Somewhere down the road we seem to have lost our resistance to invading barbarians— resistance that would have remained impregnable if only we had been truly sincere in our allegiance to the Divine. This allegiance is now in shreds as we have succumbed to the temptation of pursuing self-centred interests no matter what the cost or consequences. This is today our greatest failing and weakness, our gaping Achilles heel, as it were, which has invited the blow in the form of Peter. How else do we explain our blind eye, nay, even active support to this mole planting himself in the Ashram and burrowing with impunity in his vile mission of vilifying the Masters? Our inexplicable indulgence of him for as long as (hold your breath!) four decades has now exploded in our face. This is a grave crisis of many dimensions—a crisis quite surprisingly not so perceived by a venerable section in the Ashram, a crisis that has nonetheless convulsed devotees and enlightened countrymen alike as never before, a crisis that has also betrayed the worst in us.
Will, knowledge and love are the three divine powers in human nature and the life of man, and they point to the three paths by which the human soul rises to the divine. The integrality of them, the union of man with God in all the three, must therefore, as we have seen, be the foundation of an integral Yoga.
You speak of the Divine’s stern demands and hard conditions—but what severe demands and iron conditions you are laying on the Divine! You practically say to him, “I will doubt and deny you at every step, but you must fill me with your unmistakable Presence; I will be full of gloom and despair whenever I think of you or the yoga, but you must flood my gloom with your rapturous irresistible Ananda; I will meet you only with my outer physical mind and consciousness, but you must give me in that the Power that will transform rapidly my whole nature.” Well, I don’t say that the Divine won’t or can’t do it, but if such a miracle is to be worked, you must give him some time and just a millionth part of a chance.
Vijay taught Mathematics and Marathi in the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education from 1963 till he breathed his last on 18th June 2011. He was a sincere and dedicated follower of Sri Aurobindo and Sri Mataji and always tried to perform the job, honestly and sincerely, assigned to him by the Mother. He was a very silent person, normally appeared to be engrossed in some thought as an absentminded professor. At least four articles written by him in 1995/96, which I have seen, for Mother India: The Pursuit of Agni and Soma; Aum, the Mystic Syllable; Indian Temples and Man, the Embodied Soul; Shiva & the Myth of Phallus Worship; these are indicative of his scholarly pursuits. He has written some poems in English, two of which are given in the attachment. He has also written an article in Marathi Sanjeevan on Integral Yoga. In addition to this he had also translated Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson into Marathi as Divya Shikari. He was also very much interested in politics, National and International, in reference to social progress of Humanity and had written a very nice note in a letter to me on Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.
The upshot of this entire discussion is simple: to dismiss the specious argument that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is based on facts, facts gathered from various sources over a period of time, even scraping the containers where the official records are kept. Of course it will be ridiculous to look for these in a creative work such as Savitri, a notion wrongly harboured by the biographer. In the process, he has further exposed himself by calling Savitri a fictional creation. This collection of facts may be a laudable piece of work, but perhaps has absolutely no relevance with the life of a spiritual person, here Sri Aurobindo the Yogi. But even in the world of facts there are issues. Selection of facts from reams of papers is never a straightforward process and subjective decisions are never uncommon. So, the situation is like this: the author himself dismisses the aspects of values which is tantamount to dismissing them from his life; presentation of facts gets tailored to suit the biases of the writer making these again false and fake, counterfeit if one looks at them with sufficient care. We feel extremely sorry that such a book on Sri Aurobindo should have come out with the official permission from the Ashram authorities for the use of the copyright material. This must be revoked.
First of all what matters in a spiritual man’s life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time (that is what historicity or biography comes to, does it not?) but what he was and did within; it is only that that gives any value to his outer life at all. It is the inner life that gives to the outer any power it may have, and the inner life of a spiritual man is something vast and full and, at least in the great figures, so crowded and teeming with significant things that no biographer or historian could ever hope to seize it all or tell it.
Mirror of Tomorrow 