Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Buddhi or the mind of Light, what Sri Aurobindo calls the Luminous Mind
There is a beautiful poem you may wish to read, Thought the Paraclete by Sri Aurobindo
How thought rises from manas to buddhi to pure Chitta
https://x.com/i/status/2083161304831812050
One Truth- One Family- A vision that transcends time. Discover how the Vedas reveal the unity of humanity and the deeper meaning behind these timeless words. Watch now. Discover more in this episode. youtu.be/DQbeYr4W_1Q?si… @AmazingVedas @PariksithSingh @MakrandParanspe
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What stories do symbols reveal? Join @PariksithSingh as he uncovers the deeper meanings within the poem 'A Reflection' from Satya: Poems to My Father, exploring the interplay between the peacock feather, memory, and identity. youtu.be/YakyhouaTLQ?si… @AmazingVedas @MakrandParanspe
https://x.com/i/status/2083311750787797481
From loss, grief to rebirth, every poem reveals a deeper truth. Join @PariksithSingh for the reading of Bindu, part of Satya: Poems to My Father—a trilogy exploring loss, love, and transcendence. youtu.be/_QygBJZSjUI?si… @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas
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Think the Vedas are only for a select few? Think again. In this episode, @PariksithSingh and @MakrandParanspe challenge one of the biggest myths about Vedic wisdom. Watch now and rethink who the Vedas are really for. youtu.be/plt3dbzkwVM?si… @AmazingVedas
https://x.com/i/status/2083178615647461504
Sri Aurobindo ke newspaper editorials ka collection :--
" BANDE MATARAM " aur " KARMAYOGIN ".
In 2 books ko aap World History ka Summary ya MOST IMPORTANT Glimpses maan sakte ho ??
In books ke according Ancient India me real power Brahmins ke haath me tha, Kshatriya ke nahi.
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General Vishwa Nath Sharma, PVSM, AVSM, ADC (Retd) former Chief of the Army Staff, passed away at 4:10 am in New Delhi today, 31 July 2026. He was 96... His other siblings - Lieutenant General Surindra Nath Sharma served as Engineer-in-Chief of the Indian Army, and Major Dr Kamla Tewari née Sharma of the Army Medical Corps.
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Om Shanti...his sister Dr Kamla Tewari was married to Maj Gen KK Tewari of Signals. He was Cdr Sigs , 4 Inf Div and was taken PoW by the Chinese in 1962 from Tawang. He was later one of the founding members of the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Their daughter married the well known Tibetologist, Mr Claude Arpi.
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I knew him personally a fine person. A correction he joined Auroville as a member which had already been founded in 1968
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Auroville Tomorrow – Ushus 2 | Kiran 4 is out. The Future Begins Between Us. Exploring conscious communities, stewardship, human unity, and the evolution of consciousness. Link: linktr.ee/aurovilleoffic… #Auroville #TheMother #SriAurobindo
https://x.com/i/status/2083079220721488218
Join Samsaktabhih, a month-long celebration of Sri Aurobindo’s 154th Birth Anniversary, uniting the community through spirituality, culture, and consciousness. #Auroville #TheMother #SriAurobindo
https://x.com/i/status/2082831056282190012
The eThics of Yoga and The spiriT of godmen
even though he gestures toward catholic … The competitive structure of the free
market combined with the spirit of Hindutva turns the ultimate goal of yoga—the …
Competition beyond Capitalism
The Ethics of Yoga and the Spirit of Godmen
https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836954460 Joseph S. Alter
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber ([1930] 1958) does not appear to be explicitly concerned with competition. His focus is on the contradiction between religious values and economic interests and how one signifies the other. Nevertheless, his argument hinges on how the idea of salvation, conceptualized in terms of predestination, produces a worldview in which the saved and the damned are winners and losers. This worldview would seem to render competition pointless and meaningless since the elect are chosen by God...
Sivananda sought to bring yoga down to earth and make it do the work of middle-class social and cultural reform by means of embodied self-development. Sivananda embraced the athleticism of yoga, but then linked postural practice to a spiritual ideal of worldly asceticism.
In this context, the work that competition does to enable self-improvement is materialized and essentialized in a regimented form of public postural practice under the rubric of the Divine Life Society and Sivananda Yoga as a global brand. As in the case of Calvinist worldly asceticism, Sivananda’s yoga is embodied in terms of righteous sociality. It reflects civic responsibility by contributing to middle-class health, well-being, and dedication to the nationalist ideals of Indian freedom and independence. But it does so by fetishizing the power of self-discipline. The materialization of self-discipline in postural practice is dependent on the erasure of the power of complete asocial detachment that is integral to yoga’s philosophical foundation. It is in this sense that ‘enlightened’ godmen in modern India are different from the elect ‘men of God’ whose fetishized wealth and entrepreneurial success reflects a functional synthesis of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
Although both Sivananda and Baba Ramdev fetishize the body and essentialize self-development, Sivananda’s brand of postural practice combines asceticism, athleticism, and competition more easily, it seems, than Baba Ramdev’s hyper, self-centered mode of personal self-development. For Sivananda, the practice of yoga is an end in itself, albeit one that has social significance. For Baba Ramdev, yoga is a means to the end of personal achievement as worldly self-realization. In this way, the performance of yoga invokes the possibility of transcendence. Performing yoga thus becomes a sign of one’s investment in the value of personal self-development—the endless process of trying to become happier, healthier, and more productive.
These are, of course, the core tenets of neoliberal responsibilization. Performed in massive arenas involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, Baba Ramdev’s brand of yoga promotes ideology and generates tremendous wealth through advertising. But unlike Sivananda’s appeal to the embodiment of a collective Divine Life Society, it does not build community. It enables those who participate to join in a staged performance of anonymous middle-class modernity, that is, to exercise their individuality and free will in terms of the power of embodied self-realization.
By turning the performance of yoga into a public spectacle, Baba Ramdev draws on the sense of mystery, secrecy, and ineffable wisdom that is a key feature of yoga’s cultural history. All of the early literature on yoga defines its practice in terms of the importance of secrecy and self-isolation. As Svatvarama, the author of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, one of the three most well-known pre-modern texts on postural practice, put it:
11. A Yogi desirous of success should keep the knowledge of Hatha Yoga secret; for it becomes potent by concealing and impotent by exposing.
12. The Yogi should practice Hatha Yoga in a solitary place being free from … all disturbances. (Svatvarama [1915] 1991: 2)
Twentieth-century reformers have all struggled with the paradoxical nature of these statements and the contradictions that stem from teaching yoga ‘indiscriminately’ to everyone. Like other godmen, Baba Ramdev engages with the power of fetishism that is manifest in postural practice by simultaneously revealing the secret while invoking the power of secrecy itself. Doing yoga with everyone is empowering precisely because the potency of concealment is reflected in the exposed anonymity of the spectacle itself. Each person does the best they can on their own yoga mat. Each embodies the burden of neoliberal self-determination, aiming to become their own best version by competing with themselves in terms defined by the liberating freedom of embodied immortality.
As it finds expression in a range of different contexts that involve various forms of power—spiritual, mystical, material, physical, and metaphysical—an examination of yoga as competition shows how these forms overlap and intersect in ways that productively complicate simplistic, universalizing assumptions about winning and losing, profit and loss, success and failure. A consideration of how power is embodied in the practice of yoga shows how a dynamic of fetishism provides a critical perspective on the work that competition does in the context of secular and religious nationalism. The embodiment of ‘enlightened’ worldly asceticism also brings into focus the work that competition does within the differing ideological frameworks of free market neoliberalism on the one hand and planned economic development oriented toward collective welfare on the other.
Joseph S. Alter is the Director of the Asian Studies Center and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His research focuses on environmental health, the globalization of Asian medical knowledge, and the cultural history of yoga’s development within the institutionalized structure of Nature Cure in contemporary India. He is currently studying the way in which yoga and Nature Cure establish an ‘ecology of the body’ within the rubric of public health. His publications include Yoga in Modern India (2004), Moral Materialism (2011), and the edited volume Capturing the Ineffable (2020, with Phi...
https://www.jstor.org/content/pdf/oa_chapter_edited/jj.37252711.7
https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/07/calvin-and-sivananda.html
