Alexander Brodie. 2012. “Agreeable
Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment links with France ”. Edinburgh : John Donald, Birlinn Ltd.
This is a most agreeable book for scholars and those interested in the
Scottish Enlightenment from which so much of the modern world evolved… Broadie’s
thesis is that what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment has its roots in
a long history of connections between Scottish intellectuals from the medieval
period onwards, primarily with their French opposite numbers, despite their
different theological traditions, particularly after the Reformation (largely
inspired from Luther’s Germany ). Enlightened
thinkers thought for themselves; unenlightened thinkers were tied to the
unchanging thoughts of past, mainly theological, authorities. Where there is
argument and debate without political repression, or at least passivity,
Enlightenment may follow. Brodie’s account of this background is
enlightening itself…
In summary, I consider Alexander Broadie has established his thesis
that the centuries long links between France and Scotland were foundational in
what became the Scottish Enlightenment in the unpromising circumstances of each
country, one dominated by an all embracing rigid Calvinism and the other by a
monolithic Catholic Church, yet feeding each other intellectually in the
prelude of the transformation of one world to another.
First there was my encounter with DeLanda’s Intensive Science
and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History, both of which brought non-signifying differences and material
processes to the fore and led me to read Deleuze in a very different way.
I was spitting mad and simultaneously fascinated when I encountered these
books. Was he really arguing that ocean currents and wind
patterns (non-diacritical, a-signifying differences) played a key role
in where European and American cities developed? Preposterous! But
he got me reading the historian Braudel
and his dry as dirt yet magnificent Capitalism and Civilization.
And in the background of all this was the material history of
Ferdinand Braudel in
the three volumes of Capitalism and Civilization. Braudel’s three volumes have been my
nightly bedtime reading for the last few months. Let Harman have his Gibbon,
I’ll take my Braudel. If
reading Braudel has
been such a transformative experience, then this is because he draws attention
away from familiar territory revolving around signs, ideologies, texts, norms,
and concepts, investigating instead infrastructures throughout history such as
the presence or absence of roads, the epidemiology of diseases, diets, trade
routes, clothing, forms of energy, etc., etc., etc.. You leave these works with
an entirely new set of glasses, seeing the world and why the world is the way
it is in an entirely different light. Suddenly things you were focused on in
your social and political thought seem to become less important as a
consequence of the rather minor role they play in social organization, while a
whole host of other urgent questions come to the fore.
While it is the first formulation of human motivation, the force of
desire, attraction towards what is pleasant and avoidance of what is
unpleasant, is not the sole...
at Hall of Harmony, Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry ,
India
Inspirational & Religious 2013: Savitri and The Yoga of the
Cells Sri Aurobindo (Author), The Mother (Author), RY Deshpande
(Editor)
The body was not ready to hold the charge of luminous immortality in
it. It had remained an unbaked vessel, atapta tanu. The cells of the body had
not awakened yet to the reality that is seated deep within them. The problem of
the inconscient nature had yet to be tackled.
Sri Aurobindo’s concern was chiefly this. It was a twofold effort, of
invoking and bringing down the dynamism of the supreme Truth on the earthly
plane, and preparing the unregenerate inconscient material nature to receive it
for its unhampered action. The spiritual and occult-yogic tapasya carried out
together by him and the Mother saw that this was done. That opened up new
doors, bright doors of the physical, for the entry of the Infinite's dimensions
in the earth-possibilities. Presently it has made its manifestation an
accomplished fact, here in the physical’s subtle.
SABDA - A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo — Dr. Anand Reddy
A FOLLOWER OF CHRIST AND A DISCIPLE OF SRI
AUROBINDO — CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN BEDE GRIFFITHS AND K. D. SETHNA (AMAL KIRAN)
So too, Griffiths tries to subsume Sri Aurobindo in
Christianity:
‘To me it is important
because I think that the transformation of the body is an essential element in
Christian doctrine. The physical transformation which took place in Mary was
seen as related to the physical transformation of the body of Christ in the
resurrection, and this again as foreshadowing the physical transformation of
man and the universe. This is where I find Aurobindo’s insistence on the
transformation of matter and the body so significant’. (p.44)
‘I cannot resist the
conviction that Jesus did exactly what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were
attempting to do’. (p.72)
‘The resurrection of
Christ is a physical event, which has effected all humanity and the whole
creation. If this is not the same as the belief of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
it is extraordinarily close to their idea of the Supramental manifestation’.
(p.86)
Amal Kiran, in a note of
tender mercies, replies: ‘What a diminution of his (Sri Aurobindo’s) colossal
stature, his Herculean labour, to understand him as having come just to confirm
Christianity and to establish a person more firmly in it! If he and the Mother
have nothing really momentously new to give us, since everything was there in
the Christian vision, all of us who are striving to live up to their teaching
and example are misguided fools who could do much better to get baptized and
join hands with the priests and nuns of Pondicherry’. (p.93)
And in a stronger vein
he argues: ‘Lastly, after postulating an evolution over millions of years
following in man’s progressive spiritual history through the aspiring mind
towards a Supramental which is still in the future, is it logical or reasonable
or consistent to affirm that all evolution was summed up to thousand years ago
in one man who did not exemplify an evolutionary transformation in his life-time
but is alleged to have acquired a divinized body after his death?’ (p.61)
The tree is an 82-year-old Peltophorum pterocarpum that stands next to Sri Aurobindo's Samadi, which was
named 'Service Tree' by the Mother. Through the ..
