Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular
diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson , novels
competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though
memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new
incarnation in the personal blog.
What is the Meaning of
"Integral"? Jack Crittenden
Wilber's approach appears to have provided a coherent vision that
seamlessly weaves together truth-claims from such fields as physics and
biology; the eco-sciences; chaos theory and the systems sciences; medicine,
neurophysiology, biochemistry; art, poetry, and aesthetics in general;
developmental psychology and a spectrum of psychotherapeutic endeavors, from
Freud to Jung to Kegan; the great spiritual theorists from Plato and Plotinus
in the West to Shankara and Nagarjuna in the East; the modernists from
Descartes and Locke to Kant; the Idealists from Schelling to Hegel; the
postmodernists from Foucault and Derrida to Taylor and Habermas; the major
hermeneutic tradition, Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer; the social systems
theorists from Comte and Marx to Parsons and Luhmann; the contemplative and
mystical schools of the great meditative traditions, East and West, in the
world's major religious traditions. And all of that is just a sampling! Jack Crittenden Author,
Democracy's Midwife integralinstitute.org
[3:23 pm]
Walsh reviews Wilber's
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - CogWeb - The
Spirit of Evolution by Roger Walsh - An overview of Ken Wilber's book Sex,
Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995). Roger
Walsh (MD) is a Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology,
Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, University of California College
of Medicine, Irvine .
Periodically there arose spectacular individuals--St.
Augustine , Meister Eckhart, Dame Julian, St. Teresa, the Rhineland mystics and more--in whom transcendence
triumphed over institutional barriers and who thereby faced themselves and the
Church with the difficult and dangerous task of reconciling conventional
mythology with transconventional realization. However, despite the profound
insights of such mystics, the power of conventional myth (for example, Church
dogma) largely reigned supreme until the rise of modernity and the empirical
scientific outlook during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from
philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely
neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western
esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from
Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as
Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this
book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics,
and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this
hermetic tradition.
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.
Sample
Chapter for Aravamudan,
S.: Guru English: South
Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language - Srinivas Aravamudan Book Description - Endorsements - Table of Contents - This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format Introduction
When it begins to accommodate multiple
registers and innovations, Guru English expands into a free-floating literary
discourse that can tolerate a high degree of ambivalence. At this point, if I
may invoke Michel Foucault, the range of the discourse makes visible
characteristics that are not directly linguistic but also institutional and
practice-oriented, and contextual to the deployment and manipulation of
language as a material phenomenon with corresponding effects within social
networks of power…
Writing to a positivist friend, Jogen Ghosh, in the late nineteenth
century, the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee asserted, "anyone
who wishes to address all Hindus must of necessity write in English." Bankim's
most famous novel of religious atavism, Anandamath [Abbey of
bliss], ends with the proposition that "imbued with a knowledge of
objective sciences by English education, our people will be able to comprehend
subjective truths." The point made by Bankim's conclusion, even if a
hopeful stretch given empirical realities, was that the English language would,
as a means of international access and especially scientific technocracy,
objectively create the conditions where pan-Indian cultural unity could be
discovered as a kind of remaindered essence. This adoption of English as
a via negativa to the literary discourse of "subjective
truths" is quite different from other plausible choices, such as Persian,
which in Bankim's context had greater historical precedent as the language of
Mughal bureaucracy and government, or Sanskrit, the sacerdotal language of the
Brahman-dominated religious and cultural elites of the Hindu majority. We now
find that there is an anomalous afterlife to Bankim's recommendation that he
may not have anticipated: the circulation of Hinduism through English was
probably an early alternative means--and continues to be an important
vehicle--for the religious discourse of middle-class urban Hindus in search of
their "subjective truths." The global transmission of Hindu and
Buddhist thought eventually led to the rise of the self-proclaimed
ethno-religious nationalist as well as the detached and Asian-influenced
cosmopolitan. It might be worth considering the most provocative version of
Bankim's thesis, that the use of English was indispensable to the defining of
Hinduism as a universalist "spirituality" at the outset. This new
articulation of spirituality cohered around several general assumptions brought
to it by colonial discourses and practices, even as it undoubtedly made good
use of preexisting practices and doctrines. This necessarily modern
presentation of ancient practices explains the constitutive contradiction of
Hinduism's national and cosmopolitan roles far more effectively than various
empirical accounts that map the contingent coming together of a number of
loosely related practices and identities under the pressure of British colonial
rule…
The first chapter explores the impact of the orientalists and the
resultant reaction-formation of a number of indigenous voices with diasporic
appeal, including Brahmos such as Rammohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen,
Vedantists such as Vivekananda, and yoga exponents such as Yogananda. These
figures are neoclassical in that they reinvent continuous tradition under the
sign of the advent of modernity. Through some of these individual cases, I
narrate the existence of the discourse of Guru English from the late eighteenth
to the mid-twentieth century. It is indeed moot whether neoclassicism of this
sort can ultimately be separated very carefully from Romantic nationalism.
More through a principle of convenience and slightly different
philosophical emphasis rather than that of radical separation from the figures
treated in the first, the second chapter examines the parallel implication of
Guru English into a literary form of late colonial Romanticism. Writers such as
Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sri
Aurobindo are shown to contribute richly to this enterprise, one that
participates in the Janus-faced project of Romantic nationalism. Looking back
atavistically, Romantic nationalism also generates a wholly modern idiom that
is produced prosthetically. These important early figures are but the very
beginning of a whole range of Indian and foreign romanticists and romanticizers
of the subcontinent's religious wealth. The eternal rediscovery of Indian
spiritual and religious mysteries continues unabated, whether in travelogues,
tourist brochures, pulp fiction and media, or even occasionally in religious
anthropology.
Yoga
Journal - Jul 1975 - Page 3
Vol. 1, No. 3 - Magazine - Full
view And it was for this purpose that he was sent to the United States in
1951 by his Guru, Hegel’s India
The
Other Tale of Indian Modernity: Savita Singh by Pratilipi Blog
Hindi poet and feminist scholar Savita
Singh's reading of Ashis Nandy's version of Sri Aurobindo's life in his
book Intimate Enemy is a classical, scholarly refutation of Nandy's critique of
modernity and in a way suggests that ...
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