Sri Aurobindo's name as a freedom fighter has faded into oblivion

The End of the History? by Mishel and Andrea   Thursday, 30 December 2010

Debashish Banerji immersed in the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother came with the theme - The European Enlightenment... and the Divinization of the Human - on 28th of December to participate in the second set of inter action series on Mutation II. From the philosophical point of view participants were diving into the subjects. Many common aspects emerged, but also many unanswered questions. Event was organized by Sri Aurobindo Centre for Studies. India and the World Bharat Nivas. 

Integral Leadership by Mari   Wednesday, 29 December 2010

Today's interview is with Partho, after a three days retreat with a group of approximately 20 Aurovilians that are involved in different fields of activities. Integral Leadership was the main team, and in his talk Partho shares with us what was the main idea in this workshop, what was the content and how did he felt after this experience. We also remember that today starts the Twilight Festival. And talking about festival, Auroville Film Festival has an appeal to the community: they need movies suggestions that are align with Auroville's ideal.

AurovilleRadio - Sharing Auroville`s life and spirit

For two days - tonight and tomorrow - at Sri Aurobindo Auditorium at Bharat Nivas film lovers will come on their expense by festival of short films of ... Short Film by Miriam   Tuesday, 28 Dec

Twiglight 10, a festival of short films it will be held at Bharat Nivas on 29th and 30th of Decmeber, and we would have a chance to see some excellent work of students from Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication in New Dehli. Before the screening on both nights will be panel discussions, and at Galerry Square Circle, Kale Kendra tonight at 4pm is an inauguration of photography exhibition. At Arka library tonight at 7pm and also on Thursday children and puppet theater lovers can see classical fairy tale "Goldilocks” by KOEKLA puppet theater from Holland. Read more

Towards the Rebirth of India: Introducing Sri Aurobindo's Creative ... By Aju Mukhopadhyay
In the face of huge publicity and propaganda in favour of some freedom fighters whose names are the main thrust of some political party, making them cult figures, Sri Aurobindo's name as a freedom fighter has faded into oblivion. ...

'God is supernatural' Express Buzz Subhakeerthana S Express News Service 28 Dec 2010

Acclaimed musician Bharat Sundar believes that there are different ways of cultivating control over one's mind: […] Meditation and awakening

I am not a temple traveller but I love visiting Pondicherry and Auroville. Meditation is important to everyone as it sets a path of self-realisation. It is said that the deeper the meditation, the deeper would be the healing. The mind and  body are intimately connected, and the relationship of the mind to the body in meditation is very interesting. The mind creates a situation in which we see the body as peaceful and beautiful.

Stress-free, hassle-free Hindustan Times New Delhi, December 28, 2010

The school, which is based on teachings of Sri Aurobindo, scores high on almost every parameter considered on the survey. The teachers at Mother's ...

However, some parents feel that sometimes Mother’s gets carried away in trying to keep its traditions alive.

“Students at Mother’s lead a sheltered, almost utopian existence till they graduate whereas in 21st century you need to be a little street smart to survive,” said Sharma. “That go-getter attitude is lacking in students here and the school needs to think of how to change with changing times while keeping its philosophy intact.” It’s also one of the few schools in the city where selection of prefects is not a result of academic achievement alone — leadership skills and co-curricular activities are vital too. 

The school counts sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan, cricketer Gautam Gambhir and writer Khushwant Singh among its alumni.

For Sri Aurobindo, the ultimate social agency remained Spirit

Dealing with Modern Times Through Spirit By Adam Dietz

In his relation to modernity Aurobindo is a powerful thinker. He shows the many of the same tendencies that historically permeate the traditions of Hinduism: diligent commitment to the highest realms of human existence, a supreme all pervading Divinity within all creation, discipline in uniting with the Divinity, furthering the relationship of others to the Divinity through sympathy, and intense inner concentration upon the various realms of consciousness, these among many other similarities. However, Aurobindo becomes the exemplar of the Hindu tradition, an ambassador to modernity by expanding its ideas, refocusing the emphasis, while adhering to the tradition of welcoming new ideas innovations. Aurobindo incorporates evolution, secular materialism, social and political concern into the vast tradition. […]

For Aurobindo the ultimate act of social concern was immersion in spirit and the manifestation of spirit in all realms. In union with spirit, guided by spirit, one would naturally find the best course to take when confronted with strange and difficult modernization. For Aurobindo, the ultimate social agency remained Spirit, and the propagation of Spirit in others. This union with Spirit, Spiritual teaching and its manifestation was the One ultimate, incorruptible answer to all social concerns past, present and future. Posted by Adam Dietz at 5:35 AM

Integral Consciousness: Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and how Haridas Chaudhuri brought it to the West by Mark Kitchell (Director) | Format: DVD

Integral Consciousness is the story of a spiritual philosophy developed by one of the great sages of the 20th Century, Sri Aurobindo - and how his yoga was brought to the West by Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri.

The film includes a history of Integral Yoga, from Sri Aurobindo's origins as a revolutionary leader determined to free India from British rule, to his founding an ashram at Pondicherry and the beginnings of Auroville. 

The story also tells of Dr. Chaudhuri's twenty-five years in America, bringing together east and west. The film presents pivotal figures in America including Alan Watts and Michael Murphy, and recounts the birth of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), the Esalen Institute, and the Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF). 

The second part of the film is a concise explication of Integral Yoga and key concepts like the Psychic Being, the Supermind, and Conscious Evolution. Archival material of Dr. Chaudhuri is featured as well as interviews with highly regarded luminaries including Debashish Banerji, Hilary Anderson, Michael Murphy, Aster Patel, Brant Cortright and Rama Jyoti Vernon.

This 55-minute film is the result of a grassroots effort by alumni of CIIS and CIF who wanted to preserve the legacy of Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri and spread the word about integral yoga. Highly respected documentary filmmaker Mark Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties) was engaged to write and direct the project.

Integral Consciousness was shot in Pondicherry and Auroville, India, and in San Francisco, California. Portions of the film were nationally televised in the United States in April 2009. Proceeds from this film are helping to make a new film, now in production, featuring the evolution of consciousness and conscious evolution. 

This is the dawning of the Age of Integral Consciousness... And everyone should see this important and engaging film!

Entertaining and educational, April 23, 2010 By  JGarcia "JGarcia" (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

I really like this film... with sensitivity and maestry it unites interviews with great scholars on the history and philosophy of Integral Yoga by Sri Aurobindo. 

The film is entertaining and educational. It is extremely useful for those who are familiar with the subject and those who are curious about the spiritual ideas of Sri Aurobindo. 

Anthropology must explore the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical universals

Kant’s relevance for anthropology today from The Memory Bank by Keith Hart

Kant held that humanity’s hardest task was the administration of justice worldwide. In the meantime, anthropology must explore the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical universals on which such an idea of human unity might be founded. The categorical imperative to be good (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) provided a moral link between individuals and this emergent inclusive order.

Kant’s cosmopolitan project

Immanuel Kant started out as a geography lecturer in the Baltic port of Königsberg. He published his first book at the age of 57, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and it marked his arrival as a philosopher. Kant is the source for the notion that society may be as much an expression of individual subjectivity as a collective force out there. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. In his Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason he writes:

“Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects…. but what if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?” (Kant 2008:22)

In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience and in all the judgments we have made. This is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed on us from above.

Kant published Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in 1798. The book was based on lectures he had given at the university since 1772. His aim was to attract the general public to an independent discipline whose name he more than anyone contributed to academic life. Remarkably, histories of anthropology have rarely mentioned this work, perhaps because the discipline has evolved so far away from Kant’s original premises. But it would pay us to take his Anthropology seriously, if only for its resonance with our own times.

Shortly before, Kant wrote To perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch (1795). The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw its own share of “globalization” — the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the rise of British industry and the international movement to abolish slavery. Kant knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for war, yet he responded to this sense of the world coming closer together by proposing how humanity might form society as world citizens beyond the boundaries of states. He held that “cosmopolitan right”, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, on the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally.

“The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” (Kant 2003:18).

This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago, can now be seen as the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation-state.

Earlier Kant wrote an essay, “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose” (1784) which included the following propositions:

“1. In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual.

2. The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.

3. The latest problem for mankind, the solution of which nature forces us to seek, is the achievement of a civil society which is capable of administering law universally.

4. This problem is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.

5. A philosophical attempt to write a universal world history according to a plan of nature which aims at perfect civic association of mankind must be considered to be possible and even as capable of furthering nature’s purpose.”

Our world is much more socially integrated than two centuries ago and its economy is palpably unequal. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem to be indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century is an urgent one and anthropological visions should play their part in that.

Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s work was in jeopardy

Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang Georges van Vrekhem talks about 'Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang'. by Andrea Friday, 10 December 2010

The latest talk of Georges van Vrekhem on Thursday December 9 was about Sri Aurobindo's take on the Big Bang theory. Sri Aurobindo’s works are seldom approached for their scientific contents, yet he has followed the evolution of scientific thought up close. He wrote at the time of Einstein and the quantum mechanic revolution. In Savitri, his ‘testament’, Sri Aurobindo takes a clear stand for the Big Bang theory, even before the general consensus it has today.

Descent Into Death by Andrea and Anitha  Wednesday, 08 December 2010

On Saturday, December 4, Georges van Vrekhem’s talk was on “Sri Aurobindo’s Descent into Death”. Georges recounted that soon after the Second World War, the world, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, was “worse than worst”. In fact, Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s work was in jeopardy -- and it was not his intention “to give his sanction to another fiasco”. This is one of the most dramatic episodes in spiritual history and the history of humankind, documented hour-by-hour and commented upon by the Mother herself. Georges explained Sri Aurobindo’s voluntary descent into death, only six years later, the manifestation of the Supermind with its enormous future consequences.

Auroville & the Quiet Healing Center - Nandita Shah

Welcome to my website. This has been designed to introduce you to me, my philosphy and my work and also to let you understand my vision of healing through ...

Homeopathy encompasses a wholeness that touches the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of an individual. Although it is used effectively to treat physical disease, it recognizes the connection between the disease and the emotional imbalance. It is truly the balanced binding together of the whole that allows the freedom of expression in the nature of the being. 

Comment on Raising a child prodigy by Supriyo Bose from Comments for Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Supriyo Bose

Dear Sandeep,

Delightful to read Jane Austen starting your post. Speaking of which, did you know that “Mother’s Service Society” has been running a series of programs on “Pride and Prejudice”, it seems, for some years now?
And now, they are using the insights and lessons in that book to teach Sri Aurobindo’s “The Life Divine”. You can get the recordings of those talks (by Garry Jacob) here: http://karmayogi.net/ -Supriyo