September 11, 2021

Embedding your identity in a set of abstract beliefs

Rashtram School of Public Leadership
@rashtramspl
We are pleased to announce the launch of our webinar series #Vaicariki as part of #SriAurobindo's 150th birth anniversary celebrations. The first webinar will be on the topic ‘Integrality of the New Education Policy’ on 13 Sep. Register here:
rashtram.org/event/vaicarik
Sh. Matthijs Cornelissen, Founder of Indian Psychology Institute and teacher at SAICE Pondicherry, took the class on 'Gradations of Mind' today in the #SriAurobindo Course. Register for the course here: rashtram.org/sri-aurobindo-
Dharmapāla
@Dharmapla1
Human beings are conditioned. Therefore they are not free. They think they are free because when they choose, they think they are free. Choice is merely the outcome of confusion, not of certainty. When you are certain, clear, there is no choice. Any Comments Idiots
Priyank ચૌહાણ
@priyankchn
Traditionalism is paradoxically a very modern thing because the moment you start embedding your identity in a set of abstract beliefs independent of your location in society, space and time, in that moment you become irreparably modern.
This happens because the kind of individualism that powers this feat of abstraction is a distinctly modern thing. So the whole exercise which makes 'tradition' a ground for mobilisation itself is distinctly modern.
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Put well, but the consequences, regrettably, may not be modern and hence looking at traditionalism in this reductionist and abstract sense might not be a good lens. The best assessment of tradition vis-à-vis evolution has been provided by Sri Aurobindo in his The Human Cycle.
HKMaheshwari
@hetramrathi
Savitri Erans are either Hindus or are not Hindus. If they are not, then why must they interfere in the affairs of Hindus?
Sanjaysingh
@Sanjays81301051
surprising that some ‘I know more than everyone‘ type devotees of d Mother claim that we shouldn’t believe in our Gods once we’re on d path of #SriAurobindo ! It was a different matter that Lord Ganesh too couldn’t fulfill all d demands of TM !!
@Auro_Mere
@Mirra21Mala
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
It's upon each individual; each one has his own pace of progress. So there's no we, no uniformity. [Matthew 6:24 - Bible “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both]
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Hindutva agents trying to spread seeds of discord and confusion among the devotees of The Mother & Sri Aurobindo is mischievous. There should be constant vigilance against flamboyance of such characters and their overt and covert promoters. Savitri Erans will have to win this war.
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Brevity can mislead. Integral yoga may not ask for change of religion but it doesn't bar religious conversion as available under the Constitution. However, there shouldn't be any unreasonable allurement or coercion. Officially unrecognised religions too have their own attraction.
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Writing can't but wresting power can. Savitri Era Party seeks to provide an alternative under Sri Aurobindo's inspiration.
ତୁଷାରନାଥ ମହାପାତ୍ର
@NathTusar
Culture amounts to sympathetic appreciation, right evaluation, and avoiding disproportion. Some handles focus on interested themes as a result of which a balanced view of things fails to emerge. This lopsidedness leads to distorted history and unintended selective amnesia. Beware
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
library.sriaurobindoashram.org/mother/cwm10/c [One who truly follows the path given by #SriAurobindo, as soon as he begins to have the experience of this path, will find it impossible to confine his consciousness to the worship of any god or goddess or even of all of them together.] -Mother on T&A-159
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Rainbow & the Other: Bipin Chandra Pal articulated with greater eloquence the idea of Swaraj rainbowther.blogspot.com/2021/09/bipin- [Therefore it's not the case as Pradhan claims of all the Extremist leaders, Aurobindo alone could visualise Swaraj in the form of absolute political independence]
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Marketime: It's not the case that Sri Aurobindo alone could visualise Swaraj marketime.blogspot.com/2021/09/its-no Collated by TN Mohapatra
@NathTusar
Director, SELF (2005), Savitri Era Religion (2006), and Savitri Era Party (2007) Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.
Savitri Era
@SavitriEra
Evergreen Essays: Polar difference between Vivekananda’s idea and Kendra's evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2021/09/polar- [Kendra lays its stress upon Hindu nation. Vivekananda did not want confrontation with other faith or religion. He was a man for tolerance, openness, nonsectarian and a true Hindu.]

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Thank you Sumangala.
But the inspiration of scientists is often mystical, coming through the depth of the unconscious and science is rarely just a rational activity. Our emotionally held biases keep creeping in and the 'participant observer' tend to change outcomes. Andris Heks
...
To claim that scientific activity stems from "evidence" as stated by the flyer below by Sripad Bahkta Mahdavah Puri Maharaja is in ignorance and neglect of both the imaginal activity and the semiotic processes as primordial, be that scientist, artist or explorer or still of a human of anywhere and any cognitive background of any kind, which go to discover the evidence that would meet this activity. 
Its further claim for the "rationality" of science stands as the natural reductionism of dualism. It is more of a dialectic process, in which creativity is supported by a supradual ontoepistemology, even when the said humans are unaware of it. When this is not unconscious we operate through abduction, as described as a non-inferential process identified by Charles Peirce as the only way to creativity in his work on the logic of science.
This claim ignores the unconscious activity which supports the eureka events, such as the realization by Hamilton of the quaternions which manifested as a whole in an instant. Two realizations were involved: fourness and non-commutatitivity, the latter the fundamental basis for Quantum Mechanics as today further realized as Quantum Cognition, and the very basis of the torsion geometry of space and of cognition (Rapoport)
Would rationality be the means and support of science, then Organic Chemistry would not exist. We recall Kekule's report of his revelation of the circular structure of benzene while in an hypnagogic state sitting at his desk after luch, falling asleep to "awake" to see two serpents mutually  one the other. Kekule was not a rationalist in the sense of this flyer, but actually a belated alchemist being informed on the archetypal Ouroboros, then turned to benzene. Newton, the alchemist scientist was far more unintegrated than Kekule. 
The only difference in that claim is a recourse to mention that is undefined but by negation of its "mechanical inception", and left unellaborated at that.
Also to claim that "Science is the product of the Rational activity of Scientists" is on the one hand to reduce this rich process of creativity in which semiotic processes such as  metaphorization are crucial (think of the Bohr picture of the atom as a planetary system, for one), and still to ignore that prior to "Rationality" emotics plays a crucial role to spur the cognitive process, and as biological psychology has elicited (Panksepp, Solms, Damasio in the neurosciences. 
Neglect of the aesthetics of the activity as a driving axis is also manifest.
Seems more of an extract of a 19th century positivism manual.
Sincerely, humbly adamantly
Diego Lucio Rapoport
To view this discussion on the web visit

No, science is not a body of knowledge. I know that the Classical Latin word scientia meant "knowledge", but that's not what is meant by "science" today. Science is a _method_ for testing ideas. It consists of empirical falsification and parsimony (and really the former contains a lot of the latter).

> physics and chemistry are subsets of Scientific knowledge
No, physics and chemistry are science as applied to certain subsets of natural phenomena.

> Science is the product of the rational activity of Scientists.
Sure, parsimony is rational, at least to the extent that it can't be outsourced to a computer, and falsification is rational as well in that it requires coming up with rigorous ways of testing a particular idea, often using statistics. But, as others have pointed out, the ideas that science tests need not have any rational origin. They can come from dreams, like Kekulé's idea on benzene that turned out to be pretty much correct; they can come from meditation, LSD trips, religious experiences, it doesn't matter. What matters is whether they're testable.
Ideas that are not testable are not scientific. Subjective experiences are testable if enough people have them that they can be compared. If that is not the case, so that everyone else can only take them on faith, they're useless to science.
The rest of the picture falls with these three statements.
David Marjanovic
...
It reminded me of similar contrasts in Karl Heim's book, Christian Faith and Natural Science.  In it, he uses the term "suprapolar space" to express what may be the same as your concept of absolute space. On page 165 of my 1957 Harper Torchbooks edition, he lets the reader know that he wants to  get beyond the concepts of immanence and transcendence. The next ten pages go into various details about how he wants to do this; in the process he also talks about how the suprapolar space contrasts with the ordinary "polar" space of physics.

His main thesis throughout the book is how we must take consciousness as the starting point for a philosophy that can stand in contrast to materialism. He uses the word "Ego" for what Hinduism calls  Atman, the individual Self, and it is our separate selves that he never loses sight of, and how we are separated frorm each other in a way that only God, whose space is suprapolar, can overcome. 

At the end of this book he says he means to overcome the disharmony between secularism and faith, in a way that is firmly grounded in the physical and biological sciences, "in the remaining parts of this work." I never found out  what these "remaining parts" were, but the Wikipedia entry on Karl Heim leads me to think that it might be The Transformation of the Scientific World-View. 

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics        
University of South Carolina
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September 01, 2021

His ideas were self-validating for Aurobindo

On The Life Divine

The first parts of the book deals with the major problems and issues of modern, ancient and Indian philosophy and religion. After presenting the theories and views of various schools of philosophy lucidly as if it was his own, Sri Aurobindo elucidates his own integral view

The key concepts in Sri Aurobindo’s synthesis is the concept of supermind and the concept of spiritual evolution or the evolution of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo provides a spiritual alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution.

While the first parts of the book spell out the metaphysical aspects of Life Divine, the last parts describe the mystical, yogic, spiritual and the prophetic dimensions of the divine life on earth. - M.S. Srinivasan
...

A Divine Life Peter Heehs

The prospectus of the Arya promised readers “synthetic studies of speculative Philosophy,” of which the first would be Aurobindo’s “exposition of Vedantic thought in accordance with the Ishopanishad.”824 The philosopher in him was still subservient to the commentator. Most of the writings that fill his notebooks from 1910 to 1914 were based more or less directly on the Upanishads and Rig Veda. The most extensive of these were the aforementioned commentaries on the Isha Upanishad entitled “The Life Divine.” Presumably he intended to draw on them when he wrote the promised “exposition,” but when he started a new draft of “The Life Divine” in the middle of May 1914, he hardly mentioned the Isha Upanishad. Instead he dealt with Indian philosophy in general, particularly its experiential basis. After working on this draft for about a month, he set it aside and in just three days wrote the opening chapter of another Life Divine that would become a thousand-page treatise of spiritual philosophy. He was happy with this chapter when he wrote it and he remained satisfied with it for the rest of his life. In it he presented, in four taut pages, the principal themes of his philosophy:

These ideas and their synthesis were self-validating for Aurobindo, and most of his followers accept them as unquestionable truths. But if a philosophical system is to merit acceptance as philosophy, it has to be defended by logical arguments; otherwise it joins other infallible revelations that depend on faith for acceptance and persuasion or coercion for propagation. In other words, it becomes a religion. Aurobindo did not want his teaching to be regarded as a religion and therefore used logic to present and defend it — but not, he stressed, to arrive at it. In reaching his conclusions, he owed nothing, he said, “to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others.” If the spiritual value of Aurobindo’s system can only be gauged by one who has had the same experiences, its philosophical value is measurable by the usual critical means: studies of sources, arguments, and conclusions, and evaluations of rhetoric and style.

AUROBINDO HAD LITTLE INTEREST in philosophy and read few of the major Eastern or Western philosophers. At Cambridge he read a few Platonic dialogues as part of his study of Greek literature. He tried to acquaint himself with Hume, Kant, and Hegel, but retained little of the little he read. In general, European philosophy seemed to him to be “a mass of abstractions with nothing concrete or real that could be firmly grasped and written in a metaphysical jargon to which I had not the key.” Most of the ideas that he absorbed were “picked up desultorily” in his general reading. This included the works of the English Romantic poets, some books by Friedrich Nietzsche, and secondhand accounts of the theory of evolution. His study of Sanskrit literature led him eventually to the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda, but he did not study the dialectics of Vedanta or other Indian philosophical systems; only some “general ideas” stayed with him. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to say that he was innocent of philosophy when he began to write The Life Divine. The books he read were enough to introduce him to the classic problems of the discipline and to acquaint him with some of the leading schools.

The only works that Aurobindo regularly cited in The Life Divine were the Gita, Upanishads, and Rig Veda. His philosophy, he explained, “was formed first” by the study of these works, which were also “the basis of my first practice of Yoga;
...

Sri Aurobindo on individualism and collectivism, The State-Idea and Anarchy - By Dr. Soumitra Basu http://motsac.org/humanitycahpsrevised.php
Sri Aurobindo's aspiration may sound utopian but actually the seeds of what he termed as ANARCHY have already been sown in the social psyche. The word anarchy was loosely used till popularized as a valid political construct by Proudhon (1840) and Bakunin (1872).Though suppressed by Fascism in the 1930s, anarchism re-emerged in 1950s and 1960s by influencing the civil rights movement and students movements in the West. In fact the contemporary radical ecology movement that was initiated in the 1970s was very much inspired by anarchism. There is every reason to be optimistic that an uplifted and higher anarchism based on the freedom of soul-poise can really be operative one day.

Sri Aurobindo reminds, "Our destiny may be the conversion of an original animal association into a community of the gods. Our progress may be a devious round leading from the easy and spontaneous uniformity and harmony which reflects Nature to the self-possessed unity which reflects the Divine" (18Ibid)
http://motsac.org/humanitycahpsrevised.php

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Savitri Era: Modalities of social action need to be examined against present constraints
Tusar Nath Mohapatra @NathTusar Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum (SELF) and Founder of Savitri Era Religion
Savitri Era of those who adore,
Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.
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