February 18, 2013

Spiritual practice contains its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments

Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship even banned Christmas. Protestantism emphasised the centrality of text and text alone as the word of god and the basis of religion. Enlightenment thinkers applied this to all religions. So when the Orientalists came to India and tried to categorise the culture, they ignored much of the customs and traditions in favour of what could specifically be found in texts. This was the only paradigm that they could use when confronted with a bewildering array of what became known as Hinduism. So anything in religious text such as Vedas formed the canon of Hinduism. All else was custom, tradition, tribalism or culture. It is that thinking which has lasted until today in defining secularism in India. The Enlightenment differentiated between sacred and profane, between religion and culture.

Hegel also considered himself to be an orthodox Christian. The greatest minds of the following generations – Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Marx – did not. They considered themselves Hegelian, yet they were against the gods… That atheism is at the heart of Marx’s dissertation… Marx turns his focus to two lesser-known figures, Epicurus and Democritus… The topic of his dissertation is Epicurus; Democritus’s role is merely to illustrate why Epicurus is so great…  The gods are just as distant in Epicurus’s explanations; he can look like a precursor of Darwin. And so it was to Epicurus that Marx turned as an inspiration for his still-developing atheist Hegelianism.

(title unknown) from enowning Robert Mugerauer on tenderness. 
“Tenderness, according to Heidegger, is used by Hölderlin to indicate the native essence of the Greek: their art of showing, letting appear what shows itself purely and thereby presences.  For the Greeks, what brings the splendour of the presencing to appearance is the athletic warlike struggle of heroes (also consider Heraclìtus and Pìndar) and the power of reflection (die Reflexionskraft) (HEH 166).” P. 414 HEH: Hölderlin's Erde und Himmel.

The Being behind Hitler Science Of Spirituality Blog on ... By: Martin Sobieroj on Feb 18, 2013 Source : Mother's Agenda, 12 January 1965
(Regarding an old "Playground Talk" of March 8, 1951, in which Mother spoke of the being that possessed and "guided" Hitler: … As for Sri Aurobindo ... (you know that there is a place in Russia where they were defeated [ii]), Sri Aurobindo had foreseen the defeat and had worked the night...

“Spiritual ordeal” is too one-sided a vision of spiritual practice, which includes ordeals, but contains also its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments. I “see” it as a process psychic and collective individuation, as Simondon and Stiegler call it. There is no necessary dualism between philosophy and individuation, and Deleuze is a shining (in the sense of Dreyfus and Kelly’s ALL THINGS SHINING) example of their co-existence and superposition.
Gilles Quispel once declared that “Alchemy is the yoga of Gnosticism”, that is to say the actual experiential and transformative practice that subtends and is subtended by Gnostic theoretical creation. One could reformulate this as “Non-philosophy is the yoga of philosophy”. 

Order never comes for free, but always requires operations, energy, and work precisely because it’s more probable for anything to be related to anything else, than for anything to maintain improbable and selective relations to a delimited range of elements in the order of being. “Onto-cartography” would be the investigation of the mechanisms by which improbable orders are maintained; and would therefore include investigations of discursive mechanisms (not surprisingly, the favorite of the humanities), chronopolotical mechanisms, geographical mechanisms (geopolitics), and thermopolitical mechanisms.  Whenever encountering an order in the social and political world we should be surprised and ask ourselves how it maintains itself.  In understanding how it maintains itself, we can begin to devise strategies undermine it where those negentropic mechanisms are oppressive.
All of this aside, we now see a third argument against holism.  A world in which everything is related to everything else is identical to the definition of a highly entropic system.  It is a world where no inferences can be made to other elements precisely because there’s an equal probability of anything being related to anything else.  Such a world would be a world of Brownian motion, where there was no language, mathematics, ecologies, or social orders, precisely because all of these orders are orders in which relations between elements are selective or improbable.  As Deleuze said of Hegel’s categories, the world proposed by holists is a world that is too baggy, too ill fitted, to get at the real of the world that we, in fact, encounter.

There is the practical mind that involves itself with the physical and vital levels of existence and works to manage and utilize them to best advantage; there is also a higher mind of thought and concept, as well as an aesthetic and an emotional aspect that weave the complex fabric that we consider to be mental functioning. Sri Aurobindo explains: “The mental energy divides itself and runs in many directions, has an ascending scale of the levels of its action, a great variety and ...”
It is not simply the complexity of these different energies and levels of action that we have to contend with; we also have to take into account the varying concentration and intensity of the energy put forth within each of these lines. A weak force will soon be deflected, drowned out or watered down by the myriad other active forces around it and with which it needs to contend.

It is here she loses herself into Infinity the way the crested eagles of thought fly into the sky of the Unknowable… Wherever he looked, he saw the veiled and seeking Force, she an exiled goddess building mimic heavens, a Sphinx gazing at the Sun.

Why do some people get angry and mad when you mention alternative medicine, the mind and the soul? Here's one person that explains it. ... if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are at once superfluous. Sri Aurobindo 

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