Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts

February 22, 2013

Adam Smith defends the soundness of ordinary human being’s judgments

On the occasion of the Mother's Birthday, an evening performance was held at the Matrimandir amphitheater. Passages were read from Savitri "Book of the Divine Mother" and "The Book of Birth and Quest", accompanied by the flute and tanpura. 
21st of February  important day in Auroville's life, FoodLink takes a gift economy's aspect to celebrate this day. Based on the joy of giving, food shopping is an exchange. Farmers bring their productions, vegetable, fruits, milk .... and people pay the price that they can afford. A different way to estimate value of goods, in a typically Aurovilian way of living. This happened in "Pour Tous" next to solar kitchen, finishing at 3 pm. 

10,000 visitors thronged the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Over 10,000 visitors are expected to have crossed the portals of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, to have a ...

A mass meditation was held at Sri Aurobindo Ashram to mark the 135th birth anniversary of the Mother here on Thursday. Devotees from the country as well as...

Talk - Matter – Man’s Last spiritual Frontier at Sri Aurobindo Complex ... Feb 21 2013 04:30 PM Sri Aurobindo Complex Trust 21 Feb, 2013. 'Mother's birth anniversary', talk on 'Matter - man's last spiritual frontier' by Bhaskara Reddy.

MOTHER´S BIRTHDAY AT AUROBINDO (Colonel Nirmal Mahajan, EME, Retd) 21 Feb, was Mother’s 135th birthday
It was celebrated with all the fervor, enthusiasm at the Aurobindo Ashram, Rajpur Road. The Prayer hall was packed to capacity with the devotees who had come to pay homage to Mother. Madhu Anjali, energetic Vice Chairperson of Aurbindo Ashram, had splendidly decked up the whole place with marigold flowers. Flurry of white flowers at the entrance add to the ambiance of Ashram. As always, as per the tradition, the program started with meditation and reading of a page of epic, “Savitri” (written by Sri Aurobindo). Later Kiran Sood, Principal of M.K.P (PG) Collage, gave a thought provoking talk on Mother, which the knowledgeable audience heard in pin drop silence. Kiran is a regular speaker and has in-depth knowledge of spiritual matters…
Special message received from Pondicherry was distributed to all. It read, “There is a sacred fire that burns in the heart and envelops the whole being; it is Agni, who illumines and purifies all. I kindle that fire in you each time that you ask me for some progress; but it destroys nothing but falsehood and obscurity.” The Mother
20 boys and girls of Jaswant Modern School sang few melodious Bhajans, befitting the auspicious occasion, in the presence of their principal Meenakashi Ganhotra. Every one in the vast gathering appreciated chorus singing especially “ Om Namo Shivai” in crescendo. In the end Devi Wahi, chairperson of Aurbindo, profusely thanked Kiran Sood and principal, students of Jaswant Modern School. She also informed the devotees that on 24 Feb, Promila Mahajan will give lecture on “Meditation” at 10:30 AM.  All are welcome. The function was attended by large devotees of Dehradun including Gen Agarwal, Thapar, Mohan Sachdev, Narang , Bansal, Sethi , Mehta , Mahajan and many more. Community lunch was served to one and all. It was indeed a memorable day at Aurobindo Ashram.

As the human mind develops beyond its first focus on purely vital success and fulfillment, we see the next stage as the attempt to abstract out of the life experience some basic principles or rules which get framed into the concept of “right”, which became in the ancient Indian philosophy, the concept known as “Dharma”. We see here a more characteristically mental framework developing an independence from the needs for vital success in life, and a corresponding attempt to control life based on these abstract principles…
We see here a real transition from the non-moral law of the vital world, and the first mental developments focused on supporting and achieving success in the world of life and action, to a more purely mental framework that seeks to modify life, and impose itself regardless of the vital desires and fulfillments. Of course, this starts out as a mixed action still highly colored by the desires, demands and needs of the vital being of man, and thus, the ideals and goals set in this initial stage are very much vital goals.

The term noosphere was originally coined by Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit anthropologist. However it was Vernadsky integrated the emergence of noosphere with the evolutionary history of the planet… His book ‘The Biosphere’ was published in Russian in 1926 and in French in 1929. With 150 pages and unassuming cover, the book’s importance was not understood fully outside a small minority of inter-disciplinary scientists dealing with eco-systems… In 1960, in the centennial year of the publication of ‘Origin of Species’, Sir Julian Huxley coined the term ‘psycho-social evolution’ to characterize the nature of evolution after the advent of humans. Huxley also strongly felt the need for a psychosocial science for guiding this post-biological evolution…
But what makes Vivekananda more relevant to the study of noosphere is the way he shuns the pseudo-science of social Darwinism. This is a remarkable stand because at that time the most of the Western world was under the sway of Herbert Spencer – applying the ‘survival of the fittest’ to human societies, justifying enslaving of non-western societies, colonial exploitation, racism and elimination of mentally challenged individuals in the name of the science of eugenics… He saw in evolution an underlying unity of all life rejecting spontaneous creation with an external factor like God and he also inferred that with the advent of human mind and unity of humanity, a new phase in evolution has commenced… In fact Vernadsky seeing mind as an important factor in planetary geo-bio evolution gets a premonition in Vivekananda’s thought, though in a much larger canvas… Vernadsky in his last days was deeply attracted by the works of Swami Vivekananda. And this year sees the 150th birth anniversary of both Swami Vivekananda and Vernadsky. 

A central thread running through his work is an unusually strong commitment to the soundness of the ordinary human being’s judgments, and a concern to fend off attempts, by philosophers and policy-makers, to replace those judgments with the supposedly better “systems” invented by intellectuals… Perhaps taking a cue from David Hume’s skepticism about the capacity of philosophy to replace the judgments of common life, Smith is suspicious of philosophy as conducted from a foundationalist standpoint, outside the modes of thought and practice it examines. Instead, he maps common life from within, correcting it where necessary with its own tools rather than trying either to justify or to criticize it from an external standpoint. He aims indeed to break down the distinction between theoretical and ordinary thought. This intellectual project is not unconnected with his political interest in guaranteeing to ordinary individuals the “natural liberty” to act in accordance with their own judgments.

Polanyi suffers from ideological blindness.  He has a political point of view that denies the very evidence he quotes!  

Remembering Arumuga Navalar from Centre Right India by Pulitheva Tamizhmannan
There are other equally great figures who are less famous, but who deserve to be known and remembered. Among them is Arumuga Navalar (1822 – 1879) who is regarded as the “father” of modern day Tamil prose and an architect of Hindu destiny in Eelam (Sri Lanka) is the most prominent member…
The school he established was modeled along the lines of the Protestant school he had studied in since he felt that the traditional Tamil schools were inadequate for facing the missionary onslaught which he saw as shiva’s way of chastising the Tamils and awakening them to their own heritage… By 1850 he had managed to set up the printing press and began publishing religious texts and texts like Bala Patam (Children’s Lessons) for the Shaiva school children… To put it simply, Arumuga Navalar created an awakening among the Sri Lankan Tamils and set the standards for modern day Tamil prose; what Swami Dayananda and his Arya Samaj had achieved in North India in stemming conversions, Arumuga Navalar achieved in Eelam.

At a time, when India was suffering from corruption, low economic growth etc, and the common man was left with frustration and anger over the system, Hindi Cinema turned violent and aggressive. Reflecting the anger of the masses, Amitabh Bachchan became the new hero, who had the courage to fight against the wrong and maintaining moral values at the same time… Reflective of "the tumultuous politics of the early 70s" in India, Deewaar (1975 film) was a ground-breaking work. It was one of a few films which established Bachchan as the "angry young man" of Bollywood cinema. ~ How do movies affect yoga practice?

February 19, 2013

Sri Aurobindo's Copernican revolution in Vedic hermeneutics

The philosophy of integralism, or, The metaphysical synthesis ... - Page 81 - Haridas Chaudhuri - 1954 - Russell says that the notion of the universe is traceable to an anthropocentric outlook generated by the geocentricism of pre-Copernican astronomy. But he conveniently turns a blind eye to the fact that the advocates of one all-embracing ...
On Samuel Hugo Bergman's Philosophy - Page 39 Abraham Zvie Bar-On - 1986 - Preview - More editions ... a revolution in modern philosophy, which in Bergman's view was not less important than his "Copernican Revolution". ... To express his admiration Bergman quoted the words of the renowned Hindu thinker Sri Aurobindo: Man must be ...
Sri Aurobindo circle - Issue 32 - Page 91 - Aurobindo GhoseSri Aurobindo AshramSri Aurobindo Society - 1976 - and more in the evolving ... The New Copernican Revolution, as it is called, proposes a profounder change in the scientific picture and paradigm itself. And as Kuhn puts it, when ...
Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta: The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Page 137 - Nolini Kanta Gupta - 1972 - ... and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear.
Annual - Page 78 - Sri Aurobindo mandir, Calcutta - 1982 - the rise of a Fuehrer or a Dictator seems to have been a ... That is not the Copernican revolution that is needed in the social body today. Money was always a power and those who had money were always ...
The Advent - Volumes 27-28 - Page 25 - Sri Aurobindo Ashram - 1970 - SCIENCE AND ... It was this world-picture, accommodated to the practical needs of science and supported by theological orthodoxy, which became the target of the so-called "Copernican Revolution". We must notice ...
Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution - Page 34 - V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1966 - ... yet confirmed, *In the words of the physicist Niels Bohr, " We are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." was regarded as the centre of the universe. The Copernican 
Sri Aurobindo: a biography and a history - Volume 2 - Page 1223 - K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar - 1972 - Writing of the essential character of the poem, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1947: Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often. " ibid., p. 864. 66 ibid., p. 829. In terms of Copernican astronomy, of s ...
Bharata manisha quarterly - Volume 4 - Page 19 - 1978 - Sri Aurobindo's is such a Copernican revolution as his method of symbolic interpretation of the Veda provides the secret key to unravel the spiritual ... Herein lies the significance of Sri Aurobindo's Copernican revolution in Vedic hermeneutics.
The Theosophist - Volume 92 - Page 111 - Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, Annie Wood Besant - 1970 - The matter is excellently summed up as usual by Aurobindo, who is acutely conscious of the need to make humanly ... as was the Copernican recovery of helio-centricity to the preceding ignorance in regard to the operation of our Solar system.
The Hindu quest for the perfection of man - Page 165 - Troy Wilson Organ - 1970 - ... the Copernican, the Darwinian, the Marxian, and the Freudian to challenge the fundamental assumptions upon which ... In Hinduism the Westerner can look in upon Aurobindo, "The Indian Conception of Life," The Indian Philosophical ...
Prabuddha bharata: or awakened India - Volume 91 - Page 283 - Vivekananda (Swami)Advaita Ashrama - 1986 - Often the revolutions of the modern centuries (Copernican. Industrial. French, Darwinian and the ... Aurobindo as a modern Jnani and Gandhi as a modern Karma-yogi have paved the path to moksha. Professional academic philosophers like ...
Nivedita commemoration volume - Page 247 - Sister Nivedita, Amiya Kumar Mazumdar - 1968 - SRI AUROBINDO'S CONCEPT OF MAN A NEO-KANTIAN REVIEW D. P. CHATTOPADHYAYA If philosophy is defined in ... Since the days of Kant and primarily because of his (anthropocentric) Copernican Revolution this view has become ...
Philosophical consciousness and scientific knowledge: conceptual ... - Page 107 - Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, Ashoke Kumar Sen Gupta, Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy, and Culture. Sub Project: Consciousness, Science, Society, Value, and Yoga - 2004 -  ... in the Interuniversal Essence while experiencing an unfolding of the nested hierarchy of Being (Sri Aurobindo). ... universe we inhabit almost the same way Copernican Revolution demolished the unique position of the Earth in the cosmos.
The moon of Hoa Binh: a novel - Volume 2 - Page 588 - Nha Trang Công Huyè̂n Tôn NWilliam L. Pensinger - 1994 - "He [Steiner] credits Goethe with a discovery of a Copernican scale: the Beautiful is not, as 'Platonic' art theory asserts, ... himself in agreement with Webern (not to mention with the objectives Aurobindo had in mind for the practice of yoga).
No other name?: a critical survey of Christian attitudes toward ... - Page 149 - Paul F. Knitter - 1985 - He appeals to Sri Aurobindo's "logic of the Infinite": all we can say about the ultimate reality is much more a matter of ... A New Christology Hick does not evade the implications of his Copernican revolution: "This paradigm shift involves a ...
Newsletter - Volume 9, Issues 1-14 - Page 9 - Institute of Noetic Sciences - 1981 - ... as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Joseph Campbell, Michael Polanyi, and Carl jung. ... as the Industrial Revolution, and simultaneously a conceptual revolution as shaking as the Copernican Revolution.

February 13, 2013

Ken Wilber has put further flesh on the skeleton of Sri Aurobindo's work

I would strongly suggest that you consider looking at Joshua Ramey’s new book The Hermetic Deleuze… While a lot of my earlier years were spent reading esotericism, gnosticism, hermeticism and occultism, I have been incrementally distancing my philosophical self from such potential contaminants to reason for twenty years now. And this is despite teaching both philosophy and contemporary incarnations of such esoteric traditions at university. I only started to forcefully question the viability and value of this bracketing quite recently: Posted by Paul Reid-Bowen at 13:38
Ashis Nandy and the Cultural Politics of Selfhood - Christine Deftereos - gives the reader an insight into a novel aspect of Nandy. The author insists that Ashis Nandy is not merely a self-described political psychologist; he is also an intellectual street fighter who comes face to face with the psychology of politics and the politics of psychology, thus affirming why this intellectual is one of the most original and confronting Indian thinkers of his generation. The main features of this book are its original reading and the authentic use of the psychoanalytic theory to characterise and demonstrate the importance of psychoanalysis in Nandy's work. Read More...
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. 
Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
ABA Journal - Feb 1962 - Page 155 Vol. 48, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view Lawyers are now frequently called upon to make decisions in business matters, and businessmen must often decide a course of action that has distinct legal implications. by Stuart T. Saunders, President, Norfolk and Western Railway Co.
In his stimulating book, The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller emphasizes the importance of values in these words: “Our business as rational beings is not to argue for what is going to be but to strive for what ought to be . . .” It is this pursuit of truth in the face of ultimate uncertainty that establishes the essential dignity and grandeur of man. All our hopes for the future depend upon this quest, and we, as judges, lawyers and businessmen, must see to it that human idealism remains the well-spring of our civilization.
Source Book Modern Hinduism - Page 171 - Glyn Richards - 2013 - Preview The rending of the veil by involution and evolution is the prerequisite of the development of divine consciousness and divine life within humanity. ... Though he failed to stir the imagination of the people in the same way as men like Vivekananda and Gandhi he still succeeded in inspiring enthusiasm in small groups of intellectuals for the cultural heritage of India, especially the Vedas and Upanishads in which is philosophy is firmly rooted.
Science and Religion Around the World - Page 204 John Hedley Brooke, Ronald L. Numbers - 2011 - Preview - More editions One of these was Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), an English-educated Bengali nationalist and philosopher, who repudiated the materialism of Darwinian evolution for the “involution” of divine consciousness. Hindu creationists, however ...
The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 11 - V. P. Varma - 1990 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo traces this theory of involution and evolution also in Heraclitus according to whom the cosmos represents the involution and evolution of the one eternal principle of Fire — at once the one substance and the one force — which he expresses as the upward and downward road. Vivekananda traced this concept of involution in the ancient Hindu philosophy. He says: "... this whole chain, is the involution of that cosmic life which is everywhere. It is this one mass of intelligence which from the protoplasm up to the most ...
The political philosophy of Swami Vivekananda - Page 33 - A. V. Rathna Reddy - 1984 - Vivekananda related the evolution of the world to the involution of the spirit. According to him, social evolution is not an independent process. He believed that it is regulated by involution. It is not evolution that decides the course and destiny of...
Hinterlands and Horizons: Excursions in Search of Amity - Page xii - Margaret Chatterjee - 2002 - Preview - More editions Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and S. Radhakrishnan. Their cultural ... Out of this mining of ancient wisdom the Indian thinkers of the post-Brahmo Samaj era chiseled a discourse that was not derivative, but rooted in Indian soil. This took further ...
Page 47 Vivekananda invokes guna language elsewhere, when he applies the concept of realization to the national and ... Indeed Sri Aurobindo, like Vivekananda, combines mining ancient thought along with grafting elements of modernism and is untouched by the Christian framework of ideas. His rejection of the Samkhyan strict dualism of purusa (spirit) ... The theory of "involution" of the Eternal or Spirit is to be understood as a counterconcept to "ex nihilo" creationism, and integral yoga draws on all the capacities of the individual without polarizing nature to spirit. In this connection, it is worth ...
History of Science and Philosophy of Science: A Historical ... - Page 6 Pradip Kumar Sengupta, Sengupta Pradip Kumar - 2010 - Preview - More editions A product of the Indian intellectual temper of the late 19th century, he, like Swami Vivekananda, was committed to ... in the light of lights, only the wisest person can discern the different levels of evolution (uttarana) and involution (avatarana).
Analysis of Sri Aurobindo's 'The Life Divine' - Page 131 - Roy Posner - Full view Source (i.e. the involution) and an ascent to the Source (i.e. the evolution) simultaneously. ... Aurobindo also tells us that Life/Energy is a dynamic play of the universal Force, and through this interchange, stimulation, and response between the ...
Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 125 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - More editions (Aurobindo uses the term 'involution' in a rather precise sense: as "infolding" or "self-containment," which is to contrast with "unfolding" and "self-expression.") Matter, for example, marks as complete an involution of the characteristic of ...
Teilhard De Chardin and Eastern Religions: Spirituality and ... - Page 200 - Ursula KingJoseph Needham - 2011 - Preview - More editions Teilhard also uses the term involution, but it describes a rather different process from what it means in Aurobindo's thought. For both thinkers involution is the fundamental law of evolution, but in an almost opposite sense. When Teilhard ...
The future of man according to Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo Ghose - Page 424 J. Chetany - 1978 - Involution: We have noted that Aurobindo explained evolution as an inverse process of the Saccidananda's original ... Aurobindo means by involution the original process whereby the Absolute Saccidananda became Matter and Ignorance.
The Essential Aurobindo - Page 70 - Aurobindo GhoseRobert A. McDermott - 2001 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo Ghose, Robert A. McDermott. Involution. and. Evolution. THE Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being. Limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, it does not ...
Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, ... - Amit Goswami - 2001 - Preview - More editions A greater power must come, a larger light (Aurobindo 1970, bk. 6, canto 2). For the last few hundred years, nay, the last millennium, with a few ... Involution. and. Evolution. Esotericism has an aspect that two philosophers of recent times ...
God Is Not Dead: What Quantum Physics Tells Us About Our Origins ... - Page 128 - Amit Goswami - 2012 - Preview - More editions Indian thinking with the idea of first involution and then evolution of consciousness. Ken Wilber (1981) has put further flesh on the skeleton of Aurobindo's work, and so have I (Goswami, 2001). Figure 9-2 shows the evolved version. E = Mc2 ...
The Perennial Quest for a Psychology with a Soul: An Inquiry Into ... - Page 411 - Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - Preview SRI AUROBINDO'S COSMIC EVOLUTION IN TERRESTRIAL NATURE For Sri Aurobindo and Ken Wilber, evolution is preceded by involution, and what was original and primal in involution is in evolution the Supreme emergence.
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Page 293 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2007 - Preview - More editions also prefiguring the upward-arc of the evolutionary vision of Henry James Sr. and Sri Aurobindo. It is precisely this involution-evolution mysticism that Darwin Fall will discover is dramatically embodied in the physical transfigurations and ...

February 12, 2013

Philosophers do do a lot of suppressed or unexpressed spiritual practices

Responses to "Prof. Reddy is a visionary who dreams of the unification of India and Pakistan"
koustav mukherjee January 22, 2013 at 9:04 am unification of Indian subcontinent has to be done. it is required to make India a superpower. Almost 90 percent of our present problems will be shorted out by the unification of India. Unification of India should be done on a urgent basis.
Md. Zahidur khan February 12, 2013 at 3:15 am Unification is a reality and once it will be done must. Fact is that when. Because partition was done based on some illogical matters and political failures and for some greedy persons. The result is not good enough for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. So coming generation must reunified for their existence or hoping to be great power or from realization that unification lead them nothing than chaos.

Every fundamentalist evangelist, a Wahabhi or an evangelical Christian or an ISKCON devotee, attacks evolution because it is a strong rebuttal to a literal interpretation of the scripture. If one part of the scripture – particularly one as central as the creation of the universe and life – becomes poetic and symbolic, then so does every other part of the scripture. Every part becomes subject to interpretation as per the inner spiritual needs of the individual. That is the last thing that a Wahabbist – or, for that matter, any religious fundamentalist – needs. If the Garden of Eden is only a poetic metaphor then what does that make of a hell fire and if I am to spread my religion by means of the fear of eternal damnation, what does that make of my evangelical career?
Hence the fervent attempts to reject evolution… Then there are also fundamentalist of the Indic variety who oppose evolution, on both theological grounds like ISKCON and because it is a ‘western’ import… Later Jesuit and anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin speculatively and geologist Vernadsky more emphatically ponder over the subject of how human evolution is qualitatively different and give us the concept of ‘noosphere’. And in Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’, evolution becomes an epic song of spiritual odyssey. In the poetry of Tamil poet Bharathi are lines which are artistic premonition of Gaia. All these show what theory of evolution can do to a culture, when embraced as a worldview and science – it at once broadens the canvas of human understanding and internalizes the spirituality. Let us just imagine: If every seminary, every madrassa, every Veda-padasala, were to teach its students evolution, how would their worldview change? 

ABA Journal - Feb 1962 - Page 155 Vol. 48, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view In his stimulating book, The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller emphasizes the importance of values in these words: Our business as rational beings is not to argue for what is going to be but to strive for what ought to be . . . It is this pursuit of truth ...

The tense relation between philosophy and hermeticism (increasingly, in my work, “hermeticism” is a generic term for the “spiritual sciences”) is a kind of double-cross. There is a kind of conflicting and twice-over short circuit between necessity and contingency that binds and blocks these two levels or modes of apprehension. On the one hand, philosophical concepts are grounded or founded upon a putatively universal appeal, an appeal to what would be or might be necessary for anyone with reason to assent to. On the other hand, there is the contingency of the perspective from which any such an appeal is made. I have argued in the book that philosophers themselves do a lot of work (and have a lot of work done to themselves) at the level of their perspective, having it shaped by a distinctive but often suppressed or unexpressed spirituality, a set of disciplines or practices that inform and potentially transform their explicit or stated concepts. (This is, incidentally, what the entire opening of Deleuze’s book Nietzsche and Philosophy is cryptically about).

I have expressed my criticism of Polanyi’s denial’s that markets were important features of classical societies, long before they became dominantly familiar in the modern period… Polanyi wrote during the 2nd world war and had a pessimistic outlook. Those developing countries that have and are now breaking through to and beyond the $1 a day income levels or the bulk of their populations – elites in all human societies known to mankind have always done better than majority of their populations in all economic systems – have or are now experiencing the positive effect of markets on their desperate situations. 
These are the consequence of the only Great Transformation that matters: the raising the living standards of the desperately poor by growing their market economies. The angst felt by intellectuals in their comfortable circumstances at what is happening is vulnerable to the question of what do they suggest that is practical as a workable alternative, given the experience of actual collapse of 20th-century socialist non-market experiments?

January 15, 2013

Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Gabriel Tarde, and Sri Aurobindo

Women On the path - bookmyevent.com - a series of talk in collaboration with the India Habitat Centre - Insights into Contemporary Feminine Spirituality with Ameeta Mehra 16th January, 2013 7:00 pm Casuarina Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi - 110003
A researcher and practitioner of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Ameeta Mehra will speak about her spiritual practice and work that are based on the dictum, ‘All Life is Yoga’.  She is chairperson of the Gnostic Centre, Delhi, and is on the governing board of Auroville, an international township for human unity. She has written about and facilitated courses on integral yoga philosophy, integral education, and management.

Posted by RY Deshpande on Fri 20 Feb 2009 04:12 AM Permanent Link But the focus on facts could have its own relevance and value, I suppose. ~ RYD
Posted by RY Deshpande on Tue 17 Feb 2009 07:52 PM Permanent Link But there are moments when one has to be, out of good necessity, verbose also. Perhaps I fall too often into that kind of trap. But finally one cannot make a fetish of either. They each have functional roles and if they serve the respective purpose well, they must be acceptable in their own right. In any case, follow your inclination and please get going; your contribution to this important topic will be valuable—and there’s no doubt about it. ~RYD 
Posted by Kepler on Tue 17 Feb 2009 02:58 AM IST |  Profile |  Permanent Link
Here’s a question: what if one did want to know, as objectively as possible, all that could be documented about Sri Aurobindo’s external life, not in order to critique, reduce, or explain his spiritual greatness by mundane details, but rather because one has a deep love for Sri Aurobindo, and finds everything one learns about the actual external life he led is filled with sweetness and brings an increasing sense of closeness.
Posted by Kepler on Thu 19 Feb 2009 09:51 PM IST |  Profile |  Permanent Link
But consider the much less important, but still interesting (to some of us), attempt to get at all the available external documentation of, for example, Sri Aurobindo’s outer life in Baroda, i.e. what he did, where he went and when, whom he associated with, what they recorded as their impressions of him, etc. Would the empirical, critical, “scientific” historian’s approach to this specific task produce more reliable results than a hagiographic one? I personally do appreciate the results of the rationalistic approach to this “documentation of external facts” about the saint’s life, meaning just those facts that actually were “on the surface for others to see”. I think the raw tasks of collecting, evaluating and presenting the available physical data, do lend themselves to the empirical, rationalistic approach.

The way Peter Heehs wove falsehood so magisterially while latching on to the objective label must make us realize how sacrosanct the bare facts are at this juncture. Even Vivekananda presented a doctored picture of Ramakrishna, says a fresh book by Jyotirmaya Sharma. [TNM55]

Perhaps the most intriguing questions for most of us are those that relate to the operation of the law of Karma. We want Karma to conform to our mental notions of right and wrong, or to fit within a pattern that satisfies our desires. We expect to find some kind of “legal system” that operates the law of Karma and to find thereby that our moral, ethical, religious or mental notions are supported and justified by the action of Karma. The law of Karma however is not a law framed by the mind of man, but a law of the Spirit that has manifested the complexity and subtlety of the entire creation. 

Unknown God - The Times of India 20 Jan 2012 – Book Review: Title: Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God Author: Georges Van Vrekhem Publisher: Amaryllis Pages: 292. Price: Rs 595
For those keen on Darwin, the book is a treat. In the latter half of the book, Von Vrekhem brings in various other arguments and strands: the human genome project, attacks on the ignorance of scientists in religious matters, the anthropic principle, the debate of science and religion, the intelligent design theory, and huge dollops of Sri Aurobindo -- whom alone he seems to unquestioningly accept. Although it shifts the focus away from Darwin and the evolution debate, it is just as penetrating and as interesting as the scientific theories and arguments — and indeed, as the rest of this book.
This book is in fact a spell-binding history of the search for the ways evolution, even before or at the time Darwin. The chapter on Alfred Wallace is outstanding…  - Jyotsna Mohanty, in The Advent 
The book narrates the relevant events in the history of 'Darwinism', the most popular of the several theories of evolution. What is nowadays generally labelled as Darwinism hardly resembles what Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, but is the result of scientific developments that are at times considered anti-Darwinian. The book analyses and clearly discerns between the theories of creationism and intelligent design. The author highlights how much of the Darwinist view and the present controversies over evolution results from the exclusively Judeo-Christian background of Western thought. He makes the necessary difference between religion and spirituality. Finally, he expounds the still little known evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo, Eastern in origin, but synthetic in its application.

It is commonly believed that the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde allows even for inanimate objects such as chemicals, atoms, and stars to be topics of sociology. This article claims otherwise. Tarde is an arch-reductionist for whom nothing exists below the tiniest micro-level of the cosmos. His theory of monads is by no means an adequate sociology of medium- or large-sized things. Show full item record Related Items By Author:

January 13, 2013

Vivekananda’s doctored picture of Ramakrishna

Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo Spiritual Events Info ... Spiritual Event on Speaking Tree By: Ramesh Bijlani on Jan 13, 2013
A talk highlighting the landmark role Swami Vivekananda played in creating a receptivity for ancient Indian wisdom in the West, and how other spiritual masters have continued the work. Ramesh Bijlani Date: Jan 13, 2013 Time:10:00 am to 11:30 am Venue: Meditation Hall, SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM -- DELHI BRANCH, Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110 016. Entry through Gate No. 6. Phone: 011-2656-7863, E-mail: aurobindo@vsnl.com
Harisharan Walia 09:02 am Swami Vivekanada believed in vedantic philosophy of Brahma satyam jagat mithya, where as Shri Aurbindo saw the gross Sagun changing world and the subtle unchangig Nirguna Brahma as two layers/aspects of God. Both believed in service of the universe. Please elaborate what are their views on Gyan, Karma and Bhakti, Karma-Akarma- Vikarma.

Auroville is an experimental city, located a few miles out of town, that grew out of the Sri Aurobindo ashram that dominates social and educational life in Pondi.

Swami Vivekananda's connection to Puducherry The Hindu KAVITA KISHORE PUDUCHERRY, January 12, 2013 With the 150th birth anniversary of the philosopher providing a fitting backdrop, Kavita Kishore explores the threads that link him to Puducherry
When Swami Vivekananda travelled from Kanyakumari to Chennai, it is said that he stopped in Puducherry for a few days. According to popular belief, he is said to have stayed in the house on Vysial Street that Sri Aurobindo and Subramania Bharathiyar occupied when they first came to the town…
According to Aurobindonian Scholar, Prema Nandakumar, since Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were born only nine years apart, they were almost contemporaries. Swami Vivekananda was the inspiration for the Vande Mataram movement that a young Sri Aurobindo and several of his contemporaries participated in. When Sri Aurobindo was imprisoned in Alipore Jail from 1908 to 1909 in the Alipur Bomb Case, he read the Bhagavat Gita and other spiritual books to gain higher consciousness. It was then that Swami Vivekananda played a role in his achievement of spirituality, she said… Vivekananda’s influence was felt all over India at the time, especially in Bengal. So, it is not surprising that he played a role in Sri Aurobindo’s rise to spirituality as well…
Although the route that Swami Vivekananda’s spirituality took was different from that of Sri Aurobindo, there are some similarities between their philosophies, including the importance given to Indian culture, the dedication to social service and education and tolerance of all religions, said Ms. Nandakumar.

Jyotirmaya Sharma busts many myths around Swami Vivekananda From: Outlook Magazine, 21 January 2013 Interview ‘His Inclusiveness Is A Powerful Myth’ Vivekananda comes across as a Hindu supremacist, and not so much a social reformist - Satish Padmanabhan Interviews Jyotirmaya Sharma
In his third book in the quartet on Hindu identity and self-images, academic-author Jyotirmaya Sharma busts many myths around Swami Vivekananda. He comes across as a Hindu supremacist, and not so much a social reformist. Excerpts from an interview with Satish Padmanabhan: …
This book, like the previous two (Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism and Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India), is an attempt to delineate a genealogy of Hindu identity. In this context, Vivekananda provides the most influential restatement of Hinduism. His religious nationalism is the decisive influence behind Hindu nationalism. Also, unlike many writers, I do not distinguish between Hinduism and Hindutva. For me, Hindutva is merely the politically dominant face of Hinduism today…
This idea of his inclusiveness and liberality is a powerful shared myth in our country but entirely based on a limited, partial reading of his works. Forget Islam and Christianity, Vivekananda wasn't particularly generous towards many sects and schools of thought within Hinduism.
Vivekananda, more than anyone else, helped construct the elements that constituted this carefully edited, censored and wilfully misleading version of his master’s ‘catholicity’. He used it to mean what he thought was Ramakrishna’s tolerance, generosity and inclusiveness in relation to other faiths while carefully glossing over the sources and influences that produced this ‘catholicity’. The continued use of the term has had a longevity independent of Vivekananda’s remoulding of Ramakrishna from a “religious ecstatic to a religious eclectic”, and continues to be used even to this day by perceptive and critical readers of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda story…
Vivekananda’s interpretation of Ramakrishna is a simultaneous act of fidelity and distortion… In 1896, Vivekananda gave two lectures in America and England on Ramakrishna. At the outset, he confesses that he speaks on behalf of his Master, but the errors in interpreting the message are entirely his own. The bare bones of Ramakrishna’s message are all there, beginning with renunciation, devotion, love, and ending with Ramakrishna’s love of all sects and religions. But the moment one unravels the details, a very carefully doctored picture emerges.  

Tweets 16h - Prasanna Viswanathan @prasannavishy To be fair to Jyotirmaya Sharma, he has always held that Rishi Aurobindo & Swami Vivekananda as spiritual progenitors of Hindutva project
23h - Pritish Nandy @PritishNandy Nice to see Swami Vivekananda back in the news. Time to rediscover Sri Aurobindo.
21h - Anil Kumar Gupta @anilguptarsd @PritishNandy Sri Aurobindo's 150th birth anniversary will fall in 2022. Enough time to make grand preparations for rediscover him. Start now.
23h - Pacifist @iHindu - @PritishNandy sir, request you to share your thoughts on Sri Aurobindo. Please.  View conversation
23h - jagdish sharma @ivorysharma - @PritishNandy You are a master communicator. Please start with yourself writing about the philosophy and thoughts of Sri Aurobindo & Sri Ma
11 Jan - Gautam Chikermane @gchikermane And Peter Heehs on 'Roots, trunk, branches & seeds: Similarities and differences in SV's and Sri Aurobindo's approach to Vedanta and Yoga.'

Having penned all this appreciative remarks, one has to admit and point out the presence of  a just  few  flaws  in the book. We feel as if we are reading just a recorded history—the evocative fire of aspirational afflatus is missing at some points. The author seems to get lost in the quagmire of facts and figures in his enthusiasm to offer information and more informations. However,  dedication and devotion of the author overrule all these  minor errors and  we have the privilege and joy to read through the book—The Book of The Divine Mother. 

Comment on Predictions of Sri Aurobindo by nizken More cents from me then…. Start in this order: 1. The Mother 2. Synthesis of Yoga 3. Letters on Yoga (vol. 2) 4. The Agenda
You don’t have to finish everything in them nor does it have to be in a linear cover-to-cover fashion. Just my recommendations although many other books like Essays on Gita are also quite fascinating.
“Jason: a book that tells most about the particular changes he and the Mother aimed at inaugurating in the mind and body of humanity?”
Are you referring to the supramental consciousness ? If not, then Nizken’s recommendations are fine. Otherwise, check out the Life Divine and the Mother’s Agenda.
Sri Aurobindo added 12 new chapters to the Life Divine in the 1940s and these represent his final detailed notes on the subject. A discussion of the changes he made can be read at the end of the book in the section entitled “Note on the Text” (CWSA vol 21-22, pages 1109-1117). The last two chapters “Gnostic Being” and “Divine Life” are especially relevant. On page 1004, he says power of intuition will increase in the immediate future : “A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence”.
There are also some conversations with disciples, where he cautioned against over-interpreting the consequences of the supramental change. Cats and dogs won’t change, for instance… Georges van Vrekhem, who passed away recently, has aggregated a lot of this material in his books. See his website http://www.beyondman.org
l think satprems books cover it a lot, especially ‘On The Way To Suparmanhood’ which is meantioned in the Agenda, l believe a Power was given to this book by the Mother and SA [as said in Agenda] and SA seemed to be writing it through Satprem.

Science advances and works within a “paradigm” as written by Thomas Kuhn. The materialistic clockwork mechanistic paradigm that Don Salmon talks about has been overthrown by the work in quantum mechanics by Einstein/de Broglie etc but yes it does persist to a large degree in the public mind. I think Thomas Kuhn’s book (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) would be the best way to visualize and understand these scientific paradigms and how they are overthrown by scientific ‘revolutions.’ Another great book which I found very helpful and short was What is this thing called Science written by A.F. Chalmers. Thomas Kuhn after Karl Popper probably gave us the basic framework in which to understand the history and progress of science of past 300 years.

Sri Aurobindo’s view of rebirth takes issue with the near-exclusive concentration laid upon the concept in the traditional viewpoint. This traditional viewpoint looks upon life on the earth as some kind of short-term interlude, with the goal being to return to the original source and therein to dissolve ourselves. The entire focus then revolves around individual salvation. It is, however, impossible to understand the larger significance of the manifestation and evolution of the world and all the other beings in the world from a viewpoint that starts with this level of fragmentation. This has led many to consider the world to be an illusion. Sri Aurobindo integrates the evolutionary development of the individual with the universal manifestation.

Hymns to the Mystic Fire_Volume-11 - Sri Aurobindo Ashram Home E-Library  Works Of Sri Aurobindo English Sabcl 
The integral Advaitism of Sri Aurobindo - Page 342 Ram Shankar Misra - 1957 - It is true that Sri Aurobindo's integral view of Reality cannot be said to be perfectly original. The transcendence and immanence of the Absolute or Brahman has been advocated in the Upanisads and the different systems of the Vedanta.
Political Thinkers of Modern India: Sri Aurobindo Ghose - Volume 11 - Page 336 - Verinder Grover - 1993 - Preview Unlike Christianity, Hinduism did not find it difficult to assimilate Darwinian ideas, because from the beginning Vedanta viewed God as both transcendent and immanent in nature. Aurobindo could easily spiritualise the concept of evolution and ...