Georges van Vrekhem was a devoted child of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo

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

Phone: 98302 58723 E-mail: arupbasu99@yahoo.com , arup.mbe@rediffmail.com

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