Whether a religion is being created

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Larger Issues of "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" Controversy
by Debashish on Sun 01 Feb 2009 09:52 AM PST Permanent Link
Larger Issues of the Heehs Biography Controversy
Debashish Banerji, Rich Carlson, David Hutchinson, Angiras
The opposition to The Lives of Sri Aurobindo raises serious issues. A few of these include:
· Whether a religion is being created
· The devotional narrowing of the Integral Yoga
· Language use and the reification of experience
· Control of the representation of Sri Aurobindo
· The importance of minority views in the yoga community
· The need to proclaim Sri Aurobindo’s divinity
· Criteria for membership in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
· Changing the rules of the Ashram
· Hindutva influence
· The use or misuse of quotations by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
· Reading skills
· Balance and distortion
· The legitimacy of ad hominem attacks and methods of character assassination
· Effects on future discussions in the Integral Yoga community]

Our thanks to Angiras, Banerji, Carlson, & David (ABCD) for categorizing the major worrying concerns for closer examination. The hermeneutical hurdles too are receiving appropriate attention. Many other questions will also arise, especially from the other side, when an honest attempt is initiated to understand the whole affair and its ramifications.

A faulty practice often committed by leftist intellectuals is that they attribute all problems of the society to the malfunctioning of an illusory State or an abstract Capitalism. Many of the problems outlined here, in a similar vein, belong to humanity and not to “IY Community” alone.

Till now we presumed that Angiras is a pseudonym. Now that he has come out openly, can we know his antecedents? Anonymous comments are a nuisance over the Internet, and more so within an informed debate. [TNM]