Sri Aurobindo: Man or Messiah?
Readers of this blog may have heard of the great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo. We have often acknowledged him in the pages of EnlightenNext magazine as one of the pioneers of evolutionary spirituality. Recently, we reviewed a fascinating new book by long-time Aurobindian scholar Peter Heehs called The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, published last year by Cambridge Press. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone who might be interested in finding out more about this incredible Indian sage. Ellen Daly (who wrote the review) and I visited Heehs in Woodstock, NY, last year and really enjoyed speaking to him (you can hear a recording of our conversation here). He is without doubt a serious student of Aurobindo’s work and the book reflects that. But the book is no hagiography. Heehs tried to bring a historian’s objective eye to Aurobindo’s extraordinary life. That’s part of what makes the book so accessible and interesting. He doesn’t present Aurobindo as an untouchable flawless saint or Avatar. Indeed, he steered clear of the hagiographic, messianic mythology that has built up around the memory of Aurobindo and his long time collaborator, the Mother, over the last decades. Heehs presents him as a spiritually gifted genius and pioneering teacher and writer, but all in the context of Aurobindo being a human being who was shaped by the remarkable circumstances of his life.
Doesn’t exactly sound like the raw material for a scandal, does it? But that’s what is unfolding right now in the world of Aurobindo—which includes the Ashram in India, Auroville, and many supporters and students worldwide. A few individuals have started a campaign against the book calling it malicious and claiming that it maligns the legacy of this great Indian figure. Not only that, they have even convinced the Indian legal system to temporarily stay publication of the book. And they have tried to kick Peter Heehs out of the ashram in India where he has lived for many years. Basically, it sounds like a mess, and it’s causing a split in those who are passionate about Aurobindo’s legacy and work. The good news is that Heehs’s supporters are fighting back and have stated a website called Integral Yoga Fundamentalism, in which they document the controversy and provide updates. This is an excerpt from the site:
At this writing, the movement against Heehs and his book is still in full swing. Frustrated by their failure to bring about Heehs’s expulsion, the leaders of the movement continue their work through court cases, incendiary blogs, mass emailings, gossip, and other attempts to influence the mass mind in the Ashram and outside. So far their efforts have been remarkably successful.
In the offices of EnlightenNext, we have long speculated that one of the reasons why Aurobindo’s work is not more celebrated in the West is in part due to the tendency of so many supporters to view his work and life in such mythical and messianic terms. Of course, spiritual movements that are pushing into new territory, as his was, do tend to have a little revolutionary flavor to them. And they tend to have a highly developed sense of their own relevance and importance. I think that just comes with the territory. But students of Aurobindo and the Mother have a tendency to take this kind of inflation to extreme heights. What a shame. He truly was one of the great figures of the 20th century. He was a pioneer. He was a genius. He did have a big impact on the evolution of spirituality. Isn’t that enough?
Aurobindo should be more known, more respected and more appreciated for the tremendous influence he has had on so many of the leaders of today’s spiritual movements, human potential movements, and integral movements. Heehs book helps that recognition along. Indeed, I can only wonder why more students of Aurobindo and the Mother aren’t thanking Heehs for doing such a masterful job making this underappreciated spiritual icon — whose incredible life hardly needs extra embellishment — accessible to a broader audience.
Filed Under: Culture • EnlightenNext Editors’ Blog • Evolutionaries • Evolutionary Spirituality • Hinduism • News • Spirituality
Hi
Glad to see some recognition of Aurobindo’s work and have read about Heehs work on Aurobindo and definitely intend to read it.
The current crop of followers of Aurobindo, especially the ones that stick around the ashram and the related communities seem content to idolize Sri Aurobindo, make him an Avatar/God/Supreme and manage to have a sprinkling of spirituality to legitimize the whole affair. Very little Yoga seems to get done.
With that perspective it becomes easy to understand why they would be worried to have their presumptions challenged in the work of Heehs.
Sri Aurobindo himself had mentioned that he began the Yoga as a plain vanilla rationalist, so guess he would have viewed Heehs work with some sympathy. And remember he had mentioned on another occasion that his life was not lived on the surface for men to see..so, there you go. :)
Arrested for conspiracy in May 1908, Sri Aurobindo spent a full year in Alipore Central Jail while the British Government, in a protracted trial, tried to implicate him in various revolutionary activities. He was acquitted and released exactly one hundred years ago, in May 1909. “When I would re-enter the world of activity it would not be the old familiar Aurobindo Ghose,” he later wrote. “Rather it would be a new being, a new character, intellect, life, mind, embarking upon a new course of action that would come out of the ashram at Alipore.”
In 1910 Sri Aurobindo settled in Pondicherry. Originally he thought to return to politics after completing his yoga in a year or two at most. But before long “the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became more and more clear to him.” It was no longer a question of revolt against the British government; he was now waging “a revolt against the whole universal Nature.”
I write this to stress the inappropriateness of speaking in the same breath of Sri Aurobindo and of a spiritual movement. “A movement in the case of a work like mine,” he wrote, “means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the ‘religions’ and is the reason of their failure.”
Sri Aurobindo was the humblest person I can think of. It is those “useless people” who tend to have “a highly developed [and wholly unjustified] sense of their own relevance and importance.”
But let it be said for the record that there are beautiful exceptions; not many perhaps but, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in his wonderful tongue-in-cheek style, “nothing depends on the numbers.”
Why the surprise? the same thing happened to Jesus, and we still have whole bureaucracies and people who are ‘avid’ about his uniqueness as ‘the’ son of God, even tho it’s pretty clear he intended no such thing.
Father Hank,
Remember me??? How are you these days?? Drop me a line!!!
Alyson Haeger-Newe
Integration will have us accept the man, the men, the mother, the women, and all that they do; enlightenment is not just a product, or just a journey: it is everything. The wrangling in the gaps makes for matter that is at once of matter to be seen through, and matter to be smiled at, and matter not necessarily to be nattered over, ha!
The work by Peter Heehs is a disappointment as a scholarly biography of a mystic. It is more of a thinly veiled Freudian psychoanalysis by an non psychologist on one of the greatest Mystics and a genius of the past millenium.
The best biography of Sri Aurobindo which was guided by the Mother herself was “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness” by Satprem. It is this book that I would recommend to anyone who wants to know about Sri Aurobindo and Integral Yoga.
I doubt whether this editor has read all existing biographies before calling them “hagiographic”!