An Examination of Larry Seidlitz’s Defence of Heehs’s Biography of Sri Aurobindo
Part 1
Larry Seidlitz’s defence of Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is rather lengthy and boring. It corroborates the decontextualisation theory put forward by Heehs by applying it faithfully in example after example, page after page, until you go to sleep. Now the word decontextualisation may be of recent origin but the practice of it is very ancient. It began, as the Mother recounted, with the appearance of the original Four Asuras separating from their divine counterparts. Love, Ananda, Truth and Life became, respectively, Hatred, Suffering, Falsehood and Death when they separated themselves from the Divine, or rather, decontextualised themselves from the larger context of the Divine, in which they were all united. References to decontextualisation of late have been more in the mundane realm of cricket. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, exonerated himself of the critical comments he had passed on Gavaskar in his book by the same argument—all this to say, there is no big deal about it, despite the academic pretentiousness with which it has been presented. Let me take Larry’s first and most important example: Sri Aurobindo’s “madness”. He writes: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/11/26/3995462.html )
...full text...
