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Alyson Haeger-Newe

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”!

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.”

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. :)