An Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs's "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008 ― A Zombified Disciple

Peter’s Attitude and approach: Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject have exceptional value, but they need to be compared against other narrative accounts, more important, against documents that do not reflect a particular point of view.

My Comments: This statement authorises me to take this exceptionally valuable preface as I find it and, without giving special treatment to his particular point of view, compare it against other narrative accounts and facts that do not reflect his version of events, and interpret the whole by my critical openness of a disciple. The biographical story that has emerged I call Avatars (Lives) of Marcher. The name ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of C. Mayo (1867-1940) whose Mother India vilified Indians, and W. Archer (1856-1924) who vilified Indian culture through his India and the Future and whom Sri Aurobindo put in his place in The Foundations of Indian Culture.

Analysis of the Preface of

Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008

MURDERS IN THE LAND OF THE NAÏVE – 3

Note: Peter Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, Oxford Univ. Press, 1989 (Bio-1), and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, Columbia Univ. Press, 2008, (Bio-2). Peter being a member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram since 1971, it is implicit that the Ashram Trust approved of all his publications.[1] One reason why it supports Bio-2 is its faith in Peter’s assurance that, because he wrote it as a materialist, it is successfully propagating  Sri Aurobindo in the West. Perhaps the Trust forgot Sri Aurobindo’s letter: “As for propaganda I have seen that it is perfectly useless for us – if there is any effect, it is a very trifling and paltry effect not worth the trouble. If the Truth has to spread itself, it will do it of its own motion; these things are unnecessary.”[2] Did it also forget the Mother’s comment on Satprem’s biography Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness written from the spiritual standpoint in intellectual terms: “Sri Aurobindo was so interested in the book and took such a part in [its writing, because] it is the way of explaining things which those with a European education can best understand… it is very appropriate for America too. And for the whole part of India that’s under the influence of British education.”[3] The Trust seems to have also ignored Peter’s public assertion that Aurobindo is a spiritual person, but not an avatar; I hope it has not ignored Sri Aurobindo’s warning: “The Supreme demands your surrender to her, but does not impose it, you are free at every moment, till the irrevocable transformation comes, to deny and to reject the Divine or to recall your self-giving, if you are willing to suffer the spiritual consequence.”[4]

In this analysis, as in the previous, Peter’s words are in Italics and mine are in Roman.

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Peter’s Attitude and approach–A):

(1) Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs.

(2) Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject have exceptional value, but they need to be compared against other narrative accounts, more important, against documents that do not reflect a particular point of view.

My Comments:

(1) This validates my analysis of Bio-1’s preface: Peter and his retouchers (editors) falsely made him appear a sincere agnostic. For example, after declaring I believe that the needs of the two classes of readers, materialist and spiritual aspirants are legitimate, he made his materialist uncritical openness of the seeker of anti-spiritual truth the arbitrator of the genuineness of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences.

(2) This statement authorises me to take this exceptionally valuable preface as I find it and, without giving special treatment to his particular point of view, compare it against other narrative accounts and facts that do not reflect his version of events, and interpret the whole by my critical openness of a disciple. The biographical story that has emerged I call Avatars (Lives) of Marcher. The name ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of C. Mayo (1867-1940) whose Mother India vilified Indians, and W. Archer (1856-1924) who vilified Indian culture through his India and the Future and whom Sri Aurobindo put in his place in The Foundations of Indian Culture.[5]

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–B):

(1) I first encountered Aurobindo [in an April 1950 photo] in 1968 in a yoga center on 57^th Street in Manhattan. The teacher was an elderly Jew with a suitably Indian name. He gave instructions in postures and breathing for a fee, dietary and moral advice gratis. Between lessons, he told stories about his years of wandering in India. Among the artefacts he brought back were photographs of people he called “realized beings,” which covered the wall of his studio. One of them was of Aurobindo as an old man. I did not find it particularly remarkable, as the subject wore neither loincloth nor turban, and had no simulated halo around his head.

My Comments:

Quitting family, church and college, the need of the hour for his generation, 20-year old Marcher took up the path of  liberating drugs. Obeying unknowingly an adesh of his Daemon, his Supernatural Guide, he tumbled through the 4^th dimension into the yoga center of a Jewish spiritualist. No sincere Western seeker after four decades in the spiritual field would introduce his first guru (even if his initial ignorance mistook him for a charlatan) in this off-hand manner, shrouding the latter’s heroic efforts to turn young drifters like him towards truer, deeper, higher truths of existence, in times when his generation threw out the baby with the bathwater. Nor would he misguide ignorant readers by confusing ‘yoga’ meaning pranayama and asanas with ‘Yoga’ the fulltime spiritual sadhana. A child’s nature can be known from its very infancy and a son/daughter-in-law’s from the first meeting. I wonder what opinion his parents and that Jewish guru formed of Marcher’s character. “It is only to those who can conquer the mind’s preferences and prejudices of race and education [as that Jew had] that India reveals the mystery of her treasures,” the Mother says; “Others depart disappointed…for they  have sought it in the wrong way and would not agree to pay the price of the Divine Discovery.”[6] Marcher’s derisive quote marks around realized beings betrays his unyielding contempt for the spiritual content of the words ‘spirit’, ‘realisation’ and ‘being’. His refusal to ‘pay the price of the Divine Discovery’, is explained by this passage from Sri Aurobindo: “The average European draws his guiding view not from the philosophic, but from the positive and practical reason…. The Indian mind [which that elderly Jew understood better than Marcher ever will] holds on the contrary…that the ultimate truths are truths of the spirit and that truths of the spirit are the most fundamental and most effective truths of our existence, powerfully creative of the inner, salutarily reformative of the outer life [these the wise Jew failed to infuse in Marcher]…. The Indian mind does not admit that the only possible test of values or of reality is the outward scientific, the test of a scrutiny of physical Nature or the everyday normal facts of our surface psychology…. The tests of this other subtler order of truths [of the vast hidden subconscious and superconscious heights, depths and ranges]…since these things are truths of the soul and spirit, it must necessarily be a psychological and spiritual experience, a psychological and psychophysical experimentation, analysis and synthesis, a larger intuition which looks into higher realms, realities, possibilities of being, a reason which admits something beyond itself, looks upward to the supra-rational, tries to give as far as may be an account of it to the human intelligence.”[7]

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–C):

A few months later, after a brief return to college and a stopover in a wild uptown “ashram”, I found myself living in another yoga center housed, improbably, in a building on Central Park West…. The center had the most complete collection of Aurobindo’s writings in New York. I started with a compilation of his philosophical works, which I could not understand. Undeterred, I tried some of his shorter writings, which seemed to make some sense to me. By then I had read a number of books by “realized beings” of the East and West. Most of them consisted of what I now would call spiritual clichés. This is not to suggest that bits of advice like “remain calm in all circumstances” or “seek the truth beneath the surface” are not valid or useful. But if they do not form part of a coherent view of life, they remain empty verbiage. Aurobindo’s view of life seemed to me to be coherent, though not always easy to grasp. His prose was good, if rather old fashioned, and he had a wry sense of humour that came out when you least expected it. I lived in or near New York for the next four years. I did a lot of reading, primarily of Aurobindo, but also writers he got me interested in: Shelley, Dante, Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, Plato, Homer, the Buddha, Kalidasa, Wordsworth, Whitman, and dozens of others, in no particular order. I learned enough Sanskrit to struggle through the Gita, and tried to meditate as long as I could, which was not very long. All the while I was helping out at the yoga center, and the same time working as an office assistant, stock boy, or taxi driver. Now and then I thought about travelling to India, and eventually bought a ticket for Bombay. A week after my arrival I found myself living in the ashram Aurobindo had founded.

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–C):

(1) A few months later, after a brief return to college and a stopover in a wild uptown “ashram”, I found myself living in another yoga center housed, improbably, in a building on Central Park West….

My Comments:

(1) An uninhibited historian hiding details of this brief return to college! Was it a shaming return to conformity? Veiling the courses, degrees taken then or later, only validates the talk of forged doctorates and titles like Founder of Aurobindo Archives, Director of History at Aurobindo Archives, etc! A biographer of the mud, by the mud, for the mud, covering up his own mud in that wild uptown “ashram”! It must have been a return to the hippy haven on Cheap Street reeking of drugs and sex! A true biography of Sri Aurobindo, says Bio-1’s preface, does not give readers the life of a saint, it adequately brings out the human characteristics and personal drama of his life. Why then this dainty lid on Marcher’s own human characteristics and personal drama at  college and in that ashram? Was it an instinctive repulsion to the wise old Jew’s teachings the cause for this break? Whatever the truth, obeying another adesh, Marcher tumbled into a sane ashram where his Daemon will prepare him for his life’s mission.

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–C):

(2) The center had the most complete collection of Aurobindo’s writings in New York. I started with a compilation…which I could not understand. Undeterred, I tried…. By then I had read a number of books by “realized beings” of the East and West. Most of them consisted of what I now would call spiritual clichés. This is not to suggest that bits of advice like “remain calm in all circumstances” or “seek the truth beneath the surface” are not valid or useful. But if they do not form part of a coherent view of life, they remain empty verbiage. Aurobindo’s view of life seemed to me to be coherent, though not always easy to grasp. His prose was good, if rather old-fashioned, and he had a wry sense of humor….

My Comments:

(2) One of Marcher’s pet ploy is to make sweeping statements and then obfuscate them with qualifiers like a number of, almost, most etc. Before tumbling into that Jew’s center, Marcher’s Daemon had exorcised his soul from such valid and useful spiritual clichés as: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And, Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.[8] Hence, in a jiffy he unmasked the entire gallery of realised beings there, esp. ‘Aurobindo’. Now, at this center, Speedy Marcher Gonzales[9] tore through a number of books by ‘realized beings’ and found most of them consisted of spiritual clichés, i.e., empty verbiage. How did he decide they consisted of incoherent empty verbiage? He applied this down-to-earth rule of his frogs-in-the-well drifters-community: What does not conform to our coherent view of life is incoherent verbiage, trash it. Thank his Daemon that he didn’t adopt the logic which burnt down an ancient library: “If these books don’t agree with our coherent view of life, they are sacrilegious; if they do they are superfluous, either way destroy them.” As I said, state, obfuscate, get away with murder, is his trademark style: Thus by Aurobindo’s view of life seemed to me to be coherent, though not always easy to grasp, he means it was incoherent as hell. And by His prose was good, if rather old-fashioned, he means: What if ‘Aurobindo’ learnt his English in infinitely greater schools and colleges than mine? Since it doesn’t conform to my prose-style, it is worthless for humanity’s evolution. Recall Bio-1’s preface, Marcher’s assumption of the possible validity of Aurobindo’s spiritual experiences, legitimises his anti-devotional materialistic scholarship to investigate and judge whether what Sri Aurobindo claims as his spiritual experiences were actual realities or hallucinations. Marcher’s scholarship and judgments are best adjudicated in Sri Aurobindo’s words: “Reading and study [of spiritual texts] are only useful to acquire information and widen one’s field of data. But that comes to nothing if one does not know how to discern and discriminate, judge, see what is within and behind these things.”[10]

Those rejected realised beings must have thanked their stars when Marcher hit pay-dirt in the cliché seek the truth beneath the surface. Alas, they knew not that this rang their death-knell! For, he would soon burnish that cliché into his mind’s infallible weapon of critical openness of a seeker of [anti-spiritual] truth beneath the surface of ever-fluctuating human life.and always biased  documents. Later, settled in his karma-bhumi in Pondicherry, he will wield it with unfailing success while roughing it out among naïve Ashramites, like the Phantom amidst a pygmy tribe. Side-products such as scholarly pamphlets, articles, books will emerge, while he would concentrate on his central mission: To create authentic, i.e. de-retouched, versions of all published works of ‘Aurobindo’ and his ‘Mother’ – since they were edited (retouched) by direct disciples, i.e., hagiographies, hence untrustworthy for the critical openness of seekers of historical and biographical truths like him. As to the unpublished ones, his infallible weapon would authentically edit and publish them in the Collected Works of [Sri] Aurobindo.

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–C):

(3) The center had the most complete collection of Aurobindo’s writings…. I lived in or near New York for the next four years. I did a lot of reading, primarily of Aurobindo, but also writers he got me interested in: Shelley, Dante, Nietzsche, Ramakrishna, Plato, Homer, the Buddha, Kalidasa, Wordsworth, Whitman, and dozens of others in no particular order. I learned enough Sanskrit to struggle through the Gita, and tried to meditate as long as I could…. All the while I was helping out at the yoga center, and at the same time working as an office assistant, stock boy, or taxi driver.

My Comments:

(3) Powered by his Daemon’s supernatural powers, Speedy Marcher chewed up not only the whole collection on ‘Aurobindo’ but also ten foremost poets and philosophers of the world, along with dozens of others, learnt a foreign tongue and meditated on his Daemon, all without failing in his full-time daily duties – a unique feat in human history. More to the point, in four cool years, he digested all that ‘Aurobindo’ had read since 1877 at Loreto, and written since “Light” in 1883,[11] digested all ‘Aurobindo’ had been, experienced, thought, and felt – Marcher being a pea of a more evolved Mendelian[12] pod. How he achieved myriad such miracles is explained in Bio-2: If the spiritual value of Aurobindo’s system can only be gauged by one who has had the same experiences, its philosophical value is measurable by the  usual critical means studies of sources, arguments, and conclusions, and evaluations of rhetoric and style.[13] That is to say, without belief in or experience of any spiritual reality, he is qualified to evaluate Sri Aurobindo’s entire system of Yoga by his physical mind’s critical study of the sources, arguments, conclusions, rhetoric and style of Sri Aurobindo’s writings,. Recall Bio-1: 15 years’ research in primary source materials and reliance on these documents allows me to characterize this biography...well researched, documented, and objective, making no unwarranted spiritual assumptions or unverifiable spiritual claims. As his hagiographer I’d shout: “Marcher has always been greater than  ‘Aurobindo’!” But Bio-1’s preface prevents me with: Faced with evidence about outward happenings that is not in accord with his preconceptions, the hagiographer is not permitted to explain it away by invoking the deus ex machina of supernatural intervention – so I can’t attribute his feat to his Daemon’s power. At any rate, in four years his Daemon had fully primed him for the mission of his life.

Peter’s Attitude and approach (C):

(4) I learned enough Sanskrit to struggle through the Gita, and tried to meditate as long as I could….

My Comments:

(4) Marcher struggled through the Gita, a religious tract credited to a historically undocumented, hence imaginary, ‘avatar’ whom ‘Aurobindo’ declared to be his spiritual Guide. I guess he found it consists ‘mostly’ of the empty verbiage of spiritual clichés with bits of advice possibly valid or useful to civilised humanity. This study must be the seed of his current scholarly authority to evaluate all that his ‘Aurobindo’ experienced and wrote on the basis of the Gita.

And Marcher meditated. Why is this up-front biographer so bashful about who or what initiated him in this multi-tiered, multi-faceted, multi-purposed, un-copyrightable exercise called ‘meditation’? Was it part of that Jew’s exercises? Was it a teacher at the Central Park Street center? It certainly was not something from ‘Aurobindo’ or ‘Ramakrishna’ for they would have thrust on him what Bio-1’s preface calls their lifelong obsession with mother figures. For Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Aurobindo the Divine Mother is the Sole Supreme Reality who does the Yoga in the sadhak to the extent his/her faith, sincerity and surrender invites and allows Her. Marcher knows the Mother’s opinion that, “if you live only a moment, just a tiny moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufficiently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours.”[14] But surrender, aspiration, prayer, repellent to his inherited instincts, heretical to his Darwinian-Dawkinsian evolutionism would, he knew, be fatal to his Daemon. The only book among those he named, that could have inspired his atheist soul to meditate would be the one on Buddha and Buddhism. Two facts in support of my conjecture: In an interview to the Reader’s Digest, the Dalai Lama called himself an atheist; after Bio-2 enlightened us, Marcher considered taking up Zen – like Lucky Luke riding into the sunset after solving an Indian tribe’s problem.

Peter’s Attitude and Approach–C):

(5) Now and then I thought about travelling to India, and eventually bought a ticket for Bombay. A week after my arrival I found myself living in the ashram Aurobindo had founded.

My Comments:

(5) I relate first, in what I believe is Marcher’s instinctive style, his unexpressed opinion on why and how ‘Aurobindo’ left Calcutta in February 1910 and settled in Pondicherry. (His interpretations and remarks in Bio-2 are in Italics): For years ‘Aurobindo’ was in contact with extremists-terrorists in Chandernagore, a French possession outside of the jurisdiction of the British police…. For a man with a British warrant against him, it was the best place near Calcutta to go. Since July 1909, he was in contact with another such group based in Tuticorin and Madras, and through them, with Tamil absconders from British Law burrowed since 1908 in the safe soil of French Pondicherry, which was an ideal place for a man with a British warrant against him. On Feb. 8, Govt of India banned the free expression of political opinion. ‘Aurobindo’, who had already made it a “habit in action to watch events, prepare forces and act when he felt it to be the right moment”, stopped his terrorist-political activities and learnt Tamil. The right moment came when the Law of the Democratically Elected British Government of India caught up with him. The adesh also came at an opportune moment…and there were good reasons to comply. Aurobindo had also written ten days earlier that he would “refrain from farther political action” until a “more settled state of things supervenes” – something that was unlikely to happen soon. So, in the dead of the night he escaped to Chandernagore, and thence, again in the dead of the night, with false papers and a false name, to Pondicherry. Years later, when ‘Aurobindo’ was accused of having deserted the freedom struggle, he invented the excuse of an inviolable adesh of his Inner Guide, and his soul’s imperative need to concentrate on his Yoga.[15] Equally bogus, , was his claim of having given up terrorist activities; for he kept himself informed of them for years. For instance, he knew of the conspiracy to assassinate Viceroy Hardinge in 1911, and still wrote in his diary that he helped nurse the injured Viceroy through his Yogic powers.

Marcher, on the other hand, obeying his Daemon’s real adesh, zigzagged his way until one morning he found himself living in the ashram Aurobindo had founded. Like ‘Aurobindo’, he built his own Cave of Tapasya and equipped it (like the Phantom did his cave in the jungles of Bangalla) with the latest electronic gadgetry. It took Sri Aurobindo four decades to build up his revolutionary Spiritual Ashram and revolutionary Spiritual System of Yoga. Likewise in four decades, Marcher built up his avant-garde Aurobindo Archives[16] and avant-garde Anti-theist System of Yoga. That he and his works are more successful than Sri Aurobindo’s works is proved by the fact that while just a handful of disciples pull Sri Aurobindo’s Spiritual Chariot, a mass of disciples pull Marcher’s Anti-theist Chariot with Bio-1 as its lead wheels, Bio-2 as its central wheels, and the CWSA edited by him as his throne. Not just that, they are eager to commit hara-kiri under its emancipating wheels – like devotees of Lord Jagannath do under his Chariot.

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[1] Rules of The Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003, p. 26 see Rule 11.

[2] Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA), Ed. P. Heehs, 2011; Vol. 35:691

[3] Mother’s Agenda, IV, 1963: pp. 150-51

[4] CWSA, Ed. P. Heehs, 2011; Vol. 32:4

[5] Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL), 1971; Vol. 14.

[6] Words of the Mother, Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), 1980; Vol. 13:382

[7] CWSA, Vol. 20:112-13

[8] The Mote and the Beam, a saying of Jesus in his Sermon of the Mount, Matthew: 7: 1-5. – Wikipeadia.

[9] Speedy Gonzales is a Warner Bros. cartoon character: a super-swift mouse.

[10] SABCL, vol. 24:1277.

[11] Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, 1989: 10-11.

[12] Austrian-German biologist Gregor Mendel (1822-84), studied the hybridization of pea plants. His laws are still the fundamental laws of heredity today. – Courtesy Georges van Vrekhem’s Evolution, Religion, and the Unknown God, Amaryllis, Manjul Pub. House Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, 2011, pp. 5, 97-98.

[13] Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 2008:277

[14] CWM, vol. 8:88-90

[15] Lives of Sri Aurobindo, 2008:201-07

[16] As interpreted from a bio-data published in his India’s Struggle for Freedom, OUP, 1988: “…settled in Pondicherry [not as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo]. He is a [visiting] a research scholar [not a disciple or Ashramite] at the Sri Aurobindo [not the Ashram’s] Archives and Research Library….”