On the Visit of BJP President Amit Shah to Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Sampdas

It is both comical and ironical that the Ashram Trustees first took the BJP President, Sri Amit Shah, to the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and then to the Archives Cold Storage, where their manuscripts are  preserved. It is ironical because the very supporters of the denigration of Sri Aurobindo posed as earnest followers of the Master in front of powerful politicians. At the same time, it is comical that those who insolently tamper with the writings of Sri Aurobindo are introduced as the ones who reverentially preserve his writings. [read full article below]

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Quo Vadis? by Sampdas – Response to Ritwik Banerjee

Apropos “An Earnest Appeal” by Shri Ritwik Banerjee, let it be noted that there are disciples and devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother – both within the Pondicherry outfit and outside – who are very much perturbed by the manner in which the Masters are denigrated by a handful of influential persons, possibly encouraged and egged on to such vicious efforts by those who are close to the Trustees of the Ashram. On the other hand, the silent majority are perhaps hapless witnesses to it – counting their day to day rations – since they have no other go if they are thrown out of the Ashram. The junta that rules now has the leverage to muzzle dissent into submission by denying food and medical facilities to those who owe allegiance to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, and who dare to protest against atrocities not only against human beings but against the Divine as well. The protestors on the other hand appear to have been carrying on their crusade as a sacred duty to ensure that the Masters are not denigrated in the very Ashram which bears the name of the Pioneers of the New Age.

There are many like me who share the concern for the need to cure this festering wound in time so that it does not become a gangrene threatening the very fundamentals of the spiritual endeavour of sincere disciples and devotees.

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Review of “An Atrocious Biography” – Aron Aronite

From the grammatically inaccurate term ‘Lives’ gets unleashed this narrative style of insinuations about Sri Aurobindo – as if the Mystic led double lives, one imagined for him by himself which his followers and the world began believing as well, while the other ‘human aspect’ to be exclusively discovered through this self-appointed and ambidextrous style of writing pseudo history. Deshpande shows how each left handed compliment accompanies a dismissive, negativist, suggestive insinuation about Sri Aurobindo.

In fact only when we read R.Y. Deshpande’s Atrocious Biography, it gets clear how academia and intellectuals get honey trapped by this irreverence towards a Spiritual Stalwart, forgetting the fact that the gems they hurry to attest as scintillating insights are from someone who has no academic grounding, no formal education in history writing and doesn’t even have a post graduation, least of all a PhD in historiography or any mentionable qualifications in any other discipline. If we are to go by R.Y. Deshpande, we are hearing the "brilliant" (!) take of an American ‘taxi cab driver and a high school dropout’ on one of twentieth century’s most profound Mystic, and a Cambridge alumni who was proposed the Noble prize for Literature. 

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An Atrocious Biography – by RY Deshpande

|| The Lives of Sri Aurobindo || 

An Atrocious Biography 

is now available on Amazon at

https://www.createspace.com/4992004

 

A Preview
An Atrocious Biography by RY Deshpande

[This is a book critiquing Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, US, in May 2008.]

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Who is Gaining from Legal Battles? – Sridharan

The Well-Wishers of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Forum is active again. This Forum can be considered as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust with Matriprasad Satyamurthy (secretary of the Ashram Trust) and Richard Hartz (controversial editor of Sri Aurobindo’s publications) hiding behind pseudonyms and spewing hatred at what they call anti-Ashram elements. Let me remind you once more that we had made a clear distinction between the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust in our last response to this forum. Therefore the Ashramites who have filed this “new case” are not against the Ashram but the Ashram Trust, which runs the Ashram in the most irresponsible manner. Their demand is to revamp the present administration through a Government intervention without which no structural changes can be brought about in the governance of the Ashram. The changes will ensure transparency and accountability, the utter lack of which is the hallmark of the present setup. The introduction of some democracy into the highly autocratic functioning of the present Trustees would also be a welcome measure. All these demands are fundamental to any institution in modern times and, if the excuse for not conceding to them is that the Ashram is a spiritual institution and not a secular one, then show me these “highly spiritual disciples” among the present Trustees who can guide the Ashram to its spiritual destiny!

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Connecting the Dots between the pro-Ashram Trust Nexus – Sridharan

The Well-wishers of Sri Aurobindo Ashram website which follows closely our site has recently done some “remarkable investigation” and announced how it has “connected the dots” between the so-called anti-Ashram nexus. Let me first remind these “highly intelligent sleuths” that Sri Aurobindo Ashram (Pondicherry) is different from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust (Pondicherry). The Ashram Trust was created by the Mother in 1955 for protecting the assets and properties of the Ashram, whereas Sri Aurobindo Ashram spontaneously began in 1926 when Sri Aurobindo gave “the spiritual and material charge” of his disciples to the Mother after the Siddhi Day. The Ashram is the spiritual institution and the Ashram Trust is only a legal body, whose administration has at first gradually and then rapidly deteriorated in recent times after the passing away of its Gurus. A section of the Ashramites are extremely unhappy with the corrupt and dictatorial functioning of the Ashram Trust and have therefore gone against it in various legitimate ways. They have not gone against the Ashram itself nor do they want to destroy the Ashram from the face of this earth, as the supporters of the Ashram Trust would like the ignorant public to believe. The solution to this rudderless present situation of the Ashram without any spiritual heads, or rather with the present Trustees who always get into loggerheads with anybody who differs from them, is an alternate system of fair and democratic governance. If this is difficult to understand and highly objectionable, then I think we have to set the clock back and go back to pre Magna Carta days.

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Apropos of Savitri and Prof. Manoj Das – by R.Y. Deshpande

Private dispute should always be avoided; but shrink not from public battle; yet even there appreciate the strength of thy adversary. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Prof Manoj Das writes: “I was for a while representing the Ashram in the courts where several cases were filed against the Trust because it brought out a revised version of the Master’s epic, Savitri. It was ‘revised’ in the sense that errors (typographical, punctuation, omission, words not properly deciphered in corrected proofs, etc) were removed through years of study and scrutiny.I was convinced that the Revised Edition of the epic is the most authentic one.” [Refer to Bireshwar Choudhury's reply to Manoj Das.]

In response to this we have the following on the website: “The Savitri revision controversy has rocked the Ashram for a decade or two. RY Deshpande was part of the team that finalised the Savitri revisions and he says that even Nirodbaran expressed his unhappiness over some of the revisions. The late Jugal Kishore Mukherjiwrote a fifty page letter to Amal on these revisions. … I will throw a challenge which Deshpande has long been insisting upon: Make all the Savitri manuscripts public. Put them up on the Net for all to see and judge for themselves the legitimacy of the revisions of the Archives editors.”

Prof Manoj Das says, “I was convinced that the Revised Edition of the epic is the most authentic one.” He also writes to the same effect to Dr Karan Singh.

Here my concern is to ask one or two immediate questions to Prof Manoj Das. If I get direct and non-evasive answers I would like to continue the dialogue further. The technical dialogue will be on this website. It is up to him to say yes or no.

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Rich Carlson calls the “Court Diary” a “Slanderous Document”

I don’t know if we should take those who celebrate The Lives of Sri Aurobindo and defend its author with any seriousness at all. I’m yet to see, even after year and a half of publication of the book by the prestigious Columbia University Press any worthwhile academic study, full-length or short, bringing out its claimed gainful contributions to the vast body of literature that already exists around Sri Aurobindo. Its author says that Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri is a “fictional creation” which makes the whole thing suspect. This is particularly so when we have the Mother declaring Savitri as “the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision”. If we go by her, we will be dismissed as gullible, a credulous lot who have no minds of their own. In arrogant contrast to what the Mother says, the tyros’ Lives makes it a travesty of the entire spirituality. But what are the credentials of the author or his irrational buddies to speak about this? None. Our concern is not really with the “Court Diary” but with this biography which is the cause of all the dismay. I don’t think anybody is keen to drive the matters to the Court if the Lives is given a deserving and desirable burial. Let’s hope it will happen.
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Apropos of the “Court Diary"

We have the deconstructionist Rich Carlson of the post-Ron dubious sciy who writes that the Diary contents are by RY Deshpande. What was an email forward from him has become in his hand “recent report by R.Y. Deshpande”. There cannot be anything more ridiculous than this, that here is a report by RY Deshpande. But this is not unusual of Carlsons to put on an aura of rational rationalists, and distort things. But they don’t realize that none is going to buy this kind of deconstruction except perhaps their faithful but unthinking cohorts.
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Savitri is "Fictional Creation", says Heehs! -- by R.Y Deshpande

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published last year by the Columbia University Press dismisses Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri as a possible source for getting some idea about the yoga-sadhana of Sri Aurobindo. Here is what we have on p. 398: “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 life 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. [ref: 144, Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 276]

Let us examine the phrase “fictional creation” being supported by the reference from Letters on Poetry and Art.   ...full text...

Trojan Horses—a Warning from the Owl

Countless and cunning Trojan horses have entered the Web-Journals and their objective is to destroy the future, what stands for Tomorrow. But here is a warning from the watchful owl deeply keeping guard on things in the preciousness of the night.

The owl hooted in the mocking night, “Beware
Of Trojan horses set in brutal woods,
’neath thick branches of thought. They’re built in moods
Born of artful ends, and in the least care
Things that are to the growing spirit fair;
Deep silence in which the magic word broods
Is unknown to them; instead they prize goods
Synthetic, hurtful, swift masters of malware.

Seems they’re here to advance deceit, on the net
Spread disinformation; they will debunk
You, working night and day in shifty times.
They’ve no flowing manes, of scruples, and you’d get
Tricked by these schemers in the wooden trunk,
Beware! They would sue even gods for fake crimes.”

RY Deshpande
15 June 2009

First introduced by Virgil with a kind of finesse that speaks very highly of the ancient warriors, there is an acceptable Trojan Horse in Drydens’ translation. Its cunning is praiseworthy and honest resourcefulness, of doing things by noble and heroic people—unlike the way things happen on the quarrelling web-pages these days, witness vis-à-vis The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, the accusations and counter-accusations hurled by the warring tribes—as if they are all an insufferable lot. This has got to be remedied.

The subterfuge to deceive the Trojans was thought out, of course, by Athena herself, but was put into operation by the conniving and clever Odysseus. The gigantic wooden horse was designed and built by the artist Epeius and, when ready, a select number of Greek warriors climbed inside it. The rest of the Greek fleet pretended to sail away, back to their shores. The horse was left behind as a parting gift for the Trojans. Sinon, one of the accomplices, stayed behind to reassure the marvelling enemy not to worry about the horse, and that they could take it inside the city. Laocoon and Cassandra warned about the danger but, as usual, they were ignored. On the other hand, even as those thousand ships started sailing away, there were wild celebrations inside the guarded city and the treacherous gift was taken inside it. The moment of destiny had arrived and soon Sinon signalled the warriors hiding in the trunk of the wooden horse to jump out and attend to the short work they had planned with great care, in the manner of the Athenian perfection. Priam was killed and the city was set on fire.   ...full text...

Is this Imbroglio or Falsification?

So the peaceful expanse of the brow, the trouble-free face, and the fathomless eyes were after all the artifacts, the work of art...

Is this Imbroglio or Falsification?

Let me read along with you the preface for The Lives of Sri Aurobindo and you will see that the tone is fixed right at the start. Our young author, who also did at that time taxi-driving in the US, once chanced to visit a Yoga centre where on the wall were three pictures. He narrates that one of them was the standard portrait of Aurobindo. “I was struck by the peaceful expanse of his brow, his trouble-free face, and fathomless eyes. It would be years before I learned that all of these features owed their distinctiveness to the retoucher’s art.”

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Archetypal Images and Symbols—by Paulette

Here is a personal e-mail from Paulette which is significant in more than one respect. I therefore thought it gainful to post it for the benefit of the perceptive readers of the Mirror of Tomorrow, particularly the aspiring souls of the Aurobindonian or what is called the Integral Yoga Community.   ...full text...

Two Sides of Two Different Coins

About three weeks ago my friend and ex-colleague at the sciy, Rich, approached me,—of his own, and that could surely have been a gainful step had it progressed,—for a ‘dialog’ on the issue that has been harassing everyone for months now. I took it as a definite positive move, assuming that it was not a tactical move, and made a proposal for an open discussion on the Lives of Sri Aurobindo, going through the weighty book paragraph by paragraph and page by page. But Rich stepped back—which means that the open ‘dialog’ will continue to languish and the parties will continue to operate in their own way, moral, ethical, civic, political, literary, academic, legal, spiritual, and what not. Perhaps this has got to get exhausted before something in the nobility of the IY Community appears on the horizon. It is sincerely hoped that it will be sooner than later. But beyond this terrible ‘human potential’ there is another Hand and, true to the IY Ideal, the best, and reassuring, for us to firmly hold it, rather to let it do unhindered its work in us.
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Two Poems — by RY Deshpande

Two topical poems by R Y Deshpande:

The Death of Angiras—an Obituary

Devastation

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The Death of Angiras—an Obituary

His eyes were perfect, but like a blind star
He walked through the long night when were asleep
The skilled gods of time, and the guards who keep
Vigil on swift things, in the lands that are
Priceless and precious, stretching wide and far;
In those realms of gold he saw a huge heap
Of papers and, rather with a snarly leap,
Took hold of them, wonders that had no scar.

One by one all the missed commas were found
And many a word looked quite dubious;
The poet had lost his sense, in a voice bold
He declared to the sleepy world. What ground…?
But the sudden hand of death, furious,
Took away his soul ere it could be sold.

17 April 2009
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Devastation

A village nestled in a ring of hills
And waters came hurrying in a stream,—
It was so until academic mills
Got busy grinding scripts, ream after ream.

Oh these stupid credulous folk! don’t know
Methods of editing texts, how to read
Phrases that are old, blurry, that but show
The author his own promptings failed to heed.

We’re the authentic lot from Yale-Harvard
And the archival sciences, they maintain,
Cannot be disputed be they for the bard
Or for chaps who in the world see no gain.

By now disappeared the small place, the brook,
And the demons of thought its possession took.

20 April 2009
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The Theme of Evolution in Sri Aurobindo’s Writings—its Centennial Celebration

The theme of evolution was central to Sri Aurobindo’s thought almost throughout his life. We have a set of essays written by him in 1909 which first came out in the weekly review the Karmayogin edited by him when he was in Calcutta; this was after his acquittal in the Alipore Bomb Case filed against the revolutionaries, including himself, in 1908. It is quite appropriate that we should read these over again to celebrate the centenary year of their appearance. For details click here.

Along with these three selected pieces, from Harmony of Virtue, must also go the absolutely last set of articles Sri Aurobindo dictated in 1950; this was at the request of the Mother who wished him to contribute to the newly started periodical, the Bulletin of Physical Education. These last writings were later published, in January 1952, in the book entitled The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth. The most important thing we become aware of in these revelations is the arrival of what Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light, the mind of the physical receiving the Supramental. It is this Mind of Light which governs the race of beings who provide a link between the Mental and the Gnostic beings,—the Intermediate Race.

If we do see a change in the writings of these two periods, separated by forty years, then it is not a change or shift of any kind in his central concepts related to the principles and methods of evolution, evolution which is more a collective change of consciousness, a change pertaining to spiritual evolution than to the evolution of form. The difference is due to the great yogic work that had gone towards the realization of the life divine upon earth, the difficult and untiring yoga-tapasya of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. To view it in any other manner, other than an occult-yogic work, howsoever appealing it might be to the rational mind, is to miss the entire purport of the evolutionary objective itself. One might please oneself with theories and concepts, but that would avail hardly anything if the day’s job is to make the evolutionary possibility a realised certainty.

Precisely in it lies the convincing uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo’s vision and work, and it is that we must celebrate during the centenary year, celebrate the first appearance of the theme in 1909.

Belonging to the writings of this early period, we include here a relevant record Sri Aurobindo made in his jottings of yogic experiences, dated March 1914. These jottings or records were more for his personal use than for publication. But these have now been published in book form under the title Record of Yoga. We do not know if Sri Aurobindo meant these to be made public at all, as we understand that the heap of papers containing these details had on top of it a note, marking it as ‘confidential’.

Perhaps the best thing would have been to just keep them as proper archival documents for studies by the interested individual researchers of his works. Which means that, while reading these, we must be extremely careful about the parameters that were associated with them at the time—we should not apply the demanding inflexible criteria of academic or professional scholarship to them, for they do not belong to the mental domain at all; we must only try to enter into the spirit of the occult knowledge they contain.

And what a treasure-mine it is, shining with luminous details, containing many a gem of the divine preciousness! When Sri Aurobindo says, for instance, that the Sun is only a subordinate star of the great Agni, Mahavishnu, in whom is centred the Bhu, the Earth, he is actually talking of knowledge of another world altogether. It will be a sheer travesty of this knowledge, as much as of the knowledge obtained by our present-day science, if we mix them up. One should be extremely careful in reading such details, actually meant for advanced yogi-occultists, and that could well be the reason why Sri Aurobindo might not have approved the publication of his records.

It is rather unfortunate that this important perspective is missed in the present publicity given to the Record of Yoga. All that we can now say is that the Record is meant for the seekers of the occult truth-details and they must qualify themselves before picking them up for study which should be more in the direction of extending the investigation of the occult working of nature, that functioning in this vast domain of space and time, time comprising of its three operative divisions. Let us hope that this will be well borne in mind before reference is made to the secrets of Record of Yoga.

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About Immersed Attention and Revelatory Speech

The biographer of Sri Aurobindo applies contemporary standards to judge the past. Even if we grant such a stand to be valid, how can the past ever measure up to the present? But perhaps this conflict of two regimes of time has to be resolved elsewhere, particularly when the spirit’s expression comes from the timeless freedom and felicity of speech. If the whole approach is to pander to the demands of the quick audience,—and that would mean to become dishonest—then it is the case of misapplication of literary criticism to another mode of writing.

At Sri Aurobindo’s Prose Style we’ve a detailed discussion of the seven modes of his writings. There is also a comment about the maturing up of his writings with experience. But nowhere do we notice the aspect of Philip Davis’s “immersed attention” in its critical appraisal, a thing which is perfectly understandable because a spiritual person must be seen with some degree of spiritual perception, particularly a Yogi par excellence. Otherwise we simply trivialise all his work, as is done by the biographer of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo .

Let us look into it from a few points of view. Firstly, if Philip Davis is a present-day writer-critic, then we fail to understand how we can apply his criteria to what Sri Aurobindo wrote several decades ago—unless we decide to scrutinise and check the entire past from the perspective of present formulations. There is also the doubt if the theory of "immersed attention" has credibility at all in the literary circles, if it is taken seriously by the present-day authors-critics. Might be the non-cognisance of such theories of criticism by the upstarts and the tyros will not be respected by the professionals and the academics, but that could as well amount to mixing up of the issues which belong to different domains of expression—speech promoting human comprehension and speech entering into it with another power of knowledge and revelation. We cannot compare, for instance, the statement-speech of a business executive with the speech of a hero-general or that of a prophet of nationalism, of human values promoting freedom and self-determination. On the literary side, the author’s identity in the Formalistic style is generally kept aside and what counts are the contents in his writings; the intuitive-creative element is shortened or gets subdued in comparison with the discursive; here the mysterious subjectivity aspect no longer wearies the critics. But it is not necessarily or primarily the style which marks Sri Aurobindo as one coming from Cambridge, if there is the Cantabrigian stamp on it—note that Sri Aurobindo has been listed as one of the alumni of the Cambridge University. What counts is the whole approach towards things and matters; it is the approach of a well-prepared well-developed personality that must be seen. Sri Aurobindo enters into the field of life with a distinct individuality of his own, and it is that which really is important.

Surely we do understand and also somewhat admire the commitment of the academics to their line of approach, their faithfulness to the avowed profession. But that leaves a problem. How does one cognise and appreciate, in fact more than that, benefit from the style and language of a yogi who brings things from the "pure realms of gold" that are not accessible to us, the utterance of a yogi with its authority of expression, one who has the power to make things invisible visible to our developed faculty of seeing? It must be borne in mind that the dignity and profundity of certain writings have the mark of the unfading, the eternal style,—witness the Veda, the Upanishad, the Gita or for that matter King James Bible. Do we dismiss them by saying 'dated'? And then, as Sri Aurobindo had written apropos of Savitri, one has to wait for the arrival of the right type of a readership. I suppose there is also a deep connection between depth of thought and the wideness of expression. If we are not in tune with the substance, the contents, then the mould of the language looks clumsy. Intuitive writings have both together, fused in a most harmonious manner. If we have to put it differently, the problem is between spiritual writings and secular writings, they operating in different domains.

The biographer of Sri Aurobindo applies contemporary standards to judge the past. Even if we grant such a stand to be valid, how can the past ever measure up to the present? But perhaps this conflict of two regimes of time has to be resolved elsewhere, particularly when the spirit’s expression comes from the timeless freedom and felicity of speech. If the whole approach is to pander to the demands of the quick audience,—and that would mean to become dishonest—then it is the case of misapplication of literary criticism to another mode of writing.

The basic issue is perhaps connected with two modes of expression: academic-literary and spiritual-revelatory. Their styles have to be different and the criteria of one will not apply to the other. One is human potential perhaps going towards the other, the higher; the other is a possibility of expression that can enter into ours and enrich it in several ways. How does one convey this difference to the academia? Is it possible at all? If the answer is "No", then no dialogue can be held between the two. But, finally, it is not the question of convincing the one or the other; it is a question of feeling—if a piece of writing elevates our spirit, promotes our truer deeper aesthetic enjoyment, creates around us and within us an atmosphere of beauty and joy. These might be subjective criteria, but if there is the evolutionary urge to step into the supra-rational mode of living and progress, to go beyond the small and the puny and the immediate, to exceed ourselves is the greatness of the aspiring spirit and the invitation is to accept it.

On one occasion, when KD Sethna was living at the rue Fransçois Martin, Goutam Ghosal told him that he disliked the shorter biography by Hees, especially his literary observations; he asked Sethna what he thought about it. Sethna said, and he distinctly remembers it, "I asked Peter not to comment on the literary merits or demerits of Sri Aurobindo's work... he is no expert there." Goutam Ghosal concurs fully with Sethna.

Let me add a comment apropos of this. Sethna (Amal Kiran) gave me his copy of Peter Heehs’s book Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography and I’m thankful to him for this. I value it very much both as a present from him and for some of the important footnotes written by him in pencil. I’ll refer to just one, pertaining to a remark by Heehs on p. 109. He says, Sri Aurobindo “found Aristotle ‘exceedingly dry’ but admires Plato, whose Symposium he used as a model for his Harmony of Virtue. Amal’s footnote has the following: “The Harmony of Virtue, though archetypally based on the Platonic system of dialogue, seems actually to be more an independent exercise in the dialogue made brilliant by Oscar Wilde. There is even a reference to Wilde in it.” But all that we can say is, wild are the ways of the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo!

This comment presenting Sri Aurobindo’s prose style appeared originally at the Mirror of Tomorrow. It is preceded by several other comments in the context of the article entitled This Author must have been from Cambridge.

~ RYD   ...full text...

Sri Aurobindo's Sevenfold Prose Style

Sri Aurobindo’s Prose Style by Goutam Ghosal is one of the professional studies which examines the characteristics and nuances as much as influences and traditions given to the creation of newer possibilities of expression. It is not in an isolationist manner that one would admire his uniqueness, but by holding a universality which can become spiritually wide and comprehensive, and rewarding, that one might be able to enter into the vastness of its exoteric as much as its esoteric spirit. Ghosal says in his preface that “Sri Aurobindo never wrote like a scholar… [even] when he was a real scholar. Tradition formed his outline, the novelty came from experience. The more he matured the more he depended on his own experience. …his prose is of a literary artist with a mind of exceptional calibre.” It is a pity that the recent biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is unable to enter into its immensity and feel the charm of its ambiance, the presence of the spirit pervading it; not only that, it hurriedly and disparagingly speaks of it, Sri Aurobindo’s prose style, having problems in structuring itself for the modern mind to appreciate and understand it, to value the contents. But there is in his prose style, says in the foreword VK Gokak the eminent literary critic of yesteryears, “meticulousness and virtuosity possessing the power, charm and propriety” that stand out distinctly. In this author must have been from Cambridge we have a large number of examples presenting Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings belonging to different periods of time and covering diverse subjects. These should be sufficient to dismiss the oblique manner of looking at Sri Aurobindo as an author, one possessing exceptional power of expression which is lucid, powerful, musical, full of harmonious coherences climbing to the sheer inspired and inevitable mode of expression, the revelatory speech itself. It is in that context we reproduce in the following a chapter from Goutam Ghosal’s study, lending weight to what the perceptive and discerning see in Sri Aurobindo’s writings. Ghosal himself is an academic and carries authority being the professor and head of the English Department at Vishwa Bharati University, Santiniketan. Here is a remarkable chapter, chapter nine, entitled Style in the Major Works: Fusion of Myths and Seven Kinds of Style in Sri Aurobindo’s Prose Style published in 1990. ~ RYD

Refer to the following post for fuller details:

Sri Aurobindo's Prose Style
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Sri Aurobindo was unable to restructure his articles

Regarding his writings in the Arya, our biographer says that Sri Aurobindo was “unable to restructure” his articles constrained as he was by the publication schedule of a monthly periodical. There wasn’t scope to redo those compositions as they had to be rushed to the press. In other words, Sri Aurobindo left them in that raw form as they were typed out. If we go by our standard modes of assessment of writings, this observation might sound perfectly acceptable and there should be every reason to question the style that was adopted by the author. But the question is: can one really apply such considerations to a Yogi’s writings, one who says that he received all that he had written in a state of silent mind? Either we dismiss the claim, of that ‘silent mind’ by calling it humbug or nonsensical or funny or absurd, not worth paying attention to; or else we might pause for a while and ask ourselves the question if that could really mean something special to a spiritual person. In any case, much later when Sri Aurobindo was revising the Arya chapters for publication in a book form, he had no previous constrains of a periodical. Yet his style did not differ much from the earlier one.

As an example of constrains of a periodical, the biographer cites The Synthesis of Yoga in which “one part is too long, another too short.” But there are, in his opinion, other criticisms also, criticisms which could be levelled at the entire Arya writings. He says: “The style is involved and, by modern standards, frequently obscure. Like other writers trained in classical tradition, Aurobindo loved the periodic sentence, in which clause follows clause, until sometimes the point of the statement is lost in a maze of qualifications. He was the last generation to write like that in English. The twenty-first century reader of Dryden, Ruskin, Aurobindo, Virginia Woolf, or continental writers such as Michel Foucault, must develop what British literary critic Philip Davis calls ‘immersed attention’ to be able to profit from this style.”

But what has Sri Aurobindo common with these three authors, that he should have been grouped with them? Dryden’s greatest achievements were his satires; Ruskin was concerned with social justice and influenced the formation of Labour movement; Virginia Woolf as a novelist experimented with the stream-of-consciousness carrying psychological and emotional motives. In great contrast to all this, Sri Aurobindo was presenting his spiritual realizations and the associated mystical-intuitive metaphysics in a language that had substance and rhythm and the power of vision coming from the corresponding domains of expression, the beauty and the harmony which belong to the worlds of the spirit. It is a mistake to put these disparate things together which only goes to show, more than the sheer insensitivity of the author, his total lack of understanding of both. We should consider ourselves lucky that, he does not put together Harry Potter and The Life Divine.

~ RYD   ...full text...

Sri Aurobindo and the Future of Humanity—a Comment

It is possible to look at Sri Aurobindo in context of the future of humanity but that should be primarily done recognizing him as the Master-Yogi and perhaps not so much as a traditional or professional Master-Philosopher appealing to the rationalist of the western kind. It is justifiably said that Sri Aurobindo gives us a framework of thought, as well as pragmatics of psychology, that carries us forward in becoming a better acceptable individual and a better organised collectivity. Due credit is also given to him as a Master-Critic for giving us a creative expression which is futuristic uttering the Word of the Spirit. His writings do mark “a blueprint for a destiny which he announces as a life divine”.

But in order to get to this life divine, the life divine something else, something radically different from all these things has to happen.

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