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.

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. 

Sri Aurobindo is neglected as a literary critic

Sri Aurobindo Ashram - E-Library - Works Of Sri Aurobindo - CWSA - 28 Letters On Yoga-I Page – 272 … it is not our hope to transform suddenly the whole human race. Your object is precisely to lead a higher life away from the ordinary world, only it is not solitary; there is a collective side to it and a side, not only of meditation, but of work, action and creation. There is nothing in this that is impossible.

Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: integral sociology and dialectical ... - Page xx - -Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1988 - Here the student of the history of sociology can hardly fail to note that the Marx-Aurobindo controversy is a creative extension of a very old and interesting intellectual battle which has been going on for centuries and drawing into its arena distinguished thinkers like Hobbes, Rousseau, Vico, Hegel, Comte, Mill, and Morgan. 6:46 PM

Aurobindo, the first Indian English critic of poetry – Dr. Sandipan Vitthal Wanve, Maharashtra

Sri Aurobindo is neglected as a literary critic. Because people considered him as a saint, a yogi and even a philosopher but not as a literary critic and poet of eminence. But actually he was a man with a keen sense of critical perception…

Aurobindo has an encyclopaedic range. Not only English authors but European writers all come under the critical purview of Aurobindo. Ancient Indian works like Vedas and Upanishads are also studied by him. Aurobindo has used Eliot’s observation ‘Comparison and Analysis’ in his criticism. He has studied Milton beside Dante, Homer beside Valmiki and so on. His theory of translation of poetry is very fascinating. He think that there are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another- one is to keep strictly to the manner and turn of the original, the other to take its spirit, sense and imagery and reproduce them freely so as to suit the new language.

Aurobindo’s observations about the poet and poetry create special place in Indian criticism. He is the first Indian English critic of poetry with a theory of his own. His assessment of English authors remains as a gift for the readers.

Sri Aurobindo - the vocal opponent of socialism - Sanjeev Sabhlok's revolutionary blog sabhlokcity.com

Most people think of Sri Aurobindo as a great spiritual and literary master. Few realise that he was, in line with Vivekananda and most Indian philosophers, a great proponent of liberty and – in Sri Aurobindo's case – a direct opponent of socialism… The more I think about it, it becomes clear that I am speaking from the ANCIENT INDIAN TRADITION. It is an instinctive expression of critical thinking, tolerance, and liberty that ancient India so deeply understood… a deep instinctive tolerance and insistence on liberty. It was an instinctive expression of Indian-ness, the true Hindutva… It is time to reclaim Hindu Capitalism (also known as Hindu Dharma) and bring tolerance and liberty back to India. This includes economic freedom and incentive-based governance outlined in Arthashastra.

A Philosopher Defends Favoritism BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Steven T. Asma has an interesting article on fairness versus favoritism...

I have consistently found that the actions of parents undermine programs aimed at redistributing resources and opportunities to achieve uniform “fairness” in American schools. Even when parents sincerely believe that every student should have exactly the same benefits and opportunities, they do everything they can to maximize the opportunities of their own children. Since some families are better able to realize their goals than others, families promote inequality of opportunity. They are, Asma might say, devoted to favoritism. This, I think, is as it should be. Parents who do don’t want to promote the best interests of their own children over goals of abstract equality are, to put it bluntly, bad parents.

The Soul, Karma and the Evolutionary Progression « Sri Aurobindo Studies

The law of karma as part of a process of soul evolution and development can only have meaning if it is continuous and follows the line of development.

Message on Mother's Mahasamadhi 17th Nov Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles.

Devotees throng Aurobindo ashram Webindia123 - Thousands of devotees from all over the country and abroad thronged the Sri Aurobindo Ashram here today to pay tributes to the Mother, a leading disciple of Sri...

Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Delhi Branch. Saturday 17 November 2012 The Mother’s Mahasamadhi Day will be observed in the Ashram as a day of SILENCE

6.45 p.m. - Offering of Lights of Aspiration

7.00 p.m. - Silent Meditation

On 17th November 1973, the Mother left her body. She was ninety-five. Many among her children were deeply shaken for the time being. But they realise now that she is always present amidst them.

Both at home and abroad, the devotees see the Mother in their dreams. They feel her presence, listen to her message and get inspiration and instruction in their work. They firmly believe that the Mother will return in a new form. Meanwhile her mission is getting quietly fulfilled more and more. When Sri Aurobindo left his body the Mother said, "Nothing has changed. All that Sri Aurobindo has said is true, time will prove it." On the Mother's withdrawal, her children are carrying on her work repeating the same dictum "Nothing has changed."

It is upon you, the young, that her hope rests.

Home > Sri Aurobindo> Memorial Plaques In Calcutta

"Sri Aurobindo and Calcutta Memorial Committee" identified places in Calcutta where Sri Aurobindo had stayed at or worked from. In co-operation with the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, Memorial Plaques were erected at these identified sites - a consummation of Joya di's long and laborious endeavour.

Guidance for the seeker

This message is generated randomly from a collection of short written statements taken from the notes, letters, and messages of The Mother. The process of generating the guidance is the electronic equivalent of randomly looking up a book to receive an indication or answer.