Apropos of a comment by Auroman employing
the Freudian phrase anal-retentive David Johnston, a Jungian
authority, writes to me in a personal e-mail the following:
RYD
Calling someone anal retentive is a colloquial
expression, at least in
I am sending a small section from my essay below, modified about 2 months ago, that might speak to this concern. The complete essay is attached. You can use whatever aspects of the comments below that you feel are relevant.
Warm Wishes
David
I’m taking this opportunity to post the entire article in view of its deep and perceptive observation bearing on the inner myth of Sri Aurobindo’s—and the Mother’s—life, they together traversing the Path of Descent from the moment they met first on 29 March 1914, at 4 pm in the Ashram’s Guest House where Sri Aurobindo was staying at that time. That marks the beginning of a new adventure in the spiritual annals of the world, by that time they having completed the journey on the Path of Ascent.
RY Deshpande
According to the author’s own assessment of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, it reveals a
“much more lifelike” and “complex” figure of a man, who is open to unforeseen
currents of life than is found in previous biographies (Peter Heehs, as reported
in Debashish, 2008). The popularity and the clearly perceived merit of the book
by many readers notwithstanding, one could question the legitimacy of a
biography on Sri Aurobindo that mainly relies on outer events, no matter how
well researched and rigorously based on verifiable facts, as being too
superficial. Sri Aurobindo himself
rejects its relevance, noting that his life “has not been on the surface for men to see and that “a man’s value does
not depend on” learning, fame “or what he does but on what he is and inwardly
becomes.” He also notes: “It would be only myself who could speak of my past
giving them their true form and significance.”
In fact, any genuine biography of such an intensely
inner-directed multifaceted personality, with an unprecedented level of
consciousness and transformation of being, would have to tie together the inner
and outer worlds, giving precedence to the inner life, synchronicity and the
verifiable evidence of dreams, visions, creative productions and significant
world events. Given his intimate identification with the consciousness of the
Mother, it would ideally include meaningful coincidences with experiences of
the Mother, both inner and outer, prior to her living in
Given these observations a biography of Sri Aurobindo to be valid at
all must perforce acknowledge the magnitude of Sri Aurobindo’s (and the
Mother’s) consciousness and the fact that nobody can truly understand his life
in its wholeness and significance. No
individuals, therefore, are competent to judge it or the works he produced
unless they have attained a similar level of consciousness. To critically
evaluate Sri Aurobindo’s work in any way is therefore out of the question for a
researcher of integrity. What can be done is explication with examples,
associations and amplifications of the body of work that Sri Aurobindo (and the
Mother) has bequeathed us as well as to organize the material around his inner
myth, where myth in this sense means patterns of interests and behaviour based
on the flow of archetypal realities.
Here it is interesting to note that by far the most
unique and meaningful biography on the life of CG Jung was written by
Marie-Louise von Franz in precisely this fashion, with profound respect and
love accorded to Jung (George R Elder and Dianne D Cordic, editors, 2009). In the Introduction to the book entitled, CG Jung: His Myth in Our Time, she writes: “I have throughout this book
tried to follow the basic melody of Jung’s inner myth (Marie Louise-von Franz,
1975, p. 14).” Following the poetic cadence of Sri Aurobindo’s inner myth would
be a challenge, but a sound basis for a valid biography of his life. It can
only be accomplished by a highly individualized (individuated) person, who
writes with conviction as well as having a genuine attitude of trust and loving
loyalty towards Sri Aurobindo (and the Mother) and their path.
In the case of Sri Aurobindo, the study of his magnum
opus, Savitri, the Mother calls “the
supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision” would be an important source for
determining his (and the Mother’s) mythological ground. There is considerable
evidence, anecdotal and other, that the Mother is depicted as Savitri and Sri
Aurobindo as Aswapati in Sri Aurobindo’s opus.
RY Deshpande, for instance, relates the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga
of Ascent to the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, as a precursor to the
Yoga of Descent, which finds its beginnings in the Book of the Divine Mother.
According to Deshpande, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s tapasya were eventually
entirely concerned with the Yoga of Descent.
Heehs (2008, p. 378) acknowledges that Savitri is a “vast symbolic account of
his yoga” and a “ladder that helped him” to reach higher levels of being with
greater powers of poetic expression. He exemplifies the mythological nature of Savitri with a description of the
sunrise being “a symbol for the breaking of the supramentral light into the
obscurity of the inconscient (Ibid.,
p. 378),” which can be directly related to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s yoga.
Moreover, he refers to Aswapati’s journey to “the kingdoms of the greater
knowledge” and Savitri’s journey through the “inner countries” to “her inmost
soul” as being “certainly based on his (Sri Aurobindo’s) and the Mother’s
experiences (ibid., p. 398).” However, he goes on to write “but the poem is
a fictional creation” referring to a statement made by Sri Aurobindo (as
reported in ibid., p. 398) in
response to a query of whether or not the Mother’s former guide, Théon, was
Aswapati, in reply to which Heehs reports him to have said: “...the
circumstances of this life have nothing to do with” its plot (p. 398).” In fact Sri Aurobindo actually writes: “Théon
and the circumstances of this life have nothing to do with it,”
circumstantially colouring this statement significantly. By making such a
disastrous misreading and misinterpretation, the author abandons the most
profound source for understanding Sri Aurobindo’s life in terms of an inner
myth, despite of having initially written as if he accepted its value.
Sri Aurobindo writes that he “used Savitri as a means of ascension, and that he rewrote it, apparently
ten or twelve times, from different levels of being. He regarded the poem as “a
field of experimentation” to see how much poetry could be creatively written to
reflect one’s yogic consciousness. Referring to the different drafts of the
poem could therefore be interesting fodder for understanding the development of
Sri Aurobindo’s inner myth. So could references to other key poems such as A God’s Labour.
With regard to the other requirement for a valid
biography on Sri Aurobindo, which is to avoid critical assessments and
judgements and only to explain and mediate his message, Heehs (2009, pp. 327,
414) falls short in that, on several occasions, he makes critical judgements,
for example that Sri Aurobindo didn’t do enough to include the Muslims in the
Indian Independence movement, that “his prose and poetry seem dated today,” and
“some of the works are unbalanced,” including The Synthesis of Yoga.
Moreover, although he writes that it is impossible to judge the success
or failure of the endeavour in “bringing down a new principle into the
“earth-consciousness,” he leaves an ambiguous, if not negative, impression,
which does not harmonize with the evident nature of the extraordinary
transformative work done by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who, by definition,
must be taken together as a package (ibid.).
In fact, Heehs writes that “to accept Sri Aurobindo as
an avatar is necessarily a matter of faith, and matters of faith quickly become
matters of dogma (ibid., p.
413).” An individual with pistis, meaning fidelity or trustful
loyalty, and writing with conviction could easily find ample ammunition to
argue otherwise, even while admitting this shadow difficulty. Nor does he write convincingly about the
powerful spiritual and life-transforming effect Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
have on their disciples and their individualization (individuation), to which
many people, to this day, would attest.
In one place, he writes somewhat disparagingly about them, for instance,
that experiences of the higher consciousness were “comparatively infrequent”
even for advanced sadhaks, and, as a rule, time was spent in a lower
consciousness involving slander, “jealousy,” in “sexual daydreams,” with
occasional experiences of the psychic fire in the heart or the spiritual plane
of oneness (ibid., pp. 372,
373). There does not seem to be any
recognition here of the natural rhythm of the psyche and the ways and byways of
the path of individualization (individuation] for the sake of conscious
integration of the shadow and other unconscious material. Heehs writes, rather, as if there were
intermittent inner experiences of value along with continuous indulgence.
I have come to the conclusion, nonetheless, that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is too often
reductive and far from adequate for two main reasons, notably Heehs’s
presumptuous critical judgements on both Sri Aurobindo’s life and works and,
secondly, he essentially ignores Sri Aurobindo’s life as an inner myth. I have
the feeling that not only did the author capitulate to American academia, but
that he personally writes without conviction. The answer to the challenge of
Peter Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is not polemical debate, however, but
a more valid biography,—one, written by a true child of the Mother and Sri
Aurobindo, which portrays Sri Aurobindo’s (and the Mother’s) life as an inner
myth, while not going beyond mediation and explication of his powerful and
integral teachings.
