How to deal with exhaustion? spirituality is a surival tactic

Taking Materialism Seriously from Larval Subjects

Taking materialism seriously means attending to our understanding of the symbolic and imaginary are transformed as a result of what we learn about the real.  It means that we can no longer fully divorce these realms from one another, but have to attend to how they’re entangled.  And, of course, our idea of materiality is also transformed as a result of our understanding of the symbolic and the imaginary or the semiotic and the phenomenological.  Of course, at this point in history, I also feel that we need to attend a bit more to materiality than to the symbolic and imaginary. “Objects” and Institutions from Larval Subjects

The work of theorists such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, and Jane Bennett among others has all gone far in raising attentiveness to genuine materiality.  The same is true of media theorists such as Kittler, Ong, and McLuhan.  Catherine Malabou is notable in this connection with her work on neurology.  That said, critical theory has been overwhelmingly dominated by a focus on the phenomenological and the semiotic.  Making a little room for the material doesn’t hurt anything, but merely opens new vistas for understanding the mechanisms of power and devising strategies for resistance.

Of Cruelty and Vulnerability: A Response to Dan Whistler’s “The Hermetic Critique of Deleuze” from An und für sich by joshua ramey

Deleuze’s incompletely conceived or even ill-conceived later vitalism might not be a symptom of his becoming-sentimental, but of a becoming-invulnerable, a drying out, a crack up. Perhaps this tells us something, those of us investigating the labyrinth of the spiritual sciences: the problem of the meta-pragmatic is not how to avoid sentimentalism but how to deal with exhaustion. I have already indicated that spirituality, as I deploy the term, is a surival tactic. It is what to do when confronted with being out of breath. Deleuze ended his own life: he could no longer breathe. He did not breathe without pain, for years. What an ordeal.

Now There's an Invisible Foot! from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Adam Smith never taught anybody “to think of competition as an ‘invisible hand’ that guides production into the socially desirable channels”. He never mentioned ‘competition’ in relation to his use of the IH metaphor and neither was either case in which he used the IH metaphor remotely linked to competition issues.

An Inquiry into Literary Postmodernism

Such an agglomeration of disparate names and terms may confuse a person who is keen to know what Postmodernism is all about, but again, such confusion need not weigh too heavy on him as the very spirit of postmodernism requires of him maturity and ability not to be bothered by confusion. “Perhaps to grow up,” writes Patricia Waugh, “ is to live suspended between the modern and the postmodern, resisting the temptation for resolution in one direction or the other” (9). Posted by Dharanidhar at 4:38 PM Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (in India)

Do you want fame and success in India? It is not that hard if you know what to do. Here are seven simple techniques that can make your career more fulfilling and make you more popular than ever before! 

2 hrs - Jaideep A. Prabhu ‏@orsoraggiante The Indian electorate loves a little hypocrisy, some false modesty and arrogance: http://goo.gl/W3F6H  - @TheJaggi on Modi, MMS, and Rahul  View summary 

1 hr - Savitri Era Party ‏@SavitriEraParty [Seven distinctive features of Indian secularism -alternative definitions for Western welfare states] Rajeev Bhargava http://sepact.blogspot.in/2010/09/seven-distinctive-features-of-indian.html …

1 hr we are engaged in a process of refining the whole structure through aspiration and receptivity.] -Rod at UHU Seminar http://www.universityofhumanunity.org/audiodetail.php?audioid=572 …

2 hrs If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment that has empowered us to be so. -Terry Eagleton] 3 hrs Sixteen needs: http://rainbowther.blogspot.in/2007/11/16-basic-human-psychological-needs.html … -  View summary

Integral Psychology – Theorizing its Disciplinary Boundaries - Debashish Banerji

A revised transcript of a talk given at the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco in 2008 and carried in the February 2010 issue of Sraddha, a journal of the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata. In this, I bring into dialog the epistemic boundaries of the western academic discipline of Psychology and Sri Aurobindo's formulation of Integral Yoga, so as to reflect on the disciplinary formation of a field of Integral Psychology. What would such a field hold out and how would it impact the existing assumptions of both Psychology and Yoga? The insertion of such a discipline into the academy is not a trivial task. It is a project fraught with danger and possibility, which needs to be carefully negotiated.

Revising British Aestheticism: Critics, Audiences, and the Problem ... - Page 23

Ji-Hyae Park - 2008 - Preview ... “If we can and must be severe critics of the Enlightenment, it is the Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so” (8). Indeed, the ways in which nineteenth-century aesthetic critics conceptualize art enable them to conceptualize ...

At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies - Page 309 Thomas Rosteck - 1999 - Preview - More editions In one direction, theory is the critique of Enlightenment; in another, it is its expression. "If we can and must be severe critics of the Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so" (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 8). Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer declared, "the Enlightenment must consider itself if humanity is "not to be wholly betrayed.

Who Killed Shakespeare?: What's Happened to English Since the ... - Page 67 - Patrick Brantlinger - 2001 - Preview - More editions "If we can and must be severe critics of the Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so" (Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 8). Or as Adorno and Horkheimer declared, "the Enlightenment must consider itself" if humanity is "not to be wholly betrayed.

The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context ... - Page 24 - Andrew Kirkman - 2010 - Preview As Terry Eagleton has put it, “If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so.”69 And as Gombrich observed of Burckhardt, the strength and influence of his perspective derive from ...

Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination - Page 200 - Jonathan Hart - 1994 - Preview - More editions If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so. Here, as always, the most intractable process of emancipation is that which involves freeing ourselves from ourselves. (1990:8) Here...

Serious play: the cultural form of the nineteenth-century realist ... - Page 168 - J. Jeffrey Franklin - 1999 - As Terry Eagleton observes in a more general vein, "If we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so" (Li 8 ) . Indeed, the dangers of replicating Arnold's blindnesses are strongest for ...

"An innocent way out": the literature and politics of cultural ... - Page 191 - Carrie A. Tirado Bramen, Stanford University. Program of Modern Thought and Literature - 1994 - If we can and must be severe critics of the Enlightenment, it is the Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so" (Ideology of the Aesthetic 8). Although Eagleton remains rather vague about the criteria for determining which elements are ...

What is an author? - Page 45 - Maurice Biriotti, Nicola Miller - 1993 - If we are able today to be critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so. The subject as self-authoring is in any case a peculiarly tragic, self-thwarting creature. It knows only two ways of coping with external ...

JOBS - Volumes 11-12 - Page 131 - Florida State University. Dept. of English - 2002 - ... free themselves. lt is worth remembering Terry Eagleton on the topic: "lf we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so." Davies is certainly an accomplished scholar and authority ...

From Auroville to Esalen: Yoga of ideas, meetings, and presentation

The Symbol Dawn: A video presentation from Mirror of Tomorrow by Govind Nishar

The accompanying paintings are by Huta who did these directly under the guidance of the Mother. The recitation of the text is in Narad’s (Richard Eggenberger’s) voice. The creation of the video is by Tuhin Chowdhury. This is a beta-version and is being made as an offering to the Mother on her birthday, 21 February [...] Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth from Savitri 

Shall pour the nectar of a sorrowless life

Around her from her lucid heart of love,

Heal with her bliss the tired breast of earth

And cast like a happy snare felicity.

Discussion # 56258 from Auroville Radio

Maybe the discussion's number it's wrong, but the point it's that Auroville is piling up much more meetings and presentation than facts and actions. It seems that the further we go in the development harder it gets to take decisions and act consequently. This may sound slightly negative but was the feeling expressed of some of the participants at the meeting. The frustration reflects the little progress Auroville has achieved recently. Maybe it's time to act?

Comment on Cosmology by Sandeep

Don’t worry if you don’t understand whats written on this page. Whether the Gods exist or not is of no relevance to the novice. As you develop deeper understanding of your inner movements, you will begin to understand everything else. Spiritual development is like an growing and ascending spiral, which starts from a bright point and gradually envelopes and illumines the surrounding areas.

In the beginning, one must focus on psychology (how should I live?) rather than ontology (what exists out there?). You have to read literature which motivates you to live better, which awakens introspection as well as the Atman within. If you have an affinity for Sri Aurobindo, start reading his works such as Savitri, Essays on the Gita, Life Divine, Synthesis of Yoga or the Letters on Yoga. It may take a few readings to grasp his texts but keep trying because its worth it.

The Hypnotic Text from Larval Subjects

The problem is that this strategy seems to exchange one form of power and domination for another.  In the first instance, we’re in the thrall of dominant codes that typify our identities and reduce us to good consumers.  In the latter instance, however, we seem to become hypnotized by the text and thereby enslaved.  Like the cult follower that believes that the leader contains a mysterious amalga or objet a around which our desire comes to pulsate, the enigmatic and elusive text comes to capture our desire and enslave us.

I began by looking for a point of resistance to the dominant codes structuring communicative capitalism.  I turned to this thinker or that to find technologies of resistance at the level of the semiotic.  Yet now I find that I’m trapped in the enigma or the elusiveness of that theorist’s writing.  My goal begins to change.  Where before it was strategies of resistance, now it’s understanding the theorist.  Hours and years are now spent deciphering Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Adorno, Hegel, and so on.  “They must,” I reason, “know what they’re saying, they must have a secret behind all of this, and I only fail because I haven’t read enough, haven’t done enough work tracking down their references, haven’t followed their lines of thought carefully enough!” Paradoxically, then, such texts tend to produce university discourses.  The product of identification with a hypnotic text is a divided subject ($) that has become caught within the thrall of the master-figure (S1), becoming their servant by endlessly doing commentary on their work.  The old goal disappears– though to be sure, it’s still given lip service –and the new goal becomes a life devoted to understanding Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and so on.  Of course, there’s no end to this project insofar as it belongs to the nature of objet a to slip away. 

Oh don’t get me wrong.  I’m not suggesting that any of these thinkers should be rejected on the grounds of style.  I’ve certainly gained much by becoming hypnotized by all the thinkers I’ve listed here.  I do, however, think that style can be a form of power– sometimes hypnotizing us like the cult leader, at other times functioning as a shibboleth for privileged communities –and that it’s not clear that conceptual work, clearly expressed, can’t be a more effective strategy against communicative capitalism.  Indeed, another danger that arises out of the enigmatic text is that it becomes mere noise for the broader society, having little to no effect outside the halls of the academies.  I will suggest– perhaps imprudently –that such texts seem to suggest a somewhat poor regard to readers.  To publish a text is to invite others to read.  Those who read give their time.  In a world saturated by information as ours is today, it seems somehow wrong to entrap others in your text when they wish to learn from you and give portions of their life over to you.

Life Undead and Resurrected from An und für sich by joshua ramey

If there is one theme in The Hermetic Deleuze:  Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal that I think causes the most ambivalence for myself, and for contemporary philosophy, it is the possibility, today, of conceiving thought—any thought, whether hermetic or rationalist—as some kind of affirmation of life.  My overwhelming impression of much of contemporary continental and post-continental reflection is that it is conditioned by an almost paralyzing combination of dread, horror, and malaise over the ongoing ecological holocaust (and its twin, economic endgame) through which we are currently “living,” if one could even call it that.  The most difficult thing I continue to try to come to terms with, in my own life and work, is what it means to engage in thought and spiritual discipline as some kind of intensified relation to “nature” when “nature” has become something like absolute contingency, incarnate…

We might focus here by a return to Christian Kerslake’s question in response to my first response, to Dan Barber:  what is a specifically hermetic incarnationalism?   I agree with Christian that something like tantric sciences, focusing on the body, breath, chakras, and extremely local/animist divinities is somehow closer to Deleuze’s own thinking than perhaps any other spiritual tradition.  And yet Deleuze receives his spiritual sciences mediated through a line of Western estoericisms that both incorporate and struggle against Christian theology…

It is interesting that the great critics of Christianity Deleuze admired (and in many ways I count my allegiance to them)—Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Artaud, Bataille—could not but admire the figure of Christ as Love… Most of hermetic mysticism and practice, including alchemy, theosophy, and the Western adoption of tantrism, yoga, and meditation, all seems to be carried out under the sign of Joachim de Fiore’s “Age of the Holy Spirit,” an era in which there is a mesmerizing, uncanny, and ultimately nondual relationship between humanity and divinity (In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes tantalizing reference to Fiore, as well as to Vico, in his attempt to explain the relation of the syntheses of time to historical repetition.  He is basically critical, but then as Kerslake has shown, later finds his way to an oblique affirmation of Toynbee’s universal history with its repetition of 22 essential archetypal phases, corresponding to the 22 major arcana of the Tarot).  This is a very different perspective, it seems to me, than the Feuerbachian-cum-death of God point of view that points to the total disenchantment of the world…

Here is an alchemical legend:  the issue (offspring) of Adam is the issue (product) of resurrection.  Hermeticism is the Western version of bodily esotericism.  Yes, Deleuze’s thought is in many ways closer to Tantrism.  I “force” the issue of Hermeticism strategically as a way of locating Western philosophy within a specific impasse between reason and spirit.  But that impasse “is” in some sense the problem of the body (or to use the older term, nature, or the one we are now learning to use, ecology).  That is what is really the limit of Descartes’s “ordeal”: the specific deliverances of what the body might be are forsaken in the name of what the body appears to be, to the mind.  It’s almost as if there is simply a mind-mind problem in Descartes, and as if he never reaches the level of the body—the subtle, alchemical body, the body of the chakras, kunadalini, and the mercurial body of Adam Kadmon.  The specific role that Hermes plays in alchemy is the role of the “mercurial” element, the moist, flowing element that “revives” matter from its slumber.  Mercury is the element of resurrection, and Hermes is a psychopomp… Why resurrection?   The problem of spirituality today is the problem of survival.  This is why, although I have been to Esalen and tasted its nearly supernatural bounties of health and healing, I can only peruse its catalogue and its denizens with a rueful eye.   

(title unknown) from enowning In-der-Blog-sein

The Anti-Modernist on the problem of objective philosophizing. 

“The theoretical conceals its own concealing, or rather, that it is wholly ignorant to the fact that it forces all of experience into categorical classifications through the creation of an impression that rigorous and detached observation of entities as present-to-hand is the only way to access truth.”

Want to but a tablet-cum-laptop By Mihir Patkar, TNN Feb 20, 2013,

The Lenovo Ideapad Yoga is quite innovative with its ability to flip back its screen by a full 360 degrees, letting you use it as a tablet. In this mode, its keyboard becomes the back plate of the tablet - and although disabled, it can be a bit distracting because you can still feel the play of the keys when you hold it like a slate. Also, the Yoga is quite heavy to be used as a truly portable tablet. Besides, it is extremely hard to read its reflective display in direct sunlight…

So for the money you would spend on the IdeaPad Yoga (86,000 approx) or the XPS 12 (93,000 approx), we would instead recommend you buy a good ultrabook for around 50,000 (such as the Lenovo IdeaPad U310, Dell Inspiron 14z or Samsung NP530U4C) and a highend tablet (Apple iPad, iPad Mini or Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1); these will give you more bang for your buck - at least for the moment.

Spiritual practice contains its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments

Should India be Secular or Hindu? Hindu Human Rights Online ... Ranbir Singh February 17, 2013

Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship even banned Christmas. Protestantism emphasised the centrality of text and text alone as the word of god and the basis of religion. Enlightenment thinkers applied this to all religions. So when the Orientalists came to India and tried to categorise the culture, they ignored much of the customs and traditions in favour of what could specifically be found in texts. This was the only paradigm that they could use when confronted with a bewildering array of what became known as Hinduism. So anything in religious text such as Vedas formed the canon of Hinduism. All else was custom, tradition, tribalism or culture. It is that thinking which has lasted until today in defining secularism in India. The Enlightenment differentiated between sacred and profane, between religion and culture.

The very young Marx from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele

Hegel also considered himself to be an orthodox Christian. The greatest minds of the following generations – Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Marx – did not. They considered themselves Hegelian, yet they were against the gods… That atheism is at the heart of Marx’s dissertation… Marx turns his focus to two lesser-known figures, Epicurus and Democritus… The topic of his dissertation is Epicurus; Democritus’s role is merely to illustrate why Epicurus is so great…  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.

(title unknown) from enowning Robert Mugerauer on tenderness. 

“Tenderness, according to Heidegger, is used by Hölderlin to indicate the native essence of the Greek: their art of showing, letting appear what shows itself purely and thereby presences.  For the Greeks, what brings the splendour of the presencing to appearance is the athletic warlike struggle of heroes (also consider Heraclìtus and Pìndar) and the power of reflection (die Reflexionskraft) (HEH 166).” P. 414 HEH: Hölderlin's Erde und Himmel.

The Being behind Hitler Science Of Spirituality Blog on ... By: Martin Sobieroj on Feb 18, 2013 Source : Mother's Agenda, 12 January 1965

(Regarding an old "Playground Talk" of March 8, 1951, in which Mother spoke of the being that possessed and "guided" Hitler: … As for Sri Aurobindo ... (you know that there is a place in Russia where they were defeated [ii]), Sri Aurobindo had foreseen the defeat and had worked the night...

JOSHUA RAMEY’S ACADEMIC GNOSIS: Non-philosophy is the yoga of philosophy Posted on February 16, 2013 - Terence Blake ‏@TPBlake

“Spiritual ordeal” is too one-sided a vision of spiritual practice, which includes ordeals, but contains also its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments. I “see” it as a process psychic and collective individuation, as Simondon and Stiegler call it. There is no necessary dualism between philosophy and individuation, and Deleuze is a shining (in the sense of Dreyfus and Kelly’s ALL THINGS SHINING) example of their co-existence and superposition.

Gilles Quispel once declared that “Alchemy is the yoga of Gnosticism”, that is to say the actual experiential and transformative practice that subtends and is subtended by Gnostic theoretical creation. One could reformulate this as “Non-philosophy is the yoga of philosophy”. 

Against Holism: The Argument from Entropy from Larval Subjects

Order never comes for free, but always requires operations, energy, and work precisely because it’s more probable for anything to be related to anything else, than for anything to maintain improbable and selective relations to a delimited range of elements in the order of being. “Onto-cartography” would be the investigation of the mechanisms by which improbable orders are maintained; and would therefore include investigations of discursive mechanisms (not surprisingly, the favorite of the humanities), chronopolotical mechanisms, geographical mechanisms (geopolitics), and thermopolitical mechanisms.  Whenever encountering an order in the social and political world we should be surprised and ask ourselves how it maintains itself.  In understanding how it maintains itself, we can begin to devise strategies undermine it where those negentropic mechanisms are oppressive.

All of this aside, we now see a third argument against holism.  A world in which everything is related to everything else is identical to the definition of a highly entropic system.  It is a world where no inferences can be made to other elements precisely because there’s an equal probability of anything being related to anything else.  Such a world would be a world of Brownian motion, where there was no language, mathematics, ecologies, or social orders, precisely because all of these orders are orders in which relations between elements are selective or improbable.  As Deleuze said of Hegel’s categories, the world proposed by holists is a world that is too baggy, too ill fitted, to get at the real of the world that we, in fact, encounter.

The Multiple Strands of the Mental Being « Sri Aurobindo Studies

There is the practical mind that involves itself with the physical and vital levels of existence and works to manage and utilize them to best advantage; there is also a higher mind of thought and concept, as well as an aesthetic and an emotional aspect that weave the complex fabric that we consider to be mental functioning. Sri Aurobindo explains: “The mental energy divides itself and runs in many directions, has an ascending scale of the levels of its action, a great variety and ...”

It is not simply the complexity of these different energies and levels of action that we have to contend with; we also have to take into account the varying concentration and intensity of the energy put forth within each of these lines. A weak force will soon be deflected, drowned out or watered down by the myriad other active forces around it and with which it needs to contend.

Her hooded eagles of significance from Savitri

It is here she loses herself into Infinity the way the crested eagles of thought fly into the sky of the Unknowable… Wherever he looked, he saw the veiled and seeking Force, she an exiled goddess building mimic heavens, a Sphinx gazing at the Sun.

Why do some people get angry and mad when you mention alternative medicine, the mind and the soul? Here's one person that explains it. ... if that force can be made to work freely, drugs are at once superfluous. Sri Aurobindo 

The Hermetic Deleuze and The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : Madurai Today Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting on 'The yoga of Savitri reading,' 3 Lajapathi Roy Road, Chinna Chokkikulam, 4 p.m..

Message From Sri Maa « Sri Aurobindo Patha Mandir Trust Working on the field of education, health, small scale industry, and spiritual growth of the society. (by SAPMT)

Sri Aurobindo Society  Focus Area Integral Education  "Happy is he who can exchange his qualities with the real qualities of the flowers. Try to cultivate in yourself their refined qualities." The Mother

Flower Exhibition in Mumbai based on ‘The spiritual significance of flowers’  Jan 18-20, 2013; 9:00am-6:00pm Bhavan's College, Munshi Nagar, Andheri (West), Mumbai - 400 058. Sri Aurobindo Society, Mumbai Branch, organized a flower exhibition based on ‘The Spiritual Significance of Flowers’ as given by The Mother. This exhibition was part of a much larger nature festival called ‘Prakruti’, which was organized by Bhavan’s Nature and Adventure Centre (an affiliate of Bhavan’s College, Andheri, Mumbai).

She carries crucified God upon her breast from Savitri 

True, here she is a slave to death and ignorance, but there is the constant aspiration driving things to deathlessness, of knowing the Unknowable. She may have fallen asleep but even then she creates a world. In the march of time what is inconscience after all? just a gigantic pause. The Light that had sent her forth might have been denied to her, yet she continues still though she would meet agony and pain; she carries crucified God upon her breast.

The exchange of vital forces during social interactions Integral ... by Sandeep

Sri Aurobindo: It is not only talk that creates a turmoil – disturbing forces can come in by contact also. There may be restlessness or confusion of consciousness in the person who talks with you to which he does not give expression or is not ...

In the Afternoon of Time: An Autobiography - Page 502 - Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Rupert Snell - 2001 - Preview - More editions I could not think why Amit would want to throw up a good job to try his luck in cinema; but I didn't want to discourage Bunty, nor, for that matter, was there anything I could do to stop him anyway. While in Madras I visited the Shree Aurobindo Ashram ...

Books on Hinduism - Concepts of Reason and Intuition With Special Reference to Sri Aurobindo, K.C. Bhattacharyya and S. Radhakrishnan Author Bio: Prof. Ramesh Chandra Sinha (1944 )

The great thinkers are fully aware that unless they interpret and formulate the traditional truths in the modern framework of ideas, they would cease to inspire. There seems to be a distinct change in their views concerning man's existence in the world. The book embodies a fresh approach towards critical evaluation of some theories and gives valuable insights. It attempts to make relevant comparisons of the views of Indian thinkers with those of some of the eminent thinkers of the West. In the detailed study of Sri Aurobindo, K.C. Bhattacharyya and S. Radhakrishnan, the author shows, not only a profound grasp of the concepts of Reason and Intuition, but also the admirable understanding of other important metaphysical and religious problems. This book cannot miss the sight of students of philosophy, researchers and scholars. 

What is the Scope of Doctor of philosophy in Sri Aurobindo ... - ignou IGNOU has started the new program in the Doctor of philosophy in Sri Aurobindo studies which is based on evolutionary philosophy. Sri Aurobindo was a great ...

Private Universities that have shown interest in Odisha by Chitta Baral - Based on a list in February 2013. Amity University Amrita Viswa Vidyapitham University ASBM (Asian School of Business Management) University Birla Global University Chicago University to set up a satellite university within Utkal University Campus C V Raman International University Devine Global University by Devine Education Trust, Delhi DRIEMS University Educity in Rourkela by Knowledge [...]

Conscious Complicity at the Crossroads: A Response to Jacob Sherman’s “What’s at Stake in Hermetic Reterritorialization” from An und für sich by joshua ramey

This is not “a way of reading Deleuze.”  It is the excavation of tendencies in Deleuze’s thought, tendencies that are incompletely realized but that point in certain directions, directions Deleuze himself did not, or could not yet take…  At the level of content, there is almost nothing in Deleuze’s work except exceptional, obscure, bizarre, unusual, paradoxical, uncanny, traumatic, visionary, apocalyptically intense realities.  Not only are the artists and their artworks found only at the outlying edges of sense and sensibility, from Masoch’s ordeals to Proust’s involuntary memories to the impossible temporality of Last Year at Marienbad, but even the scientists, historians, and mathematicians Deleuze is devoted to are undeniably fringe, nomadic, heretical characters.  So I simply can’t recognize the idea that Deleuze’s thought is substantively immanentist.

Rather, I would say, his thought is immanentist precisely at a formal or methodological level, and that is the level at which I find it the most problematic. I have always been convinced, by the likes of John Milbank, Philip Goodchild, and François Laruelle (an unholy trinity, that), that it is symptomatic of any attempt at a perfectly, purely, absolutely immanentist system (such as Spinoza’s explicit thought, and to a certain extent Bergson’s) that at the level of methodology it is inadvertently, performatively dualist.  At the level of conceptual presentation, Deleuze is almost hypnotically “dualizing” (not to be confused with Laruelle’s dualysis)…

Giambattista Vico’s famous formula was verum factum:  the true is the made.  Humans can only know with certainty what they make—only the social world, the cultural world, can be known with certainty.  And metaphysical truth, the language of the philosophers, is somehow paradoxically the “rhetoric” of democracy, because its persuasive power derives from an appeal to the putatively universal ability of all to reason.  And yet the very words with which we reason, for Vico, remain ineluctably empowered by their gigantic, heroic genesis in unique experiences of time and place, geography and climate, bodily morphology and systemic affect peculiar to irreducibly local series of experiences…  For me it is Laruelle who has seen this situation, at least formally, with the most clarity, at least among contemporary philosophers. 

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?