Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 8
Heehs
wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo,
CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) & much else
in the same vein. Bio-1 was, perforce, subtly
devious; Bio-2
is a shameless tour de force of
perfidy.[1] His pseudonym ‘Marcher’
is a fusion of his fêted forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) & William
Archer (1856-1924), though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma &
vilifying the greatest children of Mother India – was born centuries them. The
entire credit for his thriving at the expense of his subject and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram goes to his Daemon, a special
emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and
Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]
All
text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 & their prefaces; all in
Roman is mine.
I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is
always in Italics.
Peter’s Attitude
and Approach – H 1: Absorbed in inner experience, the
mystic is freed from the problems that afflict men and women who are caught in
the dualities of knowledge and ignorance, pleasure and pain, life and death. A
mystic thus absorbed often is lost to the human effort to achieve a more
perfect life. But this is not the only possible outcome of spiritual practice.
Aurobindo’s first major 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.
My Comments:
The only Marcherian way to be free
from the dualities that afflict human life is to be absorbed in inner mystical experience,
forsaking the only actual reality,
the Darwinian evolution through the mechanism of survival of the fittest
organisms (individual and species). Aurobindo,
Marcher tells us, experienced such liberating mystical absorption in 1907-08 when meditating with a guide (later
he called it the realisation of the passive Brahman), but he was driven to return to the active life of overt leadership
of extremist politics and covert leadership of terrorist [criminal,
anti-social, not activist meant to bring Swaraj] activities. Some months later
he experienced what he called the realisation
of the cosmic consciousness, but again, by then the only important Extremist leader with a countrywide reputation,[3] he returned to his active life of dualities. By thus re-yoking himself to the dualities of knowledge and ignorance,
pleasure and pain, life and death afflicting human life, he regained the
prerequisite to contribute to the human
effort to achieve a more perfect life. It was thus, as a mind, life and
body no different from those of Marcher that Aurobindo spent the next forty years looking for a way to bring the knowledge and power of the spirit into the world. Now, the dictionaries
available to me confine spirit
to only this-worldly phenomena, namely: “vital or life principle, principle of
thought, intelligent or immaterial part of man, soul, bodied or bodiless soul,
ghost etc; enthusiasm, actuating emotion, disposition, frame of mind, courage,
mettle, etc”; confine spiritual
mainly to “refined in thought and feeling, religious, etc”; and confine Spirit to Christian theology. By using spirit and not Spirit Marcher reduces every other-worldly or spiritual / mystical
experience and realisation of Sri Aurobindo to achievements of his duality-afflicted mind’s efforts – a mind no different from Marcher’s;
and throws out the extra-terrestrial Spirit
or the deux-ex-machina from Sri
Aurobindo’s forty years of sadhana looking for a way to bring Its
knowledge and power into the world.
In
consequence, this is Bio-1’s
evaluation of Aurobindo’s
principal work in prose, The Life Divine: It is regarded by some as one of the most
important metaphysical treatises in the present century…. The task of
philosophy, according to Aurobindo, is to formulate the relationship between
‘the psychological and physical facts of existence’ and ‘any ultimate reality
that may exist’; its purpose is to help the individual live and act according
with these facts, seen in terms of this reality. Academic philosophers [reject]
this purpose [and] refuse to consider his metaphysics as
philosophy properly speaking [because it is] deficient in the essential attributes of philosophy, namely: logical
argumentation…. And Bio-2: The Life Divine’s philosophy ‘was formed
first’ by the study of the Gita,
Upanishads, and Rig Veda…. [Sri
Aurobindo:] ‘I was never satisfied till
experience came and it was on this experience that later on I found my
philosophy…. All sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to
conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic
whole.’ These ideas and their synthesis, continues Marcher, were self-validating for Aurobindo and most
of his followers accept them as unquestionable truths. And so he founds his evaluation of Sri
Aurobindo’s system of Yoga on this scholarly Law: 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 Marcherian] mind’s
usual critical means, i.e., studies of Aurobindo’s documented sources, arguments, and conclusions, and
evaluations of his rhetoric
and style. Justifying this method he says: If a philosophical system is to merit
acceptance as a philosophy, it has to be defended by logical
argumentation; otherwise it joins other
infallible revelations [=psychotic
hallucinations!] that depend on faith
for acceptance and [like in Christianity and Islam?] persuasion or coercion for propagation. In other words it becomes a
religion [thus reducing the sadhana of disciples as coercive religiosity and their biographies of Sri Aurobindo and
Mother as
hagiographies].[4]
Peter’s Attitude
and Approach – H 2: In
trying to trace the lines of Aurobindo’s sadhana, a biographer can use the subject’s
diaries, letters, retrospective accounts
[and] for comparison, accounts by
others of similar mystical experiences. But in the end, mystical experiences
remain subjective. Perhaps they are only hallucinations or signs of psychotic
breakdown. Even if not, do they have any value to anyone but the subject?
My Comments:
Marcher, I have said, claims that the documents in his possession deal
exhaustively with Sri Aurobindo’s entire sadhana and were written by a mind
identical to his own, thus empowering him to judge it in all its aspects. Take his
evaluation in Bio-2[5]: Aurobindo
claims that he saw visions, heard
voices, had sources of knowledge independent of the senses and the reason…
could read people’s minds… had knowledge of the future… could change the course
of events, cure diseases… alter the form of his body; that he went into
trance; …felt physical pain as pleasure and experienced spontaneous erotic
delight…; that he had a sort of supernatural strength; that he was in touch
with goddesses and gods; [and] was
one with God. But those familiar with
Indian mythological [=fictional] literature
will not be surprised by these powers and experiences, as they are commonplace
in the epics and Puranas. Besides like all mystical powers, experiences,
and realisations, Aurobindo’s are subjective
and so don’t contribute to the human
effort to achieve a more perfect life. This evaluation led him to a vital
discovery (revealed to him, I believe, in a mystical
absorption while meditating on his Daemon): Due to his inborn tendency to psychotic breakdowns, Aurobindo’s system of Yoga, as it
developed after 1926, imposes
two hallucinogenic processes on his disciples
that thrust them into an evolutionary abyss.
Bio-1’s
chapter “A Laboratory Experiment” expands
on this discovery of which the core seems to be
contained in these statements:
(1)
Recognizably ‘spiritual’ activities [how
did this sworn anti-spiritual materialist recognise
them?] grew up gradually during the
twenties…. Aurobindo and Mother did not expect the disciples to help actively
in this work. The novices were in
fact a great drain on their energy…. The community…was required as a field of
experimentation. If the force that they were ‘bringing down’ was to extend
itself…they needed to know in detail how it acted on ordinary men and women.
The only way to obtain such knowledge was to stock their ‘laboratory’ with
voluntary guinea pigs [v.g. pigs]. Note the suppression of the fact that
not any volunteering Tom-Peter-Harry
was accepted, and even when accepted as a disciple, not all were admitted as
inmates.
(2)
Up to this point [opening the ‘laboratory’ in 1926], the methods of yoga that Aurobindo had
given those who approached him were the methods that he himself had used…. Some
disciples…got stuck or went astray…but many…floundered in place. As in the
Christian missionary’s satire: “The Stupid Guru and foolish Disciples”, Aurobindo thrust his own methods without taking into account the
nature, potential etc. of his v.g. pigs,
and they floundered.
(3)
In the Arya (1914-19) he had placed
special emphasis on the role played by the mind in sadhana, asserts Marcher. ‘Man is a mental and not yet a supramental
being,’ he wrote in the Synthesis of Yoga. ‘It is by the mind therefore that he has to aim at knowledge and
realise his being.’ This special emphasis, he claims (misleadingly as
usual), was in accord with his own nature
and experiences. In the first place the sentence “Man is a mental… it is by
the mind therefore…” occurs in Chap XIII: “The Difficulties [not the
indispensability] of the Mental Being” of Part II: “The Yoga of Integral [not
of just mental] Knowledge”. And quoted in full it gives an altogether opposite
meaning: “It is by the mind therefore that he has to aim at knowledge and
realise his being, with whatever help he can get from the supramental
planes. This character of our actually realised being and therefore of our Yoga
imposes on us certain limitations and primary difficulties which can only be
overcome by divine help or an arduous practice, and in reality only by the
combination of both these aids.” Secondly: As to the role played by the mind in sadhana, this is what Chap XXI: “The
Ladder of Self-Transcendence” says in the same Part II of the Synthesis: “…a sufficient perfection of
the pure mental being…would still fall far below the greater possibilities of
the spiritual nature…. That vaster light, that profounder bliss are beyond the
mental reaches. Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit
[S not s]…. Even if mind could be free from all positive falsehood
and error, even if it could be all intuitive and infallibly intuitive,
it could still present and organise only half-truths or separate truths and
these too not in their own body but in luminous representative figures put
together to make an accumulated total of a massed structure.” Finally: This
self-styled seeker-writer of Truth dismisses
the dozens of serendipitous spiritual experiences that invaded Sri Aurobindo – never
laboured for by his mind or nature – from the moment he stepped on the Indian
soil at Bombay
in 1893.
(4)
Realizing that most sadhaks [v.g. pigs] would have difficulty following the path he himself had taken [which was not, as just pointed out, the
exclusively mental one Marcher claims he took], he began to lay stress in his talks and letters on a process that he
called the ‘emergence’ or ‘coming forward’ of the psychic being…. The second
change of focus concerned the role of what he called the ‘divine force’ or
force of the Mother …. Many readers [remember, Marcher’s target audience
are the materialists and anti-theists],
and even those who admit the possibility of an inactive Absolute or
disinterested Creator, will have difficulty accepting the existence of a conscious ‘divine’ or ‘spiritual’ force in Aurobindo and Mother [this is added to incite creedal religionists]…. From around 1926, he began to encourage
his disciples to approach her in this
[suicidal] way. [6]
The
only way, then, we v.g. pigs can
avoid an evolutionary abyss is to reject the hallucinogenic processes of psychic emergence and surrender
to the Mother and take up the
Marcherian ‘sadhana’ of placing special
emphasis on the role played by the mind.
Marcher
is not the first Ashramite to refuse to surrender to the Mother. In mid-1930s, a
mind-led Ashramite wrote a Marcherian tract. When Mother refused sanction to
publish it, he kept arguing, forcing Sri Aurobindo to spell out the refusal:
“…it is an attack on Yogis, Gurus and occultists in general and a warning
against them and their ways. According to you they are men who use their knowledge… and powers to
dominate and impose themselves on their disciples; using the ‘alien being’ in
men for their purpose, they inflict on them false and misleading experiences in
order to farther their own personal objects. You warn all to be on their guard
against [them], not to trust or believe in them; for all of them, even the
greatest, you have by personal experience found to be the same, ignorant,
self-interested misleaders…and exploiters. You do not except your own Gurus,
but rather expressly include them. You specify several elements of the Yoga as
it is practised here, transformation, reception of peace, light and other
experiences and warn everybody that any such experiences of transformation, peace,
light etc. are unreal falsities and illusions imposed by the occult power of
the Guru. One can have transformation and the rest, but only through one’s own
self; one should accept only what comes from one’s own self…not follow the
misleading…distortions taught in [their] writings…. I may say that publication
without permission will be incompatible with your remaining here.” When the mind-led
claimed constitutional rights, Sri Aurobindo put his foot down: “If anyone
questions the right of the Mother to control the Ashram or to control his own
conduct, his place is outside; there he can exercise his full civic or other
rights and do what he pleases…. There is no right civic or legal or
republican or constitutional or any other entitling anyone to do whatever he
likes in the house of another or debars that other from objecting or
enforcing his objection. There is a discipline of obedience and of
abstention from forbidden acts in this Ashram and whoever refuses to recognise
it has no “right” to remain here.”[7]
These
replies quelled the rebellious mind of that Ashramite who was at heart a v.g. pig. But they infuriated Marcher
who has never accepted the existence of a conscious Divine
Force in Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother, always defied the “discipline of obedience and of abstention from
forbidden acts”, always placed exclusive emphasis on the
role of his own mind, always asserted his
civic, legal and constitutional rights to do “whatever he likes” in this Ashram.
Though, why his fury excluded only the first of these replies from his
CWSA is a matter worth probing from all possible angles.
Soon
after Bio-1 exhibited the real Aurobindo to the world, a non-devotee (leftist?) scholar
closely guided by M&Co, wrote a tract echoing its scholarly triumph. In
1999, he published a banal compilation of articles by Sri Aurobindo to veil the
tract tacked on as its “introduction”.[8]
Since this
“intro” amplifies like an echo Marcher’s warped judgments
and innuendos on Sri Aurobindo, the Mother,
and us v.g. pigs, these
extracts from it are in Italics – as if Marcher’s
own text:
During
the Baroda
period… Aurobindo also began writing articles [wrote only one series of seven, stymied
by Moderates] and pamphlets [wrote only
one, it was promptly banned by Govt!]…he belonged
to the Extremist section of the Congress and was instrumental in engineering
[for no blemish of Govt or Moderates] the
split between his faction [of upstarts]
and the Moderates [legitimate leaders][9] at Surat
in 1907…. In 1901, he married Mrinalini…. The marriage cannot be described as a
great success [because] little
mention is made of it [of their physical-emotional relations] in Aurobindonian literature [i.e.
hagiographies]…. On 2 May 1908 he was arrested for terrorist
[anti-national] activities and
imprisoned [because convicted]….
Obeying an inner [not supra-human / supra-terrestrial] imperative he went into hiding [being a criminal]… then departed for Pondicherry…. Mrinalini was left behind. In
the years to come she would undergo loneliness and terrible psychological and
emotional suffering [due to his insensitivity & egotism]…. On 29 March 1914 Aurobindo met Mirra
Richard [for why ‘Richard’ is added here, read on]…. At the age of 16 Mirra began to befriend artists and to study
painting [=study of painting was
pretence]…. . Earlier she had seen his
photograph but had not ‘recognized’ [=?]
him…. Mrinalini died of influenza in
1918, just when she was preparing to join her [fickle] husband in Pondicherry….
At nineteen Mirra [had] married a
painter…. The marriage however soon broke up. Yet all her life she showed
a highly refined and well-developed aesthetic sensibility [=broken marriage
proves that refined aesthetic sensibility was pretence]…. After her legal divorce [from the painter] in 1908, she met Paul
Richard, whom she married in 1911 [guess why]…. In 1920 she came to live in Pondicherry
permanently. Her meeting with Aurobindo on 24 April was [so] decisive [that blameless] Paul Richard left and she got her divorce
from him soon after. On 24 November she moved to the same house in which Aurobindo
was residing. In 1922 she took charge of his household [as his mistress]….
In time, a whole
set of beliefs and rituals began to be built up around Aurobindo and more so,
around Mother. The death of each of them caused dismay and disappointment among
large sections of the faithful [=dim-wits who] had grown to believe that some miraculous
transformation of their Gurus and through them of the disciples themselves was
in the offing. Naturally these devotees [=dim-wits] were disheartened when this did not happen in the manner they had come
to expect. Besides, a whole theology began
to be developed, especially because of the extensive records of what they had
said [by ‘records’ are meant unauthorised jottings by disciples from memory
of ill-understood talks long after they took place].[10] What ought to be interpreted as obvious setbacks [esp. the
Supramental Manifestation] were turned
into mega-triumphs. Such ‘Master-saving mechanisms’ did not protect the ashram
community [=each & every inmate!] from
doubt, insecurity and uncertainty…. The commonality
in the belief systems of those who
adhere to this path is a theology that
not only asserts the Avatarhood or Divine
Incarnation of Aurobindo and Mother, but builds around them a special cult of
worship and devotion. Several miracles and special interventions in world
events [esp. World Wars] many of
which have a basis in the words of the Masters themselves, yet which call into
question our normal intelligence [compare Bio-1’s: evidence about
outward happenings that is not in accord with [normal intelligence] cannot be explained away by invoking the deux-ex-
machina of supernatural intervention]…. A careful reading [by Marcherians] of the Masters should clarify that it was
never their intention to claim such incontrovertible and transhistorical
infallibility or to encourage the formation of a cult or a sect…. Now that
their original contexts are no longer available [except in Bio-1 and 2], we need to exercise the
utmost circumspection in taking their statements literally. The more plausible,
sensible and reasonable [Marcherian] interpretation
should be preferred to the fanciful,
far-fetched and irrational one [by disciples and admirers]….
Strangely, Mr Echo damns
our theology and special cult of worship but his own cult of worship makes him dedicate his book to Yogi Ramsuratkumar and Devaki Ma of Tiruvannamalai who, presumably, accept Ramana Maharshi’s theology! To this cult of worship still lurking in him, I offer these facts: In
Aug.’14 (1st issue of Arya):
“The peculiar character of our age is the divorce…between reason and faith, the
logical mind and the intuitive heart…. The
heart and the mind are one universal Deity and neither a mind without a heart
nor a heart without a mind is the human ideal. Nor is any perfection sound and
real unless it is also fruitful.” In Jul.’26: “All ashramas have a
tendency to degeneration. It is due to the incapacity of human nature. Whatever
it receives from above, it spoils very soon. As long as the influence of the
founder lasts, his teaching remains pure, but then his disciples, who cannot
fully grasp it or can only grasp it intellectually, deform the whole thing.” In
Feb.’33: “It is rather surprising that the Ashram
does not break down altogether…but perhaps it is the great grip of the thinking
elements here on the physical world that keeps the Ashram going in spite of the
imbecility of myself and the Mother.”[11]
The keynote of
Aurobindo’s [philosophical] thought is evolution, continues Mr Echo. From his earliest writings in 1890-92…the
notion of evolution influenced the basic orientation of his ideas.
According to Bio-2: Aurobindo inherited the notion of evolution from his father Dr Ghose, who
when in England in 1871, was in the thick of the greatest intellectual controversy of the century created by
Darwin’s Descent…and Origin…; he sided with evolutionists and returned a tremendous atheist. At Cambridge
Aurobindo had little interest in
philosophy and read few of the major Eastern or Western philosophers…. Most of
the ideas he absorbed were “picked up desultorily” in his general reading… and second-hand
accounts of the theory of evolution…. This is why his
philosophical
articlesin the Karmayogin on the relation between the individual and the cosmos, the puzzle of
free will and fate, the origin and significance of evil, though not particularly original try to harmonize the Upanishads and the late
Victorian science by means of [Darwinian] evolution. No wonder, his
arguments are rather quaint [irrational], e.g., A seed grows into a certain sort of tree because “the tree is the idea
involved in the seed”. In the light
of molecular biology, this is at best
a metaphor, scoffs Marcher, knowing that biologists “do not know how the
universe began…why it is there… [and] beyond the trivial have no theories…about
the human soul”; knowing too Sri Aurobindo’s justified assertion in a
compilation of his writings that M&Co published 15 years before Bio-2: “The Science of the West has
discovered evolution as the secret of life and its process in this material
world; but it has laid more stress on the growth of form and species than on
the growth of consciousness: even, consciousness has been regarded as an
incident and not the whole secret of the meaning of evolution.” According to Bio-1: Aurobindo regarded evolution as
fundamentally an unfolding of higher powers of [the
subjective] consciousness, and only
outwardly a development of more complex forms…. To quote Sri Aurobindo again from M&Co’s
compilation: “In my explanation of the universe, I have put forward this
cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here. It
is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital,
the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised in
the fully developed man and thence into the perfect consciousness which is
beyond the mental, into the supramental Consciousness and the supramental
being.” Since man is a conscious being,
continues Bio-1, this evolutionary transition from man to superman will be a conscious
process.
Man can participate in his own self-exceeding. The name given to this [subjective]
participation is yoga which is
essentially an aspiration to the creative [terrestrial and mental] power behind [subjective] evolution and surrender to its workings. [12] But,
as Marcher ‘discovered’, Aurobindo’s originally
rational system of yoga got corrupted by his inborn tendency to psychotic breakdowns, resulting in his v.g. pigs being thrust
into an evolutionary abyss.
This
explains why Mr Echo proclaims: There is
an urgent need to rethink and review the whole Aurobindonian project of the
spiritual (=religious) evolution.
Before it is possible to take a fresh look at the vast body of Aurobindonian
literature, it is necessary to separate the plausible from the incredible, the
sensible from the hyperbolic, the real from the imaginary. This requires a
critical Marcherian reinterpretation,
not just an adulatory avowal. To begin with, it needs to be acknowledged that
though both Aurobindo and Mother repeatedly warned against the creation of a
cult around them, they themselves encouraged it in several ways. They
themselves deified each other. How is this paradox to be explained? Not just by
asserting the divinity of the Gurus and our own mental inadequacies as devotees
are wont to do, but by having the maturity to admit that such contradictions
are a part of the spiritual enterprise; we could call them risks…attendant to
any venture for profit, whether secular or religious [=spiritual]. The Aurobindonian project of the spiritual evolution of humankind,
therefore, need not be identified so
closely to the persons of Aurobindo and the Mother. It is not by deification or
glorification that the role of the Guru can be understood, but by carefully examining
their roles in the historical contexts in which they lived and acted [and
left without a trace]. By separating what
is still relevant [to normal
intelligence] from what was specific
to a particular time and age [the
v.g. pigs] can avoid the pitfalls of
disillusionment of self-deception. Such indeed was the approach that Aurobindo
himself recommended [recall Bio-1’s
this special emphasis was in accord with
his own nature and experiences above].
In other words, scepticism [Marcherism] strengthens
faith while unthinking adherence [v.g.
pigism] undermines it. Whether or not
Aurobindo was [=dead, yet] indeed ‘an
Avatar of the future’…is up to each individual [T-P-H] to discover.
I
wonder how scepticism (disbelief) in the divinity of the Gurus and one’s own
mental inadequacies, strengthens one’s faith in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga in
which, “one is supposed to go beyond every mental
idealistic culture. Ideas and ideals belong to the mind and are half-truths
only; the mind too is, more often than not, satisfied with merely having an
ideal, with the pleasure of idealising, while life remains always the same,
untransformed or changed only a little and mostly in appearance. The spiritual
seeker does not turn aside from the pursuit of realisation to mere idealising;
not to idealise, but to realise the Divine Truth is always his aim, either
beyond or in life also – and in the latter case it is necessary to transform
mind and life which cannot be done without surrender to the action of the
Divine Force, the Mother.”[13]
Yet
Mr Echo ploughs on: A better or more
fitting tribute to Aurobindo’s life and thought can scarcely be paid than by a proper study of his works [not by
practising his Yoga of surrender!]. The
writings themselves need to be studied objectively and dispassionately,
divorced from the mythology which was built around them. Once the validity of
Aurobindo’s spiritual evolution of humankind is recognized…it will be possible
to reinterpret and recover its energy and initiative because there is a great deal that is enduring in Aurobindo’s work that reaches beyond the confines of his time and
place. It is important to salvage and
showcase this for in the coming
century and the next millennium the future generations will find new meaning
and fresh inspiration in his works.
This study can be facilitated by the new edition of The Complete Works of
Sri Aurobindo (CWSA). This implies: 1) Sri Aurobindo never thought, felt, said,
wrote, observed, experienced, realised, anything that is not in Marcher’s CWSA.
2) Sri Aurobindo and Mother can no longer communicate through word or act with
anyone anymore. 3) Their invisible presence, guidance and help that most of his
v.g. pigs experience is sheer
hallucination.
A word on CWSA:
In
1980, soon after Marcher declared himself the Chief Editor of all Ashram
publications and started publishing articles foreshadowing Bio-1 and Bio-2,
M&Co laid down, in scores of pages, their scholarly attitude and approach
in their Archives &
Research. The indispensable attitude:
The duty of the editor is to present the text exactly as the author would have wanted it presented.
The indispensable approach: He must resort to emendation to set right a
manuscript reading that is clearly not what the author intended. The true scholar,
Bio-1 preface told us, must not be
devotional i.e. hagiographic, for that is bound to corrupt his work. M&Co
honed this attitude and approach when editing Purani’s
Life of Sri Aurobindo: they rectified
his English and research[14],
altered, rearranged and enlarged its contents. For Indians, Marcher has always said,
are genetically unable to learn correct English and disciples can never
learn the scholarly methods of research and presentation.
With the same scholarship they rectified, altered, rearranged and enlarged the
SABCL, and produced the CWSA. It is in this CWSA, as Mr Echo echoes, that the future generations will find new meaning
and fresh inspiration in Aurobindo’s works.
I
can’t help echoing Sri Aurobindo’s warning to sadhaks, present and future: “For the sadhaka of the integral
Yoga, it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra [here CWSA], however great its authority
or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the
eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest
Scripture [here CWSA]… he must
take his station, or better still…from the beginning he must live in his own
soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses.” [15]
To
return to the present: It seems M&Co believe that the correct raison-d’être of this Ashram should be
formulated on the basis of this passage from the Chapter “The Spiritual Aim and
Life” of Sri Aurobindo’s Human Cycle: “The spiritual aim will recognise that man as he grows in his being must have as much
free space as possible for all its members to grow in their own strength,
to find out themselves and their potentialities… [True] spirituality will
not lay a yoke…or compel them to square their conclusions with any
statement of dogmatic religious or even of assured spiritual truth, as some
of the old religions attempted, vainly, ignorantly, with an unspiritual
obstinacy and arrogance. Each part of man’s being has its own dharma which
it must follow and will follow in the end, put on it what fetters you please. The
dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth by the intellect
dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgment, with no other first
propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes…. In the
end, if left free in their action, they will find the unity of Truth
with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any
dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give
us. But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God and good and beauty
if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them…. Often we
find atheism both in individual and society a necessary passage to deeper
religious and spiritual truth.”[16]
But
the context in which the spiritual aim
will recognise anyone’s right to deny
God and be atheist and anti-theist is laid down two paragraphs before this
one: “The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as
a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment
upon earth…. It will therefore regard life, mind and body [not] as ends
in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction…but as first instruments
of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpose….”
This
is why the preceding chapter (or stage of spiritual evolution) is titled “The
End of the Curve of Reason” and the ensuing one is titled “The Necessity of the
Spiritual Transformation”. And that this “Necessity…” is the raison d’être of the ashram founded by
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is proved by the following facts:
1)
In 1927, Sri Aurobindo stated the prerequisite
for admission to his Ashram: “The call to the way and spiritual purpose of this
Yoga; an entire and one-minded readiness for surrender and the giving up of all
else for the One Truth; acceptance by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.” The next
year, he explained
the reasons for this condition: “In all that is done in the universe, the
Divine through his Shakti is behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga
Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature. In Yoga also it
is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana…but so long as the lower
nature is active… the personal effort required is a triple labour of
aspiration, rejection and surrender…. If you follow your mind, it will not
recognise the Mother even when she is manifest before you. Follow your soul and
not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at
appearances…. The Mother’s power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can
alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down
into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and
Light and Life divine and the immortal’s Ananda.”
2)
In 1934, when the Mother told a sadhak that ‘She did not know what will happen to this Ashram in the future’, he
couldn’t believe ‘She knew nothing about
the work for which She has taken a body on earth’. So she clarified: “I do
not think that I said any such thing. You must have misunderstood me. But it
is wrong to believe that I came upon earth to establish an Ashram! That would
really be a very paltry objective.”[17]
What is [‘was’ for M&Co] ‘the work
for which She has [‘had’ for M&Co] taken
a body on earth’ if it is [‘was’ for M&co] not founding this “paltry”
Ashram and all the “paltry” institutions and us “paltry” people connected with
it? Three of the relevant answers she has given are: 1) When Sri Aurobindo left
his body, I continued to live here in order to do his work which is, by serving
the Truth and enlightening mankind, to hasten the rule of the Divine’s Love
upon earth. 2) Lord, we are upon earth to accomplish Thy work of
transformation. 3) A work that has terrestrial progress as its goal cannot
be started unless it has the sanction and help of the Divine. It cannot
endure unless there is a constant material growth which satisfies the will
of Nature. It cannot be destroyed prematurely except by human
[Marcherian] ill will, which then serves as an instrument of forces hostile
to the Divine, which are striving to delay as much as possible His
manifestation and the transformation of the earth.[18]
The
concluding words belong to Nolini K. Gupta, the mentor of the present Trustees:
(1) “Mother told us long ago that our Ashram…represents all that is good…and
also all… the bad qualities…. But the Ashram was made to be a conscious
collective centre where these things must change from within, not under
external compulsion, and that is why the Ashram was not given an authority
strong enough to dominate or control its members…. And each one of us who
is here in the Ashram is an epitome of the Ashram… even in the best ones the
wrong movements can cast a shadow. So it is a task for each one, especially the
so-called “best” ones, that is, those who are more conscious, to detect and
reject and change all that is wrong and false in themselves and develop all
that is true and good, and thereby help to change those very elements in the
Ashram atmosphere as well as outside it. That is the only solution and the only
remedy…..” – Sept.1976. (2) “If there is one value that the Mother cherished
most, it is undoubtedly freedom… freedom from everything that constrains the
evolution of the soul…. She refused to frame a tight set of rules and
regulations for the sadhaks…. Freedom from fear, freedom from the compulsion of
authority, freedom from any type of imposition, is what she aimed at, among
other things…. Where there is no freedom to function, there we have failed the
Mother…. My freedom cannot clash with yours when it proceeds from the level of
the soul and not from the ego…. Where freedom is curtailed or suppressed in the
supposed interests of an organisation, the soul cannot blossom. An enforced
discipline can only lead to a soulless, mechanical, stultifying order foreign
to the innate character of the evolving spirit.” – Nov. 1983
*
* *
Postscript:
Besides personal reasons, what pushed me to analyse the prefaces of Bio-1 and Bio-2 was Mark
R’s Customer-Review of Peter Heehs’ The
Lives of Sri Aurobindo posted by Amazon.com in June 2011. I reproduce
the points that swayed me most:
1) Kinda boring and tedious – more
anthropological than biographical.
2) This book… isn’t much uplifting at
all….
3) It is so heavy on details and lacking
in spirit…. [It] seems like more of an anthropological study… digging up
all kinds of trivial details about his life. However, once I finished it, I
felt like I had ‘read about the clothes, but not the man himself’.
4) The author seems to be more concerned
about revealing as many “facts” as possible, without really appreciating them.
It is a very dry study, almost stripped of all life and inspiration.
5) Perhaps it is part of the common
trend nowadays, to ‘humanize’ people of inspiration and accomplishment, by
focussing more on the trivial than the meaningful – and what is meaningful is
reduced to bland analysis. It is almost as if there is an effort to take Sri
Aurobindo down a notch, or knock him off his pedestal.
6) I wish I had known that before
struggling though so many tedious pages.
A
Zombified disciple
Concluded
[1] Approved by the Ashram
Trust as per Rule No.6 on p.5 of its Rules
of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003: “Nothing should be sent out for publication
(contributions to newspapers and magazines, or books) without having been first
submitted to Sri Aurobindo for approval.”
[2] Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Chapter 1
[3] Bio-1:95, 61
[4] Bio-1:106-12; Bio-2:270-77
[5] Bio-2: 245
[6] Bio-1: 134-38; CWSA 23: 392, 472
[7] CWSA 32:375-76, dated 4
May 1937
[8] Prof. Makarand Paranjape,
Penguin Aurobindo Reader, Penguin
Books, New Delhi, 1999. Had the Ashram’s official reader (Prof Jugal K.
Mukherjee?) tasked with recommending the copyright sanction, given this
“introduction” to pass, it would never have been permitted. By the grace
of Marcher’s Daemon, this book and Bio-1
(in all their editions) are sold by the Ashram from they day they enlightened
us.
[9] Mr Echo is a committed
Gandhian-Nehruvian and Gandhi-Nehru inherited the mantle of the Moderates – of
the legitimate Congress leaders.
[10] Bio-2 quotes one such ‘record’ after its official editor Heehs
deliberately left hundreds of its blunders and false statements just to make
Sri Aurobindo convict himself for things he never did or said.
[11] CWSA 13:439-40;
“Conversations”, Sri Aurobindo Circle,
No.34, 1978; CWSA 32:358
[12] “Darwin impels us to
atheism [actually to anti-theism]. It is not merely that evolution erodes the
explanatory potency of God, it eliminates God altogether.” George van Vrekhem
quoting Alistair McGrath in Preparing for
the Miraculous, Stichting Aurofonds, May 2011, p.17; Bio-2:5-6, 276, 203; Evolution,
Religion, and the Unknown God, George van Vrekhem, Manjul Pub. House, 2011:
213-14; The Integral Yoga – Sri
Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, edited by P. Heehs and B.
Zwicker, S.A. Ashram Publication, 1993: 43; Bio-1:108-13
[13] CWSA 32:141
[14] Purani was a Science
graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Bombay. But after five decades in the field
his English and methods of research and presentation, as Marcher told his daughter,
remained amateurish.
[15] The Synthesis of Yoga, CWSA 23:55
[16] CWSA 25:228-29
[17] CWM 17:72 (8 Dec.1934)
[18] CWM 13:8; CWM 15:92-93
(Three Conditions)
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