Whether hew to the old order of life or hew the ways of Immortality

A Factual Analysis on the Present Controversy Govardhan Dave December 1, 2012

The existing Religions or specifically the Institutional Religions in the world had attempted to transform the Truth revealed to some saints or prophets into an intricate theology or dogma with concurrent rituals and codes of conduct. Moreover, they had insisted upon the necessity for the faithful followers to ensure conformity of their behavior with the prescribed standard or norms and had devised the complex mechanism of reward and punishment to get things done. These Religions took up these Revelation as the Absolute Truth, out of the sheer regard for the spiritual personalities, whom people adored as Prophets. They gave it the status of the Absolute Truth, a Truth beyond and besides which there is nothing. It was for them the final message delivered by God to the humankind for its good, which should command the unequivocal adherence of all humans.

This belief in the finality of the basic concepts or ideals espoused by Religions encouraged the move for their horizontal expansion, while inadvertently sidelining the vertical growth. This happened because they regarded an aspect of Truth as the whole truth, which left no scope for any other quest or for the quest beyond. This state of affairs inculcated rigidity of approach, which eventually generated intolerance towards differing views. It caused conflict between the different sects, which at times had acquired criminal dimension. The agitating devotees of the Ashram while exhibiting such intolerance in the present context have exposed fully their religionist bias.

Eventually, these Religions lost their contact with the genuine spiritual practice and promoted dichotomy of faith and reason, which led to the division of the religious life, which belonged to the domain of faith and the mundane one to the one of the reason. It created a scope for hypocrisy since the two lives have to unavoidably coexist and interact with each other. This state of affairs has generated the belief of an unbridgeable gulf between Principles and Practice.

Moreover, because of the conformism promoted by these Religions the emphasis on the inner spiritual quest or growth in consciousness that is raison d’ etre of Spirituality was shifted to the conformity of behavior with the preconceived standard. This paradigm shift further instilled in the believers the faith in the efficacy of the prescribed rituals giving credence to the externalist view and approach to life, which made spirituality quite redundant. Thus, these Religions succeeded in preserving the body of the Truth at the cost of its soul. And now we come across a move to corporatize the Religious Institutions in order to make their working more effective as is done in the professionally managed corporate establishments, and thus the Religions are gradually being transformed into Mega-establishments dealing with the so-called Spiritual Goods.

Thus, one would see that the source of inspiration of these friends in their effort to reform the Ashram is not the teachings of the Mother, but the Ideology subscribed by the prevalent Religious, Political and Business or Industrial Establishments. However, this ideology has lost its significance as far as further progress of Humanity is concerned, which necessitates the spiritualization of life as such. This amounts to serving the mission of the Mother like a legendary trader who would certainly worship his God but would prefer to keep Him away from his routine life and business. This approach found its support in the prevailing ideology, which took for granted the rift between God and mundane life as the final truth of existence and subscribed to the view that the earth and heaven would never meet.

These friends are thus unknowingly working to perpetuate the old order of life while resurrecting the old mode of working, which the Mother was and is attempting to transform. However, the mission she has undertaken is not an easy task, since the old order, which has established itself firmly in the life of humanity, would certainly offer its resistance before it disappears and would make inroads to upset her work. It has made such inroads in the Ashram through the medium of these devotees.

The prevalent mode of regulatory working with its prescription of several external sanctions is in tune with the ill-conceived notion of man as a self-centered mental being whose behavior needs a provision to control him for his personal and social good. It became necessary because man is very much prone to a variety of unruly and undesirable vital cravings, the cravings of the lower vital being. It presumes distrust in the basic human nature, which if left on its own would operate in the manner detrimental to his existence and its progress. The present-day society and its Institutions are subscribing knowingly or unknowingly to this faith while they remain busy in devising and operating a variety of mechanisms to tame the legendary wild horse in the interest of civilization and culture.

However, since the man in the very scheme of things, or as it is said, his being in the process of evolution is required to outgrow this state of consciousness for a greater destiny, there has arisen a dire need for its change for which the Mother has been working. Her first step in this direction was to initiate a new approach to organize and manage the Ashram with an emphasis on freedom in thought and action in order to facilitate inner governance with a view to create an opening for the influence of Higher Consciousness in the actual working. It would not amount by any stretch of imagination to being lax and chaotic or subscribing to the laissez-faire order under the guise of freedom. This approach entails the sincerity of the purpose and clarity of the aim to prepare man for the Divine Life on the earth, in view of which it has departed from dogmatism and conformism for good. Thus, the adherence of the trustees of this Ashram to this mode of working does not amount to promoting or encouraging, much less to protecting and shielding any libertine behavior as alleged by these friends.

The laissez-faire approach of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother | Integral ... by Sandeep

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother facilitated the process of surrender by adopting a laissez-faire approach towards their disciples. Instead of pushing the disciples towards certain goals, they would intervene only after the disciple became aware of ...

The ideal is to have suppleness and receptivity Posting date: 01 Dec 2012 from Savitri The Mother

As I said, I took it simply as a caress to comfort a child. But now I realize that the most important thing is not to have any fixity: nothing should be set, definitive, like the sense of a perfection in the realization – that means a dead stop in the march forward. The sense of incapacity (with the meaning I said of mediocrity, of something by no means exceptional) leaves you in a sort of expectation of something better. So then, the most important thing is suppleness – suppleness. Suppleness and breadth: reject nothing as useless or bad or inferior – nothing; set nothing up as really superior and beautiful – nothing. Remain ever open, ever open.

The Evolution of the Spirit in Human Existence « Sri Aurobindo Studies

When we look at the involution of Spirit into Matter, and the subseequent evolution of Consciousness in successive stages out of Matter to realize the spiritual ...

Sangh’s Narendra Modi Problem - Prasanna CRI Saturday, December 1, 2012

Given the intentional inscrutability and deliberate obfuscation that the Sangh tends to practice in its communication, it will never go on record admitting… Sangh vanguard, to put it charitably, practices a bit of sophistry when they claim that they do not meddle in the political affairs of BJP. I have observed Sangh for long, often with huge admiration at their exemplary record of social service and purposeful patriotism but also with consternation at their prejudiced pronouncements and regression in to some kind of a secretive, Marathi Brahmin brotherhood… Victimhood narrative will yield diminishing returns with aspirational middle India… Sangh has a unique opportunity to embrace modernity that it always feared and resented… Sangh has a historic chance to leave behind embarrassing aspects of its legacy which included advocating isolationism of mind, fostering fear of modernity and contempt for politics as an instrument of socio-political change.

Herder, Schiller, Kant, Fichte The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion

I MUST NOW TURN to a very different figure, namely, Fichte, who was neither, like Herder, a man of very generous character, nor, like Kant, a man who was totally dedicated to the truth. Nevertheless, his influence in some respects was perhaps wider than that of either Kant or Herder. Schiller’s classification of mankind, at least of the history of mankind, into three stages is what affected the imagination of his contemporaries. 11:33 AM Sunday, September 09, 2007

Seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires

The Body Electric: Extending Soul into Cyberspace Posted by Andrew Neuendorf on November 12, 2012

I think Bostock would have an unlikely ally in Walt Whitman, no Luddite, who celebrated the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable  in his poem “Passage to India,” which is largely about the unfinished journey of Columbus. Whitman writes about this journey symbolically (not from a historical perspective, which would reveal Columbus’ mission to Christianize and enslave the indigenous West) as an attempt to unite East and West by bringing Europe and India together to begin a global civilization. (Columbus’s journey is also Edgar Morin’s historical starting point for the beginning of the planetary era in his book Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, which I’ve written about recently here)…

The work of uniting the world is still in progress, but whether the means consist of ships, cables, or the internet, technology always provides the backbone. In “Song of Myself,” we encounter Whitman’s version of extension, his body taking flight and touring the nation. However, he is not disembodied. His journey is concrete and rooted to the land… His flight is rooted in the American landscape, in the vast extension of the material world, the expanses of nature on the continent…

Camille Paglia argues in her 2000 Salon article The North American Intellectual Tradition, that a kind of earthy, visionary pragmatism is the dominant philosophy on this side of the Atlantic. She argues against the continental philosophers (such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacan) whose works are too dry, abstract, and jargon-laden to appeal to the American sensibility. Instead of the disembodied mind, she embraces the body:

“My argument is that the North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas — a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace — that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Time of Useful Consciousness: Excerpts Interview & Review by abdul lateef Posthuman Destinies - Science, Culture, Integral Yoga NOVEMBER 18, 2012

We always like to return to Whitman one of the poets with whom Sri Aurobindo’s concludes his Future Poetry.  Fittingly Ferlinghetti on his journey to the West concludes by invoking Whitman whose oracular voice echoes through the bohemians and the beats from the east village to north beach, it is here given over in what will surely be one of last great exhalations from a founding member of that generation (al)

Fichte and Romantic Self-Assertion The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE ASSAULT ON THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

Fichte is the figure who betrayed the rationalist and ultimately libertarian and even democratic ideals of Kant, and the harmless, benevolent, decent, populist ideals of Herder, who thought that there were many flowers in the garden and that they need not struggle with each other at all.

The person who foresaw where this was going to lead was the poet Heinrich Heine, who in a very famous passage said, warning the French, I think after 1830, not to down their weapons, not to disarm, because of the fearful danger from their neighbours: ‘Kantians will appear who will … ruthlessly with sword and axe hack through the foundations of our European life … Armed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical wills neither fear nor interest can touch.’ 26 And who shall say that he was altogether mistaken? Page 30 FICHTE AND ROMANTIC SELF The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2005 11:33 AM

Tweet 13h - Steven Shaviro ‏@shaviro I accept the parts of Deleuze that stem from Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, & Kant, but reject the parts that stem from Nietzsche & Hume.

On the Universality of Culture by larvalsubjects

What I’m trying to think– along with many others –is multiple causation or how a variety of different causes interact with one another from both the plane of expression and the plane of content.  My gripe with a theorist like Lacan, for example, is not that he’s wrong in pointing out that the signifier– another example of an incorporeal machine –plays an important causal role in human subjectivity and social assemblages.  My gripe lies in the way in which he tends to treat language as a “primary modeling system” for everything else– “the universe is the flower of rhetoric” –treating it as structuring an unformatted matter (everything else), without exploring the causal contributions (“difference contributions”) made by non-signifying entities.  It’s not that Lacan is wrong, but that he is not sufficiently thinking in terms of overdetermination.  This is why much in Guattari’s work represents a significant advance over Lacan.  So basically, without sharing her thesis that culture is universal, I’m on the same page as Aprell…

The mark of the universality of culture in the anthropocene thus does not lie in the universal reign of the signifier structuring everything– cultural narratives and signifiers structure very little in Antarctica –but rather lies in the universal effects of contemporary technology and capitalist modes of production that have managed to transform the fabric of the planet at the atmospheric, chemical, and biological level no matter how remote the region.  In this respect, the anthropocene does not entail the erasure of the biological, chemical, or geological, but rather the emergence of a new dominant actant that every other actant must contend with.

The Prince of This World: Thinking the Devil in Light of Agamben’s Kingdom and the Glory  from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

From this perspective, The Kingdom and the Glory represents a crucial turning point in Agamben’s project, deepening his account of Western theologico-political structures by beginning to work out how the logic of sovereignty is deployed and transformed in order to penetrate the fine-grained textures of everyday life. In place of the easily delimitable “state of exception” where the sovereign suspends the law in order to save it, we are directed toward the workaday realities of flexible management.

Though it is perhaps surprising that he derives this logic from the Christian theological tradition, it appears in retrospect that many of his key points were more or less hiding in plain sight. For instance, who could deny, after reading Agamben’s account, that Adam Smith’s infamous “invisible hand” is modelled on theological accounts of divine providence? 

Revisiting Integral Humanism from Centre Right India by Kesava

It is a bit of a mystery why Panditji called his theory Integral Humanism in English. Not many of his articles really concentrate on “humanist” aspect. On the contrary they concentrate more on “national character” and the role of “individual character” in it… Deendayal Upadhyaya Institute has been doing some fabulous ground work, especially with the Chitrakoot project. However, unfortunately, there has not been much of intellectual activity from the institute… We need to reestablish The Integral Approach as the core of the right in India.  

The Soul and Subhuman Existence  from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

In ancient times, the world was invested with spirit everywhere, in all things. Sri Aurobindo describes it thus: “Ancient belief…saw a soul, a living godhead everywhere in the animate and in the inanimate and nothing was to its view void of a spiritual existence.”

The development of the logical mind and its focus on dividing, classifying and simplifying through trenchant separation rejected this view of life. It does not mean, however, that this is the final answer to the question. Sri Aurobindo describes a process of development that is one unified continuum, and this implies that soul exists, in some form, not only in the human and the animal existence, but even in the earlier, more primitive forms of life…

Further work with crystals and minerals has even begun to uncover the responsiveness that Sri Aurobindo has posited in the world of material forms. One consciousness, one existence, in a unity that spans from the most inconscient Matter to the heights of Spirit, implies that there is a continuum and our attempt to divide and classify and separate is an artificial mental construct but not an essential underlying Reality of the manifested universe. We find that the ancient view of inclusion has more ultimate truth in it that the modern view of fragmentation.