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

Philosophy as Spiritual Ordeal from Pagan Metaphysics by Paul Reid-Bowen

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...

Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False - Amazon.com

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 King, Joseph 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 Ghose, Robert 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 ...

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.

Some thoughts on Darwin Day : Centre Right India by Aravindan Neelakandan

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 Nonstyle of Misknown Nonnaming: A Response to Anthony Paul Smith’s The Misknown Desire of the Philosophers: On Evaluation and Hermeticism from An und für sich by joshua ramey

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).

Roman Markets and Polanyi's Pessimism from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

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 2^nd 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 20^th-century socialist non-market experiments?