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.
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.
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
Notes
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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.
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