We,
the devotees in Bengaluru, are really not surprised that despite mounting
protests Peter Heehs continues to brazen it out in the Ashram. This only
reinforces our conviction that he is one of an insidious mafia that
is strongly committed to destroying the heart and soul of this country by
infiltrating and undermining its spiritual institutions in every way. Peter's
publications so far, including his book, are solely intended to smear and serve
this dark purpose. All those gullible knights in shining armour who spring up
in his defense from time to time do not evidently realize that they are being
fooled by a dangerous Pied Piper who has a sinister agenda of his own.
Peter
poses a far greater threat than meets the eye. Has he not already
lured away the media, the political class, self-styled
"intellectuals", uninformed public at large and the high and mighty
not to speak of sundry busy bodies? Has he not successfully wrested his
extended stay in this country for yet another year in the face of stiff
opposition? Has he not polarized the entire community of the Ashram and
associated bodies for the first time ever into two warring camps — the
"Pro" and the "Anti"? Has he not in effect reduced all of
us to a set of jackanapes eating out of his hand? Aren't these enough evidences
of his evil prowess at work when it comes to the question of him having his
way?
Somewhere
down the road we seem to have lost our resistance to invading barbarians –
resistance that would have remained impregnable if only we had been truly
sincere in our allegiance to the Divine. This allegiance is now in shreds as we
have succumbed to the temptation of pursuing self-centred interests no matter
what the cost or consequences. This is today our greatest failing and
weakness, our gaping Achilles heel, as it were, which has invited the
blow in the form of Peter. […] Thanking You, Sincerely yours, For Sri
Aurobindo Study Circle
Vaishali
Ganapati Bhandari [The letter has been
signed by 91 members of the Sri
Aurobindo Study Circle of Bengaluru.]
Whether
Westerners take chauvinistic positions or whether Easterners take devotionalist
approaches doesn’t change anything with regards to the Myths of an
Aurobindonian Religion. Attempts to create childish fault-lines between the
East and the West or between Spirituality and Religion when following the
principles of Integral Yoga are sure to fail and are most laughable. Spirituality
is universal and transcends the so-called boundaries of the East and the West
and of one religious form or another that some people may wish to create.
On
the other hand Religion is parochial and therefore needs well-demarcated
boundaries to exist. Those who may feel insecure in universal spaces are therefore
free to mark out their territory and live within it’s confines.
But nothing can stop Westerners like the Mother or Easterners like Sri
Aurobindo as well those who wish to practice their Integral Yoga from
transcending these artificial boundaries that some wish to create and maintain
for their own limited ends. Sincerely, Auro Truths. [Pingback: Westerners shouldn’t take chauvinistic
positions « Skylight]
[I
was kind of hoping it would be broad-minded, full of rational, emotionally
mature people, committed to using mental and cultural tools to fight against
obscurantism and hatred in this world ...]
A very common
mistake. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came precisely because mental and
cultural tools are insufficient to fight against obscurantism
and hatred in this world. They said and wrote in so many words that what is
needed is not a better humanity but a new species altogether with a new
consciousness and the powers that come with it. Humans are not better than monkeys
because they can climb trees better. By the same token, the next species isn't
going to be better by human standards.
Ned:
[We
in the IY community should be fighting against the ignorance in mainstream
psychiatry and psychology, not pandering to it.]
There
is no justification for speaking of "pandering". But this is not what
I want to address here. Elsewhere you
wrote
[I'd
hate to see integral yoga associated with things like that.]
I
suppose by "integral yoga" you mean members of the IY community, for
otherwise I don't see how there can be an association. So the question arises,
at least in my mind, who or what is the "IY community"? What are the
criteria for membership? I am reminded of Arjuna pestering Sri Krishna in the
Bhagavad Gita about the signs by which a yogi can be recognized. Krishna's answers are evasive in that he mentions signs
of yogic conditions that cannot be recognized by the outer eye. By the same
token, I believe that you cannot put down criteria for membership in that club,
as you do when you tell us what the IY community should be fighting against or
not be associated with. Otherwise you are making the same mistake as RR&RR,
who want to impose on the members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram a code of conduct
way beyond what Sri Aurobindo or the Mother demanded from them. I perfectly
understand your wish to join a group of like-minded people, but I'm afraid that
anything deserving to be called "IY community" has to be a group of
like-souled people, which is something rather different from
like-minded. As Arthur Deikman wrote in "Evaluating Spiritual and Utopian
Groups" (see AntiMatters 2-4),
[we
are social beings and derive benefits from joining with others. Groups can
provide a gratifying sense of belonging, support and purpose.... these aims may
be important and valuable but they are not spiritual, no matter how pious their
outward presentation. Correspondingly, our motivations for joining a spiritual
or utopian group may be other than we realize or wish to know.]
While I am overall agreed with you that the way the controversy has been
handled does not bode well for our community's record, and am very glad that
you have refuted lots of the false allegations floating around against Peter
(one of the more ridiculous ones I read was that Peter is an agent of the
Vatican *rolls eyes* ), I just want to (as a balancing argument) express a
couple of counterpoints.
Why is it necessary for him to
consider other critics’ negative comments about Sri Aurobindo’s poetry? Why is
it necessary to speak of the “delusiveness” of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual
experiences?
Heehs has exercised “the right of reply and rebuttal” admitted by R&R
themselves in item 7 above. This cannot be done if one is barred from even
mentioning these criticisms. Heehs himself does not present Sri Aurobindo’s
spiritual experiences as “delusive,” but argues against such a view.
If you are referring to the section that starts after Peter's summary of the Record starting
on p. 245 of the biography, certain objections to the style and even some of
the content in the section could be legitimately raised.
For one thing, there is quite a lot of literature in transpersonal psychology
now that sees yogic states as being (unlike schizophrenia and similar mental
disorders) characterized by extremely high levels of self-control and
self-mastery. Readers who think that Sri Aurobindo's experiences resemble
schizophrenia simply haven't been reading -- no schizophrenic can produce
anything with even a fraction of the lucidity found in Sri Aurobindo's
writings, poetry, and his day-to-day record of yoga.
If there are mystical states that resemble schizophrenia, they pertain much
more to certain archaic techniques of shamanism than to yoga. Shamanism
certainly involves things like psychic "splitting", or possession,
which resemble schizophrenia. But by contrast yogic phenomenology is completely
different, leading to integration, self-control and internal coherence. The
transpersonal psychologist Roger Walsh published some papers doing this sort of
phenomenological comparison and he argued these points quite forcefully.
It did seem strange to me to see a sadhak of the yoga not being more forceful
about these points. We in the IY community should be fighting against the ignorance
in mainstream psychiatry and psychology, not pandering to it. Consider the
damage that mainstream psychiatry/psychology does by medicating people going
through actual psychospiritual emergencies. I can testify to it -- I was put
through it myself when I was having my first real spiritual awakenings.
The attitude reflected in Heehs’s remark is by no means unknown in the
Indian spiritual tradition. Swami Nikhilananda writes in his biography of
Vivekananda: “For five years Narendra closely watched the Master, never
allowing himself to be influenced by blind faith, always testing the words and
actions of Sri Ramakrishna in the crucible of reason. It cost him many sorrows
and much anguish before he accepted Sri Ramakrishna as the guru and the ideal
of the spiritual life. But when the acceptance came, it was wholehearted,
final, and irrevocable. The Master, too, was overjoyed to find a disciple who
doubted, and he knew that Naren was the one to carry his message to the world.”
Sri Aurobindo himself in the Synthesis of Yoga encourages a certain degree of
skepticism, without which we could easily fall into infrarational mysticism
rather than suprarational mysticism. I think all of us who are serious about
yoga have dealt with doubts and fully expect to deal with doubts along the way.
As far as testing the Guru goes, I personally, after my first introduction to
this yoga, did not see Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as my Gurus without first
rationally and experientially testing what they were saying.
The only difference is that everyone else who doubts or tests the Guru isn't
publishing their ignorance for all to see. I keep my personal doubts or
questions of the Masters private, sharing them only with advanced sadhaks who
might be able to help me process/resolve them, offering them to the Masters as
a prayer, and basically working on some sort of inner resolution of these
doubts. So in my opinion, Vivekananda's testing of Sri Ramakrishna is more of a
private affair between guru and disciple which is entirely kosher by orthodox
Vedantic standards. That's not the same thing as publishing your doubts in a
peer-reviewed academic community that is largely hostile to nonmaterialistic
explanations of reality anyway.
R&R claim to speak on behalf of all members of the Archives. But their
impressions about Heehs would be disputed by others in the department and
elsewhere. Before the controversy started, several readers of his book wrote to
him expressing reactions such as “one can feel your love for Sri Aurobindo.” In
any case, sadhaks of the Integral Yoga have never been required to be devotees
in the Indian bhakti tradition. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not use the
word “devotee” for their own disciples. As Sri Aurobindo reminds us, “men
differ in nature and therefore each will approach the sadhana in his own way –
one through work, one through bhakti, one through meditation and knowledge –
and those who are capable of it, through all together. You are perfectly
justified in following your own way, whatever may be the theories of others –
but let them follow theirs. In the end all can converge together towards the
same goal.” (Letters on Yoga, pp. 532-33)
Maybe you can correct me here if I am wrong, but my impression was that while
everyonestarts off doing this yoga with a different approach, and
everyone has their own individual, quirky way of really building up the
momentum, eventually, without surrender to the Divine Mother progress becomes
quite difficult. My personal temperament is also intellectual, and it took a couple
of experiences of being attacked by anti-divine forces before my vital
arrogance was broken down and bhakti started to feel more "natural"
for me. I have seen Sri Aurobindo repeatedly saying that without the Mother's
Force transformation is impossible.
I am totally against thought-policing or bhakti-policing of any sort (who among
us can claim to be pure enough to have the right to criticize others? if Mother
and Sri Aurobindo criticized a disciple it was because they had the power to
dissolve the impurity as well) -- and of course everyone is where they are, and
that's not really my problem. Also, someone could be a very loud bhakta but be
totally insincere. Better to be a sincere agnostic than an insincere bhakta --
I believe Haridas Chaudhri said this once in an essay on Sri Aurobindo and
Mother's theory of education. But my point is, at some point, without a
relationship developing with the Supreme Mahashakti, I don't see how the actual
growth of consciousness is possible. It's too hard. Our egos are too finite,
too miniscule, and the webs of karma, hypocrisy and forces of universal Nature
far too powerful for us. Only the Mother can remake the instrument and lift the
veils -- at least this is what I have experienced in this yoga so far.
Again, I think we are overall in agreement. I personally have not found the
biography defamatory. At worst, it is a sympathetic but neutral
biography written in a rationalist skeptical mode. For defamation, one could
see Sil's biography of Vivekananda or Geoffrey Falk's "Stripping the
Gurus" -- those are excellent examples of what defamation looks like.
"The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" may be seen as misleading at times, and
certainly there are quite a few worthy criticisms of it being made on the
Mirror of Tomorrow blog which should be made public, but I think
calling it defamatory is a bit farfetched.
I just wish that instead of things getting to this point there had been an
open, public debate on this biography from day one, without personal prejudices
coming into play, so that we could have had a healthy, rigorous and balanced
exchange of views on the pros and cons of this biography. At this point things
are too emotionally polarized for a balanced perspective to emerge.
