Heehs’s presumptuous critical judgements on both Sri Aurobindo’s life and works

Jeremy R. Carrette’s Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality review by Michel Carrier from Posthuman Destinies by rcarlson

The Death of God announced by Nietzsche and the Death of Man announced by Foucault return humans to their finitude. The double-absence of God and Man is perhaps the Nietszchean moment of a return to a divine form of thinking, where “ religious ideas become ways of expressing the body which can be both a technology of domination and a more positive technology of self, a religious aesthetic which animates matter ” (p. 126).

For a biography of Sri Aurobindo to be valid... —by David Johnston

from Mirror of Tomorrow :: Regarding Peter Heehs

I have come to the conclusion, nonetheless, that The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is too often reductive and far from adequate for two main reasons, notably Heehs’s presumptuous critical judgements on both Sri Aurobindo’s life and works and, secondly, he essentially ignores Sri Aurobindo’s life as an inner myth. I have the feeling that not only did the author capitulate to American academia, but that he personally writes without conviction. The answer to the challenge of Peter Heehs’s biography of Sri Aurobindo is not polemical debate, however, but a more valid biography,—one, written by a true child of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, which portrays Sri Aurobindo’s (and the Mother’s) life as an inner myth, while not going beyond mediation and explication of his powerful and integral teachings. 

Integral Psychology – Theorizing its Disciplinary Boundaries

from Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji

The following is a revised transcript of a talk given at the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco in 2008 and carried in the current edition of Sraddha, a journal of the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata. In this, I bring into dialog the epistemic boundaries of the western academic discipline of Psychology and Sri Aurobindo's formulation of Integral Yoga, so as to reflect on the disciplinary formation of a field of Integral Psychology. What would such a field hold out and how would it impact the existing assumptions of both Psychology and Yoga? The insertion of such a discipline into the academy is not a trivial task. It is a project fraught with danger and possibility, which needs to be carefully negotiated. – db

The Climate of History: Four Theses by Dipesh Chakrabarty

from Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji

The Climate of History: Four Theses Dipesh Chakrabarty. Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago and a professorial [read more...]