Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting on 'The yoga of
Savitri reading,' 3 Lajapathi Roy
Road , Chinna Chokkikulam, 4 p.m..
The AUM (All USA Meeting) is the annual gathering of the Integral Yoga
community in the United
States . AUM 2013, June 20 to 23 in Ashland , OR , brings participants
an opportunity to discover the true soul-being of the USA as a part
of their personal and collective practice. Activities include presentations,
interactive exercises, guided meditations, artistic expression, group sharing,
a Native solstice ceremony, and musical performances.
Over the centuries lone visionaries have inspired humankind with
predictions of a New Creation, a New Age, or a radically new
consciousness for humanity in the not too distant future. Sri Aurobindo, born
in India in 1872 and
schooled in England ,
richly described this golden evolutionary transformation and the steps
needed to actualize it on Earth. After his return to India , he began
developing a practical approach to it through an “integral yoga,” a union with
the Divine essence on every level of one's being: spiritual,
psychic, mental, vital—even physical.
Mirra Alfassa, born in France
in 1878, likewise had this vision of a coming golden age. In 1914, she met Sri
Aurobindo in Pondicherry , India . Sri Aurobindo recognized
Mirra as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. Those who gathered around them
called her simply “The Mother.” The two forged a lifelong collaboration for
discovering within and without the realizations needed to enter this new
consciousness and bring it even into the body. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram and
later the international community of Auroville are first steps of a
concentrated collective aspiration and effort to make real this radical next
stage of Earth evolution. There are now many groups around the world aspiring
for a new age, each with their own unique views and approaches.
The Ashram Trust’s reply of 22 July, 2010 to Kittu Reddy,
Sumita Kandpal & Ranganath Raghavan from Critique of The Lives by General Editor
This is the last letter that the Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram wrote
to the group of three senior Ashramites – Kittu Reddy, Sumita Kandpal & Ranganath
Raghavan. If there is one characteristic that defines the letter of the
Trustees, it is “arrogance” – the arrogance of being unquestioned and
unquestionable Trustees in “a Providentially ordained game”. The very
tone and tenor of the letter, the constant denial mode and the counter
accusations leveled at the three senior Ashramites, who dared for the first
time to question their authority, leave hardly any room for a healthy debate.
The correspondence thus abruptly ended here with the Trustees rattling their
legal sabres, “Our lawyer will respond” though we are not under any “legal
obligation to reply”, and finally, “The futility of continued correspondence is
thus obvious.” As there was no scope for further discussion, Kittu Reddy’s
group did not reply to the letter. Sumita Kandpal remarked that she had never
received such a rude letter during the entire period of her service as a
Collector. The Trust thus lost one more golden opportunity to put its house in
order and settle matters internally. The attached endnotes contain a few
responses by the editor to some of the issues raised by the Ashram Trust…
Though granting “freedom
of speech” has been the public explanation of the Trustees, the truth is
that they always have been hand in glove with Peter Heehs… According to people who worked at the Archives with
Peter Heehs, his hostility towards the Mother was open and well-known. In fact,
the whole tenor of his book is anti-devotional and anti-hagiographic, and there
is no question of loyalty to neither Sri Aurobindo and the Mother nor the
Ashram as an institution, which has given him shelter and material support for
the last forty years. Even this would not have been objectionable to the
Ashramites had he not claimed himself to be the founder of the Archives, which
(in the absence of any clarification of the Ashram Trust) would have led to an
unquestioning acceptance of the distortions and misrepresentations of Sri
Aurobindo’s life and works in his book. What is incredible is that this is
perhaps the first case in the spiritual traditions of the world where the
Trustees of an Ashram have openly supported the denigration of their own Guru
for the sake of supporting “multiple viewpoints” from the Guru’s disciples.
(Even the members of a criminal gang, I think, have a greater sense of loyalty
to their group than the Trustees of Sri Aurobindo Ashram!) As for justifying
this position of disloyalty to the Guru in the most devious ways possible,
Manoj Das Gupta, the Managing Trustee, scores over them all, and should be
nominated for the Nobel Prize in the Art of Deception…
Moreover, when Peter Heehs criticises
Sri Aurobindo left, right and centre, it is not merely one of the multiple
viewpoints which can be legitimately expressed within the Ashram. His hostile
viewpoint not only destroys collective harmony but is incompatible with his
stay in the Ashram. He is of course free to express his hostile opinions
against Sri Aurobindo outside the Ashram, to which very few Ashramites would
have objected. Also, the view of those who have criticised him cannot be
considered as one of the multiple viewpoints which can be tolerated within the
Ashram along with his hostile viewpoint of Sri Aurobindo. The former has
attacked Sri Aurobindo in his own Ashram, which is certainly not good for the
collectivity. The latter have criticised Peter Heehs because he attacked Sri
Aurobindo in his own Ashram; later they went on to criticise the Trustees for
having allowed such an attack and not doing anything about it! The argument of
multiple viewpoints is merely an excuse for irresponsibility and inaction or a
cover-up of a secret deal with Peter Heehs!
Few, if any, thinkers in modern India have matched Damodar
Dharmanand Kosambi's range and depth of scholarly interests. He mastered
several classical and modern languages — Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Prakrit,
English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Marathi, Konkani and Urdu. This
enabled him to explore disciplines as varied as mathematics and statistics,
numismatics and archaeology, Sanskrit literature (especially two widely-hailed
works on Bhartrihari's poetry), anthropology and ancient Indian history from
many cultural perspectives. His exertions seldom failed to yield seminal
insights, not least because he tested his knowledge, derived from his critical
analysis of texts, against whatever he learnt during his fieldwork.
First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an
outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic
confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the
self. After Richardson ,
novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though
memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new
incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined
histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature.
The book began, in germinal and liminal form, in the PhD thesis I wrote
under John Carvalho’s direction at Villanova University .
John’s generosity and intelligence toward his graduate students, and at the
helm of the department, are equally legendary, and I owe him more than
gratitude that I am even here, today. The thesis I wrote for John, who is
an aesthetician, critical theorist, and expert in Ancient Greek Philosophy, was
called “Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art.” I was already guessing
that there was some parallel between the role of aesthetics in Renaissance
philosophy and the role of art in Deleuze’s semiotics and ontologies, but I did
not have the time or space to push that research into a book on Deleuze’s
esotericism. The book that became The Hermetic Deleuze took a
very long time to write and to research, because of how much I was teaching,
looking for academic jobs, raising a young son, and going through many other
ordeals personal and professional.
Ideas
and Trends in World Anthropology - Page 6 - Charles
Frantz - 1981 - Preview - More
editions ... in terms
of non-violence and talked of establishing a sort of spiritual humanism,
Sri Aurobindo discussed
at length the ... Roy,
Dada Dharmadhikari, Ram Manohar Lohia, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Benoy
Sarkar, ...
Comparative
History of India and Indonesia - Page 94 - Peter
James Marshall - 1987 - Preview
The chief protagonists of the revolutionary ideology included Aurobindo Ghosh, a Cambridge
trained classicist, ... (Calcutta
1953-1969); Bhudev Mukhopadhyay,
Samajik pravandha (Essay on Society) included in his collected works
(Calcutta ...
The
Uncolonised Heart - Page 55 - Lou
Ratté - 1995 - Preview - More
editions ... by the
young revolutionary theorist Aurobindo Ghose
and treated as a political tract, with Bankim himself hailed as the ... Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, for instance, the author of essays which
expounded on the virtues of traditional domestic life, ...
Making
India: Colonialism, National Culture, and the Afterlife of ... - Page 90 - Makarand
R. Paranjape - 2012 - Preview - More
editions Sri Aurobindo's eulogy,
written in the heady days of his revolutionary activism, is not
exaggerated. ... history,”
after Bhudev Mukhopadhyay's
famous phrase “Swapnalabdha Bharatvarser Itihas” (A Dream derived History of India ),
the title ...
Literary
India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, ... - Page 271 - Patrick
Colm Hogan, Lalita Pandit - 1995 - Preview - More
editions ... suggests
that Bhudev Mukhopadhyaya
(1827-1894), a lesser-known contemporary of Bankimchandra, was the first
to ... Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) in
his revolutionary years, when he was under the influence of Mazzini, was a good...
World
Perspectives On Swami Dayananda Saraswati - Page 36 - Gaṅgā Rām Garg - 1984 - Preview - More
editions He met Rajnarayan Bose, the maternal grandfather of Yogi Aurobindo, who was leading a
newly-emerging movement of ... Rajnikant
Gupta, and the educator and journalist Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, all imbued with the spirit of Hindu
revival.
Early
Novels In India - Page 146 - Meenakshi
Mukherjee - 2002 - Preview - More
editions Kaviraj calls this discourse of Bankim's "imaginary
history," after the title of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay's
fictional narrative ... Mukherjee,
in addition, cites Sri Aurobindo,
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Sisir Kumar Das, and Jogesh Chandra Bagal in support ...
The
View from Below: Indigenous Society, Temples, and the Early ... - Page 8 - Kanakalatha
Mukund - 2005 - Preview
The only extensive study of Indian attitudes to Europe in this period is Tapan
Raychaudhuri's exploration of three Bengali intellectuals — Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and
Swami Vivekananda. A strong
sub- theme...
Aspects
of India's International Relations, 1700 to 2000: South ... - Page 560 - Jayanta
Kumar Ray - 2007 - Preview
Rakhahari Chatterjee: With Swami Vivekananda,
we take a huge step forward from Bankimchandra
on ideas regarding national consolidation and restoration of India's
pride. His was not a tortuous path like Bankim's. Whatever inner conflicts he
had— and he had ... Page
557 Rammohun, Akshoy Kumar Datta, Derozio and the Derozians, Iswar
Chandra Vidyasagar, Bankimchandra ... Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankimchandra
Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda about
the confident and universalizing Europe .
The
Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, ... - Page 195
- John
Darwin - 2009 - Preview - More
editions Bhudev Mukerji, Bankim Chandra Chatterji (the
first modern Bengali novelist) and Swami Vivekananda showed how foreign ideas could be scrutinised,
annexed or rejected in the creation of an up-to-date literary and religious
tradition. The ...
Contending
with marginality: Christians and the public sphere in ... - Page 11 - Chandra
Mallampalli - 2000 - Christians and the public sphere in colonial
South India Chandra Mallampalli ...Tapan Raichaudhuri's study of three
Bengali nationalists, Bankimchandra Chatterji, Bhudev Mukhopadyay
and Swami Vivekananda offers an excellent analysis of ...
Hindutva,
Ideology, and Politics - Page 3 - A.
A. Parvathy - 2003 - Preview - More
editions ... traditionalist
intellectuals, each assessing the civilisation of Europe in his own distinctive
way. Such books on Indian perception of the West are very few. He takes
up Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankim Chandra and Swami Vivekananda ...
The
new Hindu movement, 1886-1911 - Page 216 - Rakhal
Chandra Nath - 1982 - VIVEKANANDA AND
THE SWADESHI MOVEMENT Rakhal Chandra Nath. Bankim never gave a full-length
blue-print of his Dharmarajya. ... If Bhudev's picture was that of a
Utopia, Bankim's was
that of the landmarks that separated the Utopia from the reality of India under
British rule. ... Vivekananda's contribution
to the Swadeshi Movement was in the direction of (i) emphasizing the idea of
restoration ...
Proceedings
- Volume 7 - Page 10 1973 - Rajnarain Bose and Bhudev Mukherjee had strong pro-Indian views on vernacular
education. Bankim Chandra Chatter
ji urged the necessity of undertaking the education of the masses directly. The
future India ,
according to Vivekananda, ...
First
fruits of English education, 1817-1857 - Page 113 - Bhagaban
Prasad Majumdar - 1973 - It would be no exaggeration to say that the
group of illustrious persons who received English education prepared the ground
for Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,
Swami Vivekananda, the
Theosophists and Dr. Atmaram Pandurang. As English ...
From SELF-Shelf
Entropy & evolution, resistance & purification 10
Jan 2013
The Vaishya, Mitra, and Mahalakshmi 10 Oct 2007
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