Jung to Piaget, Kohlberg to Gilligan, Kegan to Sri Aurobindo

Strangely enough, some Western psychologists -- Mark Epstein (Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and Thoughts Without a Thinker) seems to be the most well-known, and therefore, the target of my disdain -- have adopted the ideal of no-self, that self is illusory, as a primary goal in therapy. It's hard to imagine anything more dangerous and short-sighted for the majority of people seeking therapy.

In order for a person to approach the experience of no-self, there absolutely must be a solid and well-formed ego in place or any existing pathologies from earlier developmental stages will manifest in possibly dangerous forms. The mantra for this process as a project of therapy is "regression in service of the ego." Epstein rejects this project, as well as Ken Wilber's formulation of developmental levels and the process of ego development (Spectrum of Consciousness was the first articulation of Wilber's model, which has been fleshed out in The Atman Project and Integral Psychology), despite the near-universal acceptance of this model in psychology circles.

Everyone from Jung to Piaget, Kohlberg to Gilligan, Kegan to Aurobindo have shown without a doubt that human beings move through distinct developmental stages, that each stage transcends and includes the previous stage, and that no stage can be skipped without the occurrence of pathology. In order for anyone to enter the three highest fulcrums of development, all of the previous six must have been mastered and integrated into the self-sense. posted by WH Sunday, August 14, 2005 @ 5:45 AM William Harryman Location:Tucson, Arizona Integral Options Cafe

Freud and Sri Aurobindo

Now back to the topic at hand: language, God, and the trans-logic of supersensible domains. In order to begin this discussion, we probably need to go back to Freud's discovery of the unconscious, especially as elaborated by the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, because the unconscious shares much in common with the higher realms of consciousness where God is encountered. In fact, it is my belief that the vertical dimension extends above and below, so to speak.

While Freud ably addressed the "underworld" of the lower unconscious, he mistakenly consigned all religion to that realm as well (some religion most certainly emanates from there, such as most of Islam). But his genius notwithstanding, Freud had no understanding of real religion. Coincidentally, he also had no feel whatsoever for music--it didn't do anything for him. I can't help thinking that these two disabilities were related.

In any event, we can certainly be thankful to Freud for being the first psychic cartographer to map the world of the unconscious. Moreover, he discovered the mode of logic whereby the unrepressed unconscious mind operates. In other words, the unconscious is not only the realm where repressed psychological content resides. There is also an unrepressed unconscious which is by far the larger part of our being. No matter how "conscious" you are, it will be only a fraction of the unrepressed unconscious, in the same way that your dream life is literally infinite and inexhaustible...

As in the recent discoveries of chaos and complexity theories, Freud's discovery was that apparent irrationality is not arbitrary but ordered: it is patterned irrationality. That is, according to Freud, unconscious logic obeys five main principles: timelessness, placelessness, non-contradiction, displacement and condensation, and inability to distinguish between imagination and reality. However, Freud had no idea that these same principles also applied to the higher vertical realm of consciousness, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental overmind.

Rather than spending time explaining how these five principles apply to the unconscious, I'll skip that and explain how they apply to the higher vertical as well. Religion offers a language through which we may speak of the eternal, or timeless. Remember, eternity is not time everlasting, but timelessness. posted by Gagdad Bob Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 5:25 AM One Cosmos

Sri Aurobindo synthesises East and West

A Fragrant Flower of Cambridge (Sri Aurobindo - His Contribution to Humanity) Lecture delivered on 27th April 1991 at Cambridge University by Gopal Bhattacharjee

It must be stressed however that Sri Aurobindo's evolution and Darwinism are not the same thing. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection is a biological process, whereas Sri Aurobindo's evolution relates to the growth of consciousness. Further, it has nothing to do with Hegel's metaphysical theory of evolution. An unwarranted comparison between Bergson and Sri Aurobindo is also often made. Again Sri Aurobindo's Superman, is often mistakenly identified with Nietzsche's Superman. These somewhat hasty misconceptions based on semantics need to be eschewed. It is the uniqueness of Sri Aurobindo that his theory of evolution not only synthesises the best in the Eastern and Western systems but also opens up new vistas and uncharted horizons.

The classless society prophesied by Marx and Engels cannot materialise because democracy, socialism and communism haven't been able in actual practice to end the human tendency to egoistic separativity, assertiveness and rivalry and their attendant evils of exploitation in economic life, corruption, violence and liquidation in political life. It is only when the spiritual revolution resulting in the cracking of the human ego comes about that the godheads of the soul - justice, liberty, equality, brotherhood — will be realised on a permanent basis in a "Kingdom of Heaven" as was dreamtof by Christianity and the Hinduism of old. That would be the Gnostic society of the future.

Philosophy will be life-enhancing

Henryk Skolimowski

Philosophy is a form of life itself. What we witness today is a separation of philosophy from life because in our atomised, analytical society everything is separated from everything else. No wonder culture atrophies. In a society in which everything is separated and analysed ad nauseam, philosophy is on one shelf and life is on another shelf-and indeed so often life is on a shelf. When I talk about the relevance of philosophy for life, I think I am not alone.

In his book Small Is Beautiful, E.F Schumacher emphasises very strongly that the most important task for our times is not so much an economic reconstruction, although this is vital and necessary, but what he calls a metaphysical reconstruction or a religious reconstruction-looking deeper into our philosophical and metaphysical foundations and seeing what has gone wrong. In this sense philosophy is vital, because many of our problems stem from the fact that we started to look at the universe in too limited a way from the seventeenth century on. The metaphor of the universe as a clock-like mechanism has constricted not only the meaning of the universe and the meaning of cosmos for us, but also the meaning of our own life. We have somehow strangled ourselves.

So what I am trying to do in Eco-philosophy and other books is to look for alternative philosophical and metaphysical foundations. We have to realise that the mechanistic way is only one way and not the best one. It is pernicious nowadays. Although it has brought great material rewards, it is counterproductive in the long run. We have to create another matrix, another architecture around which we can weave reality and the cosmos. It must be an architecture of the cosmos within which our life can breathe, and thereby our philosophy will be life-enhancing. We need to establish a symbiotic relationship with the cosmos and other forms of life. This cannot be done within the mechanistic universe which splits and disintegrates everything in the mortuary of our analytical thinking.

Life-enhancing philosophy is one that tries to bring to bear such a conception of the universe which is home for Man. In it, we are part of the flowering of the great blossom of evolution. Within such a conception of the universe, we are not pitted against other forms of life and especially we are not pitted against each other. On top of the mechanistic conception of the universe, we have grafted Social Darwinism, "homo hominae lupus est," man is wolf to a man. And those two conceptions, which are philosophical par excellence, are working towards our own undoing.

What I am saying is the following. Our philosophical roots are not nourishing us any more. They are responsible for our plight. We'll have to change those roots, this whole foundation, so that it becomes again a tree that is nourishing us, that connects us with the universe, with other forms of life, and with our ultimate destiny which some call God. We cannot live in a shattered, meaningless universe. Human being craves for meaning and this meaning is part of our nature. So rethinking our foundations is not only an intellectual exercise, it is part of the quest for meaning. It is our existential necessity.

Bergson, Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo

MT: In The Theatre of the Mind, you wrote something that I had experienced in my own life, and that is the incredible similarity in the philosophies espoused by de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. Though they were in some sense contemporary, they didn't know one another, and you make the connection between them. De Chardin was a Catholic, Sri Aurobindo was an Indian, came out of the Hindu system. How about that connection? What does it mean?

Henryk Skolimowski: Teilhard de Chardin was one of the great influences on me in recent times. I have been fascinated by his story of evolution as one of the most thrilling adventures of the human mind.To try to reconstruct and shed light on such a phenomenon as total evolution is like holding the whole universe, from its inception, in one's palm. I've tried to puzzle out how Teilhard arrived at his system. When I discovered Sri Aurobindo, who arrived at a very similar system, I couldn't believe it. There is, of course, the theory that the Zeitgeist has worked through both of them. Zeitgeist or not, I thought there must have been some influences. So when I was at Pondicherry in southern India, where Sri Aurobindo Ashram is located, I finally got to some people who knew the entire opus of Aurobindo and also were aware of Bergson. One lady had done a doctorate dissertation at the Sorbonne on Bergson and Aurobindo. I said to myself, "Right, this must be the connection." I asked her point blank, "How much did Aurobindo learn from Bergson?" She said, 'The influence is so great that I would not be able to distinguish one from the other."

We know, of course, that Teilhard was very greatly influenced by Bergson as well. So this is the connection. Bergson's influence is really tremendous, though not obvious.You see, evolution goes on. And so does our evolution about the meaning and the significance of evolution. Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859. It was exactly the year in which Henri Bergson was born-1859. When Bergson was a mature man, about forty or forty-five, the whole impact of Darwin was already absorbed. So Bergson could really accept the idea but also look at it in a different way. This is what he did. He came up with the idea of creative evolution. He conceived of evolution not merely as a process of chance and necessity - as Monod and other Darwinists and neo-Darwinists tried to make us believe - but as something much more subtle, much more miraculous. In his work Creative Evolution, he put this point across, and it is from those views that both Aurobindo and Teilhard learned. Now, when we move into the second part of the twentieth century, the impact of Bergson is already more accepted.

One of the evolutionary biologists, Theodosius Dobzhansky, said: As it was important in the nineteenth century to see the connection between the human species and other species-that we are brothers of chimpanzee and other apes and other animals-w it is equally important In the twentieth century to see what distinguishes us from lower forms of life. What I see as happening is that we are articulating the idea of evolution. And it is such an awesome, complex, and beautiful idea that we are far from fully understanding it. My whole book, The Theatre of the Mind, is a series of articulations of the idea of evolution. In a sense, it is a celebration of evolution through the dancing mind, through the theatre of the mind.

Aster Patel was brought up at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. She studied in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education there until Higher Courses in Philosophy and Integral Psychology. She's been teaching there since decades. Aster also studied at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and presented a doctoral thesis in Comparative Philosophy - on a study of the work of Sri Aurobindo and Henri Bergson. Since the early 1970s, she's been living the Auroville experience!

Consciousness Timeline: 1875-1945

Compiled by Stephen Dinan

The following timeline is by necessity somewhat arbitrary and quite partial. The point is not to chart the minutiae of events of what I am loosely calling the "consciousness movement," but to give a sense for a few prominent milestones. The last hundred years have witnessed the gradual creation of a new world philosophy, one that sees human beings engaged in an evolutionary process to access a deeper, richer, more playful consciousness and to manifest the fruits of that work in the world. This new amalgam of ideas and practices has drawn from dozens of traditions, thousands of books and experiments, and millions of lives. Drawing a firm boundary around this "movement" is thus misleading. It is better likened to the flow of a tumultuous river, its millions of eddies and currents creating, when seen from afar, a cohesive sense of direction. This timeline is best viewed as a snapshot of that river from high above.

1875 Founding of the Theosophical Society in New York, spurs interest in spiritualism. The Society propounded the notion of spiritual evolution in an attempt to bridge the religious world view with that arising in science. (Nov. 17)
1890 William James, Principles of Psychology.
1893 First Parliament of World Religions, Vivekananda electrifies the gathering and brings Vedanta to the West.
1894 Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, first of his four "foundational" books.
1900 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Birth of the psychoanalytic movement.
1901 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, lays the groundwork for the cross-cultural study of mystical experience.
1903 Frederic Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
1905 Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness.
1906 James Mark Baldwin, Thought and Things.
1907
D. T. Suzuki's Outline of Mahayana Buddhism introduces Zen to the West.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution.
1909 Alexandra David-Neel's The Buddhism of the Buddha and Buddhist Modernism, presents a non-academic account of Buddhist practice.
1911 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism.
1912
Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, break from Freud.
P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum.
1913 Rudolf Steiner founds anthroposophy.
1914
James H. Woods, The Yoga System of Patanjali, considered the first full-length scholarly work in America on Indian philosophy.
Caroline Rhys Davids, Buddhist Psychology, offers the first well-developed discussion of the compatibility between Western psychology and Buddhism.
1917 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy.
1918 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, especially influential on J. Campbell.
1920 Arrival of Paramahansa Yogananda in Boston, an important figure in the spread of Hinduism in the West.
1921 Carl Jung, Psychological Types.
1923
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id.
Martin Buber, I and Thou.
1924
Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth.
Jean Piaget, Judgement and Reasoning in the Child, demonstrates how structures of thought evolve.
1925
C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
1926
Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West, helps create the discipline of East-West comparative mysticism.
Jan Smuts, Holism and Evolution, argues that each subsequent level of evolution is more encompassing than the last, that what was once a whole becomes part of a greater whole. Influential in systems theory.
1927Wilhelm Reich, Die Funktion des Orgasmus.
1928 Richard Wilhelm invites Jung to write a commentary on the Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower in which Jung aims "to build a bridge of psychological understanding between East and West."
1929
Alfred North Whitehead, in Process and Reality, introduces the notion of prehension, that interiority is fundamental all the way down to the most basic levels of the universe.
Krishnamurti, who had been chosen as the next World Teacher by the Theosophical Society, rejects the organization and states that "truth is a pathless land," setting the stage for the nondoctrinal teachings of his next sixty years.
1933 Beginning of the Eranos seminars, started with the purpose of finding common ground between Eastern and Western religious thought. Participants included C.G. Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, D. T. Suzuki, Martin Buber, and Mircea Eliade.
1934
Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, explicates his theory of the rise and breakdown of civilizations.
1936 Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being.
1937 Anna Freud, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense.
1938 Jung travels to India and upon his return warns against the Western adoption of the practice of yoga, instead calling for the development of a Western form of yoga.
1939 First East-West Philosophers' Conference, organized by Charles A. Moore in Honolulu, attempts to forge a global philosophy.
1943 Albert Hoffman accidentally ingests LSD-25 (first synthesized in 1938), a mistake leading eventually to the widespread use of psychedelics. (4/16)
1944 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy.

1945
Merleau-Ponty, inPhénoménologie de la Perception, creates a methodology for the study of subjective experience.
Rene Guénon, Man and His Becoming According to Vedanta.

This timeline was heavily influenced by three sources in particular: Jorge Ferrer's unpublished chronology of the East-West encounter, Richard Tarnas' timeline in Passion of the Western Mind, and John David Ebert's timeline in Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age.

Rig Veda unveiled

The first references to Rudra (who later became Shiva) are in the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda can be interpreted in many different ways...For Advaita Vedanta, the Rig Veda line is extremely simple to understand since Advaitins hold that all deities are different aspects of the Saguna Brahman and so can be identified with it.

In recent times, much work has been done by Sri Aurobindo, Kapali Shastri, David Frawley, R.L. Kashyap and others to show the spiritual aspects of the Rig Veda. In line with Advaitic (though not neccesarily Shankara's Advaita) understanding, these writers often interpret the various deities as different aspects of the Supreme Brahman. The interpretations seem to be quite solid and some good argumentation is also provided in support. Often though, one has the impression that some of the interpretation is a bit far-fetched. Nevertheless, after reading it, it becomes clear that there is a very spiritual side to the Rig Veda and its not just a ritual text. posted by Rishi R. Lamichhane Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 11:37 PM Kshetragya

Language and Poetry

Norman D. Livergood

Plato's Timaeus was interpreted as analogous, within the limits of poetic intuition and philosophical speculation, to the Christian vision of the inner, sacramental structure of the world. The authority the Chartrian Teaching Masters gave to Plato's cosmology became the foundation on which the study of all ancient literature was established. One of the reasons the Chartrian Mystery School embraced poetry so openly may have been as a means of evading the murderous heresy-hunters in the Roman Catholic Church.

Chartres, St. Victor, and other cathedral schools in the twelfth century, focused a large part of their attention on the role of poetry in the expression of complex ideas, and the complexities of meaning attainable in poetic language. One of their major texts was Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy, which gave definite expression to the metaphorical implications of the cosmology of the Timaeus and placed special emphasis on the psychological experience of the philosopher. In this major work, Philosophy teaches Boethius that attachment to earthly things is a form of imprisonment. Boethius' poem shows that poetry, inspired by love, suspends the working of necessity in the universe. Philosophy moves from persuasion and rational argument to an inspired use of poetry to bridge the gap between the situation of the dreamer and the divine harmony, denying the reality of the dreamer's loss as Orpheus seeks to deny the fact of the death of Eurydice. Secondary Chartrian Literature Wallace Stevens' Poems

"Neither the intelligence, the imagination nor the ear are the true or at least the deepest or highest recipients of the poetic delight, even as they are not its true or highest creators; they are only its channels and instruments: the true creator, the true hearer is the soul. The more rapidly and transparently the rest do their work of transmission, the less they make of their separate claim to satisfaction, the more directly the word reaches and sinks deep into the soul, the greater the poetry. Therefore poetry has not really done its work, at least its highest work, until it has raised the pleasure of the instrument and transmuted it into the deeper delight of the soul. A divine Ananda, a delight interpretative, creative, revealing, formative, -one might almost say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into an original creative vision, -such spiritual joy is that which the soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the human difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all those who are prepared to receive it. This delight is not merely a godlike pastime; it is a great formative and illuminative power." - Sri Aurobindo, "The Essence of Poetry"

Perennial Philosophy

The term "Perennial Philosophy" was coined by Leibniz, but popularized by Aldous Huxley, according to whom it pertains to a primary concern "with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly or immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit." In the spirit of Aldous Huxley, this page explores Eastern and Western traditions of mysticism and religion. I would welcome any comments, questions, suggestions, advice, or e-mail correspondence. Simply e-mail me at bdeanrob@sgi.net NEW: Link pages for Blaise Pascal, Aldous Huxley, Nicholas Berdyaev, Carl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, William James, James Hillman, Paul Tillich, Karl Jaspers, Rollo May, Gabriel Marcel, Mircea Eliade, and William Blake (See below).

Excerpt from F.C. Happold (1970), "Perennial Philosophy":

What is mysticism? The word 'mystic' has its origin in the Greek mysteries. A mystic was one who had been initiated into these mysteries, through which he had gained an esoteric knowledge of divine things and been 'reborn into eternity.' His object was to break through the world of history and time into that of eternity and timelessness. The method was through initiation ceremonies of the sort so vividly described by the Latin writer, Apuleius, in The Golden Ass. Through the mysteries the initiated entered into something holy and numinous, a secret wisdom about which it was unlawful for him to speak. The word 'mystery' (mysterion) comes from the Greek verb muo, to shut or close the lips or eyes....

In the course of time the word [mysticism] came to an extended, indeed a different meaning. In that syncretism of Greek and Oriental philosophy which occurred in the centuries immediately preceeding the birth of Christ, known as Neoplatonism, it came to mean a particular sort of approach to the whole problem of reality, in which the intellectual, and more especially the intuitive, faculties came into play. As a result of the fusion of Christian and Neoplatonist ideas in the early centuries of the Christian era, a system of so-called mystical theology came into existence, which was one of the main foundations of Christian mysticism.

To speak more generally, mysticism has its fount in what is the raw material of all religion and is also the inspiration of much of philosophy, poetry, art, and music, a consciousness of a beyond, of something which, though it is interwoven with it, is not of the external world of material phenomena, of an unseen over and above the seen. In the developed mystic this consciousness is present in an intense and highly specialized form.

The mystical element enters into the commoner forms of religious experience when religious feeling surpasses its rational content, that is, when the hidden, non-rational, unconscious elements predominate and determine the emotional life and the intellectual attitude. In the true mystic there is an extension of normal consciousness, a release of latent powers and a widening of vision, so that aspects of truth unplumbed by the rational intellect are revealed to him. Both in feeling and thought he apprehends an immanence of the temporal in the eternal and the eternal in the temporal. In the religious mystic there is a direct experience of the Presence of God. Though he may not be able to describe it in words, though he may not be able to logically demonstrate its validity, to the mystic his experience is fully and absolutely valid and is surrounded with complete certainty.

Levinas Year

RICHARD WOLIN thenation.com from the February 20, 2006 issue

This year in France is a "Levinas Year." The French philosopher was born in Lithuania in 1906 and died in 1995, just a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. There is something perversely appropriate about the commemorative sequence. In many respects Emmanuel Levinas was the anti-Sartre. Like the author of Being and Nothingness, he was enamored of German philosophy. And like Sartre, Levinas viewed himself as an heir to the phenomenological method conceived by Edmund Husserl and consummated by Martin Heidegger. But that's more or less where the similarities end. It would not be an exaggeration to describe Levinas's entire philosophical endeavor as a machine de guerre directed against Sartrean existential humanism. With Sartre, it is the "For-Itself," or consciousness, that constitutes philosophy's Archimedean vantage point. For Levinas, conversely, it is the "Other," l'Autrui, in all its uncanny metaphysical strangeness.

Although the two men were born within a year of each other, Levinas's anti-Sartrism bore a distinctively Oedipal character. Sartre's version of existentialism needed to perish so that Levinas's approach might live. In fact, for the generation of French thinkers who came of age during the 1940s and '50s, Sartre's presence was so titanic that slaying Sartre-the-father became an obligatory rite of passage. So thoroughly did he dominate every field of literary endeavor that his potential heirs felt they lacked breathing space. All of them--Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, as well as the two Jacques, Derrida and Lacan--at one point or another fired off venom-tipped textual explosives in Sartre's direction. Under the cover of the "death of the author," the structuralist thinkers were secretly hoping for Sartre's early demise.

Levinas was nothing if not a late bloomer. His magnum opus, Totality and Infinity, appeared in 1961, when he was already 55. Philosophical acclaim came even later. Not until the 1980s, when Levinas was in his late 70s, did France, his adoptive homeland, take this prolific and illustrious immigrant to its bosom. France has a long history of embracing foreign-born intellectuals and scholars: Jean Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida and Julia Kristeva were all born outside metropolitan France. Sometimes it just takes a bit longer for them to be recognized.

In his refreshingly lucid study Origins of the Other, Samuel Moyn aptly characterizes Levinas's approach to ethics as "crypto-theological." By this term Moyn highlights Levinas's intrinsic ambivalence concerning the tension between his secular, phenomenological intentions and his covert eschatological aspirations. In response to the mood of profound cultural despair provoked by World War I, the 1920s witnessed a major theological revival. It is this phenomenon, Moyn contends, that formed the crucible for Levinas's distinctive approach to ethics.

Non-Cartesian Cognitive Science

Ronald Lemmen

Traditional Cognitive Science is Cartesian in the sense that it takes as fundamental the distinction between the mental and the physical, the mind and the world, the subject and the object. It is this Cartesianism which leads to such claims as that cognition must be representational and that what sets cognizers apart is the fact that they exhibit "aboutness".

It is the aim of this page to bring together non-Cartesian approaches to the study of cognition. That means that the main point which holds this page together is the idea that mind and body form a unity, not a union. Guttorm Floistad (1983) speaks of Spinozism to allude to non-Cartesian approaches to the mental. Under that heading, there is room for many different themes. Here's a short overview:

• Conscious Experience and Phenomenology Cartesianism, in its materialist guise, leads to the view that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, that qualia have no causal efficacy. Such a counterintuitive claim does not have to be held by the Spinozist, so she will be interested in the actual content of experiences.
• Body A direct implication of the claim that mind and body form a unity is that when there is talk of the mind, there must be talk of the body as well. Experiential content is rooted in bodily structure.
• Action The mind is not seen as some inner entity, but as one with the body, hence knowledge is not something which lies behind the behaviour, meaning does not ly behind the gesture, but it is immanent in it. The expressed and the expression are inseparable.
• Existentialism
• Biology and Ethology Spinozism opposes the Cartesian/reductionist tendencies to try and explain cognition as what happens in the brain. Instead, it analyses cognition and meaning in terms of relations between cognizer and environment. The relationship between the cognizer and its phenomenal world is very much like the relationship between an organism and its Umwelt. Moreover, it is natural for the Spinozist to see cognition as an outgrowth or extension of life.
• Artificial Life It is typical for the ALife approach to cognition to oppose to the standard perception-plan-action cycle which comes with the view of the mind as some kind of inner entity. It also takes embodiment seriously.
• Culture Although the structure of the mental is rooted in the structure of the bodily, there clearly are different ways for the mind to develop. The particular way that is taken up by a particular individual will depend on the kind of environment in which it finds itself, a major part of which is its social environment. Hence an interest in not only the body, but also culture (including language) as a shaping force.
• Pragmatism William James was a pragmatist, but also a forerunner of phenomenology. And John Dewey has surprisingly much in common with Merleau-Ponty.
• Emotion Since we understand content as what is available in experience, it is easy for us to acknowledge the affective component of content. This in strak contrast to the Cartesian who is forced to treat cognition as rational, and therefore non-emotional. Back to Ronald's Home Page or the COGS Home Page

Durkheim’s Collective representations

UNCHANGED MEANINGS The Literary Criticism we Need

Rafe Champion Printed in the Age Monthly Review, August 1985 FortuneCity.com

Wellek and Warren’s mention of the emergent, sui generis nature of a literary work should immediately remind us of Durkheim’s sui generis theory to account for the nature of that cultural artefact par excellence – society itself. Durkheim’s theory of collective representations is a good start on a theory of objective knowledge, which has been relegated to the archive of sociological oddities. It seems that it has not been developed despite Durkheim’s status as a founding father of sociology with his classical investigation of suicide and religious affiliation. Nobody could work out what to do with his conscience collective, sometimes translated as the "collective conscience" to illustrate its role in maintaining moral cohesion in society, and sometimes as the "collective consciousness", raising the spectre of a group mind which was not Durkheim’s intention.

Wellek and Warren’s theory, along with that of Durkheim, has apparently been buried beneath the weight of subsequent novelties, and Popper’s theory of objective knowledge appears to be completely out of step with reductive spirit of the times. Another theory which possibly avoids that charge comes from Wittgenstein who, like Popper and Piaget, was taught by Buhler and refused to take on board the mechanistic cause-and-effect model of physics to account for human language and behaviour. Wittgenstein’s response is his doctrine of "forms of life" and "language games". This may be compared with Popper's answer - the three world theory, critical rationalism and conjectural objective knowledge. These divergent lines of thought are generally considered to be incommensurable and none of the myriad of books and articles generated by the Wittgenstein industry even mention Popper. But once their common problem is recognised then they can be compared in terms of the fertility of their different solutions.

The program of objectivity and rationality that follows from the work of Popper and Bartley does not depend on any guarantees about the certainty of knowledge, it merely calls for a community of interested people who are prepared to use the higher functions of language to solve problems. This includes the problem of grasping the meaning and value of literary texts (and other works of art). This imaginative and critical task is exemplified by Martin Harrison in his review of reviewers (in the May 1985 edition of the Age Monthly Review, the journal where this piece was first printed).

Consciousness, evolution, language and social behavior

A History of Knowledge Piero Scaruffi Editor of www.thymos.com

Wilson-Edward Osborne, the founder of "sociobiology", applied the principles of Darwinian evolution to behavior, believing that the social behavior of animals and humans can be explained from the viewpoint of evolution.

Richard Dawkins pointed out that one can imagine a Darwinian scenario also for the evolution of ideas, which he called "memes". A meme is something that infects a mind (a tune, a slogan, an ideology, a religion) in such a way that the mind feels the urge to communicate it to other minds, thus contributing to spreading it. As memes migrate from mind to mind, they replicate, mutate and evolve. Meme are the cultural counterpart of genes. A meme is the unit of cultural evolution, just like a gene is the unit of biological evolutionJust like genes use bodies as vehicles to spread, so memes use minds as vehicles to spread. The mind is a machine for copying memes, just like the body is a machine for copying genes. Memes have created the mind, not the other way around.

Dawkins held the view that Darwinian evolution was driven by genes, not by bodies. It is genes that want to live forever, and that use bodies for that purpose. To Dawkins, evolution is nothing but a very sophisticated strategy for genes to survive. What survives is not my body but my genes. Dawkins also called attention to the fact that the border of a "body" (or, better, phenotype) is not so obvious: a spider would not exist without its cobweb. Dawkins' "extended phenotype" includes the world that an organism interacts with. The organism alone is an oversimplification, and does not really have biological relevance.

Stuart Kauffman and others saw "self-organization" as a general property of the universe. Both living beings and brains are examples of self-organizing systems. Evolution is a process of self-organization. The spontaneous emergence of order, or self-organization of complex systems, is ubiquitous in nature. Kauffman argued that self-organization is the fundamental force that counteracts the universal drift towards disorder. Life was not only possible and probable, but almost inevitable.

Linguistics focused on metaphor as more than a poetic tool. George Lakoff argued that language is grounded in our bodily experience, that language is "embodied". Our bodily experience creates our concepts. Syntax is created by our bodily experience. The "universal" grammar shared by all humans is due to the fact that we all share roughly the same bodily experience. The process by which we create concepts out of bodily experience is metaphor, the process of experiencing something in terms of something else. The entire human conceptual system is metaphorical, because a concepts can always be understood in terms of less abstract concepts, all the way down to our bodily experience. No surprise that we understand the world through metaphors, and we do so without any effort, automatically and unconsciously. Lakoff held that language was created to deal with physical objects, and later extended to non-physical objects by means of metaphors. Thus metaphor is biological: our brains are built for metaphorical thought.

Dreams continued to fascinate neurologists such as Allan Hobson and Jonathan Winson, as new data showed that the brain was "using" sleep to consolidate memories. Dreams are a window on the processing that goes on in the brain while we sleep. The brain is rapidly processing a huge amount of information, and our consciousness sees flashes of the bits that are being processed. The brain tries to interpret these bits as narratives, but, inevitably, they look "weird". In reality, there is no story in a dream: it is just a parade of information that is being processed. During REM sleep the brain processes information that accumulated during the day. Dreams represent "practice sessions" in which animals refine their survival skills. Early mammals had to perform all their "reasoning" on the spot. Modern brains have invented a way to "postpone" processing sensory information.

Colin McGinn was skeptic that any of this could lead to an explanation of what consciousness is and how it is produced by the brain. He argued that we are not omnipotent: like any other organisms, there may be things that we just can't conceive. Maybe consciousness just does not belong to the "cognitive closure" of our organism. In other words, understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities. The search for consciousness inside the brain took an unexpected turn when a mysterious biorhythm of about 40 Hertz was detected inside the brain. The traditional model for consciousness was "space-based binding": there must be a place inside the brain where perceptions, sensations, memories and so forth get integrated into the "feeling" of my consciousness.

Thus Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio hypothesized mechanisms by which regions of the brain could synthesize degrees of consciousness. Damasio realized that the "movie in the mind" consciousness caused by the flow of sensory inputs was not enough to explain self-awareness. He believed that "Self" consciousness reqired a topography of the body and a topography of the environment, that ultimately the "self" originated from its juxtaposition against the "non-self". An "owner" and "observer" of the movie is created within a second-order narrative of the self interacting with the non-self. The self is continuously reconstructed via this interaction. The "I" is not telling the story: the "I" is created by stories told in the mind.

Francis Crick launched the opposite paradigm ("time-based binding") when he speculated that synchronized firing (the 40 Hertz biorhythm) in the region connecting the thalamus and the cortex might "be" a person's consciousness. Instead of looking for a "place" where the integration occurs, Crick and others started looking for integration in "time". Maybe consciousness arises from the continuous dialogue between regions of the brain.

Rodolfo Llinas noticed a possible implication of this viewpoint. It looks like neurons are active all the time. We do not control our neurons, no more than we control our blood circulation. In fact, neurons are always active, even when there are no inputs. Neurons operate at their own pace, regardless of the pace of information. A rhythmic system controls their activity, just like rhythmic systems control heartbeat or breathing. It seems that neurons are telling the body to move even when the body is not moving. Neurons generate behavior all the time, but only some behavior actually takes place. It sounds like Jerne's model all over again: it is the environment that selects which movement the body will actually perform. Consciousness is a side-effect: the thalamus calls out all cortex cells that are active, and the response "is" consciousness.

How consciousness was produced by evolution was a fascinating mystery in itself. Graham Cairns-Smith turned the conventional model upside down when he claimed that emotions came first. A rudimentary system of feelings was born by accident during evolution. That system proved to be useful for survival, and therefore evolved. The organism was progressively flooded with emotions until a "stream of consciousness" appeared. Language allowed to express it in sounds and thoughts instead of mere facial expressions. Then the conscious "I" was born.

Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur

A History of Knowledge Piero Scaruffi Editor of www.thymos.com

Jacques Lacan analyzed the unconscious as a system of signs. Motives are signifiers which form a "signifying chain": the subconscious "is" that chain. This chain is permanently unstable because it does not refer to anything: the self itself is a fiction of the subconscious. A baby is born with a united psyche, but later in life, as the baby separates from the mother, that unity is broken, and the self is born; and the rest of one's lifetime is spent trying to reunite the self and the other. Psychic life as a permanent struggle between two "consciousnesses".

Claude Levi-Strauss extended it to social phenomena, which he considered as systems of signs just like language. Myths from different cultures (myths whose contents are very different) share similar structures. Myth is a language, made of units that are combined together according to certain rules. The "langue" is the myth's timeless meaning, the "parole" is its historical setting. "Mytheme" is the elementary unit of myth. Mythemes can be read both diachronically (the plot that unravels, the sequence of events) and synchronically (the timeless meaning of it, the "themes"). The themes of myths are binary relationships between two opposing concepts (e.g., between selfishness and altruism). Binary logic is, in a sense, the primordial logic, and mythical thinking is, in a sense, logical thinking. Mythical thinking is inherent to the human mind: it is is the human way of understanding nature and the human condition. Conversely, myths are tools that we can use to find out how the human mind works.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty countered that human freedom is never total: it is limited by our body. The individual is, first and foremost, a "situated" being, a body that lives in an environment. The body is not just an object surrounded by objects: it is the very subject of experience, that interacts with the environment. The body shapes the environment, but, in turn, the environment shapes the body, whose freedom is therefore limited by the way the environment shapes it. The same conditioning exists in society: the body is a linguistic actor but its linguistic action is constrained by the language it uses (the meaning of a linguistic action is constructed on the basis of a meaning acquired from the language). Ditto at the level of society: we are political agents, but we our political actions are shaped by the historical background. At all levels, there are a "visible" and an "invisible" dimensions of being that continuously affect each other.

Paul Ricoeur believed that the symbols of pre-rational culture (myth, religion, art, ideology) hide meaning that can be discovered by interpretation. There are always a patent and a latent meaning. A similar dichotomy affects human life, which is torn between the "voluntary" and the "involuntary" dimensions, between the "bios" (one's spatiotemporal life) and the "logos" (one's ability to grasp universal spacetime). He made a distinction between language and discourse: language is, indeed, only a system of signs, and therefore timeless, but discourse always occurs at some particular moment of time, i.e. it depends on the context. A language is a necessary condition for communication, but it itself does not communicate: only discourse communicates. The signs in a language system refer only to other signs in it, but discourse refers to a world. Discourse has a time dimension that is due to the merging of two different kinds of time: cosmic time (the uniform time of the universe) and lived time (the discontinuous time of our life's events). Historical time harmonizes these two kinds of time.

Feyerabend, Rorty, Derrida, Lyotard

A History of Knowledge Piero Scaruffi Editor of www.thymos.com

Skepticism affected philosophers. Paul Feyerabend argued that the history of science proceeds by chance: science is a hodgepodge of more or less casual theories. And it is that way because the world is that way: the world does not consist of one homogeneous substance but of countless kinds, that cannot be "reduced" to one another. Feyerabend took the Science of his time literally: there is no evidence that the world has a single, coherent and complete nature.

Richard Rorty held that any theory is inevitably conditioned by the spirit of its age. The goal of philosophy and science is not to verify if our propositions agree with reality but to create a vocabulary to express what we think is reality. Facts do not exist independently of the way we describe them with words. Thus science and philosophy are only genres of literature.

Another sign that a new era had started was the decline of Structuralism. Jacques Derrida accused Structuralism of confusing "being" and "Being", the code and the transcendental reality. Language is also a world in which we live. In fact, there are multiple legitimate interpretations of a text, multiple layers of meaning. Language is constantly shifting. He advocated deciphering the "archi-escriture" ("deconstruction" or "differance").

Jean-Francois Lyotard, the founder of "Postmodernism", was "incredulous" towards Metaphysics (towards "metanarratives") because he viewed the rational self (capable of analyzing the world) as a mere fiction. The Self, like language, is a layer of meanings that can be contradictory. Instead of metanarratives, that produce knowledge for its own sake, he preferred mini-narratives that are "provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative"; in other words, a fragmentation of beliefs and values instead of the grand unification theories of Metaphysics.

Optimal Psychological Functioning

Dr. Larry Seidlitz

The ideals of optimal psychological functioning in Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s teachings are integral. They encompass the perfection and divination of mind, life, and body as well as the realization of the inner psychic and higher spiritual dimensions of existence. They address each of the many layers and strands of the being. All the outer and inner nature must be purified, elevated, woven round the psychic center of the being, spiritualized, and transformed.

The achievement of this task is impossible by human strength alone; it requires the Divine guidance and grace. It will not do to leave out the Divine from the formula of an integral psychology. Nevertheless, effort is an indispensable component of the realization, especially in the earlier stages until the inner contact with the Divine is made, grows strong, and eventually supercedes the individual effort.

An integral psychology should provide a roadmap for people to traverse in their efforts towards psychological and spiritual perfection. It is not enough simply to paint a detailed picture of the supermind or the cosmic consciousness--people need to understand how to get there. Since people are at different levels of development, it will be useful for an integral psychology to trace the entire trajectory of development from the rudimentary to the heights of consciousness where the inner guidance can take over.

And since development must occur on many fronts, in many different aspects of the nature, the ideals of optimal psychological functioning should be both multiform and specific. That is, they should address each of the important aspects of life and the inner and outer being and nature. Not only should the ideal functioning in each of these important dimensions be described, but the signposts of progress and the pitfalls of error should be located.

The integral perfection envisioned by Sri Aurobindo requires an even higher ascent as the knowledge and powers of these higher mind planes still cannot utterly penetrate and transform matter. Above the intuition is the overmind, a power of the cosmic consciousness...I want to close by considering again the people with whom we come into contact: our patients, clients, students, children.

• How can these ideals relate to them?
• How can these ideals uplift their lives?
• How can they be communicated to them?
• How can they become a force for their growth, their spiritual uplifting?

It seems to me the most important and effective way is to embody these ideals within one’s own life...The growing expression of these powers in ourselves will be the greatest aid in the unfolding of these powers in others. Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow

Swami Vivekananda spoke of 'Involution'

INDIA AND EVOLUTION Richard Hartz

Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow

The idea of divinising human nature may sound like an unheard-of contradiction of both materialistic common-sense and the wisdom of the ages, which holds that divinity is not to be found on earth but only in heavens beyond. Yet such an audacious conception is a logical consequence of the synthesis of ancient and modern knowledge that leads us to see evolution as a gradual unfolding of the Spirit involved in matter. In Sri Aurobindo’s view, the total movement of India’s many-sided spiritual culture has always been directed towards this evolutionary goal...

Whereas the theories of Darwin and Einstein almost immediately revolutionised Western science and strongly affected European thought in general, India has paid hardly more than lip-service to the no less revolutionary work of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Religion and spirituality in India, where the grand Upanishadic synthesis of revealed knowledge became fragmented long ago into a myriad sects and schools, have continued largely in the grooves established during a period of contraction of the collective life.

The argument that evolution implies involution was

made by Swami Vivekananda with compelling logic:

• No rational man can possibly quarrel with these evolutionists. But we have to learn one thing more. We have to go one step further, and what is that? That every evolution is preceded by an involution.... In the end we find the perfect man, so in the beginning it must have been the same. Therefore, the protoplasm was the involution of the highest intelligence. You may not see it but that involved intelligence is what is uncoiling itself until it becomes manifested in the most perfect man.... If it was not present in the protoplasm, it must have come all of a sudden, something coming out of nothing, which is absurd.

The Darwinian theory, which appeared to leave no alternative to a stark materialism, was thus transmuted into a vision of the progressive manifestation of God on earth. This interpretation of evolution was later elaborated by Sri Aurobindo. It has the potential to satisfy both the progressive impulse of the modern mind and the perennial aspiration of the human soul. It does not require any denial of scientifically demonstrable truth with regard to the role of natural selection in bringing about the development of physical organisms.

Meditative intuition

Reality can only be grasped, if that is the word, via meditative intuition. The answers are intuited but cannot be articulated. When they are, they lead to paradoxes, like Reality is not one, not many, neither not one not many, and so on...There are several questions.

• Why are the most important truths only available to mystical contemplation?
• Why is it so that after they are made available through meditative techniques they cannot (must not?) be articulated to reason?

I suspect that Wilber and his fellow transpersonalists (and certainly Hegel and Plotinus who were not meditators) derived their position first philosophically, and then tried to perpetrate it via teaching and practices. The Absolute, the Spirit, Void, was too big for them to grasp via intellect, so had to come up with paradoxical terms to validate their gut-worldview. This has to have been the case with Hegel who was a philosopher. And probably with Plotinus.

The next point has to do with Wilber's elevation of the mystical practice to science. Of all transcendentalists he knows science. I do take his meaning and does an honorable job. A creative job even...

I suggest the following truly independent test: take 100 intelligent ego-staged persons and have them meditate for 3 years. OK, they can be given injunction on how to concentrate on breath, candle, and mantra, whatever. Check them 3 years later and collect their thoughts. If they reproduce Hegel, Aurobindo, Nagarjuna, if they even say that the Absolute is neti neti, or “one taste”, Wilber's point is proven. Without such a confirmation, it is questionable...

But even he has to shoehorn Plotinus, Eckhart, and Hegel to totally conform to the perennial philosophy. Besides, as I have pointed out, these thinkers have not arrived at their view via the meditative technique advocated by Wilber as the way to grasping Reality. As an aside, his selective quotes form the New Testament and Paul are really poor and totally taken out of context. posted by Paul Hoffman Saturday, June 04, 2005 at 2:31 PM Random musings paulhoffman@paulhoffman.com

Sri Aurobindo and Plotinus

Page after page in [The] Life Divine is watered down Plotinus.

-Krishna Chaitanya (Dr. K.K.Nair)

Is Sri Aurobindo a Mystic?

The Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy. 2. Sri Aurobindo and Bergson. 3. Sri Aurobindo and the Problem of Evil. 4. Is Sri Aurobindo a Mystic? 5. Sri Aurobindo and Plotinus. 6. Sri Aurobindo and Nicolai ...

Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo

Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo: A Comparative Study. // Harris, R. Baine (ed.); Mayer, John RA (introd.). Neoplatonism and Indian Thought. Norfolk: Internat. Soc. for Neoplatonic Studies, 1981. xiii, 353 pp.- PAGES: 257-272.

Sri Aurobindo and Plotinus

I have found from my superficial reading of Ken Wilber's take on Sri Aurobindo and Plotinus that both these great teachers are somewhat misrepresented by him. Kheper Home content by M.Alan Kazlev

Traveling in the Superhologram

“Space, too, must be viewed as a product of our mode of perception.”Patients with out of body experiences could describe their operations correctly. Others couldn’t. “Remember that in a holographic universe, location itself is just an illusion.”

Those with bear death experience agree on what they see, light and energy that can manifest itself in human forms or not, or partially. Time and space cease to exist. Thought structures form patterns. The beings of light ask if your motivation was love. Images produced by interacting thought forms appear real. “Some near death experiencers discovered that in the presence of the light they suddenly had direct access to all knowledge. One person said “One thing I learned was that we are all part of one big, living universe. If we think we can hurt another person or another living being without hurting ourselves we are sadly mistaken. ..”

Swedenborg noted that in the spirit world one no longer needs to eat food, but added that information takes its place as a source of nourishment. A seven year old boy said “Death is like walking into your own mind.”

Sri Aurobindo had to learn to silence the endless chatter of words and thoughts in order to explore the planes of consciousness. “What is physical reality? It is, said Sri Aurobindo, just ‘a mass of stable light.’”

Return to the Dreamtime

“We are learning how to deal with the plasticity that is part and parcel of a universe in which mind and reality are a continuum..” Friday, February 10, 2006 The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot posted by art gittleman at 8:58 PM

Trajectory of evolution

My suggestion regarding this matter is that our knowledge of the brain/mind is composed of what we know about it as an objective phenomenon and the subjective experiences that we have about the working of its components. This is not to say that these subjective experiences are not objective phenomena (things-in-themselves); this distinction is necessary to bring under focus the two different epistemological routes that we have to take for knowing the working of our brain/mind...

No evolution is possible without the restructuring of the previous and the addition of new components to an existing phenomenon. And an organic realization of the need to restructure the brain/mind as a solution to our problems as a species, can act as the external pressure whose unconsciously realized needs used to bring about evolutionary changes in a species during all hitherto evolution.

The above ideas represent the gist of what I worked on during my association with the Philosophy Department of Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy & Arts — a research organization based in Lahore, Pakistan. The basic purpose of this work was to develop a dynamic conceptual framework for the study of the human mind and to devise ways and means to restructure it, in the light of our understanding. For these reasons, instead of trying to understand the human mind as an extremely complex problem, we took the historical or the evolutionary route. Of course, the human mind is a very complex and hard to comprehend phenomenon; no one can deny this.

But our contention was that we must not be emotionally and conceptually overwhelmed by its current complexity. We must treat it as a normal and natural phenomenon, which has evolved to reach its present form. Thus, in our view, at the present level of our knowledge ("hard facts") about the working of the mind (especially its higher functions such as consciousness or the subjective experience of "I"), we have a better chance of obtaining a comprehensive view of the problem, if not its solution, by tracing the evolutionary history of the mind up to now and speculating about the course that it may take during its future evolution.

The latter is only possible if we have a macro view of the process of the evolution of the Universe and the phenomena occurring within it. So that if the mind is a natural phenomenon, its specific trajectory of evolution cannot be outside the overall process of the Universe and the evolutionary direction it may be following. Sunday, February 12, 2006 Life worth living?! Studying Consciousness posted by Farrukh at 7:42 AM 0 comments Farrukh Mehboob Khan Location: Lahore, Pakistan

Invitation
With wind and the weather beating around me

Up to the hill and the moorland I go.

Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?

Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?

By Sri Aurobindo Alipore Jail, 1908--09
posted by Farrukh at 7:03 AM 1 comments

Sri Aurobindo: pre-echo of Ken Wilber

An external unity with others must always be an outward joining and association of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet there; but the common external life remains the foundation, the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial and insecure superstructure. The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life REVERSES this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly be done. A realization of spiritual unity, a dynamization of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine life.

Sri Aurobindo literally predated Ken Wilber. Ken is now reknown as the foremost philosopher from the US. The above passage is but one example that Sri Aurobindo had things pretty much figured out. The references to inner, outer as well as individual and community is the AQAL framework of Ken. posted by Infinisri Phoenix, Arizona, United States Sunday, February 12, 2006 at 11:24 AM CoReNViA

Multi disciplinary nature of fundamental concepts

Study social science and humanities subject from IIT - Wednesday, February 08

Chennai: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -Madras has decided to introduce a five-year integrated Masters degree in Development Studies, Economics and English studies through the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. It was announced by IIT-M, Director Professor M S Ananth. He said the programme to be introduced from the new academic year in 2006 June, would offer admission for 30 students, passing out of plus two (class 12). He said the distinctive features of the new MA (Development Studies/Economics/English Studies) include wide exposure to humanities and social sciences-breadth courses - to help students appreciate 'multi disciplinary nature of fundamental concepts, compulsory courses in ecology and environmental sciences and life sciences.

He said 14 experts from different institutions in the country were involved in preparing the study material for the new degree course. The programme also had the support of the Ministry of Human Resources Development at the Centre, he said. An entrance exam on the lines of Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) will be conducted for admission to the programme," Ananth said. Mr. Aanath said , such an MA programme would be useful for a candidate aspiring to join the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) as well as the industrial sector. IndiaEduNews.net

Liberalism and human reason

Gregory Fried

Classical liberalism therefore has its deepest roots in ancient philosophy, and it encompasses questions ranging from the freedom of the human mind to understand its world to the freedom of the human being to determine ethical and political principles without being bound by tradition. The modern liberal project, which had its most optimistic expression during the Enlightenment, has urged that human reason alone, without reference to either custom or revelation, might unearth the secrets of the cosmos and the foundations of a just moral order.

My published work has focused largely on critiques of this liberal project, both from the Right and the Left. In my book, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics, I treat Martin Heidegger as a serious critic of the liberal project, one who argues that liberal universalism undermines all that is singular and precious about belonging to a particular community, in a particular place, at a particular time. For Heidegger, liberalism represented the most profound threat to human being, in all respects, from the looming dangers of technology to the ravages of homogenized culture and politics. I also explore the ways in which postmodernists such as Jacques Derrida stand in agreement with Heidegger’s critique. In my view, the distinction between “Right” and “Left” has become increasingly meaningless as a way to understand the problems facing us.

More recently, I have turned from a critique of liberalism to a defense. I call this defense “Reconstructive Liberalism” — in part as a response to the deconstruction unleashed by Heidegger and postmodernists, but also in recognition of the justice of many of the critiques of the liberal project. Whereas Heidegger held that the entire history of Western philosophy must be deconstructed in order to counter its inherent nihilism, I hold that this same history must be reconstructed to uncover and defend its salutary potential. For a prospectus of this project, please click this link.