Role of aesthetics in Renaissance philosophy and vision of a coming Golden age

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : MADURAI TODAY

Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting on 'The yoga of Savitri reading,' 3 Lajapathi Roy Road, Chinna Chokkikulam, 4 p.m..

Event: Discovering the Soul of America, a Step in Human Unity

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!

Kosambi's uplifting idea Of India by Dileep Padgaonkar 08 February 2013, TOI

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. 

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self by Peter Heehs

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.

Of Cruelty and Vulnerability: A Response to Dan Whistler’s “The Hermetic Critique of Deleuze” from An und für sich by joshua ramey

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 ...

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