Peter Heehs’s Lives of Sri Aurobindo is a recent arrival in the thriving genre of biographies and professes itself to be founded on researched material. It essentially treats the subject as a human person, one in our nature, and not really as an exceptional yogi or a spiritual stalwart, and in the least as an incarnate. The book has been recently published by the Columbia University Press and appears to be rough on the sentiments of the devotees of the Mother and the Master. The author claims himself to be a meticulous professional historian and wants to present the life, howsoever remarkable it be, strictly as it should emerge from the documentary material. The approach is, holds the author, firmly rational and is grounded in the principles of research, eschewing goody-goody emotionalism of the hagiographic presentations of such themes. This may have certain merit, free of easy shallowness, but there are things also that lie far beyond the reach of such scientification of occult and spiritual matters. In fact, it should be axiomatically understood that it is not possible for reason to grasp the issues connected with them, although to some extent it could open to its own deeper intuition; this is perfectly true, for the obvious reason that “things occult and spiritual are never on the surface for men to see them”, for reason with its limitations to enter into them. On the other hand, with a degree of spiritual experience and realization, there is a chance of presenting them to the rational mind as well. This spiritual experience and realization should come first before one attempts to speak about those who live in the richness of the spirit, in its multi-dimensionality and in its multi-glowing wisdom and widenes. If this basic fact is not recognized, then the work will fail to carry in it the substance or essential conviction of the higher principles. Not only that; such a work could be at once dismissed as an inchoate or garbled attempt, dismissed without any further consideration—because of the wrong premises with which it begins...   more »