Dear Spiritual Family,

In the current world crisis, the excesses of power, greed  and religious extremism are causing profound upheavals. People are looking to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for answers. Those of us who have given our lives over to their high ideals understand the Ashram and Auroville will be places where every problem facing humanity has to be confronted and solved.

Even with this perspective, I must admit a profound sadness from reading recent letters concerning The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. I have kept from speaking out with the deep hope that time and reflection would allow for some dialogue and exchange of ideas. Instead there rather seems to be a growing mob mentality looking to punish and avenge.

Dear all

We all deeply share the anguish at the apparent split that seems to threaten the Sri Aurobindo Community. But may I ask who is responsible for this.

From two comments by Rick Lipschutz
(A possible reply to Alok's rebuttal of Julian)

I have read in full Peter Heehs's book, "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo," and met with him when he came to San Francisco giving readings and discussing his work. I found he added to my understanding and appreciation of Sri Aurobindo — not only in his life before Pondicherry, but after his great realizations: the Silent Brahman, the Cosmic Consciousness that he entered in the Alipur jail, the Parabrahman realization, the Overmental Realization and through the entire arc of his earthy life. I have a deeper sense now how Sri Aurobindo, by the power of yoga, transformed a human consciousness into an integral divine consciousness. And in respect to his Integral Yoga, which is my principal focus (I was recently co-facilitating a Synthesis of Yoga study group and plan to resume it) the book afforded me stronger hope that humans like myself can make progress on this difficult and thorny path. Sri Aurobindo struggled with human problems, family problems, national problems; found a way through Integral Yoga to surmount them for himself and even to bring into the world a greater force so that others individually and collectively and the nations and the earth itself have a more certain hope, or at least the main chance, to transform our ignorance and struggling lives into something divine. I venerate Purani's biography, I love and enjoy what I've read of Iyengar's, have deep respect for Van Vrekhem's, but I feel there is room for "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo." I feel his approach to a critical, scholarly work based on a great deal of research, directed to the scholarly and academic community, is a potent form of inoculation against inevitable intellectual attacks to come. After all, Sri Aurobindo and Mother are not only for devotees, and for much-needed karma yogis; they're also for intellectuals, those with a more mental bent — and an integral Yoga must include in it and integrate the heart, the will, the mind and more, in a "methodized effort towards self-perfection."

"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure."

— Reinhold Niebuhr

covering the Distributed Extracts, dated 11 September 2008.

dated September 18, 2008.

Posted to the SAICE (Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education) Yahoo! group on September 25, 2008. As of April 13, 2009, the group has 200 non-bouncing members.

Readers are cautioned that this unannotated document contains numerous false assertions. For an annotated email by Ranade see The Core Problem. For in-depth analysis of this and similar documents see An Outbreak of Fundamentalism?.

Hello XXXX,

Whether someone reads (carefully or casually) or even glances through any piece of writing, it is for that particular person to choose. Such a person may even form an opinion and I have no quarrel with that.

But I would like to only add that if one simply flips through a book (that too one with more than 600 pages) and asserts and imposes an opinion after that flipping through, is it at least possible that the opinion may suffer from being a little too flippant? At least a possibility? …Is there maybe room for an iota of self-doubt?

dated 30 September 2008. Readers are cautioned that this unannotated document contains false assertions. For in-depth analysis of this and similar documents see An Outbreak of Fundamentalism?.

Email dated 1 October 2008. For in-depth analysis of this and similar documents see An Outbreak of Fundamentalism?.

Notice by Kittu Reddy displayed on the Ashram's notice board and mass emailed on 11 October 2008.