The Golden Chain Fraternity – Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust Nexus – by An Alumnus-Disciple

It is the self-regarding desire-driven leap of faith of alumni and Ashramites and would-be Ashramites that endorses SAAT’s administration as that of the Mother Herself. And in return for their defence of its assessments, policies and actions, SAAT certifies them as truly committed to the Mother and Her Ashram, hence its legitimate inmates or fit to be admitted as inmates, and admits their children to its SAICE. The criteria Sri Aurobindo and the Mother demanded for admission as sadhaks to Their Ashram have thus been clearly overridden. – Extract

  ...full text...

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.]

  ...full text...

The Book that Bombed -- by Krish Patwardhan

On reading the Lives, you get the impression of a monkey who plays to the audience by constantly jumping from one branch of learning to another without assimilating anything. The monkey often breaks some of the branches in a fit of rage, sometimes the very branch on which it was sitting a few minutes ago, and is so restless that it cannot settle anywhere on the tree!

  ...full text...

An Excerpt from Swami Tyagananda’s Rebuttal of "Kali’s Child"

[Here is an excerpt from Swami Tyagananda’s brilliant rebuttal of Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child (1995) on Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa. The filth in Jeffrey Kripal’s book is perhaps more shocking to us than Peter Heehs’s Lives of Sri Aurobindo. But there is one interesting similarity between them – both cheat with their documentation. It is not only the distasteful topics they discuss (the alleged homosexual relationship of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhamsa with Swami Vivekananda or Sri Aurobindo’s romantic relation with the Mother), but also the way they arrive at these preposterous conclusions on the basis of flimsy and wrong documentation. The first objection to their lack of taste and refinement can be dismissed as a cultural difference between the East and the West (though even here I would disagree), but how can you dismiss the second? Proper historical documentation and intellectual honesty go beyond cultural barriers and are indispensable for writing the history of any great men. There is no such thing as a Western and Eastern (or Indian) method of historical documentation. The fundamental rules of scientific documentation apply everywhere, whether in the East or the West. This is how Swami Tyagananda stumps Jeffrey Kripal in his rebuttal. Likewise, many of the articles on this site have exposed Peter Heehs’s wilful misrepresentations of Sri Aurobindo’s life.

  ...full text...

The Jinxed Book – Dr. Jitendra Sharma

Peter Heehs, without any academic qualification, 

has written the jinxed book

American writer Peter Heehs, without any academic qualification, has written the jinxed book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo”. He dons the garb of a researcher, a devotee and an impartial biographer. He writes a few pages in the book insinuating that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had a romantic relationship and Sri Aurobindo’s personality had some elements of ‘schizophrenia’, inherited from his mad mother, which were the root causes of his mystical yogic powers and supernatural experiences.

  ...full text...

Objectionable Extracts from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs

The following are the objectionable extracts which got circulated widely in 2008, after which the book got banned. Each extract is followed by a link to a major article refuting it. There are of course many more objectionable passages than those which have been included here; in fact the more closely you read the book, the more you come across the constant hostility (subtle and blatant) towards Sri Aurobindo. There has been a lot of hype about the scholarship that is behind the book. If there is, it is more of the negative kind, that of a scholar who has dedicated his life to denigrate Sri Aurobindo just because his fellow Ashramites adore their Master. And this is done on the basis of flimsy evidence, snipped documents, negative testimony provided by British Govt officials, and sometimes even speculation.  A standard knee-jerk reaction to this rather unflattering assessment is – “How can you dismiss a historian like that?” You certainly can if you have sufficiently studied the documentation of all the negative statements in this book! But how many have the patience and time to do that!

 [click on title for full text]

  ...full text...

Govind Rajesh: The “intensity” of bhakti yoga, according to Peter Heehs, is turning the spiritually symbolic into the sexually suggestive

Peter has filled his biography The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (TLOSA) with insidious suggestions about Sri Aurobindo, speculating about lurid and sensational topics such as his sexuality or apparent lack of it, his seeming inadequacy as a husband, his inaptitude as a politician, his potentially scandalous legitimization of a possible marital relationship with his spiritual collaborator, the Mother (to describe whom Peter conveniently uses the ambiguous word 'partner', which has very well-known connotations in common parlance). The list goes on and on. On page after page in the book, Peter’s convoluted mental prism distorts the life and image of Sri Aurobindo into a pock-marked caricature of itself.

Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo’s literary work is diminished into a poor and pitiful shadow of the true puissance and sublimity one experiences when it is encountered and imbibed directly in its original form. In his inadequate, uninformed and uninspired treatment of these works, Peter distorts and devalues them by inserting misleading criticism or deviant perversions, even ridicule, into otherwise harmless descriptions that serve as a shell of neutral scaffolding around the negative kernel, betraying not only his lack of understanding when it comes to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and system of spiritual discipline, but also a kind of latent, perhaps even subconscious, hostility that manifests itself in the core of his critical pronouncements and disparaging judgments.

In fact, this is a well-known literary device called an "Oxford Sandwich", which W.W.Robson in his book "The Definition of Literature and Other Essays" describes as follows "you begin by praise, then say something quite lethal, and round it off by praise again" (page 133). This literary device could be a perfect allegory for the book as a whole, and is precisely what makes it so contentious. While seeming to present a façade of objectivity and even positivity on the surface, the book, in fact, bristles with insidious suggestions designed to worm their way into the minds and hearts of readers and fill them with perverse distortions of Sri Aurobindo’s life and works.   ...full text...