I feel a movement of integration descending

Richard Lipschutz Posted September 11, 2010 at 12:49 pm | Permalink

The fundamental goal of Integral Yoga, our global fundamentalism as it were, is Saccidananda assuming its true form in another mode: our bodies, lives, minds, souls evolving, right in this good red physical world, a delightful conscious existence inner and outer, individual, global. The opposite of what we now see! We all have a supramental friend, “the human aspiration” (which is also the name of the first chapter in The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo). Somewhere in our depths we all share this aspiration toward God, Light, Freedom, Bliss, Immortality, to which however every facet of our human life seems richly opposed in striking polar fashion. And this friend tells us: “The greater the apparent disparateness of the materials offered or the apparent disorder, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavor.”

Our friend goes on: “Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings.” We know we are all impossibilities needing to be solved and even in our personal lives we have to face and incorporate our own opposition to our deepest strivings; so if I want to be courageous I must face down that shrinking coward in my own self, and moreover I have all the present direct intervention and guidance I need to do so.

The Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry is a collection of disparate representative types, some more apparently disparate than others; they are all there for a reason, to be reconciled in a fundamental way with themselves and each other and the greater movement of evolution. It’s in no way a religious institution or a place where all are cut in single mold to peacefully agree one with the others; it is, instead, a furnace for transformation. Peter Heehs is from what I see and most inwardly feel a sadhak, a spiritual practitioner, one of these impossibilities to be solved that we all are, who has in his outward work deeply researched Sri Aurobindo as one biographer, producing one of the several biographies available so far. Others are free and if so moved then even bound to produce what they feel in themselves are truer representations. Meanwhile if in outward physical consciousness we can’t understand we can begin to look a few fractions of an inch deeper within and at least try to tolerate each other.

To attempt to change the order and structure of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry based on the religious persecution of this man is itself a sacrilege in any true sense of the word. To drag the internal affairs of the Ashram, its constitution and the substance of its structure, before a politicized public court constitutes the most exemplary unbelief in the fundamental basis of the practice of transformation that is the only reason the Sri Aurobindo Ashram exists.

Due perhaps to a call for a dynamic collective meditation that has taken place this morning of September 11, 2010, I feel a movement of integration descending and spreading out to manage this situation whatever outward form it goes on take. I’ve never been to the Ashram but say all this from the perspective of innermost identification. I don’t know about you, but the way I see it this anniversary of the birth of global fundamentalism is an interior flute-call to return to the revolutionary fundamentals that roundly promise to reconcile even the deepest oppositions within ourselves. Rick Lipschutz

Comment posted by RY Deshpande:  Re: An Open Letter...The Jhumur Episode and The Registrar’s Non-Performance

This is what Jhumur the she-frog presently is, living in a she-well named self-importance, narcissism, hauteur, pride, vanity, or by whatever similar name one may like to call it. She is afflicted with a pretty familiar complex, something which should not have happened having grown up in the Ashram since her childhood, for having had personal contact with the Mother during the tremendous 1950s. But hard is it to change human nature. One can come in physical contact with the Mother for long years and yet remain stupid in several ways. …
The supercilious manner in which she handled or was prompted to handle the present issue is only indicative of immaturity, if not childishness; or else, and most probably, it simply was ugly contrivance. A nobler approach would have been to advise the student to leave the class, and inform the teacher that the student was leaving his class. The matter would have rested there, a thing which routinely happens in the Centre of Education. But the mischief was played by the predictable devil that is there in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. The test for remaining in contact with the Mother lies in it. That is also the fight. The real malaise is present in it, and many of those “early students” have lent themselves to it—a most unfortunate thing. ~ RYD 20 September 2010