An Atrocious Biography – by RY Deshpande

|| The Lives of Sri Aurobindo || 

An Atrocious Biography 

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An Atrocious Biography by RY Deshpande

[This is a book critiquing Peter Heehs’s The Lives of Sri Aurobindo published by the Columbia University Press, US, in May 2008.]

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“Well-Wishers of Sri Aurobindo Ashram” Or League of Lapsed Logicians? – by Shiva

On 15^th September, Mr Seshadri Chari’s “The Enemy Within” was published in the Organiser magazine’s issue of September 21, 2014.

This website reproduced it without any comments for readers to judge it on its merits in their own light because it realised that Mr Chari’s whole concern is with India which “is slowly but surely waking up to the virulent and concerted attacks mounted on its spiritual and cultural foundations [the Sanatana Dharma] by pseudo Western scholars in the garb of deceptive academic studies”. It reminds us of Sri Aurobindo’s prophetic words at Uttarpara on 30 May 1908:  “When it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise…. It is the one religion which impresses upon mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God…. When the Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatana Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana Dharma it would perish.” Mr Chari, like Mr Narendra Modi, is working for that rising India of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo.

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RSS Journal "Organiser" Indicts the Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

http://epaper.organiser.org/stepaper.aspx?lang=4&spage=Mpage&NB=2014-09-13#Mpage_6

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Sridharan Replies to Matriprasad Satyamurthy on the pro-Ashram Trust Nexus

Refer to the Well-wishers’ posting of August 30, 2014 “The Pro-Ashram Trust Nexus!” in reply to our “Connecting the Dots between the pro-Ashram Trust Nexus – Sridharan” (July 28, 2014), which in turn was a reply to the Well-wishers’ “Connecting the dots between the anti-Ashram nexus” (July 4, 2014).

I will not waste my time with the shameless jingoism and empty rhetoric of this particular posting on the Well-wishers’ forum, which is mainly due to the fact that the site is fully backed by the present authorities of the Ashram. Let me come straight to the distinction between the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust that we have always insisted upon. The Well-wishers’ forum is so overawed with the importance of legalities that they seem to forget that the Ashram is supposed to be a spiritual institution. (This is typical of Matriprasad Satyamurthy – secretary of the Ashram Trust, who always talks legal when you want to engage him with spiritual issues. He once told a newcomer to simply enjoy life at the Ashram instead of trying to practise Yoga!) When did we say that the Ashram and the Ashram Trust are two different legal entities? The Trust was of course created by the Mother to take care of the Ashram properties, but only the Mother is authorised to induct and evict persons from the Ashram. According to Clause 7 of the Trust Deed, this matter is left to her “absolute discretion” and no other clause qualifies any other Trustee to undertake this responsibility in her absence! In fact the Ashram Trust Deed, drafted in 1955 shortly after the de facto transfer of Pondicherry to the Indian Union, is framed for the period of her lifetime. Even the possibility of her demise is not mentioned in the Trust Deed and no future contingent arrangements are envisaged in it with regard to the guidance and administration of the sadhaks of the Ashram. For more information on this aspect, read the following article posted on our site. (“Misconceptions about the Ashram Trust Deed.”)

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The Rationalised Ashramite – by An "Irrational" Ashramite

Roused by the escalating anti-theist refrain of ‘No Religion’ in Auroville (see “The ‘No Religion’ Refrain” posted on this site on 9^th August) rationalised Ashramites belittle our offering of incense and prayer at the Samadhi and the photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, our meditations in the Ashram, Playground, etc, as rituals and conventions devoid of spirituality. But meditations at the Matrimandir can also become ritualistic conventions, for while there are no external ceremonies, the symbols of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are built into the very design of Matrimandir and with time meditations there too can become mechanical rituals. The fact is that the unspiritualised mind can never know when any form of external worship is without a living truth behind it, and is not a living spiritual expression of worshipper’s soul. “If worship is done,” says Sri Aurobindo, “as a part of meditation or with a true aspiration to the spiritual reality and the spiritual consciousness and with the yearning for contact and union with the Divine, then it can be spiritually effective.”[1] In reality, therefore, the rationalist’s “No Religion” refrain masks the lower nature’s dread of serious spiritual practice and its clamour for an unrestrained life of animal instincts, nurturing it will ultimately leave no place for devotion and reverence, no place for spirituality, no place for the aspiration of the soul, and finally no place for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves.

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