February 18, 2013

Spiritual practice contains its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments

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

Hegel also considered himself to be an orthodox Christian. The greatest minds of the following generations – Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Marx – did not. They considered themselves Hegelian, yet they were against the gods… That atheism is at the heart of Marx’s dissertation… Marx turns his focus to two lesser-known figures, Epicurus and Democritus… The topic of his dissertation is Epicurus; Democritus’s role is merely to illustrate why Epicurus is so great…  The gods are just as distant in Epicurus’s explanations; he can look like a precursor of Darwin. And so it was to Epicurus that Marx turned as an inspiration for his still-developing atheist Hegelianism.

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

The Being behind Hitler Science Of Spirituality Blog on ... By: Martin Sobieroj on Feb 18, 2013 Source : Mother's Agenda, 12 January 1965
(Regarding an old "Playground Talk" of March 8, 1951, in which Mother spoke of the being that possessed and "guided" Hitler: … As for Sri Aurobindo ... (you know that there is a place in Russia where they were defeated [ii]), Sri Aurobindo had foreseen the defeat and had worked the night...

“Spiritual ordeal” is too one-sided a vision of spiritual practice, which includes ordeals, but contains also its fair share of relaxation and hedonic moments. I “see” it as a process psychic and collective individuation, as Simondon and Stiegler call it. There is no necessary dualism between philosophy and individuation, and Deleuze is a shining (in the sense of Dreyfus and Kelly’s ALL THINGS SHINING) example of their co-existence and superposition.
Gilles Quispel once declared that “Alchemy is the yoga of Gnosticism”, that is to say the actual experiential and transformative practice that subtends and is subtended by Gnostic theoretical creation. One could reformulate this as “Non-philosophy is the yoga of philosophy”. 

Order never comes for free, but always requires operations, energy, and work precisely because it’s more probable for anything to be related to anything else, than for anything to maintain improbable and selective relations to a delimited range of elements in the order of being. “Onto-cartography” would be the investigation of the mechanisms by which improbable orders are maintained; and would therefore include investigations of discursive mechanisms (not surprisingly, the favorite of the humanities), chronopolotical mechanisms, geographical mechanisms (geopolitics), and thermopolitical mechanisms.  Whenever encountering an order in the social and political world we should be surprised and ask ourselves how it maintains itself.  In understanding how it maintains itself, we can begin to devise strategies undermine it where those negentropic mechanisms are oppressive.
All of this aside, we now see a third argument against holism.  A world in which everything is related to everything else is identical to the definition of a highly entropic system.  It is a world where no inferences can be made to other elements precisely because there’s an equal probability of anything being related to anything else.  Such a world would be a world of Brownian motion, where there was no language, mathematics, ecologies, or social orders, precisely because all of these orders are orders in which relations between elements are selective or improbable.  As Deleuze said of Hegel’s categories, the world proposed by holists is a world that is too baggy, too ill fitted, to get at the real of the world that we, in fact, encounter.

There is the practical mind that involves itself with the physical and vital levels of existence and works to manage and utilize them to best advantage; there is also a higher mind of thought and concept, as well as an aesthetic and an emotional aspect that weave the complex fabric that we consider to be mental functioning. Sri Aurobindo explains: “The mental energy divides itself and runs in many directions, has an ascending scale of the levels of its action, a great variety and ...”
It is not simply the complexity of these different energies and levels of action that we have to contend with; we also have to take into account the varying concentration and intensity of the energy put forth within each of these lines. A weak force will soon be deflected, drowned out or watered down by the myriad other active forces around it and with which it needs to contend.

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

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

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.

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.

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. 

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 ...

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 ... 

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

February 17, 2013

Critics like Sri Aurobindo and Coomarswamy didn’t treat cinema under culture

Prayers to Sri Annai: Sri Aurobindo Devotees Trust, Sais Balika Vidya Mandir, Azad Road, 9.30 a.m.; Sri Annai Meditation Centre, W7C, Kovaipudur, 4 p.m.

Saturday, 16 February 2013 - Sri Aurobindo's Rourkela School According to Sri Aurobindo's Vision. And the target of the school is to make student forward towards the New Era By putting them into the practice of Integral...
The  Nightingale of Sri Aurobindo's Rourkela School, Sector-5, Odisha - Mrs Bandana Mohanty An instrument of Divine's field of Music

The following are the main passages of the Court Order given by the 2nd Additional Munsif of the Puducherry Court in Radhikaranjan’s case. An oral order was given on 5 December, 2012 followed by a written order on 8 February, 2013 restraining the Ashram Trustees from stopping Radhikaranjan’s classes in the Ashram School.

The craftsman and the craft grown inly one. Achieve perfection by the magic throb. And passion of their close identity. Savitri Sri Aurobindo.

Affirming the beauty and splendour of her law she claims life as her natural domain. Beauty and Art awake the joy which sleeps in all things made. A mighty victory or a mighty fall, a throne in heaven or a pit in hell find justification in the fact that something is got done, something lived. No wonder, it is the soul which is the ground for Matter, it is the cause of Matter. On inner values is prepared the plan. This world’s apparent sensible design becomes vibrant. Here is a mind which is not limited by senses, powers that are not seen come out in front and reveal their faces. The occult is no more occult, and all becomes palpable and obvious. 

The ultimate realization: Aurobindo’s philosophical and mystical glow is through an integral view of man, Nature and will change the face of the world. In Savitri, his masterpiece he succeeds to a great extent in expressing hoist mystic experiences and yogic realizations. Aurobindo arrives at the conclusion that releases for bondage and changer with the secret knowledge, the soul a chives a complete spiritual transformation Savior is cast for minutely cosmic role of struggle and redemption, and is the incarnation of Divine mother. Savitri is both the response and the resulting transformation. Conclusion: Sri Aurobindo is a skillful craftsman in the use of blank verse and felicity in poetic expression. His grand and mystic style in poetic works are ample testimony of his stupendous achievements. 

Kancha Ilaiah: Even if 10% dalit children got English education, India would change from Opinion, Editorial, Columnists and Reviews The Times of India Kancha Ilaiah is a political scientist, writer and dalit activist.

Sample Chapter for Aravamudan, S.: Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language Srinivas Aravamudan Book Description -  Endorsements - Table of Contents - Adobe Acrobat PDF format Introduction - Imbued with a knowledge of objective sciences by English education, our people will be able to comprehend subjective truths. --Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandamath

Katju speaks the 'unpleasant truth': 90% of Indians are fools Firstpost - The 90% - Indian Express Mon Apr 09 2012, Markandey Katju -  The unpleasant truth: 90 per cent of Indians are fools…
In our shastras it is written: "Satyam bruyat, priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam." It means, "Speak the truth, speak the pleasant, but do not speak the unpleasant truth." I wish to rectify this. The country's situation today requires that we say "Bruyat satyam apriyam", i.e. "Speak the unpleasant truth". 

Ashis Nandy and the Cultural Politics of Selfhood - Christine Deftereos - gives the reader an insight into a novel aspect of Nandy. The author insists that Ashis Nandy is not merely a self-described political psychologist; he is also an intellectual street fighter who comes face to face with the psychology of politics and the politics of psychology, thus affirming why this intellectual is one of the most original and confronting Indian thinkers of his generation. The main features of this book are its original reading and the authentic use of the psychoanalytic theory to characterise and demonstrate the importance of psychoanalysis in Nandy's work. Read More...

Narratives Of Indian Cinema - Page 26 - Manju Jain - 2009 - Preview impress upon filmmakers the need to make films with powerful social and educational themes. even critics of this time like aurobindo ghosh and ananda Coomarswamy, who wrote extensively about art and culture, made little attempt either to treat cinema as a rich and varied register of popular culture or to understand the new regime of aesthetics that it had inaugurated.
Colonial Displacements: Nationalist Longing and Identity Among ... - Page 191 - Paromita Biswas - 2008 - Preview As scholars such as Peter van der Veer and others have argued, this investment by male nationalists of the figure of the woman with superior strength, for instance Aurobindo or Bankim's portrayal of the nation as the mother goddess, was a ...
'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in ... - Page 100 - Chris Pinney - 2004 - Preview - More editions A key element in Peter van der Veer's study of what he calls 'religious nationalism', is the claim that it is the result of the ... reference for religious nationalists today: the translation above, by Shri Aurobindo, is taken from the Bharatiya Janata ... Beyond appearances?: visual practices and ideologies in modern India - Page 142  - Sumathi Ramaswamy - 2003
Religious Freedom in India: Sovereignty and (Anti) Conversion - Page 105 - Goldie Osuri - 2012 - Preview - More editions open reading that Vasudevan calls for (which redirects Phalke's cinema towards a Gandhian desire for the ... ... framework of Hindu nationalism” through the institution of canonical texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata in print literature as discussed by Peter van der Veer (2001). van der Veer argues, for example, that “it was Aurobindo's idea, in his Foundations of Indian Culture, that the Mahabharata and the Ramayana constitute the essence of...
Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia - Page 84 Peter Van Der Veer, Hartmut Lehmann - 1999 - Preview - More editions Perspectives on Europe and Asia Peter Van Der Veer, Hartmut Lehmann ... notion of primordial Indian racial qualities, and also in the thought of Gandhi's precursors, notably Aurobindo, who conceived of nationality as a more spiritual force but ...
The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives - Page 209 Jacob Copeman, Aya Ikegame - 2012 - Preview - More editions Cosmopolitan spirituality in Rishikesh Aravamudan identifies Guru English as the most recognizable form of South Asian cosmopolitanism and Aurobindo as not only the first modern guru but one who ... 2002:10, see also van der Veer 2002b).  9:03 pm

From SELF-Shelf

February 16, 2013

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).

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.

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 ...

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 [...]

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. 

February 15, 2013

Not a lonely self-glorification, the East-West dichotomy has to be transcended

Religion and Beyond By: Ramesh Bijlani on Feb 14, 2013 7 Responses Every religion has four basic components…  
Religion is good as a gateway to spirituality, but no religion is good enough as the ultimate anchor.  That is why, religion has been called the kindergarten of spirituality.  Or, as Swami Vivekananda said, any religion is good enough to be born in; no religion is good enough to die in.  Having said that, the overall effect of religions on mankind, however, has been positive, in spite of the divisions and even violence that they have occasionally triggered. Acknowledgement: I am happy to acknowledge the insight into the four aspects of religions that I gained from Prof. V.G. Bhide.

Sri Aurobindo: A Forward-Looking Traditionalist by Peter Heehs - Talk delivered by Peter Heehs at a National Conference sponsored by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Samsthan, New Delhi, and the Sri Aurobindo Institute of Indian Culture, Shillong, February 2012  - Free download Choose a format to download
It was not until a decade after his return from England that the focus of Sri Aurobindo’s attention shifted from literary to spiritual works. Around 1902 he began his long engagement with the Upanishads, striving to bring out the majesty of Upanishadic language in English translations, … Sri Aurobindo never gave a final form to his philological investigations, because his research into the origins of language led him to the Rig Veda, and he soon became deeply absorbed in the study of this most ancient of Indian texts…
Sri Aurobindo was convinced of the greatness of the Indian tradition, but his appreciation of the Indian past looked forward to an even greater future… The old as well as the new had to be creatively appropriated, becoming transformed into something that was stronger and richer than the constituent materials. It is in the light of this assimilative appropriation that we have to view Sri Aurobindo’s approach to efforts of “the Indian spiritual mind” to recover its past and move towards its future. On the one hand he encouraged the study of India’s past achievements in religion, literature, art, polity, and so forth. On the other hand he discouraged the “revival of orthodox conservatism” as being superficial, sentimental and out of “touch with the great facts and forces of life.” Modern Indians, he wrote, had to “look upon all that our past contains with new eyes” in order “to recover something of their ancient sense” but at the same time “bring out of them a new light which gives to the old truths fresh aspects and therefore novel potentialities of creation and evolution.”
Pride in the accomplishments of the Indian soul should not take the form of what he called an “unthinking cultural Chauvinism which holds that whatever we have is good for us because it is Indian or even that whatever is in India is best, because it is the creation of the Rishis.” What India needed was not a lonely self-glorification, but “a unity with the rest of mankind, in which we shall maintain our spiritual and our outer independence.” The East-West dichotomy had to be transcended, he said, for “from the view of the evolutionary future, European and Indian civilisation at their best have only been half achievements, infant dawns pointing to the mature sunlight that is to come.”

Meghalaya Guardian ePaper Inspired by Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, he made India his home. GUARDIAN NEWS BUREAU SHILLONG, Feb 14:
Peter Heehs, an American historian living in Puducherry who writes on modern Indian history, Indian spirituality and religion was in town recently to attend the national seminar on “interrelation between Sanskrit and Indian culture with special reference to Sri Aurobindo” organized by Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi and city based Sri Aurobindo Institute of Indian Culture at its campus. On Wednesday, he addressed a select audience at the city- based Asian Confluence – an initiative to promote an open space for creating a better understanding of the North Eastern region of India. It is a space for cultural and intellectual exchange that can act as a hub for civil society initiatives and the brainchild of former Shillong parliamentarian Dr BB Dutta’s son, Sabyasachi Dutta.
In his interaction with the specially invited guests, Heehs said that he came to India at the age of 22 and made Pondicherry his home for over 40 years now. He has authored several books and is being acclaimed as an outstanding authority of Sri Aurobindo and Divine Mother’s vision, thought etc. “Having coming here 40 years ago, India has become a place where I live and work whereas my family ( his brothers) is cantered in USA,” he said. He was born in Illinois, Chicago and grew up in Philadelphia and also spent most of his boyhood in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey before coming here. His father was from St Louis and mother from California.
When his father was transferred to Philadelphia region that was when he developed first sort of interests about India and came across Indian spiritual gurus besides Ravi Shankar and his music. He was in college then when a thought about what is the purpose of this life, the ideal of Vedanta and general spiritual thinking caught his thinking. He came to know about the Indian Cultural Centre in New York and got associated with it where the in- charge, a French lady came to India and met Morarji Desai and dedicated herself as India’s ambassador as she was more influenced by Sri Aurobindo and Raman Maharshi. “I ended up with this organization and got interested in reading about Sri Aurobindo and thought why not go that place and went straight to Pondicherry and then got kind of fit in and was given a work in a literary activity to set up the archive of Sri Aurobindo’s works,” he said.
Working at this archive was a learning process for him as he was involved in identifying and sequencing the personal manuscripts of Sri Aurobindo from which he had got the opportunity to have a close look into the life of this great Yogi. “We made sequence of the books and his personal manuscripts and discovered that like Bhabani Bharati, which was talked upon largely in the seminar, there were many other works that were lying unpublished,” he said. The quality of Sri Aurobindo that took this historian by surprise was that he (Aurobindo) started a monthly journal Arya of which all the 64 pages he used to write in immaculate texts as he had greater fluency in writing English besides he was simultaneously working on various other disciplines, such as, The Life Divine, The Future Poetry, Translation of Vedas, The Ideal of Human Unity and more as all these are different subject works in addition to the 64 page monthly journal. “He was incredible,” said Heehs.
Heehs also replied questions put up by the visiting guests, such as, why institutions tend to drift away after the departure of the founding fathers besides whether Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda had any inspirational relationship between them. There was also questions regarding his book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” which created a controversy and furore in the country as there was a demand that the historian should leave the country with protests in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, too.
Heehs also shared his experience meeting with the Divine Mother for a couple of times as meeting with the mother was very restricted. “I would exaggerate if I say that there was a huge feeling or change in me thereafter but certainly there was something as I dedicated my life to that of Sri Aurobindo and Mother,” he said.

To call the killings of Muslims in 2002 a spontaneous reaction reminds one of Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938, when the entire Jewish community in Germany was attacked, many killed, their synagogues burnt, shops vandalised after a German diplomat in Paris was shot dead by a Jewish youth whose family had been persecuted by the Nazis. It was claimed by the Nazi government that this was only a ‘spontaneous’ reaction, but in fact it was planned and executed by the Nazi authorities using fanatic mobs.
In terms of historical evolution, India is broadly a country of immigrants and consequently, it is a land of tremendous diversity. Hence, the only policy which can hold it together and put it on the path of progress is secularism — equal respect and treatment to all communities and sects. This was the policy of the great Emperor Akbar, which was followed by our founding fathers (Pandit Nehru and his colleagues) who gave us a secular Constitution. Unless we follow this policy, our country cannot survive for one day, because it has so much diversity, so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups.
India, therefore, does not belong to Hindus alone; it belongs equally to Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsees, Jains etc. Also, it is not only Hindus who can live in India as first-rate citizens while others have to live as second or third rate citizens. All are first-rate citizens here. The killing of thousands of Muslims and other atrocities on them in Gujarat in 2002 can never be forgotten or forgiven. All the perfumes in Arabia cannot wash away the stain on Mr. Modi in this connection.
It is said by his supporters that Mr. Modi had no hand in the killings, and it is also said that he had not been found guilty by any court of law. I do not want to comment on our judiciary, but I certainly do not buy the story that Mr. Modi had no hand in the events of 2002. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time when horrible events happened on such a large scale. Can it be believed that he had no hand in them? At least I find this impossible to believe… I appeal to the people of India to consider all this if they are really concerned about the nation’s future. Otherwise they may make the same mistake which the Germans made in 1933. (Markandey Katju, a former judge of the Supreme Court, is Chairman of the Press Council of India)

By Ronald Dworkin (pdf).  Every economist (and many others) should read this article. And his classic two-part article on “What is Equality?” is here and here.

Auronet Sunil composed music for Mother at Sri Aurobindo Ashram for several decades. Let's enjoy the beautiful open space, an immense sunset and heavenly music in ...

February 13, 2013

Ken Wilber has put further flesh on the skeleton of Sri Aurobindo's work

I would strongly suggest that you consider looking at Joshua Ramey’s new book The Hermetic Deleuze… While a lot of my earlier years were spent reading esotericism, gnosticism, hermeticism and occultism, I have been incrementally distancing my philosophical self from such potential contaminants to reason for twenty years now. And this is despite teaching both philosophy and contemporary incarnations of such esoteric traditions at university. I only started to forcefully question the viability and value of this bracketing quite recently: Posted by Paul Reid-Bowen at 13:38
Ashis Nandy and the Cultural Politics of Selfhood - Christine Deftereos - gives the reader an insight into a novel aspect of Nandy. The author insists that Ashis Nandy is not merely a self-described political psychologist; he is also an intellectual street fighter who comes face to face with the psychology of politics and the politics of psychology, thus affirming why this intellectual is one of the most original and confronting Indian thinkers of his generation. The main features of this book are its original reading and the authentic use of the psychoanalytic theory to characterise and demonstrate the importance of psychoanalysis in Nandy's work. Read More...
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. 
Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
ABA Journal - Feb 1962 - Page 155 Vol. 48, No. 2 - Magazine - Full view Lawyers are now frequently called upon to make decisions in business matters, and businessmen must often decide a course of action that has distinct legal implications. by Stuart T. Saunders, President, Norfolk and Western Railway Co.
In his stimulating book, The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller emphasizes the importance of values in these words: “Our business as rational beings is not to argue for what is going to be but to strive for what ought to be . . .” It is this pursuit of truth in the face of ultimate uncertainty that establishes the essential dignity and grandeur of man. All our hopes for the future depend upon this quest, and we, as judges, lawyers and businessmen, must see to it that human idealism remains the well-spring of our civilization.
Source Book Modern Hinduism - Page 171 - Glyn Richards - 2013 - Preview The rending of the veil by involution and evolution is the prerequisite of the development of divine consciousness and divine life within humanity. ... Though he failed to stir the imagination of the people in the same way as men like Vivekananda and Gandhi he still succeeded in inspiring enthusiasm in small groups of intellectuals for the cultural heritage of India, especially the Vedas and Upanishads in which is philosophy is firmly rooted.
Science and Religion Around the World - Page 204 John Hedley Brooke, Ronald L. Numbers - 2011 - Preview - More editions One of these was Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), an English-educated Bengali nationalist and philosopher, who repudiated the materialism of Darwinian evolution for the “involution” of divine consciousness. Hindu creationists, however ...
The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo - Page 11 - V. P. Varma - 1990 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo traces this theory of involution and evolution also in Heraclitus according to whom the cosmos represents the involution and evolution of the one eternal principle of Fire — at once the one substance and the one force — which he expresses as the upward and downward road. Vivekananda traced this concept of involution in the ancient Hindu philosophy. He says: "... this whole chain, is the involution of that cosmic life which is everywhere. It is this one mass of intelligence which from the protoplasm up to the most ...
The political philosophy of Swami Vivekananda - Page 33 - A. V. Rathna Reddy - 1984 - Vivekananda related the evolution of the world to the involution of the spirit. According to him, social evolution is not an independent process. He believed that it is regulated by involution. It is not evolution that decides the course and destiny of...
Hinterlands and Horizons: Excursions in Search of Amity - Page xii - Margaret Chatterjee - 2002 - Preview - More editions Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and S. Radhakrishnan. Their cultural ... Out of this mining of ancient wisdom the Indian thinkers of the post-Brahmo Samaj era chiseled a discourse that was not derivative, but rooted in Indian soil. This took further ...
Page 47 Vivekananda invokes guna language elsewhere, when he applies the concept of realization to the national and ... Indeed Sri Aurobindo, like Vivekananda, combines mining ancient thought along with grafting elements of modernism and is untouched by the Christian framework of ideas. His rejection of the Samkhyan strict dualism of purusa (spirit) ... The theory of "involution" of the Eternal or Spirit is to be understood as a counterconcept to "ex nihilo" creationism, and integral yoga draws on all the capacities of the individual without polarizing nature to spirit. In this connection, it is worth ...
History of Science and Philosophy of Science: A Historical ... - Page 6 Pradip Kumar Sengupta, Sengupta Pradip Kumar - 2010 - Preview - More editions A product of the Indian intellectual temper of the late 19th century, he, like Swami Vivekananda, was committed to ... in the light of lights, only the wisest person can discern the different levels of evolution (uttarana) and involution (avatarana).
Analysis of Sri Aurobindo's 'The Life Divine' - Page 131 - Roy Posner - Full view Source (i.e. the involution) and an ascent to the Source (i.e. the evolution) simultaneously. ... Aurobindo also tells us that Life/Energy is a dynamic play of the universal Force, and through this interchange, stimulation, and response between the ...
Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman - Page 125 - Stephen H. Phillips - 1986 - Preview - More editions (Aurobindo uses the term 'involution' in a rather precise sense: as "infolding" or "self-containment," which is to contrast with "unfolding" and "self-expression.") Matter, for example, marks as complete an involution of the characteristic of ...
Teilhard De Chardin and Eastern Religions: Spirituality and ... - Page 200 - Ursula KingJoseph Needham - 2011 - Preview - More editions Teilhard also uses the term involution, but it describes a rather different process from what it means in Aurobindo's thought. For both thinkers involution is the fundamental law of evolution, but in an almost opposite sense. When Teilhard ...
The future of man according to Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo Ghose - Page 424 J. Chetany - 1978 - Involution: We have noted that Aurobindo explained evolution as an inverse process of the Saccidananda's original ... Aurobindo means by involution the original process whereby the Absolute Saccidananda became Matter and Ignorance.
The Essential Aurobindo - Page 70 - Aurobindo GhoseRobert A. McDermott - 2001 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo Ghose, Robert A. McDermott. Involution. and. Evolution. THE Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being. Limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, it does not ...
Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, ... - Amit Goswami - 2001 - Preview - More editions A greater power must come, a larger light (Aurobindo 1970, bk. 6, canto 2). For the last few hundred years, nay, the last millennium, with a few ... Involution. and. Evolution. Esotericism has an aspect that two philosophers of recent times ...
God Is Not Dead: What Quantum Physics Tells Us About Our Origins ... - Page 128 - Amit Goswami - 2012 - Preview - More editions Indian thinking with the idea of first involution and then evolution of consciousness. Ken Wilber (1981) has put further flesh on the skeleton of Aurobindo's work, and so have I (Goswami, 2001). Figure 9-2 shows the evolved version. E = Mc2 ...
The Perennial Quest for a Psychology with a Soul: An Inquiry Into ... - Page 411 - Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - Preview SRI AUROBINDO'S COSMIC EVOLUTION IN TERRESTRIAL NATURE For Sri Aurobindo and Ken Wilber, evolution is preceded by involution, and what was original and primal in involution is in evolution the Supreme emergence.
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Page 293 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2007 - Preview - More editions also prefiguring the upward-arc of the evolutionary vision of Henry James Sr. and Sri Aurobindo. It is precisely this involution-evolution mysticism that Darwin Fall will discover is dramatically embodied in the physical transfigurations and ...