Saturday, December 29, 2012

Truth of greatness thrust upon the Ashram Trust

Letter of Kittu Reddy, Ranganath Raghavan & Sumita Kandpal to Manoj Das Gupta on 28 May, 2010 Before we proceed, we wish to present these self-evident propositions: ...
b) The Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been founded by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and its roots are deeply imbedded in an eternal Truth. Any administration or management, which is temporary, ever-changing, can never be its true representative. Therefore a clear distinction must be made between the two entities, between the Truth that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother stand for on one side, and the administration and trustees on the other side. They must never be confused and a false identification must not be claimed. Today, many inmates are confused between loyalty to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo on one side and the Ashram Trust on the other. This is a disturbing trend which can be disastrous for the Ashram and for the spiritual life of its inmates.
c) The SAAT is a public body, subject to the laws of the land. It is open for examination by any national official body having authority to do so. There can be no claim for privacy and secrecy of views, actions or decisions. Everything must be open, transparent and frank, and any enquiry should be respected and answered clearly with conviction.
Having these points in view, we would like to state the following: ...
18. We believe that the Trustees of the Ashram are as human and vulnerable to ignorance and error as any other Ashramite or human being. In decisions that affect the entire community, they are answerable to all the inmates. They cannot take decisions in secrecy. As Trustees, your first responsibility is to serve the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and the Ashram community as a whole.

The collision of Eastern and Western spiritualities in the 19th and 20th centuries is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the life of Mirra Alfassa.   Heehs places her in context of the life of Aurobindo Ghosh, the Bengali philosopher and yogi in whose ashram she spent the last half of a long life.  Mirra is important to the Church of Light for an association that preceded her travels to India; she is by far the most celebrated disciple of Max Theon, spiritual guide of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor… The extent to which Aurobindo’s spiritual mission was influenced by Mirra’s former association with Theon is not readily discernable from the Heehs biography, but until Theon’s teachings are better understood no historian will be able to appraise their impact. 

Sri Aurobindo on Islam by ned Jun 13, 2008
Another article that’s worth reading is ‘Sri Aurobindo and Hinduism’ by Peter Heehs, published in the last issue of Anti-Matters, which also demonstrates that although Sri Aurobindo was inspired by the Vedantic scriptures, he never considered himself an exoteric “Hindu” per se (he grew up an atheist).
Meeting Peter Heehs by ned Dec 13, 2007
Peter Heehs is also the author of a paper entitled The uses of Sri Aurobindo: mascot, whipping boy, or what?, and a wonderful little book called Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism. In both the paper and the book, he thoroughly investigates all the allegations of Sri Aurobindo having been an “extremist” or a “Hindu supremacist” and shows that they simply do not hold water.