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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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".
I talk, you
listen. You talk, I listen. Neither talks, both listen. Neither talks, neither
listens: Silence
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 1st 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.
