Originally posted as a comment by Lynda Lester on Debashish Banerji's Stand wrt The Lives of Sri Aurobindo.

I pre-ordered Peter's book from Amazon, who shipped it to me the day it became available. The ink was fresh when I got it; I read it in less than a week.

For me, it was a page-turner; it was better than Harry Potter. I thought it was awesome; I thought it was magnificent. It moved me deeply.

I have read so many books about Sri Aurobindo, so many books full of devotion, so many that exalted him as the avatar; indeed, I have held him to be the avatar from the moment I started Integral Yoga, and have never had a moment's doubt. This certitude goes far beyond mental belief; numerous times I have palpably experienced him as the Ishwara, pranamed to him, been ravished by his divinity. Which is to say, I am permeated by love and adoration for Sri Aurobindo, and doing his yoga is the meaning and purpose of my life.

But as I said, I have read so many books that have talked about Sri Aurobindo as the Divine; that's been done so many times. (See authors such as Purani, Nirodbaran, Iyengar, Van Vrekhem, Satprem, D.K. Roy, and compilations such as Kumari's "Vignettes of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother" that document miracles, grace, and profound first-hand experiences of disciples who saw God made manifest in Sri Aurobindo.)

What I had never read was such a dense and fine-grained, high-resolution account of Sri Aurobindo's human life, based on meticulous research, drawing from obscure papers found in moldering attics and long-forgotten archives, written with impeccable scholarship, and filled with rich insight, a multilayered historical/cultural perspective, comprehensive cross-referencing, and a thousand footnotes.

I think it's worth its weight in gold.

What this book gives is a closer look at divine incarnation in its developmental aspects.

It's written from a contemporaneous point of view — i.e., what was happening at the time, without foreknowledge of what was going to happen. Which means that early in his life, no, Sri Aurobindo didn't know he was going to discover a new plane of consciousness and develop a yoga to bring forth a new species on earth — he was throwing dice in London, bored with petty administrative tasks in Baroda, arrested for sedition in Calcutta ... and later, poverty-stricken in Pondy. In 1927, 1933, 1934, 1935, and 1938, he wrote that he was busy supramentalizing the overmind and clearing out the inconscient; in 1947 he wrote that he was still working on it — an enormous job that was taking far longer than anticipated.

What all this shows is that even for the avatar, yoga means facing challenges and unknowns, conquering obstacles, and going forward with faith and perseverance -- sometimes against tremendous odds and apparent impossibilities.

Sri Aurobindo wasn't born free from imperfection; he had a human nature. The purpose of his yoga is transformation of human nature; he was his own first guinea pig. Because it worked for him, we know it can work for us.

In my mind, this one of the things that Peter's book illustrates: there is hope for us humans; we can succeed in the yoga. Sri Aurobindo has been there, done that, and proved it's possible.

We don't have to feel bad that we struggle, that it's difficult to take the proper course of action, that we don't know what's going to happen — Sri Aurobindo went through the kind of trials and ordeals we face every day, and he conquered.

Seeing how he evolved, step by tiny step, from humanhood to superhumanhood, seems to me to be most wonderful; a breadcrumb trail of how Sri Aurobindo's outer nature changed.

Mother once said something to the effect of, "I don't want to be put on a pedestal and worshipped; I want people to follow my example." Insisting that Sri Aurobindo should only be put on a pedestal and worshipped, not acknowledged for and followed in the difficult day-to-day work of evolutionary yoga, seems to me to be contrary to the spirit of his path.

I don't know about anyone else, but comparing my own puny, incompetent, foibled human instrumentation to that of a realized being who never stumbled or felt bad and was wise and all-powerful from birth would make yoga seem futile. (That indeed is a rationale I've heard from some, who have said it was fine for Sri Aurobindo to work on transformation because he was the avatar, but it's an unrealistic endeavor for ordinary sadhaks. Sri Aurobindo, of course, strongly rejected this argument.) Rather, it gives me vibrant hope to see that Sri Aurobindo actually did take on human nature and that his yoga was real and in earnest ... and it worked.

One final point. By now, the idea that Sri Aurobindo was the avatar and brought the truth to earth has been repeated so consistently for so long that it has become a strong mental formation, even a doctrine. If we are satisfied with doctrine alone, we won't develop the mental flexibility and suppleness that is part of the yoga of self-perfection; our mind will not grow into a mind of light. Living in the safety of simple generalizations and conventional wisdom, we might forego bringing clarity and precision into our mental processes, and miss the opportunity to develop a mental faculty that can better receive and transmit the higher illumination.

In my opinion Peter's book brings a new and fresh air into the mental atmosphere of the Integral Yoga community; for me, it is invigorating.

I also think that in the vastness of Sri Aurobindo, there is plenty of room for many approaches to him and many books; no one work could possibly tell the whole story, or for that matter satisfy all readers.

***

P.S. In 1,000 years, oh! how grateful humanity will be for these details! How much more it will mean to have the conscientiously researched story of Sri Aurobindo's life by someone who was intimately familiar with original manuscripts and tracked down authentic source documents around the world, than a simple, "We know Sri Aurobindo was the incarnation of God, although we've only a limited set of facts about how he lived — unfortunately, many of the records have been lost to white ants, mold, and time, and we must rely in large measure on tradition and legend."