Peter Heehs in Live Debate with General Bakshi on Times Now on April 5, 2012

After four years of falsely claiming that he could not speak publicly because of legal cases, Peter Heehs is now freely giving interviews to any and every newspaper or TV channel that approaches him in a desperate attempt to tilt public opinion in the hope that his deportation order can be overturned. Heehs pleads to be given the same treatment that he has received for the last 40 years, yet claims that he does not ask for any special privileges. Having abused the many privileges that he received for so long, the appeal comes a tad too late. Moreover, one has to ask, what has he done to deserve pardon. Even now, as always in the last four decades, he disdainfully rejects all discussion and refuses to apologise for abusing his provileges, for insulting Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and for causing so much pain to millions of devotees.

For the last four years Heehs avoided public debates and spoke through his many proxies to avoid direct discussion on the many factual distortions and the academic fraudulences on which his book is based.

His latest live discussion on Times Now on April 5, 2012 is revealing. Among other things, it shows how hard Heehs finds it to defend the many perverse passages in his book. When challenged with the false charges of Sri Aurobindo's "madness", Heehs claims that he was merely "studying" the "suggestion" of "correlation between mental instability and genius"!

Press [Play] to watch the entire interview. For best results click the bottom-right corner of the video to view in full-screen.

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An Example of Mischief

Mr Peter Heehs has absolutely no qualms in stating on a public television: “Its also a fact that Sri Aurobindo’s mother was mad; there is no question about that; and it’s also a fact that Sri Aurobindo was a genius”.

How does such a statement become interesting to make his biography acceptable to a certain class of high or erudite readership? I wonder, when it lacks even the cultural sense. The connection between the madness of the mother of Sri Aurobindo and he being a genius has been left hanging by a professional who claims himself to be an authority on such a subject. This statement might appear jarring to some ears, and one needn’t care about those ears, but the deliberate gaps left between the two are, on part of the author, an act of deliberate mischief.

Is this scholarship? Is this history? Is this an unbiased detached presentation of facts? And does the learned class find in it an excellent piece of research work, an “original” piece of work which makes the author’s biography impartial and neutral and objective, even non-judgmental?

Besides this, one has to also debate whether it is all right for anyone to state on public television that, one of the parents of the founder of the Ashram was mad? and for what purpose? If that anyone belongs to the Ashram, then the question arises: What is the spiritual merit, what is the spiritual content, what is the spiritual gain in publicly speaking something which is totally non-spiritual, in fact is unspiritual, even anti-spiritual?

And what’s next? Do we seriously argue and try to prove that it’s not proper for someone to publicly abuse Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother, while yet remaining in the Ashram, of which one is a part? This might be an institutional question but is not irrelevant.

A friend says: “I have to be dreaming here. This cannot be reality.”   ...full text...

Prof Kamal Das on Peter Heehs's Research at the Ashram

Ashram Trustees to Govt of India:
“Sri Aurobindo was ‘Psychotic and Mentally Unstable’”

Shocking!

In a shocking revelation, it has now come to light that the Trustees of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram led by Manoj Das Gupta have submitted to the Government of India, that original research carried out at the Ashram’s Archives proves that Sri Aurobindo was “psychotic and mentally unstable with a pronounced affliction of lunacy”.

In the Ashram’s Annual Report of Research Activities submitted to the Government and dated 1997-1998, on p.26 the Trustees have cited as “original historical research” an article of some 30 pages by Peter Heehs titled “Genius, Mysticism, and Madness”. This article, written by Peer Heehs as part of his work at the Ashram Archives, was also published in the Psychohistory Review in 1997. Evidently, it matters little to the Trustees that the Ashram Archives was not created for the purpose of denigrating Sri Aurobindo but for preservation of his manuscripts. Nor does it matter to the Trustees that Peter Heehs, being a school dropout, has absolutely no formal training, degree or experience in any field whatsoever, leave alone complex subjects such as psychology and psychohistory.

In this article Heehs attempts to “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that Sri Aurobindo’s genius and spiritual achievements and realisations were the unreliable consequence of mental instability coupled with psychotic and lunatic affliction.


Extracts and Excerpts from “Genius, Mysticism, and Madness” by Peter Heehs

• “Aurobindo’s biographers describe Swarnalotta’s condition as “hysteria,” formerly a catch-all classification for different sorts of mental disorder in females. A modern diagnosis, based especially on the alternating storms account, would probably be manic-depressive illness. But some of the evidence-the psychotic isolation as well as the scar anecdote-suggest schizophrenia. One practicing psychiatrist proposes therefore that Swarnalotta suffered from schizo-affective disorder of the hebephrenic type, alterning laughter and rage being characteristic of hebephrenia.” P.53 (Psychohistory Review)

• “One of Swamalotta’s brothers was more seriously disturbed than she. A police report of 1910 (compiled because of the government’s interest in Aurobindo) described him as “a dangerous lunatic, kept in chains.” Swarnalotta’s sister, Lilavati, was eccentric in her behavior. Aurobindo’s brother, Manmohan, suffered for a time from what we now would call paranoia; later in life, after the death of his wife, he became seriously depressed. Manmohan was a poet, whose juvenile verse was praised by Oscar Wilde and John Aldington Symonds. He died, however, before he could finish his major project. Aurobindo’s youngest brother, Barin, had some measure of the family’s literary talent, but he was so erratic in his direction of a revolutionary group that he narrowly avoided being executed for treason.” p.54

• “There are, however, a few pieces of evidence that suggest that Swarnalotta’s madness might have had a more direct effect on her son [Aurobindo].” P.54

• “Constitution and health. Ellis and Ludwig have noted that many geniuses had weak constitutions. Aurobindo was healthy but weak and uninterested in games. He never learned to ride and, as a result, was rejected by the Indian Civil Service. Ludwig found that many in his upper quartile had chronic illnesses. One of Aurobindo’s classmates noted that Aurobindo had some problem with his “urinary organs” (a Victorian euphemism for kidneys). Aurobindo would die from kidney failure.” p.57

• “Family life. Aurobindo married Mrinalini Bose, a 14-year-old girl, in 1901. They spent only parts of seven years together. Mrinalini never played an important role in her husband’s life. Ellis noted that “a passionate devotion to intellectual pursuits seems often to be associated with a lack of passion in the ordinary relationships of life.”” P.57-58

• “The question of Madness. A subeditor on the newspaper Aurobindo edited once noted in his diary: “Babu Aurobindo Ghose is an extremely strange man. And I suspect a tinge of lunacy is not absent from him. His mother is a lunatic. And it is not at all strange.”“ P.59

• “This does not pretend to be a full catalogue either of the psychotic personality or of the mystical mind. It simply displays certain experiences of mentally disturbed persons (taken from the Schreber case and others studied by Sass, Boisen, et al.) alongside mystical experiences that have at least verbal resemblance to them (as recorded by Aurobindo in his poetry [CP], letters [LY, OH], and spiritual diary [RY]). (It should be noted that Aurobindo considered his poems to be transcriptions of actual experiences and not symbolic expressions or imaginations.) I have grouped the experiences in rough categories.” [In the following Tables] P.64

• TABLE 1: COMPARISON OF PSYCHOTIC AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE P.64-67

PERCEPTUAL AWARENESS

Psychotic Experience	Mystical Experience
Auditory hallucinations are common in “psychotic patients on the schizophrenic spectrum” [Sass, 62]	Aurobindo often heard voices, some of which he considered commands (adesh) of God [LY,40]
A patient described voices “becoming visible, as if written in various letters or signs” [Sass, 92]	A patient described voices “becoming visible, as if written in various letters or signs” [Sass, 92]
The “tendency of the psychotic to read hidden meanings in what he sees about him” [Boisen, 74]	Aurobindo found special meaning in texts happened upon or consulted (“sortilege”) [RY, passim]
A patient “contained within his body all the heavenly bodies” [Sass, 22]	“In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn” [CP, 131]

BODY AWARENESS

Psychotic Experience	Mystical Experience
“The basic split in the schizoid personality was a cleft that severed the self from the body” [Laing 1968, 174]	Aurobindo was “unconscious of the body for many years” [OH, 89]; “My body [is] a dot in the soul’s wide expanse” [CP, 142]
Catatonic withdrawal, observed in Schreber and Madeleine, is “common in schizophrenia” [Sass, 38]	Aurobindo has periods of “inert mood” (jadavat bhava) [unpublished letter]
Schreber, like many schizophrenics, believed his body was undergoing radical transformations [Sass, 45]	In his diary Aurobindo recorded various subtle bodily transformations (kaya-siddhi) [RY, passim]
Schreber had various sexual experiences including sexual union with the Divine; in this relationship he is transformed into a woman [Sass; Wiethaus]	Kaya-siddhi included causeless sexual delight (maithuna-ananda) [RY, passim]; “Nature” in Aurobindo is “Hoping her lord to touch, to clasp, to be.” [CP, 139]

WORLD-AWARENESS

Psychotic Experience	Mystical Experience
Schreber lived in a private cosmos of “nerves,” “rays,” “souls,” “gods” [Sass, 7]	Aurobindo described in his diary (and presents in his philosophy) an inner cosmos of worlds, beings, etc.
Many schizophrenics feel they have special powers or are controlled by external forces [Ludwig 1994, 1656]	“My acts are Thine, I do Thy works and pass ... Thy force in me labours at its grandiose plan” [CP, 143]
Schreber and other schizophrenics believe they are able to affect external events, such as the weather [Sass, 63; see also Laing 1967, 125-26]	Aurobindo’s diary contains many references to his directing of his yogic power (aishwarya) in order to influence external events [RY, passim]
“The most profound of schizophrenic fears” are “delusions of world catastrophe’’ [Sass, 50; cf. Boisen, 3]	In 1907 Aurobindo predicted the coming of a period of “sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes” [OH, 390]
“The whole world turned in my head” [a schizophrenic, in Sass, 50]	“I contain the whole world in my Soul’s embrace” [CP, 131]
The schizophrenic “may perceive both the external world and the existence of his own ego, but he no longer feels their reality; ... ‘le sentiment du réel’ is lacking” [Sass, 24]	“All is abolished but the mute Alone ... There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown./ The city, a shadow picture without tone/ Floats, quivers unreal ...” [CP, 161]

SELF AWARENESS

Psychotic Experience	Mystical Experience
“I am not alive ... I have never really existed” [patient quoted by Sass, 52]	“I have escaped and the small self is dead ... No one I am, I who am all that is” [CP, 153]
“I became in a way for God the only human being ...” [Schreber quoted in Sass, 60]	“I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss” [Ibid.]; “I am a single Self all Nature fills” [CP, 151]
Many psychotics identify themselves with Christ or God [Boisen, 761; “Schreber and God are, in some sense, one” yet Schreber “also experiences God as alien” or “distant” [Sass, 64]	“I am a centre of Thy golden light/ And I its vast and vague circumference,/ Thou art my soul great, luminous and white/ And Thine my mind and will and glowing sense.” [CP, 135]
Schreber’s relationship with God was “perhaps the central preoccupation of the Memoirs” [Sass, 63]	Aurobindo’s relationship with God was certainly the central preoccupation of Record of Yoga
“Schreber was convinced of both the profundity and ineffability of his own special vision of reality” [Sass, 93]	Like many mystics Aurobindo felt that his experiences were ineffable, but, convinced of their truth, attempted to give expression to them.

• “These similarities [as tabled above] would undoubtedly be enough to cause some clinicians to interpret Aurobindo’s experiences in psychopathological terms.” P.65

• “Conclusions: Mental disturbance runs in families and here the mediation is at least partly genetic. It is possible, therefore, that there is a linked transmission of some traits of genius and of a tendency to psychopathology.” P.69

Thus by deliberate decontextualisation and distortion, Sri Aurobindo’s sublime spiritual experiences have been equated to the ravings of a madman, and presented to the Government of India as original research of the Ashram!


The Canary Sings

The blame-game and the end-game always go hand in hand and play out in tandem. Peter Heehs, right from his early days of unemployment and taxi driving in New York up to his criminal collaboration and nexus with Manoj Das Gupta, has always been a survivor.

With the end-game very much underway and criminal charges and imprisonment and deportation staring him in the face, Peter Heehs has begun singing to the authorities in the hope of absolving himself by blaming his powerful benefactors.

On page 7 point 5 of his affidavit filed in self-defence in the Court of Orissa, Peter Heehs has clarified that he is not the Founder of the Ashram Archives, and has blamed the publisher of the book stating that the false claim was made by Columbia University Press “who made here an inaccurate statement”, and therefore it is they who must pay for the crime instead of him.

Continuing in the same vein, and in the same affidavit filed in Court, on page 67, he cites this very article titled “Genius, Mysticism, and Madness” as evidence that the Ashram Trustees have supported him, guided him and even endorsed his findings relating to Sri Aurobindo’s insanity by having this article submitted to the Government of India as original research carried out by him at the Ashram as part of his official work at the Archives. The idea is not to sink alone. The idea is to blame Manoj Das Gupta and Columbia University Press for all his crimes and try to get away in the process. However, that will not happen as neither MDG nor CUP will sacrifice themselves to save Heehs.


Questions to Manoj Das Gupta

• Do the donations to the Ashram made by thousands of sincere devotees have to be spent on this type of work aimed at defaming and maligning Sri Aurobindo?

• Why does the Ashram Archives have to constantly explore the subject of lunacy and mental instability with regard to Sri Aurobindo? Are there no other worthwhile subjects available for research? And why spend so much time and energy in perverse research when many of the major writings of Sri Aurobindo are still lying unpublished and the new Collected Works is a full twelve years behind its schedule of publication?

• How can tax concessions and benefits granted by the Government of India to an institution in Sri Aurobindo’s name be abused in this blatant and shameless manner to denigrate Sri Aurobindo and belittle the intellectual and spiritual achievements of the Mahayogi?

• How much longer will you continue to defy the inmates of the Ashram and continue to promote and support the insult and denigration of Sri Aurobindo in complete defiance of law and the minimum required loyalty to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother?

Truly,
Prof Kamal Das






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Defamation of Sri Aurobindo's character and Heehs' impersonation as founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives

An Examination of Larry Seidlitz’s Defence of Heehs’s Biography of Sri Aurobindo

Part 1

Larry Seidlitz’s defence of Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is rather lengthy and boring. It corroborates the decontextualisation theory put forward by Heehs by applying it faithfully in example after example, page after page, until you go to sleep. Now the word decontextualisation may be of recent origin but the practice of it is very ancient. It began, as the Mother recounted, with the appearance of the original Four Asuras separating from their divine counterparts. Love, Ananda, Truth and Life became, respectively, Hatred, Suffering, Falsehood and Death when they separated themselves from the Divine, or rather, decontextualised themselves from the larger context of the Divine, in which they were all united. References to decontextualisation of late have been more in the mundane realm of cricket. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, exonerated himself of the critical comments he had passed on Gavaskar in his book by the same argument—all this to say, there is no big deal about it, despite the academic pretentiousness with which it has been presented. Let me take Larry’s first and most important example: Sri Aurobindo’s “madness”. He writes: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/11/26/3995462.html )

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Page 246: Freudian Analysis of Spirituality

Peter deliberately ignores the numerous examples of Sri Aurobindo’s experiments from the Record proving many of these powers. He dismisses as “hagiography” and “hero-worship” the thousands of documented records and objective verifications by numerous first-hand and contemporary observers. He reduces all of Sri Aurobindo’s experiences and realisations to mere “claims”. Then on Pages 245-248 he presents these spiritual experiences as the result of psychological instabilities. Here I will analyse not so much the details of his text but the background of his justification for the discussion.

After showing the sadhana in the Record as unstable and inconclusive through selective quotations, Peter offers as mere “claims” a long list of magical “powers and experiences” of Sri Aurobindo. By misrepresenting quotations on the one hand and offering no proof for the powers on the other hand, he compels the reader to disbelieve these “claims” and almost forces us to accept instead his “rational” and Freudian explanation of mental imbalance. For this purpose he quotes lengthily from reductionist and Freudian psychoanalysts, ignoring the numerous developments in modern psychology that not only accept the reality of mystical experience, but also use them successfully in modern psychotherapy. He relies heavily on Varieties of Religious Experience by William James to justify his thought process. He tries to deceive us by referring to the 1961 edition of the book, when in fact this book was first published in 1902 and represents an outdated psychological thinking. In developing his perverse agenda, Peter throws quotations and references at us without concern for the quality and relevance of the authorities he relies upon.   ...full text...

Page 199: Fanatical, dangerous, mad

Several innocent-sounding quotations are used by Peter throughout the book to build his thesis of mental imbalance. One such in passing:

Page 199: Critics of Aurobindo could be as zealous in detraction as Jitendra Lal was in praise. Annie Besant again proclaimed him dangerous, even fanatical on account of “his refusal to work with any Englishmen.” Members of government used the same terms to describe the man they were trying to imprison. Some added that they thought he was slightly off his head: “There is madness in his family,” wrote the Viceroy to the secretary of the state, “and he probably has a bee in his bonnet.” Minto seems to have picked up this notion from R.C. Dutt, a onetime friend of Aurobindo’s, who had been asked for information by the political agent of Baroda. “Arabindo’s mother was off her mind,” Dutt volunteered, “and Arabindo himself was eccentric.” Other Moderates spoke privately in terms similar to Dutt’s. Publicly they charged Aurobindo with being an impractical dreamer, an “impatient idealist. About this epithet Aurobindo wrote….”

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