An American Historian in India

Despite his massive political and spiritual influence, the twentieth century Indian revolutionary turned mystic Sri Aurobindo Ghose has been curiously neglected in Western scholarship. Heehs, one of the founders of the Aurobindo Ashram Archives, corrects this by producing what is certain to become Aurobindo’s definitive biography. Aptly pluralized, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo recovers Aurobindo as a scholar, politician, revolutionary, poet, philosopher and sage by helpfully dividing the major periods of his life from his childhood in India and England to his final years as reclusive spiritual guru with the equally enigmatic Mother at their Auroville ashram. While certainly rewarding, wading through Aurobindo’s prolific writings can be a daunting task. Heehs, therefore, has done us a great service by organizing vast amounts of primary and secondary sources, including Aurobindo’s own diaries and unpublished letters, to produce a compelling biography that intelligently discusses the main themes of Aurobindo’s epic political, literary, and metaphysical canon. He is also to be congratulated for resisting the tendency to mythologize and perpetuate the romantic mystification of earlier hagiographies. Although clearly persuaded by Aurobindo’s spiritual weight and metaphysical vision, Heehs doesn’t avoid less flattering issues such as Aurobindo’s early commitment to political violence and the neglect of his wife. The result is a clear and detailed picture of a fascinating figure whose continuing religious relevance can be seen in the contemporary popularity of many of his pioneering East-West teachings: the evolution of consciousness, an integral approach to spiritual liberation and a socially engaged this-worldly mysticism. Particularly recommended for those interested in the religious, cultural and political landscape of twentieth-century India.

-- Ann Gleig, Rice University  

In 1916, Indian poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote of his contemporary Aurobindo Ghose: “He is a great man—one of the greatest we have—and therefore liable to be misunderstood even by his friends.” Tagore was right. The man later known as Sri Aurobindo—a Bengali-born, British-educated scholar, poet, revolutionary, philosopher, spiritual practitioner, and revered mystic—remained an enigma all his life. And in the decades since his death in 1950, a haze of hagiography, combined with the complexity of much of his own writing, has continued to obscure his greatness for many. Despite being a foundational influence in some of today’s most significant spiritual movements, including the human potential and integral movements, and one of the great forefathers of the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality, Aurobindo has never gained the recognition he deserves in the West.

Historian Peter Heehs has done the world a great service with the publication this year of a book that may finally make Sri Aurobindo and his work accessible to a broader audience. Appropriately titled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, this meticulously researched and beautifully written scholarly biography follows its subject through five periods and personas—Son, Scholar, Revolutionary, Yogi and Philosopher, and Guide. While biographies of Aurobindo have been published before, including a short one by Heehs himself, none has ever drawn on such a vast resource of original letters, diaries, and other primary sources. Heehs brings to the task a historian’s sensibility and unparalleled access to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archive, of which he was one of the founders. The result is a rich and fascinating portrait of a spiritual pioneer.  

The brief first part of the book describes Aurobindo’s early childhood in India—a “life” that lasted only seven years before his Anglophile father sent him to England with two of his brothers to receive a classical education, beginning his second life as a scholar. An outstanding student, Aurobindo won a scholarship to Cambridge. But while he had a great love for English and European literature, he had little love for the British and deeply resented their colonial grip on what he felt was the far superior culture of his birth. He wrote various “revolutionary speeches” while at Cambridge and briefly formed a secret society known as the Lotus and Dagger. Returning to India in his early twenties, he took an administrative job working for a maharajah in the remote province of Baroda. Immediately discovering “a temperamental feeling and preference for all things Indian,” he immersed himself in the history, culture, and spirit of his homeland.  

Part three begins with Aurobindo’s return to Calcutta, where he took up a life of political action. During his short but outspoken political career, he was labeled by the British the most dangerous man in India, although his revolutionary weapon was the pen rather than the sword. It was during this period that Aurobindo’s spiritual awakening also began. Heehs traces the inner tensions between his growing yearning for spiritual depth and his commitment to a life of action and engagement. India’s great spiritual traditions, particularly the Vedantic school, tended to equate spiritual attainment with a rejection of worldly concerns and engagement, which were seen as “maya,” or illusion. But Aurobindo, possessed of a rare degree of spiritual independence, had decided quite early in life that many of the great luminaries in India’s spiritual canon had gotten it wrong in concluding that the phenomenal world was unreal. In his own commentary on the Upanishads, he argued that there was no contradiction between the transcendent Absolute, or Brahman, and the palpable, material universe, and therefore there was no conflict between spiritual attainment and political engagement. His attempts at reinterpretation suffered an unexpected experiential setback, however, when he first sought the guidance of a yogi, hoping to “establish a relationship with a personal Godhead and learn to follow its guidance.” He got rather more than he was asking for. Plunged within twenty-four hours into “an eternal silence . . . drowning this semblance of a physical world,” Aurobindo found himself immersed in “precisely the experience [he] did not want from yoga.”

His descriptions of this experience, while powerful, are not unique or even unusual in spiritual literature. What is rare about Aurobindo’s spiritual awakening is that it occurred at the height of a fully engaged political career to which he returned shortly after this event. In fact, it was Aurobindo’s continuing involvement with the revolutionary movement that led to the next phase in his spiritual development. Jailed for a year as a result of a failed assassination plot involving his younger brother, Aurobindo suddenly found himself with time on his hands to devote to the practice of meditation. During those months in jail, his initial experience of the unreality of the world now deepened into a recognition of the Divine as being present in the world and in all its manifest objects. As he put it, with characteristically dry humor, “The only result of the unfriendly attention of the British government was that I found God.”

It was a further result of the unfriendly attention of the British government that Aurobindo was eventually forced to take refuge in the French enclave of Pondicherry, beginning his fourth “life” as a full-time yogi and philosopher. Drawing on Aurobindo’s own diaries from the time, which were discovered only during the 1970s and later published as Record of Yoga, Heehs offers a fascinating glimpse inside the spiritual practice of an extraordinarily dedicated explorer of consciousness. Aurobindo described this time of his life as “a laboratory experiment,” and his diaries are less accounts of his subjective experience and more like a researcher’s notes, recording in matter-of-fact language and great detail his successes and failures in the many different aspects of the complex yogic path he had devised for himself. These ranged from more traditional spiritual ideals such as the attainment of knowledge, bliss, and peace, to mental powers such as telepathy, and even to attempts to alter the physical body. Heehs describes how at one point “he had succeeded with some difficulty in changing the form of one of his feet by volition, but the old shape kept returning.” Whatever one makes of such claims—and the more grandiose myths that grew around Aurobindo and his enigmatic teaching partner, “the Mother,” during the final stage of his life—what shines through Heehs’ book is Aurobindo’s single-pointed dedication to his own path, a path that led him into uncharted territories of consciousness.

Heehs has done a masterful job of pulling aside the veils of myth and giving us what must be as close to the real Aurobindo as is possible to get from our twenty-first-century vantage point—the independent young man with a deep love for his country; the reluctant revolutionary thrust into the spotlight of history; the spiritual practitioner digging through “subconscient mud” with a scientist’s dedication; and the erudite scholar with a dry sense of humor and a love of cigars and the occasional glass of wine. Throughout his account, Heehs never strays from the historian’s perspective or lets his imagination fill in the gaps or add inner dimensions to events where no first-hand source remains. The result is that his subject, in the end, still retains a certain impenetrability, which in itself seems fitting for someone who, by all reports, never quite lost the stamp of a British gentleman.

Aurobindo once described his work as an attempt to “feel out for the thought of the future.” The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, besides being a great biography and a fascinating history lesson, is also, and perhaps most importantly, a doorway into his extraordinary spiritual philosophy and vision—a body of work that does indeed, at times, seem more connected to the emerging edge of consciousness and culture today than it does to the time and place in which it was written. Heehs does not reduce the complexity and subtlety of Aurobindo’s thought into convenient sound bites, but offers enough tastes of the beauty and power of his vision to hopefully inspire a new generation of spiritual activists to get more deeply acquainted with the work of one of their greatest forefathers.

-- Ellen Daly

© EnlightenNext, 2008