I’ve just gone through the chapter entitled The Ascent to Supermind: Pondicherry 1915-1926, the first of Part Five: Guide, of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs, and find it rather hastily written. It is also crude and easily popularistic-journalistic in its approach and attitude when seen in the context of the grand theme it purports to present, its plentiful inadequacies very glaring, its spiritual perceptions wanting in their penetration, in insight as much as in substance. The decidedly selective handling of the researched material much amounts to insensitive and blundering representation of Sri Aurobindo’s yogic siddhis, his realisations and his remarkable achievements. In fact the biography is doing enormous injustice to the spiritual things we value so deeply, so observantly and feelingly, injustice in more than one way. I may touch upon a few of them here…

But let me promptly illustrate. The chapter runs into 36 pages and has at the end 120 references, with a very large number of them as archival documents. Unfortunately these documents are inaccessible to the researchers who might like to look into them with another viable perspective or might like to verify the contextuality of the quotations. The quotation from the Record about the anandamaya-vijnanamaya vision of universal beauty makes a very beautiful beginning of the chapter, but immediately it slips into the mundane, into life at 41 François Martin St, and the daily connected things. In fact it slips further down, down into the terrible mud. We’ve thus: “Paul [Richard] spent his time looking for a job that would take them [he and Mirra] from France. At the same time, and with Mirra’s approval, he formed a sexual liaison with another woman who bore him a child.” The source of information is not indicated, something unpardonable for a work that claims to be based on research. But we should be concerned with another aspect, a deeper aspect. We know very well that the Mother never wanted to make a mention of her personal or private life anywhere, never. Instead, what we have here, and in any number of places in the biography as I cursorily see it, is something obnoxious, most repugnant, despicable. Imagine such a description in a chapter dealing with the Ascent to Supermind! Where is our sense of propriety, in these matters? Has that good sagacity taken leave of us? …   more »