The Trust Board of the Ashram Trust is scrambling for damage control
following the conscientious resignation of the senior-most Trustee of the
Ashram, Albert Patel.
At first the Trustees begged Albert-da not to resign. When they found
him adamant, Manoj Das Gupta, the Managing Trustee, put great pressure on him
to sign a second letter of resignation where he would declare his resignation
on grounds of “loss of memory and ill-health”. This is a dangerous trick that
he has played with others earlier, but which everyone sees through now. Failing
all these options, Manoj Das Gupta has now ordered his men to spread the word
that Albert-da is resigning only in March and not before.
Meanwhile the Trustees are in a desperate search to find a suitable
successor. But this is not an easy task any more. To begin with, any successor
must be someone who will swear personal loyalty to Manoj Das Gupta as against
Sri Aurobindo. Some of the names being discussed include Vishweshwar, Chitra
Sen and Swadesh Chatterjee who have for long proved their personal loyalties.
But the thinking within the Board is to try for a better public profile to
soften the widespread criticism.
Two names are being discussed openly: Jhumur Bhattacharya who has been
one of Manoj Das Gupta’s preferred girl-friends from his young days at theatre,
and whom he has been steadily promoting first as a spiritual figurehead and
later as head of the Ashram’s college and its alumni journal, and now as keeper
of the Mother’s room. But the dark horse is Meera Gupta whom he had earlier
assigned as head of the Ashram’s book distribution agency, and who was recently
working overtime organising the Ashram-wide signature campaign to garner
support to save the Trustees from going to jail. But therein lies the rub.
Although there are enough people waiting to serve the Trustees in their abuse
of Sri Aurobindo, none of them is keen to go to jail with them!
Vishweshwar and Chitra Sen are already telling all those who care to
ask that they are too old to take up such responsibilities. Swadesh, it is
felt, does not bring any value to the Trust Board. Jhumur Bhattacharya is
excusing herself saying she already has too many responsibilities. Meera Gupta
alone has kept a strategic silence. When asked of her chances of becoming a
Trustee, she merely said, “It is for them to decide.” But she did not appear
too enthusiastic. After all selling one’s conscience is easier than going to
jail for life. Albert-da may well turn out to be smartest of them all.
The Supramental Action (The World, India, Ashram and the
Individual) from At the Feet of The Mother Tuesday, 15th January 2013 at
Hall of Harmony, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India. Duration: 39 Minutes
Articles
in Professional Journals and Books Peter Heehs is an independent scholar
based in India .
He has written or edited nine books and published more than fifty
articles. 2011. “The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and
the Integral Yoga: A Study in Cross-Cultural Influence”. Aries 11:2
(September): 219-247 (Pdf file
available here).
Some of these scholars have made strong claims about influence of Max Theon
and his wife on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In their history of the H.B. of
L., Godwin, Chanel and Deveney write that Aurobindo and the Mother ‘were very
largely inspired by Theon and his wife’. In his dissertation, Chanel goes
farther: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ‘may from many points of view be looked
on as disciples of the Theons or in any case as continuers of their work’. In
another passage Chanel suggests that the Theons have been denied due
recognition by Aurobindo’s followers: The Philosophie Cosmique, he asserts,
‘constitutes one of the essential sources of the teachings of [Aurobindo’s]
ashram in Pondicherry, even though this fact is, or was, generally little known
or eclipsed’.
What I have written in the preceding sections should be enough to show
that these claims are exaggerated. Theon had a good deal of influence on the Mother
for three or four years, but he had no direct influence on Aurobindo. Whatever
indirect influence he had on him was minor, being confined for the most part to
terminology. The Mother may have considered herself a ‘disciple’ of the Theons
at some point, but the relationship between her and them was just one of
several relationships she had with spiritual-occult figures before she met
Aurobindo. She carried over many ideas from the Theons into her collaboration
with Aurobindo, but their work together could hardly be called a continuation
of the work of the Theons, about whom Aurobindo had no direct knowledge. All in
all, the parallels between the Philosophie Cosmique and Aurobindo’s philosophy
are interesting but relatively unimportant compared to the enormous influence of
the Vedantic tradition of India ,
which Aurobindo fully acknowledged.
Chanel also notes that it is through the Integral Yoga of Sri
Aurobindo ‘that the work of the Theons, that is, the Philosophie Cosmique, is
present, though unbeknownst to many, in the world today’. This is true, and it
draws attention to what might be called the “multinational” side of the
transmission of esoteric knowledge. The Philosophie Cosmique, based in large
measure on a form of the kabbalah that took shape in what is now Israel , was developed in France and Algeria during the early twentieth
century, but now is scarcely remembered in any of these places. Elements of
this teaching are present in the Integral Yoga, a system of thought based
largely on the Upanishads that was elaborated in India by an English-educated
Bengali and a Frenchwoman of Sephardic extraction. This system of yoga is
followed by tens of thousands of people in India ,
and many hundreds in Europe and North America .
Thus elements of an esoteric teaching made a journey from mediaeval Spain to Palestine
and then back to Europe, where they were repackaged for dissemination in France . From France they were taken to India , and from India they have begun to make their
way back to the West.
Matrimandir
looks like a slightly flattened golden golf ball, sitting on a squat tee,
waiting for Krishna to putt it into outer space - Pilgrimage
Through India, Installment 1 Jun 18 2008
Almost every day we went for sadhana meditation in the ashram, which
offered a contrast to the brassy worship of the gods in the various temples.
Each late afternoon, pilgrims and locals line up to approach the white marble
tombs of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and kneel in prayer, their arms extended
over the tightly woven tapestries of flowers adorning the saints’ resting
place, and then silently arrange themselves to practice unity in consciousness
beneath the spreading limbs of the emerald green jacaranda tree that shelters
the courtyard. Like the sand paintings of the Tibetans, the flowers on the
tombs are a graceful expression of beauty and impermanence which reappear in a
new design each day.
There we will leave you, then: standing, hands folded and head slightly bowed, before the tomb ofPondicherry ’s
premier saints. Until next time, we send you our love from Mother India , Robert
and Susana 8:35 am Thursday 19 June 2008
There we will leave you, then: standing, hands folded and head slightly bowed, before the tomb of
