Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting on 'The yoga of
Savitri reading,' 3 Lajapathi Roy
Road , Chinna Chokkikulam, 4 p.m.
As the mental force begins to make itself felt and tries to develop a
law or rule of life, it starts out with the demands, needs, desires and fears
of the dynamic life force as the primary controlling factor with which it has
to grapple. Rather than being able to impose, therefore, a reasoned moral and
ethical code, it resorts to attempts to modify and upgrade the vital impetus
through offering a system of rewards and punishments, a “carrot and a stick”,
for following the basic lines set forth in the moral doctrines. On close
examination it can be seen that even the goals set forth at this point are
mostly driven by the vital drive for success, achievement and prosperity and
the fear of loss, suffering and pain.
It is thus at this point that the most common ideas about the law of
Karma appear and take center stage. The moral principle, the ethical ideal is
tied to the concept that the “good” will achieve worldly success; or if not
worldly success, then at least a success in a life hereafter. The influence of
the vital power is clearly seen in the fact that “right” has to be tied to
“success” in order to be something to be attempted.
While on the subject of I, AM, and the link between the two, I'd like
to discuss Scruton's The Face of God. It's a short book, containing the
published version of his Gifford Lectures of 2010.
If you're not familiar with them, the Gifford
Lectures were the brainchild of the Scottish Lord Gifford (1820-1887),
established and endowed for the purpose of promoting and propagating "the
study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term -- in other words,
the knowledge of God." The quality of these lectures is often quite high,
and draws big brains from many disciplines, and thus comports well with our own
multi-undisciplinary approach.
Among others, I've read those by Royce, Gilson, James, Eddington,
Heisenberg, Dawson, Toynbee, Barbour, Dyson, Eccles, Polkinghorne, Rolston,
Taylor, and, of course Jaki, Polanyi and Whitehead, all of whom are recurring
characters on the One Cosmos blog. Again, these are folks who are attempting to
think across disciplines, so many of them are pione'er-do-well Raccoons.
I am currently finishing a booklet for the greater public on the
external enemies of Hinduism. It will make me very popular among Hindus. But
next, I want to write a similar booklet about the internal enemies of Hinduism,
or is other words: what is wrong with the Hindus so that e.g. they cannot
settle the Kashmir dispute or the
constitutional/legal discrimination of the Hindus in spite of being a
democratic majority? This should make me a few friends among the secularists,
but I think the enmity on that side in already too entrenched; but it will
certainly make me many enemies among Hindus. They don’t like a Westerner
criticizing them, though I have most of these criticisms from Hindus
themselves. At any rate, if Hindus don’t make a systematic diagnosis of the
problem, someone else has to do it. And the current (sentimental and
confused) Hindu bhakti notion of “God” is certainly a big part of the problem.
Enter Mamata Banerjee. And Narendra Modi. And Mulayam Singh Yadav. In
short, all those political players who proudly display an almost Macaulay-like
disdain towards Indians who use English as their main language of
communication. And they are confident, to the point of arrogance in many cases,
in adopting styles of political, social and cultural behaviour that is alien to
Macaulay`s cherished western norms and practice… So, here`s a question: As
democracy deepens, must we in fact expect an onset of decline in the very
republican norms embedded in the Constitution that upholds the idea of India?
It seems to me that Hobbes’s critique of the RCC is essentially that
it undermines the sovereignty of individual nations without having the strength
to form a larger over-arching sovereignty of its own (the latter part being
more implicit in his argument) — so in essence, it simply sows the seeds of
discord and division by muddying the waters of whether Catholics should be
loyal to their local sovereign or the pope. I wonder if Hobbes might view the
European Union, and particularly the Monetary Union, in a similar light. To
become part of the EU and especially the Eurozone, nations must give up
sovereignty over their currency, which is one of the most important tools for
managing a modern economy, and they are also significantly constrained in their
fiscal policy. Even worse, the measures dictated are often very unpopular with
local populations, prompting protest and perhaps eventually revolt. Yet the EU
itself has even less popular legitimacy than local governments, and its own
ability to project power is very limited… Hence it seems to me that Hobbes’s
hypothetical diagnosis has a lot of truth to it.
The
very young Marx from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele - Feb
18, 2013
Because throughout his life, Marx was, in a word, a materialist.
Not in the modern pejorative sense (“he who dies with the most toys wins”) nor
the negative philosophical sense, in which ideas and mind are treated as
somehow unreal. Rather, for Marx it was always the case that matter matters. The physical world sets the terms on which we human
beings can exist, and so to understand human life both as it is and as it
should be, we must understand that physical world. Marx lived at a time when
the modern scientific revolution was hitting full steam (and that is not only a
metaphor). The discoveries of Charles Darwin, above all, were an inspiration to
Marx’s inspiration. Friedrich Engels said
at Marx’s funeral that Marx had done for human history what Darwin had done for
organic nature. For it was Darwin who made it intellectually
feasible to explain the biological world without reference to a god.
The gods are just as distant in Epicurus’s explanations; he can look like a
precursor of Darwin .
And so it was to Epicurus that Marx turned as an inspiration for his
still-developing atheist Hegelianism.
