Reviews of books & articles including 'The Lives of Sri Aurobindo' by Peter Heehs, 'Better to Have Gone' by Akash Kapur, 'End of Illusions' by Luc Venet ..
Yoga in 21st Century
THEME/S
Peter Heehs • Published: 2003
The modern biographer has become history's great leveller: every summit must be reduced to a hill, every hero to a neurotic, every saint to a madman.
Given this trend, soon, the surest certificate of greatness may be a book dedicated to disproving it.
These books differ widely in subject, yet they are united by a common approach.
Each contains a central dark knot—a sinister note, an obscure impulse, often concealed yet always alive enough to make its presence felt. And that, ultimately, ruins everything.
It is as though the poverty of the author's mind is transferred to the subject, and the resulting distortion is triumphantly presented as an iconoclastic masterpiece. Just as some animals must gnaw their food before they can digest it, certain minds seem incapable of approaching an idea, an event, or a life without first grinding it through the mill of mediocrity and instinctively defiling it.
What is truly intriguing, however, is the way the modern intelligentsia has persuaded readers that sympathy produces hagiography, whereas aversion produces genuine biography. As though love necessarily corrupts judgment, while hostility guarantees objectivity.
Millennia of human evolution have brought us to this curious destination: little minds casting their little gaze upon a little world, insisting that their smallness is not merely inevitable but virtuous—the highest form of wisdom, the only permissible vision, and our sole salvation.
(A Counter to) Deliberate Distortions of Sri Aurobindo's Life and Yoga
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