“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.

            But the League of Lapsed Logicians, like frogs-in-the-well frightened by thunder and lightning overhead, has failed to grasp that Mr Chari’s dealing with its patron saints Peter Heehs and the Ashram Trust (who alone, according to them, constitute the institution called Sri Aurobindo Ashram), is only incidental. Mr Chari focuses on Heehs as “a petty henchman of the loathsome tribe” of unapologetic misinterpreters and denigrators of India’s spiritual and cultural foundations only because Heehs successfully “adopted the more devious and crafty modus operandi” of “the wily colonizer and invader” and “identified and befriended the enemy within”, namely “the incumbent Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram”. And “such a disgraceful exploitation,” Mr Chari stresses, “has been possible only because of the decade long rot at the very core of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as an institution”. L-L-L has failed to realise that as editor of a magazine reaching millions and as spokesman of the largest political party, Mr Chari’s data is the result of competent research. He is not so naïve as to be “spoon-fed the stale stew of lies and misinformation that has been cooking in the pots of disoriented, psychotic and parasitic cancers [like L-L-L] that prefer to terminate their host along with themselves”.

And so, on the 18^th, L-L-L issued a sage advice (reproduced below) to Mr Chari as would a parent disabusing an aberrant child with irrefutable logic or reasoning, and offered to “help him identify the real enemy within which he is free to vanquish as it pleases him”. Now the commonest form of deductive logic is this three-step Aristotelian syllogism: The first step, premise or statement: “All men are mortal” and the second: “Socrates is a man”, irrefutably lead to the third or conclusion: “therefore Socrates is mortal”. Logic thus is a science or art of reasoning which demonstrates the validity or inevitability of its conclusion arising from the irrefutable interrelation of its statements of facts or events.

L-L-L’s advice opens with: The word ‘enemy’ is defined as a person or persons who hate(s) another, attack(s) or seek(s) to harm, injure, overthrow or confound antagonistic or opposing person or persons. Like “All men are mortal”, this premise is irrefutable: For indeed an “enemy” is or does all these things.

But weirdly L-L-L assumes that this premise by itself, must lead Mr Chari to accept its illogical conviction that “since 2008 Reddy, Ranade, Deshpande and other anti-Ashram elements have been openly and publicly hating those in the Ashram who do not agree with them; although their hate was never provoked nor reciprocated, they have been trying to harm and threaten those individuals in the Ashram who do not agree with them; in some cases even physically fighting with fierce antagonism against the Ashram, seeking to injure some members and trying to overthrow the Ashram, acting like a hostile force and unit…. These hostile elements from WITHIN the Ashram use the institution’s very own resources [Really?] to try to cause damage to it… gone to the most unimaginably absurd extent of even demanding that the Ashram should finance the legal battles that these people are waging against the Ashram itself! Like disoriented, psychotic and parasitic cancers, instead of seeking a remedy these elements prefer to terminate its host along with themselves, the only justification appearing to be that without it they will perish in any case.”

This and other such malicious fulminations are supposed to act as L-L-L’s irrefutable second premise or statement demonstrating that its conviction or conclusion is irrefutably valid because it arises inevitably from the indisputable interrelation of R-R-D & Co. and its first premise defining the “enemy within”!

Now fulmination, says a reputed American dictionary, is derived from fulminic acid – an acid isomeric with cyanic acid. Fulminates, says Wikipedia, are chemical compounds which include the fulminate ion. The fulminate ion, CNO is a pseudohalic ion, acting like a halogen with its charge and reactivity. Due to the instability of the ion, fulminate salts are friction-sensitive explosives. The best known is mercury(II) fulminate, which has been used as a primary explosive in detonators.

            Before L-L-L’s malicious fulminations explode or implode sending its precious well-wishers and patron saints into God-knows which limbo, let it heed, and heed urgently, Sri Aurobindo’s sound advice: “Common sense by the way is not logic (which is the least commonsense-like thing in the world), it is simply looking at things as they are without inflation or deflation – not imagining wild imaginations – or for that matter despairing ‘I know not why’ despairs.”