The accompanying paintings are by Huta who did these directly under
the guidance of the Mother. The recitation of the text is in Narad’s (Richard
Eggenberger’s) voice. The creation of the video is by Tuhin Chowdhury. This is
a beta-version and is being made as an offering to the Mother on her birthday,
21 February [...] 
Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth from Savitri
Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth from Savitri
Shall pour the
nectar of a sorrowless life
Around her from her lucid heart of love,
Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth
And cast like a happy snare felicity.
Maybe the discussion's number it's wrong, but the point it's that
Auroville is piling up much more meetings and presentation than facts and
actions. It seems that the further we go in the development harder it gets to
take decisions and act consequently. This may sound slightly negative but was
the feeling expressed of some of the participants at the meeting. The
frustration reflects the little progress Auroville has achieved recently. Maybe
it's time to act?
Don’t worry if you don’t understand whats written on this page.
Whether the Gods exist or not is of no relevance to the novice. As you develop
deeper understanding of your inner movements, you will begin to understand
everything else. Spiritual development is like an growing and ascending spiral,
which starts from a bright point and gradually envelopes and illumines the
surrounding areas.
In the beginning, one must focus on psychology (how should I live?)
rather than ontology (what exists out there?). You have to read literature
which motivates you to live better, which awakens introspection as well as the Atman within.
If you have an affinity for Sri Aurobindo, start reading his works such as Savitri, Essays
on the Gita, Life Divine, Synthesis of Yoga or
the Letters on Yoga. It may take a few readings to grasp his texts
but keep trying because its worth it.
The problem is that this strategy seems to exchange one form of power
and domination for another. In the first instance, we’re in the thrall of
dominant codes that typify our identities and reduce us to good
consumers. In the latter instance, however, we seem to become hypnotized
by the text and thereby enslaved. Like the cult follower that believes
that the leader contains a mysterious amalga or objet a around
which our desire comes to pulsate, the enigmatic and elusive text comes to
capture our desire and enslave us.
I began by looking for a point of resistance to the dominant codes
structuring communicative capitalism. I turned to this thinker or that to
find technologies of resistance at the level of the semiotic. Yet now I
find that I’m trapped in the enigma or the elusiveness of that theorist’s
writing. My goal begins to change. Where before it was strategies
of resistance, now it’s understanding the theorist. Hours and years are
now spent deciphering Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Adorno, Hegel, and so on.
“They must,” I reason, “know what they’re saying, they must have a secret
behind all of this, and I only fail because I haven’t read enough, haven’t done
enough work tracking down their references, haven’t followed their lines of
thought carefully enough!” Paradoxically, then, such texts tend to produce university
discourses. The product of identification with a hypnotic text is a
divided subject ($) that has become caught within the thrall of the
master-figure (S1), becoming their servant by endlessly doing commentary on
their work. The old goal disappears– though to be sure, it’s still given
lip service –and the new goal becomes a life devoted to understanding
Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and so on. Of course, there’s
no end to this project insofar as it belongs to the nature of objet a to
slip away.
Oh don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that any of these
thinkers should be rejected on the grounds of style.
I’ve certainly gained much by becoming hypnotized by all the thinkers I’ve
listed here. I do, however, think that style can be a form of power–
sometimes hypnotizing us like the cult leader, at other times functioning as a
shibboleth for privileged communities –and that it’s not clear that conceptual
work, clearly expressed, can’t be a more effective strategy against
communicative capitalism. Indeed, another danger that arises out of the
enigmatic text is that it becomes mere noise for the broader society, having
little to no effect outside the halls of the academies. I will suggest–
perhaps imprudently –that such texts seem to suggest a somewhat poor regard to
readers. To publish a text is to invite others to read. Those who
read give their time. In a world saturated by information as ours is
today, it seems somehow wrong to entrap others in your text when they wish to
learn from you and give portions of their life over to you.
If there is one theme in The Hermetic Deleuze:
Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal that I think causes the most
ambivalence for myself, and for contemporary philosophy, it is the possibility,
today, of conceiving thought—any thought, whether hermetic or rationalist—as
some kind of affirmation of life. My overwhelming impression of much of
contemporary continental and post-continental reflection is that it is
conditioned by an almost paralyzing combination of dread, horror, and malaise
over the ongoing ecological holocaust (and its twin, economic endgame) through
which we are currently “living,” if one could even call it that. The most
difficult thing I continue to try to come to terms with, in my own life and
work, is what it means to engage in thought and spiritual discipline as some
kind of intensified relation to “nature” when “nature” has become something
like absolute contingency, incarnate…
We might focus here by a return to Christian Kerslake’s question in response to my first
response, to Dan Barber: what is a specifically hermetic
incarnationalism? I agree with Christian that something like
tantric sciences, focusing on the body, breath, chakras, and extremely
local/animist divinities is somehow closer to Deleuze’s own thinking than
perhaps any other spiritual tradition. And yet Deleuze receives his
spiritual sciences mediated through a line of Western estoericisms that both
incorporate and struggle against Christian theology…
It is interesting that the great critics of Christianity Deleuze
admired (and in many ways I count my allegiance to them)—Nietzsche, D.H.
Lawrence, Artaud, Bataille—could not but admire the figure of Christ as Love… Most
of hermetic mysticism and practice, including alchemy, theosophy, and the
Western adoption of tantrism, yoga, and meditation, all seems to be carried out
under the sign of Joachim de Fiore’s “Age of the Holy Spirit,” an era in which
there is a mesmerizing, uncanny, and ultimately nondual relationship between
humanity and divinity (In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes
tantalizing reference to Fiore, as well as to Vico, in his attempt to explain
the relation of the syntheses of time to historical repetition. He is
basically critical, but then as Kerslake has shown, later finds his way to an
oblique affirmation of Toynbee’s universal history with its repetition of 22
essential archetypal phases, corresponding to the 22 major arcana of the
Tarot). This is a very different perspective, it seems to me, than the
Feuerbachian-cum-death of God point of view that points to the total
disenchantment of the world…
Here is an alchemical legend: the issue (offspring) of Adam is
the issue (product) of resurrection. Hermeticism is the
Western version of bodily esotericism. Yes, Deleuze’s thought is in many
ways closer to Tantrism. I “force” the issue of Hermeticism strategically
as a way of locating Western philosophy within a specific impasse between
reason and spirit. But that impasse “is” in some sense the problem of the
body (or to use the older term, nature, or the one we are now learning to use,
ecology). That is what is really the limit of Descartes’s “ordeal”: the
specific deliverances of what the body might be are forsaken
in the name of what the body appears to be, to the mind. It’s almost as
if there is simply a mind-mind problem in Descartes, and as if he never reaches
the level of the body—the subtle, alchemical body, the body of the chakras,
kunadalini, and the mercurial body of Adam Kadmon. The specific role that
Hermes plays in alchemy is the role of the “mercurial” element, the moist,
flowing element that “revives” matter from its slumber. Mercury
is the element of resurrection, and Hermes is a psychopomp… Why
resurrection? The problem of spirituality today is the problem of
survival. This is why, although I have been to Esalen and tasted its
nearly supernatural bounties of health and healing, I can only peruse its
catalogue and its denizens with a rueful eye.
The Anti-Modernist on the problem of objective philosophizing.
“The theoretical conceals its own concealing, or rather, that it is
wholly ignorant to the fact that it forces all of experience into categorical
classifications through the creation of an impression that rigorous and
detached observation of entities as present-to-hand is the
only way to access truth.”
Want
to but a tablet-cum-laptop By Mihir Patkar, TNN Feb 20, 2013,
The Lenovo Ideapad Yoga
is quite innovative with its ability to flip back its screen by a full 360
degrees, letting you use it as a tablet. In this mode, its keyboard becomes the
back plate of the tablet - and although disabled, it can be a bit distracting
because you can still feel the play of the keys when you hold it like a slate.
Also, the Yoga is quite heavy to be used as a truly portable tablet. Besides,
it is extremely hard to read its reflective display in direct sunlight…
So for the money you would spend on the IdeaPad Yoga (86,000 approx)
or the XPS 12 (93,000 approx), we would instead recommend you buy a good
ultrabook for around 50,000 (such as the Lenovo IdeaPad U310, Dell Inspiron 14z
or Samsung NP530U4C)
and a highend tablet (Apple iPad, iPad Mini or
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1); these will give you more bang for your buck - at
least for the moment.
