which all seekers aspire to live. It is necessary to have what is known as a “psychic opening” to be able to understand the utterances of “realized beings”. It is doubtful, given Peter’s own account of how he came to work in the Ashram Archives, as to whether he had any such opening. Here is what the Mother said on the right approach to spiritual truths and the way to understand them. She made the following comment on Sri Aurobindo’s aphorism quoted below:
My soul knows that it is immortal. But you take a dead body to pieces and cry triumphantly, “Where is your soul and where is your immortality?”1
Mother: It has often been repeated—but except in certain cases very rarely understood—that only like knows like. If this were understood, a great deal of ignorance would vanish.
Only the soul can know the soul, and on each level of being, only the equivalent level can recognise the other. Only the Divine can know the Divine, and because we carry the Divine in ourselves we are capable of seeing Him and recognising Him. But if we try to understand something of the inner life by using our senses and external methods, the result is sure to be total failure and we shall also deceive ourselves totally.
So when you imagine that you can know the secrets of Nature and still remain in a purely physical consciousness, you are entirely deceived. And this habit of demanding concrete, material proofs before accepting the reality of something, is one of the most glaring effects of ignorance. With that attitude any fool imagines that he can sit in judgment on the highest things and deny the most profound experiences.
It is certainly not by dissecting a body which is dead because the soul has departed from it that the soul can be found. Had the soul not departed, the body would not have been dead! It is to bring home to us the absurdity of this claim that Sri Aurobindo has written this aphorism.
It applies to all judgments of the critical mind and to all scientific methods when they would judge any but purely material phenomena.
The conclusion is always the same: the only true attitude is one of humility, of silent respect before what one does not know, and of inner aspiration to come out of one’s ignorance. One of the things which would make humanity progress most would be for it to respect what it does not know, to acknowledge willingly that it does not know and is therefore unable to judge. We constantly do just the opposite. We pass final judgments on things of which we have no knowledge whatsoever, and say in a peremptory manner, “This is possible. That is impossible”, when we do not even know what it is we are speaking of. And we put on superior airs because we doubt things of which we have never had any knowledge.
Men believe that doubt is a sign of superiority, whereas it is really a sign of inferiority. Scepticism and doubt are two of the greatest obstacles to progress; they add presumptuousness to ignorance.2
One wishes the author of TLOSA had heeded this golden advice before starting his venture that was foredoomed to fail, when seen and judged from its intrinsic spiritual worth. But then humility and the author never seem to have gone together as we shall see in
the following pages.
What a roundabout way of saying that the devotees’ claims were inflated! As if the worth of a man is measured by documents that are eating dust in the Archives of various institutions. We see that the main intention of this biography, as suggested by the Preface, is to deflate, to diminish, and to belittle all that is known about Sri Aurobindo’s life so far. The author passes a very negative judgment on devotees and previous biographers without any valid justification. His main concern seems not to verify and state the truth as he claims, but criticise and take a dig at the established accounts in the name of so-called objectivity, taking advantage (from the point of view of public recognition) of his unique position at the Archives. In psychological parlance, the above paragraph primes the audience. He prepares his readers to believe that whatever has been written so far is a highly coloured account and therefore not true. Note the frequent use of pejorative terms such as “champions, advocates, devotees, followers, admirers, apologists” to refer to the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, including direct disciples such as Nolini Kanto Gupta, Nirodbaran, Amal Kiran, Srinivas Iyengar and Rishabchand, whose biographies are the source of much inspiration and invaluable material on the Master’s life and works.
day events of his inner and outer life. Most biographies of Aurobindo have made his sadhana, or practice of yoga, seem like a series of miracles. His diary made it clear that he had to work hard to achieve the states of consciousness that are the basis of his yoga and philosophy. (Lives, xii)
Miracle or not, this statement is factually inaccurate and contradicts some of Sri Aurobindo’s own statements. Some of the major experiences of Sri Aurobindo did come spontaneously and, one may say, quite effortlessly (miraculously). These include major experiences such as (a) the sense of a vastness and calm as soon as he touched the Indian soil on his return from England; (b) the sense of the Infinite while walking on the ridge of Solomon in Kashmir; (c) the vision of the Godhead while sitting in a carriage;
(d) the presence of the World Mother while gazing at an image of Kali, and, of course, (e) Nirvana in three days, actually one, and finally (f) the vision of the One Divine everywhere. These are not ordinary achievements. The diary (Record of Yoga) Peter refers to belongs to a much later period, from 1912 to 1920, when Sri Aurobindo’s personal realisation of the traditional paths was already over, and he had started working on the physical nature for its transformation. It is then that the process slowed down for he had to tackle the difficulties of universal nature, a task that was never attempted before. But PH’s statement makes it appear as if the disciples were exaggerating his achievements and everything came with great difficulty and hard labour for him. Cited below for reference:
Now to reach Nirvana was the first radical result of my own Yoga. It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought, unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real world …There was no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, …yet supremely real and solely real. This was no mental realisation…I lived in that Nirvana day and night…it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless
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eternity of the Divine.…Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realisation, a first step towards the complete thing… It came unasked, unsought for, though quite welcome…without even a “May I come in”.3
A word on this ‘remarkable diary’ (Record of Yoga) that the author makes it seem was discovered by chance while organizing Sri Aurobindo’s manuscripts. The fact of the matter is that this diary was kept in Sri Aurobindo’s room and was later in the custody of Nolini Kanto Gupta, Sri Aurobindo’s secretary. Towards the end of his life, Nolini-da gave it to Jayantilal Parekh, the then in-charge of the Archives, for safe keeping, and not for publication! There are no written instructions by Sri Aurobindo, the Mother or Nolini to publish the Record of Yoga. Hence, given the nature of this diary, it was extremely unwise to publish it.
One could ask: “Why not a great Yogi’s diary should be made public for the benefit of humanity?” Because of the possibility of it being misunderstood and misused by untrained minds and ambitious half-baked disciples. We have already in front of us the classic case of the interpretation of the term maithunananda in the Record of Yoga, which Peter has misinterpreted as “spontaneous erotic delight” – this interpretation goes totally against Sri Aurobindo’s written views on the transformation of sexual energies and gives a left-handed Tantric twist to his Yoga.
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This statement is not only deprecatory but clearly chauvinistic; it stems from a racial prejudice that recurs through the pages of the book. It is besides too sweeping a statement that makes it appear that Indians, by nature, flatter their group identity at the cost of truth. It also shows that the author was fully aware of what he was doing and the possible consequences (of a riot, etc); in fact, he nearly caused one at the Ashram. He simultaneously builds a defence for himself as an exponent of truth, though hidden beneath this concern for truth, is merely an overcritical attitude. Obviously he understands nothing of the way Indians perceive their spiritual figures and, in his arrogance, condescendingly labels it as hagiography. History in the Indian context is not limited to the outer facts and figures, but includes the inner movements and representations of the human archetypes in their earthly play, which keep repeating from age to age. That is why the legends of Rama and Krishna are termed as history (itihasa) as also the mythical accounts recorded in the Puranas. It is the history of the inner life, of the play of forces that move men and events from behind, which is more important than the mere chronology of surface events. The author betrays a total lack of understanding of the Indian ethos and, instead of trying to understand, is quick to cast aspersions on it. If he had read the following words of the Master, he might have perhaps refrained from such stupid statements. The following are the Mother’s comments on another aphorism of Sri Aurobindo:
Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the Bhagavat could not have been written.4
Does Brindavan exist anywhere else than on earth?
Mother: The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere
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in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for the manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested.
In the world of the gods there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature.
Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible (to the ordinary man) and receive their inspiration from them.
So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed.
Whether Krishna existed or not in a human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance (except perhaps from an exclusively historical point of view), for Krishna is a real, living and active being; and his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.5
Once again he rubbishes the previous biographers and doubts their honesty. He also casts aspersions on the admirers of Sri Aurobindo, as if their admiration was based on an incomplete knowledge of facts. The fact is that in the eighties whenever Peter tried to give alternative explanations to events in Sri Aurobindo’s life, he was challenged by Jugal Kishore Mukherjee and Amal Kiran and shown how his explanations were wrong and how he had actually twisted
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the data to fit his conclusions. Jugal Kishore and Amal Kiran responded to PH’s revisionist views with academic counters which PH was unable to respond to. As a result, the Archives and Research magazine in which PH expressed his controversial views was finally discontinued by the Ashram authorities. So it is PH who has been dishonest and academically unsound and not the admirers of Sri Aurobindo.6
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.… But for many, figure 1 is more true to Aurobindo than figure 2.... Figure 2 thus falsifies the “real” Aurobindo. It is the task of the retoucher to make the photograph accord with the reality that people want to see. (Lives, xii-xiv)
Bogus example used to commit mental disfigurement, as these photographs are associated in people’s minds with the sense of divinity! Indicates a kind of perversity in taking pleasure in vilifying beauty! Besides, what is his problem if people like one photograph or another? What is there to wonder about it, unless he means that people willingly choose a false appearance? In those days the quality of photographs was not good as nowadays and had to be touched up. Champaklal (the Mother’s assistant) says how the Mother herself sent Sri Aurobindo’s photograph for retouching because the plate was quite bad.
Moreover, the two photographs which have been compared by PH have been taken at different times! The comparison could have been valid if the untouched photograph had been compared with the touched-up version of the same. But that is not the case, so how can the two photographs be compared at all? This is a typical case of how the author uses wrong data to come to wrong conclusions. The biography is full of such conclusions based on
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apparently correct data, which prove to be wrong or one-sided on closer examination.
Besides, there is a subtle dimension to these things that he completely ignores. The Mother has stated that She is (spiritually) present in Her photographs. We could hold the same for Sri Aurobindo. It requires some spiritual maturity to understand the purpose behind such photographs. The photograph was prepared by the Mother for the disciples and was intended to reflect the subtle or occult image of Sri Aurobindo. The same photograph was put on the cover of Satprem’s book The Adventure of Consciousness as part of her occult action, and one can judge by the effect it had in the 1970s. Moreover, the technique of using an image of the Master to concentrate the mind is there in all paths of Yoga. Even the Buddhists in their meditation concentrate on idealized images of the Buddha sitting in paradisiacal environments.7
The fact is that PH has more often quoted the enemies and critics of Sri Aurobindo and shied away from those who have made positive statements on him. He does not give credence to even Sri Aurobindo’s statements on the events of his own life, though he is quick in highlighting Sri Aurobindo’s negative statements on himself in a highly decontextualised manner. Why this biased choice on implicitly accepting “negative statements” and rejecting outright “positive statements” of Sri Aurobindo or his admirers? His criterion of selection is not based on whether a document is authentic or not, but on whether it is critical or not of Sri
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Aurobindo. If it is critical, he is too eager to accept it; if it is appreciative, he is too willing to reject it or doubt its authenticity! There are also in the book plenty of highly critical personal opinions of PH, often unwarranted and illogical, unsupported by documents or based on flimsy documentation. The claim of objectivity is false and is used only as a cover to justify his hostile intentions.
The real issue is not about quoting friends or enemies, but of finding authentic and reliable sources. PH’s book is full of secondary, tertiary and biased sources, which are given more importance than Sri Aurobindo’s own narration of his life, or those of his immediate disciples present at that time. For example, in order to cast aspersions on Sri Aurobindo, PH quotes a newspaper cutting which reports that during the Surat Congress session someone shouted in the crowd “Aurobindo, go eat Tilak’s shit.” What was the necessity of reporting this verbal abuse, even if it be accurate? One might as well report the conversation of quarrelling taxi drivers to give an idea of a musical performance at a theatre! The very choice of such evidence reflects a certain depravity of taste and perversity of mind.
Another example of Peter’s so-called “objective reporting” is his unquestioning trust in Matriprasad’s reporting of what Nolini- da told him in his last days as against Sri Aurobindo’s own statement on whether he guided his lawyer (Chittaranjan Das) in the Alipore Bomb Trial. Sri Aurobindo said in his famous Uttarpara speech that when he got a message from within, he left the case entirely on his lawyer and gave no further instructions to him. Nolini-da apparently confirmed the contrary in his last days, at the age of ninety-three. And how does this evidence get additional worth? By the fact of Matriprasad remembering the exact date of when Nolini-da told him about it! (Read Jugal Kishore Mukherjee’s first letter to the Trustees). So Sri Aurobindo’s evidence of what he said in public shortly after he came out of jail is set aside against the “irrefutable” evidence of what Nolini-da said after seventy years of the same event, and that too, when he was in his nineties, ailing and bedridden. This is the result of Peter’s policy of “not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events”!
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This is simply not true but a conjectural hypothesis in order to avoid a generous inclusion of the subject’s first-hand account, which is most likely to be a reliable account of things. PH must know that self-reporting is very much an accepted form in biographical reporting. Accepted scientifically under the rubric name of Autoethnography, it is a form of autobiographical personal narrative that explores the writer’s experience of life. The term was originally defined as “insider ethnography”.8
Peter seems to ignore the important criterion for inter- subjectivity: that Sri Aurobindo along with the Mother provided guidance to a number of disciples through inner influence. A lunatic would not have been able to gather and transform so many educated and skeptical disciples such as Pavitra, A.B. Purani, Kishor Gandhi, etc. Besides, has not Sri Aurobindo himself answered these questions abundantly with clarity to the utmost satisfaction of the scientific community? Then why this pseudo-academic exercise by the author, who knows next to nothing about the psychological, scientific or spiritual realms? Here is a reply of the Master himself to the doubts and questions of scientists. I wish the author had read this and incorporated it in his arguments. Instead he seems to be more than happy to label these as hallucinations and be done with it.
They told me, “These things are hallucinations.” I inquired what was a hallucination and found that it meant a subjective or a psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality. Then I sat and wondered at the miracles of the human reason.9
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What does Sri Aurobindo mean by “the miracles of the human reason”?
Mother: In this aphorism, by “they” Sri Aurobindo means the materialists, the scientists and, in a general way, all those who only believe in physical reality and consider human reason to be the one infallible judge. Furthermore, the “things” he speaks of here are all the perceptions that belong to worlds other than the material, all that one can see with eyes other than the physical, all the experiences that one can have in subtle domains from the sense perceptions of the vital world to the bliss of the Divine Presence.
It was while discussing these and other similar “things” that Sri Aurobindo was told that they were “hallucinations”. When you look up the word “hallucination” in the dictionary, you find this definition: “Morbid sensation not produced by any real object. Objectless perception.” Sri Aurobindo interprets this or puts it more precisely: “A subjective or psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality.” There could be no better definition of these phenomena of the inner consciousness, which are most precious to man and make him something more than a mere thinking animal. Human reason is so limited, so down to earth, so arrogantly ignorant that it wants to discredit by a pejorative word the very faculties which open the gates of a higher and more marvellous life to man.... In the face of this obstinate incomprehension Sri Aurobindo wonders ironically at “the miracles of the human reason”. For the power to change truth into falsehood to such a degree is certainly a miracle.10
The aim of the author seems to belittle mystic experience. He shows his leanings even before he has started writing his biography. The issue of spiritual experiences vis-a-vis psychotic breakdowns cannot be stated in such a summary way. However, it indicates his leanings and doubts, a theme that runs throughout the book as an undercurrent. While it is true that our faith cannot be disturbed by his gimmicks, it shows the nature of the consciousness and the attitude that has gone into the book. Fortunately, Sri Aurobindo
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has written a lot on the subject of faith, which is considered by all spiritual Masters as a preliminary and indispensable requisite to any spiritual pursuit, and in fact to any genuine seeking!
But faith is necessary; if faith is absent, if one trusts to the critical intelligence which goes by outward facts and jealously questions the revelatory knowledge because that does not square with the divisions and imperfections of the apparent nature and seems to exceed it and state something which carries us beyond the first practical facts of our present existence, its grief, its pain, evil, defect, undivine error and stumbling, asubham, then there is no possibility of living out that greater knowledge. The soul that fails to get faith in the higher truth and law, must return into the path of ordinary mortal living subject to death and error and evil: it cannot grow into the Godhead which it denies. For this is a truth which has to be lived,—and lived in the soul’s growing light, not argued out in the mind’s darkness. One has to grow into it, one has to become it,—that is the only way to verify it.”11
Obviously PH takes a wrong turn from the very beginning which he keeps justifying throughout the book. One wonders how he has not learnt this basic, fundamental truth of spiritual life and failed to imbibe the Ashram ethos despite staying there for nearly forty years. What is more surprising is that his approach is justified by some as a legitimate approach while the reactions against his book are dubbed as merely sentimental reactions. What PH calls hagiography are simply truths seen by the eye of faith and confirmed by the inner vision that is born of the soul as it grows and peeps out of its dense sheaths. By denying all that can be seen only by the eye of faith or subtle vision, PH rubbishes or discards a whole set of data at the very outset.
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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 inner 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. (Lives, xiv)
The last paragraph of the Preface cannot be found fault with. The author at least knows that one of the fundamental differences between Sri Aurobindo’s message and that of other mystics is this return upon life. But he has already passed so many caustic remarks that the final statement loses its shine and leaves one wondering as to what really the author is trying to say. For by now one thing is evident, that the author has no sympathy for spiritual experiences. He is averse to them and considers the possibility of regarding them as “signs of psychotic breakdown”. For those who are not familiar with the term psychosis, it may be recalled that the word is used in the language of Psychiatry to indicate a serious form of mental disorder commonly referred to as insanity. Thus by discussing the possibility of insanity with reference to mystic and spiritual experiences, Peter has indirectly accused Sri Aurobindo of being insane. He will argue that discussing the possibility of somebody being insane is different from actually finding him insane, but this is only a clever argument of a journalist who does not want to get caught saying the wrong thing in public. For when do you really need to discuss the possible insanity of someone? When there is enough prima facie evidence to back it up! And not when you merely want to tarnish the reputation of a person by raising unnecessary doubts about his insanity on the basis of flimsy evidence.
We shall see in the pages that follow how the author has honed this clever defamatory technique to perfection. He will buttress one positive comment between two strongly negative ones, so that the value of the positive statement is lost or negated, and the reader
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is left wondering what to believe in. This constant self-contradiction obviously helps the author to escape the sharp responses that his negative statements would evoke. Falling back upon the positive statements, his supporters say that he has indeed written positively in spite of the negative things that have been pointed out by his critics! But this is only a clever way of getting out of a bad situation. I am reminded of the story of the boy who grew up in a household helping the family in its errands and daily chores. Gaining the confidence of the house, he got access to the keys of the cash- box. One fine day, taking full advantage of the trust the family had reposed in him, he stole a large amount and used it for his private pleasure. When questioned, he retorted with a curt sorry and justified his action by saying that after all he had served the family for so many years!
One can summarise the Preface as follows:
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Basically, the author of TLOSA intends to win accolades from perverted academics like Jeffrey Kripal and Wendy Doniger by denigrating a great spiritual Master. He takes it as an opportunity to project his distaste for devotion and his cynical attitude towards faith. (To those who have worked closely with him, his condescending attitude towards anything that partakes of faith and devotion is well-known.) At the same time, he weaves his defence by making occasional positive statements to avoid a backlash from Sri Aurobindo’s disciples and admirers. He says that, unlike him, the disciples are sentimental and squeamish about discussing the negative side of their Guru. But the truth of the matter is that PH makes “active omissions” of highly positive sources, highlights flimsy negative evidence, constantly decontextualises Sri Aurobindo’s autobiographical statements and makes highly critical comments without any basis whatsoever on most of his works – does he think himself to be a master of all subjects? One cannot but notice the hostile motivation (under the guise of so-called objectivity) to destroy the high regard for Sri Aurobindo in the public mind. If Sri Aurobindo were not truly great, Peter himself would not have attempted to destroy his reputation, for it is only by maligning truly great men that authors like Peter Heehs hope to thrive and make their way into newspaper headlines.
22 January 2011
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Peter Heehs uses in his book certain subtle psychological techniques to create a negative opinion of Sri Aurobindo. One such device is never passing an outright negative judgment without making some qualifications to it. Generally he flip-flops between positive and negative statements, swings to the left and right, and in a most unsuspecting way nullifies his positive statements on Sri Aurobindo. For committing this “murder in cold print”, he begins with some sweet talk lulling the reader into a false sense of sympathy, and then delivers a blow to Sri Aurobindo in someone else’s name, adding his own opinion quietly in the presentation of a multitude of documents. He does this so cleverly that at times it is hard to distinguish his personal opinion from the quoted documents. For example, while summarizing Sri Aurobindo’s life at Baroda, the author makes the following statement:
Looking back three years later on Aurobindo’s entry into the public life of Bengal, his colleague Jitendra Lal Bannerji recalled that he was looked on then as “an obscure school- master in a far-off province of India—one who had apparently failed in life and had retired into oblivion—a man unknown, unheard-of.”To call the professor from Baroda a failure was to exaggerate his insignificance, but not by much. He had done little in thirty-three years to make a name for himself. Since his return from England in 1893, he had risen from trainee to secretary to the Gaekwar and vice principal of Baroda College. He might have looked forward to a ministerial post in ten or twenty years, but his interests lay elsewhere, in literature and revolutionary politics. In these fields he had taken some preliminary steps, but little more. As a writer he had achieved fluidity, had begun to find his voice,
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and was on the trail of the themes that would carry him into mature expression, but he had produced comparatively little and published less. As an organizer, he had helped to found a revolutionary group in 1902, but little remained of the organization, and the revolutionary impetus had passed from Calcutta to Dacca. Overall, “in the stirring and slow-heaving political atmosphere of the time,” Aurobindo was, in Jitendra Lal’s summing up, “an altogether negligible factor.” (Lives, 101- 02)
Note how Peter selects this particular document to summarise Sri Aurobindo’s life at Baroda. Jitendralal was a colleague of Sri Aurobindo but did not stay with him in Baroda, so how could he comment on Sri Aurobindo’s life there? Note the way he shortlists Sri Aurobindo’s achievements until then, and quickly, as if by a sleight of hand, trivialises them (text in italics) before dismissing him at the end of the paragraph (text in bold). Finally, he slips in his personal opinion, blending it so well with the quoted document that the average reader is left confused as to whether he endorses or mitigates Jitendralal’s view (see text in bold italics).
Let us examine Sri Aurobindo’s life and achievements until the end of the Baroda period. He had passed the Tripos in the first shot and in first class; he had cleared the ICS examination (the riding test was only an excuse to get himself disqualified for the ICS); he was among the toppers at Cambridge and was known for his mastery of foreign languages; he was chosen as the Maharaja’s Secretary, which was by all means a very respectable and lucrative job; he was the Vice-Principal of the Baroda college (later the Principal for a short period) and loved and admired by his students and colleagues; he had written poems such as ‘Light’ at the age of 11; written The Harmony of Virtue at the age of 18; had experienced the “vacant Infinite” while walking on the Takht-e-Suleman; looked into the eyes of the World-Mother while staring into the image of the goddess Kali at Narmada and had experienced the rush and flow of occult experience following his assiduous practice of Pranayama. By what standard can the above achievements be attributed to a man who has “failed in life”? It can be argued that Jitendralal had no inkling of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences, but then why quote him and justify his poor and ignorant
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assessment of Sri Aurobindo? Does not the present day historian have the advantage of hindsight? Or will Peter say that spiritual experience does not fall in the ken of the objective historian? If that is so, why mention Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences, why write about the Record of Yoga; in fact, why write about Sri Aurobindo at all, for if there is anything that Sri Aurobindo is known for, it is his spiritual world-view which even explains Matter in spiritual terms!
But no, our biographer has to criticise Sri Aurobindo, for otherwise how can he be called objective by the academicians! Mark how he validates Jitendralal’s negative remark by a half- hearted disapproval of the same, “To call the professor from Baroda a failure was to exaggerate his insignificance, but not by much.”
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Let me now give an example of one-sided reporting from the chapter entitled “Son”. Our biographer goes at great length to describe the madness of Sri Aurobindo’s mother and keeps referring to it time and again well past the half-way mark of his book. He mentions the unfaithfulness of Sri Aurobindo’s father to his wife and dubs him as “Darwinian Mr Ghose” because he was “proud to have brought children of a better breed into the world” (p 9). What does the author convey through the presentation of this data? He is forcefully drawing our attention to the poor heredity of Sri Aurobindo, more specifically the inheritance of madness from his mother, and the unhappy environment of his childhood days, both of which may have caused the spiritual “hallucinations” he saw in the latter part of his life! This view we of course discredit, but even from the angle of the psychologist seriously interested in engaging with someone who does not believe in spiritual things, there are three important factors Peter deliberately ignores. First, he belittles Sri Aurobindo’s father by neither mentioning his generosity nor his achievements in the medical field and his reputation as a good doctor (there was even a biological test bearing his name which is now outdated).
Next, emotionally Sri Aurobindo was closer to his maternal grandfather, Rishi Rajnarayan Basu, than to his mother. He even dedicated a poem to him, Transit Non Periit, on his death in 1899. I quote below the poem both for the subtle influence of Rishi Rajnarayan on Sri Aurobindo and the depth and maturity of Sri Aurobindo’s thought in his early youth.
Transiit, Non Periit
(My grandfather, Rajnarayan Bose, died September 1899) Not in annihilation lost, nor given
To darkness art thou fled from us and light, O strong and sentient spirit; no mere heaven Of ancient joys, no silence eremite
Received thee; but the omnipresent Thought Of which thou wast a part and earthly hour, Took back its gift. Into that splendour caught Thou hast not lost thy special brightness. Power Remains with thee and the old genial force Unseen for blinding light, not darkly lurks:
As when a sacred river in its course
Dives into ocean, there its strength abides Not less because with vastness wed and works Unnoticed in the grandeur of the tides.1
Knowing the elementary laws of Mendelian Inheritance, the non- genetic vertical heredity transmission, and, above all, going by the common-sense theory that we are influenced most by those whom we love and admire, it is important for any scientific biographer writing for the academia to speak about Sri Aurobindo’s grandfather, the only blood relation to whom he has dedicated a poem. The Wikipedia describes him as:
Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899) was an Indian writer and intellectual of the Bengal Renaissance. He was born in Boral in 24 Parganas and studied at the Hare School and Hindu College, both premier institutions in Kolkata, Bengal at the time. A monotheist at heart, Rajnarayan Basu converted to Brahmoism at the age of twenty. After retiring, he was given the honorary title of Rishi or sage. As a writer, he was one of the best known prose writers in Bengali in the nineteenth century, writing often for the Tattwabodhini Patrika, a premier Brahmo journal. Due to his defence of Brahmoism, he was given the title “Grandfather of Indian Nationalism”.
Rajnarayan Basu was a close friend of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a prominent poet of the time, and the introducer of free verse in Bengali. Both were responsible for introducing classical Western elements into Bengali literature. He briefly tutored Asia’s first Nobel prizewinner, Rabindranath Tagore and spent three years translating the Upanishads into English on the earnest request and co-operation of Devendranath Tagore. As a member of Young Bengal, Rajnarayan Basu believed in “nation-building” at the grassroots level.
I also quote at length from Shri Chinmoy’s article on Rajnarayan Basu:
The father of our Master Sri Aurobindo’s mother, Swarnalata, the ‘grandfather of Indian Nationalism’, the militant defender of his country, the Olympian champion of truth, the ruthless antagonist to sham, and, above all, a holy personage of hallowed memory who arouses a profound esteem and veneration in the hearts of the Bengalis, is Rishi Rajnarayan Bose.
He was a fond child of the Goddess of learning. Not once but twice he successfully proved himself matchless: as a student and as a teacher. “It was my principle,” the Rishi said, “as a teacher to guide the boys by means of love.” He was thoroughly at home in English literature. He had an easy access to the mines of Sanskrit and Arabic literatures.
Some of his countrymen took him amiss. They took him for an old man who cherished a clinging to the education and culture of ancient India, be it supremely good or abysmally bad. In fact, what he wanted was to draw the attention of his countrymen to the silliness of holding such notions as that “the Indian way of eating, the Indian way of dressing, the Indian way of learning”—in a word, whatever India could offer to the world in any sphere of life—are too insignificant, while whatever the English would offer should be worth having for a man in a civilised society. According to him, no other country in the hoary past dared belittle India for
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anything. And now why should it be otherwise? The Indians must be Indians heart and soul. To ape the English is to ask the presiding Deity of India to quit her own throne. And what, after all, would they get by this mad pursuit? Nothing short of self-perdition. He was a pioneer in the field of giving concrete shape to Indian Nationalism.
His heart would be uncontrollably swayed while he was singing Bande Mataram, careless of the fact that his voice was sadly wanting in the art of singing. In this connection let us remember what he wrote to the author of Anandamath in which shines our national Anthem. He was simply enamoured of the book, and wrote to Bankim, “May your pen be immortal!” The Rishi’s prayer was fulfilled.
A character with diverse virtues was he. This moment his face shows a thunderbolt determination. The next moment he becomes the personification of irresistible laughter. This moment he tries to identify himself with the innermost Spirit. The next moment he discharges the duties of a wise householder. This moment he gives advice to alumni and the adorers of Bengali literature on how to serve the country better through their powerful contributions. The next moment he loses himself in the company of impossible fools.
The Superiority Complex was altogether foreign to his nature. Children had free access to him who was four times as old as they. Tagore was one among those little ones. One will be frankly bewildered as to how such a thing could take place in Bengal, where age is treated with far more reverential awe than in any other part of the world. It was impossible for anyone to resist the good humour of the Rishi. Once Sri Aurobindo said to one of his disciples:
“Your question reminds me of the story of my grandmother. She said: ‘God has made such a bad world! If I could meet Him I would tell Him what I think of Him.’ My grandfather said: ‘Yes, it is true; but God has so arranged that you can’t get near Him so long as you have such a desire in you!”
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“A prophet is not honoured in his own country.” This frequently mouthed proverb proved quite true in the case of Rishi Rajnarayan. His own son-in-law K.D. Ghosh decided to send his children to England to get thoroughly anglicised. As preparation for the fulfilment of his wishes, perhaps, he had appointed a European nurse to attend on his child Auro and later he sent him to an English convent at Darjeeling for his primary education. But as a contrast, it is equally strange that the very same father should send to his son Auro in England press-cuttings from India describing the injustices and atrocities of British Rule here. Thus he supplied unconsciously, as it were, fuel to the fire of patriotism with which the son appears to have been born. The father did all this, for he intuitively felt that his son Auro was destined to do something very great. His expectations were more than fulfilled in Sri Aurobindo becoming a spiritual Leader of mankind, while his immediate expectations were only partly fulfilled. Aurobindo learned what the West could teach him, yet he remained out-and-out an Indian in the core of his heart, and was not anglicised as desired by his father. The grandfather’s joy and pride knew no bounds to find in his grandson a unique love for his motherland, for her culture and education, notwithstanding his Western education of the highest order….
Among the mighty minds caught by the spirit of India’s renaissance and among the pioneers in the field of national creativity, the Seer of the age, Sri Aurobindo, has seen in only two personalities the true Rishi-vision: Bankim Chandra and Rajnarayan. In his Bankim-Tilak-Dayananda and Bankim Chandra Chatterji he has immortalised Bankim; to Rajnarayan he has given perpetuity in a sonnet: Transiit Non Periit….
Rabindranath, who had great admiration and veneration for Rishi Rajnarayan, has noted two significant aspects in his character:
“On the one hand he had committed himself and his household affairs entirely to the care of the Divine; on
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the other hand he would busy himself making innumerable plans feasible or otherwise for the advancement of the country’s progress.”2
We can see clearly from the above quotations that if at all Sri Aurobindo’s psychological make-up depended on heredity, it was certainly the seed of his grandfather that had sprouted in him. His mother was merely a physical instrument for carrying the seed or, let us say, the fire of the grandfather’s personality. From a deeper understanding of her madness, one could say that her madness itself may have been an inability to bear in a frail body her father’s fire. In this so-called academic biography of Peter Heehs, there is hardly any mention of Rishi Rajnarayan’s influence on Sri Aurobindo.
Finally, the third important factor our biographer has failed to note due to his obsession with Swarnalata’s madness, is a beautiful poem written by Sri Aurobindo when he was only eleven years old, a poem that is almost prophetic of his future work, and hence all the more important to reveal certain traits of his personality which were at that time in the form of a bud.
Light
From the quickened womb of the primal gloom, The sun rolled, back and bare,
Till I wove him a vest for his Ethiop breast, Of the threads of my golden hair;
…..
When I flashed on their sight, the heralds bright, Of Heaven’s redeeming plan,
As they chanted the morn, the Saviour born – Joy, joy, to the outcast man!
Equal favour I show to the lofty and low, On the just and the unjust I descend:
E’en the blind, whose vain spheres, roll in darkness and tears,
Feel my smile – the blest smile of a friend.
….O, if such the glad worth of my presence on earth,
Though fitful and fleeting the while,
What glories must rest on the home of the blessed, Ever bright with the Deity’s smile.3
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One need not wonder as to what prevented our biographer from bringing out these aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s childhood. For under the dubious garb of objectivity and neutrality, he had his own agenda to fulfil, the agenda to demolish the faith of the disciples in their Master. It is true that no one can demolish faith once it is born, not even a thousand such biased authors, but should we become party to his mischief on that account? If I am personally immune to an illness, should I let others be exposed to it and let the falsehood spread with the excuse that the Divine will do everything to defend himself? What about our own responsibility in the matter? Thus each has a role to play, small or big, depending on one’s sincerity and concern for the truth that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother represent.
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Peter Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, published by Oxford University Press in 1989, and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by Columbia University Press in June 2008. I have referred to them respectively as Bio-1 and Bio-2 in my analysis of the Preface of Bio-2. In the article below Peter Heehs’s words are consistently in Italics and mine are in Roman, and I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Peter Heehs’s quoted text which is always in italics.
Peter Heehs’s attitude and approach–A:
Biographers must take their documents as they find them… 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. Accounts by the subject have exceptional value, but they need to be compared against other narrative accounts and, more important, against documents that do not reflect a particular point of view. (Lives, Preface, p. xiv)
My Comments:
This statement authorises me to take this exceptionally valuable preface as I find it and, without giving special treatment to his particular point of view, compare it against other narrative accounts and facts that do not reflect his version of events, and interpret the whole by my critical openness of a disciple. The biographical story that has emerged I
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call Avatars (Lives) of Marcher. The name ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of C. Mayo (1867-1940) whose Mother India vilified Indians, and W. Archer (1856-1924) who vilified Indian culture through his India and the Future and whom Sri Aurobindo put in his place in The Foundations of Indian Culture.1
Peter Heehs’s attitude and approach–B:
I first encountered Aurobindo [in an April 1950 photo] in 1968 in a yoga center on 57th Street in Manhattan. The teacher was an elderly Polish Jew with a suitably Indian name. He gave instructions in postures and breathing for a fee, dietary and moral advice gratis. Between lessons, he told stories about his years of wandering in India. Among the artifacts he brought back were photographs of people he called “realized beings,” which covered the walls of his studio. One of them was of Aurobindo as an old man. I did not find it particularly remarkable, as the subject wore neither loincloth nor turban, and had no simulated halo around his head. (Lives, Preface, pp. ix-x)
Quitting family, church and college, the need of the hour for his generation, 20-year old Marcher took up the path of liberating drugs. Obeying unknowingly an adesh of his Daemon, his Supernatural Guide, he tumbled through the 4th dimension into the yoga center of a Jewish spiritualist. No sincere Western seeker after four decades in the spiritual field would introduce his first guru (even if his initial ignorance mistook him for a charlatan) in this off-hand manner, shrouding the latter’s heroic efforts to turn young drifters like him towards truer, deeper, higher truths of existence, in times when his generation threw out the baby with the bathwater. Nor would he misguide ignorant readers by confusing ‘yoga’ meaning pranayama and asanas with ‘Yoga’ the fulltime spiritual sadhana. A child’s nature can be known from its very infancy and a son/daughter-in-law’s from the first meeting. I wonder what opinion his parents and that Jewish guru formed of Marcher’s character. “It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s preferences and prejudices of race and education [as that Jew had] that India reveals the mystery of her treasures,” the Mother says; “Others depart disappointed…for they have sought it in the wrong way and would not agree to pay the price of the Divine Discovery.”2
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Marcher’s derisive quote marks around realized beings betrays his unyielding contempt for the spiritual content of the words ‘spirit’, ‘realisation’ and ‘being’. His refusal to ‘pay the price of the Divine Discovery’, is explained by this passage from Sri Aurobindo: “The average European draws his guiding view not from the philosophic, but from the positive and practical reason…. The Indian mind [which that elderly Jew understood better than Marcher ever will] holds on the contrary…that the ultimate truths are truths of the spirit and that truths of the spirit are the most fundamental and most effective truths of our existence, powerfully creative of the inner, salutarily reformative of the outer life [these the wise Jew failed to infuse in Marcher]…. The Indian mind does not admit that the only possible test of values or of reality is the outward scientific, the test of a scrutiny of physical Nature or the everyday normal facts of our surface psychology…. The tests of this other subtler order of truths [of the vast hidden subconscious and superconscious heights, depths and ranges]…since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must necessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and psycho- physical experimentation, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition which looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason which admits something beyond itself, looks upward to the supra-rational, tries to give as far as may be an account of it to the human intelligence.”3
Peter Heehs’s attitude and approach–C:
(1) A few months later, after a brief return to college and a stopover in a wild uptown “ashram”, I found myself living in another yoga center housed, improbably, in a building on Central Park West. (Lives, Preface, p. x)
(1) An uninhibited historian hiding details of this brief return to college! Was it a shaming return to conformity? Veiling the courses, degrees taken then or later, only validates the talk of forged doctorates and titles like Founder of Aurobindo Archives, Director of History at Aurobindo Archives, etc! A biographer of the mud, by the mud, for the mud, covering up his own mud in that wild uptown “ashram”! It must have been a return to the hippy haven on Cheap
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Street reeking of drugs and sex! A true biography of Sri Aurobindo, says Bio-1’s preface, does not give readers the life of a saint, it adequately brings out the human characteristics and personal drama of his life. Why then this dainty lid on Marcher’s own human characteristics and personal drama at college and in that ashram? Was it an instinctive repulsion to the wise old Jew’s teachings the cause for this break? Whatever the truth, obeying another adesh, Marcher tumbled into a sane ashram where his Daemon will prepare him for his life’s mission.
(2) The center had the most complete collection of Aurobindo’s writings in New York. I started with a compilation…which I could not understand. Undeterred, I tried…. By then I had read a number of books by “realized beings” of the East and West. Most of them consisted of what I now would call spiritual clichés. This is not to suggest that bits of advice like “remain calm in all circumstances” or “seek the truth beneath the surface” are not valid or useful. But if they do not form part of a coherent view of life, they remain empty verbiage. Aurobindo’s view of life seemed to me to be coherent, though not always easy to grasp. His prose was good, if rather old-fashioned, and he had a wry sense of humor. (Lives, Preface, p. x)
(2) One of Marcher’s pet ploy is to make sweeping statements and then obfuscate them with qualifiers like a number of, almost, most etc. Before tumbling into that Jew’s center, Marcher’s Daemon had exorcised his soul from such valid and useful spiritual clichés as: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And, Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.4 Hence, in a jiffy he unmasked the entire gallery of realised beings there, esp. ‘Aurobindo’. Now, at this center, Speedy Marcher Gonzales5 tore through a number of books by ‘realized beings’ and found most of them consisted of spiritual clichés, i.e., empty verbiage. How did he decide they consisted of incoherent empty verbiage? He applied this down-to- earth rule of his frogs-in-the-well drifters-community: What does not conform to our coherent view of life is incoherent verbiage,
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trash it. Thank his Daemon that he didn’t adopt the logic which burnt down an ancient library: “If these books don’t agree with our coherent view of life, they are sacrilegious; if they do they are superfluous, either way destroy them.” As I said, state, obfuscate, get away with murder, is his trademark style: Thus by Aurobindo’s view of life seemed to me to be coherent, though not always easy to grasp, he means it was incoherent as hell. And by His prose was good, if rather old-fashioned, he means: What if ‘Aurobindo’ learnt his English in infinitely greater schools and colleges than mine? Since it doesn’t conform to my prose-style, it is worthless for humanity’s evolution. Recall Bio-1’s preface, Marcher’s assumption of the possible validity of Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences, legitimises his anti-devotional materialistic scholarship to investigate and judge whether what Sri Aurobindo claims as his spiritual experiences were actual realities or hallucinations. Marcher’s scholarship and judgments are best adjudicated in Sri Aurobindo’s words: “Reading and study [of spiritual texts] are only useful to acquire information and widen one’s field of data. But that comes to nothing if one does not know how to discern and discriminate, judge, see what is within and behind these things.”6
Those rejected realised beings must have thanked their stars when Marcher hit pay-dirt in the cliché seek the truth beneath the surface. Alas, they knew not that this rang their death-knell! For, he would soon burnish that cliché into his mind’s infallible weapon of critical openness of a seeker of [anti-spiritual] truth beneath the surface of ever- fluctuating human life and always biased documents. Later, settled in his karma-bhumi in Pondicherry, he will wield it with unfailing success while roughing it out among naïve Ashramites, like the Phantom amidst a pygmy tribe. Side-products such as scholarly pamphlets, articles, books will emerge, while he would concentrate on his central mission: To create authentic, i.e. de-retouched, versions of all published works of ‘Aurobindo’ and his ‘Mother’ – since they were edited (retouched) by direct disciples, i.e., hagiographies, hence untrustworthy for the critical openness of seekers of historical and biographical truths like him. As to the unpublished ones, his infallible weapon would authentically edit and publish them in the Collected Works of [Sri] Aurobindo.
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(3) The center had the most complete collection of Aurobindo’s writings…. I lived in or near New York for the next four years.... I did a lot of reading, primarily of Aurobindo, but also writers he got me interested in: Shelley, Dante, Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, Plato, Homer, the Buddha, Kalidasa, Wordsworth, Whitman, and dozens of others, in no particular order. I learned enough Sanskrit to struggle through the Gita, and tried to meditate as long as I could…. All the while I was helping out at the yoga center, and at the same time working as an office assistant, stock boy, or taxi driver. (Lives, Preface, p. x)
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ex machina of supernatural intervention – so I can’t attribute his feat to his Daemon’s power. At any rate, in four years his Daemon had fully primed him for the mission of his life.
Peter Heehs’s attitude and approach C:
(4) Marcher struggled through the Gita, a religious tract credited to a historically undocumented, hence imaginary, ‘avatar’ whom ‘Aurobindo’ declared to be his spiritual Guide. I guess he found it consists ‘mostly’ of the empty verbiage of spiritual clichés with bits of advice possibly valid or useful to civilised humanity. This study must be the seed of his current scholarly authority to evaluate all that his ‘Aurobindo’ experienced and wrote on the basis of the Gita.
And Marcher meditated. Why is this up-front biographer so bashful about who or what initiated him in this multi-tiered, multi- faceted, multi-purposed, un-copyrightable exercise called ‘meditation’? Was it part of that Jew’s exercises? Was it a teacher at the Central Park Street center? It certainly was not something from ‘Aurobindo’ or ‘Ramakrishna’ for they would have thrust on him what Bio-1’s preface calls their lifelong obsession with mother figures. For Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Aurobindo the Divine Mother is the Sole Supreme Reality who does the Yoga in the sadhak to the extent his/her faith, sincerity and surrender invites and allows Her. Marcher knows the Mother’s opinion that, “if you live only a moment, just a tiny moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufficiently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours.”10 But surrender, aspiration, prayer, repellent to his inherited instincts, heretical to his Darwinian- Dawkinsian evolutionism would, he knew, be fatal to his Daemon. The only book among those he named, that could have inspired his atheist soul to meditate would be the one on Buddha and Buddhism. Two facts in support of my conjecture: In an interview to the Reader’s Digest, the Dalai Lama called himself an atheist; after Bio-2 enlightened us, Marcher considered taking up Zen –
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like Lucky Luke riding into the sunset after solving an Indian tribe’s problem.
(5) Now and then I thought about travelling to India, and eventually bought a ticket for Bombay. A week after my arrival, I found myself living in the ashram Aurobindo had founded. (Lives, Preface, p. x)
(5) I relate first, in what I believe is Marcher’s instinctive style, his unexpressed opinion on why and how ‘Aurobindo’ left Calcutta in February 1910 and settled in Pondicherry. (His interpretations and remarks in Bio-2 are in Italics): For years ‘Aurobindo’ was in contact with extremists-terrorists in Chandernagore, a French possession outside of the jurisdiction of the British police…. For a man with a British warrant against him, it was the best place near Calcutta to go. Since July 1909, he was in contact with another such group based in Tuticorin and Madras, and through them, with Tamil absconders from British Law burrowed since 1908 in the safe soil of French Pondicherry, which was an ideal place for a man with a British warrant against him. On Feb. 8, the Govt. of India banned the free expression of political opinion. ‘Aurobindo’, who had already made it a “habit in action to watch events, prepare forces and act when he felt it to be the right moment”, stopped his terrorist-political activities and learnt Tamil. The right moment came when the Law of the Democratically Elected British Government of India caught up with him. The adesh also came at an opportune moment…and there were good reasons to comply. Aurobindo had also 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 soon. So, in the dead of the night he escaped to Chandernagore, and thence, again in the dead of the night, with false papers and a false name, to Pondicherry. Years later, when ‘Aurobindo’ was accused of having deserted the freedom struggle, he invented the excuse of an inviolable adesh of his Inner Guide, and his soul’s imperative need to concentrate on his Yoga.11 Equally bogus was his claim of having given up terrorist activities; for he kept himself informed of them for years. For instance, he knew of the conspiracy to assassinate Viceroy
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Hardinge in 1911, and still wrote in his diary that he helped nurse the injured Viceroy through his Yogic powers.
Marcher, on the other hand, obeying his Daemon’s real adesh, zigzagged his way until one morning he found himself living in the ashram Aurobindo had founded. Like ‘Aurobindo’, he built his own Cave of Tapasya and equipped it (like the Phantom did his cave in the jungles of Bangalla) with the latest electronic gadgetry. It took Sri Aurobindo four decades to build up his revolutionary Spiritual Ashram and revolutionary Spiritual System of Yoga. Likewise in four decades, Marcher built up his avant-garde Aurobindo Archives12 and avant-garde Anti-theist System of Yoga. That he and his works are more successful than Sri Aurobindo’s works is proved by the fact that while just a handful of disciples pull Sri Aurobindo’s Spiritual Chariot, a mass of disciples pull Marcher’s Anti-theist Chariot with Bio-1 as its lead wheels, Bio-2 as its central wheels, and the CWSA edited by him as his throne. Not just that, they are eager to commit hara-kiri under its emancipating wheels – like devotees of Lord Jagannath do under his Chariot.
Peter Heehs’s attitude and approach–D:
Marcher’s Seeker of Truth avatar has never lost his faith in the correctness of his instinctive reaction to anything. Yet, as we shall see below, he gave up his discontent with the photo of the old man and his admiration of the standard portrait when he found that the first was by Bresson, a Westerner, the other by Latour, a local devotee.13 One of Marcher’s fleeting avatars was “Ambitious Photographer”, has anyone attained eminence without ambition?
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Look where lack of ambition has landed his ‘Aurobindo’ – in the Gutters of True History! Marcher’s failure to create prize-winning photos made him realise that winning photographers falsify actual physical reality by the retoucher’s art which led to this supreme revelation: Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs. Thus biographies of Sri Aurobindo by disciples or devoted admirers are not biographies but hagiographies, because they assume he was an avatar and adopt the spiritual point of view which inevitably reads back his avataric personality even into the un- spiritualised nature of the earlier stages of his career (sic). The human characteristics and personal drama are thus lost in the process. Therefore, the only True Biographies of Sri Aurobindo are Bio-1 and Bio-2 – for they alone fulfil all the requisites of an academically valid biography.
If Marcher was deceived by the standard portrait, the Ashramites who took him for a sincere disciple were deceived by his James Marcher Bond avatar: friendly philanthropist, good conversationalist, talented actor and playwright, outstanding athlete and swimmer, etc. His truer mole avatar was never imagined even by those Ashramites who worked closely with him in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives (founded before his advent in Pondicherry) by Jayantilal Parekh, a dedicated disciple staying in the Ashram since the 1930s. Only too late did some realise that from the very outset the chief occupation of this mole had been to squirrel away all sorts of materials…written by the subject’s enemies…not giving special treatment to the subject’s own version of events, for his Terminator avatar to concoct book-bombs such as Bio-1 and Bio-2.
Few witnessed Marcher’s Mayo-Archer avatar letting off steam. Once his Historian avatar revealed his view to two of his admirers, Gazelle Eyes and Leather Face: “No Indian can be trusted to write the true history of India, least of all Marathas and Bengalis.” Gazelle gazed on; Leather Face blurted: “You mean the true histories of America and Europe have still to be written because they also have been written either by Americans or Europeans?” Leather Face was fired. Again, in a ‘scholarly’ Western journal, he asserted that Hindus are innate liars because they obey this Sutra
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of Manu: “Speak the truth that pleases, never the truth that displeases.” For instance, his Hindu tailor always sweetly promised to deliver his clothes on a certain day but never did. In order to support his conclusion, he omitted the rest of the couplet: “Truth always, never falsehood; this is the Sanatana Dharma.” In the same article, under a quote from The Hindu that he had used to justify his anti-Hinduism thesis, he put a footnote assuring readers that since its inception, the Hindu has always been 100% secular. A historical fact in support of Marcher’s assurance: In the article “The Coming Congress” in Bande Mataram, 13 Oct. 1906, Sri Aurobindo made this comment on the pro-British Government Indian newspapers who opposed the Bande Mataram, the mouthpiece of the New (later Nationalist) Party led by Lal, Bal, Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Balgangadhar Tilak and Bepin Pal): “The New Party... are not wanted: but they cannot by a mere pious wish, be got rid of either…. And this being so, what, we ask, would the Hindu or the Madras Standard, or even the Indian Mirror want us to do…commit hara-kiri?”14
Two more facts contributing to Marcher’s animosity towards Hinduism and Sri Aurobindo: (a) The Hindu temple near his residence in Pondicherry, ever-crowded, noisy and dirty, with its thousand festivals and begging sprees, torture him day and night.
(b) On May 30, 1909, at Uttarpara, Sri Aurobindo spoke on the Hindu religion, concluding with this declaration: “When therefore it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall be great…. It is for the dharma and by the dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country…. What is this religion which we call Sanatana, eternal? It is the Hindu religion… That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others…. I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatana Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatana Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana Dharma it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism. This is
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the message that I have to speak to you.”15 Sri Aurobindo’s statement on Hinduism “as the universal religion that embraces all others” must have peeved off Marcher who grew up with the belief in the superiority of American universalism.
Figure 1 is not a retouched copy of Figure 2. The original of Figure 1 has been reproduced several times by the Ashram; it is on the Calcutta Pathmandir’s Calendar for 2013. Moreover, taken around the same time does not mean taken at the same time; a photograph of the same man may appear different even on the same day, depending on how he has groomed himself, on the lighting and technology used, on how the negative has been developed, etc. Then, a close-up shot such as Figure 2, will always show insignificant irregularities which are not visible from far. Such readings as undreamy eyes are a subjective judgment – in this case clearly motivated. Interested readers can study Figure 2, enlarged to larger than life-size and framed, on the south wall of the hall in the Ashram Dining Room where meals are served.
This boast proves how successful Marcher was in wheedling out from the Ashram authorities whatever sanction he wanted. Thus he came into possession of masses of documents, whether in the Ashram or through any of its centres in India or outside, with none of the hundreds of devotees assisting his ‘research’ suspecting that he worked for himself, not the Ashram. Inexplicably, the Mind of the Ashram (the Ashram Trust) does not see anything wrong in Marcher’s actions even after Bio-2 has splintered the
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body of this Ashram! “Disease will always return to the body,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “if the soul is flawed; for the sins of the mind are the secret cause of the sins of the body.”16 And the soul of this Ashram, the Mother, has warned: “What have you given to the Lord or done for Him that you ask me to do something for you? I do only the Lord’s work.”17 She also clarified that it “is wrong to believe that I came upon earth to establish an Ashram! That would really be a very paltry objective.”18
This infinitely more appealing reminds me of how Gangadhar, practising Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga for six decades, described Ashram life: “It is like taking a dip in the holy river Godavari. Some come up with beautiful shells or gems; others with only mud.” This is why Sri Aurobindo warned, “It is not enough to be in the Ashram – one has to open to the Mother and put away the mud which one was playing with in the world.”19 But Marcher has never stopped scooping up and spraying around the mud in this Ashram and in India. The rest of the passage is written in his trademark methodology: First, suppress the decisive fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother approved the reproduction of Figure 1 and that it was solely meant for the use of disciples and devoted admirers. Next, suppress the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never asked any non-disciple or visitor, Indian or foreign, to purchase their photographs. Then, slyly imply that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother deliberately reproduced millions of time such falsified photographs of themselves in order to swindle millions of “honest seekers of truth” like him.
This spiteful description seeks to prove that Figure 1, the standard portrait, being retouched is not the “real Aurobindo” while Figure 2, being ‘untouched’ is the “real Aurobindo”. But it also convicts the Danish artist’s painting of Sri Aurobindo on the cover of Bio-1 as a false historical document. If a photographer’s retouching is a distortion of reality, so is an artist’s painting. True artists and photographers seek to bring out the inner reality they know or sense, as opposed to the mere physical reality. But utterly lethal are the spiteful editors who retouch the published and unpublished manuscripts of an author behind his back.
(Lives, Preface, p. xiv)
Marcher stated his standpoint in Bio-1’s preface: My form, method and tone all are scholarly; a scholarly biography cannot be devotional in tone; I rely on traditional historical (i.e. materialist) methodology. As a materialist biographer refusing to be a disciple, he will never understand that for us disciples the “real” Sri Aurobindo was never captured in any photograph or biography, not even in his own writings; this truth has been amply and repeatedly explained by Sri Aurobindo and Mother. What we seek in their photographs or their books is spiritual guidance and uplift (words in Bio-1’s preface), not a materialist historian’s ‘facts’ that matter to him and his tribe. Take the sadhak Gangadhar’s experience and advice to newcomers: “By sitting before Mother’s photo, remember Mother, that only. After your advanced stage, gradually your mind becomes silent; you go deep in meditation.” The truth is that Marcher’s Protestant aversion to the worship of images and photos and his petty grudge against the standard portrait have spawned this Farce of Figures. It is just an excuse to condemn disciples who talk or write on Sri Aurobindo as conscious retouchers or hagiographers who assume Sri Aurobindo was an avatar.
This argument is meant to confuse us with the following questions: Which photo of which period is meant by the phrase the “real” Aurobindo used for the first time? Hasn’t he amply proved that Figure 2 is the “real” Aurobindo of 1915-16, not Figure 1 of the same period? Does not the April 1950 series show the “real” Aurobindo of later life? Does then Figure 2 falsify an unidentified “real” Aurobindo on the basis of the 1950 one? Or does it falsify the 1950 series because he did not find it particularly remarkable in 1968 when he saw it for the first time? This confusion is meant to prevent us from dwelling deeply enough on these later life changes in Sri Aurobindo’s body, because Marcher knows they began to appear not in 1950 but soon after his pièce de résistance Figure 2 was taken in 1915-16, as documented by the following first-hand accounts:
“The second time I met Sri Aurobindo was in March 1921,” wrote A.B. Purani, one of Sri Aurobindo’s well known biographers. “During the interval of two years his body had undergone a transformation which could only be described as miraculous. In 1918 the colour of his body was like that of an ordinary Bengali – rather dark – though there was lustre on the face and the gaze was penetrating. This time…I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink colour and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light…afterwards…he explained to me that when the Higher Consciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the vital and even below the vital, then a transformation takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.”20
The second account is Kapali Sastri’s: “...at last I came back to him in 1923...as a seeker seeking the feet of the Teacher, and exclaimed marvelling at the change in his appearance: ‘What other proof is required, Sir! Then your complexion was dark-brown, now it is fair; today the hue is a golden hue. Here is the concrete
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proof of the Yoga that is yours.’”21 For us Sri Aurobindo took up an earthly body to progressively transform it through his Yoga- Shakti, until it is sufficiently evolved to receive and manifest the Divine integrally. In this sense, each transformation that occurred in his physical body falsified all its previous stages as each was more true to the “real Aurobindo” that his disciples surrendered to.
But for Marcher these accounts are falsification of facts by disciples, and his biographies must de-retouch them for having invoked the deus ex machina of supernatural intervention, such as the descent of Sri Krishna’s Consciousness in Sri Aurobindo’s body on 24 November 1926. To Neo-Darwinian evolutionist Marcher any account of a Spiritual Truth-Force evolving a physical body is a falsification, as his comment on the Karmayogin in Bio-2 shows: Aurobindo’s essays on these subjects [individual and the cosmos, free will and fate, origin and significance of evil] are…not particularly original. Many of them try to harmonize the Upanishads and the 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 metaphor.22 Two birds in one shot: Upanishads and Sri Aurobindo. Marcher’s claim that positing involution as preceding evolution is scientifically false and can do with some scientific light. I quote from a book by the late George Vrekhem: (1) Darwinism was built bit by bit between 1859 and 1910… [it] has never been able to provide evolution with a theoretical necessity…. (2) Essential to Darwin’s conception [of evolution] was the worldview influenced by ideas of utilitarianism, individualism, imperialism, and laissez-faire capitalism…. Darwin rode on the rising tide of British economic, political, and cultural imperialism…. Natural selection seemed the right answer to a man thoroughly immersed in the productive, competitive world of Victorian England. (3) Darwin, in The Descent of Man: At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of [the white] man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage [non-white] races throughout the world. (4) By explaining life through chemistry, and the evolution of life up to the human species through Darwinism, the biological sciences
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claimed to complete the totality of all science as well as of its explanation of nature. As in the ideology of that time positivist [now materialist] knowledge constituted the ultimate goal of humanity, the new science, having become the all-round explication and the source of all truth, was supposed from then on to replace religion and morality. (5) We [biologists] know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from ‘a warm little pond’. The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul.23
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Ashramite] at the Sri Aurobindo [not the Ashram’s] Archives and Research Library….”
Versatile Genius, Sri T.V. Kapali Sastri (1986), p. 295.
A Brief, Non-Hagiographic Peek into the Lives of The “Founder” of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives
Peter Who?
To assert that one is the founder of the Archives Department in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is to lay claim to a very prestigious title which has to it a ring of official-sounding, bona fide scholastic and organisational authenticity that could hardly be matched by other humble and unassuming self-descriptions such as “member of the Ashram”, or even “scholar” for example. There is an all-too- human motive behind this self-description. Any writer who wants to be considered a legitimate scholar and promote his book needs to establish his own standing in the eyes of his readership. Evidently, Heehs has been successful in this self-promotion. Today the Internet is littered with references to Heehs as “Founder of the Ashram Archives”. In fact, it is almost exclusively on the basis of this title that Heehs can claim significant credibility in the minds of people who had probably never even heard of him before.
A pattern of self-promotion emerges when we observe that on his own website1 Heehs declares himself to be “an acknowledged expert on Sri Aurobindo and his philosophy”. One wonders who acknowledged Heehs as such an expert and on the basis of what authority. Note that this is Peter’s own website and not a third- party web-site anointing him an expert. Assuming that there are grounds for Heehs pole-vaulting himself onto that pedestal of expertise, one wonders further how someone claiming to be a spiritual seeker and a disciple of Sri Aurobindo can so blithely advertise himself as an expert on his spiritual preceptor. For example, Heehs vaunts himself as a Sadhak of the Integral Yoga in the following words “I am, after all, a practitioner of Sri Aurobindo’s
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yoga” in his interview to Auroville Today in August 2008.2 Even in the case of Swami Vivekananda, himself a god-like personality overflowing with power and illumination, one would be hard pressed to find claims of expertise and authority on his outwardly unimpressive yet inwardly infinite spiritual preceptor and parent, Sri Ramakrishna.
Still, the issue of expertise is admittedly a philosophical, and not really an ethical or legal issue. The claim of being a founder of the Ashram Archives, in contrast, represents a far bigger problem for Heehs, given the strong likelihood that it is a naked untruth which, instead of establishing his trustworthiness as a scholar and a historian, actually ends up having the very opposite effect, indicating that he is rather a bluffer and a pretender. Our primary concern here is not with the apparent contradiction between Heehs’ claims of authority and expertise on one hand and his claim of being a disciple of Sri Aurobindo on the other (although based on his public claims and output that claim too can be challenged), but rather with the question of whether he is pretending to be the founder of the Ashram Archives.
An Inconvenient Truth
There is at least one person who could have laid claim to the title of “founder” of the Ashram Archives, or the department of the Ashram that eventually came to be called by that name, a person who perhaps himself never claimed to be its founder. This was Mr. Jayantilal Parekh. Remarkably enough, in 1999 Heehs authored a short, obscure obituary to Mr. Parekh, in which he himself referred to the deceased as the one who “established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives”.3 Note that Heehs does not refer to Mr. Parekh as a co-founder or a colleague, or just one among several who established the department. Heehs further describes Mr. Parekh as “a self-effacing servant of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo who quietly produced lasting results”. It is doubtful, therefore, whether Mr. Parekh, unlike his less self-effacing eulogiser, would have described himself as the one who “established” the Ashram Archives as its “founder”. Evidently the example set by Mr. Parekh was one that was easy to grasp, but hard to emulate.
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A closer look at Mr. Parekh’s pivotal role in the formation of the Ashram Archives makes Heehs’ claim of being any sort of a founder of that department, either in place of or even along with Mr. Parekh, appear to be an instance of serious résumé padding in order to inflate his credibility in the eyes of his readers. In other words, Heehs seems to be intentionally bluffing or misleading his readers when he claims to be a “founder” of the Ashram Archives.
When one contrasts Jayantilal Parekh with Heehs, one is immediately struck by the staggering difference, in terms of seniority, between the two men. When the Ashram Archives was established, Mr. Parekh seems to have been around 58-60 years of age. Mr. Parekh had studied at India’s prestigious Shantiniketan School, established by its most famous poet and humanist, Rabindranath Tagore. Furthermore, Mr. Parekh had joined the Ashram in 1938, which means that he had already been a member of the Ashram for almost 35 years when the Archives department was established. By then he had also, in Heehs’ own words, “played a significant role in the development of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, and was the guiding force behind the publication of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library.” Mr. Parekh was in fact the one who sought permission from the Mother to have Heehs join him in the work given to him by the Mother, and was thus responsible for giving young Heehs’ life its most significant turn.
This is only a brief description of Mr. Parekh’s extensive background and immersion in the Ashram work at the time, but it is enough to establish the utter contrast between him and Heehs who had only arrived at the Ashram sometime back as a person with no impressive qualifications of his own.
It is not even clear whether Heehs had fully entered the Ashram community at that time, at least as far as his own self-consecration was concerned. In the preface to the TLOSA book, Heehs writes that he may not even have stayed at the Ashram had he not been asked to join the archiving work, which indicates that whatever may have been his status at the Ashram, it was not that of a full- fledged member who had taken an irrevocable decision of becoming a part of the community dedicated to fulfilling the vision
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and work of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It is possible that Heehs’ youth, since he was probably in his early twenties at the time, may have acted as a bar to his full admission to the Ashram. But by Heehs’ own admission the thing most likely to have come in the way was his own reluctance to join the Ashram in the first place.
It is also a fact that some senior members of the Ashram referred to Heehs at that time as “the boy”, not a very edifying appellation for a founder of anything, let alone a key department of the Ashram charged with preserving documents written by or related to Sri Aurobindo. In any case, in terms of age, seniority, education, length of stay at the Ashram, familiarity with the works of Sri Aurobindo and also in terms of the sheer work done in publishing these, it is clear that Heehs could not even be remotely compared to Mr. Jayantilal Parekh and his role in founding the Ashram Archives.
A Most Convenient Falsehood
Given these circumstances it is a travesty of logic, but certainly not of the creative imagination, to claim that Heehs was considered by anyone at the Ashram at that time, including himself, to be a “founder” of the Ashram Archives, or even on the same footing as a person with the background and the standing of Mr. Parekh. At most Heehs was a very junior person helping out other far more senior members of the Ashram, like Mr. Jayantilal Parekh, who had already been involved in the work
It could only have been the senior members who assumed the real responsibility of doing the work at that time and who had to ask permission from the Mother to let the young and totally inexperienced Heehs make himself useful in the Ashram by merely participating in the effort. It is hard to imagine a young, untested person like Heehs, given his lack of qualifications and short stay at the Ashram, being given such a great responsibility as the “founding” of the Ashram Archives. Let us also remember that the Founder of the Ashram, the Mother, was physically present in the Ashram at the time, and that it was under Her auspices and aegis that the department was formed.
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If despite all these facts, we continue to insist upon the role of Heehs as a founder of the Ashram Archives, then we might as well glorify the sadhaks who just happened to be around and working for the Mother and Sri Aurobindo at the time of the founding of the Ashram in 1926 as nothing short of “founders of the Ashram” along with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Can any line of reasoning be more patently ridiculous or absurd?
In fact, Heehs himself inadvertently blurts out the truth about his standing vis-a-vis Mr. Parekh in an interview where he refers to Mr. Parekh as “my first boss at the Ashram Archives”.4 Therefore, the unvarnished, unadulterated truth is that Heehs was merely a worker and an employee of the department at the time and is today only pretending to be its founder.
By The Self Thou Shouldst Uplift Thy Self
At least in the case of Heehs, an appropriate extension to the above statement from the Gita would be “… but beware lest in doing so thou degrade others”. Even in the TLOSA book, Mr. Parekh does find mention as the first one to be thanked by Heehs in the acknowledgment section. However, in contrast to the concession made by Heehs in his obscure obituary to Mr. Parekh, here Heehs makes no mention of the latter’s primary role as the one who “established” the Ashram Archives. This may not be mere coincidence or a slip on the part of the supposedly meticulous scholar. After all, doing so would have meant sharing credit for the founding of the Ashram Archives, in itself a false premise.
A review of Heehs’ self-descriptions in previous books reveals a discernible pattern of increasingly greater self-promotion. In his first biography of Sri Aurobindo, written when Mr. Parekh was alive, Heehs takes care to describe himself merely as “an archivist” at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives. However, in a subsequent book of his, written in 2002, after Mr. Parekh had passed away, Heehs describes himself as “the director of historical research” at the Archives. Finally, not content with remaining a director, it seems Heehs has now tried to make the final leap and has retroactively promoted himself to the status of a founder of
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the Ashram Archives. The only problem in doing so is that to assume this new title requires not only a change of office but also a distortion of history, in other words, false historical revisionism. Apart from the fact that this self-declared “historian” (on his web- site he describes himself as “an American historian based in Pondicherry, India”) apparently sees no problem in manufacturing false history to benefit himself and fool the readers, the other very disturbing thing about this act of self-promotion is that it is done at the expense of a person like Mr. Parekh, who may have very well acted as Heehs’ mentor and guided him throughout the remainder of his life at the Ashram Archives. This is not just falsehood in words but in deeds as well, and reveals a certain disturbing moral flexibility that is not only economical with what is true but also liberal in its disregard for what is just and fair.
Since this seems to be Heehs’ approach to his human mentor, it is only reasonable to expect him to adopt a similar one in the case of his spiritual preceptor, Sri Aurobindo. The expectation proves to be more than justified. While Heehs apparently proceeds quite coolly to touch up his own résumé in promoting himself, he takes umbrage at others for touching up Sri Aurobindo’s photographs and supposedly even his biographies, and goes to some lengths to introduce imperfections and defects in Sri Aurobindo’s apparently touched-up public image, intending to produce a genuinely “factual” and “objective” biography, a “non- hagiography”. He clearly states his intention of doing so right in the very preface and delivers on his promise in the rest of the book. The whole point of course would be to raise his standing in the academic world by appearing to cleave to its standards of objectivity by mixing damaging criticism with apparently sympathetic praise. Iconoclasm was the price for a coveted seat in that highly exclusive circle which includes worthies such as Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal.
One consolation is that at least Sri Aurobindo is not left to face it all alone, although he does bear the brunt of it. Ashramites will not be happy to note that even the Ashram has not been spared by Heehs, who concludes his book with the implied suggestion that the place has become, at least on the surface, a religious institute.
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Not content to stop there, the missionary has repeated the claim openly in a recent article of his on the Mother. There is no denying how harmful even a suggestion like this can be when made by one who claims to be a long-time, highly placed insider. To call such statements merely irresponsible would be a euphemism. Other sadhaks and devotees are implicitly tarnished elsewhere in the book as “religious” followers who take their stand on faith rather than reason.
A foretaste of his treatment of the Mother’s way is obtained when he dwells critically on her encouragement of a worshipful attitude towards Sri Aurobindo. Not surprisingly, after the book was published, others picked up the threads laid out by Heehs to judge and criticise the Mother’s actions in their own articles, basing their pronouncements on Heehs’ “scholarship”. For example, Rich Carlson’s article uses Heehs’ book to criticise the Mother for taking an apparently “patronizing” approach.5
It seems that Heehs can’t help publicly debasing and working against the interests of those who have taken him into their embrace and have given him shelter or admittance into their circle of trust, be it his spiritual preceptors Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, his mentor Mr. Parekh, the Ashram where he is allowed to stay, and finally the other sadhaks who live there as aspirants and god-seekers, unsuspecting of the critical acid churning in his mind.
The pattern in all cases seems to be the same. Criticize others while glorifying one’s own self. Although it could be argued by others that this is not really a pattern of betrayals so much as a series of ‘coincidences’, even in human terms such behavior is not something that one would consider to be very moral. From the spiritual point of view, it would perhaps indicate the lowest sort of approach, adhamâm gatim.
Satyam Eva Jayatan Nânritam
Thankfully, from a yogic point-of-view, perhaps through the action of a Grace whose all-embracing compassion includes Heehs as well, instead of magnifying his self-created identity and ego as an authority on Sri Aurobindo and a “founder” of the Ashram Archives, this whole episode has backfired rather badly and has
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served to irredeemably reduce his standing in the eyes of many who would have otherwise put him on a sort of pedestal. Furthermore, where pleas for sensitivity, decency and basic honesty have failed, legal procedures have proved to be very effective, a common but in no way universal panacea in dealing with unrepentant criminal minds and personalities. The case initiated against Heehs for misrepresenting himself as a founder of the Archives has already produced a kind of retraction. With real punitive repercussions looming, Heehs has apparently blamed his publisher, Columbia University Press (CUP), for falsely misrepresenting him as a founder of the Ashram Archives, confirming once and for all that this claim was indeed a falsehood.
But one wonders why Heehs did not come out with this clarification before, when he would have held the first copy of his book in his hands? It is difficult to accept further that the thing went to the press without Heehs knowing how he himself was being described in it. Also, where did the publisher get the idea that Heehs is one of the founders of the Ashram Archives, since there seems to have been no precedent for this claim in the past? Surely the most obvious and straightforward explanation is that the source was the author himself. Furthermore, given that this book is his “magnum opus” and touted as the definitive biography of no less than the life of someone whom Heehs has declared to be his own yogic preceptor, can we imagine that this glaring error somehow miraculously slipped past the scrutiny of this meticulous and thorough researcher? Indeed Heehs has not issued any kind of clarification even when he gave talks in the U.S, the advertisements for which again repeat the very same falsehood that Heehs is “one of the founders of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives”. Even if we continue to lay the blame at the doorstep of the CUP, it is at least clear that whether or not he originated the falsehood, Heehs is happy to let it be propagated.
Despite everything, even if we were to fanatically assert that Heehs had no part in manufacturing this falsehood, if this sort of capital error can find its way so prominently into the book, it should at least be enough for any prospective reader to pause and expect
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more gargantuan falsehoods from Heehs and his collaborators, including his editor, publisher, and financier. When it comes to playing the blame game, there is here a vast and open field in which to play, and the author can easily chuck the ball in any direction he likes, so that he is not left holding it himself. Generally, authors take responsibility for their errors in their books, but then all authors cannot be expected to hold themselves to average moral standards.
If it is true, as the facts seem to indicate, that Heehs engaged in deliberate historical falsification to promote himself and his book, then, while such self-serving bluffing clearly disqualifies him as a trusted scholar or historian, it is even more devastating when it comes to claims of being a Sadhak of the Integral Yoga, for which honesty, straightforwardness and an absolute rectitude in one’s public pronouncements about oneself and one’s Preceptor are fundamental preconditions.
February 2011
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We live in a strange and confused time. On the one hand, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have given us absolute certainty with regard to the general direction we should be heading in life, that is, if we don’t want to get into unnecessary difficulties. On the other hand, their withdrawal from the physical world has opened up a tremendous scope for wrong interpretations of their teachings. No matter how well-read we are in this vast mental knowledge inherited by us, we flounder in uncertainty when faced with the practical problems of life. We realise that no amount of mere intellectual knowledge can replace the necessity of inner guidance, without which we are bound to lose our way in the difficult maze of life. I remember the day when a few of us were trekking through miles of cashew plantations in the countryside. It was a cloudy day, the sun was not shining, nor did I have my compass to show the direction. We started walking towards our destination which was to the west and, as we wound our way on narrow grassy paths used by the local villagers, we came back after a few exhausting hours to the point where we started from. We did not realise that we had gradually turned south and then slowly headed back east to make a full circle. This is exactly what has happened to our historian Peter Heehs over the last few decades of research in an Ashram dedicated to the transformation of human nature. It can happen to any of us, if we don’t take the necessary inner precautions and carry around our inner compass.
I propose to outline the spiritual and intellectual journey of one such imaginary seeker whose life is similar though not the same as that of Heehs in the general circumstances of his outer and inner life. The particular traits of Heehs do not matter so much in this discussion; in fact, I have been generous to him by
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endowing him with qualities he never had. It is the general phenomenon that he represents which is immensely interesting, not only from the point of view of the disciple, but from the point of view of the honest scholar. It raises the fundamental question of faith and spirituality and the role of the intellect in it.
The journey begins with the arrival of a young seeker at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, who finds the atmosphere very conducive for both inner and outer growth. The first few years yield remarkable results and witness the blossoming of unexpected faculties. Poetry begins to flow from his pen, the mind develops an unusual clarity, the body grows strong and healthy, and the vital acquires taste and refinement. But the Integral Yoga is not easy and the obdurate mule of our human nature kicks back at us when we press upon it the necessary change. Only the real heroes survive, only those who can surrender themselves to a higher Power and anchor themselves in the Divine. Most of us compromise on the Yoga, for we realise that even if we fail (if at all there is something called failure), we cannot go back. There are of course many who go back to the ordinary life, but those who have reached a point of no return will prefer to dilute the Yoga than start life again, say at the age of fifty. It is then that we have to plough our way through the twilight zone and often through bleak patches of moonless nights until we see hope in the glimmerings of a distant dawn. A few make it, but only after a long grind and after the hair has sufficiently greyed with failures and disappointments. That is why I find some of the older members of our Ashram the happiest lot.
But some don’t make it! Doubts creep in questioning first their fitness for the Yoga, then questioning the Yoga itself. That is why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have so often advised us not to play with Doubt, even though it might seem fashionable to do so. When years of sadhana seem infructuous and the hidden spiritual ambition gets frustrated, the sadhak revolts against his Gurus and either goes away to live the ordinary life or sets up his own Ashram. The list of such cases in the Ashram is not short, even if you leave out the recent ones. Among the most prominent ones in the past are Barin Ghose (Sri Aurobindo’s own brother), the famous singer
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Dilip Kumar Roy and many others, including Westerners such as Anna Bogenholm Sloane.1
What I have described above is the spiritual journey of a seeker. But what about the intellectual journey of the seeker who becomes a scholar and is given the highly privileged task of compiling Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings and collecting biographical material on them? There is at first a profound unwillingness of the seeker in him to judge them by human standards because he considers them Avatars,2 though they themselves have hardly cared to project themselves as such. At the same time, the job of the editor-archivist has to be done with due mental honesty and proficiency, and Sri Aurobindo gives valid scope to this effort in his own remarks on Avatarhood. The Avatar, he says, has two sides – “the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature”.3 Can he, on this basis, correct, question, criticise and judge Sri Aurobindo and his works, and, if so, to what extent?
The legitimate consideration of this question begins with minor editorial interventions which most people would accept without much hesitation. Sri Aurobindo sometimes did not mark his full- stops (.) or question marks (?) at the end of his sentences, especially in the enormous amount of correspondence he wrote in the thirties. He wrote at great speed and for many hours till late at night, replying to questions of sadhaks and departmental heads who sometimes wrote a dozen pages a day, if not more. He not only answered questions regarding their sadhana, but also ran the administration of the Ashram by jotting down day to day instructions, which he had to often squeeze in the narrow margins of their notebooks when he ran out of space. Minor mistakes were bound to happen, such as misspellings of words, which were obviously slips of the pen. This is what he casually admitted to Nirodbaran in March 1936:
Nirodbaran: What Sir, in your letter on “Swan and its symbol” expect has become except? Supramental slip!
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Sri Aurobindo: Do you mean to say this is the first you have met? I used to make ten per page formerly in the haste of my writing.4
We now climb the ladder of textual editing with more confidence and get into greater complexities: (1) Transcription errors made by his disciples that have long gone unnoticed, so that the textual editor has to often fall back to previous versions to trace the origin of the mistakes. (2) Faulty and sometimes pre-edited transcriptions of Sri Aurobindo’s letters which were given to him for finalisation, so that he had no choice but to make the best of the circumstances. Do we go back to the earlier versions, which are obviously better, or continue with the later ones simply because he saw through them last for publication? (3) Double revisions of the same text done on two different occasions, so that the editor has to choose between parallel versions. Sri Aurobindo kept on perfecting his work on different occasions on various manuscripts, so that the editor is often faced with multiple choices in the case of unpublished material. (4) Problems arise when missing manuscripts are found, such as the second page of the “Hour of God” which the Mother has so wonderfully read, apparently not realising that she was reading an incomplete text. The same applies to some of the passages of Savitri recorded in her voice. Mistakes of transcription were detected after she read them out. It is interesting to note that sometimes the Mother’s French translation of Savitri, which was based on the 1954 edition, anticipated the corrections carried out in later editions. These are among the many problems of this complex field of textual editing with which very few are familiar.
On the historical side, it starts with the discovery of slight factual inaccuracies in Sri Aurobindo’s statements regarding his own life, as to when he joined Saint Paul’s school in London, when he came back to India, when he joined the Baroda State service, when he got married, etc, etc., most of which can be verified from various institutional records.5 Having admitted the possibility of minor slips of memory, we move into more dangerous waters – the imperfections of a divine personality. Sri Aurobindo described
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himself as “a great coward”6 when he was a young boy in England, whom nobody imagined “could face the gallows or carry on a revolutionary movement”. He was also “extremely selfish” until one day he felt he “ought to give up selfishness”, 7 and that became a turning point in his life. In any case, he had to “feel all the difficulties before embodying the Divine Consciousness”. But once progression is admitted from the human to the divine, from the unyogic to the yogic, we have paved the way for legitimate criticism at every point of the Master’s lifetime, especially when we assume that the final goal of physical transformation had not been achieved by him. Moreover, he had himself clarified that Avatars need not be embodiments of “mental and human perfection” as long as they were representative of what they came to manifest in the earth consciousness. It is here that the twist begins, when we are given unlimited scope for intellectual questions with a bagful of defects in our own personality.
Most sadhaks and devotees, intelligent or not, do not bother at all about the defects of the divine personality they adore. They do not come in the way of the reception of the radiant force that flows from their Gurus to them. In fact, they deepen the mystery of the divine personality and make him more intimate. The secular intellectuals, of course, shy away from this area, because they are generally strangers to spirituality. The ones who get into trouble are those renegade sadhaks who, due to their own failure in the sadhana, want to prove to others that success is impossible. They conceive failure from the point of view of not achieving impressive outer results, forgetting that Yoga is not done to impress others, and that you attain even preliminary results only after a long and silent preparation of the being. So when the ambitious sadhak realises that the Yoga is much more difficult than he had expected, he gets angry at not getting his dues in time. He throws up his hands and develops a critical attitude towards the Yoga itself. This is what happens to the sadhak-scholar who stays long enough in the Ashram to get frustrated, but not long enough to go beyond it to root himself in tranquillity and equanimity. For the results of Yoga come slowly, after we cease to believe in our unaided efforts, after we are tired of our recalcitrant human nature and finally give
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ourselves up to the Divine. Then we see a higher power taking over our puny self and we ascend happily the yogic ladder assisted by a solicitous hand.
But what happens to the scholar who has turned against the sadhana? His attitude automatically gets reflected in his writings. Honest intellectuality deteriorates into critical and then over-critical intelligence; self-deception sets in, ending in perversity and he plays into the hands of hostile forces. The over-confident scholar now steps beyond his legitimate scope in the editing of the Master’s works. The rule of indispensable editorial intervention gives way to “making sense” of the problematic text, even when the Master is speaking in “the higher sense” which we often don’t understand, and even when there is abundant proof that the Master wanted to say precisely what doesn’t make sense to us. Once the scholar takes this approach, he has started sliding down the slope.
With regard to the facts of the Master’s life, the scholar now says, “How can we depend on the Master’s statements regarding the events of his life when he has been wrong so many times? He himself has said on one occasion that he does not remember the exact dates. In any case, you cannot expect him to be a super- computer whose memory never gets erased! So let us be strict about accepting his evidence at face-value and investigate each time the veracity of his statements. I don’t want to concede anything to him without a full consideration of other sources.” Strictness leads to being over-strict with the Master, and then only with him rather than the others. Why so? Because previous biographers have always been woolly-headed hagiographers than disciplined historians! The need for historical accuracy is thus confused with the scholar’s wish to find inaccuracies in the Master’s statements and flaws in his character, simply because nobody has dared to point them out before. The benefit of doubt shifts to secondary or even tertiary documents and the Master’s evidence is set aside because it contradicts them. The burden of proof is on the Master instead of the secondary and tertiary sources, because he could have forgotten as he did a number of times; he could have misunderstood and even lied, as opposed to the others who have
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no reason to be wrong, or at least, who have to be seriously considered until they are proved wrong.
In the inner world of the Master’s spiritual experience and philosophy, it becomes worse. The scholar has to depend totally on the Master’s testimony, but he hates to be uncritical despite his own inability to verify it. So he first looks for internal discrepancies and takes what is convenient to him. For example, during the Arya period Sri Aurobindo smoked and occasionally drank; 8 he wrote in the Synthesis of Yoga that “All Life is Yoga”9 and told his companions that nothing human was alien to him.10 How convenient are these facts and statements for the satisfaction of the vital! That is, if you don’t mention that Sri Aurobindo has made a number of qualifications to the statement on Life and Yoga in the same paragraph of the Synthesis, which prevent the hedonistic interpretation it could easily lend itself. Also the fact that he was totally detached from smoking and left it the very next day after the Mother expressed her dislike for it,11 which put his early disciples in a fix because they could not throw away the habit as easily as he had done.12 And that later when the Ashram was established, sex, smoking and alcohol were strictly prohibited and the sadhana consisted mainly in rising above the defects of the lower nature in order to be able to divinise life.
Next, the scholar proceeds to compare the Master’s spiritual experience with objective material standards, knowing fully well that the material and the spiritual are two opposing camps, and that even though the Master has explained the unity of both, “belief shall be not be till the work is done”.13 But this is convenient to him, because he can now talk with the confidence of verifiable facts (read ignorance) and relate to other academic ignoramuses. There is a certain truth about the materialistic attitude in the spiritual context which the Mother talks about in the Agenda – the truth of not accepting one’s imaginations for spiritual experience – but this is the obverse attitude which would doubt spiritual experience even if it actually happened. The sadhak-scholar has now reversed his values and standards of judgment, and the sadhak in him has ceased to struggle against the so-called intelligent scholar. Fundamental
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questions arise in his mind and he is thrilled at their apparent newness when they are in fact as old as the hills, questions challenging the existence and necessity of the Divine. I can figure God in his armchair complaining to man, “How many times we have had to go through this nonsense before you definitely accept me?” The scholar folds up his sleeves and fires a salvo of questions: “Is all this talk of Supermind true, especially when the Master himself has failed in his endeavour to transform his body? Why don’t we simply accept life as it is with all its multifariousness? Why limit ourselves to the Master’s view of life as if it is the eternal truth? Did he not himself advise us not to be bound by any formulation of Truth?” So the scholar indulges in an old, well- practised art of the hostile forces – quoting the scriptures to disprove them.
The sadhak-scholar now goes haywire. He cares a hoot for the inner life – he regrets the time wasted on these mindless reveries called meditations, these endless blank sessions spent in the adoration of the Divine. How many books he could have written for the academic and scientific world of today if only he had not wasted his time in these fruitless activities? He gets into a new upbeat mood: “Use your mind, man! Update yourself with the latest technological developments, and catch up with the sexy trends of modern life! Don’t be a prude! Go! Go! Go! I am going away from this silly Ashram!” But he does not go!!! Why? Because of the number of years he has already invested in the institution, the friends he is attached to, the comforts and privileges he enjoys. Moreover, it is not easy to survive in the go-getters’ world outside, where everything revolves around money and even friendship is measured against bank balances! So, instead of starting a new life there, the scholar decides to transform “the sleepy idiots” around him by challenging the very ideological foundations of the institution and denigrating its spiritual founders in the light of his recent “enlightenment”!
24 November 2009
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p. 527
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Sudha Sinha is a well-known writer in Hindi. Her article on “Education for Creative Thinking” received the national award for the best article in Hindi for the year 1967. She was also nominated the best writer of Bihar State for the year 1985. She has published 50 books so far and written numerous articles in various journals such as Navneet, Navbharat Times, Kadambini, Hindustan, Dharmyug & Kahaani. Her stories are presently being broadcast by the All India Radio, Pondicherry.
(Mother! Grant me your blessings so that my memory and expression remain faultless.)
Having come to Pondicherry with the aim of offering my services to the Ashram after retirement from government services, I met Shri Jayantilal Parikh, the founder and main person in charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives. I learnt that he was in search of a person who was good in Hindi. I carried with me one or two earlier publications of mine which he glanced through cursorily and asked me a few questions. I gathered that he felt reassured about me. He told me to join work the very next day and added that he will inform the person who looks after the inmates’ work distribution that I am working at the Archives. He also fixed up the time for me and said that for now he would want me to start translating Sri Aurobindo’s unpublished writings on Kalidas. He arranged for me to have the original manuscripts in English and I started the work immediately remembering the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Till that time there was no English-Hindi dictionary at the Archives; I took a copy of Dr Kamil Bulke’s English – Hindi dictionary and respectfully placed it there amidst other books of reference.
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The joy of translating lines from Sri Aurobindo was beyond description. I was experiencing that divine joy and upliftment. One day I was stuck at a certain portion; I felt as if I neither had the words nor the skill to express it. I tried to gather everything possible from all the corners of my mind, but this mental effort was of no use. Feeling lost, I stopped working; but before leaving the place I did this much – I noted the difficult passage in my diary.
My mind kept hovering over the lines till I was awake. A sense of otherness came on me. I sleep well; so it must have been that day as well! It was around 3 in the morning when I woke up fresh and felt like writing something. Something? I did not understand what was happening – something started coming from somewhere and like an instrument I opened my diary and translated those lines,1 and that too in poetic form. I couldn’t believe it; it was actually poetry. I read it again and again, there was no need to change anything much; I prepared a second draft (I had not yet started working on computers till then).
On reaching the Archives I went straight to Jayantilal-da and told him my experience. I recounted it spontaneously. The state with which I had been overcome while translating those lines, I felt Jayantilal had entered that state himself, and his throat was full of that feeling. The sense of what he conveyed to me with great emotion was that he was very happy and that I was open to the positive forces that helped me while writing. On that day itself, he took the decision that when the book with those essays will be published, it will carry this passage as its foreword. So did it happen. The words that Jayantilal-da said in praise of me and the blessings he gave, I would like to keep them to myself; but this much I can tell that his last blessing-command was, “Keep it as it is.”
Just then Peter came up to him like a comet. He had some papers in his hand. He started raising his voice to say something to him. He was showing him those pages, shaking his hands. What I could understand was that he had come to quarrel with Jayantilal- da for having raised objection to his editing some of the unpublished portions of Sri Aurobindo in a capricious manner. He was as excited as Jayantilal-da was calm. At that moment I
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asked to take leave of him and he permitted me with a nod of his head.
Jayantilal-da started keeping ill health. His naturally smiling countenance began to be enveloped by a shadow of gloom and repentance. He could not survive long with the grief and pain he bore in his heart owing to Peter. One day, when he was disturbed due to Peter’s insulting attitude, I went to ask him something. He said, “I am fed up with this man!” He then spoke in Hindi, “I will have to do something.” But before he could do anything, before he could save the Archives from Peter’s dark hands, he left this world. After the influence of Jayantilal-da’s physical presence was gone, the asura got a free hand. He started robbing the place. He started speaking openly against Sri Aurobindo. It is only after this that I met Shri Manoj Dasgupta and brought to his notice Peter’s unabashed deeds. But I found that Peter and his collaborators were never restrained. That unfortunate, semi-literate, unrefined profligate kept writing books against Sri Aurobindo while sitting inside the Archives room. The mask of deception was that he was editing Sri Aurobindo’s new set of works. There was nobody to keep an eye on the delay in the work and the inner treachery; even now there is none, because the Ashram’s administration is in the PIT of Peter.
There is a need to look carefully at all the books that Peter has touched with his filthy hands; it is necessary to investigate and remove whatever and wherever he may have put objectionable things. Towards this end there is a need for a team of highly learned men to work day and night who (1) understand Sri Aurobindo’s literature, (2) have faith in Sri Aurobindo, (3) are conversant with Sri Aurobindo’s original conceptions of “Integral Yoga” and “Supermind”, (4) are able to take their vision up to those aspects of Indian culture that Sri Aurobindo has seen.
No need to mention that the editing of Sri Aurobindo’s works cannot be left in the hands of a fraudulent characterless loafer who harbours hatred towards India. That a fraud cheated us by wearing a mask of deception does not mean that, when we have discovered the cheat, we must place him in the panel of experts.
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As of now there is only this mistake that a school drop-out, lusty American taxi driver managed to enter that department of the Ashram which had place only for learned persons. Now that everything is exposed, then what is the purpose of taking sides with that scoundrel? Foolish ego of a few petty-minded persons who are hand in glove with a habitual offender! Some persons with a “Yes Boss” mentality are afraid of losing some personal privileges! A hypocritical peace for a few beloved children of the Mother! Come out of this self created prison house! Look inside yourself! Does not your soul bleed with the insult hurled at the Supreme Master?
With humility 17 July 2010
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Here is a brief summary of the article posted by Mr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta at Book Clubbed Indian Express: Article Link dated 12 April 2012. We shall try to look at some of the points raised by him in it, but before that let us briefly summarise it. However, in a careful and critical review it could be easily, albeit quickly, asserted that the author has not really studied or read Sri Aurobindo with much attention; instead he is simply going about on the basis of the bits and pieces he gets from his feeder lines. The touch with the original seems uncertain, frail and shaky in its understanding and formulation.
The trouble with these neo social reformists and journalists, these professionals, is they must mention Sri Aurobindo to gain, if not purchase, a certain credibility and acceptability for their own projectionist views. They cannot ignore-bypass-dismiss him and yet they must refute or belittle him, careerists as they are. That seems to be the whole psychology behind the operation. Similar things happen in the field of literature also, where they keep him away disparagingly by calling him a Victorian, out-moded, ignorant of the modern idiom, or something similar to it. Such is the current projection of Sri Aurobindo. Such is obviously the technique which Mr. Peter Heehs has honed to the sharpest and swiftest degree of perfection in his The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Pratap Bhanu Mehtas and Gautam Chikermanes and Ramachandra Guhas in the newspaper media, and Sagarika Ghoses as TV anchors, have mastered the art very assiduously and systematically to an amazing grade of sophistication. So much the better for them! But let us
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get back to Mr. Mehta’s post, only to quickly see the superficialities with which it abounds in several respects.
Mr. Mehta opens the post with the following: “Crossfire over Heehs’s work says much about our public culture of readership / India’s visa policy for scholars has long been a scandal unworthy of a liberal democracy. But the public culture of readership is even more disconcerting. Indian democracy now has to be defended book by book.”
The grudge of Mr. Mehta against the public culture of readership is the obscuration of a deeper point in the chaos and confusion arising out of the issues related with legalities and free speech. He states that our public culture seems to be satisfied to remain settled in its own comfort zones. When a challenge to it is posed by works such as Mr. Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, it reacts in an irrational if not a fundamentalist way. In the process the book gets maligned and the author hounded, if not dragged around as a criminal. These are nothing but symptoms of a wider cultural crisis.
However, it needs to be pointed out here that “the issue” as expressed by the “protesters” of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo was of “denigration”, “belittling” and “spreading lies” with regard to our national sources of strength, in the present case Sri Aurobindo. Whereas the media never took interest in reporting the said “issue”; it picked up on the story only after it found Mr. Heehs to be on the brink of being shut out of India, though for entirely different reasons of legal violations. What was most disconcerting was the way the media projected “the issue” to be that of Mr. Heehs, the “world renowned” scholar, “guardian angel of India in the tradition of Humes”, being hounded out of India by “religious fundamentalists” and “extremists” for “writing the best biography of Sri Aurobindo”. Now Mr. Mehta comes along and gives a new twist to “the projected issue”. According to him the issue is the lack of training of Indians in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” and the consequent incapacity to appreciate sophisticated arguments. This is a mistaken analysis about the Indian mind and the Indian spirit.
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Mr. Mehta has had a “long professional interest in Aurobindo”, and for him Heehs’s book comes as “a revelation, one that elevates its subject rather than diminishes him.” He calls it a “first-rate piece of intellectual history”. It makes Sri Aurobindo’s “obscure thought” precise. He goes on to say that it is a “measure of its acuteness that it has grasped a deep philosophical fact: that most of Aurobindo’s oeuvre, including The Life Divine, is an extended reworking of the Isa Upanishad.” Therefore the question is: Why should such a book draw ire?
Mr. Mehta then lists “three ridiculous charges against the book.” These are related to Sri Aurobindo’s self-confessed lack of physical courage and being a liar in his young days; then the madness in the family which was not unconnected with his spiritual experiences; and the relationship between the Mother and Sri Aurobindo being depicted in the biography as romantic. Such reactions to the historian’s scholarly work, argues Mr. Mehta, “tell you a great deal about the fragility and close-mindedness of those who are shocked.”
This only means that the book is not at all offensive, but there is a failure on part of them who feel offended. The causes are, first, the lack of liberal education in them. They do not recognize that Sri Aurobindo himself was conscious about his serious inability, for instance, to recover the meaning of the Vedas. Then, these people go by faith and not by experience or what may be called “enlarged empiricism”. “For followers, bereft of the experience, what remains is the assertion of faith. We put ourselves under the yoke of the Divine when we feel its presence the least.”
Mr. Mehta concludes: “Aurobindo wanted to ‘prepare India for Truth’. But the relentless assault on scholarship, the cramped sensibility with which we approach tradition, and the reduction of intellectual life to questions of identity suggest one thing: we are not prepared for any truth, whether it comes with a small ‘t’ or a capital ‘T’.”
For details and nuances the link mentioned above provides access to Mr. Mehta’s post. These are the points which need to be examined, if at all we are going to attach any importance to the
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professional rant and rave of a director of an institution. He forgets that one cannot talk of “any truth” in the absence of facts, if empiricism has a place in his world. The simple fact is that he is totally ignorant of any number of posts and comments on the Net critically examining the distortions and misrepresentations in his favourite Lives.
Mr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s work says much about our media culture of readership as regards Sri Aurobindo. His article represents a new dimension, a new layer, a scholarly-professionally sordid element in the patronising of Mr. Heehs. As yet the controversy was of content. Mr. Mehta goes a step further, dismissing the objections to content as “ridiculous”, that the content is not really the real source of the protesters’ ire; it is the protesters’ own lack of appreciation for The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, it is its “sophistication” that is provoking the protesters’ ire! Mr. Heehs has unfortunately become the target because of the crudeness and lack of training in “liberal education” and “religious sensibility” of the protesters. It is as though liberal education and sensibility is the singular trait or property of the new class of social thinkers only. But one wonders if they have any real contact with the values of Indian traditions bequeathed to us, traditions which also create values in the dynamics of time and life.
And what is this much-flaunted much-peddled sophistication of the Lives? According to Mr. Mehta the sophistication is that Mr. Heehs, the great devotee, has achieved a marvellous feat of “sraddha” from the standpoint of the non-believers’ Sri Aurobindo! In other words, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is a hagiography from an anti-hagiographic perspective! The author and the commentator have created a trap for themselves.
Mr. Mehta does not stop at that. Because apparently he has ire against Sri Aurobindo as his own “professional interest” can’t understand the mental sophistication of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, or rather its spiritual coherence and simplicity. So he feels relieved to hurriedly read Mr. Heehs’s speculations of the Isha Upanishad being the source of The Life Divine and of Sri Aurobindo’s failure in interpreting the Vedas. And going beyond his brief of patronising
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Mr. Heehs, Mr. Mehta cannot resist claiming that the Isha Upanishad is the entire source of Sri Aurobindo’s writings. By so doing he perhaps rescues his own mental vanity. He probably attempted to read The Life Divine and, after some failures, gave it up; but of course this would have seriously afflicted his own sense of scholarship. Maybe Mr. Mehta himself lacks in “yogic education” and “spiritual sensibility”. But does he have the humility to admit that or consider it before judging important spiritual matters on the national stage? To restate: there seem to be present in him multiple layers of vanity.
It may be true that the general Indian readership is lacking in “liberal education” and “religious sensibilities”; it may also be true that it falls short in organised, desired mental application, requisite initiative and “sophistication”. But there is something else in the readership of Sri Aurobindo which is distinguished by a certain “aspiration” and “spiritual sensibility”, and it cannot be said that this generalised assessment, this sweeping conclusion is true everywhere. So the weak link in Mr. Mehta’s argument is primarily in his two premises, that there is some hard-to-discern “sophistication” in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, and that the readership of Sri Aurobindo does not possess a certain “liberal education” and “religious sensibilities” to discern. The fact is the admirers of the Lives have never looked into the hundreds of posts and comments on the Net critiquing the so-called scholarly work of Mr. Heehs. We are yet to see cogent well-argued responses to them. It would have been better had Mr. Mehta just made a search on Google and found for himself the faulty nature of Mr. Heehs’s work. That is precisely the reason why such writings fail to make any appeal to the intelligent sense.
But Mr. Mehta is to be primarily faulted not for his hasty, reverse- engineered premises of his main argument to patronise Mr. Heehs. The shocking part is his direct presumptuous attempt to diminish Sri Aurobindo. Mr. Mehta elevates Mr. Heehs and diminishes Sri Aurobindo. He does it to the extent that he draws them level by suggesting that Mr. Heehs too possesses the same stock of experiences as Sri Aurobindo because he makes Sri Aurobindo’s
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“obscure thought” precise. If we assume, like devotees and scholars of Sri Aurobindo’s works do, that Sri Aurobindo’s work emanates entirely out of his experiences and realisations, then there will arise a piquant situation in which Mr. Heehs might himself get embarrassed at such ‘ridiculous’ patronisation.
Let us take an example. Mr. Mehta declares that “despite working laboriously, Aurobindo more or less admitted that he had not been able to recover the meaning of the Vedas”. But his claim remains totally unsupported. First, we need to understand that the Vedas were written more in the manner of “experience” to “experience” in a symbolic way for the direct yogic growth of consciousness unhindered by the mind, as was the way of the ancients of that time. As regards Upanishads, which is unique to the Indian tradition for the transition of civilisation from the Symbolic Age to the Age of Mentality, the method was of “light” to “light” for direct realisations unhindered by scepticism or doubt. So in recovering the meaning of the Vedas and Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo had undertaken the difficult task of presenting the same in the manner of “logic” to “logic” with full scope given to the speculative and doubting mind. So the difficulty for Sri Aurobindo was in the immense bulk of recovery, if he considered presenting all the different shades of meaning, nuances, etc. And it is to that extent that Sri Aurobindo has admitted to the “difficulty”. Yet it is neither an admission of shortcoming nor a difficulty. In the logical framework he had chosen to present the theme, he could establish a few things in a definite manner and the rest he left unsaid. That can never imply admission or difficulty of any sort. Let us see what he says in the context. Talking about unravelling of the Vedic symbolism in The Secret of the Veda we read:
More we cannot at present attempt; for the Vedic symbolism as worked out in the hymns is too complex in its details, too numerous in its standpoints, presents too many obscurities and difficulties to the interpreter in its shades and side allusions and above all has been too much obscured by ages of oblivion and misunderstanding to be adequately dealt with in a single
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work. We can only at present seek out the leading clues and lay as securely as may be the right foundations. (pp. 246-47) Is there at all or is there still a secret of the Veda? (p. 3)
Our object is only to see whether there is a prima facie case for the idea with which we started that the Vedic hymns are the symbolic gospel of the ancient Indian mystics and their sense spiritual and psychological. Such a prima facie case we have established; for there is already sufficient ground for seriously approaching the Veda from this standpoint and interpreting it in detail as such a lyric symbolism. (p. 246)
Finally, the incoherencies of the Vedic texts will at once be explained and disappear. They exist in appearance only, because the real thread of the sense is to be found in an inner meaning. That thread found, the hymns appear as logical and organic wholes and the expression, though alien in type to our modern ways of thinking and speaking, becomes, in its own style, just and precise and sins rather by economy of phrase than by excess, by over-pregnancy rather than by poverty of sense. The Veda ceases to be merely an interesting remnant of barbarism and takes rank among the most important of the world’s early Scriptures. (p. 9)
Similar avowals we have, for example, in The Essays on the Gita and The Life Divine. In terms of the so-called ‘scholarly or academic’ presentations, Sri Aurobindo was always to the point and he was always rigorous. What fell out of its methodology, he did not occupy himself with, but that only shows respect for the framework he was placing himself in. In that respect the real freedom he had was only in his wonderful Savitri. But let us examine here the following comment of Mr. Mehta:
“a deep philosophical fact: that most of Aurobindo’s oeuvre, including The Life Divine, is an extended reworking of the Isa Upanishad.”
There cannot be anything more ridiculous than this – The Life Divine
is an extended reworking of the Isha Upanishad! I would
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recommend the author to read the last few chapters of the magnum opus more carefully, if not perceptively, and compare with the several commentaries Sri Aurobindo has written on the Isha. Where do we find in the Upanishad “the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil as the path of our progressive self-enlargement”? It is only in The Life Divine that we have it. Nowhere in the ancient scriptures we are told about the possibility, if not the inevitability, of the higher state of consciousness becoming a part of this world of ours. And then, the total non- mention of his grandest oeuvre Savitri only shows the superficiality of the hastily drafted article which lacks the needed depth to grasp the power and the dimensions of Sri Aurobindo’s writings.
That is Mr. Mehta à la Mr. Heehs. But, if Mr. Mehta claims to
pass grand judgments and proclamations regarding the works of Sri Aurobindo, then we surely would request him to illuminate us more on the subject!
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[Dr. Alok Pandey was one of the first to prick the balloon of Heehs’s bogus scholarship. When most of us were reeling under the awesome pretence of objective research that the so-called historian claimed and were wondering whether our hearts had belied us, Alok took P.H. head on, and stung him a few quick blows like a well practised boxer. His pugilism is what really made the supporters of Heehs fume with rage, for how could a devotee dare to speak back in their own language, and that too in straight and tough terms, without mincing his words? They had not expected this kind of spirited defence from the land of passive spirituality! Devotees until now were supposed to be stupid and mindless, and intellectuals were necessarily untouched by devotion; therefore the West and the East, representing the mind and the heart respectively, had to be at loggerheads! Alok proved the contrary. He asserted that this was a false dichotomy created by a small-minded person dominated by the physical mind, that Westerners were not bereft of the deeper feelings of the soul, and that Indians devotees could equally fight with their minds for what they felt to be right with their hearts. – Ed.]
Dear Peter,
I read your biography of Sri Aurobindo, and I have come to truly appreciate your “intellect” that everyone seems to hold in such awe. Truly, one has to be only an “intellect” and nothing else, a robotic brain-machine, so to say, to write with such heartless ingratitude and subtle mischief a biography of someone who gave you spiritual and material refuge, despite all your doubts and resistance. Surely, you must be a great intellectual to so deftly weave your doubts in a story of faith and even make them look like guiding stars that the blind God-lover does not see. And yes, it
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does need all your ingenuity and cunning to put forth your subjective judgments in a way that they seem to stem from non- committal objectivity. And what shall one say about your claim to be able to objectively find the facts of human life, — a claim that even Heisenberg dealing with the inside of hard concrete matter would not make? Why historians, the world of psychologists should hail you as the new avatar, the prophet and the guru who can know and write about another avatar, prophet and guru! For only the “like knows like” and by that logic you yourself must be a great Master to be able to analyse, discern and know the facts of another great Master, possibly the greatest in recent times.
Oh no, I forgot, you do not really believe in Masters and yogis and their “claims”, for you do not know whether what they claim is delusive or true or whether they are schizophrenic or real and authentic. Nevertheless, you still are an equal to them though by another logic. Me human — you human — we human — we all human = you and me are basically the same; the difference is only in degree and measure and not in any essential quality. Oh yes, I am sorry, you do not say this in so many words objectively, I mean. And, unlike your “misfortunate” self, we do not have the privilege of digging into private diaries with voyeuristic “displeasure”. But, you see, that’s where your logic leads or will lead those who would read your book. Oh yes, I am sorry again, you are not so famous that anyone will bother to find out about your sex-life or your ability to lip-sync to someone else’s song.
But that may be presumptuous on my part, for with this new book you may indeed become famous! After all, it takes guts for a mole to dig a hole in the mighty mountain and bring out a few strands of hair of some buried carcass and declare proudly to the world, “Here is my find, my exhibit! Come, come, I will tell you the secret of the mountain. You deluded jnanis, the mountain’s snow-summit may be doubted, as I do not see it; you sentimental bhaktas, the purifying streams of the mountain heart may be delusive as I, the mole, have never bathed in them; and you foolish seekers, the rich bounty of flora and fauna you speak of is equally suspect as it may be or may be not to my objective eyes, for I do not believe in
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the books that have been written on it by others. Come, I will tell you something you do not know.” And one can fancy rats and moles gathering around you, and bandicoots and lizards and serpents hailing your find as the result of wonderful and painstaking labour and thanking you for revealing to them what the great climbers and photographers have missed.
Anyway, your road to fame is open through the backdoor, nay, the sewage pipe through which some choose to enter a palace, for they are but thieves at heart and feel unfit for the front-door. Don’t worry, you too will be purged and given an equal seat by the side of the Lord. For history repeats itself as they say, and who would think of Rama without thinking about Ravana, and Krishna without Kansa, and of Christ without Judas. But these are myths for you, “objectively” unverified. Maybe, but then, such myths as these which have helped man to grow towards Truth and Beauty and Light, are far better than your half-truths and misrepresented facts that perpetuate the reign of falsehood in the name of Truth. After all, Judas was being truthful and honest when he pointed a finger at Christ and revealed his identity. Yes, but truthful and honest to whom, — to those hostile to Christ’s mission and not to his own soul!
But forget it, you won’t understand all this as it needs truly a wide mind and a generous heart, an inner psychic vision and spiritual sense. And I doubt if you have these, even though you claim to be a practitioner of Integral Yoga. This must be some new brand of your own making where you don’t require faith or a Master, but can be done by anybody and anywhere. Or is it the American edition of the IY you are busy with, where you do not need the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s divine help? I am told that new self-styled IY gurus have sprung up all over the world and your book will be the new gospel for them.
Frankly, I do not wish to concede to you the status of even Ravana or Kansa. At least they were honest about their intent and did not hide their hostility or masquerade as a disciple. But Judas may fit you well. Though historians have doubted the existence of Christ and Judas, the fact of our inner life is that they, just as
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Krishna and Kansa, continue to live and wrestle in the human heart. But who can show that to you, O petty-minded scholar, for you the heart is just an anatomical organ and all emotions rubbish! Well, not quite all, for you would surely validate your own self- love and love for your family and girl-friend. But if emotions surpass these limits and turn to God and by the force of His Grace enter into His secret heart and read the dream-prints of His eyes and share the vastness of His kingdom of delight, then you become scared (envious for the capacity you lack). Only in limits your reason is safe. Not for you the Illimitable and the Immeasurable. May I ask how big is your measuring rod and rope and how deep your probing lens? Can you measure the ocean of Light that shines through the milky way? Can your rope tie the universe as a whole? Can you probe into the secret intent, the Will and Intelligence that works within the atomic void? If you can, then you may be ready, perhaps, to measure the infinite Compassion and Light that is Sri Aurobindo and probe the heart of boundless Love and Grace that is the Mother.
But it is pointless to tell you all this! Who can show the sun to the blind or show him the beauty and joy of flowers? So let me not dare to try what even God Himself will perhaps find it difficult. My only request is that a blind man should be put in his proper place so that he cannot bluff to the equally blind, “claiming” that he can see. His place is at the school of elementary education with Braille. To graduate him to read the script of the stars or to expect him to see the Light that even mortal eyes cannot bear, is surely a wrong choice. And what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have written is neither braille nor mere human words! You should not be where you are right now [the Ashram Archives], even though I am told some great man [Jayantilal Parekh] put you there. But you see, great men can blunder greatly and it is left sometimes for the lesser mortals to bear the brunt of their blunders. And have we not borne enough? – first, your previous biography, and then this one, all at the expense of Ashram resources, to denounce its own founders, its very basis and core, its soul and substance. While the world outside waits eagerly and expectantly for the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, you are busy spinning these awful biographies!
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Have we not had enough of you and your tales? Perhaps, you never learnt in the kindergarten that it is wrong to lie and tell tales about other people. Oh, I forgot, you are the founder of the Ashram Archives, and this we need to remember, because you will soon turn it into a department of research in psychoanalytic history.
Lastly, and since it is not within our means to do anything else, as you are held in such awe and respect, let me just give you a word of advice, an advice similar to what Angad (I am sorry I can’t furnish accurate documents for this man or monkey in the Ramayana, I do not know his qualifications, but his advice was sane and is still valid) gave to Ravana – to seek refuge in the Divine Incarnate whom the highly intellectual Asura could not understand. Well, here is the same advice for you – take refuge in Her Grace. And maybe your heart would change and your eyes see, feel and know the splendours that hide beyond the reach and ken of your so-called objective sight.
Wishing you well within and without
October 2008
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Why is Jeffrey Kripal’s name included in Peter Heehs’s list of acknowledgements in the Lives, and what is he being thanked for? Peter may deny Kripal’s association and influence as he would deny everything now, but surely there is more to it than meets the eye. Here are a few interesting observations:
The Lives of Sri Aurobindo easily constitutes the most comprehensive, thorough, and balanced study of Sri Aurobindo Ghose’s life and thought to date. Peter Heehs’s remarkable access to archival sources both at the ashram and in numerous other archives around the world establishes this text as the definitive study of Aurobindo’s immense output in all of its genres and modes. His text humanizes and problematizes a historical figure whose complexity has been more or less lost to us via hagiography, piety, and now Hindutva apologetics. In some very real sense, Heehs gives us back Aurobindo as a political figure, a prolific writer, and a religious teacher—all in all, a remarkable accomplishment. His writing is clear, uncluttered, precise, and in places quite beautiful. There are few scholarly texts I genuinely enjoyed reading, but this is one of them.
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Mark the choice of words that JK uses to praise the book: “most comprehensive and thorough due to the author’s remarkable access to the Ashram Archives”, “the book humanises and problematises”, “lost to hagiography” “gives us back the political figure”. Finally he mentions the “Hindutva apologetics” – one can see clearly the political agenda of the man. But the nexus goes deeper.
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Who is Jeffrey Kripal?
Jeffery Kripal (JK) is the author of several books including the infamous Kali’s Child, which launched his dubious career by defaming Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. In Kali’s Child, he has deliberately mistranslated Bengali texts to “prove” to Western audiences that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a paedophile and homosexual. It is the book that launched JK to worldwide notoriety. In this book, JK applied a so-called Freudian analysis to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and declared him a homosexual, with autoerotic practices as the basis of his spirituality, and having perverse, paedophilic relations with his disciples, including Swami Vivekananda.
This is what the Wikipedia says on Jeffrey Kripal:
Jeffrey John Kripal (Ph. D., University of Chicago, 1993) is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient gnosticism to the New Age.
Main works: Kali’s Child
Kripal’s 1995 book Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna was a study of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. The book won the American Academy of Religion’s History of Religions Prize for the Best First Book of 1995. The book has been dogged by controversy ever since its initial publication in 1995. The thesis of Kali’s Child has been questioned by several scholars including Swami Tyagananda and Vrajaprana in Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited.
So much for academic prizes by the American Academy of Religion! I suppose the author of TLOSA also aimed for this “coveted” prize. This kind of psychoanalytical academia is out to destroy spirituality as we practise it here. So for those who gush
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praises on JK and PH, it is a choice between two extreme positions. How can these two positions, one representing spiritual truth and the other of rank sexual desire, be ever reconciled? I don’t say that sex has to be therefore suppressed, but the aim of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is to transform it and certainly not to mix up spirituality with sex. We shall see a little later what the Master Himself says apropos this issue.
Excerpt from “The Kripal Conundrum: A Critique of Ramakrishna’s Holy Homoeroticism” by Narasingha P. Sil, Professor of History, Western Oregon University:
Kripal’s Ramakrishna is a holy homosexual, actually a gay tantrika. He is obsessed with sex but despises normal healthy heterosexual practices. On the other hand, he is a practitioner of sacred sexuality, which is energized by homoerotic impulses (uddipan, in Kripal’s understanding or misunderstanding). He is also very secretive, his secret being both his vijnan (in Kripal’s understanding gnosis) and his secret chamber or guhya (anus in Kripal’s preferred translation); hence the equation of Ramakrishna’s guhya with his guhyakatha [secret talk or anal talk]. The gay Ramakrishna is also simultaneously vyakul (“eager with desire” in Kripal’s homoerotic transcreation) for sodomizing his pure pots (that is, his shuddha-sattwa devotees) as much as he is concerned about the pain and shame of being sodomized (as Kripal suggests by his hermeneutic of the “Kali’s sword” episode which Shri M considered a fabricated event)—something Kripal finds a funadamental stage in Ramakrishna’s sexual/spiritual turn.1
Excerpt from Swami Tyagananda’s refutation of Kali’s Child:
Perhaps the centerpiece of Kali’s Child is the assertion that “Ramakrishna was a conflicted, unwilling, homoerotic Tantrika” (KC 3). Further, Tantra’s “heterosexual assumptions seriously violated the structure of his own homosexual desires. His female Tantric guru and temple boss may have forced themselves … on the saint … but Ramakrishna remained … a lover not of sexually aggressive women or even of older men but of young, beautiful boys” (KC 2-3, emphasis mine.)
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Interesting thesis; how does he document his claims?
Ramakrishna, Kripal informs us, went into samadhi “while looking at the cocked hips of a beautiful English boy” (KC 19, emphasis mine). Interesting choice of adjectives. Kripal repeats this phrase later by declaring: “stunned by the cocked hips of the boy, Ramakrishna falls into samadhi” (KC 66). But what does the original Bengali say? Kripal gives two references (KA 2.49; KA 2.110) neither of which mentions the boy as being “beautiful” and, perhaps obviously, there is no mention of “cocked” hips either. The Kathamrita simply states that Ramakrishna went into samadhi upon seeing a boy who was-as Krishna is traditionally depicted in Hindu iconography-tribhanga-bent in three places (i.e., bent at the knee, waist and elbow, with flute in hand). It is this sort of documentation that Kripal uses to build the case for Ramakrishna’s purported homoerotic impulses.2
So it is now clear what “enlightened” company Peter Heehs has kept! What is more interesting is that the author of TLOSA gives a certain tilt towards the above thesis of JK, though he does not say so explicitly. However, that the two are in league is further seen when JK uses the material of TLOSA to actually further his hypothesis on Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. Note that the central thesis of this group is that mystics have two sets of practices – one that is personal and private which they do not disclose, and the other for public consumption. It is this that has impelled the Archives researchers to push for the publication of the Record of Yoga. Already a hypothesis based on the Record is doing the rounds in Sri Aurobindo circles, that a scrutiny of the Record reveals that the Integral Yoga can be done without accepting Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as Gurus! What has been written in the Letters on Yoga by Sri Aurobindo later on is only for the public. The private side of course is supposed to deal with tantric erotic practices based on blocked and sublimated sexual desire, without any high aspiration or profound tapasya. This is the perverted understanding of this group of “academics” whom PH is trying to woo and win accolades from.
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Numerous other individuals also played significant roles in my research and thinking. Some receive major treatment here. Others…Jane Hartford, Gil Hedley, Peter Heehs, James Hickman (Esalen, xii)
Endnote 23 – reference in above passage:
One of the few places where Aurobindo explicitly employed Tantric language was in his private correspondence with his revolutionary brethren. In these documents, he uses Tantric expressions as a code language to refer, for example to revolvers they were attempting to transport through the French postal system or to specific revolutionary actions (see Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo [New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming], Ch. 26, MS pp. 17-18. (Esalen, 477-78)
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Just to tie the links together – it may be of interest to note that Michael Murphy visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives after nearly a forty years gap as if to push for the publication of the Record of Yoga. He was also made a member of the Auroville Board. He had stayed at the Ashram in the early fifties for nearly a year, but then left the Ashram because he could not accept the Mother. He later founded the Esalen Institute as a place offering the transformative practices of evolution, and JK wrote a book on it – this is the book that is now being compared with PH’s TLOSA. There are quite a few of this group who do not believe in the Mother and think that She created a religion and a cult of the Supermind which never actually descended! No wonder PH leaves the question of the supramental descent hanging in his book!
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desire,” which, as Heehs points out, often came upon him spontaneously, for example when he was writing or walking.30 (Esalen, 64-45)
References to endnotes 29 & 30 in above passage:
Endnote 29: As Patrick Olivelle has demonstrated, there is an “explicit and unambiguous connection between ananda as orgasmic rapture and ananda as experience of brahma/ atman.” Olivelle demonstrates, moreover, that this orgasmic bliss was understood to be the function of the penis: just as the ear is organ of hearing and the eye the organ of sight, the penis was said to be the organ of ananda. See Patrick Olivelle, “Orgasmic Rapture and Divine Ecstasy: The Semantic History of ananda, Journal of Indian Philosophy 25 (1997): 153-80. See also Life Divine, 950, where Aurobindo clearly relates Ananda and sexuality in a sophisticated dialectical fashion. He knew.
Endnote 30: Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Ch. 27, MS p.11
This must be some novel interpretation of The Life Divine facilitated by PH’s book. Sri Aurobindo clearly cautions and warns us of the danger of this kind of spirituality that mixes sexual passions with the ardours of the Spirit. Cited below for clarity are His own words:
Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublimation to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital imagination and mental idealised chimera. If that falsification is permitted, the higher Light and Power and Bliss withdraw, there is a fall back to a lower status; or else the realisation remains tied to an insecure half-way and mixture or is covered and even submerged by an inferior exaltation that is not the true Ananda. It is for this reason that Divine Love which is at the heart of all creation and the most powerful of all redeeming and creative forces has yet been the least frontally
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present in earthly life, the least successfully redemptive, the least creative. Human nature has been unable to bear it in its purity for the very reason that it is the most powerful, pure, rare and intense of all the divine energies; what little could be seized has been corrupted at once into a vital pietistic ardour, a defenceless religious or ethical sentimentalism, a sensuous or even sensual erotic mysticism of the roseate coloured mind or passionately turbid life-impulse and with these simulations compensated its inability to house the Mystic Flame that could rebuild the world with its tongues of sacrifice.3
The usual desire for gratification, as Aurobindo has the guru call it, 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.76 Consummation may have been delayed because of Mrinalini’s youth, and his own stoicism, partly innate and partly learned from philosophers such as Epictetus, would have helped him to keep his sexual tendencies in check. (Lives, 56)
Endnote 76 in above passage:
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 on Yoga. For his experience of maithunananda, see Record of Yoga, 204, 300, 302, 329,
431, 464, 774, and 1456. Maithunananda means literally the bliss, ananda, of coitus, maithuna. In the Record it refers to a particular intensity of spontaneous erotic delight, but some
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references, notably on page 204 (“equal to the first movements of the actual maithuna ananda”) seem to imply a knowledge of ordinary maithuna. (Lives, 425)
The statement giving the reason for Sri Aurobindo’s marriage as the desire for sexual gratification and the mention of Sri Aurobindo’s ‘general knowledge’ about sexuality being more than academic is very interpretive. If JK does it, it is to fulfil his focus on homosexuality and homo-eroticism in spirituality. If PH did not have any such focus, then it is very strange that he should interpret it in the same manner, leading thus to the same conclusions as JK. Also, one wonders what could be the reason behind focusing so much on the Master’s sexual life, on how much he knew about sex, that his marriage was for sex, and that he used to have spontaneous experiences relating to sexual pleasure in the body. When all this is seen side by side with the kind of remarks PH makes on Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with the Mother and his psychoanalytical interpretation of Vasavadutta and other plays, then the mischief becomes more than clear. If one still does not see it, it is either because one is simply too dumb and stupid to notice or else because one chooses to defend the author by turning a blind eye on his defects. But the nexus is there and shows his clear intent and line of thinking.
Of course PH may say that sex is part of life and why should you not discuss it? He may also say that he is trying to show that Sri Aurobindo had every kind of human experience. Well, is that the only aspect that proves us to be authentically human? Besides, it is one thing to discuss sexuality in an impersonal way and quite another to discuss it using the life of the Master with a tilt towards Tantric interpretation. I give below more examples from TLOSA of PH and Esalen of JK.
The suggestive language of aphorism may have been more apt to express the intensity of the path of love, as in this
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example from his posthumously published collection Thoughts and Aphorisms:
What is the use of admiring Nature or worshipping her as a Power, a Presence and a goddess? What is the use, either, of appreciating her aesthetically or artistically? The secret is to enjoy her with the soul as one enjoys a woman with the body. (Lives, 284)
That JK quotes the above aphorism from Sri Aurobindo is not surprising, because he will always find and use whatever suits his ideas on sexuality and spirituality. But that PH (a member of the Ashram Archives) finds exactly the same quote out of a list of 547 aphorisms in which there are about 133 on devotion (bhakti yoga), apart from a number of exquisite passages on Bhakti in the Letters on Yoga and the Synthesis, is what is astounding!
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. (Lives, 319)
Another instance of exactly the same quote being picked up by both JK and PH, which shows a close collaboration between them! Both have interpreted in the same psychoanalytic way – relating Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences to suppressed sexuality. It is interesting to note that this quote is not in any of the readily available works of Sri Aurobindo, but from a talk published in Sri Aurobindo Circle (1953): p 207. This is the kind of research that the Archives ‘scholar’ has been engaged in that is being cited as yeoman
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service. Besides, is this the way we treat, respect and show our love towards the One who has given us everything – by discussing His sexual life in public, by distorting His words and give a totally left-handed twist to His Yoga? One can understand that JK is doing it in America since he does not claim to be a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. But is this kind of thing consistent with being a disciple? Does freedom mean the freedom to criticise the Master, to ridicule Him in public, to lay bare His life for psychoanalytic scrutiny by dark and hostile minds? Can this ever be an approach to Yoga and, if so, then tell me what is not admissible? And who is above criticism and what discussion in any public forum can be considered as not consistent with being an inmate and a disciple? What else is the most dangerous gossip than to talk frivolously about the Guru’s sexual life?
Both PH in his endnote and JK in his book have defined maithuna as coitus (see endnote 76 on p 425 of the Lives and p 64 of Esalen – both have been quoted above). But this is the narrow and perverted meaning of maithuna, which has been essentialized as sexual intercourse by American scholars of religion with little or no knowledge of Sanskrit. The correct understanding and the English equivalent of maithuna as derived from its Sanskrit meaning is ‘intercourse’, which has social as well as sexual connotations. In the Tantric sense, it has spiritual meanings.
Thus, maithuna can mean intercourse with the world with all our senses – to engage intensely with the world in order to transcend the duality of separation. It is used as a metaphor for a positive engagement with the world. In its highest sense, it can mean the enjoyment acquired by the soul through the senses.
Summary:
Two things are clear from the above mentioned passages. One, the unpublished manuscript of TLOSA was sent to Jeffrey Kripal, who is known for giving a sexual twist to spiritual thought. Second, that JK actually used portions of PH’s manuscript to support his gross misunderstanding of spirituality in general and Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga in particular.
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What is not clear is the exact reason for PH sending his manuscript to JK. Was it for his approval or appreciation? If it was sent only for reviewing (the choice of the reviewer speaks for itself), then how was JK allowed to use certain quotes for his book even before the TLOSA was published? This is surely not the norm of any standard publishing house. Finally, the careful selection of passages, especially with regard to the aphorism on Love, makes it more than evident that there is a nexus between the trio: Michael Murphy, Jeffrey Kripal and Peter Heehs. They all have met in USA and have mutual links.
7 January 2011
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If one has to believe in all that Peter and his followers are saying, then one would arrive at the following conclusions:
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7 January 2010
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Researching History the Mole-way (An Allegorical Story)
A mole was dissatisfied with his own stature. He had heard of the bear and the elephant who were apparently like him but much larger and stronger. Living in his burrow he had also heard of strange lands, of the mountains and seas, and experienced a mixed emotion of fright and wonder, doubt and faith. All this created an increasing restlessness in him, for he had to find out whether the stories were true or not. At times, he felt accursed for having read about these strange lands and their creatures that he nor anyone else in the mole-world had ever seen, because they were always so busy digging for dead earthworms and eating their remnants.
One day, however, he decided to step out of his burrow and find out for himself if the stories of the mountains and the seas, the elephants and the bears, were true. To assist him in his historical research he took with him a few useful instruments, — the best ones in the mole world, — a probe that could pierce 10" deeper than what mole feet could manage in one go, a lens that could magnify a mole tooth three times its size, and a measuring tape that was the longest available tape in the mole-world and could measure twenty times a mole-length from snout to tail. Equipped with these very best instruments “molely” possible, he confidently stepped out of the mole-world and headed towards the land of the mountains of which he had heard and read. A thought crossed the mole-mind as he moved onwards, “I will measure the mountain and probe its depths and write a most authentic book on it.” He even fantasized great adulation of his unprecedented research; for in all the books he had read he had not found any clear references to the size of the mountain or its depth. Most authors seemed to
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have been deeply moved by the sight of the mountain; some even had climbed it, but never came back to report. “Fools”, thought the mole, “if only they had measured and told us the size, it would have been so much easier and better for other moles to understand the mountain.
As he approached the great mountain, he felt the air grow cool and refreshing. But the mole did not know of anything that could exactly quantify the change, so he took it as an illusion of the senses. He moved on and unknowingly started to climb a rock at the foot of the mountain slope. But soon he realised that his feet were slipping and there was nothing he could hold or grasp. He thought, “This must be the mountain,” and rejoiced deep inside at the prospect of measuring it. But how was he to climb it? As the mole sat wondering, he saw a little monkey playing around. Understanding the mole’s difficulty, the latter offered to help him climb the rock. “No, thank you,” came the curt reply from the proud mole, who considered himself to be the best in the mole kingdom. So he tried to climb and fell back, and tried again and fell, and tried and fell again and again. Tired and exasperated, he wondered what to do next. Just then he saw a group of mountain climbers passing by. Instantly a ‘moley’ idea flashed in his mole- mind, “Maybe I could just jump on one of their bags!” The next moment he was sitting on the bag of a climber, who reached the top of the rock in a few steps. For them, this was not even the beginning. They were seekers of the snow-covered summits decked with mist and cloud and full of beauty and danger. The mole, who knew nothing about it, jumped down as soon as they had climbed the rock.
The climbers moved on. For a moment the mole wondered where were they going, but his mole vision could not see much beyond its little arc. Anyway, it did not concern him. He had now seen the top and it wasn’t really as big and huge or as magnificent as he had heard. “Well, people exaggerate”, he said to himself, and taking his probe and measuring rod went about studying in great detail the base of the mountain. He even dug a few inches in the soil around the rock and discovered a few strands of hair of some
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strange creature which had died there long ago. He also dug out a few worms and saw a swarm of ants around it. He carefully collected all these, photographed and preserved them, happy at each find that he felt was revealing the secret of the mountain. After all, he thought, the mountain was like any other place, full of worms and ants. And yes, the rock perhaps, was a little different, but still it could be climbed and measured. He wondered why people had not written about the worms and ants, for these could be easily verified by any mole. They had spoken of the snow- summits, waterfalls and rare flowers, and the only common thing mentioned was the rock.
After staying a few weeks around that small rock and collecting more data from the rocky soil, the mole finally decided to return to the mole-world. He was loaded with enough material to earn him fame and rewards for a lifetime. He planned to write a remarkable book about the minutest details of the mountain, — the ants, the worms, the hair of the dead creature, — things that nobody had found or written about. Excited and a little exhausted, he slept off at the foot of the mountain and slipped into a dream world in which he saw a number of rats and bandicoots, moles and lizards, gather around him to listen to his description of the elusive mountain with rapt attention. His book was already being acclaimed as the first authentic and objective book on the subject. A dream dialogue ensued in which he was proudly displaying his book, “The Many Sides of a Mountain”.
“So what is the mountain like Mr. PH” (as he was popularly known, — a short form of “painstaking historian”, though some heretic moles had nicknamed him as “petrified historian”, since he could only dig for scraps in the buried past)? What is the mountain like, sir?”
“Well, very much like any other place,” beamed PH and, with a sly smile, asked, “Does that surprise you?”
“Well, yes, perhaps, maybe not,” someone answered, a little confused.
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And another, “It makes us feel closer to the mountain, it is more manageable now, and maybe someday one of us would be able to climb it. How much was its height, sir?”
“Well about twenty feet, top to bottom, a few inches more perhaps,” declared confidently the historian.
“Oh, we can climb that with a little assistance and practice,” one observed.
“Yes, or with a little intelligence and cunning,” the historian added, remembering how he had jumped upon a passer-by’s backpack.
“So what is all this fuss about? I mean, these climbers speak of some enormous figure, a seemingly impossible task for us moles!” questioned another one.
“Oh, the climbers always exaggerate. Having been to the mountain and studied it closely, I know that much of what they say comes from their imagination. In fact, the mountain is one huge rock and nothing more. All this talk of greenery and caves and exquisite flowers and rare animals and snow tops where the sun-rays dance in golden hues, is romantic poetry,” replied the historian mole sarcastically.
“I see,” a young mole pondered, “and what about the pure and pristine streams and waterfalls?”
The mole answered with an air of solemnity and impartiality: “Well, I searched and dug deep and went around the mountain several times, but found no evidence of any streams or even of water nearby. I cannot say that what the other writers claim is delusive and unreal, but one thing is certain, it cannot be objectively verified.”
“And what about the healing herbs with strange magical powers to cure?” a curious child mole asked feeling a little dampened by the mole’s account.
The historian mole laughed hideously and, stamping out the joy and wonder from the child mole’s eyes, answered wryly: “I do
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not know of any such thing. All I found were some ants and worms and few strands of hair of a dead creature,” and he showed him proudly the exhibits that he had brought in his bag.
Unknown to the mole, while he slept and dreamt of his future glory and fame, a group of climbers returned from the summit. One of them took a careless step and crushed the mole under his foot, burying it in the sand. When he realised what he had done, he cast a sympathetic glance at the dead mole and cautioned himself to be more careful with his steps. And as he and his comrades proceeded on their way down, they sang of what they had seen and felt on their journey to the summit. They described “the glory of the mountain tops, snow-clad, bare, austere, free; the pristine streams and springs whose water soothed and rejuvenated; the magical herbs that healed and the rare gems that were hidden in its depths; the blinding blizzards and the snow leopards; the clear lakes and untouched forests and pine groves; and, atop all these, majestic Shiva with the moon to his left and the sun to his right, illumining the summits, which no eyes can describe and no vision behold.”
As they sang and went past, the wind ran with them and the hearts of the trees and creatures were filled with quiet wonder and joy. The mole lay dead by the wayside, the pages of his book fluttering on his side.
November 2008
[Around March 2009, the SCIY supporters of Heehs made a solemn collective statement on the larger issues behind the “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” controversy. Laying the broad outlines of how the Integral Yoga should not be practised (as if they have been practising it for a long time), voicing grave concerns about how it was going awry at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, they formulated fourteen points with summary explanations attached to them. How I wish this new charter of Yogic Rights was followed by the setting up of a new Ashram where they could have indeed shown the world how to practise the Integral Yoga in the right way. Heehs could be also anointed as its new Guru! Alok Pandey responded to this collective lamentation by writing the following replies to some of their accusations: religious fundamentalism, not permitting intellectual freedom, etc. – Ed.]
I don’t believe in any kind of fundamentalism, religious or intellectual. A narrow, one-sided, intellectual approach to truth is as harmful as religious bigotry. At the same time, every spiritual collectivity has a right to safeguard what is sacred and dear to it, its cherished values and ethos, and its unique way of life. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the centre and the circumference of the Ashram. The members here have willingly chosen this life centered around Them. They have not been forced into conversion or coerced into submission. One is free to move in (if admitted) and one is also free to move out. But when one is part of the institution, a minimum sense of public decency is expected of him. If a member writes publicly disparaging comments that are critical of the core values and founders of the institution, and that too for years together, and others rise up to challenge and criticize him, I
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do not see how they become religious fundamentalists. In this world of transparency and accountability, nobody can stay secure on his throne and demand that he will continue to be in his privileged position despite his betrayal of the very Spirit that built the institution. To expect others to meekly submit to such unlimited privileges is not the spirit of freedom, but of slavery and depravity. The Spirit that built the Ashram and sustains it is not the Spirit of Democracy or Theocracy or Autocracy or any such political ideal. It is the spirit of Yoga and acceptance of the Master. Faith in the Founder and His wisdom are part of its core values and central ethos. For the rest, there is the world outside where people are free to speak on whatever they want in appropriate forums.
Freedom, be it intellectual, vital, or physical is always relative and comes along with its own share of responsibility. An unlimited freedom is one of those chimeras of vain intellectuals who refuse to submit themselves to a higher Law or a deeper Truth greater than their minds. They are free to say whatever they want, but they must not then complain if others exercise their freedom to contradict their publicly stated opinions and ideas. Unlimited freedom, like unlimited authority is the prerogative only of a consciousness that dwells always in Truth. Since none of us can claim that, let us not speak of it. It is true that an enforced discipline by mechanical means or regimented code leads to conservatism and stagnation, which no progressive group can afford. But equally, an unlimited, unqualified freedom leads to chaos, a mad orgy of a regression to the barbarism of vital instincts and mental arrogance, which again no progressive group can accept. A right balance is needed, a healthy combination of freedom and discipline, individual and collective. The Ashram is precisely such a place with a leaning towards freedom. Yet sometimes a group may need to send away a member if his presence is detrimental to the whole group-life or threatening to attack and erode the very Soul of the place. Whether it is possible to destroy the Soul is not the issue. The issue is whether certain persisting attitudes and tendencies of an extremely undesirable type can be accepted when they damage the very fundamentals of the Ideal that a group stands and lives for. There
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are always other groups and places where the individual’s bent of mind and the group’s ethos will match. So one is always free to move there.
No one except for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother can have that absolute authority. Nobody else claims it either. And precisely for this very reason it is important to see that distortions and wrong interpretations are not made from their writings, the kind which PH has been indulging in openly and blatantly throughout this book.
Yes, of course, but around what and whom? One cannot sacrifice the central principle for the peripheral, the higher truths for the lesser lights. Unless there is a basic agreement on certain fundamental issues, how can one hope to reconcile? In that case, it is better to let different groups grow independently, each in its own way, without interfering in the other’s affairs. When we would all have grown sufficiently, then union, if necessary, will happen naturally, first inwardly, then outwardly. The fundamental issues are:
Of course, there is every scope and freedom for diverse approaches. But is the scientific objectivity of the skeptic materialist or hostile criticism of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother an approach to Integral Yoga? Of course, in the widest sense, everything leads us towards God, one way or the other, but when we speak of Yoga we mean a more direct effort. Not everything can be called conscious yoga simply because everything eventually leads us towards God. Besides, there is a difference between having a
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personal approach and claiming it as the most authentic or best approach for everybody. There is no problem if someone writes a book about how one feels closer to God when he quarrels with Him, but there is a problem when he denounces, belittles or dismisses others while hailing his own way as the only valid one. The author of TLOSA has precisely done that and he starts it in the Preface itself. It is PH and not the devotees who have been intolerant! They have only reacted to his dismissive attitude towards devotion and faith. If you put your hand in a hornet’s nest, you should not blame someone else for your pain!
This is sheer nonsense. Hindus are perhaps the most tolerant group in the world. If there is any Hindutva influence in the PH controversy, it is seen in the remarkable tolerance displayed by the devotees and sadhaks in the face of such audacity and arrogance displayed by PH and the blatant lies that he and his supporters have unabashedly resorted to. Can you imagine someone continuing to live freely and enjoying the privileges of an Ashram despite publicly denouncing its Guru and Master?
This is again sheer nonsense, an old trick used to divide people on racial lines. Has any westerner ever been harmed before, during, or after the controversy, including those who resolutely stand on PH’s side? B. and R.H. continue to occupy their places, while Sraddhalu has been asked not to go to the Archives. The feeling of racism has not been created by people who are against PH’s book, but by those who are supporting him. Somehow they are unable to see beyond the colour of their skin and country of origin. It is sad, but who is responsible for it?
There may be some truth in it, if you consider the recent turn that religion has taken in the West. It is difficult for a Westerner to surrender or acknowledge a personal and embodied Divine. But I am not sure if this is a general phenomenon or one that afflicts the Sri Aurobindo group specifically. Nevertheless, just as an Indian
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has to pursue yoga forgetting that he is a Hindu or Indian, so also a Westerner or others may have to follow yoga if they wish to, forgetting that they are Westerners, Christians, agnostics, etc. Or does this simple rule of yoga apply only to one group and not to the other??
Nobody does moral or religious policing here. Nobody peeps into anybody’s life or passes judgments except in private. It is rather PH who has tried to peep into Sri Aurobindo’s life with a voyeuristic curiosity and passed judgments. He has made his views public and therefore people have reacted because of his misrepresentations of Sri Aurobindo, His life and His works. How is that equivalent to moral and religious policing? Nobody is bothered or cares about PH’s private and personal life. Nobody has slapped a list of do’s and don’ts on him or anyone else. All that the devotees have asked of him is not to write such derogatory stuff while he is a member of the Ashram. Is that such an unfair demand? If anything at all, it is his followers in America who are trying to remote control and police and pass comments and judgments on what does not really concern them! One can understand the concern for what is written or said about Sri Aurobindo when it is not confined to the Ashram. The devotees all over the world have surely the right to express what they feel. But it is not within the prerogative of everyone, including devotees outside, to comment, interfere, influence and control the decisions regarding PH’s continuation at the Archives or the Ashram. To do that would rather be moral and religious policing. A distinction must be made between the Ashram as a source of spiritual Light for all and the Ashram as an institution. Nobody here is interfering in PH’s yoga or his personal approach to the Divine, which in any case is a matter of attitude rather than outer circumstances. Nobody is ex-communicating him. All that was asked was his removal from the Archives and that too not out of any “righteous wrath” but because of the gross misuse of his privileges, such as making use of unpublished things for public consumption without taking permission. Such a change of department and even taking someone out of the Ashram has been done earlier and is an acceptable norm in other institutions. It has
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nothing to do with this hype on “religious wrath” and “fundamentalism”. Does it mean that every time someone was asked to leave the Ashram (and there have been quite a few cases), it was done out of “religious wrath” or a “fundamentalist” impulse? It simply means that the individual does not fit anymore in the organization, because he does not agree to abide by its core principles.
Finally, one may say that supporting PH while condemning the reactions to the book is a strange and fallacious logic. The same logic used to defend PH defends also the reactions against him. For instance:
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such as vital and intellectual freedom. We believe and stand for certain spiritual values such as devotion and surrender when you take up the yoga (not otherwise).
I am not saying that tit for tat is a very yogic thing. All that I am doing is to point out the logical fallacy in supporting PH’s personal actions. What should have been done instead was a discussion on the book itself.
So do you expect that the whole book should have been circulated? That would be worse! And hasn’t PH done the same, giving a one-sided picture by selective half-quotes? And have not those who criticised our letters done the same – taken them out of context? PH’s background – his repeated hostile actions, his being part of the Ashram, and that too of the Archives, his abrasive personality that hastily dismisses other approaches, his mocking at people’s faith in the Mother,– all these are part of the full picture. To simply take a few extracts from our letters (that too selected for effect) and analyze them is only to create confusion, nothing else!
Yes, everybody here is a representative type, but not all need to stay in a particular department of the Ashram to do yoga and change themselves. And if he is a representative type, so are the others, and he is getting it from other representative types! Such logic is obviously self-defeating in the end!
April 2009
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Ranganath Raghavan teaches the major works of Sri Aurobindo to the students of the Higher Course of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Centre of Education (SAICE). He has worked around 15 years at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives helping in the publication of the new edition of the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). He is also one of the editors of the Mother India, a monthly journal published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Having come to the Ashram in 1945 at the age of five and grown up under the Mother’s personal care in the early days of the Ashram School, after which he spent a good part of his life as manager of the Ashram Press, he has seen through the various phases of Ashram life over a period of 60 years.
Alok Pandey, Shradhalu Ranade, Anand Reddy and a few others, who had objected to Peter Heehs’ book The Lives of Sri Aurobindo are being branded as “religious fundamentalists”, because they think that criticism of the Guru is wrong, and particularly so by a sadhak- member of the Ashram Community. The “broad-minded, objective, so-called practitioners of the Integral Yoga” and supporters of Peter Heehs do not mind if the Guru is criticised, denigrated, and found fault with. They have no objection to a limited, error-prone mental judgment being passed on the Guru, who lives on the highest planes of Consciousness possible to man.
It is to be clearly noted that criticism of the Guru by one who claims to be a practitioner of the Integral Yoga, and one who is living in the Ashram as an inmate, enjoying all its facilities, its infrastructure, material and spiritual support, is not only wrong but harmful to the institution and even to himself. There is no problem when a third person who is neither a sadhak nor a follower of the Integral Path does so. The attack can be dealt with in other
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ways — by intellectual discussion, by persuasion, etc. This sort of thing has happened several times in the past, even during Sri Aurobindo’s life time.
Who is a religious fundamentalist? It is one who insists on the sole truth of his religion, denies the truths of other religions, and imposes his limited views, very often by physical force, on those who do not share his beliefs. First of all, there is a big difference between religion and spirituality, but let that pass. A sadhak who objects to the falsification of the teaching, or stands for the truths of his Guru within the Community to which he belongs can hardly be called a fundamentalist!!
The characteristics of religious fundamentalism are listed as eleven by the all-wise so-called rationalists of the SCIY forum. Let us examine them one by one.
Complexity is not inconsistent with a basic simplicity.
Complexity by itself need not be raised to the status of an absolute desirable principle.
Complexity can lead to many errors and misjudgments. It can obfuscate simple truths, and, by convoluted arguments, end in self- deceit. Complexity can become an easy excuse for losing the woods for the trees.
There is nothing wrong with the demand for Doctrinal Purity. In fact it could be considered essential under certain circumstances. It is an inflexible, rigid stand denying the truths of other paths that is undesirable and dangerous, if the rejection is carried out on the physical plane with violence. But the rejection of falsehood within the community is certainly not undesirable.
Purity of any teaching must be maintained. Enlargement of the field of purity can cause dilution, leading to falsehood. On the other hand, enlargement that includes the original purity may also be quite acceptable.
When the threat does not exist, the feelings are not justified. But when a real threat of falsehood, perverse interpretation, outright lies and personally motivated comments without any basis are disseminated, widely circulated, then not only must the threat be seen clearly, but all action to counter it becomes not only necessary but imperative and indispensable.
There is no control of information in our stand. Rather the opposite is true. Information, unwanted, false, downright libelous is being circulated and passed off as authentic and official. That is what the wide distribution of a printed book does. It has a tendency to “legitimise” such false information — particularly when the author has an “official position”, wrongly claimed in the book itself. The author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo claims to be the founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, which is a blatant lie and intended to inject authenticity in the contents of the book. In such a case, the rectification, by the denial of the falsehood contained in the book, is the prime duty of those who desire to give the right information.
Here too, as in the other cases, exclusivism is not necessarily a sin. When it is a negative rejection of fresh ideas, without sufficient rational consideration of whether these ideas are acceptable or not, then it is a narrow and blind attitude. But if after a careful consideration of the new ideas, they are found to be contradictory to the basic teaching of the Guru, a rejection is obviously needed. Non-exclusiveness does not mean a wholesale, indiscriminate, pell- mell acceptance of all ideas.
Where is the opposition to discussion? Again this does not mean that one is obliged to accept all ideas that are being forwarded by the opponents. The right of rejection is always a prerogative in any debate.
Abusive language is never justified, but a strong rebuttal of the false opinions expressed in the book is always justified. Also the rejector has the right of “proportional” rebuttal, commensurate to the text being rejected.
This has to be understood correctly. There has been NO ROUSING of the masses by the initial objectors to the book by Peter Heehs. The masses have been roused by the blatant lies and self-opiniated comments of the author that are ignorant, foolish and motivated, and intended to “ingratiate him to the academics of the West”. This is exactly what happened in this case. Heehs’ band of supporters are making it sound as if Hitler and Goebbels have “roused the masses” by their false propaganda. Nothing of the sort happened. The book has been forcefully rejected, and the falsehood contained in it had, by itself, the power to rally all lovers and devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
The French Revolution, the Bangladesh Uprising, Mahatma Gandhi’s rousing of the masses during the Indian independence movement, are all examples of the truth and necessity of bringing revolution to the masses. They were spontaneous uprisings against falsehood and injustice. Having said that, let it be clearly and firmly stated that the “rousing” was not “caused” by anybody (as falsely claimed), nor was there any such intention in the minds and hearts of the first objectors. The truth of their stand itself was enough to initiate and snowball into a mass movement of resentment and anger.
No one in his senses will justify violence without sufficient reason. But when fighting blatant injustice, violence may very well be justified. The freedom movements around the world against the intransigent colonialism of the West with all its rapaciousness, greed, selfish and cruel grabbing of all that did not belong to it by military might, are certainly justified. But the mindless violence of the terrorist imposing his narrow and ignorant views on the rest
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of the world is certainly wrong. In the present case, violence is certainly to be condemned, if it has occurred without justification. There was no physical violence except in two cases, when an inflamed disciple had an argument with Heehs, and when the author’s cycle tube was cut by a group of kids. If this is supposed to be violence, then it is indeed laughable.
Here again the enemy may or may not be the demon. But if the enemy attacks the very Avatar, – Sri Aurobindo – the very representative of the Divine on earth, are we not justified in calling the enemy an anti-divine force? This may not be acceptable to the personal friends and admirers of Heehs. But the large number of devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother HAVE felt strongly the attack to be that of a dark force. There is no need to shy away from this rather “seemingly” extreme statement. It is a truth whose vindication will come out in due time. Each sadhak and follower of the Integral Yoga must recognise this fact and stand up boldly and reject the book. It is possible that the author of the book has become an instrument of this dark force without being fully conscious of the implications of his actions. But that does not diminish the seriousness of his misbehaviour.
There is absolutely no motive of heroism or any other in the first objectors to the book. Motives are being ascribed to them — personal and selfish motives. The only motive is to stand up for the truth and honour of their Gurus. In fact, why doesn’t Heehs & Co. announce their motives publicly?
Rather the motive of the author of the book was to be recognised as a “scholar” by the academia of the West!! What a motive for a “so-called sadhak” of the Integral Yoga, after having stayed for thirty years in the Ashram and enjoying all its basic infrastructure, hospitality and support!!!
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Of late, the view that Sri Aurobindo has to be presented either intellectually or with faith and devotion, historically or hagiographically, is fast catching up among the admirers and devotees of Sri Aurobindo. The idea behind it is that faith per se is anti-intellectual, and intellectuality is necessarily anti-faith. The extrapolation of this wrong view into the realm of nationalities will one day land us into deep trouble, for you can politicise this view to drive a deep wedge into the nascent world unity that is taking shape here in Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville and, hopefully, in other spiritual communities and centres across the world. The conclusion that could be drawn is that Indians are generally good for yoga, which can hardly be done without faith, devotion and surrender, and Westerners are only good for intellectual and practical work, which does not make them fit for yoga. Though this might be true in certain respects – nobody would deny that Westerners have a certain advantage of coming from an organised and mentally developed society or that the age-old spiritual civilisation of India enables Indians to take up Yoga as naturally as fish takes to water – but if you overstress these natural racial inclinations, I wonder how further progress would be possible. We all have to rise beyond personal and national barriers, learn from each other and not insist on each other’s deficiencies and definitely not make matters worse by aggressively pitting Western intellectuality against Indian devotion. The personalities of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the best examples of a perfect blend of these two aspects and it is precisely because of this that they have touched the hearts as well as the minds of so many people all over the world. Let me however dig deeper into this artificial rift created by these two opposing camps of intellectuals and devotees.
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Being myself an educated Indian from the Ashram, let me make my own position clear. I am surely not the type to shout from rooftops that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the Avatars of this age, which is the ultimate statement that any devotee can make. But I confess, without feeling the least ashamed, that I believe the above statement to be true, though I would rather hold this precious faith in my heart and not try to convince others about it. Such an aggressive propaganda of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is often the most convenient way of forgetting their teachings. The matter is simple – they wanted us to do their yoga of transformation, they did not want us to start proselytising and found another religion. Having said this, let us find out what makes the intellectual shy away from devotion. The devotee, he says, speaks of unverifiable things of which he has no actual experience. Now this is plain nonsense and outdated materialism which believes only in the knowledge of the physical mind and senses. Once we have accepted the spiritual framework of the universe and we know from the testimony of our Gurus that there are layers and layers of consciousness above and below the present mental level, how can we revert back to the materialistic “Show me proof of God” kind of attitude? I call this intellectual fundamentalism which is perhaps as bad, if not worse, than the usual brand of religious fundamentalism. I feel that both these attitudes have to be carefully avoided in order to seek the Truth.
Coming back to the point of faith and verifiability, Sri Aurobindo says that faith is a precursor to knowledge. The Mother says that faith has to descend into the vital and physical and even to the very cells of the body. This introduces a complexity which the intellectual never envisaged, and who until now thought that faith is essentially dumb. The flaw in his arrogant attitude is that he thinks he can study spirituality with the same certainty he can study physical facts, which are easily verifiable. When things are not easily verifiable in the realm of spirituality, he has therefore a tendency to pooh pooh them in the name of irrationality. But the suprarational can be as logically expounded as the physical universe, and this is precisely what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have done for us. Their writings and talks have given a vast intellectual form
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to the suprarational, which satisfies every part of our being, and all the oppositions between the mind and heart cease to exist. The intellect is basically a good barrister who will fight anybody’s case for a proper payment. Its pretensions to knowledge are therefore biased and faulty. Now all this is familiar enough to any sadhak of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, but what beats me is when a senior colleague of mine (Peter Heehs), who is supposed to be a long time practitioner of the Integral Yoga, does the same mistake of trumpeting this arrogant intellectual stand in the public arena, and that too, showing scant respect towards Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
I am reminded of the plight of Dilip Kumar Roy, one of the closest disciples of Sri Aurobindo and who received the maximum number of letters from the Master. The disciple never ceased baulking at faith all through his long years of sadhana at the Ashram in spite of having remarkable spiritual experiences. Sri Aurobindo had to finally say that no amount of writing letters would convince his doubting mind, because doubt exists for its own sake, and it is the nature of the physical mind to doubt. On one occasion Sri Aurobindo wrote to him:
I ask you to have faith in the Divine, in the Divine Grace, in the truth of the sadhana, in the eventual triumph of the spirit over its mental and vital and physical difficulties, in the Path and the Guru, in the existence of things other than are written in the philosophy of Haeckel or Huxley or Bertrand Russell, because if these things are not true, there is no meaning in the Yoga.1
The Integral Yoga is obviously difficult and the physical mind, of all parts of the being, the hardest to change, as is shown by the exit of several disciples who finally left the Ashram, including Dilip Kumar Roy himself. The revolt of very senior and respectable disciples is as yet an untold story. But the common thread that runs through all these sad chronicles is the loss of faith in their Gurus, without whose spiritual help the disciple is inviting inner desolation.
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I end with a cynical but an absolutely true observation of a European friend of mine on the practice of Integral Yoga. You sometimes enter this difficult tunnel of inner exploration wanting to come out wise and enlightened, but often come out worse than what you were twenty years back.
September 2008
1. Letters on Yoga, CWSA, Vol. 29, p. 100
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The SCIY (Science, Culture and Integral Yoga) internet forum is so worried about religious fundamentalism gripping the Sri Aurobindo Ashram that it seems to have forgotten what religion means. Everyone in the forum shies away from this word as if it is the worst calamity that could ever happen to humanity in general and the Integral Yoga community in particular. One gets the impression that in their anxiety to avoid rituals and fanaticism, they have thrown away the baby with the bathwater and replaced it with highfalutin intellectualism. Let me therefore first define what religion means before going further with my critique of this forum, which has been so insensitive to the feelings of the majority of the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But, I suppose, we are committing a serious error by even calling ourselves “disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother”!
Religion, as I have understood from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is not something fundamentally wrong, but a diminution of spirituality into mere belief and a set of rituals and practices. It has played a beneficent role in the life of the common man, explains Sri Aurobindo in the Life Divine, his magnum opus, though it has often blocked the human soul from further progress. It is not necessarily un-spiritual, as most intellectuals consider it to be. In fact, these intellectuals generally replace spirituality with intellectuality, so enamoured are they with their own abstract mental formulations. Every religion has produced great spiritual seekers, though not all spiritual seekers come from existing religions. In fact, new spiritual leaders find new paths to the divine realisation in man, which eventually become new religions after the demise of their founders. In short, religion reflects man’s basic tendency to follow the form rather than the
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spirit of the new pathfinders. Man generally wants to clutch at existing formulations and that too in their outermost aspects, because of his sheer inability to find out for himself the corresponding truths in his own being. This does not mean that one should therefore flout all existing formulations as outdated truths in order to be free from them, but rather rise above them when one can, if one can, and when one is spiritually convinced of the necessity to do so. Otherwise, one can, as most of us lesser mortals do, use them, take help of the readily available wisdom and apply it successfully to our life, instead of trying to be over- smart and condemn past formulations on the mere basis of their belonging to the past! One needs therefore sufficient spiritual maturity and inner growth in order to go beyond religions, which are basically past formulations of inner life and spirituality expressed at a certain point of time, and which will remain valid until they have been overpassed by the general spiritual progress of humanity.
But how do we distinguish religion from spirituality? Let us take the practice of bowing down or folding one’s hands in front of the figure that one adores and contemplates upon. When the action is sincere and reflective of the spiritual truth within, it should not be considered religious; otherwise one will end up condemning all external expression of the spirit. Sri Aurobindo never said that external manifestation is contrary to the spirit within.1 On the other hand, he encouraged it in the form of Pranam and Darshan during his own lifetime. An action becomes religious only when it becomes routine and mechanical and does not correspond to any deeper psychological truth. In other words, the more the spirit withdraws from the external form, the more religious the form becomes. Thus one has a whole range of truth, a spectrum of the spirit, so to say, starting from the free spontaneous expression of the spirit to the half mechanical routine which most disciples get into, to the totally senseless rituals that are followed out of sheer habit or fear of breaking conventions. The last should be broken by the enlightened intellect, the second and the various degrees of truth ending in the third, should be replaced either by a re-awakening to the half-lost spiritual truth within the existing form or by the discovery of a new truth. Most iconoclasts break the temple along
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with the spirit behind that built it. In rising above religion, one should therefore replace it by “a higher aspiration” as the Mother said, and not by mere intellectuality and disbelief of divinity. Spirituality is essentially a matter of experience and no amount of abstract thought can replace it.
I come now to the SCIY forum’s current accusation of religious fundamentalism overcoming the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. First of all, has not this religious card been overplayed and played at the wrong time for the wrong reasons? This kind of anti-religious rhetoric could draw applause in the context of the Middle Ages – in India, we never had anything comparable to the persecution and inquisitions of the Middle Ages in the West, because there were always so many religions that Truth never became a monolithic monster. Freedom was given even to the Carvakas, the God-denying, pleasure loving materialists of those times, and nobody bothered them as long as they did not bother the others. Each Ashram had its own tradition, its own Guru, its customs and obligations, and if an inmate did not follow them, he was quietly told by the Guru to pack up and go to another Ashram if he felt that path more congenial, or to have a stint of the ordinary life before renewing his spiritual pursuit. It was as plain and simple as that!
It is true that over a period of time each Ashram became more and more rigid in its formulation and prescription of the spiritual path, and that is why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have decried religion. That is why, in their own Ashram, they made the minimum number of outer rules and left each disciple free to follow the Yoga in his or her own way. The Yoga itself was broadly explained, in principles rather than in practical programmes. Collective meditations were there in the Ashram but never compulsory, even when the Mother was presiding over them. There were so few spiritual discourses that newcomers were often puzzled as to what they were supposed to inwardly practise, apart from the standard prescription of “Do the Mother’s work and she will do your sadhana.” The only thing insisted upon was work for the community, and here too, every worthwhile activity, ranging from
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washing dishes in the Dining Room to painting and writing poetry, was considered work. In fact, if anything has been followed with almost a religious fervour even though it was not imposed, I would say it is physical education, having myself grown up at the Ashram with an overdose of basketball, running and swimming, with the result that I suffer, like so many of my colleagues, from sports related injuries. Now which diehard secular fundamentalist would call these activities religious?
But I can already hear the protests of these “intellectual fundamentalists” of the SCIY, who recoil with disgust at the very mention of feeling and emotion: “What about the daily bowing down at the Samadhi? What about the sacred and special occasions which have been institutionalised in the Ashram – the Darshans and the Puja decorations of the Mother’s chair, and, yes, the march- pasts and the salute in front of the Mother’s symbol? Finally, what about the deification of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother into Avatars? “ Actually, most of what we do is replicated in secular institutions, where special days are also celebrated to mark long- forgotten events, and monuments are erected in memory of the founders. In fact, our Ashram fares better than them, because there is total freedom here not to attend these special occasions, whereas you will be surely pulled up for non-attendance in the latter case for breaking the protocol.
Secondly, this anti-religious diatribe would have been appreciated had Religion stood in the way of Science, as it did in the Middle Ages when the Inquisition persecuted Galileo. But this is no longer the case now. Sri Aurobindo has made spirituality as scientific as any secular science. Moreover, the limitations of science and rationality have become too obvious in modern times. We are no more trapped in “the science versus spirit” paradigm and are moving towards a greater synthesis of Spirit and Matter. Sri Aurobindo has provided this vast framework where everything has its due place. Faith in the Divine can go hand in hand with science and intellectuality – he even recommends this until the higher faculties can replace the mind. Avatarhood and worship of the Guru can co-exist with individual freedom. There is also no
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essential contradiction between the Personal and the Impersonal Divine: for example, when the Overmental Consciousness descended in Sri Aurobindo on the Siddhi Day, he termed it as the descent of Krishna. He had no qualms about declaring the Mother as the Avatar and instructing his disciples to submit themselves to her for spiritual growth and guidance. At the same time, in his public statements he spoke of the Divine Shakti as if it were an impersonal force. Now, in such a context, I wonder how one can be overly anxious to condemn religion. When Galileo said that the earth was not the centre of the universe and the high-priest of the Inquisition made him recant for his blasphemy, it was pretty clear on which side was the Truth! But here comes spirituality in a big way into modern life commanding our respect and attention, without denying the truth of Science and Matter. Truth has donned such a wide framework that it is impossible to condemn either religion or science!
When the Mother condemned religion, it was different. She urged us to go above it, and not below. Saying that Truth was always beyond mental formulas, she strongly discouraged the codifying of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and making a system out of it. Now what happens to lesser mortals that most of us are, when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are no more on the earthly scene to constantly revivify the Truth that was manifesting through them? The natural tendency for us is to fall back on whatever they have said or done and try our best to apply it in our lives. Given our basic human limitations, we cannot hope to do any better than, far from exceeding, what our Gurus have achieved. As it is, the knowledge that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have imparted in the realm of spirituality will keep us busy for the next thousand years, without any need for an upgraded version! If anybody thinks otherwise, let him prove it by his spiritual experience and growth rather than mental arguments. The attitude of these over-confident intellectuals on the SCIY forum is to question everything without realising that their very questioning is foolish, because there is no spiritual foundation to it. Has anybody there sufficient spiritual development to be able to question the fundamentals of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Yoga? Has anybody found his or her
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psychic being or has some awareness of the various levels of consciousness above the mind that Sri Aurobindo has written about? Even admitting a legitimate need for questioning, is Yoga only a matter of debate and comparative study of spiritual disciplines without prior spiritual experience? And what is wrong with those who would rather confine themselves to what Sri Aurobindo has written and not give credence to the Freudian interpretations of a dishonest researcher? How do they suddenly become fanatics and fundamentalists?
Another point that the SCIY forum has raised is, “Why not allow dissent within the system? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s framework of Truth is wide enough to permit other views into it. All is a question of interpretation, so why limit ourselves only to a certain positive and hagiographic interpretation of Sri Aurobindo’s life and philosophy and not squarely face the objective truth as the academic world sees it? Sri Aurobindo himself was so much against mental rigidity and institutionalisation; we should not therefore commit the same error and trap ourselves in his own formulation of spirituality.” The argument sounds convincing, but on a closer scrutiny reveals its inherent contradiction and underlying deceit. First of all, we are using Sri Aurobindo’s own words to destroy the Truth that he represents, like the devil quoting the scriptures, or more like a cheeky high school kid quoting the teacher’s words in order to cover up his own mischief. Secondly, if we contest the basic yogic values and principles as enunciated by Sri Aurobindo, where do we land ourselves? Let us take a simple example – the necessity of overcoming the lower nature in the Integral Yoga. Now we can take this as one theory among many others and end up justifying the lower nature, partly because of our inability to surrender ourselves to the Divine, which is the only way to overcome and transform it. Or we can simply and unquestioningly accept the yogic principle, as most of us do, having full faith in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s knowledge. If we fail or advance with great difficulty, as it mostly happens, we don’t start doubting the principle itself. In fact, the more we silence the mind, the easier it becomes for the higher force to descend in us and do the needful. In other words, Truth is tested out practically and not theoretically,
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and it is long practice and experience that eventually vindicates it. In the above-mentioned case, you run the risk of rejecting Sri Aurobindo even before giving him a fair and full trial.
I come now to the issue of locus standi in the Heehs affair, which has been obfuscated from the very beginning by his supporters. Peter Heehs was one of the chief editors of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, which is the repository of the most precious manuscripts that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have left for posterity. He took advantage of his position not only to flout the primary spiritual rule of not denigrating the Guru in his own Ashram, but went against the basic norms of institutional allegiance. No institution, whether secular or spiritual, would have allowed such a breach of trust! The mobilisation of public opinion that happened at the Ashram was genuine, for 95% of the disciples found the Lives of Sri Aurobindo highly objectionable, to the extent that some of them even wanted to close down the Archives. The authorities of the Ashram kept silent out of sheer catholicity and not because they appreciated the book. The best proof of it is that the book is still not up for sale on the shelves of the Ashram bookstore. But the fact that most disciples would not have cared to object had it been written by an outsider, has been deliberately overlooked by Heehs’ defendants, because that itself is sufficient proof against their accusation of religious fundamentalism in the Ashram. For how can objecting to a serious violation of the basic discipline of the Ashram by an inmate be termed religious bigotry? What thus happened was not a “rise of fundamentalist forces”, as is so glibly pronounced by these ruffled spokesmen of Heehs, but a spontaneous public outcry, the scale of which the Ashram has never witnessed.
The next point that I want to mention is the utter lack of good public relations by Heehs’s defendants. Instead of trying to understand why so many Ashramites have been deeply hurt, they (most prominently Richard Hartz who writes under the pseudonym of Angiras) put the blame on the distressed disciples instead of the guilty writer! When the disciples became angry after reading the Extracts,2 Hartz immediately accused them of fundamentalism,
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one of the worst accusations you can make nowadays, because the very word conjures up visions of blood-thirsty crowds out to kill a non-believer. Now for many people who live in the West and who have never had any experience of life in spiritual communities, this bait worked, as we see from the responses of more and more Westerners, especially from the U.S.A. Then, as if to thrust the dagger deep into the festering wound, he concluded that Indians do not have good English reading skills, because of which they have misunderstood Heehs. All this, mind you, he says after enjoying for more than thirty years the hospitality of the Ashram, where there is no dearth of English speaking disciples. I surely expected him to have a better assessment of his own fellow members. Even assuming them to be unintelligent devotees (which they are certainly not!), he should have tried to put his point across a little more gently to his fellow Ashramites, and prevail by good sense rather than by virulently criticising all those who were brave and articulate enough to take on Heehs!
As for the politics behind this whole affair, it is probably for the first time in the Ashram that the “intelligent Westerner versus the stupid Indian devotee” card has been so successfully used. In India, we are so familiar with politicians playing such cards in order to catch votes that we immediately see through the game and wait for truth and common sense to prevail. I hope those Westerners, whose national feeling and racial sense have been whipped up, will one day realise this in the same way as we do. For the overall message that is conveyed through all this furious defence and counterattack by the SCIY forum is: (1) No disciplinary action should be taken against “a white scholar” no matter what he does.
(2) Westerners, because they come from a different cultural background, need not bother about the sensibilities of the less- cultured Indian natives. Now, this attitude is reminiscent of the colonial days and the British Raj rather than reflective of the mind of a globalised spiritual community. In fact, I suspect that part of the fury of Heehs’s friends is due to the fact that they have found themselves on the losers’ side of globalisation. Instead of gracefully accepting that their colleague was in the wrong and letting him face the consequences of his actions without thinking in terms of
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race or colour, they had to make so much noise to cover up his arrogant mistakes. The matter was after all individual and never racial; the objections were to Heehs’s scholarship in particular and not to Western culture in general.
Finally, if there is one area where Indians need not learn from the West (barring a few exceptions), it is spirituality. Just as the West has a significant advantage over present day India in the field of material organisation, so also India has the undeniable superiority of an age-old spiritual tradition which has percolated down to every man on the street. This ethos is sadly missing in the West, even among those who are well-acquainted with Sri Aurobindo’s books and deliver lectures on them, which explains their lack of sensibility to the obvious defects of the book. An Indian disciple of Sri Aurobindo will generally read and judge the book in the context of its spiritual implications, which are far more important to him than the mere literary value of it. For example, the Guru is a representative of the Divine in India and becomes a means and channel for you to come in contact with the Divine Force. So once you accept him, not only the tradition but the fundamental dynamics of the relationship itself demands that you don’t criticise him with impunity. A Westerner, who is not familiar with this tradition, will hardly react when you tell him that Heehs should be censured for denigrating his Guru.
Another example of this difference of reaction is with regard to Heehs’s shoddy portrayal of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s relationship. Now many Westerners think that there is nothing objectionable in showing a romantic relation between them, because even if you accept Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as divine personalities, you can expect a human side of the Divine. So why make such a big fuss about the human side when most of us have not exceeded that level of relationship in our own lives. An Indian disciple would not even dream of this suggestion, because his life is so linked with the daily reality of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Force that the slightest tinge of doubt in this matter would make him extremely uncomfortable. Heehs not only goes against this basic spiritual sense but also dishonestly misrepresents the
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relationship as romantic. I say, dishonestly, because both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had gone far beyond this human level of relationship when they met for the first time in 1914. Sri Aurobindo had left Mrinalini, his wife, and the Mother had already divorced Morisset, her first husband. Her marriage with Paul Richard was, as we all know, a marriage de convenance. The deeper reason that lay behind the marriage, she explains in the Agenda, was her endeavour to transform the Lord of the Nations, whose emanation was no other than Paul Richard himself. When the Mother came to Pondicherry for the second time in 1920, there was no question of any romantic relationship with Sri Aurobindo. On the contrary, they came together for the stupendous work of the supramental transformation. The descent of the Overmind that followed within a few years of her second coming and the establishment of the Ashram are more than ample proof of this joint endeavour. Moreover, Heehs depends on tertiary documents to perpetrate his damage. He relies on what A.B. Purani had noted down of what Nolini Kanto Gupta told him – A.B. Purani himself was not present in Sri Aurobindo’s house during this period. The final picture that emerges is therefore twice decontextualised, first by A.B. Purani in recounting what Nolini Kanto Gupta had told him, and further by Heehs with a multiplying effect in his book. We should also remember that both Nolini Kanto Gupta and A.B. Purani did not care to mention this juicy gossip in their own books.
Among the other passages which an Indian psyche would look askance at is the casual way in which Heehs has dismissed Darshans as “theatrical” ceremonies.3 Now this shows his utter insensitivity with regard to what thousands of people have felt inwardly at the physical touch of their Gurus. If he himself never had this deeply edifying experience, he should have at least kept silent instead of making fun of it. I wonder what kind of thick skin (or hide) makes him write in this way after staying in that very Ashram for the best part of his life! I hope his supporters will soon realise that they are defending a person whose behaviour they should be ashamed of and make the necessary amends to those who have been deeply offended by his book.
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I end with a final note of clarification in case my defence of the stand taken by most Indian disciples is termed racist, and worse, misconstrued as hatred of Western culture. Most of us have grown here with plenty of Western culture in our college days, when we soaked ourselves in Western literature, admired its frankness and liberality, and even enjoyed its pop music. English and French being the mediums of instruction in the Ashram School, many of us are actually weak in our own regional languages. It is only of late that we have been exposed to the bad side of it and abruptly realised that we cannot take everything lying down! But I suppose this too is a necessary process of globalisation when you grow through confrontation than meekly accept the assumed superiority of Western culture. According to the Mother, the best of every nation should emerge victorious in the spiritual synthesis of the future. God forbid, if, under the garb of freedom of speech, it ends in the victory of the worst of every nation! One such wrong combination would be a weak and diluted form of Indian spirituality bending down to unbridled Western hedonism and materialism. I would of course hope for the reverse to happen – a strong Indian nation integrating the best of Western culture without losing its spiritual core. I am sure everybody, both Westerners and Easterners, will benefit by it.
31 May 2009
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[Debashish Banerji’s pompous interview on so-called fundamentalism in Sri Aurobindo Ashram was published in the Auroville Today issue of February 2010. An edited and watered down version of Raman Reddy’s response to Debashish Banerji was published in the issue of March 2010. Below is the unedited version of his response posted on thelivesofsriaurobindo.com.]
Auroville Today: What are the roots of fundamentalism?
Debashish: It may be through innocent and unthinking means that the apparatus of fundamentalism gets established. For me, it begins with how identity constructs build up unconsciously. Often people pin their sense of self on a group identity. As a group develops, things may get done at certain times in certain ways and over time these characteristics get fixed in the minds of that group as defining that group’s reality. This reality is reinforced by a theology or ideology – the fundamental yet invisible pillars around which identity is built – as well as parables, metaphors and stories, mythologies, which make the members of the group identify with the ideology at the personal, core level.
Raman Reddy: This can hardly apply to the Ashram where the “identity construct” (which is not the word to use here) was not built “unconsciously” but by very conscious spiritual seekers who came to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to practise yoga under their direct guidance. They were even restricted from coming if they were not ready for it. So if the Ashram community acquired a certain homogeneity of temperament, what is wrong? It is actually a healthy sign for a growing collectivity and shows that there are
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plenty of reasons to come together instead of having always ideological differences and never being able to unite to do some practical work. From this point of view, one should condemn all collectivities because people mostly have differences of opinion with each other. Or it means that the ideal collectivity, which Debashish has in mind, should allow everybody from all spheres – from rank communists to the followers of Osama-bin-Laden and from Christian fundamentalists to left-hand Tantriks. What a wonderful pot-pourri will Auroville be if it follows his advice? It only shows that he has never worked in a collectivity where certain rules have to be followed voluntarily, and if you don’t, you are supposed to make a voluntary and gentlemanly exit.
Auroville Today: How would you characterize those traits?
Debashish: In the Peter Heehs’ case there was outrage not only that somebody could have written such a book but also because he was ‘one of us’. So, evidently, the identity construct among those who took action against Peter is very strong: there is a notion that certain tenets are held in common and that these tenets have been violated. And then, of course, the whole thing is about God, the Infinite. This is another aspect of fundamentalism; the group identity stretches to colonize the invisible, the universal, it assumes this tremendous transcendental quality and literalises it in a set of tenets which have to be obeyed.
Raman Reddy: Another indication that Debashish has never lived in a big group. Incompatibility with the collective aim is one thing and “colonising the invisible and universal” is another; there is a huge difference between theory and practice. Theories about accepting everybody always sound very convincing in conference halls, but in practice any group has to guard itself from being hijacked by the wrong persons. So many mischief-mongers (or even persons whose nature was incompatible with the institution) have been thrown out of the Ashram as well as Auroville, and sometimes pretty unceremoniously because they did not go away like gentlemen; if they were gentlemen, the problem would never have occurred.
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Nobody has claimed to have achieved a final framework of ideals with their corresponding set of basic rules of life, not even Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The Mother in the Agenda says that she would have preferred to have no rules at all with regard to the Ashram, but she was forced to have the bare minimum of rules so that people don’t misuse the institution. As for the present, I don’t see what is so wrong about taking the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the basic framework of reference in order to make collective work possible. No intellectual framework at all with only pompous discussion about going beyond religions will lead us nowhere, neither the Ashram nor Auroville. In order to see the sense of my argument, I would suggest a very simple experiment: join a spiritual community.
Auroville Today: Did these tendencies already exist before the present controversy?
Debashish: I think the roots can be traced back to the early 1940s when there was an explosion of numbers in the Ashram. So long as the Ashram had been a small community there was a sense of freedom and the inmates and the gurus were interacting with each other; there was a sense of intimacy. But the increase in scale changed the situation and, for example, certain types of quasi-rituals started establishing themselves.
Raman Reddy: If the roots of fundamentalism “can be traced to the early 1940s”, then this pompous art critic should familiarise himself with Ashram history. The forties was one of the most splendid periods of the Ashram with both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother running its administration. All the activities of the Ashram were organised by the Mother, be it sports, school or the work in various departments such as technical workshops and agricultural farms. All these were daily reported by the Mother to Sri Aurobindo who gave them his full approval. One has to only go through Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years and Champaklal Speaks to get an idea of it.
Debashish: Take the images. In the early years, sadhaks had photographs of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in their own homes, but there were very few photographs in public places.
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Some people were in the habit of putting flowers in front of one such public photograph of Sri Aurobindo, but Sri Aurobindo cautioned his disciples in letters against this, saying he did not want any public display of this kind.
Raman Reddy: In the early years when Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were themselves physically present, they would have naturally discouraged putting up their photographs in public places. The situation has changed with their passing away and now you can expect more photographs of them in public places. Moreover, why should putting up their photographs in institutions dedicated to their spiritual aim be necessarily detrimental to Yoga when it is done in a genuine way? When you have no objection to putting up their photographs in a private room, why raise such a hue and cry over placing of their photographs in meditation halls or conference chambers? As long as our actions haven’t become mere rituals, there is always scope for the right expression of our feelings, especially in the midst of other like-minded people.
Let us not forget that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gave their photographs to disciples for their spiritual help. Sri Aurobindo’s photograph was displayed in the Reception Hall of the Ashram main building even in the thirties. It is in fact this photograph that Debashish is referring to without knowing the full context. In this particular case, the sadhaks were told not to sit and meditate in front of it for long periods because the Reception Hall was primarily meant for visitors. So it was a question of keeping the place for what it was originally meant than an objection by Sri Aurobindo to sadhaks meditating or bowing down in front of his photograph. He writes in the same letter that external worship was never forbidden in the Ashram.1 During this period the sadhaks went through a daily program of Pranam in the morning when the Mother blessed them and gave flowers to impart her spiritual force.
Another set of instructions was given by the Mother with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s Samadhi. Flowers on it were changed every day and a minimum of incense sticks lit, but coconut breaking was firmly disallowed. There was always a balance which the Mother struck between the external act and the inner spirit, which has
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actually been misinterpreted by both religious and anti-religious groups. The anti-religious groups have taken the extreme attitude of disallowing all photographs in order to avoid ritualism, as if that would be more conducive to inner life. In fact, one can argue that the worship of the formless can be as ritualistic as image worship. That division is already there in existing religions: the Muslims, for example, do not have any images or deities in their mosques. From a certain point of view, the meditation conducted in the Matrimandir can also be considered a a symbolic worship of the Divine, which in the future can become a ritual of its own kind. I hasten to correct the negative impression that I might have conveyed by my argument, for personally I have nothing but admiration for the Matrimandir and have passed some of the most delectable moments of my life in its meditation chamber. I had to resort to this extreme argument only to show that the usual Indian way of worship need not be necessarily ritualistic. It is finally by the spirit behind the outward act that you distinguish the genuine expression from the mere ritual.
Debashish: Today, there is a certain kind of closed mind-set that has developed at large among many in the Sri Aurobindo community, a sense that they are the real repositories of the yoga of Sri Aurobindo and that they are the ones who define what it is all about and how it should be done. In fact the situation today, as far as I can see it, is that some people are redefining the yoga and to do this they need occasions like the one offered by the publication of Peter Heehs’ book.
Raman Reddy: I do not see how those who have “a closed mind- set that has developed among many in the Sri Aurobindo community” are “redefining the Yoga”. On the one hand, our learned bhadralok has said we “the fundamentalists” are stuck with old rituals. On the other hand, he seems to be granting us the capacity to innovate and redefine Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. Is this a compliment or criticism? I thought we only insisted upon time- tested methods of surrender, opening to the divine consciousness, not denigrating the Guru, etc., and definitely not changing the very basic principles of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga.
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Debashish: And then, as far as Peter Heehs is concerned, there’s a long history. For many years he has been investigating Ashram mythologies – like the one which says that the Ashram is on the site of Rishi Agastya’s Ashram. And each time he has shown that a mythology is doubtful, he has punctured a little hole in the self-confidence of the group ego and so voices have been raised against him…I remember asking Nirodbaran about Peter and the Agastya issue and he said that there is a need for people like Peter in any spiritual community, because over time it is inevitable that mythologies will grow, people will create these increasingly exaggerated images of the divine guru, and some people have to keep this tendency in check.
Raman Reddy: The Agastya issue, by the way, was brought up by a French archeologist called Jouveau Dubreuil, and not by devotees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He came to the conclusion that Pondicherry was a centre of Vedic learning and that Rishi Agastya was associated with it. He concluded this on the basis of inscriptions found in a church on the Mission Street, which had originally been (or very near) the site of a temple which was destroyed by Dupleix, the French Governor, in 1748. There is sufficient historical evidence to suppose this was true. The evidence is necessarily sparse because it relates to Agastya’s coming to the south of India, the date of which is unfixable, but like many Indian myths, could have a corresponding historical reality. It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo himself discussed the historicity of Krishna while our “world-famous” historian Peter Heehs wrote that Krishna did not exist in the foreword of one of his compilations. Both spiritually and historically, Heehs has disappointed us.
Now it was Jouveau Dubreuil who told Nolini Kanto Gupta (of whom he was a close friend) that Agastya’s Ashram was on the very site of the present Ashram main building. Nolini Kanto Gupta merely repeated the story in an article and the story naturally caught on, given the association of Agastya’s Vedic learning with that of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. George Vrekhem, in fact, writes in his excellent biography of Sri Aurobindo that he wished that the story
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were true. Dubreuil published his findings in Le Semeur, and not all these issues are available. These missing issues apart from the archaeologist’s own credentials (which are definitely more than that of Heehs) give us a hope that he may have written about it. And even if he may not have written, he may have orally conveyed it to Nolini on some solid basis, which he probably could not fully ascertain. As for Nolini himself, his accuracy in reporting is well- known to all who have worked with his manuscripts. Finally, according to the old maps of Pondicherry published recently by the French Institute, the Vedapuri temple associated with Rishi Agastya is only a few hundred metres away from the Ashram main building, which is pretty close for such an ancient event.
Debashish: Regarding the larger issue, I believe that both Sri Aurobindo and The Mother foresaw what is happening now in the Ashram. Towards the end of her life, Mother put a lot of attention on Auroville and perhaps one of the reasons why she insisted there should be no religion, no religious observances, in this new community is that she saw the cascading religiosity among many at the Ashram and she didn’t want the same mistake to be repeated in Auroville.
Raman Reddy: The Mother did not put a lot of attention on Auroville because she had lost hope on the Ashramites, though it is true that many of them could not rise up to her expectations. For that matter, Mother was also critical of Aurovillians in the early seventies. It only means that most of us are full of defects – that’s all. Debashish is trying to pit Auroville against the Ashram, which is plain divisive politics. The truth is that both are creations of the Mother (with Sri Aurobindo’s force behind it) and both have their respective roles to play. I quote from the Mother:
What is the difference between the Ashram and Auroville?
The Ashram will retain its true role of pioneer, inspirer and guide.
Auroville is the attempt towards collective realisation.2 June 1968
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Auroville Today: Are there tendencies to religiosity in Auroville as well?
Debashish: Yes, in certain areas this is happening. But these tendencies are still fluid, they are not grounded in the consciousness of the community in the same way as the insistence upon no religions. But when these tendencies are noticed, it’s important that they are brought to the front and dialogued about. Devotional attitudes and practices can very well be a part of spiritual practice, so long as they make no claim for exclusivity, or an attempt to define the yoga. An active field of dialogue can keep plural approaches to the same goal alive.
Raman Reddy: Aurovillians better be wary about taking advice from the SCIY group who keep condemning all those who disagree with them. The full implications of their philosophy or rather non- philosophy would be very harmful in the long run. “No religion” or “beyond religion” should not mean in the end no Yoga at all! But I suppose only time and experience will show what is right and what is wrong, and to what extent right or wrong. In any case, Yoga is not done through the dialogue of the ignorant but following rather the principles and methods of those who have attained the higher consciousness. For the present, it would be quite safe to found ourselves on the spiritual framework given to us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, which is sufficiently wide to prevent rigidity, than break in a fit of intellectual stupidity the very foundation that they have laid for us with so much difficulty.
20 February 2010
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This is Raman Reddy’s second response to Debashish Banerji’s comments published in Auroville Today. The response referred to by Debashish in his comments is Reddy’s first response to him on his interview on fundamentalism and the Ashram. Both the first response and Debashish’s comments were published in the Auroville Today issue of March 2010.
Debashish: The impression being given in this response to my interview is that conscious sadhaks in a glorious period of the Ashram, directed by Mother and Sri Aurobindo, created the identity construct which accounts for the “homogeneity” of the present Ashram. This view is quite incorrect.
In the 1940s, there was a large influx of people into the Ashram, allowed because they sought protection from the war. Most of these were not admitted because they came for sadhana. The Mother makes a tripartite division of sadhaks, workers and those supporting with money as constituting the post-40’s Ashram community. In recent times, there have been more incursions of people who have come to settle in the Ashram environs with little intent of doing the integral yoga, but of being part of the “homogeneous” devotional community.
Raman Reddy: Debashish Banerji’s response to my rejoinder seems to imply that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother lost control of the Ashram from the 1940s when there was a large influx of people who sought refuge from the War. He says these people, including the children who grew up under the Mother’s care and are now at the helm of the Ashram administration, did not come for sadhana.
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I can understand that the children at that time did not consciously come for sadhana (though most of them stayed back after their studies to precisely take up the sadhana), but on what basis does he say that the adults did not come for sadhana? On the basis of his own sadhana (!) or that of Peter Heehs, who always has held cynical views of the Ashram and the Mother?
Coming to the expansion of the Ashram from the 1940s, it happened spontaneously and the Mother accepted it, encouraged and took advantage of it to widen the physical base of the Ashram, so that fresh energy flowed in without losing sight of the ideal set forth by Sri Aurobindo. This is the miracle that happened in the physical presence of the Mother. Expansion necessarily leads to dilution, as you cannot mass produce yogis like Nolini, Amrita and Pavitra, but the loss in height is offset by the gain in width. If the Mother were reluctant about expanding the Ashram, why did she go out of the way to start a school and later a centre for higher education in 1951 for the children who came in the early forties? Why did she set up a wonderful sports infrastructure through the late Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya, whom she considered to be one of her best instruments of action? Why did she encourage Udar Pinto and Dayabhai Patel to start business units? Why did she start the Press and the handmade paper unit, to mention only a few of the numerous departments of the Ashram? And what about the workshops and farms? What about the building construction work and finally even a Sugar Mill in the mid sixties? Does Debashish know enough of Ashram history to comment so glibly about its development?
Even Auroville, for that matter, is a logical culmination of this ever-widening movement of the Mother’s action. Many don’t even know that the concept of Auroville with cultural pavilions representing all the nations of the world was first clearly stated by the Mother in 1952,1 shortly after the opening of the university, which later was renamed for technical reasons as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram International Centre of Education. For some reason, the collective experiment did not pick up as much as the education, which provided a new and alternative curriculum to several
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generations of students and is still continuing to do so. In the sixties, there was a natural spillover of the Ashram into the formation of Auroville. Many of the first pioneers of Auroville were in fact those persons who got married and had children and were sent by the Mother to settle there because they were not ready for the yogic life of the Ashram. This does not mean that they were failures – there is no failure in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, only evolution – but that they were instrumental for the next phase of the Mother’s action. It is in this spontaneous way that things always happened at the Ashram and the Mother made use of every opportunity to expand the ambit of her spiritual influence.
After the Mother’s passing away in 1973, the circumference of her spiritual action seems to have further increased and spread across India, especially in the states of Orissa and Tamilnadu, and less in the rest of the world, so that no single institution can now claim monopoly over Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s teachings. The question that comes to my mind is how is it that the most difficult of Yogas, a Yoga which begins where the old Yogas end, has been at all accepted by so many. It only shows the Power that is behind and the infinite plasticity it has to adapt itself to various levels of consciousness. It is in the context of this action of the Mother that the present situation should be judged. People often compare the glorious days of old with the present times, but they don’t visualise what would have happened had there been no takers after the first generation of disciples disappeared with time. Thus, ironically, it is this very dilution that has been our gain, for otherwise so many of us would never have had the chance to enter the life of the Ashram. This of course does not mean that more dilution is welcome, because there is a point at which we have to stop, prevent a further fall and even defend the institution from the hostile attacks of those forces which are too ready to enter the Ashram and destroy it from without or within.
Debashish: This majority is in the process of redefining the yoga in its practical and theoretical foundations so as to turn it into a religion, a development which the Mother foresaw and warned against. Predictably, leaders of this inchoate mass
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have appeared, so as to give voice to their narrow interests. These leaders use events such as the publication of Peter Heehs’ book as occasions to set themselves up in positions of power.
Moreover, homogeneity is the very antithesis of the Integral Yoga. Rather, it is the basis of what could properly be called Totalitarian Religion. What I have said in my interview is that devotion can very well be a part of the integral yoga community, but an integral yoga community which was set up to be representative of world humanity, must have the openness to allow different approaches to the yoga. It should not turn into a homogeneous mass of narrow traits, beliefs and practices which responds with aggression – in Peter’s case, court action, arrest warrants and deportation – to “cleanse” itself through extermination of whatever escapes the limits of its small and ignorant interpretation.
Raman Reddy: As for religious fundamentalism due to the homogeneity of temperament of the Ashram community, hasn’t this argument become a little stale? It seems to be made up only to protect Heehs and nobody else. Incidentally, a young Indian friend of mine had to leave the Ashram due to some allegations thrown at him. This happened after Heehs’s scandal and removal from the Archives. So why did not these great defenders of freedom come to his rescue? This shows how this whole episode has been unfortunately turned into an American (or Westerner) versus Indian issue by the supporters of Heehs. I guess it is because of this that the Trust could not take any firm action against him, and certainly not because they found his book good. How I wish that this group had shown more solidarity with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother than with Heehs. The symbolic unity of the East and West is after all represented by the coming together of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and not of Debashish Banerji and Peter Heehs!
It has been argued that in America the kind of unfounded criticism of Sri Aurobindo that Heehs has indulged in, is taken lightly as part of life. That could also be now true in India, but I wonder whether that applies to the circumstances of this particular
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case. We have been saying right from the beginning and I repeat that there is a big difference between what happens outside the institution and inside it. Outside, in scholarly forums, you can keep discussing all sorts of theories till the end of Time and nobody is going to object, but inside institutions dedicated to a specific purpose, be it spirituality, business or politics, certain rules are observed by all the members. This is not totalitarianism, but plain common sense. For example, can you conceive of a Microsoft employee denigrating Bill Gates and expect him to be honoured for his opinions? Or Barack Obama welcoming Osama-bin-Laden with open arms? Or even the SCIY website posting articles which are critical of its stand on Heehs? You don’t, for the simple reason, that organisations are necessarily founded with a particular end in view, which, in case of disagreement, you quietly distance yourself from, instead of creating a rumpus over your resignation.
There is thus no “larger issue”, no “religious fundamentalism”, no “totalitarian view” imposed by the many over the few in this issue. The fact that it has been represented as such is plain politics. How can Heehs after criticising Sri Aurobindo left and right hope to be reinstated with honour in the same office in which he did his mischief ? Which disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would like to work under him? The Ashram is after all dedicated to them and not Heehs, who wanted to simply use its infrastructure to further his own ambition of becoming a famous writer by criticising a great Yogi. His book is full of uncalled for speculations on Sri Aurobindo’s sexual life, highly biased judgments on his major works and deceptive presentations of his personality. It is true that there is plenty of raw data in it, but the interpretation is that of a newcomer who refuses to understand spirituality. What Heehs has been insidiously doing from the last 37 years is an attempt to portray Sri Aurobindo bereft of his spiritual greatness!
Despite the accusation that our website has been emotional on this issue, we have exposed the defects of the book with ample intellectual arguments. We have posted more than 70 articles, comments and letters on the subject from last year but, to date, we have received very few academic responses in defence of Heehs.
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By serious academic responses, I don’t mean general overviews of how readers have felt (or mostly not felt) but coming down to the nitty-gritty of historical documents or at least making a detailed analysis of the presentation of various events in the book. All that we have got are accusations of being fundamentalists, personal attacks and allegations against us of wanting to take over the Ashram administration! But I suppose this is what people do when they don’t have any genuine arguments to defend their stand!
Debashish quotes:
Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.
A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life which must be created; it is a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.
Everything in its essence and its truth should be included in this realisation. This realisation must be an expression as total, as complete, as universal as possible of the divine reality. Only that can save humanity and the world. That is the great spiritual revolution of which Sri Aurobindo speaks. And this is what he wanted us to realise.2
Raman Reddy: I smile when Debashish pulls up a long quote of the Mother to attack the Ashram and in the process try to turn people against her, for that is what it amounts to. How can you quote Sri Aurobindo and the Mother against their own Yoga? Either you follow them or you don’t, but you can’t have it both ways. Either you say that their ideas are outdated and insufficient to face the problems of life today and offer an alternative package, or you
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simply accept and follow them as best you can. There is even a logical fallacy in the presentation of the quote from the Mother. If the Mother herself has said not to make a religion out of spiritual experience, would you now consider this very idea of “not making a religion of spiritual experience” as an outdated concept, because she said that forty-three years ago? Or would you simply listen to her advice and exercise caution in the matter of rituals? Truth remains truth as long as it is applicable, so also what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have said will remain true until you really exceed them, which will surely take a pretty long time. Therefore, when somebody challenges Sri Aurobindo and attacks him in a hostile way, he is supposed to come up with an alternative philosophy and not merely quote Sri Aurobindo to undermine him. Or is it that he wants to improve upon what Sri Aurobindo has said? In that case, I would surely question his credentials!
The accusation that the present disciples are making a religion of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga has to be substantiated, not just proclaimed. Is expressing devotion and allegiance to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother symptomatic of religion? Is cleaving to the path of the Yoga as indicated by them a sign of stupidity? Is looking upon them as Avatars contrary to spiritual sense? Secondly, what kind of rituals do the Ashramites practise? Eight hours of work, physical education, cultural participation and meditation at the Samadhi or the Playground – are these the stifling rituals that have to be changed? I thought that these are pretty healthy activities. Religion generally implies a set of compulsory observances such as the reading of namaaz five times a day or conducting pujas on certain days of the week, which, if you don’t follow strictly, you do not belong to that religion. Where is that kind of compulsion in the Ashram? There are disciples who never go to the Samadhi and are yet respected. Or is it the march-past on darshan days that has become a ritual? But these programmes are performed with pride in the most secular of institutions, especially the army. Finally, you should not be put off by the large number of visitors that arrive on Darshan days, which are more meant for them than the residents of the Ashram. In India, where pilgrimages are more popular than picnics and tirthayâtrâ is equated with trekking, you
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should always expect a crowd wherever there is a trace of genuine spirituality. It only shows how quickly the Indian mind can log on to the spirit.
There remains the possibility of formulating a set of precepts out of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s vast body of knowledge and imposing them on everybody as a new religion. If such a formulation has indeed been made, where is this booklet of precepts? We have only a book of the most basic rules of yogic life such as no alcohol, no drugs and no sex, and rules telling us to inform the concerned authorities whenever we go out of station, not to lodge other people in the houses allotted to us, etc., but where is the set of directions on how to do the sadhana? Even if such a set of instructions has been informally practised, I would like somebody to put it on paper with the agreement of all the disciples of the Ashram. The result of such an attempt, I am sure, will be an explosion of disagreement in the classic Indian style of discussion. In fact, this possibility was discussed by the Mother in the Agenda where she expressed her strong misgivings about this kind of formulation. It is perhaps because of this that there are very few good compilations of their works. She was even against too many explanations of Sri Aurobindo’s books by teachers because she feared they would misinterpret them. She instructed them to simply read aloud the text and give the minimum of their own commentary. Actually, it is not the simple-hearted disciples who have the capacity to formulate a religion, it is the pundits allied with the politicians who generally create it. So, if at all a new religion is formulated by the followers of Sri Aurobindo, it will be the intellectuals and administrators who will do it for “the good of humanity” at the risk of losing all inner spontaneity. From this point of view, the common disciple will be far better off with the good old fundamentals of spirituality – faith, peace, aspiration, perseverance, surrender and devotion, and above all relying on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s own words than anybody else’s interpretation of their Yoga.
1 April 2010
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[Jugal Kishore Mukherji (1925-2009) was the author of a dozen books in English and Bengali on various aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and Yoga. He was head of the Higher Course of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Centre of Education for several decades and was an expert on the major works of Sri Aurobindo, especially The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga. Well-known for the exceptional clarity of his mind while teaching his students, not many are aware that he refuted with equal clarity distortions and misrepresentations of Sri Aurobindo’s life and teachings. Twenty years before the Lives of Sri Aurobindo controversy became a big public issue in August/ September 2008, Jugal Kishore wrote two long letters to the Ashram Trust exposing the distortions of Peter Heehs in the Archives & Research magazine, published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust in the 1980s. Had the Ashram Trust taken sufficient note of his letters and acted firmly then, it could have easily avoided the huge public embarrassment that Peter Heehs caused it twenty years later.]
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Guru-bhâis of mine will understand me aright and forgive me for my supposed misdemeanour which may appear as an affront to them. I humbly crave their indulgence to be treated impersonally. From my side I can state that, irrespective of their possible displeasure towards me, I shall continue to hold them in the highest regard and love in future as well as in the past. To me this is just a passing incident and I pray with all my heart that they, too, will continue to show me the same love and affection that they have evinced till this day. At any rate, I am placing myself at the feet of MOTHER and SRI AUROBINDO to be judged by THEM and protected against any possible misunderstanding.
So far for my introductory remarks; now to come to the point in question:
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A few Types of Lapses
(As this copy of my original letter, addressed to the Trustees, is meant for respected JAYANTILAL-da, I leave out typing the portions pertaining to other publications. I confine myself here solely to the sections dealing with some of the types of lapses as found in the journal SRI AUROBINDO Archives and Research)
Let me cite here one flagrant instance of this type of lapse:
Subject: True reason operating behind Sri Aurobindo’s departure from Calcutta to Chandernagore, then from Chandernagore to Pondicherry.
All of us in the Ashram know and know it for many many years – and that, too, on Sri Aurobindo’s own testimony – that both these departures occurred due to some ‘Adesh’ or ‘spiritual command’ that Sri Aurobindo received. Sri Aurobindo has referred to this inner reason again and again in all his written and oral statements. To cite only two of these:
“Sri Aurobindo’s departure to Chandernagore was the result of a sudden decision taken on the strength of an âdeœa from above and was carried out rapidly and secretly without consultation with anybody or advice from any quarter.”1 (Underlined by me – Jugal)
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“Sri Aurobindo one night at the Karmayogin office received information of the Government’s intention to search the office and arrest him. While considering what should be his attitude, he received a sudden command from above to go to Chandernagore in French India. He obeyed the command at once, for it was now his rule to move only as he was moved by the divine guidance and never to resist and depart from it; he did not stay to consult with anyone, but in ten minutes was at the river ghât… … … At Chandernagore he plunged entirely into solitary meditation and ceased all other activities. Then there came to him a call to proceed to Pondicherry.”2 (pp.28-29. Underlined by me – Jugal)
Well, this is all that we, the children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, knew and accepted and know till this day. But our ARCHIVES journal, without being satisfied with Sri Aurobindo’s assertion, seeks to discover some compelling outer reasons which must have(!) prompted Sri Aurobindo’s decision and departure! A misplaced zeal for historical research has led our brother Peter H. to waste a lot of his energy, also a lot of paper and ink, to come to this preposterous conclusion:
“Warned by friends of a plan to have him arrested, Sri Aurobindo left Calcutta one night in February 1910.” (Archives and Research, April 1985, p.109)
How daringly Peter asserts:
“Outwardly, Sri Aurobindo left Bengal in order to avoid arrest by the British Police.” (Archives and Research, December 1985, p.218)
And what language does Peter use to depict Sri Aurobindo’s intention and conduct! Hurting the feelings of all of us he asserts:
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“Once arrived in Pondicherry, his unwillingness to undergo a third political prosecution obliged him to remain there as an ‘absconder’” (Archives, Vol.IX, No.2, p.218. Underlined by me – Jugal)
Pity is this that we have to swallow this stuff dished out by our own Ashram journal published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram itself!
And the mischief does not end there… To cap it all, the compiler of the booklet Sri Aurobindo and Pondicherry (published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram) devotes a long paragraph to the exposition of this new-found(!) ‘truth’(!). Here are some characteristic sentences occurring on pp. 4-5 of this book:
“The writer of a life-sketch of Parthasarathy has even asserted that Sri Aurobindo’s choice of Pondicherry as a place of refuge was the result of a suggestion made by the Tamil youth. When Parthasarathy heard about the police harassment Sri Aurobindo was undergoing, he pointed out the advantages of Pondicherry, telling Sri Aurobindo that the French settlement might prove ‘congenial to his mission’. We have seen that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry at the suggestion of no one, but in obedience to a divine command. But by speaking to Sri Aurobindo about the city, Parthasarathy may have played an instrumental role in Sri Aurobindo’s coming.”
My humble query is this: How true is this account as given by ‘the writer of a life-sketch of Parthasarathy’? Has Sri Aurobindo anywhere mentioned that ‘the Tamil youth’ suggested to him the ‘choice of Pondicherry as a place of refuge’? If not, why to bring in, then, in our own journal Archives and Research this sort of far-fetched unauthenticated extraneous accounts only to belittle the importance of the inner Adesh as referred to by Sri Aurobindo himself ? Is it really good on our part to do so?
I have, I think, said enough about this point. Now, let me pass on to the consideration of another type of lapse indulged in by the Archives journal and this is much more serious than the above- mentioned fifth one.
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Subject: Sri Aurobindo’s giving instructions or not to his Counsel Chitta Ranjan Das
Here is what Sri Aurobindo himself has to say about the matter. After his release from year long detention in the Alipore jail, Sri Aurobindo delivered his famous Uttarpara Speech on 30th May, 1909. In course of this speech, while referring to his trial proceedings in the Court, Sri Aurobindo clearly stated:
“When the trial opened in the Sessions Court, I began to write many instructions for my Counsel as to what was false in the evidence against me and on what points the witnesses might be cross-examined. Then something happened which I had not expected. The arrangements which had been made for my defence were suddenly changed and another Counsel stood there to defend me. He came unexpectedly, – a friend of mine, but I did not know he was coming. You have all heard the name of the man who put away from him all other thoughts and abandoned all his practice, who sat up half the night day after day for months and broke his health to save me, – Srijut Chittaranjan Das. When I saw him, I was satisfied, but I still thought it necessary to write instructions. Then all that was put away from me and I had the message from within, ‘This is the man who will save you from the snares put around your feet. Put aside those papers. It is not you who will instruct him. I will instruct him.’ From that time I did not of myself speak a word to my Counsel about the case or give a single instruction, and if ever I was asked a question, I always found that my answer did not help the case. I had left it to him and he took it entirely into his hands, with what result you know.”3 (Centenary Volume 2, pp. 5-6. [Underlined by Jugal)
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Years later Sri Aurobindo, writing of himself in the 3rd Person, confirmed the same spiritual truth of the matter. Here are his own words:
“In the Sessions Court the accused were confined in a large prisoners’ cage and here during the whole day he (Sri Aurobindo) remained absorbed in his meditation attending little to the trial and hardly listening to the evidence. C.R. Das, one of his Nationalist collaborators and a famous lawyer, had put aside his large practice and devoted himself for months to the defence of Sri Aurobindo who left the case entirely to him and troubled no more about it; for he had been assured from within and knew that he would be acquitted.”4 (vide Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Cent. Ed. p. 34. Underlined by me – Jugal)
*** So, this is the truth as revealed by Sri Aurobindo himself and this the spiritual explanation behind Sri Aurobindo taking little interest in the later stages of the trial proceedings; and all of us, children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, have all along accepted it to be so.
But now our Archives and Research journal has sought to re- examine the question and has devoted a full page and a long footnote to come to the astounding conclusion:
“Sri Aurobindo continued to give advice to his lawyers throughout the trial period.”
(See Archives and Research, December 1982, p.230)
And what basis is there for Peter to arrive at this preposterous discovery which turns Sri Aurobindo into a deliberate liar? – Oh, according to the writer of the Archives, our MATRIPRASAD remembers to have had a conversation with Nolini-da in July or August 1982 in course of which Nolini-da reported to have made a statement like that and ‘Matriprasad says’ Nolini-da confirmed the same on Sept.15 !!
** The writer of Archives expresses “thanks to Matriprasad for this and other pieces of information from Nolini-da.” (See Archives and Research, Dec. ’82, p.230 footnote)
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“Thanks”, indeed, for the credit of proving Sri Aurobindo wrong! I wonder what our MOTHER would have thought about this sort of sacrilegious writing in our own Ashram journal! Alas, our most revered brother Nolini-da is no longer there in his body to consult him. Otherwise I would have gone to him and brought the matter to his notice. From my close personal acquaintance with Nolini-da, spread over more than thirty years, I can testify to his utter reverence for all Sri Aurobindo’s utterances and statements. And, to cite him, of all persons, against what Sri Aurobindo himself has unequivocally said!! Oh!
And what a funny explanation is offered by the Archives journal to account for the apparent contradiction between the two statements of Sri Aurobindo and the observation of Nolini-da:
“Nolini-da clarified that when Sri Aurobindo put his defence into Das’s hands – or rather into the hands of the Supreme Lord using Das as his instrument – it was an inner movement and this did not prevent him from taking a detached outward interest in the affair.”
What a clever play with words! I humbly ask: Did Nolini-da really say so to Matriprasad? Even if it is proved that he really said so, my humble question is this: Should our own journal Archives be a forum to cite a disciple, however great he may be, to controvert Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements???
The climax is still to come. The learned writer of the Archives and Research goes on to incorporate a historical instance to prove the point! He states in mock seriousness:
“One is reminded of a well-known anecdote of Napoleon. Asked why he spent so much time planning if he believed in the power of Fate, he replied that it was fated that he should plan.” (Archives and Research, Dec. ’82, p.230 footnote)
** Oh! How wonderfully we ourselves, disciples and children of Sri Aurobindo, through the pages of our own journal, are making our Guru Sri Aurobindo a laughing stock before the reading public!!!!
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Now, let me exemplify another type of lapse, in which our Archives and Research is indulging.
Subject: Whether Sri Aurobindo met Sister Nivedita after he suddenly decided, on the strength of an Adesh, to leave Calcutta for Chandernagore.
(Be it noted, in this connection, that people associated with the Ramakrishna Mission have been assiduously spreading the unfounded rumour that on the day of his departure Sri Aurobindo saw Nivedita, also visited Sri Saradamani Devi, wife of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, and received from her some kind of dîksâ. Sri Aurobindo has strongly denied the veracity of both these claims – and that, too, many a time. For us, children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the matter should obviously rest there.
But our brother Peter, in the pages of the journal Archives, has engaged himself in a hotly debated controversy around these settled questions as if Sri Aurobindo needs to be cross-examined!!
Leaving aside for the moment the issue of Saradamani Devi, let me confine myself to the question of Nivedita alone.)
Here are some of Sri Aurobindo’s own statements regarding the question of his seeing or not Sister Nivedita immediately before his departure from Calcutta. All these citations are taken from the book Sri Aurobindo on Himself (Centenary edition):
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a message to her asking her to conduct the Karmayogin
in my absence.”6 (p. 56)
*** I ask: Can any child of Sri Aurobindo entertain any doubt about the matter after all these written statements of Sri Aurobindo? Surely not, I dare say. But not so is the case with the writer in our Archives! He catches hold of a stray sentence occurring in NIROD-da’s Talks with Sri Aurobindo wherein Nirod- da, quite erroneously, has reported that Sri Aurobindo told him on February 3, 1939: “I saw Nivedita before I left Calcutta for Chandernagore, and asked her to take charge of the paper (Karmayogin).”10 (Talks, 1966 edition, pp. 377-78)
When this discrepancy was brought to Nirod-da’s notice, he readily agreed that “Sri Aurobindo’s words were not recorded correctly” (See Archives and Research, Vol.VIII, No.2, p.232)
But even then our brother Peter would not relent! He insists: “I believe the mistake here was not in the recording (by Nirodbaran), but in the telling (by Sri Aurobindo).” (Archives, ibid., p.232)
Note the words “I believe”, also “mistakes in the telling”. Trying
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to protect the so-called prestige of the disciple by proving the Guru wrong!! How audacious!
Peter is quite aware of the fact that Sri Aurobindo has again and again denied the ‘fact’ (!) of his having seen Nivedita on his way to Chandernagore. Our friend Peter himself writes: “Here (in Nirod-da’s recorded Talks, recorded from memory) and nowhere else Sri Aurobindo said he met Nivedita before going to Chandernagore.” (See Archives and Research, Dec. ’84, pp.231- ’32. Underlined by me – Jugal)
Peter writes, too: “All Sri Aurobindo’s written and dictated accounts are consistent in saying that he went directly from the Karmayogin office to the ghat without stopping to see anybody.” (Ibid., p.231. Underlined by me – Jugal)
I humbly submit: Knowing these consistent and many times reiterated assertions of Sri Aurobindo, our writer in the Archives should have closed the chapter at that and dismissed Nirod-da’s reporting as an inadvertent slip. But, alas, Peter could not accept Nirod-da’s own explanation that it was not Sri Aurobindo who made the slip but it was he (Nirod-da) who might have misreported Sri Aurobindo’s utterance. Peter H. is determined to ‘prove’ that “in 1939 he (Sri Aurobindo) made a slip about one detail.” (see Archives, Ibid., p.233) – Not only that. Hypothetically accepting for the moment that Sri Aurobindo had indeed seen Nivedita before his departure for Chandernagore, Peter H. advances to “psycho- analyse” Sri Aurobindo in order to find out possible factors operating behind his (Sri Aurobindo’s) repeated denial to the contrary. Too shocking to believe?? Yet it is true. For this, one may read the first half of para two of p.233 of Archives, Vol. ‘No.2
** As a matter of fact, our brother P.H., claiming to act as a so- called impartial (!) historian, wants first to put Sri Aurobindo in the dock, hypothetically advance all sorts of charges that could possibly be framed against him, examine them in turn and then come to the judgment that, after all, all other charges against Sri Aurobindo are proved fallacious except perhaps one or two counts(!) under which Sri Aurobindo may be proceeded against!
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I wonder at this misplaced zeal. Pages and pages of our own Ashram journal Archives have been consumed to deal with this unnecessary and unsavoury controversy!
And what atrocious irreverent expressions P.H. uses with reference to Sri Aurobindo’s hypothetically supposed action and conduct! Here are some examples of his “historical” investigation concerning the question at issue: [All underlinings are Jugal’s]
(** I say: “Brother Peter, it is no ‘problem’ at all. It is Nirod-da who made the slip – and NOT Sri Aurobindo.” But this is the difficulty with the intellectuals: how they make mountains out of molehills!)
(What intellectual fire-works, I say!)
**(I say: “Brother Peter, do you think your personal ‘believing’ is sufficient to ‘prove’ Sri Aurobindo wrong?”)
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(I say: “Good Gracious! Sri Aurobindo wanting to conceal!! And this hypothesis is being considered in our own Journal! How strange!”)
(Ah, what a kind consideration shown to Sri Aurobindo! Sri Aurobindo resorting to deliberate dissimulation?? – what an irreverent expression!
“Another explanation might be put forward: between 1939 and 1944 Sri Aurobindo forgot about the visit, and in his first written account he denied that it occurred; subsequently this version became fixed in his mind, and as result all subsequent written or dictated accounts are consistent with the first. This explanation would allow one to suppose that the visit to Nivedita did take place without having to assume that Sri Aurobindo deliberately falsified the record later.” Then Peter adds: “I have gone to the trouble to suggest this possibility because the 1939 account (This is Peter’s bugbear. – J.) and Sureshchandra’s 1925 account read together do lend support of sorts to the Nivedita visit…” (Archives, ibid., p.233)
(I feel like exclaiming: “What a hypothesis, Peter! Sri Aurobindo could remember the fact from 1910 to 1939, and then something happened and Sri Aurobindo lost his memory in or around 1944!!!” And this is being dished out in our own journal Archives with much of fanfare!)
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(Uh! Our Master Sri Aurobindo has to prove his veracity against the evidence of a total non-entity like Ramchandra Majumdar!! I say, there should be a limit to absurdity.)
At long last our writer in the Archives comes to the conclusion that Sri Aurobindo’s written or dictated statements are, after all, true to facts. It is like abusing a person to one’s heart’s content and then saying: “I am sorry, Sir. Excuse me.”
But what’s the use of so much shadow-boxing at Sri Aurobindo’s cost? What’s the ‘great’ purpose behind it? Don’t we know that if we throw stones into the mud-heap, dirt will be flung back at us with redoubled vigour? Is this the right way of ‘guarding the prestige and honour’ of Sri Aurobindo?
**And may I humbly ask: “Should our Ashram journal Archives and Research be used by our own writers as an instrument to X- ray our Lord Sri Aurobindo, to treat him as a biological specimen to be placed on the microscope-slide and minutely examined?” Sri Aurobindo is not a mere literary fighter to be subjected to historical criticism like any other ‘mortal’. He is to us, in the memorable words of the Mother, “a might action straight from the Supreme” (Centenary Volume 13, p. 4) Sri Aurobindo himself has explained
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that “the Avatar is always a dual phenomenon of divinity and humanity”, a harmonious blending of the two. But for the sadhaks the main concern should be with the aspect of divinity. Any undue and unholy preoccupation with the Avatar’s so-called ‘human failings’ will definitely harm their spiritual welfare. Mother has warned us against this type of profanation. She has also forbidden us against being curious about the sundry details of the external life of a truly spiritual personage.
So my humble entreaty: Let outsiders speak whatever they want to speak about Mother and Sri Aurobindo; it is their affair. But let us not join their ranks and employ our own journals and books to subject THEM to criticism. That will be, to say the least, the height of ingratitude.
While describing his departure from Calcutta to Chandernagore, then from Chandernagore to Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo himself always used expressions like “going to”, “proceeding to”, “departure to”, “on his way to”, “left for”, etc. But Peter flings expressions like “Sri Aurobindo’s escape”, his subsequent “flight to Pondicherry”, etc.
Where Sri Aurobindo says that he went into “secret residence”, our brother Peter expresses the same fact by saying that Sri Aurobindo ‘absconded’, ‘fled to Chadernagore in great secrecy’. Elsewhere Peter writes: “the way he (Sri Aurobindo) jumps back…shows that the two open letters got mixed together in his mind. This slip is evident also…” Instances can be multiplied to any extent.
Our Archives journal scatters ‘objectionable’ expressions with obvious ease! I wonder how our MOTHER would have reacted to these expressions used with reference to Sri Aurobindo!
** Perhaps there is a basic difference between the psychological approach of an Indian and that of a Westerner towards one’s Guru.
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Hence, while speaking about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, linguistic expressions which sound jarring and painful to the consciousness of us Indians, may appear quite innocent and appropriate to an Occidental like Peter.
But is that sufficient reason why our own Ashram journal Archives should indulge in such hurtful expressions when more sober expressions are available for the purpose?
** My earnest request: Please give some serious consideration to this question.
In this way the writer Peter remains technically correct. But the danger inherent in this type of practice is obvious. After some lapse of time, the readers forget the note of dubiety, and the principal statements stick in the readers’ minds as undubitable truth, and these are thenceforward transmitted from person to person as historical ‘facts’!
** Is it good to do so in our Ashram journal? – Such is my humble query.
It is high time I stop talking about the journal Archives and Research. …I have already covered (11) pages and yet it is only the tip of the iceberg. I have ventured to bring before your kind attention certain lapses in the field of publication. And once I
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have done so, now the load is off from my head and heart. It is for you to decide what to do in the matter.
I earnestly hope and pray that the Guru-bhais I have referred to will kindly excuse me for my uncouth bluntness. I have no personal bias against any one of them. As a matter of fact, I have the greatest admiration for Peter’s literary capabilities, dedication to work, and editorial meticulousness. Only, certain mental attitudes, which hurt the feelings of us, the Indian devotees of Sri Aurobindo, are constantly creeping into his writings and these are being published in our own Ashram journal! Therein lies my objection.
I hope and pray, Peter will not nurture any grievance against me for this letter of mine. However, in the final analysis,
LET THEIR (MOTHER’S and SRI AUROBINDO’S) WILL BE DONE.
Yours sincerely
In the service of Mother and Sri Aurobindo Jugal
22-6-86
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[After Jugal Kishore Mukherji wrote his first letter to the Ashram Trustees in June 1986, Jayantilal Parekh, former head and founder of the Archives Dept. of the Ashram, wrote a letter to the Trustees in defence of Peter Heehs’s so-called research published in the Archives & Research journal. Jugal Kishore Mukherji then wrote a second and final letter to the Trustees in June 1987 on the same matter, referring frequently to portions from what he called J.P.’s Statement (Jayantilal Parekh’s letter), after which he kept silent. Heehs got away with Jayantilal solidly protecting him not because the latter approved his biased opinions, but because Jayantilal needed him for the material organisation of the Archives Dept. Later, Jayantilal warned Heehs to be careful in whatever he wrote because he would have to face one day or the other the result of his actions. The slow wheel of Karma caught up with Heehs twenty years later, in 2008.]
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry
June 12, 1987
After one long year, since my last communication to you dated June 15, ’86, I am constrained to approach you once again with a rather heavy heart; ‘heavy heart’, because I never imagined that I would have to plead my case again after the lapse of one year. I thought, when I wrote to you my last letter, that with a little goodwill and understanding on everyone’s part, the problem raised could be adequately solved to the satisfaction of all concerned. But, our human nature being as it is, that was not to be. And my optimism has proved to be infructuous.
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A few days back, Brother Manoj has shown me a copy of Jayantilal Parekh-da’s statement issued on 4.6.87. In this comprehensive omnibus statement J.P. has touched upon many a problem he has faced in course of his long association with the Ashram publishing work. Inter alia he has referred to some of my objections and misgivings given expression to in my previous communication to you and has sought to brush them aside as of no consequence. But I am sorry to state that none of my basic queries have been satisfactorily answered. As a matter of fact, after a very careful and sympathetic perusal of the relevant portions of J.P.-da’s statement, I am more convinced than ever before that some of the fundamental principles and attitudes governing the writing of the Archival Notes in the journal SRI AUROBINDO: Archives and Research should be changed in the wider interest of our loyal service to Mother and Sri Aurobindo. I crave our indulgence to make clear in this present communication the rationale of my anxious feeling and conviction. Otherwise, a cursory reading of J.P.’s statement will convey the not so right impression in the unwary reader’s mind that all my points have been conclusively answered, when, in truth, they have not been so.
I keep mum here about all other issues raised by other persons and alluded to by J.P. in his statement. I am solely concerned with P.’s [Peter’s] observations and conclusions as embodied in the Archival Notes. While writing this second letter of mine, I have no wish to engage in any sort of literary polemic nor to score any points in debate. I do not want to lose sight of the main points while debating over small details. Far from indulging in rhetorics and innuendos, I would limit myself only to the fundamentals and basic principles. My sole objective in writing this second letter as a reply to J.P.s statement is to keep the record straight and bring once again to your kind attention my well-considered misgivings and objections as regards certain traits of the Archival Notes. If the Archives and Research would not have been our Ashram journal published under the editorship of one of our venerable Trustees, I would have kept my sorrows to myself and would not have bothered you in any way.
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At the very outside I would like to clear one misunderstanding. It is as regards the text published in Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram. It was a deplorable slip on my part. I myself became aware of my oversight some time after I drafted my letter. I tender an unqualified apology for this avoidable lapse. …Now to the other points:
My only objection is that these ground rules of ‘authenticity’, ‘meticulous care’ and proper verification are NOT being always observed in course of the Archival writing. I shall instance my conclusion a little later on.
My comments: How authentic is this information? Neither Sri Aurobindo himself, nor Moni-da (Suresh Chakravarty), nor Purani- ji or Nirod-da in their recorded talks with Sri Aurobindo, nor even Dr. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in his massive 800-page biography of Sri Aurobindo, even for once mentions this significant information. And now, so late in the day, we are asked to accept this as part of Sri Aurobindo’s life-history solely on the basis of the testimony of Parthasarthy’s brother-in-law, brought to light in 1959, fifty long years after the reported “suggestion”. This piece of news cannot be admitted as true in all its details, unless it is properly checked and rechecked by other independently verifiable sources. J.P. remarks: “There is no reason for us to doubt the story.” I humbly say: the writer of the Archival Notes may not have any reason to doubt. But surely that is not sufficient to include this as Sri Aurobindo’s new life-material. More about this later on.
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I very much doubt the veracity of this information. Reasons for my doubt will be given below.
J.P. continues: “When Suresh Chakravarty reaches Pondicherry the letter was given to Srinivasachary, as Parthasarthy was away from home.”
This, too, in my humble opinion, does not seem to be true to facts. I shall presently explain.
In the Archival Notes (vide April 1985, p.121) it is written: “The writer of Parthasarthy’s life-sketch asserts convincingly (convincingly to whom? To the writer of the Archival Notes? Or to other competent persons in the Ashram? – This is my query – Jugal) that this letter of introduction was ‘addressed to Parthasarthy Ayengar, C/o ‘India’, Pondicherry’. Parthasarthy was out of town the day Moni arrived, and the young Bengali was received by Srinivas Acharya. Since the addressee was absent, Moni said that the letter “should be regarded as being addressed to whoever was in charge of ‘India’ at Pondicherry. Srinivas Acharya opened the letter and learnt of Sri Aurobindo’s plan.” (Archives and Research, Vol. 9, No. 1, p.121)
This flowery account hardly seems to be true and cannot be allowed to form a part of future biographies of Sri Aurobindo. The reasons are as follows:
/ para 8) . And this is what Dr. K.R.S. Iyengar has to say about the issue in question:
“In the meantime, Suresh Chakravarti (Moni) – who had been asked by Sri Aurobindo to proceed to Pondicherry in advance
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and make some arrangements for his stay – had left Calcutta by train on 28 March. …He carried with him a letter of introduction to Srinivasachariar, a sterling Nationalist, who was bringing out India… It was thought that Srinivasachariar and his friends would be able to make suitable arrangements for Sri Aurobindo’s stay at Pondicherry. On arriving there on 31st March 1910, Moni duly met Srinivasachariar with the letter.” (Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, 4th edition, pp.358-‘59)
Please note in Dr. Iyengar’s account the expressions “letter of introduction to Srinivasachariar” and “duly met Srinivasachariar with the letter”. Where is Parthasarthy here? Letter of introduction to Parthasarthy? Simply because he was out of town, the letter was delivered to Srinivasachariar? And from now on all these elements will form part of Sri Aurobindo’s biography – perhaps in a later edition of Iyengar’s book too, on the basis of the assertion made in the Archival Notes of our own Ashram journal!
“What Sureshchandra Chakravarti has written in Prabasi is not without the knowledge of Sri Aurobindo. There is absolutely no scope for any doubt in this matter. Sri Aurobindo has stated that the account as given by Sureshchandra is totally true.” (Nolini Kanta Gupta in Prabasi, Phalgun 1352)
Peter is quite aware of the inconsistencies of the two accounts, the account given by Moni (Suresh Chakravarti) and that given by the brother-in-law of Parthasarthy. He comments in his Archival Notes (April 1985, p. 121): “This account (by the writer of Parthasarthy’s life-sketch) disagrees with Moni’s own version, which
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states that Sri Aurobindo’s letter was to be given to Srinivas Acharya.” And yet J.P. asserts:
“There is no reason for us to doubt the story (about Parthasarthy)”. He even taunts to say: “This book (by the brother-in-law of young Parthasarathy) was published in 1959 (when Peter was hardly eleven years old), before Suresh Chakravarti’s book was published by the Ashram…”
No, Jayantilal-da, Suresh’s narration was printed in Prabasi and Galpabharati in 1945-46 long before 1959, although Moni-da’s articles came out in a book-form after he passed away in 1951.
And be it carefully noted that Suresh’s account was heard and approved by Sri Aurobindo himself, as per the written testimony of Nolini-da as quoted before.
And yet the writer of the Archival Notes asserts elsewhere; in another connection; “his (Suresh’s) article was written without consulting Sri Aurobindo” and “Sri Aurobindo was not available for personal consultation with any of his disciples in 1944. I (Peter) have not been able to find any correspondence between Sureshchandra and Sri Aurobindo on the matter. I do not believe there was any.” (Archives and Research, December 1984, p.234). (It is we who have underlined the expressions to bring home the point.)
This is an instance of logical fallacy. As if without any written correspondence, Sri Aurobindo could not be “consulted” by Sureshchandra!
Then, let me quote in full, what Nolini-da wrote in 1946 with the explicit approval of Sri Aurobindo:
“Since some time a very clever attempt was being made by a certain type of people to indulge in the propagation of untrue facts about Sri Aurobindo. Having read those things Sureshchandra sought to bring to the notice of the reading public events and facts which were really true. And he published his account with the approval of Sri Aurobindo.”
“What Sureshchandra Chakravarti has written in Prabasi is not without the knowledge of Sri Aurobindo. There is
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absolutely no scope for any doubt in this matter. Sri Aurobindo has stated that the account as given by Sureschandra is totally true.” (Nolini Kanta Gupta in Parabasi, Phalgun 1352, also in Bartika, April 1946)
So, this is what Nolini-da writes and Sri Aurobindo fully approves about the authenticity of Suresh’s account. On the other hand J.P. writes: “Parthasarthy died young in 1929. He was a great scholar and it was while publishing his translation of the Gita that his brother-in-law mentions some of the facts of his life in the preface of this small book.”
*** Now my humble submission is this: Whose version of events should we accept as true? Sureschandra’s as certified by Sri Aurobindo and Nolini-da (in his written statement)? Or the version as given by the brother-in-law of Parthasarthy?
And, yet, our Archival Notes printed in our Ashram journal gives publicity to an assertion like this: “The writer of a life-sketch of Parthasarthy has asserted that Sri Aurobindo’s choice of Pondicherry as a place of refuge was the result of a suggestion made by the Tamil youth.” (Archives and Research, April, 1985, p. 120)
And this unauthenticated so-called “suggestion” is being handed down as a piece of historical research requiring some significant amendment in the so-far-well-established narration of an important phase of Sri Aurobindo’s life!
Sri Aurobindo repeats again and again that “The Divine speaks to us in many ways and it is not always the imperative Adesh that comes. When it does, it is clear and irresistible, the mind has to obey and there is no question possible, even if what comes is contrary to the preconceived ideas of the mental intelligence. It was such an Adesh that I had when I came away to Pondicherry.” (Letters on Yoga, Vol. 22, p. 40)
Now, my simple question is this: Why to detract from the sublime value of Sri Aurobindo’s Adesh by introducing an unnecessary, doubtful and spurious element like someone’s brother- in-law’s “assertion” of a not-so-authentic “suggestion” contributing
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to Sri Aurobindo’s decision to come to Pondicherry? This is not the proper course to take for the Archives journal.
*** And this is one of the most serious flaws in the whole affair of the writing of the Archival Notes. Someone is examining the documents, new or old, coming to his own subjective-objective evaluations and conclusions, printing these in our Ashram journal and passing these on to the future generations as authentic history. It matters a lot because the subject of research is Sri Aurobindo, his life and his action.
May I humbly ask you to ponder over the implication of this situation?
I am afraid all future biographies of Sri Aurobindo will include these three pieces of spurious information: (i) one Parthasarthy suggesting to Sri Aurobindo… (ii) Sri Aurobindo sending Moni (Suresh), with a letter of introduction, to young Parthasarthy and not to Srivaschariar as reported by Sureshchandra, and (iii) Sri Aurobindo’s decision to proceed to Pondicherry not because of an imperative Adesh but at least partly due to the non-existent “suggestion” made in 1909 by a South Indian youth.
And this is what pains and puzzles me. And this is a very serious negative potential of the Archival Notes in one of its traits.
J.P. remarks in his statement (p.22): “We have nothing to worry on this count, or to be unnecessarily touchy and sensitive in small things” (in the last but two paras of the statement). “Small things”? – no, they are not small things at all, where Sri Aurobindo is concerned. We have no right to alter details of Sri Aurobindo’s life, unless these are called for on unimpeachable evidence.
Here is a glaring instance of how an excessive preoccupation with the attempt to pounce upon any shred of ‘evidence’ and ‘testimony’ to contest established statements of Sri Aurobindo, can lead the ‘historical and scientific researcher’ away into a blind alley.
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With regard to the past events and occurrences of his life, Sri Aurobindo clearly stated: “It would be only myself who could speak of things in my past giving them their true form and significance.” (On Himself, see the page on the reverse side of the prefatory Note)
And when in the past a controversy arose around the question of ascertaining the veracity or otherwise of certain facts of Sri Aurobindo’s life, our Nolini-da with the consent and approval of Sri Aurobindo himself, issued a written statement which was published in Prabasi and Bartika (in 1946, Bengali 1352) under the caption Sri Aurobindo Prasange. Here is a relevant passage from that statement of Nolini-da:
“Since some time, in various periodicals and journals, verbal debates are raging concerning some events of Sri Aurobindo’s life. Even the eye-witnesses are not being able to come to any consensus. In this case I too am an eye-witness, my name too has been dragged in – my evidence too is needed.
But, what Sri Aurobindo himself has to say about the events of his own life is the crux of the matter – and that should definitely settle the question.
But if there is someone who cannot trust even Sri Aurobindo’s word, if that does not conform to his own position – well, in that case, I am constrained to declare that the malady of such persons is altogether incurable, and my statement is not meant for them.”
So, this is our Nolini-da with his total reverence for Sri Aurobindo’s words. And our Archival Notes, on the basis of some oral information, cites this Nolini-da to controvert now Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements repeated more than once over the years!
J.P. writes in his statement: “Our Professor, knowing Nolini-da as well as he does, does not believe that Nolini would say anything of that sort.” Then J.P. adds: “I myself asked Matriprasad recently about this whole episode with reference to Nolini’s remarks and he told me that he stands by what he reported to Peter.” (Statement/ section 6/ p.14).
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Why one, a thousand Matriprasads’ oral assertions will not draw me away from total acceptance of Sri Aurobindo’s own statement, unequivocally made, in so many words, soon after his release from detention, again repeated years later in equally forthright terms.
And that’s why I wrote in my previous communication: “So this is the truth as revealed by Sri Aurobindo himself and this the spiritual explanation behind Sri Aurobindo taking little interest in the later stages of the trial proceedings; and all of us, children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, have all along accepted it to be so. But now our Archives and Research journal has sought to re-examine the question and devoted a full page and a long footnote to come to the astounding conclusion: ‘Sri Aurobindo continued to give advice to his lawyers throughout the trial period.’
And what basis is there for arriving at this preposterous discovery which turns Sri Aurobindo into a deliberate liar? - Oh, according to the writer of the Archives, our Matriprasad remembers to have had a conversation with Nolini-da in July or August 1982 in course of which Nolini-da is reported to have made a statement like that and Matriprasad says Nolini-da confirmed the same on September 15. (Archives and Research, Vol. 6, No.2, p.230)
In my previous communication I expressed my anguish in these terms: “Alas, our most reversed brother Nolini-da is no longer there in his body to consult him. Otherwise I would have gone to him and brought the matter to his notice. From my close personal acquaintance with Nolini-da, spread over more than thirty years, I can testify to his utter reverence for all Sri Aurobindo’s utterances and statements. And now to cite him, of all persons, against what Sri Aurobindo has himself said!”
And my humble question is this: “Should our own journal be a forum to cite a disciple, however great he may be, to controvert Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements?” I humbly ask J.P.: “I beg for a clear reply to my anguished question. Please do not confuse the central issue with verbiage and sophistry.”
(4/A) In J.P.’s statement, the justification of the above- mentioned deplorable position adopted by Archival Notes is
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preceded by a long list of so-called instances of Sri Aurobindo’s ‘forgetfulness’.
May I ask: What’s the suggested implication of this cataloguing of Sri Aurobindo’s ‘memory-lapses’? Is it being suggested that Sri Aurobindo might have forgotten what he actually did during the Trial proceedings??
Then J.P. states: “I do not believe there is any harm in pointing out these small errors of dates and mix-up of events.” (Statement
/ Section 5 / para 1).
Also: “The quotations from Sri Aurobindo about his memory, given above, should also help us in adopting the reasonable attitude to these statements.” (ibid., para 8)
My humble query: Does this really amount to correcting a small mix-up of events? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then, in that case, let God protect us!
And what is meant by ‘adopting the reasonable attitude’? – This is what Amal-da (K.D.Sethna) has to say about the question:
“Small slips of memory as regards dates and even sometimes the sequence of events – these may be pointed out and set right in the cause of scientific biography. But where Sri Aurobindo has written about his inner life or else on external events in which he took a prominent part, we can reasonably assume that he is right and that evidence from others to the contrary is mistaken. Thus when he says that he got an inner command not to give instructions to Das and that he obeyed it, we cannot dare to fault him. He may have been seen talking to Das on occasions up to the end of his detention, but this would not mean, as Nolini and others think, that he was giving legal instructions. We may refer to Nolini’s and others’ “evidence” but firmly reject it on the grounds at which I have hinted… Other people’s different reports may be taken as interested misrepresentation or just erroneous impression. Sri Aurobindo should be allowed to know what he did.
“If Sri Aurobindo were present, he would have had the chance to decide whether the contradictory opinions have
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any value. He is not there to defend himself against those who would prove him wrong. Wherever he has been quite emphatic – by reason of his direct personal knowledge of his inner life or what took place in the outer – we should not in his absence set aside his testimony.”
So, this is from Amal-da. And let me quote once again Nolini- da’s own view about the matter: “What Sri Aurobindo himself has to say about the events of his own life is the crux of the matter – and that should definitively settle the question.” (For the full passage, please see p. 4 of this present communication.)
*** May I ask now in utter humility: Whom to believe now? – Sri Aurobindo himself or the researcher of the Archival Notes? I ask, but in my mind the heart, there is no doubt about what the correct answer should be.
And this is what I object in the Archival Notes. Let the ‘elders of the Ashram’ decide.
(4/B) J.P. states: “There are a number of things in Sri Aurobindo’s writings about himself, or in reported talks with him, which are not factually correct. …In Sri Aurobindo’s talks reported by Nirod, there are quite a few statements where the date or some such small detail is not correct. …In one place Sri Aurobindo mentions that he left England in February 1893, but actually he left in January 1893 and reached Bombay on 6th February 1893.
…In 1924 Sri Aurobindo states that he has ‘clean forgotten’ his life in ‘Kiledar’s Wada’ with Dinendra Kumar Roy around 1900… Sri Aurobindo himself has made it very clear in several statements about his own memory or complete forgetfulness of events.”
My comments on the above remarks of J.P.: (i) One cannot and should not base oneself on the ‘talks’ to establish a debating point and say emphatically that “Sri Aurobindo has made it very clear” or “he (Sri Aurobindo) himself describes it in the following terms”. These talks, whether recorded by X or Y or Z, are not claimed to possess verbatim accuracy; they give a rough picture of what the particular recorder remembers Sri Aurobindo to have said.
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I can cite instances and instances where different versions of Sri Aurobindo’s selfsame talk, as recorded by X or Y or Z, vary widely in their content and implication.
And as regards the unreliability of the ‘recorded talks’ of Sri Aurobindo, let me cite here one glaring instance that occurs in the very passage reproduced by J.P. himself to drive home a point. Puraniji is reporting Sri Aurobindo as saying:
“I had to apply for a passport under a false name. The ship company required a medical certificate by an English doctor. (I say, not at all. – Jugal) After a great deal of trouble (Not at all. – Jugal.) I found out one (Presumably ‘an English doctor’. – This too is not correct – Jugal) and went to his house.” [Evening Talks, p 550, Talk dated 12.12.1938]
In the space of 2 or 3 lines, 3 factual errors. And we want to shove off these to Sri Aurobindo himself and not to the scribe who may have inaccurately reported! Therein lies my objection. And what is worse, these ‘talks’ are being used, quoted, requoted to establish some cherished point of the debater. As, for example,
J.P. asserts: “…Sri Aurobindo himself describes it in the following terms”. Again, “in one of the reported talks with Sri Aurobindo, he clearly mentions…”
Please note the emphatic expression: “himself describes”, “clearly mentions”, etc.
Because of this inherent unreliability – and not merely in small matters, as J.P. avers, but as regards points with serious import, too – that I expressed in my earlier communication my sense of uneasiness whenever I find these ‘talks’ being taken as authoritative documents to settle some point of Sri Aurobindo’s life and teaching.
What is regrettable, our Archival Notes freely used these ‘talks’ as ‘weapons of offense and defense’ to re-open some settled question and engage in polemical debate.
N.B. – I have alluded to a few factual errors creeping in into the passage from “Evening Talks” as recorded by Puraniji and reproduced by J.P. Here is what actually happened.
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down the doctor’s address and reached there that very evening.”(Smritikatha, 1962, p. 131)
“the problem was for Sri Aurobindo and Bejoy Nag to get their medical certificates. It being late, the doctor had left the port and returned to his house. Accordingly they went to his residence in Chowringhee at about 9.30 p.m.” (A Biography and a History, 1985, p. 358)
So, you can see, not ‘any English doctor’ but ‘the ship Company’s doctor’. Also, not ‘finding out one English doctor after a great deal of troubles’ but ‘noting down the address of the company doctor and going to his residence.’ More need not be said about the basic unreliability of the recorded talks as authoritative documents to be quoted in favour of or against any position.
(4/C) So, I say, one should not try to catalogue instances of Sri Aurobindo’s memory-lapses culled from these fragmentarily and casually recorded talks and conversations of Sri Aurobindo.
But, apart from this point, I dare say that small errors as regards dates and houses on one side and on the other, Sri Aurobindo not remembering whether he went on (or not) advising his Counsel Das till the end of the trial, do not, in my humble opinion, fall in the same category. So, we cannot doubt Sri Aurobindo’s explicit statement by considering it as a possible instance of ‘forgetfulness’ on Sri Aurobindo’s part.
For, there is a very serious danger inherent in this sort of psychological explanation. Once you take up this position that Sri Aurobindo was prone to making errors, the flood-gates open wide for any researcher to attribute any type of inaccuracies and
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inconsistencies contributed by our own ingenuity and miscomprehension to the ‘memory lapses’ of Sri Aurobindo .
*** Let the ‘elders of the Ashram’ judge whether it is advisable to question Sri Aurobindo’s credibility through the Archival Writings in our Ashram journal.
J.P. writes in his statement: “Some people seem to be offended that words like “escape” are used in reference to Sri Aurobindo’s going to Chandernagore or Pondicherry. …I do not think there is any derogatory sense in the use of words like “secret” or “escape” in the case of a revolutionary, even if he is Divine in inner reality.”
So, Sri Aurobindo was a mere ‘revolutionary’ in 1910? His life in Alipore jail, his life during his stay at Motilal’s at Chandernagore – was not Sri Aurobindo already a Mahayogi at that time? And ‘divine’ only ‘in inner reality’? What was Sri Aurobindo then in his outer life? ‘I pause for a reply.’
Second point: J.P. has asserted that there is nothing derogatory in the use of expressions like “secret” and “escape”. Here I am sorry to point out J.P. has taken recourse to a very well-known logical fallacy. He has dexterously lumped together the two words “secret” and “escape” and asked, by implication, for a straight reply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, where no single reply is possible. In Logic this is known as ‘Informal Fallacy of Complex Question’.
It is like asking someone: “Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or No?” or, “Do you still smoke? Yes or No?” or, “Have you by now given up your evil ways? Yes or No?.” Questions of this sort do not admit of a simple “yes” or “no” answer because it is not a simple or single question but a complex question which consists of several questions rolled into one.” (See Introduction to Logic by Irving M. Copi).
Copi cites many fallacious questions of this sort and advises: “The intelligent procedure in all such cases is to treat the complex question not as a simple one, but to analyse it into its component
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parts. Take, for example, the question “Are you for the Republicans and prosperity, or not? Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’!” There are clearly two questions involved: one does not presuppose a particular answer to the other. It is quite conceivable that the two questions hidden under a single shell have different answers. (Irving M.Copi. op. cit., chapter on “Informal Fallacies”)
So, following the prescription of the logicians, I analyse J.P.’s “secret” or “escape” into its two separate components and answer:
There is nothing derogatory in using the expression “secret”, but there is something surely hurtful if one employs it in connection with ‘our Lord’ Sri Aurobindo, expressions like “escape”, “fled to”, “absconded”, etc. – and that, too, frequently. That’s why in my previous communication I had stated:
“While describing his departure from Calcutta to Chandernagore, then from Chandernagore to Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo always uses expressions like “going to”, “proceeding to” “departure to”, “on his way to”, “left for”, etc. But Peter flings expressions like “Sri Aurobindo’s escape to Chandernagore… like his later flight to Pondicherry”.
...When Sri Aurobindo says that he went into “secret residence”, our brother expresses the same fact by saying that Sri Aurobindo “absconded”, Sri Aurobindo “fled to Chandernagore in great secrecy”. Instances can be multiplied…”
Then I added: “Perhaps there is a basic difference between the psychological approach of an Indian and that of a Westerner towards one’s Guru. …But is that sufficient alibi why our own Ashram journal should indulge in such irreverent expressions when more sober expressions are available for the purpose? Please give some consideration to this question.”
My query still stands unanswered.
Please note that even in the passage from Puraniji’s Evening Talks as quoted by J.P. in his statement, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said “I arrived in Pondicherry” and not “escaped”.
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J.P. justifies the use of the above-mentioned irrelevant expressions like “escape” by saying: “Sri Aurobindo’s divinity and his divine guidance are inner movements and when we describe his outer activities we have to use the language which describes the outer movement correctly.”
So, in the case of Sri Aurobindo, “escaped”, “absconded”, “fled”, etc. – are these the correct linguistic expressions to describe his outer activity? I beg to differ.
J.P. queries: “When Sri Krishna’s escape with Rukmini in his chariot is referred to no devotee of his seems to be offended. Why should Sri Aurobindo’s devotees protest …?”
I wonder whether J.P. seriously wants us to answer his question. Does he really want us to model our behaviour and feelings on the patterns set by others’ devotees and not as Sri Aurobindo’s?? Here is a relevant passage from Sri Aurobindo.
When a disciple wrote to Sri Aurobindo inter alia: “I think Krishna did not always speak the exact truth and his half-lies always provoke an understanding smile in all who listen to his stories”, Sri Aurobindo retorted:
“I do not remember any lies or half-lies told by Krishna, so I can say nothing on that point. But if he did according to the Mahabharata or the Bhagawata, we are not bound either by that record or by that example.” (Letters on the Mother, Cent. Vol., pp. 275 )
“Has its limitations and possibilities of errors” ? – Yes, many at times very serious. Hence our humble appeal to discontinue this type of venture with misplaced ‘historical-scientific’ zeal – especially when the subject is Sri Aurobindo himself and the journal is our own Ashram periodical of which the editor is one of our Trustees.
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“An intellectually based work of a scientific enquiry”? – Here are the most valuable and considered opinions of two of our respected elders? Amal-da ( K.D.Sethna) and Nirod-da.
Here is a relevant extract from a letter addressed by Amal-da (K.D.Sethna) to the writer of the Archival Notes:
“I am not a hagiographist and would like to be as much of a scientific biographer as I can – but with a single yet significant proviso. I should not forget, I am a disciple of Sri Aurobindo first and foremost and have to be alive all the time to the extraordinary greatness of the subject of my biography.
Face to face with the hagiographical attitude which I don’t like, there is often the temptation to shock it and one of the unfortunate means is to pick holes in the subject of its blind adoration. Some holes are perhaps bound to be picked since even the Avatar works under certain unavoidable limitations. Small slips of memory as regards dates and even sometimes the sequence of events – these may be pointed out and set right in the cause of scientific biography. But where Sri Aurobindo has written about his inner life or else on external events in which he took a prominent part, we can reasonably assume that he is right and that evidence from others to the contrary is mistaken. … I think you have to take care that the anti-hagiographical imp in you does not make fetish of “scientific biography” and tend to un-focus anywhere the insight you have into the spiritual nature and stature of Sri Aurobindo.
I don’t believe your admirable role of a scientific biographer will suffer eclipse if this insight is permitted to play on the proper occasions.”
And here is how our Nirod-da opines about the same question:
“Re. Peter: He came to see me after reading J’s criticism. Our main point was as regards the principle he has taken up. I couldn’t naturally accept his contention (nobody will) that he is first a biographer, then anything else. To say the least it is
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absurd, irrational, unspiritual. If he sticks to his tenet, it will be risky…”
I think Amal-da’s and Nirod-da’s words, as reproduced above, will make abundantly clear to any unbiased disciple of Sri Aurobindo why I object to certain facets of this overzealous tendency to write a “scientific biography” of Sri Aurobindo.
Mother once wrote to someone: “It is natural that you should approach him (Sri Aurobindo) with a reverence due to the Master of Yoga.” (Centenary Volume 16, p. 247).
And about the greatness of this ‘Master of Yoga’ Mother remarked: “Who can understand Sri Aurobindo? He is as vast as the universe…” (Ibid., p. 310)
And here is how Mother feels about the sublime grandeur of Sri Aurobindo:
“You see, I lived – how many years? Thirty years, I think, with Sri Aurobindo – thirty years from 1920 to 1950. I thought I knew him well, and then when I hear this, I realise…” (Mother makes a gesture as if to indicate a breaking of bounds)
(February 16, 1972; quoted on p.vi of Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo)
Such being the situation, it hurts us all deeply when we find that, in the name of writing a “scientific biography”, one seeks to find “external and physical explanations” for everything sublime in the unfoldment of the life-history of Sri Aurobindo. Not only that; at times, Sri Aurobindo’s actions and credentials are being minutely analysed and evaluated with the puny search-light of our sense- bound intellect. And the results thereof are being given publicity in our own journal!
I dare say Sri Aurobindo’s actions and the true reasons operative behind these actions are altogether inscrutable to the petty human mind with limited vision and still more limited comprehension. So why to seek out ‘external explanations’ plausible to our ignorant judgment?
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In this connection I cannot but recall an incident that occurred in 1950 just after Sri Aurobindo left his physical body. One of the seniormost disciples (I refrain from mentioning his name here), who dwelt in the Ashram since 1926, sought to explain Sri Aurobindo’s passing in terms of some external factors and printed a leaflet incorporating his findings. When Mother came to know of it, she became utterly displeased and wrote to the disciple concerned:
“I was painfully shocked when I heard the translation of the leaflet you are distributing here in the Ashram. I never imagined you could have such a complete lack of understanding, respect and devotion for our Lord who has sacrificed himself totally for us. …Sri Aurobindo was not compelled to leave his body, he chose to do so for reasons so sublime that they are beyond the reach of humanity. And when one cannot understand, the only thing to do is to keep a respectful silence.” (reproduced in Champaklal Speaks, p. 249)
Mother’s admonition in conjunction with Amal-da’s and Nirod- da’s words as quoted above cannot but make us aware of the serious risks involved, so far as Sri Aurobindo is concerned, if the zeal to write his “scientific biography” is not kept within proper bounds.
In the process of rewriting a “scientific biography” we may unwittingly do some damage in spite of all our basic sincerity. Did not Sri Aurobindo warn us? – “Neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life, it has not been on the surface for men to see.” (On Himself: Foreword)
Also, in another allied situation: “As for the Mother’s attitude, you have to look within to know it; if we look from outside, you will not be able to understand it.” (Letters on Yoga, Parts Two and Three, p. 858)
And we have already alluded to the following words of Sri Aurobindo: “It would be only myself who could speak of things in my past giving them their true form and significance.” (On Himself. Foreword)
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Under these circumstance what we, the disciples of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, should do is to adopt a humble approach to Sri Aurobindo’s life with all the requisite devotion and discretion – and not pry it with a mere intellectual lens. And excessive preoccupation with writing a “scientific biography” of Sri Aurobindo will, I fear, do more harm than good.
And, it is not so easy after all to write a proper biography of a Mahayogi like Sri Aurobindo. Jayantilal-da himself, in his statement, has alluded to a famous remark of Sri Aurobindo. J.P. writes: “We know Sri Aurobindo’s opinion about the biography of poets and yogis, and his famous saying that he did not want to be murdered in cold print by his disciples.”
We have to be extra-cautious so that we may not unwittingly do the same what Sri Aurobindo feared. While refuting some of the ‘wrong facts’ attributed by interested persons to Sri Aurobindo’s life, Moni-da (Suresh Chakravarti) admonished the so-called biographers in such terms which echo almost literally Sri Aurobindo’s ‘fears’. Here are his words:
“Let me say something about writing biographies. Ninety- nine per cent of people think that writing a biography is a very ease affair. …But while attempting to write someone’s biography, a writer has every probability of turning into a ‘murderer’. …and the person about whom the biography is being written may have to pray: ‘O God, please protect me from the hands of my devotees!” (Smritikatha, p. 41)
So far for pointing out the risks involved in the attempt to write a “scientific biography” of Sri Aurobindo – if the attempt is stretched to its farthest limits. Now let me proceed to the discussion of another point.
In my earlier communication I had mentioned how, against written statements of Sri Aurobindo, repeated many times, that he did not see Sister Nivedita on his way to Chandernagore, our Archives journal is obstinately bringing forward a “reported”
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statement of Sri Aurobindo, said to have been orally uttered by him, to contradict his repeated written assertions. Although the recorder N. [Nirodbaran] insists that “Sri Aurobindo’s words were not recorded correctly” (Archives, vol. 8 No.2, p. 232), the writer of the Archival Notes sticks to his opinion: “I believe the mistake here was not in the recording, but in the telling (by Sri Aurobindo)”. (Ibid., p.232 )
Not only that. Further on, the writer of the “Notes” claims: “I (Peter) have shown that all the difficulties of interpretation come from discrepancies between Sri Aurobindo’s and Ramchandra (Majumdar)’s accounts. …It comes down finally to a choice between Ramachandra (Majumdar) and Sri Aurobindo.” (Ibid., p. 234)
And who is this Ramachandra Majumdar? Here is what our Nolini-da writes about the quasi-total unreliability of Majumdar’s memory. In course of a statement, issued with the explicit approval of Sri Aurobindo, Nolini-da writes:
“In course of a long rejoinder to Sureshchandra (Chakravarti)’s narration, Ramchandra Majumdar has tried to demonstrate vaingloriously that even in his advanced age his power of memory has remained intact. Indeed, his memory-power is so wonderful that he has retained in his mind, although in a distorted form, not only the recollection of what happened in the past, but a distinct and definite image of what never happened – that too is clearly imprinted in his mind! As a matter of fact, the account given by him contains so much ornamentation, exaggeration, mistakes and errors that with the materials afforded by him one can easily construct a very excellent hair-raising fictional biography of Sri Aurobindo.” (Sri Aurobindo Prasange in Bartika, 1946 )
Moni-da (Suresh Chakravarti), too, has given a detailed enumeration of Majumdar’s memory lapses on pp. 79-99 of his “Reminiscences” (Smritikatha). The curious reader may go through those pages to be convinced of the total unreliability of Ramchandra Majumdar as a witness.
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And, according to Peter, the writer of the Archival Notes, Sri Aurobindo has to be first subjected to scientific scrutiny, before his veracity is established as against the evidence of a total non- entity like Ramchandra Majumdar! And this investigation and its findings are published in our Archives journal!
Because of the undesirability of this type of scientific-historical research as applied to Sri Aurobindo, I wrote in my previous letter: “My humble entreaty: Let outsiders speak whatever they want to speak about Mother and Sri Aurobindo; it is their affair. Let us not join their ranks and employ our own journals … to subject Them to criticism. That will be, to say the least, the height of ingratitude.”
To this J.P., in his statement, rejoins: “If an Ashram journal should avoid publishing it, by all means stop it. But I am sure, dividing the world between “our Ashram journal” and “outside” is not going to help much …”
I keep mum. Let the ‘elders of the Ashram’ decide whether J.P.’s comments adequately meet my point or not.
As regards re-opening in our Archives journal (Dec.1984) of the already settled question of whether or not Sri Aurobindo met Sister Nivedita on his way to the ghat, J.P. states: “the point Peter is trying to bring out in his article… In this enquiry he re-examines the entire evidence again with additional references.”
My humble submission: (i) Why to re-examine the question de novo, when Sri Aurobindo has himself answered the question and that too, not once but at least 5 times?
(ii) “Additional references”? – But what additional references are needed to justify or otherwise Sri Aurobindo’s own statement repeatedly made?
J.P. asserts: “We have no right to question why he does it. He has taken this up as his work.”
Is this an adequate answer to my question? Yes, I admit we have “no right” to question P.’s [Peter’s] personal opinion or judgment privately entertained. But as soon as these are given open
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publicity in one of our Ashram journals, edited by one of our venerable Trustees, every sincere Ashramite has an honest right, nay duty to bring the matter to the notice of the Trustees, and the Trustees, on their part, if they deem it fit, have every right to point out the same to the writer concerned. I leave it to the wisdom of the Trustees to judge me in this regard.
J.P. says in his statement: “The Archival Notes he (Peter) has been writing are part of the archival work and that is why they are published in the Archives’ journal. At one point I realised that some of the things he was saying might be either contradicted or found unacceptable in the manner they were expressed.”
Yes, therein lies our objection. As I wrote in my earlier letter: “I have no personal bias against anyone… As a matter of fact, I have the greatest admiration for Peter’s literary capabilities, dedication to work and editorial meticulousness. Only, certain mental attitudes, which hurt the feelings of us all, the Indian devotees of Sri Aurobindo, are creeping into his writings and these are being published in our Ashram journal. Therein lies my objection.” Then
J.P. continues: “At one point I told P. that in all future Archival Notes he must put his initials and also make it clear to the readers that the views expressed are not necessarily these of the publishers (Sri Aurobindo Ashram).”
My comments: The problem is not so simple as that. Mere insertion of the initials P.H. will not and cannot serve the purpose. Because, I am constrained to repeat my refrain again, it is an Ashram journal and the editor is one of our own Trustees. And that gives the stamp of authoritative credibility to the views expressed.
As per the advice of J.P., in the Archival Notes published in April 1983, the following note was inserted by Peter (I presume, once for all):
“Any historical narrative must be written from a particular view-point, and, however much the writer observes the ground rules of objectivity, this view-point must necessarily be
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subjective. Evaluations, judgments and conclusions, explicit or implicit, have to be made at every step. The writer’s reasoning must, of course, be supported by a detailed documentation. The references given in the footnotes to these Notes will enable readers to turn to the sources and, after study, to form their own conclusions.” [Underlined by Jugal]
The underlined portions in the above statement made by P. make abundantly clear the high potential for misjudgment and misplaced conclusions that this type of “historical-scientific” research may lead us to. My considered opinion still stands: When the subject concerned is Sri Aurobindo himself, our Ashram journal cannot and should not be freely used for unbridled publicity of these subjective “evaluations, judgments and conclusions, explicit or implicit” impinging on some fundamental episodes and truths of Sri Aurobindo’s life, especially when these “evaluations, judgments and conclusions” are, at times, based on some second-hand or third-hand or even spurious documentation. I express my opinion. Let the ‘elders of the Ashram’ judge.
J.P. goes on to assert in his statement: “The researcher and the writer should have the basic freedom to pursue his work and line of thought.”
I say ‘no’, when the subject concerned is Sri Aurobindo, the writer concerned is an Ashramite and the journal concerned belongs to the Ashram. Given the conjunction of all these three factors, the freedom cannot be unlimited.
J.P. continues: “There may be differences of opinion or erroneous conclusions and other defects, judged from a different angle. …Those who would like to contradict must give their findings and conclusions in writing with the necessary arguments which may even be printed in the Archives journal in keeping with the problems discussed.”
Our Ashram journal would publish polemical arguments and be the arena of wordy duels around our Lord Sri Aurobindo???
I say: No, no, never. Our Archives journal should on no account be turned into a forum of debative disputations with Sri Aurobindo
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as the theme. Would our Mother have ever liked this sort of proposal? Let us search our hearts and seek a reply.
And here is what Sri Aurobindo himself wrote when a possible situation of this sort loomed in the past; I quote here the relevant portion of his long letter:
“If I allowed your exposition of the matter to be published in one of our own periodicals, I would be under the obligation of returning to the subject… to re-establish my position and would have to combat…” “But I do not like the idea of one of our periodicals being the arena for a wrestle of that kind.” (Letters on Yoga, p. 208)
So, let us once for all drop the idea of a debate concerning Sri Aurobindo.
My final conclusion about these Archival Notes:
Let Peter have his freedom of thoughts, let him entertain his personal opinion and judgments, but, if these are controversial, let these not be printed in the Archives journal. Because, once these are published there – in a paper owned by the Ashram and edited by one of the Trustees – these views and opinions transcend the confines of personality and are bound to acquire, in course of time, the halo of authenticity. Let us be careful in time. The damage thus done cannot be undone in future.
You may please consult our responsible seniors like Amal-da, Nirod-da and Arindam-da on this point and seek their views.
J.P. comments in his statement: “If the historical approach is abhorrent to some, it would equally be abhorrent to others to read this tract of religious haranguing with its constant refrain of “our Lord” and “we the children of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother”.
I could not imagine that there could be Guru-bhais who would take me to task for calling Sri Aurobindo as “our Lord” and ourselves as “the children of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother”. Be
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that as it may, taunting remarks like “religious tract”, “religious piety” or “priest of mediaeval Europe” do not hurt me at all.
However, J.P. should have remembered that my previous letter was not a public document (as the Archival Notes are) but a personal letter addressed to three of our respected Trustees among whom Manoj D.G. and Paru P. count as two.
And Manoj and Paru? – I have always considered them as my own brother and sister, I have known them from their early adolescence, with them I have the deepest personal bond, and before them I can always express myself with utmost candour. While talking to or writing to Manoj or Paru, – not once, not twice, but a hundred times, – I may permit myself the use of expressions like “our Lord” (in connection with Sri Aurobindo) and “we the children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo” (while referring to ourselves). If that sounds abhorrent to some, I can’t help. I feel proud to use such expressions which translate my genuine feelings in the matter, even if these are repellent to others.
J.P. writes: “In the last thirty years or more members of the ashram have written many things in full freedom with no holds barred. It would be impossible to control or direct this tendency now by a supervisory board and, I think, it is good that it is not possible.”
Let the Trustees and ‘the elders of the Ashram’ decide this question.
“Small things”? – Where Sri Aurobindo himself is concerned, I do not consider these as “small things” at all. A careful perusal of this present letter of mine and of my previous communication dated June 15, ’86 will, I hope, make it clear to you that at times
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very serious issues are being reopened in connection with Sri Aurobindo .
“Nothing to worry”? – I am not so sure about that – especially because, as I have already mentioned, certain not so desirable traits are getting manifested in these writings and these Archival Notes are being issued to the reading public through our own Ashram journal. Therein lies my misgiving.
May I be permitted, in this connection, to draw your attention to one unhappy trend with serious doctrinal consequences? I feel very much anxious about it. Now, please consult the section (12) below.
In the Archival Notes a new theology is being subtly but persistently introduced, seeking to draw a distinction between the “inner” Sri Aurobindo and “outer” Sri Aurobindo, between his “inner” action and “outer” action, between his “inner” motivation and “outer” motivation. This has a very serious implication – if not checked in time. It is no longer a question of mere “dates and houses”, it involves the direct interpretation of Sri Aurobindo.
Let me cite here two instances from the Archival Notes which make me very uneasy, because once we start explaining differently the so-called “outer” and the so-called “inner” Sri Aurobindo, there will be no end to possible misrepresentation. Sri Aurobindo warned his disciples once against what he called “the peril of a hostile Maya” which pushed some disciples to make a distinction between “the inner Mother” and “the outer Mother” and find some opposition and contradiction between the actions of the two. The curious reader may read pages 1058-59 et al. of Letters on Yoga (experiences of the Inner Consciousness)
Here is the first extract from the Archival Notes: “...apparent contradiction between the two statements of Sri Aurobindo and the observation of Nolini-da… When Sri Aurobindo put his defence into Chittaranjan Das’s hands – or rather into the hands of the Supreme Lord using Das as his instrument – it was an inner movement and this did not prevent him from taking a detached
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outer interest in the affair.” (Archives and Research, December 1982, p.230)
I have already discussed the incongruous character of this sort of explanation under Section 4 of the present letter. So I need not say anything more here.
Now, the second extract from the Archival Notes printed in the latest number of the Archives journal (April 1987, p. 124):
“There is no reason to disbelieve Dutt’s claim that the “experiment” referred to in the letter was the Delhi bombing. A certain type of human intelligence, however, may have a hard time reconciling Sri Aurobindo’s remark (as inferred from Arun Dutt’s assertion – J.) with the many solicitous references he made in the Record of Yoga to the injured Viceroy’s condition. Certain entries, e.g. that of 15 January, show that Sri Aurobindo used his spiritual will (Aishwarya) to promote the healing of Hardinge’s wounds. The contradiction between the two attitudes is of course only superficial. This is not a matter that the historian of external events need concern himself with, but it may be suggested that Sri Aurobindo could well have approved of the attempted assassination as a matter of political expediency, while deprecating it from an occult or spiritual point of view.” (Peter in Archival Notes, April ’87 p.124)
Well, the less said about this type of far-fetching ingenuous explanation, the better. I humbly request you to consult on this question and seek the considered views of AMAL-da, NIROD- da and ARINDAM-da. I shall accept whatever they say.
To my perception there are no two Sri Aurobindos, one “inner” and the other “outer”, with two different motivations for two different simultaneous actions, one on the “inner” plane and the other on the “outer” one. Sri Aurobindo, is One and Indivisible. He always acts from one consciousness – spiritual-divine, from one motivation – spiritual-divine whether for “outer” activity or for the “inner” one. His ways and actions may appear to us inscrutable; but for that we should not try to create, through our limited investigation, contradictions and inconsistencies in his
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conduct and action, and then seek to “explain” them away as belonging to two different planes with two different standards and motivations.
At least our own journey should not indulge in this risky venture.
This is my humble opinion. Let the elders decide.
I have come to the end of my long dissertation; a long one, only to demonstrate that none of the basic points I raised in my previous communication have been satisfactorily met in J.P.’s lengthy statement. My questions still stand unanswered.
I heartily invite anyone to meet my points with well-reasoned arguments and not merely brush these aside with metaphysical platitudes and logical subterfuges or by calling me names.
I have fulfilled my duty by bringing before your kind notice all that I had to say as regards certain flaws in the writing of the “Archival Notes”, especially in the ‘guiding principles’ behind this writing. Now I must keep silent. I do not propose to engage myself in any further polemical writing in this connection. For, if more than thirty pages of my reasoning have not been able to substantiate my points, more writing will never do.
Besides, I am quite happy in my work with the boys and girls of ‘KNOWLEDGE’ – with the sweet little children of Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
J.P. proposes at the end of his long statement: “If the elders of the ashram should wish to stop the publication of our Archives journal, or the historical Archival Notes only, they should feel free to do so.”
I humbly leave it to the wise discretion of the Trustees. Whatever be their decision, I shall gladly accept it without the slightest reservation in my heart. Ultimately,
LET THE DIVINE MOTHER’S WILL BE DONE
In the service of the Mother & Sri Aurobindo, Yours for ever
JUGAL June 14, ’87
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[Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) needs no introduction to the disciples and admirers of Sri Aurobindo. Among the early poets of the Ashram who were fortunate to be guided and inspired by Sri Aurobindo himself, Amal Kiran’s prodigious literary output in the form of hundreds of poems, articles and books on the most varied subjects, covering literary criticism, yoga, history, philosophy, politics and even science, is unmatched by any other literary figure in the Sri Aurobindo circles. He was editor of the monthly journal Mother India for more than fifty years and was quick to rebut in it every hostile criticism of his Master. The article below is a rejoinder to Peter Heehs’s misinterpretation of the Adesh (divine command) that Sri Aurobindo received in 1910 to go from Calcutta to Chandernagore, and then from there to Pondicherry. The discussion is subtle and abstract and Amal Kiran says that at first he “was inclined to agree broadly” with Heehs’s presentation of the event in the Archives & Research issue of December 1987. But he changed his mind “on a closer inspection” when he realised its deeper implications. For depending on whether you agree or not with Heehs, you would either conclude that Sri Aurobindo ran away in fear of being arrested by the British police or that the Divine commanded him to escape in order to make him undertake the much greater work of the spiritual transformation of mankind that awaited him in Pondicherry, of which he was not aware at that point of time.]
In the issue of Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research for December 1987 the “Archival Notes” are partly aimed at setting certain queries raised by some statements of the writer two years earlier in the same periodical. His new statements too have come in for criticism.
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It may be that his true drift has failed to be caught, but the cause of the failure, if any, must lie at his own door. For, whatever his intentions, a persistent trend in his way of putting things has led to an impression of inaccuracy and of hazing the real posture of some extraordinary events.
This is rather unfortunate, for in his article the dissatisfying portions are in the midst of much admirable analytic matter – acute comparative evaluation, pointedly phrased, of documents and of the various shades of historical fact. There should be no question of disqualifying all his work or doubting in general his talents. That would be sheer injustice to him as a researcher. We are now concerned only with one particular theme of his, which calls for serious reconsideration: “What role did the man named Parthasarathy Iyengar play in Sri Aurobindo’s connection with Pondicherry?”
Parthasarathy belonged to a group of patriots which includes his brother Srinivasachari and Subramania Bharati. They had established an office in the French enclave of Pondicherry for a Tamil weekly, India, in order to carry on more securely their anti- British work as well as their work of regenerating Indian Culture. Previously Parthasarathy was the Secretary of the Swadeshi Stream Navigation Company which the Iyengar family was financially supporting for patriotic reasons. During his tour in Northern India in that capacity he met Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta and discussed the nationalist and cultural activities in which both the parties were engaged, mentioned the group of patriots in Pondicherry conducting India and suggested that Sri Aurobindo might find Pondicherry more congenial for his mission than British India where he suffered constant harassment from the foreign government. Sri Aurobindo’s meeting with Parthasarathy is confirmed by his own diary note of Tuesday, 20 July 1909, which was meant to remind him of the appointment.
Some time after Sri Aurobindo had gone to Chandernagore in French India he sent through Suresh Chakravarti a letter to Pondicherry requesting the friends there to make arrangements for his stay in that town. The letter was received by Srinivasachari,
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but he has himself reported that it was addressed to “S. Parthasarathy Iyengar, ‘India’ Press”. As Parthasarathy was away at the time, Chakravarti, on learning that Srinivasachari was connected with India, gave it to him and asked him to read it and do the needful. The fact that Sri Aurobindo remembered Parthasarathy more than half a year later than the meeting in Calcutta shows the significance of that meeting for him in relation to Pondicherry.
The readers’ queries raised by the earlier Archives issue seem to centre on a passage which is reproduced now as a point de départ for, among other matters, a defence against a charge of minimising the role of the âdesh (divine command) Sri Aurobindo had received about going to Pondicherry:
“We have seen that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry at the suggestion of no one, but in obedience to a divine command. But by speaking to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry, Parthasarathy may have played an instrumental role in his coming.”
The opening sentence in the above makes it clear that the writer does not support what M.A. Narayana Iyengar, who had no idea of the âdesh which Sri Aurobindo had obeyed, wrote in his Foreword to Parthasarathy’s posthumously published Bhagavad Gita: A simple Paraphrase in English. After recounting, apparently from information supplied by his friend and relative Parthasarathy himself, the interview with Sri Aurobindo in which Pondicherry had been recommended to him and the story of the letter addressed to “Parthasarathy Iyengar, c/o India, Pondicherry” and opened by Srinivasachari in the addressee’s absence from the place, Narayana ends: “It may thus be seen that a suggestion from Sri S. Parthasarathy Iyengar lay behind Sri Aurobindo’s visit to Pondicherry, which led in turn to the establishment of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.” In fact, the Archives article says that Narayana “was evidently giving his relative’s meeting with Sri Aurobindo more significance than it deserves”. But the writer also tells us that, as a historian, his acceptance of the âdesh as the cause of Sri Aurobindo’s coming to Pondicherry does not oblige him “to suspend all considerations of the political and other circumstances
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surrounding his departure” from British India. He bases himself on Sri Aurobindo’s view in a letter of 1936 that the divine Force does not act independently of cosmic forces. Sri Aurobindo has written: “The Force does not act in a void and in an absolute way… it comes as a Force intervening and acting on a complex nexus of Forces that were in action and displacing their disposition and interrelated movement and natural result by a new disposition, movement and result.” It seems to the Archives writer that an âdesh operates also within the same nexus and he concludes: “I think it at least plausible that the âdesh that directed Sri Aurobindo to go to Pondicherry operated within a nexus of forces that included the attempts of the British to have him arrested, and the recently established contact between him and the revolutionaries of Pondicherry.”
The writer’s impression is not unnatural at first sight. I was myself inclined at one time to agree broadly. But a closer look should lead us to doubt if one can equate the action of the divine Force with that of an âdesh like Sri Aurobindo’s. As far as we can gather, the latter has nothing to do, as the former has, with a nexus of other forces. It acts exclusively in the consciousness of one individual alone and it acts but once: there is no continuity of action as with the divine Force which may be concerned with several circumstances outside an individual, circumstances on which it goes on exerting itself. The âdesh such as Sri Aurobindo received is also described by him in a letter of 5 January 1936 as “imperative”: “it is clear and irresistible, the mind has to obey and there is no question possible, even if what comes is contrary to the preconceived ideas of the mental intelligence.” The divine Force of which Sri Aurobindo has written does not seem quite like this single absolute momentary stroke from the Supreme within only one person. Its comparison with the âdesh would hold simply in both having their source outside the common natural world: the modus operandi of each appears to be different. But we can grant that the situation in which the imperative âdesh occurs may include political factors. The Archives writer demonstrates easily the impossibility of overlooking these factors in the case of Sri Aurobindo, but his summing-up is challengeable: “I have no
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difficulty in accepting that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry as the result of an âdesh, and at the same time accepting that there were political factors behind his departure.”
What does the last phrase mean? Does it just mean that the âdesh operated in the midst of politics and with an awareness of their trends? If it does, there can be no quarrel, for here we have plain history and its call for attention. But the word “behind” gives us pause. It prompts the notion that “political factors” were pushing Sri Aurobindo towards what actually transpired. To put the matter in an extreme form: we may start thinking that even without the âdesh Sri Aurobindo would have gone to Pondicherry out of political considerations. Surely, the writer could not have meant this, though such an interpretation is possible on the ground of the unfortunate preposition “behind”. A more likely interpretation would be that the âdesh operated for political reasons. If such was the idea, the writer has failed to plumb the depths of the spiritual intervention.
Among the documents quoted before the “Archival Notes” we find Sri Aurobindo saying in a talk of 18 December 1938: “I heard the âdesh ‘Go to Pondicherry.’ …I could not question. It was Sri Krishna’s âdesh. I had to obey. Later on I found it was for my yogic work that I was asked to come here.” A variant of the closing words of this record by Nirodbaran is Purani’s version: “I found it was for the Ashram and for the work.” In either instance Sri Aurobindo takes us clean beyond any political causes for the âdesh. The divine command came in the midst of a political situation and must have had its current posture in sight but its drive was wholly spiritual. If Sri Aurobindo’s own gloss is to be credited, no political factors can be taken to lie behind his departure in answer to Sri Krishna’s âdesh.
One may protest: “You are bringing in ‘teleology’ and explaining an event by what lay ahead and came later: you should act the historian and give weight to what went before.” But should we not ascribe to the âdesh its own vision, its own aim? Although we may not know the goal it had in view, we should be certain that it did not come purposelessly. Hence its purpose was definitely in play
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before Sri Aurobindo went to Pondicherry. Once a historian admits the âdesh he has to judge things in terms of it. To cry “Teleology!” in such a case is a hasty move.
Besides, we are now looking backwards to 1910 and seeking explanations. We are not writing in that year itself, ignorant of the motive of Sri Krishna’s command. With our present knowledge of it we cannot write of 1910 as though we knew nothing. From our coign of vantage today, all talk of “teleology” would be inapposite.
If the âdesh brought Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry for only his Yogic work, there is little point in being told after Narayana’s exaggeration of the significance of Parthasarathy’s meeting with Sri Aurobindo has been countered: “Still, it is not at all far-fetched to suppose that when Parthasarathy spoke to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry… he dwelt on its political advantages. After all, the India, with which Parthasarathy was connected, was being brought out from Pondicherry for political reasons.” Whatever Parthasarathy had said was irrelevant in relation to the âdesh. We also perceive the oddity of the opinion expressed on the heels of the declaration about Sri Aurobindo’s coming to Pondicherry at the suggestion of no one, but in obedience to a divine command: “But by speaking to Sri Aurobindo about Pondicherry, Parthasarathy may have played an instrumental role in his coming.”
Apart from the causative irrelevance of politics to the âdesh concerned, the opinion I am discussing is couched in a questionable turn of language. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1979), p.680.col.2, defines “instrumental” as “acting as an instrument or means: serving to promote an object: helpful.” The word “instrument” in the context of “coming” would imply either that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry because of Parthasarathy had put the idea into his mind at an earlier time, thus serving to promote the coming, helping to bring about the transition – or else that Parthasarathy was used by some causative agency other than himself to send Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry at a later date. The first alternative is impossible to entertain when it has been unequivocally said at the very start that Sri Aurobindo came to
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Pondicherry at no one’s suggestion but in answer to an âdesh. There is a patent self-contradiction here. The second alternative makes Parthasarathy a “means” in Sri Krishna’s hands, the mouthpiece of a plan by the Supreme Being to hint to Sri Aurobindo in advance at what was to happen. It is as if Sri Krishna played secretly in modern Calcutta a variant on his great declaration to Arjuna at Kurukshetra in remote antiquity: “The Kauravas have already been slain by me in my mind. Be you only my instrument to slay them now.” In our context we may imagine Arjuna’s Charioteer (called “Parthasarathy” in the Gita) to have brought Sri Aurobindo to Pondicherry already in his mind and was using his namesake of the Iyengar family as his instrument to let Sri Aurobindo know the advantages of settling there. However, there are a number of snags to this highly poetic picture.
Sri Aurobindo went to Pondicherry on the afflatus of a divine injunction and not on a hint from Parthasarathy: a special message from Sri Krishna himself had to be received. And this injunction differed radically from the hint: whereas the hint was in connection with politics as the moving power, Sri Krishna’s message turned out, according to Sri Aurobindo, to have had nothing to do with them in its purpose. If we have to think of Parthasarathy as influencing Sri Aurobindo by acquainting him with the advantages of Pondicherry, we must seek a different light in which to look at him.
Before we do that, let us trace from another angle the incongruity we are trying to focus. How does Parthasarathy figure at all when the town outside British India to which Sri Aurobindo went from Calcutta, the sphere of the harassment by the British Government to which Parthasarathy had referred in his meeting with Sri Aurobindo, was Chandernagore in French India and not Pondicherry? In a letter of 15 December 1944 which the Archives quotes, Sri Aurobindo recalls the situation in the Karmayogin office in Calcutta where a search by the police was expected: “While I was listening to animated comments from those around on the approaching event, I suddenly received a command from above in a Voice well known to me, in three words: ‘Go to Chandernagore.’
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In ten minutes or so I was in the boat for Chandernagore… I remained in secret entirely engaged in Sadhana… afterwards, under the same ‘sailing orders’, I left Chandernagore and reached Pondicherry on April 4th 1910.”
The original âdesh, taking Sri Aurobindo away from the obstructed political field mentioned by Parthasarathy, did not concern Pondicherry. Thus his advice to Sri Aurobindo had no direct relation to the latter’s move out of British India. Surely, we cannot plead the general fact that Chandernagore no less than Pondicherry was a non-British French enclave? Their common Frenchness does not blur their geographical difference. Nor can we say that Chandernagore was obviously a stepping-stone to Pondicherry. The divine command did not tell Sri Aurobindo: “Go to Pondicherry via Chandernagore.” Chandernagore alone held the stage at the time: Pondicherry was completely off it. Even when Sri Aurobindo reached Chandernagore we cannot claim to discern an involvement of Pondicherry in his thoughts. He continued to stay there as if there were nothing further to do or at least as if he had no notion of any future step. In the talk of December 1938, Purani adding to Nirodbaran’s transcript makes Sri Aurobindo say: “some friends were thinking of sending me to France.” In Nirodbaran’s transcript we read simply: “and there as I was thinking what to do next, I heard the âdesh ‘Go to Pondicherry.’”
It was after this second âdesh that, recollecting what he had learnt from Parthasarathy over six months earlier, Sri Aurobindo wrote the note to which we have already alluded. Apropos only of this note we have to set Parthasarathy in our picture. And he emerges in a role quite other than that which the Archives writer with unconscious self-contradiction surmises for him. The true role is to be spotlighted by the request Sri Aurobindo made to him from Chandernagore. Through Parthasarathy’s group in Pondicherry about which he had learnt in the interview at Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo wanted arrangements to be made for, as Srinivasachari has put it in his memoirs, “a quiet place of residence… where he could live incognito without being in any
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way disturbed”. While his coming to Pondicherry was due exclusively to the âdesh, his getting privately accommodated in that town was the result of his meeting with Parthasarathy.
Not that Parthasarathy actually arranged for Sri Aurobindo’s residence. He was not present to do so. Srinivasachari and Bharati, accompanied by Suresh Chakravarty, made the proper arrangements. Direct credit in the concrete sense goes to them. But inasmuch as Sri Aurobindo’s memory of Parthasarathy led him to write the letter given to Suresh Chakravarty to take to Pondicherry where the addressee was supposed to be, Parthasarathy formed a link between the âdesh at Chandernagore and Sri Aurobindo’s finding a suitable residence in Pondicherry among solicitous friends. And as such he has a significance in Sri Aurobindo’s life at an important turning-point.
In an earlier issue of Archives – Vol. IX, No.27 – we read: “Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in April 1910 with no intention of staying more than a few months. He remained in the French colony for the rest of his life.” This confirms that he had never thought of following Parthasarathy’s suggestion of establishing his political headquarters in Pondicherry and acting from there. The indefinite prolongation of stay was due exclusively to his discovering Sri Krishna’s far-reaching spiritual plan for him that was implicit in the âdesh to go to Pondicherry. But in the years after his arrival the patriotic group which included Parthasarathy, Srinivasachari and their associates contributed to his welfare. Srinivasachari’s family is known to have been in intimate relation with him up to 1926.
[The above article was first published in Mother India, May 1988, pp. 305-310, and later in Aspects of Sri Aurobindo (2000), pp. 196-204.]
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I would like to add a few points to Amal Kiran’s brilliant article in the Mother India issue of May 1988 on Peter Heehs’s misinterpretation of Sri Aurobindo’s Adesh, published in the Archives & Research issues of April 1985 and December 1987. The following were the main points of Heehs’ argument:
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nexus of forces that included the attempts of the British to have him arrested, and the recently established contact between him and the revolutionaries of Pondicherry”. Conclusion: “I have no difficulty accepting that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry as the result of an Adesh, and at the same time accepting that there were political factors behind his departure.”
This apparently harmless conclusion not only belittles the divine nature of the Adesh Sri Aurobindo received, but lends support to the false rumour that he escaped to Pondicherry fearing a second arrest by the British police. First of all, it is a self-contradiction to accept that Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in obedience to the Adesh and, at the same time, say that there were political factors behind his departure. Sri Aurobindo’s decision to go to Pondicherry was determined by the Adesh in the context of an adverse political situation, but the decision itself was not due to political factors. Sri Aurobindo himself said he did not question the Adesh when he received it – he simply obeyed it, which means he would have obeyed whatever the Divine commanded him to do. There were several courses open to him at that point of time. He could have bravely faced the prospect of another trial and possible conviction had the Adesh ordered him to do so, or he could have simply gone underground in Calcutta, or perhaps even made arrangements to go abroad. The fact that he suddenly went to Chandernagore at the dead of night and sought refuge from Charu Chandra Roy, who, in fact, refused to help him because of his fear of the British police, and the further event of Motilal Roy (whom Sri Aurobindo never knew) giving him shelter in his own house, shows the unplanned nature of Sri Aurobindo’s action. It hardly demonstrates a well-thought out plan to counteract adverse political factors!
Coming now to Parthasarathy’s “instrumental role”, Sri Aurobindo’s intention to come to Pondicherry was determined by the Adesh and not by the information provided six months ago by the former that the French town was a safe haven for revolutionaries. Surely Parthasarathy was only one of the several contacts that Sri Aurobindo had, residing in different parts of British and French India and even perhaps abroad. As a matter of
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fact, when Sri Aurobindo received the first Adesh to go to Chandernagore, he tried to use one such contact, Charu Chandra Roy, whom we have already mentioned above. To therefore say or even remotely suggest that Parthasarathy made Sri Aurobindo come to Pondicherry is as absurd as for a resident of Pondicherry to say, “I went to Chennai (formerly Madras) because there is a bus going there at 9 o’clock in the morning.” The decision to go to Chennai is obviously taken before you choose the means of transport. Applying the same logic here, Sri Aurobindo remembered the contact in Pondicherry when he received the Adesh to go there. He did not go to Pondicherry because he had a contact there. One can concede then only a secondary “instrumental role” to Parthasarathy – that of simply being a helpful contact and definitely not playing an equally determinant role on par with the Adesh, as Heehs presents it.
Moreover, Sri Aurobindo received two distinct divine commands from within. The first Adesh in Calcutta directed him to go to Chandernagore, where, after a month, he received the second Adesh to go to Pondicherry. Assuming for the sake of argument the possibility of the Adesh working in tandem with what normally anyone else in Sri Aurobindo’s place would have done only for political reasons, how do we explain the first impromptu decision to go to Chandernagore? And what about the second and final decision to go to Pondicherry with all the bungling that happened in its execution?1 If the Adesh provided only a final seal of authority on the number of political considerations which might have prompted him to escape to Pondicherry, was the Chandernagore interlude necessary or was it a mistake? And who committed the mistake, was it the Divine behind the Adesh, or was it a case of mistaken judgment of political factors? Surely, the intelligent consideration of only political factors would have taken Sri Aurobindo directly to Pondicherry, instead of risking the sudden and unplanned flight to Chandernagore. The Adesh, in fact, put Sri Aurobindo in trouble rather than ensured a smooth flight to Pondicherry. How many times he had to change houses in Chandernagore and there were so many problems on the final day of his departure from Calcutta, not to mention Charu Chandra
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Roy’s refusal to give him refuge at the very outset. We actually see the Divine Grace intervening at every point and bailing out Sri Aurobindo from difficulties, which may not have happened had there been a cool rational planning and advance thinking.
Most important of all, the Adesh that Sri Aurobindo received did not have anything to do with politics. As a matter of fact, it distanced him from politics and gave him the necessary freedom to pursue the greater aim of the supramental yoga, which, we can now say in retrospect, was certainly more important than the liberation of India. Therefore, to say that the Adesh and political considerations can merrily go together is to indulge in a contradiction, which distorts the truth of the matter and gives additional fodder to the already existing misunderstanding that Sri Aurobindo fled from the revolutionary scene out of fear of a second arrest by the British police. Incidentally, this kind of misrepresentation is a regular feature of Heehs’s research and I can give a number of similar instances from his articles in the Archives & Research magazine,2 leave alone the present biography which literally thrives on it.
How does Heehs present the same event in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo? I quote below the relevant portion:
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
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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. 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.” 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. (Lives, 204-05)
The first thing you notice is that he has abandoned the Parthasarathy connection in favour of a number of secondary reasons he has dug out from dusty archival records to belittle the divine nature of the Adesh. Mark the words, “Had he given it any thought, however, he would have found good reasons to comply”, the import of which very few will catch in their first reading. There is in the sentence a clear taunt aimed at Sri Aurobindo for not having used his mind instead of obeying unquestioningly the Adesh, as if to say, “Why did he have to give the excuse of an Adesh (which we historians of external events don’t understand) instead of simply saying that there were anyway very good reasons to do what the Adesh dictated inwardly!”
Note that he has also brought up as additional evidence a few internal reasons that could have also played a role in the event: (1) Sri Aurobindo’s wish to retire from politics; (2) the return of Shyamsunder which ensured the movement would not be left leaderless, and (3) the arrival of Krishna Kumar Mitra, which meant
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that his last family duty of looking after his aunt and her children had come to an end. But are these various factors compatible with each other? For example, the intention of buying land in Calcutta for an Ashram hardly goes well with political factors forcing him to flee from the same city. Yes, one could argue that it evinced his desire to practise Yoga, but then, he could have done his Yoga in Calcutta as well, by publicly declaring his retirement from politics, which the British Govt. would have been so happy to hear.
Next, the phrase “last family duty” with reference to his aunt and her children implies that the other family duties had already been taken care of, which was certainly not the case. What about his own wife he left behind and whom he loved deeply? He could have arranged for her flight too had he known about his departure beforehand. In fact, his sudden departure could be misinterpreted as neglectful of his family duties rather than fulfilling them. For the Adesh seemed to have caught him totally off guard without giving him any time to make the necessary arrangements for his family members, and it was certainly not with the profound satisfaction of having fulfilled all his family duties that he left Calcutta.
Lastly, to say that the return of Shyamsundar and other deportees gave Sri Aurobindo freedom to leave the revolutionary scene implies that he would have waited for them had they not returned. Was the escape so pre-planned and well-timed that it happened only after their return? Or it just happened that way like so many things in life over which we have no control? Moreover, if Sri Aurobindo had been so concerned about the nationalist movement, why did he at all leave it? In fact, the loss of a leader of Sri Aurobindo’s stature was never really compensated by any other statesman and the first wave of the nationalist movement subsided soon after he left for Pondicherry.
But Heehs does exonerate himself for stating the wrong reasons for Sri Aurobindo’s departure at the end of the quoted passage,
This is not to suggest that he [Sri Aurobindo] thought all this through when he decided to leave Calcutta. By his own
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account, his “habit in action was not to devise beforehand and plan.” (Lives, 205)
But then, why state precisely those reasons which suggest that Sri Aurobindo indeed “thought all this through when he decided to leave Calcutta” instead of being impelled by the Adesh from within? Why mention all the historical data which is dismissed in the concluding paragraph? The presentation of historical data is necessarily interpretative, unless one is ready to state the most contradictory data like an Archives curator, who is least bothered about their cogent presentation. But, I suppose, Heehs is basically an archivist with scholarly pretensions. He has collected a lot of data over the years, including plenty of second-hand negative evidence on Sri Aurobindo, without really knowing how to use it in the proper manner. That is why his presentation of Sri Aurobindo’s departure from Calcutta presents an overall negative picture of Sri Aurobindo in spite of the few good words he says at the end. It as if he were patting Sri Aurobindo on his back and saying, “Look, I believe what you say, but don’t make such a big fuss about your Adesh!”
Lastly, how does it all reflect on the author, for the book indicates more his personality than that of his subject? As somebody put it so aptly, one can see in it a constant inner tussle between his admiration and sarcasm for Sri Aurobindo, which has resulted in a state of confusion and indecision with regard to his final assessment. One can admit that he has some respect for the Master as evinced by the oft-repeated strategy of setting the record straight after the damage he perpetrates, but he performs this act with a deep-seated grudge. Though this attitude partly stems from his adverse reaction to the over enthusiastic disciple gushing with superlatives, it is also due to the superhuman greatness of Sri Aurobindo himself. When he cannot measure up to the greatness of the Master, he attempts to downgrade him in order to make him acceptable to his puny mind. It is like someone standing at the foothills of the Himalayas and crying out in disgust that the mountain ranges cannot rise higher than those which are visible to him, because he cannot mount further. It would have been so
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much better had he, with a little humility and faith in his guide, given the benefit of doubt to the existence of the unseen heights beyond rather than what he can only see with his limited vision. For, lending credence and scope to what is beyond oneself can certainly be part of good writing, especially in spiritual matters. So also admiration of the truly great can be measured and yet convincing without having to go overboard into hagiography. I wish the author had explored more this line of approach than the one he has unfortunately chosen.
28 June 2009
April 1985, pp 81-108.
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The passage quoted below is from a booklet by Peter Heehs entitled Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism, published by Sri Aurobindo Society, Hyderabad Centre in 2007. I have quoted it here in order to point out another classic distortion of the author. Even the well-informed reader of Sri Aurobindo will at first be fooled by the basic correctness of the data presented by Heehs, without realising that his interpretation is wrong. Even the interpretation and conclusion will sometimes appear to be so equitable that the reader will not realise that he has actually skimmed over deep contradictions and given the false impression of a balanced view.
Yet, for all Sri Aurobindo’s insistence that there was no necessary connection between Hinduism and his yoga, life in his Ashram retained a recognisably Hindu tone. People who came from Hindu backgrounds found no difficulty in carrying over various Hindu habits into their yogic practice. And Sri Aurobindo did not oppose this. Indeed, he seemed sometimes to encourage it. He spoke openly of the important role that Krishna played in his yogic development. He wrote of the Divine Mother using the language of Hindu scriptures, and did not conceal the fact that he considered the Mother of the Ashram to be an incarnation of the Divine Mother. Some of the ceremonial practices that developed in the Ashram, in particular pranam with the Mother, would not have seemed out of place in an ordinary Hindu setting. But Sri Aurobindo did not see such practices in Hindu terms. He distinguished between acts like pranam, which, he wrote, “have a living value,” and conventional forms which “persist although they
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have no longer any value, e.g. Sraddha for the dead.” He disapproved of people holding to “forms which have no relation to this Yoga, for instance Christians who cling to the Christian forms or Mahomedans to the Namaz or Hindus to the Sandhyavandana in the old way.” Such people, he thought, might soon find such forms “either falling off or else an obstacle to the free development of their sadhana.” He also discouraged any form of public worship, such as prostrating before his photograph in the Ashram’s reception room. Such ostentatious worship he specifically prohibited; but he noted at the same time that there was “no restriction in this Yoga to inward worship and meditation only”. He hoped that “old forms of the different religions” would eventually fall away; but he insisted that “absence of all forms is not a rule of the sadhana.”1
Let us take the first sentence:
Yet, for all Sri Aurobindo’s insistence that there was no necessary connection between Hinduism and his yoga, life in his Ashram retained a recognisably Hindu tone.
Heehs is obviously disappointed at the fact that life in the Ashram has become “religious” in the Hindu way as opposed to the “free form” that Sri Aurobindo would have preferred. By “Hindu tone” he means Hindu habits and practices such as bowing down to the Guru or receiving the Mother’s pranam and considering her as the embodiment of the Divine Shakti. Even the mention of Krishna as having played an important role in Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana is taken as such, implying that Sri Aurobindo allowed this “old world spirituality” to creep in through the back door, probably because his Hindu disciples were not ready for the true supramental yoga! The argument seems to be quite sound, but then, in the same breath, he counters the statement he makes at the beginning of the passage:
But Sri Aurobindo did not see such practices in Hindu terms. He distinguished between acts like pranam, which, he wrote, “have a living value,” and conventional forms which “persist although they have no longer any value, e.g. Sraddha for the dead.”
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So in what terms did Sri Aurobindo see the Hindu practices that he allowed in his Ashram? First we are given the impression that Sri Aurobindo conceded to outdated Hindu practices despite his own wishes for the sake of his Hindu disciples, and then we are told that some of the Hindu practices were indeed genuine spiritual expressions! So are Hindu practices conducive or not to Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga? Or is it more a matter of which practices have still “a living value” and which have become mere “conventional forms”? If that is the case, there should be no problem with Sri Aurobindo allowing those genuine practices in his Ashram, which is what happened during the last decades of his life. Otherwise, it would mean that there was a gap between what the Master wrote and what he actually did and followed in his Ashram, which certainly does not put him in good light. Mind you, Heehs does not resolve this contradiction! He adopts instead the deceptive strategy of trying to please both the Hinduphobic scholar and the Hindu disciples of Sri Aurobindo. To the Hinduphobic scholar he says, “Look, I am criticising these unthinking devotees of Sri Aurobindo because I am a scholar like you.” To the Hindu disciples, he says, “I have some justification for your rituals in your Master’s own words; so rest assured.”
I come now to the belief in Krishna and the Divine Mother (leave aside for the moment looking upon the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an incarnation of the Divine Mother). In the absence of personal experience, they are spiritual realities which you either believe in or not, and, if you do believe, you base your belief on the testimony of realised spiritual personalities. If Heehs does not believe in them, nobody is going to object about it. But having once accepted spiritual realities and taken his stand within the framework of Sri Aurobindo’s world-view, he cannot simply dismiss Krishna and the Divine Mother as mere Hindu creations without any universal application. Sri Aurobindo said that Krishna represented the Overmind in the cosmic range of consciousness from Matter to Supermind. So when he realised the Overmind on 24 November, 1926, he associated it with the descent of Krishna. With regard to the Divine Mother, he wrote that she is “the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe” and has three
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aspects: the Transcendent Supreme Shakti, which “stands above the worlds”; the Universal or Cosmic Mahashakti who “creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces”; and the Individual Shakti who embodies the power of the other two and “makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature”. In what way these descriptions seem to be exclusively Hindu in nature, so that Western seekers can safely throw Krishna and the Divine Mother out of the window without losing the spiritual foundation of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga? The use of Indian terms should not essentially matter as long as they represent universal truths.
Let us shift the problem to the field of science for a better understanding. Do Asian scientists object to the theory of relativity being associated with Einstein, who was a Westerner? Do they insist that scientific theories be named after them and formulated in their language in order to be accepted by them? Of course, they don’t. When spirituality is treated as scientifically as physical science, which is what precisely Sri Aurobindo has done, why should there be any objection to using an Indian name for a well-established spiritual reality such as Krishna? But I suppose Heehs (who is an American) would be only satisfied if Krishna were given an American name, donned western clothes, wore a hat instead of a peacock feather and played the saxophone instead of the flute! It is somewhat the same problem that Dara (a Muslim sadhak) faced in the Ashram in 1932. When he expressed his dissatisfaction about most of the disciples (who were Hindus) wearing the dhoti (a Hindu dress) instead of the pyjama (a Muslim dress) in an Ashram which was supposed to be beyond all religions, Sri Aurobindo replied:
What has dhoti to do with Hinduism or Mahomedanism? There are thousands of Hindus who never wear it – they wear pyjamas of some kind. Rieu, Arjava, Suchi [three Western disciples] wear dhoti because it is convenient and good for the climate – they do not care one jot for Hinduism.2
17 November, 1932
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It is to Dara that Sri Aurobindo wrote the following letter in the thirties dissociating his Ashram from Hinduism:
The Ashram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future.3
On another occasion, Sri Aurobindo even went to the extent of writing:
If this Ashram were here only to serve Hinduism I would not be in it and the Mother who was never a Hindu would not be in it. 4
The above two quotations have been pulled out of their context and quoted with great enthusiasm by Heehs in order to score a point over the Hindu disciples of Sri Aurobindo. But these letters were written in the context of the “rigid orthodoxy” of past religions “whether Hindu, Mahomedan or Christian” and not in regard to the essential truth contained in any of them. Hinduism has been particularly referred to because the subject was raised by Dara (a Muslim disciple), who was missing his own culture in the predominantly external Hindu environment of the Ashram in the thirties. It was in this bad mood and on that very day that Dara wrote to Sri Aurobindo about most of the Ashram disciples wearing a dhoti and not a pyjama. He was mixing up two different issues, the external dress with the inward attitude, or rather the cultural issue with the spiritual issue. The same mistake has been committed by Heehs in a more sophisticated and supercilious manner.
Otherwise, how do you explain the following letter of Sri Aurobindo, which was also written on the same day as the above letter of 17 November, 1932:
What is kept of Hinduism is Vedanta and Yoga, in which Hinduism is one with Sufism of Islam and with the Christian
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mystics. But even here it is not Vedanta and Yoga in their traditional limits (their past), but widened and rid of many ideas that are peculiar to the Hindus. If I have used Sanskrit terms and figures, it is because I know them and do not know Persian and Arabic. I have not the slightest objection to anyone here drawing inspiration from Islamic sources if they agree with the Truth as Sufism agrees with it. On the other hand I have not the slightest objection to Hinduism being broken to pieces and disappearing from the face of the earth, if that is the Divine Will. I have no attachment to past forms; what is Truth will always remain; the Truth alone matters.5
17 November 1932
In the above letter Sri Aurobindo clarifies as to what kind of Hinduism was kept and allowed to continue in his Ashram. So if he encouraged the Mother’s daily pranam and blessings, it was because the disciples could spiritually benefit from it and not because he wanted to start a Hindu ritual. Even if the pranam were only a Hindu ritual, what about the soup ceremony of the Mother in the early days of the Ashram, which has been compared by Amal Kiran to ancient Egyptian or Greek rituals? And what about the groundnut distribution of the Mother in the Playground – to which religion does that belong? What about the Christmas celebration later on? Does the last mean that Christian rituals were instituted in the Ashram? The significance of these activities does not come from their similarity to existing religious practices (which were never demeaned), but from the way they were conducted and were a means for the Mother to communicate her spiritual force to the disciples. The fact that these activities became sometimes mechanical was neither Sri Aurobindo’s fault nor the Mother’s. It was precisely when they were taken mechanically by the disciples and drew heavily on the Mother’s energies that they were discontinued only to be replaced by a new routine, which enabled a fresh mode of contact between her and the disciples. Thus to say that these collective activities were mere rituals and that too Hindu rituals, displays not only sheer ignorance of sadhana but also of the facts of Ashram history.
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I take up the issue of addressing the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram as the incarnation of the Divine Shakti. If there was one important change in Sri Aurobindo’s advice to his disciples after the Siddhi Day of 24 November, 1926, it was his insistence on the Mother’s role in their sadhana and the necessity of opening and surrendering to her Shakti. The book “The Mother” was published as early as 1928 and immediately distributed to the sadhaks and sadhikas of the Ashram. To this day, it expresses the quintessence of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and remains the foundational book for the spiritual aspirant. Very few disciples had any problem with Sri Aurobindo regarding the Mother as the embodiment of the Divine Shakti mentioned in the book “The Mother”, including Dara, the Muslim disciple, and other members of his family who had settled at the Ashram. Very few “Hindu” disciples likewise had any objection to her French birth. There were also Parsis (Amal Kiran, for example) and Westerners who never baulked at the idea of bowing down to the Mother. Why? Because they did not see it as a mere ritual but as a means of receiving her spiritual force, which immensely facilitated their sadhana!
The tradition of looking upon your Guru as the embodiment of the divine Shakti is as old as Time and exists in all traditions, not only in Hinduism. The materialist is of course free to deny this as obsequious moonshine, but in that process he denies the truth of all spirituality. I have a certain respect for such hardcore materialists, for as long as they don’t have the experience of the Divine, they are bold and honest in expressing their views to the contrary. But what is not at all appreciable is the deceptive stand taken by Heehs: pretend to accept the spiritual reality, speak of himself as a practitioner of the Integral Yoga and downplay Sri Aurobindo by pointing out so-called contradictions in his life and teachings from the materialistic point of view. I repeat again the argument that having once accepted the metaphysical framework of Sri Aurobindo, who considered Avatarhood as a spiritual reality and applied it in the case of the Mother, on what basis does Heehs suggest that in this particular case Sri Aurobindo made the mistake of continuing an outdated Hindu ritual, which has no place in the spirituality of the future? (He doesn’t dare say this openly, but
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these are the underpinnings of his statements, which are mostly missed by the reader who is in a hurry to finish the book.) Does Heehs have enough spiritual knowledge and experience to comment so confidently in these matters? If he has indeed found a wider framework of spirituality than Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, then he should first elaborate his alternative philosophy instead of glibly commenting on the former.
Sri Aurobindo made a clear distinction between two types of Hinduism, the lower and the higher. By the lower Hinduism, he meant outdated Hindu customs and rituals, the Hinduism “which takes its stand on the kitchen and seeks its Paradise by cleaning the body”. By the higher Hinduism, he meant the Hinduism, “which seeks God, not through the cooking pot and the social convention, but in the soul”. He made a further division in the higher Hinduism, “the sectarian and unsectarian, disruptive and synthetic, that which binds itself up in the aspect and that which seeks the All”.6 It is by cleverly playing on these multiple meanings of the word that Heehs causes grave misunderstandings. He deliberately confounds these various aspects of Hinduism and uses the word consistently in the negative sense to convey that Sri Aurobindo dispensed with Hinduism altogether after coming to Pondicherry, as if it did not have anything of lasting value. In fact, he concludes by saying that the Hindu disciples of Sri Aurobindo may be doing a great disservice to their Master by still following Hindu rituals of the past such as the belief in Krishna and the Divine Shakti of the Mother!
I take up for critical study another paragraph in the same booklet on Hinduism:
What would the founders of the movement called the Integral Yoga have to say, a generation or two after their passing, about the current life of the Ashram? Would they be surprised that not just the reception room but the entire courtyard of the Ashram is used for public worship from early in the morning till late at night? Would they be surprised to see conventional Hindu symbols displayed, on occasion, in public spaces in the Ashram, its guest houses, or on the covers of their books?
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Would they be taken aback that Ashram departments observe Hindu holidays with conventional decorations, or that newcomers are told by self-righteous onlookers to follow Hindu customs while sitting and moving in Ashram spaces? To be frank, I don’t think that they would be greatly surprised, because all these things were present during their lifetimes. And if they disapproved (as they did disapprove during their lifetimes), they probably would take a tolerant or at any rate a resigned attitude towards these survivals of conventional religion. 7
The impression you get on reading the above paragraph is that Heehs, despite his long stay in Sri Aurobindo Ashram (36 years in 2007), has never overcome the initial cultural shock that a Westerner gets on his first visit to India. In fact, his inherent distaste for devotion, probably caused by his Protestant upbringing, seems to have strengthened with time. “Devotion” is one word from which he shies away as a cat avoids cold water, and his antipathy for hagiography basically stems from this deep dislike for spiritual emotion.
One also wonders whether he has ever lived the spiritual life. For, if he had, he would not have spoken with such conceit about “public worship” and the display of “Hindu conventional symbols” at the Ashram. Even the most conventional religious symbols have some inner value and Sri Aurobindo never denigrated traditional paths and practices, though he told his disciples to go beyond them. As for “public worship”, how does it necessarily become “religious” in the negative sense of the word? Is spirituality necessarily individualistic? Is there no scope for collective spiritual life? Can we not have a collective concentration without making it a religion? Why did Sri Aurobindo himself encourage the Mother’s pranam and darshan in his Ashram, which are undoubtedly collective activities?
The above quote thus implies that spirituality can only be inward and doesn’t need any outer expression, that all its outer expressions are necessarily ritualistic. There are a number of letters of Sri Aurobindo on this point to prove the contrary. I quote from the
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very letter of Sri Aurobindo that Heehs has quoted in the passage discussed at the beginning of this article:
I was thinking not of Pranam etc. which have a living value, but of old forms which persist although they have no longer any value – e.g. sraddha for the dead. Also here forms which have no relation to this yoga – for instance Christians who cling to the Christian forms or Mahomedans to the Namaz or Hindus to the Sandhyavandana in the old way might soon find them either falling off or else an obstacle to the free development of their sadhana.8
Heehs should be complimented for his ability to take both positions (for and against the Mother’s Pranam) at the same time without having any logical problems! The very fact of quoting this letter indicates that he sees truth in the act of Pranam (or any other public form of worship), which he criticises at the same time as an outdated Hindu ritual. I quote below other letters of Sri Aurobindo on the same subject:
There is no restriction in this Yoga to inward worship and meditation only. As it is a Yoga for the whole being, not for the inner being only, no such restriction could be intended. Old forms of the different religions may fall away, but absence of all forms is not the rule of the sadhana.9
These [arguments against external Bhakti] are the exaggerations made by the mind taking one side of Truth and ignoring the other sides.10 The inner bhakti is the main thing and without it the external becomes a form and mere ritual, but the external has its place and use when it is straightforward and sincere.11
What is meant by bahyapuja [external worship]? If it is purely external, then of course it is the lowest form; but if done with the true consciousness, it can bring the greatest possible completeness to the adoration by allowing the body and the
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most external consciousness to share in the spirit and act of worship.
The photograph is a vehicle only 12 – but if you have the right consciousness, then you can bring something of the living being into it or become aware of the being for which it stands and can make it a means of contact. It is like the pranapratistha in the image in the temple.13
Another suggested implication of Heehs is that Sri Aurobindo was a bundle of contraries because he allowed in his Ashram those practices he disapproved in his letters, those rituals of Hinduism which he strongly condemned in his writings. But I suppose this is but an exact reflection of Heehs’s mind which thrives in contrary statements and glosses over crucial distinctions such as the higher and lower Hinduism, or rituals which no longer have any living value as opposed to those that have.
I will now consider the fallout of these implications in the situation of an American (Peter Heehs) finding himself extremely uncomfortable in what he calls a “Hindu” Ashram. First of all, this is not an uncommon situation. So many ethnically curious Western tourists daily walk into Ashrams or temples in India without understanding anything of the practices conducted there. This is normally expected of tourists from the West, who are mostly not familiar with any spiritual traditions except perhaps Christianity. But what if someone keeps up the same attitude of contempt and misapprehension even after having settled in India from decades in an Ashram dedicated to the practice of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga? Is there something wrong with him or with the majority of Indians residing there? Or, more importantly, does it mean that the basic requisites of the path of Integral Yoga are different for Westerners and Easterners, because of which a Westerner like Heehs could never adjust himself to the primarily “Hindu” environment of the Ashram? For Heehs always seems to mean that Westerners like him need not “indulge” in devotion, faith and surrender, while Indians may do so to their heart’s content because
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of their traditional culture. Westerners need not be bound by these outdated customs and attitudes which Indians have been following from times immemorial, thereby implying that they have found a superior method of practising the same Yoga. There could be nothing farther from the truth, and you don’t have to spend hours of research to find a quotation from Sri Aurobindo to refute it (if it is to Sri Aurobindo that we fall back upon to find the truth of Integral Yoga), for Heehs himself provides us the quote:
It is not the Hindu outlook or the Western that fundamentally matters in Yoga, but the psychic turn and the spiritual urge, and these are the same everywhere.14
I recommend the reader to go through this entire letter from which I will now quote a few more portions:
… there is no essential difference between the spiritual life in the East and the spiritual life in the West,– what difference there is has always been of names, forms and symbols or else of the emphasis laid on one special aim or another or on one side or another of psychological experience….
Indian spirituality has, it is true, a wider and more minute knowledge behind it; it has followed hundreds of different paths, admitted every kind of approach to the Divine and has thus been able to enter into fields which are outside the less ample scope of occidental practice; but that makes no difference to the essentials, and it is the essentials alone that matter….
....we are not working for a race or a people or a continent or for a realisation of which only Indians or only Orientals are capable. Our aim is not, either, to found a religion or a school of philosophy or a school of Yoga, but to create a ground and a way of spiritual growth and experience which will bring down a greater Truth beyond the mind but not inaccessible to the human soul and consciousness. All can pass who are drawn to that Truth, whether they are from India or elsewhere, from the East or from the West. All may find great difficulties in their personal or common human nature; but it is not their
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physical origin or their racial temperament that can be an insuperable obstacle to their deliverance.15
Hence there is no essential difference between the East and the West as far as spirituality is concerned, just as there are none in science and technology. But what has caused the misunderstanding in Heehs? Is it his rebellious and ambitious nature standing in the way of opening himself to the Divine? Or did his vital nature revolt when his spiritual ambition was not fulfilled, which is a frequent phenomenon with sadhaks who want to storm the heavens by their intense personal efforts? Or is it simply his Protestant upbringing that could never reconcile with the concept of surrender? Whatever be the case, there seems to have been a spiritual failure and revolt because of which he went against the very grain of sadhana, for how else can a seeker have such a deep aversion to faith, devotion and surrender? How can you expect to do the yoga so unyogically as it were, without these fundamental requisites of the path? It is perhaps due to this spiritual failure that Heehs had to find a scapegoat, and he found it in Hinduism. He had to put the blame on something to avoid admitting his own failure, and conclude that the above requisites were not necessary for practising the Yoga. So it is not that he (an American) could not familiarise himself with the “Hindu” environment of the Ashram; it is because he refused to surrender himself to the Divine (which most Indians have no difficulty accepting in theory, though not in practice), that he had to condemn Hinduism in general. Instead of humbly accepting his own failure in sadhana, he had to arrogantly react and say that the sadhana which the Hindus practise is a failure.
It is somewhat similar to the reverse situation of an Indian who goes to America, who cannot cope up with the general level of intelligence and external organisation of life and condemns American culture, saying that Indians have a better way of organising their cities. Very few Indians commit this mistake. Most of them are good learners, and they not only catch up but outshine other groups with their innate capacity. It is because of this that the non-resident Indian community abroad is so affluent and never
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thinks of going back home. For who would want to face the political and social mess of present day India? Who would want to face its tremendous lack of basic infrastructure and even civic sense? I (being an Indian) have no qualms in admitting this, for we do have to learn from the West in these matters, just as the West has to learn from India in spiritual matters. I am thus conveying a simple point dictated by my common sense: let us learn from each other, for this is how we will become better human beings. Condemnation restricts the opportunities to learn and limits the scope of our self-expansion. Mutual appreciation makes us global citizens instead of narrow-minded chauvinists. In short, avoid the Peter Heehs phenomenon of being critical when you are unable to learn and appreciate! You can of course turn the tables and accuse me of exactly doing the same, thereby meaning that I should appreciate Heehs’s point of view, but that is only a clever argument to hide the deceit behind it. For it was he who denigrated Hinduism and not me who criticised Western values.
What is also contradictory to the basic stand of Heehs and his mentors, Jeffrey Kripal and Wendy Doniger, is that they have no objection to Hinduism when it comes to Tantric sex, with which they are so comfortable. Then there is no question of outdated rituals and conventional practices, but only praise for its detailed knowledge and scientific pursuit of pleasure! But mention that sexual pleasure has to be transcended and sexual energies have to be transformed, and see how they wince! This is the reason why Heehs had to attribute Sri Aurobindo with “spontaneous erotic delight” in the Lives knowing fully well Sri Aurobindo’s view of the incompatibility of sex with his Integral Yoga.16 Thus it is not Hindu conventions but unregenerate human nature which stands in the way of the Integral Yoga. Conventions and rituals can always be practised in the right spirit and need not be necessarily thrown aside. The spirit can express itself in new forms, but it can also breathe life into existing forms belonging to Hinduism or any other spiritual tradition. Therefore when Heehs belittles Hinduism in the Ashram, it is not Hindu conventions that he disparages, but spirituality itself.
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Let us take the practical example of bowing down to the Samadhi or the offering of flowers and lighting of incense sticks. Why should anybody make such a big fuss about them as long as he is not forced to perform these actions which have always had some value in one’s relation with the Divine? It is only when they are mechanically performed that they lose their inner significance. It is when “the form prevails and the spirit recedes,”17 as Sri Aurobindo says in The Human Cycle, that they have to be abandoned, in which case you filter out outdated rituals from those actions which have a living value. But to say that all outer expressions are mechanical rituals is like throwing the baby with the bathwater and rejecting the spirit along with the form. Heehs always views the complex problem of spiritual expression from the wrong end, from outside rather than inside. Posing himself like a recent visitor from the materialistic environment of the West, he pretends not to understand the significance of these forms and strikes a sympathetic chord among those who are strangers to spirituality. For, after all, he wants to sell his book in the West, and how will his book sell if he repeats the same old traditional “spiritual hash”, whether it be true or not!
Heehs further mixes up spiritual realities with cultural issues. For him, the Divine Shakti is a dispensable Hindu creation, as if Westerners don’t have to surrender themselves to Her (or It) in their spiritual practice. The fact that the Divine Force may or may not be equated with the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram is a secondary issue and should not come in the way of accepting the essential truth of the former. For it is well-known that every sadhak of the Integral Yoga invariably opens to this Divine Force in his spiritual endeavour. If he does not, I wonder what he is supposed to open to! I am waiting for the day when Heehs will declare that even the Divine is not necessary for the divinisation of life! So also Avatarhood is not a figment of the Hindu imagination, but an undeniable fact of spiritual traditions. So what is wrong if Sri Aurobindo affirmed the Mother’s Avatarhood and vice versa, especially when they left the matter to individual faith and did not enforce it in their Ashram. Similarly, Krishna is not just a Hindu myth but a personification of the Overmind plane of
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consciousness, through which all Yogis have to pass in order to attain the Supermind. The fact that Sri Aurobindo chose to go beyond the Overmind consciousness does not alter its own truth and role in the cosmic range of consciousness, which he has described so well in The Life Divine.18
Or is it that Heehs is under the wrong notion that the Divine is necessarily impersonal, so that there is no place for divine personalities in the Integral Yoga? If so, he has only to read the chapter on “The Modes of the Self ” in The Synthesis of Yoga.19 In the passage I quote below, Sri Aurobindo at first seems to support Heehs’s thesis:
The distinction between the Personal and the Impersonal is substantially the same as the Indian distinction, but the associations of the English words carry within them a certain limitation which is foreign to Indian thought. The personal God of the European religions is a Person in the human sense of the word, limited by His qualities though otherwise possessed of omnipotence and omniscience; it answers to the Indian special conceptions of Shiva or Vishnu or Brahma or of the Divine Mother of all, Durga or Kali. Each religion really erects a different personal Deity according to its own heart and thought to adore and serve. The fierce and inexorable God of Calvin is a different being from the sweet and loving God of St. Francis, as the gracious Vishnu is different from the terrible though always loving and beneficent Kali who has pity even in her slaying and saves by her destructions. Shiva, the God of ascetic renunciation who destroys all things seems to be a different being from Vishnu and Brahma, who act by grace, love, preservation of the creature or for life and creation. It is obvious that such conceptions can be only in a very partial and relative sense true descriptions of the infinite and omnipresent Creator and Ruler of the universe. Nor does Indian religious thought affirm them as adequate descriptions.20
Mark the last two sentences where Sri Aurobindo denies what he states in the beginning. He goes on to explain how the Personal
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and Impersonal Divine co-exist and how both these modes of the Divine Consciousness can be simultaneously possessed.
The Personal God is not limited by His qualities, He is Ananta- guna, capable of infinite qualities and beyond them and lord of them to use them as He will, and He manifests Himself in various names and forms of His infinite godhead to satisfy the desire and need of the individual soul according to its own nature and personality. It is for this reason that the normal European mind finds it so difficult to understand Indian religion as distinct from Vedantic or Sankhya philosophy, because it cannot easily conceive of a personal God with infinite qualities, a personal God who is not a Person, but the sole real Person and the source of all personality. Yet that is the only valid and complete truth of the divine Personality.
The place of the divine Personality in our synthesis will best be considered when we come to speak of the Yoga of devotion; it is enough here to indicate that it has its place and keeps it in the integral Yoga even when liberation has been attained. There are practically three grades of the approach to the personal Deity; the first in which He is conceived with a particular form or particular qualities as the name and form of the Godhead which our nature and personality prefers; a second in which He is the one real Person, the All-Personality, the Ananta-guna; a third in which we get back to the ultimate source of all idea and fact of personality in that which the Upanishad indicates by the single word He without fixing any attributes. It is there that our realisations of the personal and the impersonal Divine meet and become one in the utter Godhead. For the impersonal Divine is not ultimately an abstraction or a mere principle or a mere state or power and degree of being any more than we ourselves are really such abstractions. The intellect first approaches it through such conceptions, but realisation ends by exceeding them. Through the realisation of higher and higher principles of being and states of conscious existence we arrive not at the annullation of all in a sort of positive zero or even an inexpressible state
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of existence, but at the transcendent Existence itself which is also the Existent who transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality.
When in That we live and have our being, we can possess it in both its modes, the Impersonal in a supreme state of being and consciousness, in an infinite impersonality of self- possessing power and bliss, the Personal by the divine nature acting through the individual soul-form and by the relation between that and its transcendent and universal Self. We may keep even our relation with the personal Deity in His forms and names; if, for instance, our work is predominantly a work of Love it is as the Lord of Love that we can seek to serve and express Him, but we shall have at the same time an integral realisation of Him in all His names and forms and qualities and not mistake the front of Him which is prominent in our attitude to the world for all the infinite Godhead.21
I have quoted at length from this chapter because it addresses the fundamentally wrong notion of the Divine being necessarily impersonal, which has probably led Heehs to altogether dispense with Krishna and the Divine Mother. I will now quote another lengthy passage which should settle the issue beyond all doubt, for at least those who are ready to accept Sri Aurobindo’s authority in these matters.
The answer to the question [whether the Krishna of Brindavan and the stories of his lila are literally true or merely symbols of deep spiritual realities] depends on what value one attaches to spiritual experience and to mystic and occult experience, that is to say, to the data of other planes of consciousness than the physical, as also on the nature of the relations between the cosmic consciousness and the individual and collective consciousness of man. From the point of view of spiritual and occult Truth, what takes shape in the consciousness of man is a reflection and particular kind of formation, in a difficult medium, of things much greater in their light, power and beauty or in their force and range which come to it from the cosmic consciousness of which man is a limited and, in his present
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state of evolution, a still ignorant part. All this explanation about the genius of the race, of the consciousness of a nation creating the Gods and their forms is a very partial, somewhat superficial and in itself a misleading truth. Man’s mind is not an original creator, it is an intermediary; to start creating it must receive an initiating “inspiration”, a transmission or a suggestion from the cosmic consciousness, and with that it does what it can. God is, but man’s conceptions of God are reflections in his own mentality, sometimes of the Divine, sometimes of other Beings and Powers and they are what his mentality can make of the suggestions that come to him, generally very partial and imperfect so long as they are still mental, so long as he has not arrived at a higher and truer, a spiritual or mystic knowledge. The Gods already exist, they are not created by man even though he does seem to conceive them in his own image; fundamentally, he formulates as best he can what truth about them he receives from the cosmic Reality. An artist or a bhakta may have a vision of the Gods and it may get stabilised and generalised in the consciousness of the race and in that sense it may be true that man gives their forms to the Gods; but he does not invent these forms, he records what he sees; the forms that he gives are given to him. In the “conventional” form of Krishna men have embodied what they could see of his eternal beauty and what they have seen may be true as well as beautiful, it conveys something of the form, but it is fairly certain that if there is an eternal form of that eternal beauty it is a thousand times more beautiful than what man had as yet been able to see of it. Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence and keeping it in being. Such beings are as real and more permanently real than the men they influence, but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic consciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human consciousness on which they exercise their influence. It is natural for man who only sees his own consciousness individual, national or racial at work and does
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not see what works upon it and shapes it, to think that all is created by him and there is nothing cosmic and greater behind it. The Krishna consciousness is a reality, but if there were no Krishna, there could be no Krishna consciousness: except in arbitrary metaphysical abstractions there can be no consciousness without a Being who is conscious. It is the person who gives value and reality to the personality, he expresses himself in it and is not constituted by it. Krishna is a being, a person and it is as the Divine Person that we meet him, hear his voice, speak with him and feel his presence. To speak of the consciousness of Krishna as something separate from Krishna is an error of the mind, which is always separating the inseparable and which also tends to regard the impersonal, because it is abstract, as greater, more real and more enduring than the person. Such divisions may be useful to the mind for its own purposes, but it is not the real truth; in the real truth the being or person and its impersonality or state of being are one reality.22
This letter was written in 1946, only four years before Sri Aurobindo passed away. Sri Aurobindo hardly seemed to have lost interest in Krishna or have “a resigned attitude towards these survivals of conventional religion” (p 21), as Heehs has claimed. On the contrary, Sri Aurobindo forcefully confirms the reality of “the Divine Person” whom we can meet, “hear his voice and feel his presence”. With regard to the Gods, they exist and “are not created by man”. With reference to the nation soul, “Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence”. Which spiritually conscious Indians would now be ashamed of Hindu culture after these occult confirmations of Sri Aurobindo?
I come now to the impression some disciples may have inadvertently created that Sri Aurobindo was against Hindu culture. It is true that you can find a few statements in his writings dissociating himself from Hinduism, like the ones quoted here by Heehs, but these have been made in the context of outdated Hindu ceremonies and practices which have lost their inner significance.
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As for his position with regard to traditional Hindu paths, I quote the following letter:
I have never said that my Yoga was something brand new in all its elements. I have called it the integral Yoga and that means that it takes up the essence and many processes of the old Yogas – its newness is in its aim, standpoint and the totality of its method….
It is new as compared with the old Yogas:
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my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamised, made secure and public. Our Yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.23
What can we conclude from the above letter? There is certainly no belittling of traditional paths because Sri Aurobindo “takes up the essence and many processes of the old yogas” in his Integral Yoga. Nevertheless, his Yoga is sufficiently new for us to claim a break from the past aims and methods, especially in the aim of the supramental evolution and the method of triple transformation. Even in that method, Sri Aurobindo says he takes up “old methods but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive”.
What was the practical outcome of this view in the early days of the Ashram? There was a bare minimum of collective rules for practising the Integral Yoga, such as the ban on sex, smoking and alcoholics. As Sri Aurobindo had retired after November 1926, the Mother conducted the daily collective meditations of the disciples. These were often followed by her blessings and distribution of flowers, which were a means of communicating her spiritual force to them. Otherwise, the rest of the day most disciples worked for the community in various departments such as the Dining Room, Building Service, workshops, flower gardens and other domestic departments. The sadhaks and sadhikas worked in the spirit of Karmayoga and never found the work a compulsory regime. In their free time, some of them wrote poetry, composed music, painted or did handwork and embroidery. There was no dress code or social restrictions preventing them from speaking to each other. Does the above description have any semblance to a strictly codified traditional Ashram where members are supposed to abide by certain rules and compulsorily participate in collective pujas? This is not to say that traditional Hindu Ashrams or other religious communities have no value, but that Sri Aurobindo
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deliberately kept the minimum of outer forms and rules in his own Ashram.
What is the situation now? In the absence of the physical presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, most of the disciples (both Indians and Westerners) bow down to their Samadhi and draw spiritual sustenance from it. They regularly concentrate or meditate in front of the photographs of their Gurus and derive great benefit. If they offer flowers and light incense sticks, it is certainly not due to any outer compulsion, but because these actions have for them a living significance. Now if anybody objects to these actions because he thinks they are religious in nature, then I would consider him not only a stranger to Hindu religion, but a stranger to spirituality itself! I would request him to first distinguish between religion and spirituality, and then make the further distinction between a ritual and a genuine spiritual expression. If he still insists on stopping these so-called “religious rituals”, I will tell him quietly that nobody is forcing him to follow them, and that he could perform his own ritual or no ritual at all as long as it is not a public nuisance.
Finally, let us look at this whole problem of religion and spirituality with a little more humility and common sense. How are we fit to pass judgment in such matters? Are we sufficiently spiritually advanced to distinguish one from the other? The fact that our Gurus made the distinction does not automatically give us the faculty of discernment. We are often so gung-ho about decrying religion that we forget that the difference between religion and spirituality is not as black and white as we project it to be. There is actually a whole range of outer expression between the two and the range (or spectrum) of these symbolic actions vary from: (1) those practices which have a genuine spiritual value; (2) those which have become half mechanical but still retain some inner significance, and (3) those which have become mere rituals and have no spiritual value at all. In such a fluid situation, how can we pass facile judgments on the beliefs and practices of others without being ourselves judged in a similar manner by them? And even if we are right in certain cases in disallowing certain rituals
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over which we have administrative control, why criticise those who practise them and derive great benefit?
As for old Yogas, have we mastered the achievements of traditional disciplines to be able to say that we have gone beyond them? Have we, for example, realised the Self (Atman), or managed to silence the mind, purified the heart or even disciplined the body? Have we realised even a modicum of the Integral Yoga in order to claim superiority over other Yogas? The fact that Sri Aurobindo said that his Yoga begins where old Yogas end applies to him and not to us who are mostly neophytes in Yoga, whether old or new. Moreover, old and new are relative terms and Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga, as expounded in the Arya, is now almost a hundred years old. But we have faith that his Yoga is not going to be outdated for a long time to come in spite of all the misunderstandings that it has had to face. Spiritual seekers all over the world are thus faced with the prospect of climbing the Himalayas of consciousness consisting of hundreds of traditional and modern Yogas, and if Sri Aurobindo has added one more yet invisible peak or a new dimension, it hardly makes any difference to our present station, which is generally at the base of the mountain range. Therefore instead of heatedly arguing as to which destination is better, let us all start climbing together and help each other out with mutual respect and goodwill. For the preliminary and perhaps even the intermediate goals will be the same, no matter the way we choose, provided it is not the path leading to a precipice. And the higher we go, the less we will disagree with each other until all arguments cease with the dawning of true knowledge.
9 August, 2010 Notes
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[In this lengthy article, I have not challenged the interpretation of Peter Heehs as much as Arun Chandra Dutt’s inference of Sri Aurobindo’s usage of code words in his letters to Motilal Roy between 1912 and 1920. What surprised me is that Heehs, who questions Sri Aurobindo’s credentials at every point, accepted without any reservations Arun Chandra Dutt’s deductions of certain statements made by Motilal Roy. He combined them further with some notations from the Record of Yoga and came up with a preposterous conclusion regarding Sri Aurobindo’s attitude towards revolutionary activity during this period. He found nothing wrong about Sri Aurobindo congratulating Motilal Roy for the bomb attack on Viceroy Hardinge and at the same time using his spiritual force to cure the wounds of the very same man who was attacked. According to Heehs, political expediency dictated the first action and spiritual solicitude the second. I personally found everything wrong with this conclusion that gives Sri Aurobindo a Jekyll and Hyde personality and creates a contradiction between his inner and outer person. That is why I have questioned Arun Chandra Dutt’s deductions and found plenty of loose ends in his arguments.]
The Hardinge controversy is with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s attitude towards the assassination attempt on Viceroy Hardinge in 1912 at Chandni Chowk, Delhi. This is how Peter Heehs presents the event in the April 1987 issue of the Archives & Research magazine:
On 23 December 1912, Hardinge was grievously injured by a bomb during his ceremonial entry into the new capital of Delhi. The bomb was made and thrown by revolutionaries connected with Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual and political disciple Motilal Roy. A short while later Sri Aurobindo wrote a letter
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to Motilal in which, according to Motilal’s disciple Arunchandra Dutt, Sri Aurobindo referred to this attempt. In this undated letter (written probably early in January 1913) Sri Aurobindo wrote: “About Tantric yoga; your experiment in the smashâna was a daring one,– but it seems to have been efficiently & skilfully carried out, & the success is highly gratifying.” Dutt writes that “smashâna” (burning ground) was a code word for Delhi. It is certain that in Sri Aurobindo’s correspondence with Motilal, “Tantric Yoga” stood for revolutionary activity. There is no reason to disbelieve Dutt’s claim that the “experiment” referred to in the letter was the Delhi bombing. A certain type of human intelligence, however, may have a hard time reconciling Sri Aurobindo’s remark with the many solicitous references he made in Record of Yoga to the injured Viceroy’s condition. Certain entries, e.g. that of 15 January, show that Sri Aurobindo used his spiritual will (Aishwarya) to promote the healing of Hardinge’s wounds. The contradiction between the two attitudes is of course only superficial. This is not a matter that the historian of external events need concern himself with, but it may be suggested that Sri Aurobindo could well have approved of the attempted assassination as a matter of political expediency, while deprecating it from an occult or spiritual point of view.1
Mark the taunt in the words “A certain type of human intelligence...” aimed at the reader who would baulk at his concluding suggestion – “Sri Aurobindo could well have approved of the attempted assassination as a matter of political expediency, while deprecating it from an occult or spiritual point of view.” Not many noticed this objectionable sentence in 1987; those who did, maintained a dignified silence for the sake of institutional propriety. Only the late Jugal Kishore Mukherji, former head of the Higher Course of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, spoke out his mind in no uncertain terms. In a letter addressed to the Trustees of the Ashram, he mentioned some half a dozen serious objections to Heehs’s research articles on Sri Aurobindo’s life published in the Archives & Research magazine. With regard to this particular controversy, he wrote the following:
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Well, the less said about this type of far-fetching ingenuous explanation, the better....
To my perception there are no two Sri Aurobindos, one “inner” and the other “outer”, with two different motivations for two different simultaneous actions, one on the “inner” plane and the other on the “outer” one. Sri Aurobindo, is One and Indivisible. He always acts from one consciousness – spiritual-divine, from one motivation – spiritual-divine whether for “outer” activity or for the “inner” one. His ways and actions may appear to us inscrutable; but for that we should not try to create, through our limited investigation, contradictions and inconsistencies in his conduct and action, and then seek to “explain” them away as belonging to two different planes with two different standards and motivations.2
Before we launch ourselves into a detailed examination of the event, let me first contextualise it for the lay reader. Sri Aurobindo was in Pondicherry at this point of time. He had been there for around two and a half years and was facing an acute financial crisis. Luckily, Motilal Roy had paid his first visit to him in November-December 1911 and had started sending him a monthly remittance of Rs 50/ for his household expenses. Now, according to Arun Chandra Dutt (disciple of Motilal Roy), Sri Aurobindo congratulated Motilal Roy for the daring assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge, planned and carried out by revolutionaries connected with the latter (Motilal) and operating from Chandernagore, namely Rashbehari Bose and Srish Ghose. Motilal was sufficiently involved in it to be congratulated by Sri Aurobindo. The bomb itself was prepared by Mani Naik, a close associate of him, who in 1915 became the editor of the Prabartak, the Bengali counterpart of the Arya.
But the question is whether Sri Aurobindo at all congratulated Motilal Roy! Because if he did, Sri Aurobindo becomes a bundle of contradictions, not only in his political action and spiritual work, but also in what he declared in public and what he wrote in private. The fact that Heehs did not find anything contradictory in Sri Aurobindo’s attitude when he wrote about it in the Archives &
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Research of April 1987 shows that there is something seriously wrong with him than with Sri Aurobindo, which is exactly the reason why his recent biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo raised such a huge controversy. How does he say that this Doctor Jekyll and Hyde portrayal of Sri Aurobindo is just a superficial contradiction in his personality? Even an ordinary man would not be happy about the attempted murder of an individual in whose safety and well-being he is interested, forget about a Yogi like Sri Aurobindo who was acting directly on universal forces with his Yogic power. Sri Aurobindo wrote the following in his letter to Motilal which can be dated August 1912, only two months before the assassination attempt:
My subjective sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consummation by a prolonged realisation & dwelling in Parabrahman for many hours. Since then, egoism is dead for all in me except the Annamaya Atma,— the physical self which awaits one farther realisation before it is entirely liberated from occasional visitings or external touches of the old separated existence.
My future sadhan is for life, practical knowledge & shakti,
— not the essential knowledge or shakti in itself which I have got already — but knowledge & shakti established in the same physical self & directed to my work in life. I am now getting a clearer idea of that work & I may as well impart something of that idea to you; since you look to me as the centre, you should know what is likely to radiate out of that centre.3
Does the above quotation, and I request the reader to go through the rest of the letter, give scope to a schizophrenic personality? Surely not! But the best proof that it does not is Heehs’s own retraction in the present biography of the earlier statement he had made in the Archives & Research issue of April 1987. In the Lives, he writes the following with regard to the same event:
It would seem from this that Aurobindo was pleased with the attempt to assassinate the viceroy. But his apparent endorsement of Motilal’s activities is hard to reconcile with
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his evident distress at Hardinge’s injuries, which he frequently expressed in his diary. Presumably his attitude toward Motilal’s activities was the same as his attitude toward Barin’s five years earlier: “it is not wise to check things when they have taken a strong shape” because “something good may come out of them.” He certainly never ceased to believe that Indians had the right to use violence to topple a government maintained by violence. But he did not believe in individual terrorism, and he felt more than ever that terrorist acts were against India’s long-term interests. (Lives, 237)
He now finds “hard to reconcile” what he had earlier thought was a superficial contradiction in Sri Aurobindo’s personality, which means he has attributed himself with “the certain type of human intelligence” he had a dig at in his earlier interpretation. But then why flog a dead horse? Why remind him of the years when he was a novice historian?
Heehs would hardly appreciate the pointing out of such gross discrepancies in his work. But I would like to use this example to demonstrate his inbuilt bias against Sri Aurobindo to those who are mesmerised by his so-called scholarship. To come to the point, the evidence adduced by Arun Chandra Dutt to show that Sri Aurobindo congratulated Motilal is, to say the least, flimsy and most unconvincing. But Heehs simply assumes that Dutt is right; he does not even critically examine the evidence whereas he is so keen in putting Sri Aurobindo in the dock for every slip he might have made. Sri Aurobindo’s memory is questioned, his credibility is put to the test, his honesty discussed, but whatever Arun Chandra Dutt says is tamely accepted and a superstructure of falsehood built on it.
Let us take up Dutt’s evidence and interpretation of the sentence in which Sri Aurobindo congratulates Motilal in code words:
About Tantric yoga; your experiment in the smashâna was a daring one,– but it seems to have been efficiently & skilfully carried out, & the success is highly gratifying.4
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“Tantric Yoga”, we are told, stands for revolutionary activity, and “smashâna” is a code word for Delhi, the “cemetery ground of mighty empires in the past and destined sepulchre of the ruling British empire”.5 Frankly, this is hard to believe. The meaning of Tantric Yoga or Tantric kriyas here as elsewhere in the other letters of Sri Aurobindo to Motilal, seems to be what it would normally mean. Sri Aurobindo does seem to be referring to Tantric Yoga per se, though we are not sure what kind of Tantric Yoga is meant. All that we can say is that the Yoga of Sapta Chathusthaya, which Sri Aurobindo was practising during this period, had some Tantric elements from the point of view of the mastery of the forces of life. Let me quote from the previous paragraph of the same letter:
What I [Sri Aurobindo] am attempting is to establish the normal working of the siddhis in life ie the perception of thoughts, feelings & happenings of other beings & in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data. 2d., the communication of the ideas & feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, nations,) by mere transmission of will-power; 3d., the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas & feelings; 4th, the determining of events, actions & results of action throughout the world by pure silent will power. When I wrote to you last, I had begun the general application of these powers which God has been developing in me for the last two or three years…6
The sense is obvious here, and for those who are familiar with the Record of Yoga, it is an unmistakable reference to the yogic powers mentioned in it. How does the sense then suddenly change to “revolutionary activity” in the very next paragraph which opens with the controversial “smashana” sentence?
Dutt also claims that Sri Aurobindo took revolutionary activity as Tantra or Shakti-sadhana, but surely Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga encompassed all the activities of life and not only revolutionary action. Even if Sri Aurobindo particularly meant it to be so, can we apply systematically the same sense to all the occurrences of the word “Tantra” in his letters to Motilal? We see that we cannot,
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unless we perform some extraordinary semantic feats. For example, what would the phrase, “we have been attempting an extension of Tantric Kriya without any sufficient Vedantic basis” mean? 7 Vedanta is so often mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in relation to Tantra that one would expect it to be also connected with revolution. In the Yogic context that Sri Aurobindo seems to be writing, the term “Vedantic basis” means the psychological foundation provided by the practice of Vedantic Yoga which is based on the Purusha principle, as opposed to Tantra which relies on the Shakti aspect of the Divine. Another problematic interpretation is that of “old Tantra” and “new Tantra”.8 Do these terms mean old and new revolutionary activities? If so, what is new and what is old? What are “big kriyas” and small kriyas, “right mantra & tantra, “mukti” and “bhukti”? 9 Why does Sri Aurobindo stress on avoiding “rajasic defects” in the performing of Tantrik kriyas? – I would think that rajas helps in battle and courageous militant action. Then what would Sri Aurobindo mean by the Shakti preparing to pour herself out and choose her own method with regard to Tantric work?10 Does this mean that you leave the planning of bomb attacks on the Divine Shakti? These and so many other questions arise on a closer analysis of Dutt’s proposition that I would rather let the reader himself complete this exercise. But one thing stands out clearly, that Sri Aurobindo wrote about Tantric Yoga in general to Motilal and not about revolutionary activity in the guise of advice on Tantric Yoga. One can always force the meaning of revolutionary activity into his words under the plea that it was taken as Tantric Yoga by Motilal and his associates, but this narrow sense does not fit in with the larger compass of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga.
On the other hand, we cannot associate the terms “smashana” and “Tantric kriya” with Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga. But that is because our conception of his Yoga is generally founded on what he taught much later in his lifetime, especially in the 1930’s when he wrote thousands of letters to his disciples, and in the forties when he revised some of his major works. From this point of view, even the Yoga of Sapta Chatusthaya that Sri Aurobindo practised during the first decade of his stay at Pondicherry and noted down its
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results in the Record of Yoga, does not quite match with the Yoga of the triple transformation he prescribed to the sadhaks of the Ashram. We also do not know what exact method Sri Aurobindo advised Motilal to follow, apart from the three mantras he sent him from Pondicherry to recite in the traditional Indian way. Not many are aware that Motilal did develop certain powers mentioned in the Record of Yoga. He developed certain subtle senses and he once predicted the death of the mother of a close friend. On another occasion, he used his yogic will to prevent a miscarriage.11 Moreover, he had already acquainted himself with certain Tantric and Hathayogic practices before he became Sri Aurobindo’s disciple. The word “smashana” would not seem so strange if the reader is informed that Motilal at some point of time volunteered to burn dead bodies in order to overcome his fear of them.12 I do not say that this is what is meant in the sentence, but it is as legitimate a supposition as Arun Chandra Dutt’s, who wants us to believe that it refers specifically to the Delhi assassination attempt on Hardinge.
Let us further examine Dutt’s evidence. One would expect him to build his reasoning on the testimony of his guru Motilal Roy, for after all the latter was a first-hand witness to what transpired between him and Sri Aurobindo, but, surprisingly, he does not. Dutt only refers to the book Sri Aurobindo –Yuga Purush by Motilal Roy, who has mentioned there the fourth letter of Sri Aurobindo to him dated February 1913 as evidence of Sri Aurobindo’s approval of the attack on Hardinge. But Dutt himself quotes the third letter of Sri Aurobindo to Motilal dated January 1913 to prove the same. This is a serious discrepancy, for where did he then source the smashana evidence from and the supposed meaning of “the graveyard of vanished empires” standing for Delhi? Moreover, Motilal himself seems to have made a mistake. I cite below the passage quoted by him:
I welcome it as a sign of some preliminary effectiveness, through you, in this direction, in which, hitherto, everything has gone against us; also, as one proof of several, that the quality of your power & your work is greatly improving in
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effectiveness & sureness. I need not refer to the other proofs; you will know what I mean.13
The above passage is taken by Motilal as Sri Aurobindo’s approval in code words of the Delhi bombing, and it is from this passage that Dutt seems to have extrapolated his interpretation of the third letter of Sri Aurobindo to Motilal dated January 1913. Nowhere does Motilal himself say that the sentence in Sri Aurobindo’s third letter to him refers to the Delhi bombing. Even this passage in the fourth letter clearly refers to the money that Motilal has sent Sri Aurobindo and not to the Delhi bombing. I incorporate the first two sentences of the quoted passage above and reproduce the full text in order to show the context:
I have received Rs 60 by wire & Rs 20 by letter. It was a great relief to us that you were able to send Rs 80 this time & Rs 85 for March; owing to the cutting off of all other means of supply, we were getting into a very difficult position. I welcome it as a sign of some preliminary effectiveness, through you, in this direction, in which, hitherto, everything has gone against us; also, as one proof of several, that the quality of your power & your work is greatly improving in effectiveness & sureness. I need not refer to the other proofs; you will know what I mean.14
The context, as we can see, is the “great relief ” felt by Sri Aurobindo at the receipt of the money sent by Motilal and certainly not his appreciation of any successful revolutionary action. This is followed by his explanation of how Motilal had become an effective instrument in reducing his financial burden. The reader should be reminded that Sri Aurobindo was in dire financial straits and he was using his yogic will-power to ease it. I quote a sentence from the Record of Yoga written on 3 February, 1913, which might be a reference to the very money mentioned in Sri Aurobindo’s fourth letter to Motilal written in February 1913:
Proofs of karmasiddhi were given, especially the arrival of money in the full sum willed & more than had been probable or expected. 15
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Next, I quote another sentence from the Record of Yoga written on 25 December, 1912, two days after the attack on the Viceroy:
The public news (eg the attack on the Viceroy, the ill-success of the Turkish naval sortie) show that the Power is still ineffective to prevent adverse occurrences.16
Sri Aurobindo took the attack on the Viceroy as an “adverse occurrence” which he could not prevent with his yogic Power. After this notation, we come across a dozen references to the use of his yogic power (aishwarya) to cure the Viceroy, intervene in Turkish politics, and improve his own health. The fact that he brought all three under the ambit of his Yogic force rules out the possibility that he was merely experimenting with the Viceroy as he did with ants. Why would he then congratulate Motilal for what he considered to be an adverse event whose undoing took him a month of Yogic concentration?
Let me approach the problem from another point of view. Motilal says that Sri Aurobindo had instructed him to correspond with him on important political matters in a secret numeral code which was explained to him by Parthasarathy Iyengar. Sri Aurobindo’s letters were also written in the same code and these letters were destroyed by Motilal in his house in 1916 on the eve of a raid by Tegart, the police commissioner of Calcutta. If these letters were written in secret numeral code, why did Sri Aurobindo write in this verbal code of secret communication? Surely, the Hardinge incident was important enough to be written in the earlier code of secret communication, which would have been more difficult to crack by the British police than this verbal code. If it be argued that the secret code explained by Parthasarathy is this very verbal code, then how is it that these letters have survived, because they were supposed to have been destroyed? Finally, Motilal himself says that Sri Aurobindo was not informed about the planning of the assassination of Hardinge while, at the same time, claiming Sri Aurobindo’s guidance in all his revolutionary activity in Chandernagore.
These are some of the obvious questions which could have been raised before accepting Arun Chandra Dutt’s interpretation
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of Sri Aurobindo’s letter to Motilal Roy. But why was there not a single a murmur of protest or even a call for clarification by our so-called objective historian? Intellectual honesty requires him to question everything and everyone concerned with the issue, not only Sri Aurobindo. What kind of scholarship makes him test only Sri Aurobindo’s evidence with great severity and critical evaluation and accept the others without any hesitation? As a matter of fact, Sri Aurobindo has not been granted by Heehs the credence that even an ordinary man deserves when speaking on the facts of his own life. Heehs has consistently made Sri Aurobindo bear the burden of proof instead of giving him the benefit of doubt. I enumerate below a number of such instances where secondary evidence has been portentously weighed against Sri Aurobindo’s statements regarding his own life:
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Nirodbaran and Purani recorded of Sri Aurobindo’s conversation of 5 February, 1939, which stands in direct opposition to what Sri Aurobindo wrote later on. In other words, the secondary evidence of Sri Aurobindo’s assistants is given more credence than Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements.18
I take this occasion to mention another type of bias which Heehs has demonstrated from a long time – that of deliberately going against the grain, of attempting to disprove what everybody thinks is true. I mention a few instances without going into the details:
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example, will always signify the overmental power, by whatever name you may call him. Yes, denounce the Hindu rituals that have lost all relevance, but why deny the eternal values of the ancient Hindu scriptures on which Sri Aurobindo himself based his Integral Yoga?
The list can go on, but what I would like to explore is the reason for this kind of deliberate exercise to undermine the faith of people in whatever they believe. I can understand the classic opposition of intellectual honesty against popular misconceptions or superstitions when there is a face-off between scientific truth and blind belief, but this is a case of plain bad will using the subterfuge of rational enquiry. It is also simply bad research, because the concerned person is bent upon disproving whatever you hold as true and sacred; good research surely requires a more dispassionate attitude to start with, for how can you build a good argument on bad premises? Moreover, the new paradigm introduced by Sri Aurobindo does not pit rationality against devotion or science against spirituality. Both are taken into account in his vast framework of the universe and each is given its proper place in his cosmic scheme. As a matter of fact, it is because the disciples in the Ashram are so catholic in their attitude that Heehs could get away for such a long time – 37 years to be precise as of 2008. Not many people protested against his articles in the Archives & Research in the 1980s’, except a few elders who voiced their objections. When he wrote his history of the Freedom Movement of India giving plenty of credit to Mahatma Gandhi while mentioning cursorily Sri Aurobindo’s role in it, this is what he replied when he was asked the reason for doing so: “I would not have got the prize.” This speaks volumes on his so-called scholarship and intellectual honesty.
I end with a final observation with regard to the crux of the problem. Disciples of Sri Aurobindo were never against intellectuality because their Master himself had a great intellect, but intellectuals (of the wrong kind) do seem to have problems with devotion and surrender, which are so highly prioritised in this Yoga. It is perhaps because of this deep dislike of spiritual emotion that Heehs has cultivated over the years his anti-
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hagiographic attitude, assuming that intellectuality is necessarily pitted against devotion. I suppose he is not aware that devotion, common sense and higher sense often go together with plenty of clarity of mind while the crazy intellectual, who does not have any of these saving factors, keeps weaving his fancy theories in an abstract world. A true intellectual will therefore not use his intelligence merely to deny what he would be pleased to debunk or because of a certain sadistic pleasure he derives from it, but because there is sufficient justification in his quest and enough evidence to back it up. Heehs fails to win our confidence on both these counts.
But the real problem still remains to be solved. Why did Sri Aurobindo perceive the attempted assassination of the Viceroy as an untoward event and why did he use his yogic force to cure his wounds? Why should a great nationalist like him be sympathetic towards the very symbol of British oppression in India? Sri Aurobindo was certainly not a pacifist to act in the Gandhian way, nor did he preach the gospel of Ahimsa. He did not denounce militant action for the sake of freeing the nation from foreign rule and had played himself a role in the formation of secret revolutionary societies which could prepare the nation for an armed revolt.
I must say at the very outset that this is a very difficult question to answer and requires much more research on the revolutionary period than what I have been able to manage. But I would still venture an answer based on what I assess as the best document on Sri Aurobindo’s political life, viz. “A General Note on Sri Aurobindo’s Political Life”, written by himself in the third person in 1946, but revised and published in 1948. As he had revised it after the independence of India, one can assume that he came out with the full truth of the matter in a public way, which perhaps may not have been possible before India was free. There are, of course, other documents which I would like to refer to, but only to show how they match with what he wrote in this long article. As a matter of fact, I haven’t found any contradictions between
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what he told his disciples in the Evening Talks or noted down in his private diary (Record of Yoga), and wrote in his public statements to newspapers.
Let us start by giving Motilal Roy the benefit of doubt despite the numerous questions I have raised with regard to his claim that Sri Aurobindo was guiding him from Pondicherry in all his revolutionary activity. Sri Aurobindo himself writes in this article that after coming to Pondicherry he kept up for some years “some private communication with the revolutionary forces he had led through one or two individuals”. Motilal was surely one of them, though he never came to the forefront of revolutionary action like the other prominent leaders of Bengal. But the question is to what extent was he guided by Sri Aurobindo? And to what extent he acted on his own?
Let us start with what Sri Aurobindo wrote on his political life at Pondicherry. I quote at length from the very paragraph that includes the above-mentioned sentence:
At Pondicherry, from this time [April 4, 1910] onwards Sri Aurobindo’s practice of Yoga became more and more absorbing. He dropped all participation in any public political activity, refused more than one request to preside at sessions of the restored Indian National Congress and made a rule of abstention from any public utterance of any kind not connected with his spiritual activities or any contribution of writings or articles except what he wrote afterwards in the Arya. For some years he kept up some private communication with the revolutionary forces he had led through one or two individuals, but this also he dropped after a time and his abstention from any kind of participation in politics became complete. As his vision of the future grew clearer, he saw that the eventual independence of India was assured by the march of Forces of which he became aware, that Britain would be compelled by the pressure of Indian resistance and by the pressure of international events to concede independence and that she was already moving towards that eventuality with whatever opposition and reluctance. He felt that there would
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be no need of armed insurrection and that the secret preparation for it could be dropped without injury to the nationalist cause, although the revolutionary spirit had to be maintained and would be maintained intact. His own personal intervention in politics would therefore be no longer indispensable. Apart from all this, the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became more and more clear to him, and he saw that the concentration of all his energies on it was necessary.24
There is a complexity in Sri Aurobindo’s political action and spiritual attitude which could easily be misunderstood or misused. One cannot simply conclude that he left politics because he became aware of his spiritual work. For him, politics was to be an expression of spirituality – he wrote in a letter to Parthasarathi in 1911 that “spirituality is India’s only politics”. But then why did he leave politics? He left it because he needed time to concentrate on building a spiritual basis of all the activities of life, which would include politics of the right kind. So there was no essential dichotomy between politics and spirituality. Secondly, his vision of the future assured him that Britain will be forced to concede independence to India “by the pressure of Indian resistance and by the pressure of international events”, because of which his personal participation in the national cause would no longer be necessary. There was thus a practical side to it, that of a statesman realising that his active role was over. Finally, I come to his attitude towards revolutionary activity, which is the subject in question. He felt there would be “no need of armed insurrection” although “the revolutionary spirit had to be maintained”. Assuming that he translated this attitude into practical guidance, there was every scope to be misunderstood in practice by those whom he inspired for such action. I suggest straightaway that this is very likely to have happened to them, and especially with Motilal, who was so close to Sri Aurobindo as a disciple and yet so far away at Chandernagore to be able to communicate with him on a regular basis for being guided in his revolutionary activity.
I will now corroborate the fact that Sri Aurobindo was against revolutionary action after he came to Pondicherry, not in principle
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but against the way it was being carried out. He wrote the following in a letter to the Hindu which was published on 20 July, 1911:
An Anglo-Indian paper of some notoriety both for its language and views, has recently thought fit to publish a libellous leaderette and subsequently an article openly arraigning me as a director of Anarchist societies, a criminal and an assassin. Neither the assertions nor the opinions of the Madras Times carry much weight in themselves and I might have passed over the attack in silence. But I have had reason in my political career to suspect that there are police officials on the one side and propagandists of violent revolution on the other hand who would only be too glad to use any authority for bringing in my name as a supporter of Terrorism and assassination.25
Note that the British police officials as well as the “propagandists of violent revolution” would have been too glad to use Sri Aurobindo’s name in connection with terrorism, the former to get some evidence to put him behind bars, the latter to use his authority to enrol more recruits in their movement. Sri Aurobindo’s name carried weight and one of the best ways of making people join the revolution was to say that it had his full approval. One could object to this conclusion saying that the above statement to the Hindu was after all meant for public consumption and to inform the Govt. officials, and was written under circumstances which did not permit him to tell the whole truth of the matter. But what about his letter to Parthasarathi written around the same time, in which he is highly critical of Indian politics, be it parliamentary or revolutionary? This letter written on 13 July, 1911 (a week before the letter to the Hindu) gives us an insight of how things went wrong in the early stages of the freedom movement of India after an initial descent of the higher forces. I am tempted to quote it at full length:
Be very careful to follow my instructions in avoiding the old kind of politics. Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfilment of the Sanatan Dharma its only Swaraj. I have no doubt we shall have to go through our Parliamentary period in order to get rid of the notion of Western democracy by
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seeing in practice how helpless it is to make nations blessed. India is passing really through the first stages of a sort of national Yoga. It was mastered in the inception by the inrush of divine force which came in 1905 and aroused it from its state of complete tamasic ajnanam. But, as happens also with individuals, all that was evil, all the wrong sanskaras and wrong emotions and mental and moral habits rose with it and misused the divine force. Hence all that orgy of political oratory, democratic fervour, meetings, processions, passive resistance, all ending in bombs, revolvers and Coercion laws. It was a period of asuddha rajasic activity and had to be followed by the inevitable period of tamasic reaction from disappointed rajas. God has struck it all down,— Moderatism, the bastard child of English Liberalism; Nationalism, the mixed progeny of Europe and Asia; Terrorism, the abortive offspring of Bakunin and Mazzini. The latter still lives, but it is being slowly ground to pieces. At present, it is our only enemy, for I do not regard the British coercion as an enemy, but as a helper. If it can only rid us of this wild pamphleteering, these theatrical assassinations, these frenzied appeals to national hatred with their watchword of Feringhi-ko-maro, these childish conspiracies, these idiotic schemes for facing a modern army with half a dozen guns and some hundred lathis,—the opium visions of rajogun run mad, then I say, “More power to its elbow.” For it is only when this foolishness is done with that truth will have a chance, the sattwic mind in India emerge and a really strong spiritual movement begin as a prelude to India’s regeneration. No doubt, there will be plenty of trouble and error still to face, but we shall have a chance of putting our feet on the right path. In all I believe God to be guiding us, giving the necessary experiences, preparing the necessary conditions.26
Sri Aurobindo is against both democratic and revolutionary activity of the Western kind and the emphasis is on evolving India’s own politics of a spiritual type. But towards the end of the letter he is particularly harsh on terrorism and calls it the only enemy of India. Again, it should be understood that he was not against it in principle,
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but when it became in practice an “asuddha rajasic activity”. In other words, he would have had no objection if it was properly executed and the kshatriya dharma fulfilled under the control of the “sattwic mind”. Sri Aurobindo spoke in similar terms to Motilal when the latter came to Pondicherry in November-December 1913. As soon as Motilal asked him if he should get revolvers from Indochina, Sri Aurobindo replied, “India will not awaken through rajasic ways”, and that its freedom could come only if a group of people became Gunateeta (free from the action of the gunas).27 Finally, the most convincing evidence that Sri Aurobindo was against terrorism at this point of time is found in his Record of Yoga. I repeat here the notation of 25 December, 1912, which I have already quoted in Part 1 of this article:
The public news (eg the attack on the Viceroy, the ill-success of the Turkish naval sortie) show that the Power is still ineffective to prevent adverse occurrences. 28
There is no better evidence than this notation which was written only two days after the attack on the Viceroy. The fact that he wrote it down in a private diary, meant for only himself and immediately after receiving the news, makes the evidence doubly certain. That he did not take well the attempted murder of the Viceroy is incontestable, and that he gave his attention for a whole month to cure his wounds with his spiritual power is therefore not surprising.
We see thus a clear compatibility between Sri Aurobindo’s public statement to the Hindu, his letter to Parthasarathi, his diary notation and even his conversation with Motilal, all written or said during the same period, that is, mid 1911 to end 1913. All these documents match in content with what he wrote in 1948 in his long autobiographical note on his political life. Thus Arun Chandra Dutt’s claim that Sri Aurobindo congratulated Motilal for the attack on Hardinge seems difficult to accept, not only because there is lack of sufficient evidence, but also because it is difficult to reconcile it with Sri Aurobindo’s attitude towards revolutionary action as expressed in the documents of that period. I would suggest a gap in time between the moment Sri Aurobindo gave his
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instructions to Motilal and the time they were fully understood and implemented. Motilal himself later wrote in Amar dekha Biplaba O Biplabee that Sri Aurobindo urged him to refrain from revolutionary work from the time the Mother came to Pondicherry in 1914, but that he (Motilal) actually dissociated himself from it in 1916. It is possible to conclude on the basis of the above documents that Sri Aurobindo was discouraging him from revolutionary work even earlier than that, at least a couple of years before 1914. Moreover, Sri Aurobindo was hardly the type to give orders with the expectation that they will be carried out immediately. He always gave freedom to his associates and played an advisory role than forced them to obey him unconditionally. So all the more reason why there might have been a delay between what he wanted Motilal to do and what the latter finally did.
What do we conclude from the above discussion? That Motilal seems to have been mostly responsible for whatever he did in his revolutionary work and not Sri Aurobindo, and that surely Sri Aurobindo would not have congratulated Motilal with regard to the attack on the Viceroy. That there might be some truth in the story of the revolvers that Sri Aurobindo procured for Motilal, but the supposedly code words used for arms and revolutionary action such as “Tantric kriyas” or “Yogini chakras” seem to be the deductions of Arun Chandra Dutt than Motilal’s own assertions. It is true that some of these phrases do sound strange, but the benefit of doubt should be given to what they mean at face value. For the phrase “Tantric kriyas” does make a lot of sense in the practice of Tantra and, as a matter of fact, has been explained in the Record of Yoga:
In the same way there is a power in the consciousness of acting upon other conscious beings or even upon things without physical means or persuasion or compulsion. Great men are said to make others do their will by a sort of magnetism, that is to say there is a force in their words, in their action, or even in their silent will or mere presence which influences and compels others. To have these siddhis of power is to have the conscious and voluntary use of this force of
Chit. The three powers are Aishwarya, Ishita, Vashita. These powers can only be entirely acquired or safely used when we have got rid of Egoism and identified ourselves with the infinite Will and the infinite Consciousness. They are sometimes employed by mechanical means, e.g. with the aid of Mantras, Tantric Kriyas (special processes), etc.29
Now Tantric processes have been there in India from times immemorial, but we generally don’t associate them with Sri Aurobindo, even though we know that he integrated some of the elements of Tantra in his integral Yoga. But the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo we are all familiar with was expounded much later in his lifetime and we don’t know exactly what and how he practised it in the earlier stages and taught it to others. Motilal Roy was practically his first disciple and, according to him, Sri Aurobindo sent him three mantras from Pondicherry, instructing him to repeat them in the traditional way. This opens up the possibility that Sri Aurobindo may have sent him also “Tantric kriyas” and perhaps relied upon other traditional methods as well to guide his disciple. Beyond expressing this supposition, which has certainly more validity than Arun Chandra Dutt’s deductions, we cannot conduct our enquiry any farther due to the paucity of information available on this event. All that we can say for the present is that there is sufficient evidence to reject Arun Chandra Dutt’s conclusion on Sri Aurobindo’s stand with regard to the attempted assassination of Viceroy Hardinge.
26 August 2009
B.S. Paush (= 1951, January-February) issue of the Prabartak, Motilal writes of a similar remark made by Sri Aurobindo in November- December 1911, during his first visit to Pondicherry. This date tallies all the more with the other documents of this period, showing Sri Aurobindo’s strong disapproval of revolutionary activity by this time. Though the date given in the Prabartak should be more reliable by the very fact of being recorded twenty years earlier than Yug Purush, I still extend the benefit of doubt to the latter. In general, Motilal’s chronology is often vague and not reliable, though his closeness to Sri Aurobindo as a disciple for practically a decade cannot be doubted.
Page 602
Sri Aurobindo was a Terrorist, says Peter Heehs, in his book Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism – Essays in Modern Indian History, published by Oxford University Press in 1998. The book is on the revolutionary movement in Bengal led by Sri Aurobindo and his associates against the British regime between 1906 and 1910, after which Sri Aurobindo received an Adesh to go to Pondicherry. All through the book and very consistently, Peter Heehs has referred to Sri Aurobindo and his associates as “terrorists” instead of “revolutionaries” or even “militant nationalists”. He has justified the use of the word “terrorist” (see passage on p 12 reproduced below) and described their actions as “terrorist actions” (p 44). Citing what a British judge had remarked in the Alipore Bomb Case trial (p 10), he says that Sri Aurobindo, Barin Ghose and others introduced the “poison” of terrorism in modern India. He goes on to equate and compare their patriotic and revolutionary actions to the terrorist activities of Left Wing insurgents in the 1960s, and more recent terrorist movements in Punjab, Assam, Kashmir and Sri Lanka. Sri Aurobindo who (with ample documentation) is shown to be the leader of the revolutionaries in Bengal, becomes thus the leader of the terrorists instead of the national hero of the early phase of the freedom movement in India. I reproduce below the relevant passages from the book:
Peter Heehs: In 1909 the judge in the conspiracy trial of Barin Ghose and his associates declared: ‘The danger of a conspiracy such as this lies not so much in its prospect of success as in its fruition. When once the poison had entered into the system it is impos-sible to say where it will break out or how far-reaching will be its effects.’ He spoke more
Page 603
prophetically than he knew. During the first two decades of India’s independent existence there was little organized terrorism in the country; but since then it has been a constant presence. During the late 1960s left-wing insurgents began using terrorist methods to achieve their aims. The eighties saw the rise of separatist terrorism in Punjab, Kashmir and Assam and among ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka. As I write (late 1991) Assamese and Kashmiri terrorists are holding hostages in their respective valleys, Punjabi terror-ists account for a dozen or so killings every week and a Sri Lankan Tamil group is being investigated in connection with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. (p 10)
Peter Heehs: Early writers on the violent side of Indian nationalism avoided the term ‘terrorism’. The phrase they preferred, ‘militant nationalism’, might have been a suitable label for the kind of operation Indian revolution-aries dreamed of: an armed uprising throughout the country. Nothing like this ever took place. The widespread risings of 1942 were quickly subdued; the Indian National Army was not taken seriously even by its Japanese masters. All other attempts at armed resistance during the 1858-1947 period were small- scale acts of covert violence: assassinations of officials and collaborators, armed robberies, etc. However ‘terrorism’ is defined — and more than a hundred definitions have been proposed — it would include any act of this sort. (p 12)
Comment: Early writers on the revolutionary movement avoided the word “terrorism” because they had the sense of national pride, which many of the present day intellectuals of India totally lack. Even plain common sense differentiates nationalist movements against oppressive colonial regimes from terrorist actions that deliberately target innocent civilians. Indian revolutionaries targeted cruel British Govt. officials and Indian traitors and spies; they did not blow up public buses or trains in the style of Islamic extremists, causing large scale mayhem and destruction of civic life. To club legitimate revolutionary action with terrorist activity shows only the clear intent to malign and denigrate Indian revolutionary heroes. How would Peter Heehs react if a British historian called George Washington the leader of American terrorism!
Page 604
Also the implied argument that Indian revolutionary activity would not have been called terrorism had there been “an armed uprising throughout the country” (as it happened in the American revolution) is hardly an intelligent one. Does it mean that a failed uprising of Indian revolutionaries should be discounted as terrorist activity? Do Indian revolutionaries become “terrorists” by the mere fact of not being able to muster enough support from the people of India? How does numerical strength change the moral and patriotic issue?
Or does violence by itself become the sole criterion of distinguishing terrorism from legitimate political action? If this were the case, I wonder how many honest citizens would be called terrorists, and how much of lawful political action would be tantamount to terrorism! Most countries (especially the U.S.A.) would be accused of it both in their internal administration as well as in their external relations with other countries.
Finally, readers should know that Heehs is not making an original observation (even if it be a negative one) when he refers to Sri Aurobindo and his associates as terrorists. He faithfully toes the line of leftist historians of India such as Bipan Chandra and Romilla Thapar, who took over the reins of the ICHR (Indian Council of Historical Research) in the seventies. It was after this takeover that there was a systematic downplaying of the role of revolutionary leaders such as Sri Aurobindo and Subhash Chandra Bose. Bipan Chandra refers to the revolutionaries of the freedom movement of India as “revolutionary terrorists” in his India’s Struggle for Independence 1857–1947. The book was published in 1989 by Penguin, long before Peter Heehs came of age. Given that it is extremely difficult in India to gain entry into this elite coterie of leftist historians without whose approval no reputed publishing house will publish your work (however well-researched), it is not difficult to guess why Heehs opted for this official line of thinking. Academic success was obviously more important to him than historical truth. The following is the title of an article in this book:
Peter Heehs: “Aurobindo Ghose and Revolutionary Terrorism”
(Title of article on p. 42)
Here is another subtitle on page 53 of the same book:
Peter Heehs: “Aurobindo and the Terrorists” (Subtitle on p. 53)
Another passage:
Peter Heehs: “It is accepted in all accounts, from the most laudatory to the most hostile, that from around 1902 Aurobindo had contacts with ‘revolutionaries’ in western India and also helped to establish samitis or secret societies in Bengal. Among those who carried out this work on his behalf was his brother Barindrakumar (‘Barin’). In 1906 Aurobindo went to Bengal and began working in the Bengal National College and as a writer for the Extremist organ Bande Mataram. Barin worked as an editor of the frankly revolutionary journal Jugantar and also took part in terrorist ‘actions’: attempted assassinations and dacoities. Around the middle of 1907 Barin severed his connection with Jugantar and became the leader of a group of young men who between November and April 1908 took part in a half-dozen terrorist actions, the last of which was the attempted murder of a judge in Muzaffarpur that resulted in the death of two women. Soon after this Barin, Aurobindo and more than thirty others were arrested and put on trial at Alipore.” (p 44)
Comment: The death of these two women was not planned by Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, the two revolutionaries who were associated with Sri Aurobindo and Barin Ghose. The target was Kingsford, the cruel British magistrate of Muzaffarpur, who was known for passing harsh sentences and inflicting corporal punishments on young political workers of Bengal. Due to a mistake of identification, the two revolutionaries bombed the carriage of the two ladies instead of the one carrying Kingsford. This unplanned and accidental killing of these two women cannot be called a terrorist action. Terrorism is generally associated with the deliberate and senseless killing of innocent people. Peter Heehs has taken much advantage of this and other such incidents to show that the Bengal revolutionaries were indeed terrorists.
5 August 2015
general issues
bias against Sri Aurobindo 6-8, 357
clever denigration of Sri Aurobindo, 359-61
five divisions of Sri Aurobindo’s life in TLOSA 339-40 frequently asked questions on 11-22
Hinduism, part of the general attack on it by certain Western authors 8-10
intention to criticise Sri Aurobindo 350-51
intention to tarnish the reputation of Sri Aurobindo 95 lessons to learn from 101-02
list of damaging conclusions on 25 preface of TLOSA 56-60, 338-58, 369-86
series of lies on Sri Aurobindo 66-67 sheer indecency of some passages in 167
Sri Aurobindo’s work, will cause great harm to 16-17, 28-29
deceptions and distortions
deception, a great work in the art of 76-77 deception, deliberate 25-26
deceptions to malign Sri Aurobindo, use of different kinds of 7
dishonest research 166-67 distortion of facts in 24-27
distortions and misrepresentations, full of deliberate 13 distortions intended to form the first layer of a Freudian
interpretation of Sri Aurobindo 18-19 distortions, dangers of ignoring 17-18
distortions, no campaign against TLOSA but a rebuttal of 14-16
extracts of TLOSA
argument that the extracts are decontextualised 170-75 circulation of the extracts of 169-70, 451
defence of the extracts of 169-181
views on TLOSA
East-West divide in opinion, cause of the perceived 27-29 Indians and Westerners, necessity of mutual appreciation than condemnation 567-68
Indians educated in Western culture, but Westerners hardly know Indian culture 469-71
Western mind, the excuse that it is written for 13-14 Westerners and Indians, split in the opinions of 14-15 Westerners versus Indians, misrepresenting the controversy as between 483-84
Westerners versus Indians, politics of 468-69
criticism of TLOSA
Amazon website, review on 40
Ashram management and senior sadhaks of the Ashram, views of 42-44
logic of defending Peter Heehs can be also used by his critics 450-51
Manoj Das, the writer, found 60 objectionable passages in TLOSA 27
negative publicity cannot be avoided when countering the distortions 17-18
not recommended; read instead the biographies of Srinivas Iyengar and A.B. Purani 106
personal attacks on all those who have academically refuted TLOSA 30-31
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust does not approve of it 3-4 Sri Aurobindo Society strongly disapproves of it 5
praise of TLOSA
Gautier, François; his admiration stems from ignorance of well-known facts 28
IYF (Integral Yoga Fundamentalism) website, Sraddhalu Ranade’s reply to 23-49
IYF website’s main charges against those who have criticised TLOSA 38-49
Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s condemnation of the critics of PH is unfounded 411-18
Ramchandra Guha’s misplaced praise of TLOSA 103-04 Richard Hartz in the controversy, reaction of 467-68 shifting grounds of defence of 45-48
supporters of Heehs, summary of the conclusions of 436-37 Westerners supporting Heehs 448-49
why some people have enjoyed reading it 20-22
(Distortions in Roman and Counters in Italics)
Life and Character
anger, tinge of lunacy in his 195-96 coward and liar 193-94
failed in life, on having 359-61
fracture of the left thigh when it was actually the right thigh 252-56
Freudian interpretation of 18-19
horse riding test for the ICS, failure to appear for 182-92 kidney trouble, over emphasis on his 125
liar 182-86
medical test: something wrong with his urinary organs 194-95 photographs, retouching of his 59-60, 87-88, 107-08, 341,
349-50, 377-85
pockmarks on his face, focus on 104
spiritual biography, general considerations with regard to writing a 50-53
Major Works
Sri Aurobindo’s major works treated summarily 91
Essays on the Gita 163
Foundations of Indian Culture 161-62
Foundations of Indian Culture, PH takes the side of William Archer 67
Future Poetry 164
Life Divine 152-59
Life Divine is a reworking of the Upanishads 418
Record of Yoga, no definition of maithunananda in 197-211
Record of Yoga, publication of 344-46
Record of Yoga: misuse of Sri Aurobindo’s diary 74-76
Savitri: distortions regarding 77-80; 160-61
Secret of the Veda 162-3
Secret of the Veda is not complete 306-13
Page 612
Secret of the Veda, difficulty of understanding 416-18
Synthesis of Yoga 159-60
Upanishads 163-64
Hinduism, Sri Aurobindo’s views on
Sri Aurobindo rejected Hinduism 562
Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism, contradictory statements on 555-57
confusing the multiple meanings of Hinduism and concluding that Sri Aurobindo rejected Hinduism 562
Sri Aurobindo condemned Hinduism in his letters but allowed Hindu practices in his Ashram 565
Sri Aurobindo did not reject Hinduism 555-78
‘Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism’ by Peter Heehs, rebuttal of 555-578 Hinduism, context of Sri Aurobindo’s strong statements against 558-60 Hinduism, distinction between higher and lower 562
Krishna is merely a Hindu creation 557-58
Krishna is a spiritual reality and not merely a Hindu creation 557-58, 569-70
Mother as the Divine Shakti is a Hindu creation 555-56 Mother as the Divine Shakti is not merely a Hindu creation 557-62, 569
Tantric sex, no objection to Hinduism when it comes to 568
Marriage with Mrinalini Bose, Sri Aurobindo’s
speculative reasons for 230-35 misrepresenting it 331-36 contradictory statements on 224-25
proof to show that he was not a brahmachari 213-16 omission of crucial documents on Sri Aurobindo’s brahmacharya 216-18
Sri Aurobindo’s brahmacharya, documents on 216-18, 227-29
Sri Aurobindo takes up brahmacharya after he gets married 213-29
Mother and Sri Aurobindo as spiritual associates
spiritual association misrepresented as a romantic relation 69, 93, 105, 108-21, 297-98, 469-70
contradictory statements on their association 243-47
their spiritual association 174-75, 236-50
their spiritual association misrepresented as a romantic relation on the basis of hearsay 297-98
Heehs misrepresents their association by leaving out the spiritual dimension 108-21
why Sri Aurobindo said he would marry Mother if she asked for marriage 118-19
reason behind Mother’s marriage with Paul Richard 112 Mother is Sri Aurobindo’s Shakti not partner 119-20 Paul Richard’s attempt to strangle Mother 116-17
as Gurus
different ways of acting on their disciples, but both influences are necessary for sadhana 288-90
Sri Aurobindo acted on the disciples through the illumined mind while the Mother acted on them through the psychic 288-90 spiritual importance of Mother 113-14
Mother did not live in a state of spiritual vacuum in Japan 314-20
as Avatars
Avatar, who is an 260-62
common objections and misunderstandings with regard to calling them Avatars 272-75
Divine can be personal as well as impersonal 570-74
indirect suggestions in Sri Aurobindo’s letters of being Avatars
266-72
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as Avatars 257-75
their mutual recognition and not mutual reciprocation of being Avatars
262-63
Philosophy
Sri Aurobindo cannot be ranked as a philosopher 171-74
Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy based on experience unlike Western philosophy 92, 173-74
his view of conventional morality compared to that of Nietzsche 72-74
Seed-Tree metaphor to express the idea of Evolution is outdated 323-25, 384-85
Politics
communalist, Sri Aurobindo portrayed as a 105 partition of India, blaming him for 89
revolutionaries and terrorists, no distinction made by Heehs between 604 terrorism, Sri Aurobindo inspired 88-89
terrorist, Sri Aurobindo was a 603-06
Adesh, belittling of Sri Aurobindo’s 493-95
relying on second hand sources than on Sri Aurobindo’s own account
493-95
Suresh Chakravarthy’s primary account, not giving credence to
510-15
relying on secondary sources than on primary accounts with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s departure to Chandernagore 510-15
Chittaranjan Das in the Alipore Bomb Case, Sri Aurobindo instructed his lawyer 33; 496-98; 515-17, 535-36 Matriprasad gets a wrong statement from Nolini Kanto Gupta in his
last days 497-98
relying on second hand sources than what Sri Aurobindo himself said in the Uttarpara speech 496-98
relying on what Nolini Kanto Gupta said in his last days than what he wrote earlier 515-17
Sri Aurobindo’s talks as noted by his disciples, unreliability of
519-20
Sri Aurobindo’s memory-lapses, Amal Kiran and Nolini Kanto Gupta on 518-22
Page 615
Hardinge, Viceroy; Sri Aurobindo’s approval of the bombing of 536-37
self-contradictory attitude of Sri Aurobindo in the bomb attack on Viceroy Hardinge 580-601
Dr Jekyll and Hyde portrayal of Sri Aurobindo with regard to Viceroy Hardinge 582-84
Tantra refers to revolutionary activity in Sri Aurobindo’s letters to Motilal Roy 600-01
Sri Aurobindo was against violent revolutionary action after he came to Pondicherry, documents proving that 594-601
Sri Aurobindo; no division between the inner and outer 535-37, 581-84
Nivedita, Sister: Sri Aurobindo met her before he left for Chandernagore 499-505; 528-30
relying on second hand sources than on Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements 499-505
Suresh Chakravarthy’s account, not giving credence to 529-30 Relying on Nirobaran’s mistaken oral notation of Sri Aurobindo’s talk than on Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements on it
499-502
Yoga, Integral
psychic being, Integral Yoga can be done through the mind without 277-290
psychic being not necessary for Integral Yoga, only meant for the disciples 277-283
Sri Aurobindo did not know of the psychic being up to 1926 277-78
He knew about it but its importance was felt after 1926 when the sadhana descended into the physical 286
Psychic and spiritual transformation, no incompatibility between the two 286-88
Sri Aurobindo acted on the disciples through the illumined mind while the Mother acted on them through the psychic 288-90
Page 616
spiritual experiences compared to madness 90-91
spiritual experiences, comparing them with hallucinations 352-55
Sri Aurobindo’s madness, discusses the possibility of 352-55
Vivekananda guiding Sri Aurobindo in jail, wrong presentation of 125, 326-30
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on spiritual experiences being taken as hallucinations by materialists 352-53
Jesus Christ himself would become a schizophrenic if we apply some of the modern psychiatric yard scales 91
Sri Aurobindo had to work hard to get spiritual experiences 344-46
Some of his major experiences did come miraculously 344-46
Tantrism, his Yoga misrepresented as 67-71
maithunananda in Record of Yoga means spontaneous erotic delight 197-211
no definition of maithunananda in Record of Yoga 197-211 sex-impulse, necessity of mastery and transformation of 204-07 sexualising Bhakti Yoga, 299-305
gross perversion of a spiritually symbolic aphorism of Sri Aurobindo
balance of evidence always against Sri Aurobindo
criticising Sri Aurobindo so that you can praise him 39-40 final balance of negative and positive statements on Sri Aurobindo is always against him 108, 172
insidious suggestions, method of implanting 304 Oxford sandwich 300
purvapaksha uttarapaksha form of argument does not apply to TLOSA 20
contradictory statements
confuses the multiple meanings of Hinduism and concludes that Sri Aurobindo rejected Hinduism 562
convoluted explanations on how Sri Aurobindo could be wrong in what he wrote on his own life 502-04
flip flop between positive and negative statements on Sri Aurobindo 359-61
Hardinge, Viceroy; contradictions with regard to Sri Aurobindo attitude in the bomb attack on 580-601
method of constant self-contradiction 355-56 on Hinduism and Sri Aurobindo 555-57
on Sri Aurobindo 88-89; 92
on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s association 246-47 on Sri Aurobindo’s marriage 224-25; 232
spiritual and materialistic points of view: one cannot base oneself on both at the same time while writing on a spiritual personality 243-50
decontextualisation
decontextualisation in TLOSA 291-94 decontextualised letter of Sri Aurobindo 278-79 decontextualised sources 232-33; 241-42
quoting out of context Sri Aurobindo’s remarks on the Veda 306-13
quoting out of context with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s marriage 331-36
wrong chronological sequence, presents documents in the 234-35
deficiencies
constant use of double quotes 123 no mention of major disciples 124 no scholarly depth or insight 123
Pondicherry, not enough research on 94-95
Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, no concise presentation of 124 Sri Aurobindo’s passing away, hardly mentions what happened after 124
documentation not authentic
authentic sources, does not quote 350-51
secondary source to denigrate Sri Aurobindo, quoting of 359-61
secondary source when it can be used against Sri Aurobindo, quoting a 326-30
speculation than history, more of 230-35 unauthentic documentation 297-98
unauthentic sources with negative content while suppressing primary sources with positive content, bases himself on 230 unauthentic sources, relying on 238-41
specific instances of unauthentic documentation
Adesh, with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s 493-95; 510-15 Chittaranjan Das in the Alipore Bomb Case, with regard to Sri Aurobindo instructing his lawyer 351; 496-98; 515-17 Hardinge, Viceroy; with regard to Sri Aurobindo’s attitude in the bomb attack on 580-94
Nivedita, Sister: whether Sri Aurobindo met her before he left for Chandernagore 33; 499-505
Sri Aurobindo and Mother’s asssociation, with regard to 236-43; 297-98
omissions, deliberate
deliberate omissions 295-96
does not focus on Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experience and philosophy 90
leaving out the spiritual dimension, misrepresents Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s relation by 109-21
Mother has been excluded 125
omission of crucial documents on Sri Aurobindo’s brahmacharya 216-18
omission of primary sources when they are favourable to Sri Aurobindo 326-30; 350-51
omission of the Mother’s spiritual experiences 109-12 one-sided reporting 363-68
presentation, method of
biased against Sri Aurobindo, quotes only documents that are 350-51
critical method, does not match with the current practice of 98-99
Freudian framework, attempt to force-fit Sri Aurobindo’s life and work into a 24-25
historical method of Heehs, Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran’s comments on 525-26
method of constant self-contradiction 355-56 obsessed with the sexual life of Sri Aurobindo 93 quotations of Sri Aurobindo, misinterpreting 301-05 quoting the Mother against Mother 485-86
scientific biography is not contrary to faithfulness and devotion, writing a 524-28
textual traditions of a spiritual biography, does not follow the 99
vitanda and kutarka 123
Author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
history of
Alok Pandey’s letter to him 419-423 anti-Hinduism 378-80
Ashram Archives personnel vote to prevent his return to the department 34
Ashram connection 55-58
Ashram, dubious motives for coming to 56-57; 60-64 bad temper, incident at the Archives showing his 408-09 contempt of realised beings 341-44
description of him by a colleague 408-10 devotion, distaste for 563
India, no understanding of 338-39; 346-48 Indians, racial prejudice against 346-47 Jayantilal Parekh was fed up with him 409 sadhana; does not mention any teachers 375 sadhana; how it backfired 398-405
spiritual failure 567
Sri Aurobindo’s Adesh compared to Heehs’s adesh 376-77 worship of images and photographs, aversion to 382
books of
Archives & Research magazine, Jugal Kishore Mukherji’s objections to Heehs’s articles in 508-37
Archives & Research magazine, rebuttal of article in 538-46 Bomb in Bengal, discrediting established historians in 87 Bomb in Bengal, errors regarding Jatin Mukherjee in 131-35
Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, errors regarding Jatin Mukherjee in 135-37
Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, running down previous biographers in 86
academic fraud
academic qualifications not mentioned 371-72
claims to have read a lot 374-75 controversies, list of previous 63
controversy, track record of courting 32-34; 60-64 copyright violations 37-39
founder of the Ashram Archives was Jayantilal Parekh 390-93 founder of the Ashram Archives, Heehs posing as 15-16, 371, 389-97
freedom of speech should not lead to committing academic fraud 31-32
hagiographers, accuses previous biographers of being 58-59; 64-65; 86; 99
hagiography, accuses Sri Aurobindo’s followers of 344; 348-49 Heehs always tries to disprove what everybody thinks is true 591-93
Heehs as Marcher (combination of Mayo + Archer) 370 Heehs’s intention of showing Sri Aurobindo’s growth from the human to the divine is an outright lie 167-68
Jeffrey Kripal and Peter Heehs, comparison between 18-19 Jeffrey Kripal and Wendy Doniger, wanted to please perverted academicians such as 357
Jeffrey Kripal, his association with the notorious 8-10, 35-37, 62-63; 105-06
Jeffrey Kripal’s sexual twist to spirituality 424-35
leftist historians of India, Heehs follows the line of 605 Michael Murphy, role of 9, 429, 435
objectivity, claim of 98-99 offensive expressions 522-24
Sri Aurobindo’s biography, writing of: how he turned hostile 399-405
Sri Aurobindo’s works, editing of; how he became overconfident 400-01
Sri Aurobindo’s works, Heehs finds great pleasure in finding fault with 105
Symbolic story of a mole (Heehs) who wants to measure a mountain 438-42
writing career and various publications 86-87
Adesh
belittling of Sri Aurobindo’s Adesh 493-95, 510-15
Heehs relies on second hand sources than Sri Aurobindo’s own account of 493-95
Suresh Chakravarthy’s primary account not given credence 510-15
Agastya’s Ashram in Pondicherry, story of Rishi 477-78
Amal Kiran
Amal Kiran & Nolini Kanto Gupta on Sri Aurobindo’s memory-lapses 518-19
Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran’s comments on PH’s historical method 525-26
Amazon website, review on TLOSA 40
Arun Chandra Dutt’s flimsy deductions of Sri Aurobindo’s letter 584-89
Ashram (Sri Aurobindo Ashram)
Ashram Trust, Heehs misuses the credibility of 16 Auroville, difference between Ashram and 478 basic allegiance to the institution 484
basic discipline of the Ashram, violation of 467 ethos: context and background explained 53-55 expansion of it from the 1940s 480-82
freedom of speech is not unlimited within 446-47
history, Debashish Banerji’s lacks knowledge of Ashram 474-76
journals should not be turned into debating forums 531-33 management and senior sadhaks of the Ashram, views of 42-44
no moral and religious policing in 449-50
rebutting the accusation of religious fundamentalism in 461-71
reply to Debashish Banerji’s accusation of religious fundamentalism in 472-79
writing against Sri Aurobindo in his own 176-180
Auroville and Ashram, difference between 478
Auroville as a logical result of the expansion of the Ashram 481-82
Barin Ghose and Jatin Banerji split in 1904, but other revolutionary groups were active in Bengal 137-42
Bengal secret society, errors with regard to 137-42
Bhakti yoga, ineffability of it makes it difficult to write about 300-01
sexualising Bhakti Yoga 299-305
Chittaranjan Das in the Alipore Bomb Case, whether Sri Aurobindo gave instructions to his lawyer 33, 496-98, 515-17,
535-37
Debashish Banerji’s accusation of religious fundamentalism in the Ashram, reply to 472-79
his lack of knowledge of Ashram history 474-76
East-West divide in opinion on TLOSA, cause of the perceived 27-29
Evolution: Sri Aurobindo’s use of the Seed-tree metaphor to express it is not outdated 323-25, 384-85
Faith and Intellectuality need not clash 457-60
Freedom of speech is not unlimited within the Ashram 446-47
Freudian interpretation of Sri Aurobindo, TLOSA’s distortions intended to form the first layer of 18-19
Gautier, François: his admiration of TLOSA stems from ignorance of well-known facts 28
Hardinge, Viceroy: Sri Aurobindo’s attitude in the bomb attack on 536-37, 580-601
Hinduism
Heehs confuses the multiple meanings of Hinduism and concludes that Sri Aurobindo rejected Hinduism 562
Heehs’s anti-Hinduism 378-80
higher and lower Hinduism, distinction between 562 Hinduism and Sri Aurobindo, contradictory statements on 555-57
Page 624
Hindutva influence, accusation of 448
Krishna is a spiritual reality and not merely a Hindu creation 557-58
Mother as the Divine Shakti is not merely a Hindu creation 557-62
Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism by Peter Heehs, rebuttal of 555-579 Sri Aurobindo condemned Hinduism in his letters but allowed Hindu practices in his Ashram (Heehs) 565
Sri Aurobindo did not reject Hinduism 555-578
Sri Aurobindo’s strong statements against; context of 558-60 TLOSA is part of general attack on 8-10
India
Heehs has no understanding of 338-39; 347-48 India, partition of; blaming Sri Aurobindo for 89
Indian Civil Service (ICS): Sri Aurobindo’s failure to appear for the riding test 182-92
Indians and Westerners: necessity of mutual appreciation than condemnation 567-68
Indians and Westerners: Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is the same for both 565-67
Indians educated in Western culture, but Westerners hardly know about Indian culture 469-71
Indians, Heehs’s racial prejudice against 346-47
IYF (Integral Yoga Fundamentalism) website
bogey of religious fundamentalism in the Ashram 41-42 charges against those who have criticised TLOSA 38-49 Sraddhalu Ranade’s reply to 23-49
Jatin Mukherjee
errors in A Brief Biography regarding 135-37 errors in Bomb in Bengal regarding 130-35 errors in TLOSA regarding 137-42
errors regarding his role in the revolutionary movement 130-46
incident that caused a misunderstanding with regard to his attitude towards Sri Aurobindo 144-45
Sri Aurobindo was in touch with him through Motilal Roy 143-45
worked directly under Sri Aurobindo 136
Page 625
Jatindranath Sen Gupta’s reply to mischievous allegations on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram, downplaying 125-26
Jayantilal Parekh was fed up with Heehs 409 founder of the Ashram Archives 390-93
Jeffrey Kripal
association with Peter Heehs 8-10, 35-37, 62-63, 105-06 exchanged notes with Peter Heehs before the publication of TLOSA 424-35
his sexual twist to spirituality 424-35
Jeffrey Kripal and Peter Heehs, comparison between 18-19 Jeffrey Kripal and Wendy Doniger, Heehs wanted to please perverted academicians such as 357
Ramakrishna Paramhansa, effect of his vilifying biography on 17-18
Jitendralal Bannerji’s negative assessment of Sri Aurobindo 359-61
Jugal Kishor Mukherji’s first letter to the Ashram Trustees regarding Heehs’s distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life in the Archives & Research magazine 491-507
second letter to the Trustees regarding Heehs’s distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life in the Archives & Research magazine 508-37
Krishna is not merely a Hindu creation 569-70
Maithunananda in Record of Yoga does not mean spontaneous erotic delight 197-211
Michael Murphy, Peter Heehs’s association with 9 role of 428-29; 435
Mother, see Index of Distortions on Sri Aurobindo with Counters to Them
Motilal Roy, Sri Aurobindo was in touch with Jatin Mukherjee through 143-45
Tantra in Sri Aurobindo’s letters to him does not refer to revolutionary activity 600-01
Nietzsche’s view of conventional morality, Sri Aurobindo and 72-74
Page 626
Nirodbaran and Amal Kiran’s comments on Heehs’s historical method 525-26
Nivedita, Sister: Sri Aurobindo did not meet her before he left for Chandernagore 499-505, 528-30
Nolini Kanto Gupta and Amal Kiran on Sri Aurobindo’s memory- lapses 518-19
Oxford sandwich 300
Parthasarathy Iyengar and Sri Aurobindo’s Adesh 538-54
Paul Richard
attempt to strangle Mother 116-17 led a rather loose life 116
Heehs makes a hero of a villain 241-42 reason for leaving Pondicherry 114-15 confession to Dilip Kumar Roy 114-15 memoirs of 243
Pondicherry, Heehs has not done enough research on 94 story of Agastya’s Ashram in 477-78
Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s condemnation of the critics of Heehs is unfounded 411-18
Psychic being
importance of the psychic being was felt after 1926 when the sadhana descended into the physical 286
psychic and spiritual transformation: no incompatibility between the two 286-88
psychic being is not necessary for Integral Yoga (Heehs); only meant for the disciples 277-283
psychic being, Integral Yoga can be done through the mind without (Heehs) 277-290
Sri Aurobindo did not know about it until 1926 (Heehs) 277-86
Purani, A.B. & Srinivas Iyengar: read their biographies instead of TLOSA 106
Ramchandra Guha’s misplaced praise of TLOSA 103-04
Ramchandra Majumdar’s memory than Sri Aurobindo’s own written statements, relying on 529-30
Religion
no religion should not lead to no Yoga 479
on making a religion of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga 485-87 religion and spirituality, distinction between 461-63 risk of rejecting Sri Aurobindo in the name of 466-67
religious fundamentalism
in the Ashram, IYF website’s bogey of 41-42
in the Ashram, rebutting the accusation of 445-87
Page 627
in the Ashram, reply to Debashish Banerji’s accusation of 472-79
denying the characteristics of 452-56
protesting against TLOSA is not 445-46, 452-56 replying to the accusation of 445-51, 452-56, 461-71
Revolutionaries and Terrorists, no distinction made between 604
Richard Hartz in the controversy, reaction of 467-68
SCIY forum, reply to 445-51, 461-71
reply to its accusation of being religious fundamentalists 452-56
Sex-impulse in the Integral Yoga, necessity of mastery and transformation of 204-07
Spirituality
spirituality and religion, distinction between 569 spirituality and religion, various shades of 577
spirituality and materialism
one cannot base oneself on both at the same time in writing on a spiritual personality 247-50
spiritual experiences are taken as hallucinations by materialists 352-53
spirituality and science, similarity between 558
spirituality or materialism, Heehs never takes a firm stand on 243-51
spirituality versus materialism: Heehs presents both point of views, but the final balance of evidence tilts towards materialism 164-65
insider of the institution cannot write against it in a spirit of disdain 100-01
minimum of rules in 576-77
not a religious institution 463-64
Page 628
question of institutional allegiance 165-66
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust does not approve of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs 3-4
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust should have publicly dissociated itself from TLOSA 30
Sri Aurobindo Society strongly disapproves of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs 5
Srinivas Iyengar and A.B. Purani, instead of TLOSA read the biographies of 106
Suresh Chakravarthy’s account, not giving credence to 510-15, 529-30
Tantra does not refer to revolutionary activity in Sri Aurobindo’s letters to Motilal Roy 600-01
Tantric sex, no objection to Hinduism when it comes to (Heehs) 568
Tantrism, Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga misrepresented as 67-71
Terrorism, Sri Aurobindo inspired (Heehs) 88-89 terrorist, Sri Aurobindo was a 603-06
Théon, Madame; nothing wrong with her revelations 321-22
Vivekananda guiding Sri Aurobindo in jail, wrong presentation of 125
his guidance to Sri Aurobindo in Alipore Jail, doubting of 326-30
Western
Western mind, the excuse that TLOSA is written for 13-14 Western philosophy, Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy based on
experience unlike 92
Westerners and Indians
split in the opinions of 14
Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga is the same for 565-67 Westerners hardly know about Indian culture while Indians
are educated in Western culture 469-71 Westerners supporting Peter Heehs 448-49
Westerners versus Indians, misrepresenting the controversy as between 483-84
Westerners versus Indians, politics of 468-71
Page 629
Bhakti yoga, ineffability of it makes it difficult to write about (Heehs) 300-01
Bhakti yoga, sexualising 299-305
Indians and Westerners, same for 565-67
making a religion of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga: what does it mean 486-87
no concise presentation of Sri Aurobindo’s 124 no religion should not lead to no Yoga 479
revolt of early disciples of Sri Aurobindo due to loss of faith in Guru 459
scientific 558
sex-impulse, the necessity of mastery and transformation of 204-07
Tantrism, misrepresented as 67-71
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