Alok Pandey’s comment on “The Metamorphosis of a S...

2009-11-28T10:12:55.247+05:30

Alok Pandey’s comment on “The Metamorphosis of a Sadhak-Scholar” (26.11.2009):

I completely agree with your insightful understanding on the subject of an intellectual scholar who loses his way in the dry and dusty landscapes of the mind searching for spiritual waters by his outer vision. Finding none, he declares that all is a chimers since he was searching it wrongly and in the wrong place. Thus disheartened, he easily falls to the grey whispers of the chill night buried under the sand-dunes of scholarly 'wisdom'.

But this (the author of The Lives...) however seems to be a different case. It is more like the grey hounds of hell entering the kingdom of heaven to whisper the word that slays. Right from the start, if one has to believe what he himself says and also from the actions as seen from the very beginning, his work had a touch of the diabolic in it. His stated purpose of staying on at the Ashram was not yoga or any interest in the place or the work, but the fact that he got a job to his liking. Even if there was a lurking impulse to a higher life behind, it doesn't show itself in any of his writings or talks anywhere. If anything there is the blind and the biased historian or the arrogant and opinionated man. It is strange and surpasses my understanding as to how so much leeway is given to what is done at the Archives. It is as if a free hand is given to publish anything and everything. I can give a number of examples. The book on Sri Aurobindo's life by AB Purani has a number of pages added to it that were not written or intended by AB Purani. So also, we see much unnecessary and controversial material being published in the Autobiographical Notes whereas its second part which will put things in proper perspective is delayed for so long. It is as if the team was rather keen to bring out the Autobiographical Notes (Part I) and the Record of Yoga much faster while the part II and the Mother (with Questions and Answers on the Mother) must wait. In fact if you read the promo at the website regarding the Mother you will find something peculiar. It seems to make a distinction between the Divine Mother and the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram! Strangely enough the CWSA also promises to bring out a glossary of Record of Yoga (by whom, one may ask, for Sri Aurobindo never wrote one, then what is it doing in CWSA?). The instances multiply and I cannot help see in it a pattern and wonder at the complacency with which the whole thing is being managed. The book is just the culmination of a long sustained effort in a certain direction and not a freak event or even a slow or sudden fall.

Comments on A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs: The Metamorphosis of a Sadhak-Scholar -- by Raman ...

Alok Pandey’s comment on “The Metamorphosis of a S...