December 21, 2018

Beware of Westphobia, myopia, and provincialism


Freedom’s fascists: Hate speech and the new European far right - Far right parties have metamorphisized: they are now anti-Islamic rather than anti-Semitic; as populist parties they rely on mass mobilization around a nar...

Sri Aurobindo in Bengal, Part 9 - Sri Aurobindo had a more or less definite conception — it was, indeed, a foreknowledge — even in his childhood, of the mission of his life. This foreknow...

The Bridge of Love - One more love story? Aren’t all love stories alike? Maybe. But this one is different. Pondicherry is a unique place in the world. It has beautiful villas b...

An Appropriate Role for the Intellectual Faculties in the Review and Appreciation of Beauty in Art - Every faculty of man has its role somewhere in the development of a complete and balanced human individual. Having spent considerable effort reviewing the...

Ramkaran Sharma, 1927-2018 - From Robert P. Goldman on the Indology discussion list comes the sad news of R.K. Sharma’s passing: Sharma was one of the great stalwarts of Sanskrit Studi...

Agamben on philosophy and theology - [Note: This text represents the introduction to a lecture I gave at the University of Copenhagen earlier this month. The remainder of the lecture investiga...

India is merely a notion and not a nation - Assorted tweets The difficulty is in the fact that for religious people there are things which it is their duty to believe and it is a sin to let the mind...

Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene - Notes from a talk I gave at CIIS this past March titled “Politics and Pluralism in the Anthropocene” Here’s the video of the whole panel: https://youtu.be/...

- In The Atlantic, the spectral presence of Smart Compose. Some might think I’m being histrionic when I say that Gmail’s auto-reply function fills me with *...

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF EXECUTION — M.S. Srinivasan - (Review of the book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ramcharan, Business Books) Contemporary management ...

Favorite Movies, 2018 - These are my favorite movies of 2018. I won’t call this a best films list, since there are so many movies I still haven’t seen (for instance, Mandy, Let th...

Existentialism is a qualitative individualism - My first post on qualitative individualism attracted several helpful comments, possibly drawn here by a link from Daily Nous. A … Continue reading →

Symbolic meaning of Veda is lynchpin to disperse lynch mobs - Tweets by @SavitriEraParty and @NathTusar Nehru-bhakts were euphoric about him last month but don't have even a word to say regarding Sri Aurobindo. This d...

To Thee Our Infinite Gratitude (Writings on the Passing of Sri Aurobindo) - To Thee Our Infinite Gratitude Writings on the Passing of Sri Aurobindo A series of essays written in commemoration of Sri Aurobindo’s passing. The words o...

Death in the forest - *Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.* *Botanical Name**: Gomphrena Globosa* *Common Name**: Globe...

Remembering Mona Pinto on her 107th Birth Anniversary - Dear Friends, Ethel Anne Lovegrove better known as Mona Pinto (11 November 1911—21 May 2004) came to Pondicherry in January 1937 and married Udar Pinto in ...

Hare Krishna - A special offering for Krishna Janamashtami — my humble attempt to capture in photographs a few expressions of the Divinity and the Divine Personality of ...

Material Time - I’m slowly walking along the isthmus in Svaerholt, Norway. My legs are tired from climbing hills and mountains and I can’t move any faster through the gra...

When it Hurts - When you dig and dig some more to find out why something bothers you so much, it hurts. When you discover, or at least you think you have discovered, the...

Goddess Kali and the Big Destructions of Nature - Behind all the destructions - the big destructions of Nature - earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, floods, etc., or the human destructions - wars, r...

@BeingChatterjee Read "The Road Less Travelled". Romantic love is called "cathect" a temporary emotion that soon wears out.  @oyesuna
https://twitter.com/sankrant/status/627909662940233730?s=19

holy shit, I forgot Marshal McLuhan, Francisco Varela, Alan Watts, Isabelle Stengers, Giordano Bruno, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, Rudolf Steiner, Raimundo Panikkar, and Terence McKenna. These are my choices for tomorrow.
https://twitter.com/ThouArtThat/status/1075593786837757952?s=19

[In many ways Nietzsche, as a philosopher, can be said to inaugurate the modern age.] [The tension between Hegel and Nietzsche, or that between historicism and individual will is a constant and living dialog in Sri Aurobindo] -Debashish Banerji https://t.co/X3BoDN1A5A #FiveDreams
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1074897583149969409?s=19

Who Put the Super in Superhero? Transformation and Heroism as a Function of Evolution
SL ROSS - Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
The heart of the paper is a detailed guide identifying when during the process of transformation, the initiate can expect to receive the support of natural processes, when to be vigilant for beyond nature or Divine intervention, and when to intervene with “supernatural” activities. The framework culminates with an elucidation of how the ordinary yet heroic individual becomes a superhero or transhuman as outlined by spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo, through three transformations of biopsychosocial maturation and spiritual realization.

Thread on misleading interpretation of Vedic terms and relevance of Sri Aurobindo. https://t.co/XOTBcPjXgr
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1072383461649014785?s=19

[DOC] BHU, VARANASI-221010
PK Dhal, B MU
… Human civilization has seen the above words among the great teachers like: Viswamitra, Valmiki, Vasistha, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Froebel and Dewey etc … Aurobindo Ashram, P.28 …

During the APA (E) meeting in New York (January, 7-10, 2019), there will be an author meets critics session with Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on his book Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India. The session is scheduled for Jan. 8th from 2-5 pm. by elisa freschi

Today, thousands of farmers, landless labourers and dispossessed rural Indians are marching towards the Parliament. We are marching with them.
Will you join us?
#FlashbackFriday #FarmersMarch #DilliChalo #NationForFarmers #FarmersProtest https://t.co/I0LXLl4XOe
https://twitter.com/SACAC_India/status/1068478347783614464?s=19

Today, is the 75th Anniversary of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre Of Education (#SAICE), also known as the #AshramSchool.
This thread captures glimpses of #SriAurobindo and #TheMother and their vision of #Education. https://t.co/YTvodcx910
https://twitter.com/integralyog/status/1069094763612139520?s=19

Certain recent happenings on H twitter only go to show that our people lack maturity.
Most major H thinkers of the last century or more have employed euhemerism of sort sort and to some degree. If you find that offensive or 'insulting', you should be equipped with scholarship to counter it, not rants https://t.co/2BmHdOuVHZ
https://twitter.com/ArmchairPseph/status/1069078956542844932?s=19

Macaulay was not successful.
RK Mookerji, PV Kane, Ganganath Jha, V Raghavan, M Hiriyanna, many many other great modern Hindu scholars existed in pre-independence and early post-independence India.
Nehru and secularism are what killed Hindu scholarship.
https://t.co/lgQN3QlOMW
https://twitter.com/HinduLiberty/status/1068936216362463232?s=19

Age, privilege and gender hierarchies plague Indian academia – and #MeToo is one fallout of this https://t.co/J8QCNEolYx https://t.co/kOw0tE49uh

Tracking the tweets of a dozen South Indians gives the impression that Hindutva is firmly in the saddle and people are zealously organising their lives around religion and rituals but the reality is otherwise. Sri Aurobindo completed The Life Divine hundred years ago. A must read
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1068924054386761728?s=19

Education encourages to generalise, find common principles whereas introspection and contemplation unveil subjectivity. Yoga too is a means of connecting to universality but at its core is purely personal with a unique trajectory. Sri Aurobindo however talks about the Supramental.
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1068919075806633985?s=19

By firmly positing rising to the next level of Evolution as the target Sri Aurobindo alerts us to present imperfections. While rejection of what is wrong is necessary aspiration for the good qualities is primary. Both however must proceed in an attitude of surrender before Grace.
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1068396502488367105?s=19

Intellectuals in India have not been able to take advantage of two outstanding books that appeared quite early: The Integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo (1957) - Ram Shankar Misra (BHU) & The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1960) - Vishwanath Prasad Varma (Patna University).
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1068932196163964928?s=19

Sri Aurobindo finds a number of approving mentions but his agenda may not be in sync with the thrust of this otherwise admirable article. Nevertheless, the utility of Sri Aurobindo as an intellectual arsenal, if harnessed reasonably, would mean a substantial gain for the nation. https://t.co/kS13smDzNU
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1075809947684753408?s=19

The whole problem is the word Hindu since so many texts and traditions form such an indigestible mixture that reconciling them or following any one poses difficulty. Further, it doesn't offer any definite solution and adds to human confusion. Sri Aurobindo did try to cherry-pick.
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1076161618470330368?s=19

From a practical point of view, RSS is a reality and it's evolving. It can't be uprooted so easily but people can be weaned away by offering a different ideology. Such a recipe was formulated by Sri Aurobindo 100 years back but lies unused. That needs to be zealously popularised.
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1075815130225627138?s=19

Good survey and as things change with time and circumstances, they should be accepted as they are; but the author seems to be carrying the burden of changing the course of change. The very confidence that the future can be moulded or managed is problematic like chasing a chimera.
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1074728942588678144?s=19

Hindutva victimhood prevents its adherents from exploring alternative viewpoints or appreciating worth in more viable theories. Recognising value is essential on the part of any individual, organisation, or nation and privileging it needs to be internalised otherwise it's demise.
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1076030527591743488?s=19

Many of Sri Aurobindo's ideas pertain to his times when the thoughts of Nietzsche, Myers, or Bergson et al were dominant. His synthetic philosophy, therefore, has an edge over traditional Hindu systems and ethical prescriptions. So beware of Westphobia, myopia, and provincialism.
https://twitter.com/SavitriEraParty/status/1074893189599748096?s=19

[“At the head she stands of birth and toil and fate... His base was gathered in one pointing spire.”
Dr Mangesh Nadkarni using these lines as invocation to the Divine Mother... Dr Prema Nandakumar, the prayer in these lines are the same as Devi Mahatmyam.] https://t.co/gOWKTRAw1g
https://twitter.com/NathTusar/status/1076152400233332737?s=19

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