Five Dreams and five Indias

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.

Five unexplored Indian destinations - Lifestyle - DNA Mumbai Saturday, Mar 2, 2013 By Ashish Virmani 

Auroville is a small ‘experimental’ township located near Pondicherry. This place has a blend of French and Indian cultures, established as it was by the French spiritualist Mirra Alfassa. Widely known as ‘The Mother’ Mirra was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Some of the popular attractions in Auroville are the gold-plated Matrimandir and Auroville Beach.

Auroville was built as a vision of human unity. The Mother said in her first public address concerning the location, “Auroville is meant to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, politics and nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity”. The Government of India has endorsed the township, and UNESCO has also endorsed it inviting the member-states to participate in the development of the place. Today it has a population of just a few thousands who hail from nearly over 40 nationalities.

Missing Women - Mysticism Article on Speaking Tree - Swati Chopra on Mar 02, 2013 

Another powerful and enigmatic woman teacher was the Mother, who along with Sri Aurobindo, formed a unique spiritual collaboration. Her radical views on women were shared by Ameeta Mehra. 

Conversations with Sri Aurobindo recorded by Anilbaran Roy from Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Sandeep

The Overman Foundation has published the entire set of conversations with Sri Aurobindo that were recorded by Anilbaran Roy. These talks cover a wide spectrum of issues (symbols, occultism, karma, politics) and were originally published in the Sri Aurobindo Circle from 1977 to 1994.

A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs ... The present administration of Sri Aurobindo Ashram is not only a misfit in the current situation but a total anachronism. Everyone in the Ashram, including the ... The Cords that Bind the Ashramites ― Baikunth

When a community spends a few decades together, human relationships naturally form between the members of the community, and these ties and attachments prevent disciplinary or corrective action. The tendency of those who are at the helm of affairs is therefore mostly to protect and condone, because how can you take action on your immediate circle of relatives, colleagues and friends, or the wider circle of their colleagues, friends and relatives? These constricting ropes criss-cross the community rendering the administration ineffective or practically impossible.  In the ordinary life outside the Ashram, the joint family has been broken due to the assertion of individual interests. Sons and daughters separate from their parents, build new houses, establish new businesses and migrate to foreign countries in search of better prospects. In the relatively small world of the Ashram, lasting relationships are informally formed, friends’ circles remain active, colleagues meet up daily and there is a steady increase of acquaintances with an ever increasing inflow of people who simply want to take economic advantage of the Ashram. Thus the once spiritual family, consisting of devotees who came from all parts of India and the world to unite under the Mother’s banner, has now become a big clanking joint family, which obstinately stands in the way of progress and indirectly causes the downfall of the institution… There is also no retirement age in the Ashram which adds tenfold to its existing problems.

Govind Nishar - March 2, 2013 at 7:17 AM I am very happy to see that under the Mother's protective and nurturing Grace this effort already seems to be underway, and also to discern the shoots and saplings of the future that are already germinating in the fecund soil of this controversy. My faith is that this crisis will reveal itself to be not a destructive armageddon but a revelatory and transforming apocalypse for the Ashram.

The Habits of Organisations and How to make them better from The Tao of Wealth by Sreekanth

These organizational habits—or “routines,” as Nelson and Winter called them—are enormously important, because without them, most companies would never get any work done… But among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization. Most people are accustomed to treating companies as idyllic places where everyone is devoted to a common goal: making as much money as possible. In the real world, that’s not how things work at all.

Companies aren't big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup. Companies aren't families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done. Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich… But even perfectly balanced truces can become dangerous if they aren’t designed just right. 

The Foundations of Psychological Theory in the Veda (contd.) from Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

Function of the Gods: Sri Aurobindo found that the systematic symbolism of the Veda was extended to the legends related to the Gods and their dealings with ancient seers and that in all probability had a naturalistic origin.   If this was so, the original sense was supplemented by psychological symbolism…

They also realised that such a great task cannot be achieved by human effort only and the Gods must collaborate doing the actual work. Every time a human being does a task with some consciousness, he can feel the collaboration of the Divine Powers. Human journey towards perfection is often compared to climbing a mountain from peak to peak or to a journey in the uncharted waters of the ocean in a boat. With dedicated effort a stage will come where the person feels that all the work is done by the Gods themselves.  Adverse cosmic powers in nature are also common posing obstacles in the path of human seeker.

(Dr R.L. Kashyap is an Honarary Director & Trustee of SAKSI. He has to his credit 6 major books on the Veda and has undertaken a mission of writing a commentary on all the Veda mantras.) - C. Krishnamurthy (chamathu2003@yahoo.co.uk) 

The Jealousy of the Gods from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

As we exercise our mental powers and will to achieve vital success in the world, we not only have to face the resistances stemming from our physical and vital nature, and the response of others with whom we interact and the social organization within which we move, but we also have to face a universal or cosmic force of evolutionary intention and development. This force essentially maintains the basic principles or laws of the universal manifestation, whether we understand or recognize them or not. While we may experience this in our lives, and talk of it as “luck” or “fate” or “necessity”, we do not often focus on or pay attention to this force and its operation. Sri Aurobindo points out that the ancient Greeks had a great appreciation for this force and its operation on our lives and our destiny. 

Cosmic Law and Karma from Sri Aurobindo Studies 

The powerful imagery of the human transgressing limits and then being struck down by a force of cosmic justice has permeated our response to life’s setbacks through the ages. We need only look to the famous ancient Greek tale of Oedipus or the story of the house of Atreus, or even tales such as Hamlet or Macbeth by Shakespeare to recognise that we have imbibed these concepts and accepted them at some level of our consciousness as “the way the universe works.”

It is at this point that we generally assign a moral or ethical component to this universal action, but as Sri Aurobindo point out, the response is not strictly to moral failings but actually a response to any form of weakness, insufficiency, imperfection at whatever level it manifests. The human striving is to exceed our limits, to achieve success in life through expansion, extension and enjoyment. We push ourselves to and beyond the normal limits. To the extent we have truly understood and implemented the universal laws we achieve that success; but wherever we have any imperfection in our energy, the universe takes that into account in the response and in the result. The inter-relationship between all manifested beings and forces in the universal eco-sphere and bio-sphere is a very sensitive mechanism so our attempt to aggrandise ourselves in any way sets up waves of action that both push forward and create feedback and various forms of resistance.

Five-year Plans more important than FM's speech ET 2 MAR, 2013, Dipankar Gupta

As the short term is more exciting than anything longer, the budget speech features like a rock event, but the Five-year Plans go unsung… The short term casts its spell over the corporate world too. Investment managers use quarterly reports rather than long-term projections to lead the way. Shareholders don't care, but this is not how financial assets are best valued in functioning capital markets. As Alfred Rappaport wryly commented, it was as if companies were being lined up for a "Keynes Beauty Parade". 

The Four Stages of Prayer from The Tao of Wealth by Sreekanth 

I talk, you listen. You talk, I listen. Neither talks, both listen. Neither talks, neither listens: Silence

Mango as spiritual guide - Times Of India Jun 1, 2011 – Lama Doboom Tulku Jun 1, 2011

Acharya Nagarjuna is a great Indian philosopher. Many traditions regard him as a Tantric Acharya, in some other traditions he is regarded as an Ayurvedic expert and in yet others, even an Alchemist, but i am yet to come across a story of his being associated with horticulture…

Nagarjuna in his letter talks to the king about different categories of mangoes. They are special varieties whose appearances and degrees of ripening can be categorised as follows: 1) those not ripe but appear ripe; 2) those ripe but appear not ripe; 3) those unripe and appear unripe; and 4) those ripe and appear ripe. He was extrapolating this with reference to people we come across in our daily lives… Spiritual friends should not only be spiritually ripe but should also appear to be so. They must be morally clean, compassionate, have association with good people.  

Girish Karnad’s remarks leave philosopher’s family seething The Hindu, BANGALORE, March 2, 2013 BAGESHREE S

“In one of the last pieces Professor K.J. Shah published, he drew attention to the hollowness of the claims of Hindu nationalists by posing a set of questions. These were: 1. Is Hinduism a religion? 2. Is Hinduism a philosophy? 3. Is Hinduism more a religion or more a philosophy? 4. Is Hinduism a religion and a philosophy? 5. Who knows what is Hinduism?”

The last question, Prof. Sharma told The Hindu, “not only brings to centre-stage the question of legitimacy, or adhikaar, but also questions the very arbitrariness that constitutes the Hindu nationalist’s project to fashion themselves as the self-appointed guardians of the content, meaning and practice of Hinduism.”

An Ode to the Internet from Larval Subjects

For me, the world before the internet, the world prior to 1994 (god, I have students now that were born that year), was a world where I could only find books at crappy mall bookstores like Walden Books and B Daltons.  I had heard of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and many others, but only could get some books by Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Russell, Whitehead (strangely), Spinoza, and a few others.  I had to scour the country side, driving for hours to find whatever I happened to come across:  an obscure translation of Kant’s first Critique with uncut pages, Santayana, Josiah Royce,  Unamuno, Gassett, Proust, and a host of others.  This was all in the early 90s.  I read whatever fell into my hands.  And when my grandmother gave me a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Husserl’s Ideas (actually I stole it from the community college library, don’t tell), and the then official translation of Kant’s first Critique, I felt as if I’d received something tremendously valuable, like illuminated texts.  My highschool friends weren’t impressed.  It was also a world pervaded by loneliness and where conversations were entirely random. 

(title unknown) from enowning Lewis Coyne on allowing beauty to come to presence.

For Kant, perception of a particular form—the roundness, softness, and gentle scent of a petal, for example—harmonises with the faculties of the mind in such a way that the subject may judge the object to be beautiful. Heidegger, in turn, does not doubt that form plays a part. For him, beauty "consist[s] in form, but only because the forma once took its light from being and the being of beings". The principal difference lies in Heidegger's rejection of the role of a transcendental subject. Against Kant, he argues that beauty does not exist "relative to pleasure, ... as its object". Heidegger instead claims that beauty must be understood as something more than an aesthetic judgement of an object experienced by the subject—elusively suggesting that beauty draws ontologically from the "light" of being. 

James O’Meara’s review of my Lovecraft book Graham Harman March 1, 2013

1. Kant never reaches the Husserlian insight into the fact that the phenomenal sphere is broken up into intentional objects. Husserl makes a truly original assault on the empiricist dogma that objects are just bundles of qualities with no need to posit a naive substratum to hold them together. Husserl reverses the relation, so that objects come before their qualities, without those objects ever attaining an extra-phenomenal existence (Husserl really is an idealist, at the end of the day).

2. Kant tells us nothing about object-object interactions on the noumenal level. Indeed, he suggests that we can’t even know for sure if there is a plurality of noumena– unity and plurality are categories of the human understanding, after all. Insofar as we can talk about object-object interactions, it is only insofar as humans are the ones observing them.

Schellingian Reflections on Latour’s 2nd Gifford Lecture – “A Shift in Agency, With Apologies to Hume” from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall

In his second Gifford lecture, Latour rehearses David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Practicing the art of philosophical fiction, Latour re-constructs the history of philosophy (in much the same way that he helped reconstruct the Bergson-Einstein debate), wondering if Hume’s reflection on natural theology was really enough to stir the sage of Könisburg from his dogmatic dreaming, or if, in fact, he and all other Enlightened moderns are still sleeping, still spellbound by the pleonasm of natural religion, still stuck within the paradigm of design (by mechanistic de-animation or deistic over-animation), still paralyzed by the false split between science and religion, matter and spirit, fact and value, etc.

I haven’t read Hume’s dialogue since college, but Latour has made it seem like necessary re-reading. I’m particularly fascinated to expand Philo and Cleanthes’ discussion concerning the scope of analogical reasoning in cosmology. Is the universe more like an animal (a world-soul), or a plant (a giant vegetable)? Hume leaves the matter undecided, all the worse for the supposed speculative power of analogical reasoning. The Naturphilosophis left wondering whether his imaginal methods of conversing with nature, namely correspondance and analogy, have any basis in reality. Hume argues that they cannot be justified. Poetic metaphors cast too wide a net to catch the certainties sought by calculative mathesis. This is no refutation of the power of imaginal methods; it is only to say that, if analogical reason and speculative philosophy are to be productive of knowledge, they can only achieve this result through a cognitive magic still too occult for conscious reasoning to dispassionately reflect upon (see Hume’s Treatise, i. Sec. 7). The possibility of reasoning about the cosmos analogically in a scientific way depends upon the possibility of scientific genius. 

A nation of five Indias - The Times of India By KANTI BAJPAI Mar 2, 2013

But in fact Indians live in at least five world historical time zones if we go by the social, economic, political and technological features of different parts of the country. This is why understanding India and governing it are so difficult…

The third time zone exists in the second- and third-tier towns of India. Life in these towns is perhaps like the major cities of India 50-60 years ago. The rhythm of life, the influence of the small local elite, the availability of consumer goods and modern home devices including communication and media devices, economic surpluses sufficient to allow people to travel within India quite extensively and to imagine the country as a nation to which they belong and which they can shape, the growing sense of individuality and agency that even ordinary people possess in relation to their communities and government - in short, something like modern citizenship exists here. In world historical terms, this is where urban life was in say the early to mid-19th century in Europe - even if the comparison is not exact because the Europe of that era did not have television and the cellphone.

The fourth time zone is in the first-tier towns and big metros of India… Time here is industrial time, nine to five. There is a restless, rootless freedom for many - and for the middle classes and the rich, there are many of the appurtenances of big city 21st century life.   

For New Readers of Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

Basically, Smith writes about humans as social beings, learning how to behave (in the ‘great school of self-command’, starting in the school-yard) from those they live with or near (because other people in society act as a “mirror” on their conduct, which moulds to some extent their behaviours, their moral conduct and their sentiments).  Morality is not innate, nor derived from revealed religion.  Smith’s device was that of an “impartial spectator” that judges one’s conduct.  Society’s laws also influence, and among most people also constrain their behaviour. 

This is where later editions, especially the sixth, 1789, Smith reduced the number of his references to theological language, especially after his mother died in 1784. He became more secular without anchoring TMS in revealed religion (as in the 1^st and early editions).

Wealth Of Nations reproduces verbatim sections from his “Lectures in Jurisprudence’ [1763] from students’ notes, and places this title in its historical context.  WN was not a textbook on economics; it is a critique on the prevailing mercantile political economy of Britain in its historical context and should be read as such.  Its economics is fairly basic by Econ 102 standards.

Most modern economists have not read WN and those few that try often give up because modern economics is taught without any historical context, or indeed any prevailing connection to how economies developed to get where they are today.  Modern economic theories are divorced from the real world, as they must be if they represent them in largely two dimensional maths, roughly where ‘hard’ science was in the 1870s.  Even attempts to found a theory of “general equilibrium” mathematically are so far divorced from the real world as to be of little value in practice, as in the Welfare theorem which may produce a society that is perfectly disgusting by most moral standards. 

Two or more carbon atoms behave the same on Earth as they do anywhere else in the Universe, but two or more humans might behave differently across the same street, or within the same family. Hence treating humans as if they behave the same or even behave predictably across time and space is likely to disappoint those who postulate the same rational behaviour for them all. That is why Smith said nothing about humans as subject to the postulate of common rationality: Homo economicus is a fable agreed upon by those blind to the world and history of humans around them.

Smith said humans have the power of reasoning, which is not the same as sharing a common universal Rationality.  Self-interest is far more complex than rationality.  Moreover humans can only achieve their self-interests in co-operation with other self-interested humans. In the course of seeking co-operation, the self-interests of individuals are mediated by what is acceptable to both of them and that process requires mutual persuasion – or, unhappily, in its absence it invites degrees of coercion (tyranny, strikes, wars).  The meaning of all self-interested inter-actions by real people within the context of moral sentiments is elaborated by Smith throughout TMS and illustrated in WN.

Hegel’s India and Sri Aurobindo's view of the West

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self By: Peter Heehs

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.

Joshua Ramey - The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual ... Description. 

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.

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

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 prophet of Integral Yoga. It was at this time that he, along with his dedicated wife Bina Pani, established the Cultural Integration Fellowship ...

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 ... 

Publications - Aakash Singh - LUISS Guido Carli FORTHCOMING BOOKS 

Hegel’s India: Texts and Commentary (complete manuscript [ms.] under review at SUNY Press, NY). Co-edited with R. Mohapatra. 

Professor's opacity as a productive principle

Comment on Sri Aurobindo on Nationalism by Sandeep February 4, 2013

The Uttarpara speech was made after deep God-realization, although it has been misinterpreted and appropriated for sectarian purposes by those who do not understand the universality of Sanatana Dharma. I don’t think he ever rejected the speech, because the same theme is repeated in the “five dreams” message he gave when India became free in 1947.

Jabberwock: Divine savages and “real” truth 17 Oct 2011 [Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

There is no such thing as an “objective” reader or reviewer – our feelings about a book are shaped by many things working in conjunction: personal experiences, biases, genetic makeup, level of engagement with a subject, and so on. The best a reviewer can do is to admit the necessary subjectivity of his perspective and then tackle a book as honestly as possible.

The Other Tale of Indian Modernity: Savita Singh by Pratilipi Blog January 30, 2013

As an interpreter invariably does while understanding the truth, I too do not presume that the entire truth lies in the text itself. For, after the truth has been communicated to the readers, and some clarity has been brought to the text compared to its previous reading, the truth still remains. Truth perhaps is a remainder. In the light of this position on ...

Teaching, ISA’s, and the Pedagogy of Alienation from Larval Subjects January 30, 2008 

It was Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx who taught us that the subject is split or barred, and that our relationship to ourselves is characterized by a fundamental meconaissance. In the Freudo-Nietzschean constellation, this split is between the conscious ego that takes itself to be the one calling the shots, and those acephalous unconscious desires or that unconscious will of which we are but an effect. It is this unconscious desire or will that is calling the shots, not the sovereign ego. In the case of Marx, this split nature of the subject is located in the way we are caught up in social relations that exceed our conscious intentionality, functioning as determinants of our action…

Hume begins with an obvious “common sense” thesis about how we come to know– “all knowledge originates in sensations” –yet in holding fast to this thesis he unsettles all our common sense about knowledge and the world. Husserl begins with an obvious thesis– “look at the things themselves!” –yet in executing this project he unsettles our assumptions about what it is to experience the world and objects, opening a vast domain that continues to challenge central assumptions in cognitive science, psychology, the social sciences, etc. 5:27 am

Great Moments in the Classroom from Larval Subjects January 31, 2008 Students shuffling out of the classroom after a discussion of Platonic realism and the possibility of transcendent, objective values independent of culture, history, and individual determination.

STUDENT: “This class is impossible.”
ME (Alarmed): “Why?”
STUDENT: “We come in here thinking we understand the world and now we discover that everything we think might be mistaken.”

larvalsubjects Says: February 2, 2008 at 4:33 pm

I think what was most important in the comment was the statement that “everything we think might be mistaken”. That is, the conditional. The world becoming questionable or mysterious is a condition, I think, for practicing philosophy. In the philosophy classroom– especially at the introductory level –I believe the production of this space of the question is the most important and significant thing to be accomplished. That is, the teaching of philosophy shouldn’t be about demonstrating a particular doctrine, nor is it simply about acquainting students with a variety of different philosophical positions (though that’s important), but is rather about opening the space of questionability as such.

larvalsubjects Says: February 3, 2008 at 8:47 pm

I go back and forth on the question of whether anything should be pushed in the classroom. In part I think about Socrates and how you can never pin down what his position might be or if he even has one. In part I think about the nature of the analyst’s position in the analytic setting, where the analyst sets his own desire to the side so that the analysand might discover his or her own desire. It seems to me that this opacity of the professors own positions can function as a sort of productive principle where the students progressively discover their own thought as they try to figure out what it is that the professor thinks or wants. I guess in my own teaching I try to advocate fully for whatever material it is I’m teaching. One moment I’ll be vigorously defending Kierkegaard or Augustine, only to shift to Lucretius or Nietzsche. I’ll bring critical tools to bear on one tradition from another tradition, and so on. I can’t decide whether there’s a principle behind this or not. I would like to think that part of the aim is to undermine attachments to the professor as “master”. Here I always think back to Deleuze’s remark that “the best teachers are never those who say ‘do as I do’ (representation), but who invite to ‘do with me’”.

Augment Whitehead with Sri Aurobindo

RESEARCH IN PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION-ABSTRACTS DEVI, S., A Critical Study of the Concept of Creativity in Philosophy with special reference to Bergson, Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo, Ph. D. Phil., Kur. U., 1976

The objectives of the study were (i) to find out if creativity was the general scheme of reality, (ii) to find out if creativity was linked with different concepts of this universe, that is, with becoming, cosmic evolution, consciousness, organic evolution and teleology, (iii) to trace the historical background of creativity both in Indian and in Western thought, with special reference to the Vedas, Upanishads, Plato and Plotinus, (iv) to locate the concept of creativity in Bergson's ideas, (v) to investigate how Whitehead contributed to the concept of creativity, (vi) to identify the concept of creativity in the ideas of Sri Aurobindo, and (vii) to analyse various theories of creative evolution developed by S. Alexander, L. Morgan and James Ward.

The methodology adopted was philosophical, historical and comparative. The study was philosophical in the sense that ideas of various personalities were organized, critically analysed and evaluated. It was historical because the development of the concept of creativity from various sources had been traced. Further, it was comparative as commonness between the ideas and theories of various persons on the concept of creativity had been identified and critically evaluated. Content analysis was used both as a tool and technique to analyse the educational ideas of Tagore and Whitehead. Content analysis consisted of documentary analysis and thematic analysis. For content analysis, primary as well as secondary sources were used. The material was also examined to find out its suitability for the proposed research by way of internal and external criticism.

Some of the findings of the study were:

1. Creativity constitutes the very basis of reality.

2. Creativity has been conceived by various thinkers as an exercise of nonfigurative powers of the whole psyche involving all its substance, the play of its entire energy. The creative action is more than cerebral, more than visceral, involving more than mind and heart, intellect and emotions. It augments the structure of human vision by introducing some new, vital configuration of ideas or from among those available to organize experience.

3. Creativity was the power to evolve a pattern that remained omnipotent insofar as it touched the details of actualization. Creativity was a widely recognized ideal for every human being.

4. Both east and west emphasized that what was creative about spiritual experience was not its psychological accompaniments but the inward change which manifested itself in the fruits of the spirit-peace, JOY and loving suffering. A new type of life emerged with a higher correspondence between one's self and the ultimate sources of reality. New qualities of mind and character were called forth out of ordinary men and women, qualities which manifested the Divine in them.

5. Bergson's concepts elan-vital had led to a revolutionary syndical that would restore a purified social life by insisting that social change in any class of people could be achieved only by the force of their own associations, through means that would evolve so as to suit their particular needs. In the theory of science, he had inspired a new `positivism' that criticized scientific data in a vigorous and original way and showed how much arbitrariness there was in our methods of measurement of magnitudes.
6. Whitehead introduced an omnibus principle called creativity, which was a sort of universal blanket to cover all logical branches that his philosophy had created. Whitehead's emphasis on the organic character of natural systems and his attempt to bring physics and biology closer together had a good deal in common with the Gestalt approach to mind and nature.

7. Some emergentists advocated the theory of levels according to which evolution proceeded by the method of creative synthesis and life and mind came of a certain kind of organization of non-living elements. These new qualities could not be inferred by merely adding together the qualities of elements taking part in the organization. At each new level of reality, new powers, new capacities and new qualities emerged. Life appeared at one of these levels. Along with it emerged a series of new qualities such as growth, assimilation, irritability, adaptability and reproduction. Mind was the result of still more highly complex organizations. This was called creative evolution or emergent evolution whose pioneers were Bergson, Alexander, Morgan and Ward.

8. Sri Aurobindo's evolution admitted both mechanism and emergence, determinism and freedom. The creator was the supermind and it was a power of Sachchidananda. Hence the process of evolution was free, self-imposed and self-determined by Sachchidananda. The world was not the result of blind chance but a self-manifestation of the ultimate. Nature's processes appeared to us to be mechanical merely because the purpose was under disguise. Nothing was created from outside.

9. Creativity constitutes the very basis or foundation of reality. It was the creative purpose which steered and guided cosmic evolution and natural evolution. Creativity in human civilization was the expression of creation, which was at the root of nature and reality.

10. Man's future is in the hands of two creative agencies, his biological evolution and his psychological evolution. Genetic and natural environmental forces continued to influence the development of man. Psychological control dominates the direction of human evolution. Man's personal potential is biological, but he is freely And creatively designed. His future depended upon his understanding and attitudes towards reality. Man would be creative and free in projecting his future only if he could at one and the same time realistically immerse himself in the history of his age and culture, discover trans-historical meaning and affirm divine communication. 

11. Bergson, Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead are quite close to each other as far as the process of creativity is concerned.

Science v. Religion (in the lead up to my dissertation) – Al Jazeera interviews Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence’s Krauss thinks he’s special from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall

Now that I've completed preparatory research essays on Schelling (The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency) and Whitehead (Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of A.N. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology), it’s finally time to start zeroing in on my dissertation thesis. The title I’m proposing for now is Imagination Between...

Sri Aurobindo, the hope of man - Page 309 - Keshavmurti - 1969 - In the beginning Sri Aurobindo did not concern himself much with the war though he knew that poor leadership in England and France was at least partly responsible for Hitler's truculent and bellicose ...

Collected Works: Words of the mother - Page 127 - Mother - 1980 - 1 April 1946 A Declaration Sri Aurobindo withdrew from politics; and, in his Ashram, a most important rule is that one must abstain from all politics — not because Sri Aurobindo did not concern himself with the happenings of the world, but because politics, as it is practised, is a low and ugly thing, wholly dominated by falsehood, deceit, injustice, misuse of power and violence; ...

The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page xv - V. P. Varma - 1990 - Preview - More editions Possibly such reconstruction of the political philosophy of Aurobindo might not appeal to some sections in our country who would regard it as an enterprise in the profanization of a sacred personality. But we must not forget that Aurobindo was ...

Quest - Volumes 93-98 - Page 16 - Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom - 1975 - Aurobindo might not have had the time or the inclination to enter into a proper study of the scientific picture of the world. Also, some of the great discoveries took place after his self-imposed seclusion. However, the theories of relativity and ... Sri Aurobindo Ghose - Page 581 - Verinder Grover - 1993

Sri Aurobindo's treatment of Hindu myth - Page 32 - Jan Feys - 1983 - But for these queries Aurobindo might not have spoken of it at all. His general approach to myth also holds good here. Thus, e.g., Radha under the spell of Krishna symbolises "the soul, the psychic, hearing the call of the Divine". Aurobindo's ...

Sri Aurobindo--the poet - Volume 2, Part 4 - Page 162 - Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna - 1999 - Just as the merits of Savitri were appreciated to the utmost, whatever seemed a shortcoming no matter how slight and negligible in the midst of the abundant excellence was pointedly remarked upon so that Sri Aurobindo might not overlook... Sri Aurobindo: Savitri; a legend and a symbol - Page 733 - Aurobindo Ghose - 1970

The philosophy of Sri Aurobindo: his idea of evolution - Page 58 - Joseph Veliyathil - 1972 - So Aurobindo might not have felt the necessity of attributing immediacy to the acquisition of knowledge by the intellectual faculty. This made him limit the intellectual operation to discursive level only. Now if a comparison may be made ...

Sri Aurobindo--secularist? or nationalist? - Page 37 - Ke. Es Nārāyaṇācārya - 2006 - ... a detail Sri Aurobindo might not have known, as most savants of 'unity' took it for granted that Islam too was a 'religion' like any other, without realising its diabolic, predatory nature. Only recent researches are waking us up all over the world.

Letters on Savitri - Page 10 - Aurobindo Ghose, Sri Aurobindo, Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna - 2000 - Just as the merits of Savitri were appreciated to the utmost, whatever seemed a shortcoming no matter how slight and negligible in the midst of the abundant excellence was pointedly remarked upon so that Sri Aurobindo might not overlook...

Swami Vivekananda and Indian Nationalism - Page 91 - Subodh Chandra Sen Gupta - 1984 - Although Aurobindo might not have known the 'tens of thousands of young men' beaming with patriotic fervour, he should not have failed to see that most of them could not have much to do with P. Mitra's Samiti, some associates and members ...

The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism - Page 104 - Agehananda Bharati - 1976 - His writings are different indeed from those of the older Vivekananda and the younger Sivananda. Aurobindo might not have been a good poet, but he was a poet; he might not have been a thinker in any professional sense, but he expressed ...

The oneness/otherness mystery: the synthesis of science and mysticism - Page 508 - Sutapas Bhattacharya - 1999 - Preview ... of the material order is held by Aurobindo, Whitehead and others to be Nature's development of habits (stable patterns of behaviour emerging from repetition) rather than laws obeyed by Nature. Reality is fundamentally creative but patterns ...

Sri Aurobindo and Vedānta Philosophy - Page 71 - Sheojee Pandey - 1987 - Preview - More editions Here we have to say that Whitehead's Philosophy of evolution is more close and more similar to that of Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy of evolution. Like Whitehead Sri Aurobindo also believes that God is the ultimate principle and the evolution ...

Evolutionary, Spiritual Conceptions of Life - Sri Aurobindo, ... - Page 35 - Michael Leicht - 2008 - Preview Here Aurobindo gets quiet sociological. In the following I want to correct one misunderstanding of Madhusudan Reddy of Whitehead's theory: He assumes that Whitehead's philosophy has no final goal of evolution (Reddy, 2004: 156).

Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 3 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - More editions I doubt that one could overstate the importance of Aurobindo's mysticism for his philosophy. How then is he a metaphysician? A.N. Whitehead gives a just characterization of the trade: "Speculative Philosophy," he says, "is the endeavor to...

The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad - Page 356 - Ken Wilber - 2001 - Preview - More editions Notice that Shankara, Nagarjuna, Aurobindo, Plotinus (and Alexander and Wilber) can pass this test; Whitehead does not. This is not a secondary issue; it is at the precise heart of the matter, a heart that Whitehead lacks. Thus, the notion of ...

Cognitive models and spiritual maps: interdisciplinary ... - Volume 7, Issues 11-12 - Page 202 - Jensine Andresen, Robert K. C. Forman - 2001 - Preview What Whitehead doesn't have, something essential to Wilber, is the Great Nest or Chain of Being in addition to the Great Network of Being. For that, we would need to augment Whitehead with Aurobindo. I agree with Wilber that Whitehead's ...

The Essential Aurobindo: Writings of Sri Aurobindo - Page 23 - Aurobindo Ghose, Robert A. McDermott - 2001 - Preview - More editions In its philosophic comprehensiveness, Sri Aurobindo's philosophy finds its contemporary Western analogue among the systematic thinkers — Royce, Bergson, Whitehead, and Heidegger; in its spiritual and autobiographic quality, it more closely resembles Kierkegaard and Buber, and perhaps Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy of Social Development - Page 40 - Preview This is what Sri Aurobindo has attempted in his metaphysics of evolution. And it is here that the theories of Darwin, Lamarck, Herbert Spencer, S. Alexander, Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan, Bergson, Hegel and Croce have stopped short of the ...

Integral Psychology - Page 84 - Ken Wilber - 2000 - Preview Maslow. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) is well known enough that I will only make a few passing comments. Like all truly great integral thinkers— from Aurobindo to Gebser to Whitehead to Baldwin to Habermas—he was a developmentalist.

Faith possesses understanding: a suggestion for a new direction in ... - Page 220 - Jehangir Nasserwanji Chubb - 1983 - Preview - More editions It can be said of Sri Aurobindo what Eckhart said of God : 'In him there is no denial except the denial of all denials.' Upanishadic paradox, 216 Whitehead, A.N., 182 Upanishads, 16, 60, 210. See my article The Logic of the Infinite in the ...