Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 06 May 2009 05:31 AM PDT
There were several distortions of the truth in a recent letter (May 1st) by Sraddhalu regards the IYF site and SCIY and the associated people responsible for them. While the former site is of interest the later site SCIY is what concerns me because it is the only one in which I have participated in as a co-constructor and editor. Aside from the fact that these assertions are clearly libelous, I wish here to demonstrate to Sraddhalu the reasons for his factual errors, in the hope he will correct them in future correspondence.I will only speak to the issues he raises against SCIY and hope the other distortion of facts will be addressed elsewhere.
Sraddhalu Point 1:
"After reading within the context as offered by Heehs, most people remained unconvinced. R Y Deshpande, the most senior contributor of SCIY was threatened and forced out for not falling in line with the SCIY “fundamentalist†view. All his blogs were deleted. Many other contributors of SCIY left. Critical comments were deleted from all blogs and only a sanitised pro-Heehs version survives today with no significant voice of opposition.)"
R: This is an entirely false statement. Deshpande was asked to remove the more offensive post from his Mr. Objective series on the book that stretched out for over a period of a week in late September in which Peter Heehs was trashed personally every day. Among other invective Heehs was labeled asuric and diabolical and Mr Objective was used over and over again as an pernicious way to describe him. During the same period he reprinted large selective quotations from the book, without respect to copyright laws or context.
I remember the incident well because at the time it was my hope to retire from SCIY and I was only -and still am- happy to do so had I not received an email from the author notifying me of the copyright violations.
I then read the post and openly asked Deshpande to refrain from personal attacks and specifically to remove the copyrighted material from the Heehs text. Here is how he responded in an email of 9/25/09 in which two other editors of SCIY were CC;d, so there are witnesses!:
RY Deshpande wrote:
Dear colleagues
** *Ref: The Lives of Sri Aurobindo—a Controversial Biography by Peter Heehs *
*https://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2008/9/17/3889102.html*
If you have any problem about this posting of mine at the sciy you can pull it down fully. These problems could be wrong referencing, partial referencing, biased referencing, distortion of the text, malice against an individual or a group of people, flawed intentions, inflammatory nature of writing, inappropriate mannerism, copyright, arrogant posturing, lack of understanding of the principles of the Integral Yoga, lack of Culture, lack of Science, lack of spiritual calm and poise, or whatever. You are absolutely free to go ahead and remove it—_but under one condition_.
The condition is, you must _first_ pull down all my postings made during the last two years or so, every bit, hundreds of articles and comments. As founders of the sciy you have the privilege, and of course the responsibility, and I've no regret if this is done.
Thanks and bye
warmly
RY Deshpande
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Here is how I responded to Deshpande, clearly asking him to reconsider his position:
Deshpande
Lets see who was the last person who in outrage quit SCIY demanding in a huff that all his postings be pulled downed because one of his post was altered?.....hmmm Oh yes it was me!
In retrospect it was a rash outburst on my part that could have been solved much more peacefully if my vital impulses had not hit the self-destruct button without proper self-reflection. If lessons can be learned from my mistakes here it would be a good thing, so my suggestion is to take some time to think about this one
Of all the items below that you list as offenses transgressed, the only ones I mentioned were on the specific issue of the Heehs biography:
wrong referencing, partial referencing, biased referencing, distortion of the text, malice against an individual
In no way were any suggestion made about any of the other items you list here your other post have been respected as a scholar, however it was impossible for me to ignore the 20 pages of mis-representation of the text that I received yesterday that I verified, and the copyright violations with Columbia University Press. These were what the specific items referred to and I feel correctly so.. My feeling is that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding by many people in Pondi of the intention of the Heehs material, which Deb did a great job explaining in his post.
In fact there is a probably a misunderstanding about my own postings because of my slams against the religion -which are done not against SA/M - but because I have taken a polarized position largely polemic against this tendency in the yoga. Because it is my belief that this is a way to build a bridge to much wider culture desperately in need of a perspective such as Sri Aurobindo's but which would be rejected if put in terms of another religion.
So even if we seem to working at cross purposes, if it is truely an integral perspective it can handle all sides. I believe what is most important is the intention behind the post and I do not believe either Heehs, myself, or yourself has written anything with any negative intention toward the work of SA/M its only we are doing so from our own unique limited circumstances and perspectives. If we can all at least cede these positions and intentions to one another and give each other the benefit of the doubt we will be just fine
Rich
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Deshpande's response to this was to pull down his post himself.
I responded:
RYD
In the interest of harmony, thank you!!!!
Rich
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Deshpande then voluntarily left SCIY and now S make the false claim that he was threatened????? and we pulled his post down!
Well Deshpande, you are free to come back and post on SCIY at anytime as moreover you are also welcome to do Sraddhalu. In fact during the last 8 months you claim that SCIY has divisively handled this issue you could have responded at anytime. Remember it is not SCIY who supports censorship as do the detractors of the Heehs book.
You can post anything although a discussion will most likely follow. In fact this forum has been available to all posters at any time so long as personal defamatory names such as asura, diabolic, demonic etc are not used, or one does not demean another for the sake of spite. I have deleted post from both sides when this has occurred. In fact if there is something up now that offends anyone let me know and if it violates the blog etiquette it will be removed.
S Point 2:
The choice of SCIY as their main platform to promote and defend Heehs is revealing. Consider that SCIY ridicules Sri Aurobindo’s vision of physical transformation as “naïve†and “post-romantic†and therefore obsolete using exactly the same misleading arguments as Heehs in The Lives in an article written by none other than Rich Carlson, signatory of the IYF circular! Not one among Heehs’ group on SCIY – including Debashish Banerjee, Richard Hartz or Ulrich Mohrhoff – has refuted those charges or exposed their deception (in fact Debashish Banerjee praises it highly!), implying their full acceptance and participation in such ridicule of Sri Aurobindo through factual and logical misrepresentation. It is therefore not surprising that these very people are now desperate to defend Heehs’ academic fraud and will go to any extent of indecency and more lies to protect their own compromise.
R: Again S's language is libelous calling us indecent and liars.
But aside from that no one has ridiculed Sri Aurobindo's vision of transformation rather it has been suggested that if Sri Aurobindo were alive today his view of the physical transformation might not exclude technological intervention.
The supporting passage in Life Divine is:
“It has been noted that the human mind has already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution of new types of plant and animal: it as created new forms of environment, developed by knowledge and considerable changes in its mentality. It is not an impossibility that man should aid nature consciously also in its own physical and spiritual evolution and transformation.†(844)
In fact one sees in this chapter written in the 1940s a slightly different take on evolution of the physical than his text from 1915. I argue in my paper that the human body today because of environmental changes (aka modern sanitation) and modern medicine (aka immunization) has in fact evolve from its embodiment of 1915. So yes the transformation of the body is different today than it was almost 100 years ago,
Thats my reading and my clearly stated interpretations of his text which may be different from yours but that does not mean they ridicule Sri Aurobindo at all. Because I hold Sri Aurobindo in the absolute highest regard.
In fact it seems to me that the word ridicule is used because rather than seeing it as simply another interpretation, since it differs from a literal reading of the text, it must demean the author. Such literal readings of text that attack all other interpretations are precisely what is being defined as a fundamentalist approach to Sri Aurobindo.
S' Point 3:
None of us has ever criticised Heehs or his group on a personal level in dignified recognition of our human differences, and out of respect for those that we continue to view as co-travellers on the Way.
R: Well here are a few direct quotes from Tusars web site which seems to be programed to show up the 3rd link down when googling SCIY to specifically hurl invectives about the SCIY crew:
I am not sure why these folks supporting the anti-Heehs movement for some reason choose to remain anonymous? But here goes a sample:
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Us "religion"; they "political"":
It is interesting that except for Debashish, all those who are supporting Heehs on SCIY are non-Indians. Some of them like the insufferable Koantum (and Debashish as well) have been insulting Indian disciples in veiled and sometimes not so-veiled language. These people at SCIY are making a mockery of dialog and are fast making this into an Indian vs non-indian affair which is most unfortunate. Carlson is the evil genius who has been at this for a long time and it remains to be seen if he will succeed. The SCIY geniuses insult and mock and disparage all those opposed to Heehs and then ask why it was that nobody wished to have a dialog with them. Posted by Anonymous to Savitri Era at 6:29 AM, December 02, 2008
Posted by Tusar N Mohapatra at 9:22 AM
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Anonymous said...
The real truth of the matter is that the SCIY idealogues are a bunch of people who believe that nothing is sacred (isn't that also the American way of life and as exemplified by the crass remarks of RCarlson!) and that the white man knows best. And that Sri Aurobindo is reverential as long as he pleases the intellectual fantasies and political views of these cantakerous people. The SCIY might have participation of both westerners (mostly american) and the "subcontinent"/Indians but the question is how many of those of write approvingly and in a shamefully deferential way after every one of Carlson's venomous attacks are not American or European (Debashish is an exception but then he appears to have been infected by American academic discourses that have erased his common sense and any intuition that he might otherwise have had). Also, questions arise as to RCarlson's own attitudes towards Indians. Taken together, the SCIY site is clearly leery of Indians and wishes to be aggressive in a typical non-Indian way. i.e. Shame and bring to "justice" all opponents because we are intellectuals and HAVE to be right! What a joke!
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Well here I stand accused of being an evil genius and an Indian hater (I better tell my Indian family to avoid me when I come to visit)
At any rate I have heard far worse things said about me and have seen far worse libelous charges written against Heehs. So your statement about the anti-Heehs forces being stoically polite is in fact a distortion of the truth!
Conclusion: SCIY has called for a dialog throughout this whole sordid affair. They have never been taken up on the challenge because of what seems to be such hatred of Heehs.
Frankly the personal issues with Heehs aint my thing. I reluctantly became involved in this affair after being pulled back into SCIY, after that came the violence against Heehs, the tire slashing, the door being broken down, and him being assaulted followed on by the court case against him. (all of these incidents of course also left out of your letter) Having no other knowledge of Heehs history at the Ashram how do you think that sounded? An author having property, and body attacked before throwing a court case on him for writing a book? And all these actions supported by people whom I had really respected.
The whole matter is outrageous to have taken place in a so called spiritual institution, I would desperately wish it would have or could still be taken care of therein.
I cant apologize for what Heehs is accused of over the past 30 years in the community, I have no idea of those events. But the fact is if this matter would have been dealt with in a civil manner in your Ashram, I would not have spent so much valuable time moderating post on this issue, Frankly the situation is disgusting and -court cases or not- I hope it is resolved soon so I never hear about it again!!!
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