"Deliberate Distortions of Sri Aurobindo's Life and Yoga" – edited by Raman Reddy

The above book is freely available at: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iWfRqqqmDLirSQyWkax9V8-q-3zipaop/view?usp=sharing

Preface

This book is a counter to the vicious attack on Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual stature that came in the form of a hostile biography of him by Peter Heehs entitled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, published by Columbia University Press in 2008. All the articles in this book are in defence of Sri Aurobindo and many of them have been written by well-known historians and academicians. Though the book is written in support of the disciples and followers of Sri Aurobindo and their spontaneous rejection of the gross distortions of their Master’s life and teachings, the refutations themselves are based on a scholarly study of Sri Aurobindo’s works and a thorough examination of the historical facts of his life. I hasten to make here a necessary clarification with regard to the study of great spiritual personalities such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

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Challenging the Ashram Trust’s Stand on Relics

[The Notice below has been issued in the name of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust in the January 2017 issue of the Oriya monthly magazine “Navaprakash”, published by Navajyoti Karyalaya, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Below is an English translation of the original Notice in Oriya.]

Facts One Should Urgently Know About Relics

(Notice on Relics published in Navaprakash)

Words are insufficient to express the spiritual significance of the sacred Relics of Sri Aurobindo. It can only be realised through profound faith, devotion and sadhana.

Usually, as per the arrangement of The Mother, the Relics are given in Sri Aurobindo Ashram from Sri Aurobindo’s Room. They are well-kept in a series of containers specially prepared and provided by the Ashram. The approval of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust is indispensable regarding the details of the institutions that take them, the places of their installation, the persons who receive them from the Ashram and those who remain in charge, the way in which they are taken and the persons who install them.

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Deconstructing Peter Heehs – by a Zombified Disciple

Peter Heehs was born & educated in USA (says his bio-data on the inside cover of his India’s Freedom Struggle, OUP, 1988). In 1971, at the age of 22, he settled in Pondicherry [=not in the ashram Aurobindo founded]. He is a research scholar [=not member of S.A Ashram] at the Sri Aurobindo [=not S.A Ashram’s] Archives & Research Library, specializing in the life & politics of Sri Aurobindo. In an earlier form the present book was awarded a State Prize in a competition sponsored by the Delhi administration.  Since then he has published many uninhibited books, booklets & ‘papers’ on Aurobindo in his native English-English for his type of non-disciples, & at least one in an inhibited Indian ungrezi for Aurobindo’s Indian disciples. [Click here to read full article.]

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The Wrong Notion that Sri Aurobindo Rejected Hinduism – Raman Reddy

(With specific reference to The Clasp of Civilisations (2015) by Richard Hartz, published by Nalanda International, and Nationalism, Religion, and Beyond (2005), a compilation of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on Politics, Society and Culture, edited by Peter Heehs.)  

I was rather disappointed after reading The Clasp of Civilisations by Richard Hartz because I expected from him a better understanding of Hinduism than most Western scholars.[1] The book starts off well with a sense of universality in spiritual matters which justifies the title, but gets caught halfway through with the usual antipathy towards Hinduism that is so common among secular scholars of India. The chapter on Vivekananda’s famous address in the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in September 1893 is indeed well-written and the circumstances of the historic event depicted in a most interesting manner with an undercurrent of humour. But the chapter on Hinduism titled “Untold Potentialities: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Aurobindo and the Idea of India”, in which Nehru is elevated into a spiritual figure and Sri Aurobindo converted into a secular icon, shows the fundamental flaws of Richard’s scholarship. One immediately gets the impression of encountering one more Hinduphobic armchair scholar, who meticulously builds his arguments on the works of other Hinduphobic scholars who also have never empathised with Indian culture. Ironically, Richard Hartz has studied the Vedas and is an expert in Sanskrit, but this only shows that mere scholarship does not open the gates of spiritual comprehension. After all, Peter Heehs, his colleague, did the same, wasting forty years of research on Sri Aurobindo and producing such a hostile biography that the disciples of Sri Aurobindo had to go to the Court to take him to task. But let us come back to Richard Hartz who could have easily come to his own conclusions instead of following the path of Peter Heehs with regard to Hinduism, or what is in fact the path of leftist secular scholars of India and abroad which Peter Heehs himself follows faithfully for the sake of his academic career. After all, for him academic success is more important than stating the fundamental truth of Hinduism!   

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Dismissal of the Scheme Suit in the Supreme Court – by Bireshwar Choudury

The Scheme Suit filed against the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust has been dismissed on technical grounds by the Supreme Court of India on 6 January, 2016. Unlike what the supporters of Peter Heehs and the cronies of the Ashram Trust are projecting on the Net, the Supreme Court has not exonerated the author of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The Scheme Suit has been dismissed because the case against the Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs is still pending in the High Court of Orissa.

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Spiritual Distortions – All Life is Yoga! – by Baikunth

There is a need to define at present what is not the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, more perhaps than the need to define what it is. Of course, the two functions are interdependent and cannot be dealt in an exclusive manner, for one often defines something by what it is not. But the mere positive definition leaves out the hidden distortions which you only come to know after a long period of gestation, and not in a one-hour lecture on the Integral Yoga, however inspiring it may be. There have been in the past, and there still are a number of brilliant speakers who mostly fulfil their role in the positive definition of the Yoga and philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but very few as yet have sufficiently dwelt on its negative definition, by which I mean explaining elaborately what it is not.

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The Necessity of Proper Procedures in Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Baikunth

It is therefore high time that some proper procedures are introduced in the current administrative setup of the Ashram without, at the same time, paralysing it with procedures as we see in various Government institutions. It is true we have made a parody of democracy in our country, but that cannot be a justification for not introducing basic democratic structures in the Ashram. It is also true that spirituality and democracy may be incompatible, but in the present predicament of the Ashram when the Integral Yoga has become an excuse to enjoy the ordinary life at other people’s expense, it is time to put in place a few checks and balances on the unlimited powers of the Trustees to prevent the most arrogant human errors in the name of divine justice. [read full article below]

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The Mahabharata in Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Sampdas

This has reference to an interesting write-up titled The Bhishmacharya Complex in Sri Aurobindo Ashram (posted on this site on 25 October, 2015). The write-up has touched the crux of the matter; to me and a large number of followers of the Mother, the legend of the Mahabharata looks as being re-enacted at the Ashram, with variations in content and scope. While the ancient epic is largely a legend and a symbol, when we ponder on the present state of affairs in the Ashram, it looks that today’s Mahabharata is for real.

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Peter Heehs on the Crisis in Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Bireshwar Choudury

Peter Heehs says that the crisis in the Ashram can be solved by offering career “advancement prospects” to the senior sadhaks who are unhappy with the present administration of the Ashram. The Ashram Trust could also establish daughter Ashrams which could provide “new job opportunities for young men anxious to obtain leadership positions upon finding themselves blocked by a lack of available positions, with older men holding onto their positions for life”! [read full article below]

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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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The Bhishmacharya Complex – by A Concerned Ashramite

The situation of the old guard of the Ashram is the same as that of Bhishmacharya, who was unable to use his mighty bow in the service of dharma and was forced to fight on the side of adharma with an anguished conscience. This inability and helplessness to stand for the truth, this forced loyalty towards the powers that be, and the apparently virtuous stand which actually facilitates falsehood is what I call the Bhishmacharya complex!
[read full article below]

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Indians and Westerners in Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Baikunth

I see a silver lining in the clouds in those few Westerners who dared to stand by Sri Aurobindo at the expense of their national pride and ego. For the true test of the World Unity that all of us aspire for, is not in how we sing and dance and hold our hands together in a symbolic circle when all is well, but in how we rise above national feeling and racial prejudice when differences arise between people from various nations and cultures. Until we can do so, the project of the New World, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wanted us to build, will never take off. We will remain on the ground imagining that we are flying high in the sky! [read full article below]  

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BJP President Amit Shah’s Visit to Sri Aurobindo Ashram – by Bireshwar Choudhury

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, while pretending to be above politics, has taken full political mileage from the recent visit of the BJP President Amit Shah to the Ashram on 25 August, 2015. A casual bystander reported to us on how the Trustees accompanied by their Secretary Matriprasad Satyamurthy (the Ashram’s best sweet-talker and accomplished sycophant) went out of their way to please Mr. Shah, fawning over him every second of the thirty-five minutes flat he spent in the Ashram main building.

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Reply to Benimadhav Mohanty – by Bireshwar Chowdhury

Yesterday Benimadhav Mohanty took a nasty swipe at a friend of mine who (along with many others) had the gumption to take on the Ashram Trustees when they shamelessly supported the denigration of Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram by Peter Heehs.  As we all know, the crisis in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, still continues, and perhaps by the end of this month the Supreme Court of India will give a major judgment in the Enquiry Case pending against the Ashram Trust. It is in this backdrop that I am replying to Benimadhav Mohanty who made the silly accusation of “self-aggrandisement” on those who have stood up to the Trust instead of whimpering down like puppies, as most Ashramites have done, to the insidious threats of the Ashram Trustees

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Did Sri Aurobindo Reject Hinduism? – Certainly not!

It is to Dara [1] that Sri Aurobindo wrote the following letter in the thirties, dissociating his Ashram from Hinduism:

The Ashram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future.

(Bulletin, Feb 2001, p 72)

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Sampdas on Jayantilal Parekh’s Article on Sri Aurobindo Ashram

It is no surprise then that the  Wellwishers of the Ashram Trust, knowing too well which side of the bread is buttered, have no qualms about keeping quiet when Sri Aurobindo himself is derated, but take up cudgels and loudspeakers on behalf of the Trustees. The guidepost for them is that those who question the wrong actions of the Trust are necessarily heretics and their actions are blasphemous. However, on their part, they are prone to take the easy path of “we see no wrong, we hear no wrong, we speak no wrong” on the actions of the Trust. They expect that wrongs against the Divine and sadhaks be not addressed at all by chanting the rhetoric, “the Trustees can do nothing wrong and people should accept everything that they do with the non-questioning maxim of conduct that “thou shalt not think or reason or question the Trustees even if they are wrong.” Their fundamental fallacy owes to the misplaced identification of the administrative outfit of the Ashram Trust with the Ashram itself. [extract – read full article below]

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Comment by an Ashram inmate who has been deeply pained by the Heehs Affair

The problem is not so much with the likes of Heehs and Doniger. Born in an alien culture, fed by the staple diet of Freudianism or else serving the cause of a militant Church, they are true to their dharma not caring about what the world may say about them. But what about us Indians who neither read nor think for themselves? Look at what happened with the Heehs issue.

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Comment on Jayantilal Parekh's article on Ashram – by Shiva

On 14^th March the League of Lost Logicians a.k.a. Well Wishers of Sri Aurobindo Ashram reproduced “The Sri Aurobindo Ashram and its Administration”, an article published in Mother India in June 2001, which was “explicitly written in the backdrop of adversely critical articles that were being planted by anti-Ashram elements in the various newspapers and journals in order to malign the Ashram”, by which it means the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust (SAAT) of the day. The article, more rightly a brochure, was undoubtedly compiled-written by the self-appointed ‘archivist-scholars’ of the Archives & Research Department set up by Jayantilal Parekh and since it was based on his viewpoint, it was hung round his neck.

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Response to Jayantilal Parekh’s Article – by An Irrational Ashramite

Jayantilal Parekh’s article “The Sri Aurobindo Ashram and its Administration” posted on the Well-wishers’ site is rather outdated. It applies perhaps to the first two decades of Ashram life after the Mother’s passing away in 1973, but certainly not to the next two decades, and especially to the present situation. Given the undeniable fact that the Ashram is going through a process of deterioration of values and motivations, we can hardly keep justifying all that happens here under the name of spirituality and Integral Yoga! How long are we going to repeat that “the Ashram is the cradle of a new world” and “not a religious monastery” in order to justify our human frailties? The question therefore is of the proportion of sadhana and human weaknesses, of when and how much their precarious balance tilts to the wrong side rather than a clear definition of what exactly qualifies us for the Ashram life. What I mean is that everybody in the wide world knows that “staying in the Ashram despite human weaknesses so that one day we can outgrow them” is different from “staying in the Ashram in order to fulfil our physical propensities and make the best of the facilities provided by the institution for that very purpose”.

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"Divine Trap" CNN - IBN Expose of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kyXRp6DNWk&feature=youtu.be
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