From Auroville to Esalen: Yoga of ideas, meetings, and presentation

The Symbol Dawn: A video presentation from Mirror of Tomorrow by Govind Nishar

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 

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.

Discussion # 56258 from Auroville Radio

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?

Comment on Cosmology by Sandeep

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 Hypnotic Text from Larval Subjects

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.

Life Undead and Resurrected from An und für sich by joshua ramey

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.   

(title unknown) from enowning In-der-Blog-sein

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.

Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo, Bergson, Heidegger, and Deleuze

THERE IS NO SHORTCUT TO HAPPINESS times of india - speaking tree By: Ramesh Bijlani on Feb 01, 2013

What it means is that happiness resides not in the car, but in ‘not wanting anything’. ‘Not wanting anything’ is an inner state to be cultivated, not a goal automatically reached by fulfillment of desires. The conclusion is that happiness is within us, not in the object outside. Let us take another example. A person goes and donates a unit of blood. That makes him happy. He has not got anything – in fact, he has given something. The person is happy because while donating blood he thought of another individual in need. In the process, he got so completely absorbed in somebody else’s need that he forgot what he himself wants. In other words, he was once again in a state of ‘not wanting anything’. Thus, to be happy, we need not get anything at all. In fact, the joy of giving is much greater than the joy of getting.

The above discussion exposes the two major flaws in the popular notion that happiness comes from getting things. One, happiness resides not in the things outside but within us; and two, true happiness comes from giving. But what we generally do is to look outside for happiness – in the objects that we want, in the work that we do, in the people to whom we are attached, in being healthy, and so on. All these are entities which are inconstant, unreliable, erratic and unpredictable. The objects that seem to give us happiness are perishable, the happiness they give is short-lasting, and the list of still more objects that we may want is endless. In case of a few fortunate ones, the work that they enjoy doing coincides with the work that they have to do for a living. Even these fortunate ones cannot go on doing the same work for ever: enforced ‘superannuation’ or bodily disability might force them to give up the work. People to whom we are attached do not always behave the way we would like them to. 

Understanding Medical Physiology - Page 876 - Bijlani - 2004 - Preview - More editions The basic text of integral yoga is The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo. CONCLUSION Yoga is an ancient system of Indian philosophy. Although its metaphysical aspects are complex, the fundamentals, as applicable to daily life, are quite ...

The meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy - Page 165 - S.K. Maitra - 1956 - This statement we can look upon as containing the essence of Sri Aurobindo's conception of yoga, as, in fact, the text of integral yoga. The first thing which it asserts is that yoga is a birth. It is not a dissolution, nor an absorption, nor a swooning away into the Divine, but it is a birth. That is to say, the human being retains his character as a human being, which means as a being with a body, life, soul and mind, and having a part to ...

Leather, Fur, & Legendary Joy: A Response from Joshua Ramey to Beatrice Marovich’s “‘We Dance These Beasts’: Capitalism, Animism, Believers of the Future” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey

As anyone who knows me knows, I spend as much of my time as I can drumming or dancing (when I’m not reading and writing and teaching).  Part of why I was drawn to Deleuze in the first place was that he seemed to be one of the few philosophers willing to lend some language to what was crucial for me about movement and rhythm, conceptually as well as at the affective level, and willing to take the emendation of the affects as far as the emendation of the intellect toward the composition of a philosophical life.  Deleuze was always, in a typically French way, reticent about being anecdotal, and I think he knew how to be revealing enough without anecdotes.  I’m not quite that refined.  Beatrice has moved me to relay, anecdotally, an experience that, for me, forms a kind of legend for the defense of spirituality Beatrice is drawing attention to between the lines of my book…

At any rate, I have often thought to myself that from the 1960’s to 2013 the spiritual stakes of experimentation have changed:  what was an aesthetic choice, then, has become a survival strategy, now.  For those of us with anything left to experiment with, survival itself has become experimental.  In the context of endless and irremediable debts, of a totally debt-leveraged existence, everything is improvisation, everything is experimentation.  Existence itself is spiritual ordeal, for those who manage to survive the imperative to “invest in oneself” at the cost of everything, and at the cost of everything manage to pretend to be an “entrepreneur of the self,” while in fact this means to take on the weight of the world, the burden of the global, ever-imploding debt.

On the Occasion of the Ordeal: A Response from Joshua Ramey to Dan Barber’s “Experimental Life and Ordeal’s Necessity” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey

I would argue, however—with Laruelle’s theory of the fundamental autonomy of heresy and gnosis—that the reverse is the case, that it is orthodoxy that is more or less parasitic, in the long run, on religious experiences that are too wild, too intense, too idiosyncratic to regulate, order, and habituate.  (It’s true that Bergson’s view of religion is similar, but I don’t hold to Bergson’s ontology of development, which overemphasizes continuity). From that perspective, let me engage in some heretical theology.  The logic of exemplarity in standard Christian philosophy is a logic that attempts to provide limits or conditions for possible spiritual experimentation, in advance of ordeal. 

But from my perspective, and the perspective that I call “the hermetic Deleuze,” since every ordeal potentially is unlimited, any ordeal can exemplify any other, to the degree that it resonates with any other ordeal. This is where Bruno did not so much reject incarnationalism as rather accelerate it into a kind of terracarnationalism or cosmicarnationalism, a becoming-divine or being-divine of everything in relation to everything else.  This has obvious overtones of mystical theophanies such as Eriugena’s, and in alchemical theologies like Boehme’s. The problem with the “standard Christian philosophy,” as Bruno saw it, and as Deleuze put it borrowing a phrase from D.H. Lawrence, is that it is not yet ready “to have done with judgment.” 

(title unknown) from enowning Tomonobu Imamichi says The Book of Tea was there first. 

[Ito Kichinosuke, one of my teachers at university, studied in Germany in 1918 immediately after the First World War and hired Heidegger as a private tutor. Before moving back to Japan at the end of his studies, Professor Ito handed Heidegger a copy of Das Buch vom Tee, the German translation of Okakura Kkuzo's The Book of Tea, as a token of his appreciation. That was in 1919. Sein und Zeit was published in 1927, and made Heidegger famous. Mr. Ito was surprised and indignant that Heidegger used Zhuangzi's concept without giving him credit. Years later in 1945, Professor Ito reminisced with me and, speaking in his Shonai dialect, said, "Heidegger did a lot for me, but I should've laid into him for stealing." There are other indications that Heidegger was inspired by Eastern writings, but let's leave this topic here. I have heard many stories of this kind from Professor Ito and checked their veracity.] [The meaningfulness of the tea cup, in 1919. P. 83]