Sraddha - A Quarterly devoted to an exposition of the
teachings of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo Vol.4 No. 2 24 November, 2012 Sri Aurobindo Bhavan 8
Shakespeare Sarani • Kolkata 700 071
Editorial
When matter for the present issue of Sraddha had
been finalised, we received news from Auroville of the passing away of Georges
van Vrekhem on 31 August following a cardiac arrest. Georges was ailing and
had been a heart patient for over 20 years. A voracious reader and a prolific
writer, Georges was a true Aurobindonian to the core, a devoted child of the
Mother and Sri Aurobindo and one of the few exegetes of their teachings. Among
his many publications, the two that stand out most are Beyond Man, the life
and work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, which, according to the late Amal
Kiran, can be considered as two of the best books that have been written on
the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. He was a close personal friend and I will miss him
sorely as would the entire Aurobindonian community in the Ashram, Auroville
and indeed worldwide.
Contents
The Law Of
The Way Sri Aurobindo 9
Sri Aurobindo: The Recluse Of Pondicherry
Barindra Kumar Ghose 11
The Last Embodied “Darshan” Amal Kiran 15
Gitanuvachan – Parts 5 & 6 Srimat Anirvan 18
Avatar Debashish Banerji 43
The idea of “holding together the world,” what is
referred to in the Gita as lokasamgraha, implies the secret power of unity
present in the Becoming and at work to reconstitute through evolution the
Conscious Harmony of the Purusha or Divine Person whose Sacrifice is this
cosmos.
God And The
World Joan Price 69
Sri Aurobindo: Looking For The True Vedanta Anita Chakraborty Goswami 76
Bringing Brahman Down To Earth: Lilavada In Colonial India Nalini Bhushan & Jay L.
Garfield 84
Involution And Evolution: Murali Sivaramakrishnan
102
The Human Body – A Spiritual View Alok Pandey 111
Psychology: Five Major Indian Contributions Matthijs Cornelissen 118
Towards A Spiritual Mankind Usharanjan Chakraborty
141
How An Egyptian Discovered Sri Aurobindo Zackaria Moursi 148
Georges van Vrekhem – An Obituary 153
Notes on Authors 157
Cover : Country of the Mind by Giles Herdman
Anita Chakraborty obtained her MA in Philosophy in 1st class from North Bengal University securing a gold medal. She subsequently
completed her M.Phil from thesame university. She is presently working as
Associate Professor in the Dept. of Philosophy, Chanchal
College , Chanchal, Malda, West Bengal .
Jay Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the
Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Logic Programme and of the Five College
Tibetan Studies in India Programme at Smith College ,
Professor in the graduate faculty of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts ,
Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne
University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central
Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. He teaches and pursues research in the philosophy of
mind, foundations of cognitive science, logic, philosophy of language, Buddhist
philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, theoretical and applied ethics and
epistemology. Garfield ’s
most recent books are his translation, with the ven Prof. Geshe
Ngawang Samten of the FourteenthFifteenth Century Tibetan philosopher Tsong
Khapa’s commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika (Ocean of Reasoning ) and
Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford University
Press 2002 and 2006), respectively.
Garfield
is also working on projects on the development of the theory of mind in children with particular attention to the
role of pretence in that process; the acquisition of evidentials and its relation to the
development of theory of mind (with Jill deVilliers, Thomas Roeper and Peggy Speas), the
history of 20th Century Indian philosophy (with Nalini Bhushan) and the nature of
conventional truth in Madhyamaka (with Graham Priest and Tom Tillemans). Other books in progress include the Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (editor), Readings in Buddhist
Philosophy (co-editor with William Edelglass for Oxford University
Press), Trans-Buddhism: Transmission, Translation and Transformation (co-editor with
Nalini Bhushan and Abraham Zablocki, for the University
of Massachusetts Press),
and Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic (co-authored with Jim Henle and the
late Thomas Tymoczko)
Joan Price has a Ph.D. from Arizona State
University . She is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Mesa Community College
and has written several books, academic and for young readers. She is the author of Philosophy
Through the Ages, a college textbook and Truth is a Bright Star, a Native American tale
for children. Joan has been a student of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for 45 years and is
an animal lover. She lives in Scottsdale , Arizona ,
U.S.A.
Murali Sivaramakrishnan, poet, painter and critic,
Professor, Department of English, Pondicherry University ,
Pondicherry , India is the author of The Mantra
of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics (1997) and a
number of critical essays and four volumes of poetry. He is the founder President of
ASLE India (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) and has
travelled widely and participated in several conferences and workshops within the country
and abroad. He has held more than 14 solo exhibitions of his works in India and
abroad. He has authored over 100 research papers and his academic publications
include: Figuring the Female: Women’s Discourse, Art and Literature (2005) co-edited;
Tradition and Terrain: Aesthetic Continuities (2005) co-edited; Nature and Human
Nature: Literature, Ecology, Meaning (2008); Learning to Think like Myself (2010);
Ecological Criticism for the Present: Literature, Nature and the Critical Inquiry (2011)
co-edit; Image and Culture :The Dynamics of Literary, Aesthetic and Cultural
Representation (2011). Inter-Readings: Text, Context, Significance (2012) co-edited. He can be reached at smurals@gmail.com Website: www.smurali.cc.cc; http://smuralis.wordpress.com.
Nalini Bhushan earned her B.A. in Economics at Stella Maris
College , and her M.A. and M.Phil. in Philosophy at Madras
Christian College ,
Chennai , India . She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University
of Michigan , Ann Arbor . Bhushan is currently Professor of Philosophy at Smith
College and Co-Director of the South Asia Concentration. Her research addresses questions in
the philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics, the philosophy of science, and 19th and
20th century Indian philosophy. Bhushan is co-editor of Of Minds and Molecules: New
Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry (Oxford University Press 2000) and author of
several influential articles in that field. Bhushan has also published articles in
aesthetics and the philosophy of mind and language. She is co-editor of TransBuddhism:
Translation, Transmission and Transformation (University of Massachusetts
Press 2009), Indian Philosophy in English from Renaissance to Independence
(Oxford University Press 2011) and Contrary Thinking: Selected Essays of Daya Krishna (Oxford University
Press 2011). Bhushan is currently at work on a book on the history of
Indian philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the work of the modern Indian
artist Amrita Sher-Gil.
Zackaria Moursi, Egyptian by birth, was born in a
well-known and respected Egyptian family and enjoyed a privileged childhood. In the
1960s at the age of 23, while studying in Germany
on a doctoral scholarship, he came across a book on Integral Yoga, a compilation of texts by the Mother and Sri
Aurobindo, about whom he had never heard before. This triggered a turning-point in his life.
Zackaria lived one year in Auroville and Pondicherry , and is currently living
in the Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham in Lodi , California , where he translates Sri
Aurobindo and Mother into Arabic. He has already translated the Ashram compilation "Integral
Healing", and the Arabic version is available in print. He has a bilingual website:
www.saamia.com, where he posts miscellaneous translated texts. Professionally he has worked as
university Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, school teacher, and
programmer in different countries, and now, in his retirement, pursues his soul's and heart's
desires, basking in Sri Aurobindo and Mother's Grace and Light.
Sraddha- Sri Aurobindo Bhavan 8 Shakespeare Sarani Kolkata
700 071
Editor: Arup Basu
Published by Sri Aurobindo Centre for Research in
Social Sciences Sri Aurobindo Bhavan 8 Shakespeare Sarani Kolkata 700071 Phone
: 2282 3057, 2282 2162, 2282 1819
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