The Game Gene Theory

Why evolution is the place to start

Philosophy and science are the basic disciplines of psychology and the question of human nature is fundamental, so human evolution is also of primary importance. I go back further to the question of the origin of life and the universe since only by this means can evolution and so humanity be explained sufficiently.

• The first reason for this logic is that causes always have preceding causes and they have their own preceding causes back infinitely and there is no reason to limit a search to recent causes. The further back in the causal chain one goes the more accurate is the claim to have identified the cause of something.
• A second reason for going back in the causal chain is that a (close-to-the-) original cause of something can have relevance in the recent cause for something. For example, if the original cause of life is a gene, a recent cause of life can be a gene. If an original cause of life could not be education, education will not be needed to cause life.

If one did not look at original causes, one could claim that Catholic education, for example, can cause life by discouraging birth control. Instead, the education has a cause in the opinions of church leaders, which has causes in history and culture, which have causes in environments and genetics, and so on and so on. The search for original causes is the search for recent causes.

The universe and evolution

The universe is infinite and all theories which offer an absolute beginning and/or an end are inaccurate. The reason is that no theory can avoid the concept of a preceding universe, a protouniverse, which causes the big bang, or causes god to snap his fingers. The universe is chaotic and matter is infinitely variable through chaos. As a result, matter eventually formed into a life at some point, if life was not already infinitely existing throughout time. It is like the story of the infinite number of monkeys working on typewriters an infinite amount of time and would eventually write Hamlet. Life is vastly improbable, but given enough time, inevitable.

The need for motivation

Life is different from non-life primarily by its motivation to act differently from other matter outside a simple cause and effect scenario. The toy is not life because it is not self-motivated to act, it is effected by someone else's motivation to act, or by other events. A rock does not act, so it needs no cause to act. A person needs a cause to act because it does act, but all actions eventually lead to death. Because all actions have the same effect there is no reason to act. As there is no reason to exist even when in existence, the motivation to act would need to be caused-structured into the life form-the cause is therefore called genetic. To survive without reason is possible for a brief moment, but to do so longer, life cannot without a cause.

Gene for motivation

A gene which allowed survival would need to motivate an action that aided survival when all actions eventually end the same way. However, chaos makes the survival of life unpredictable and so makes any measure of intelligence unable to ensure survival and makes the simplest intelligence capable of seeing all action as futile. If life used a gene which motivated only actions which guaranteed survival, no action would be taken as no action is certain to improve survival. The motivation must be towards actions which are not certain, as all actions have uncertain consequences, and towards actions which cannot ensure continued survival. This is not to say that the motivation is against survival. It must be a motivation which is separated from survival, but which consequently helps survival in most cases. Because the structure of games can be found in all directed irrelevant activities, which I explain below, the answer to this problem is a genetically programmed motivation to play games.

Seriousness of games

Before explaining how game playing works, it is important to note that the general understanding of games by life is as serious as the gladiatorial games and as superfluous as 52 card pick up. Seriousness or superfluousness are irrelevant distinctions to be made regarding games. Games serve as the blueprint for a universal motivation, because what is true about games as understood generally by human beings is also true of all motivated activity by all life-but I will restrict the discussion to human activities for this paper.

Game components

Games have several components. Games are chosen arbitrarily with one's values, and, like all actions, in the end serve no purpose, though the process towards winning and losing a game temporarily counterfeits a purpose by creating imaginary ends. A game will be chosen if it is valued and/or if it is the most available game which has value. Playing a game involves using some degree of intellect to understand the rules, goals, and risks/challenges in relation to values, and the reason games are played is for emotional rewards, which memory and intellect turn into new values. Emotions are the source of value even when substitutes for values, like money, or survival, are superficially considered the reward.

Each component of human game playing has its equivalent in other forms of life: in fungi, in plants and in animals. But, in the same way that eyes may vary in structure from fly to horse to crab and still accomplish the same task, the game gene may vary in structure from fungi to plant to animal and still accomplish the same motivation to play games. However, I do not intend to demonstrate the commonalty of a game disposition among all life forms in this paper, I restrict my discussion to human beings and only refer to other life forms as game players now in order to explain where human beings sit in relation to the rest of the universe and by extension why human ethics have little relevance in relation to the universe. GEOFFREY HAMILTON April 15, 1998

Self Directed Mutation- simolution

It is possible for life to direct its own mutations Geoffrey Hamilton

gamegene.com January 6, 2006

One of the great mysteries regarding the theory of evolution is

• how many mutations does it take before one mutation can be reproduced?
• And is it by that passing on - by that definition alone - called fit. Need it even be helpful?

It doesn't seem to matter to evolutionary theory. I suspect a large majority of mutations are easily passed on. Isn't it possible to find imperfections of every conceivable kind passed on to future generations which could eventually cause that species' extinction, and yet for a hundred generations it may have no effect whatsoever? Of course this happens, and it happens all the time. But evolutionists still think success is defined by reproduction. And this success makes the fittest out of anything. There is another possible way to make mutations that are more germane to the matter. That way is the directing of genetic code by the individual of the species on himself by way of an unconscious mechanism set in motion by a conscious appraisal.

Think of the chameleon as a superficial form of that idea, or the human face and how our emotions are expressed exactly by muscles we don't consciously control or understand. In all kinds of ways an individual being cannot nor should not operate every aspect of his own body. Just think of the sports figure in a slump. He is usually thinking too much. When he relaxes and forgets about his tasks his skills improve. So there are things out of everyone's conscious control that are better off that way.

Now there is African cichlid fish which changes genetically and changes its form significantly when it consciously recognizes a change in its political situation. The unconscious abilities to morph superficially and genetically means natural selection and human engineering are not the only ways to evolve. Even though this case does not involve reproduction there is no reason why it may not indicate a possible method. The additional factor of transposons or jumping genes shows that mid-life genetic mutation is common with up to forty-five percent of the human genome made up of them.

It may happen that a life form, not all life perhaps, can signal to it's own DNA to change part of its makeup. Then when reproduction does occur whether by cloning or by sexual reproduction or by the newly discover direct transferring of genetic material by Raffflesia micropylora Meijer , the largest flower in the world, then the individual life can reproduce with some control, perhaps very marginal control, over what the next generation will turn out to be. These discoveries are only a few among many that evolutionists have failed to notice and have been happening for years. They have been overlooked and misinterpreted. They point to many ways that choice beyond artificial selection has an effect on change through descent. What they call evolution and I call simolution.

Evil unveiled

The Russian philosopher, Nicolas Berdyaev, once said: The existence of evil is the greatest mystery in the life of the world and causes the greatest embarrassment to official theological doctrine and to all monistic philosophy....A recent writer, Richard Rubenstein, has expressed part of this shape of the problem of evil. The problem for him revolves around excess human evil and is rooted in man’s inhumanity to other men. For Rubenstein, far more harm has been done by man down through the ages than by natural catastrophes. He thinks that the real objection to the existence of a personal or theistic God is that God’s tolerance of hideous human evil cannot be reconciled with his perfection.

After the horrible experience of the Nazi death camps, no Jew should accept the omnipotent God of history or the doctrine of the election of Israel as God’s chosen people. Jews can remain a religious community without such doctrines. That God acts meaningfully in history is a terrible mistake, for if God acts meaningfully in history, then he is the ultimate author of Auschwitz. Should God tolerate the suffering of one little child, he would be infinitely cruel or hopelessly indifferent. Rubenstein is influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky who, in The Brothers Karamazov, gives a number of examples of cruelty and wickedness in the world.

Ernest Becker’s suggestion makes more sense here. Men have abdicated their natural rights over goods and power, and have let others make crucial decisions for them. Mistaken decisions lead untold masses of men to death and destruction. Human beings do not have to give in to the tendency to engage in violence. Peaceful adventures can supply the passionate enjoyment that some men find in the exciting events of war. The deep-rooted apathy or greed that leads some men to ignore the plight of other humans who need their help desperately is a clear-cut failing of which we should not be proud. Perhaps Jung was right when he said "the principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the world is man.

While Rubenstein indicts God as cruel because he allows terrible human evil, David Hume holds God responsible for all the evils of man’s existence, including those resulting from natural disasters. Either God is not good because he does not prevent such evil, or God is put down for lacking the power to prevent evil, no matter where it is found. According to Hume, if God’s power is infinite, then whatever he wills is executed. However, neither humans nor animals are happy, and, hence, God does not will their happiness. God has infinite wisdom and never makes mistakes, and yet, the course of nature does not tend toward human happiness. Hence, God did not intend man’s happiness. Philo says that misery does not come about by chance. Its cause cannot be God’s intention, for God is benevolent. Misery, however, cannot occur contrary to God’s intention, for He is almighty.

• A present-day thinker, Edward Madden, sees the problem of God and evil as revolving around the existence of an excessive amount of evil in the world. The existence of some evil in the world would not constitute a problem for the good and omnipotent God, for it could be needed as a means for developing character or for appreciating the good. The trouble is that there is too much of it.
• Jesuit theologian, G.H. Joyce emphasizes the idea of the human mind reflecting on God and his relation to the world. This is important, for it opens up the possibility that the problem of evil is rooted in man’s conception of the world, as possibly a problem unique to the human mind which makes value judgments.
• The theologian, Dom Mark Pontifex points to the importance of the absolute character of God’s goodness. If God is absolutely good, and the source of all that exists, then how can he be the source of evil? Or, how can evil have any basis at all in reality? How can evil exist if all that exists comes from the absolutely good God?

The Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, like Dom Pontifex, has difficulty reconciling evil with a good and omnipotent God who stands above the universe, ruling and watching. This is especially so if the inexorable law of karma holds. If we take pain as a trial and an ordeal, then we are led to an all-powerful, cunning, psychologist-God who is cruel or morally insensible. The same would hold if moral evil is the result of ignorance. If pain is a punishment for moral evil, then we can ask why moral evil exists or must entail such pain and suffering? Such difficulties led the Buddha to reject the existence of a free and all-governing, personal God.

For Aurobindo, all things that exist are what they are in terms of an ultimate reality; Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, a consciousness that is both creative and infinite self-delight. This leads him to ask, how can pain and suffering exist at all if this is so? If this ultimate reality, called Sachchidananda, is God, then he is all good. If so, however, who created pain and evil? Aurobindo’s answer to the problem of evil is that the Divinity also bears the evil and suffering that we find in the creature in whom he has embodied himself. Aurobindo points out that the law governing the world takes no cognizance of good and evil, but only of the force that creates, the force that arranges and preserves, the force that disturbs and destroys impartially.

We do not blame the tiger for ripping apart its prey, nor the storm because it destroys whatever is in its path. The urge of Sachchidananda towards self-expression is central. This satisfaction of the conscious-force of existence develops itself into forms and seeks in that development its delight. Delight of being--universal, illimitable, self-existent-- seeks to realize itself as delight of becoming. This delight seeks in mind and life to realize itself by emergence in the becoming, in the increasing self-consciousness of the movement. As it seeks new forms of itself, pain and suffering occur.

Dostoevsky, Hick, Underhill, Boehme, Eckhart, Shankara, and Sri Aurobindo

MICHAEL STOEBER, Director, Advanced Degree Programs Associate Professor, Spirituality m.stoeber@utoronto.ca Publications Home

Reclaiming Theodicy: Reflections on Suffering, Compassion, and Spiritual Transformation (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). This book proposes a narrative of life within which one might understand suffering in relation to a personal God of ultimate power and love. It seeks to interpret suffering within a fundamentally compassionate and redemptive understanding of the Christian God. It explores various themes of theodicy -- theology that defends God in the face of evil – creatively developing a distinction between transformative and destructive suffering. Some suffering has positive effects on people who struggle with it, but certain kinds of suffering are bitterly destructive. In response to such suffering, the book analyses the dynamics of human and divine compassion. It suggests basic principles toward developing a politics of compassion and illustrates how various spiritual experiences of God are healing and life-giving. Within a religious view that stresses compassion, healing, and spiritual growth, the book also explores the relevance of the ideas of heaven, hell, purgatory and rebirth in responding to suffering.

Co-editor with Hugo Meynell, Critical Reflections on the Paranormal (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996).The anthology is a collection of essays that discuss various aspects of paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy, psychokinesis, trance-mediumship, near death experiences, and past-life memories. In response to recent research and studies, both critical and supportive of the subject, they reflect on what is reasonable to believe about this phenomena, and why, Also, the essays suggest what changes might be demanded in our worldview, if these phenomena are accepted as genuine. The collection includes essays by Susan Armstrong, Heather Botting, Stephen Braude, Don Evans, David Ray Griffin, James Horne, Terence Penelhum, and the editors.

Theo-Monistic Mysticism: A Hindu-Christian Comparison (London: Macmillan Press; New York: St Martin's Press, 1994). In response to current explanations of mystic phenomena, this book proposes a novel interpretive framework for understanding mysticism. It explores various kinds of mystical experience, suggesting that they are not wholly determined by subjective categories of interpretation and illustrating how they can be related and integrated within a narrative of spiritual transformation. In this view, radically non-dual experiences of unity or oneness are understood to culminate in 'theo-monistic' realizations - experiences which include dynamic and personal elements that are creative and moral - and to which other kinds of mysticism might also be related. This position is illustrated through a comparative study of Ramanuja, Aurobindo, Shankara, Ruusbroec, Eckhart, Boehme, and other Christian and Hindu mystics.

Evil and the Mystics' God: Towards A Mystical Theodicy (London: Macmillan Press; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Theodicies are systems of philosophy that attempt to rationalize the existence of evil in a God-centered world. They do not normally take into account the responses to evil by mystics - people who speak of encountering divine reality in an immediate or direct fashion that transcends normal categories of experience. Evil and the Mystics' God analyses the contribution that mystical thought makes towards establishing a reliable theodicy. Major subject figures include F. Dostoevsky, J. Hick, E. Underhill, J. Boehme, Eckhart, Shankara, and Aurobindo Ghose.

A symbol of the victory of Death

Chronicles of the Inner Chamber: 9 - The Bridge of Gnosis

In the Auroville Matrimandir the only consistency we find is the consistent lack of any higher content; added to this is the unfortunate fact that the building now standing at the heart of a township purported to be a creation of the Mother’s and the cradle of the Superman, bearing Sri Aurobindo’s name, consistently denies all that the Mother sought to capture in the temple. The Auroville Matrimandir is exactly what the community, the builders, the architects and the governing bodies desired it to be: no knowledge, no higher function and purpose, no truth-conscious unity.

Given this fact, we find a very similar situation prevailing today in the Ashram, where the central focus of the community there does not reflect the purpose and goal of the Supramental Manifestation adequately. This is precisely because the Bridge did not come into being between the two fields. Both were stranded, so to speak, on either side of a chasm of Time. We find in the Ashram, therefore, a Samadhi as the focal point of worship and meditation for disciples, devotees and pilgrims. The Divine Incarnations certainly do sanctify the locale with their remains at the place where they lived and opened the path to the new future. But in the gnostic vision of the symbol as the thing symbolised, a tomb is a tomb no matter how sanctified it may be by the enlightened substance it houses.

Certainly if we accept that the Supramental Creation and its special gnosis are unlike anything the Earth has known, then we have to admit that while a Samadhi may be acceptable in all other ashrams as the proper focus for concentration, in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram it stands as an aberration similar to the cross of Christianity – also a symbol of the victory of Death. Surely when given deep thought the Supramental Manifestation was not destined to follow that old way. Next Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Global Governance

Global Governance, Human Rights, and American Empire Future Survey January 2004 Volume 26, Number 1 A World Future Society Publication Editor: Michael Marien

Global governance, emerging in a multipolar form, could be further strengthened by a standing UN Constabulary force dealing with genocide and other crimes against humanity. Violent ethnic conflict has decreased in recent years, but is still a major factor in world politics. Gains for freedom around the world were recorded for 2002, with 44% of world population now living in Free countries and 21% in Partly Free countries. Human rights are increasingly globalized, but emphasis is now needed on the right to peace and building a culture of peace, as well as the right to democracy.

The US is now widely seen as an empire, but its power could be used to promote a better world. A Year 2050 Vision proposes gradual transition to a sustainable, economically functional, and politically stable world where everyone has an adequate standard of living. Four decades ago, Sri Aurobindo envisioned the future evolution of human consciousness. In contrast, scientists pondering the future human at a Foundation For the Future workshop consider the long-term outcomes of genetic technology, but do not consider virtual humans. More immediately, UNFPA proposes investing in health and rights of the world's 1.2 billion adolescents. And the view of cultural hybridization or mélange appears more attractive than global uniformity or clash of cultures.

Knowledge, Power, Harmony and Skill in works

M.K. Raina

In his educational philosophy, Sri Aurobindo upheld the basic but commonly forgotten principle that ‘it is the spirit, the living and vital issue that we have to do with, and there the question is not between modernism and antiquity, but between an imported civilisation and the greater possibilities of the Indian mind and nature, not between the present and the past, but between the present and the future’. In devising a true and living education, three things according to Sri Aurobindo—the man, the individual in his commonness and his uniqueness, the nation or people and universal humanity—should be taken into account.

Accordingly, Aurobindo conceived of education as an instrument for the real working of the spirit in the mind and body of the individual and the nation. He thought of education that for the individual will make its one central object the growth of the soul and its powers and possibilities, for the nation will keep first in view the preservation, strengthening and enrichment of the nation—soul and its Dharma (virtue) and raise both into powers of the life and ascending mind and soul of humanity. And at no time will it lose sight of man’s highest object, the awakening and development of his spiritual being . A concept underlying the true and living integral education.

Integrality of education is conceived as a process of organic growth, and the way in which various faculties could be developed and integrated is dependent upon each child’s inclination, rhythm of progression and law of development, Swabhava (inherent disposition) and Swadharma (inner nature). Integral education is not conceived as a juxtaposition of a number of subjects and even juxtaposition of varieties of faculties. The idea is to provide facilities for varieties of faculties, varieties of subjects and various combinations of pursuits of Knowledge, Power, Harmony and Skill in works. These faculties are so provided that they could be made use of by each student and the teacher so that a natural process of harmonious development could be encouraged.

M.K. Raina (India). Professor and Head, Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations of Education, National Council of Educational Research and Training, New Delhi. Formerly Senior Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Sri Aurobindo – Pioneer of Universal Mind

Dr. Ananda Reddy Lecture delivered at the Indian embassy in Berlin, on May 31st 2001

Seldom is man given to comprehend a personality like that of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo is the synthesis between the East and the West; he is the bridge between the Past and the Future and at the same time the visionary most relevant ‘here and now for you’!

He spent his most formative years in England, absorbing the highest ideals of the Western culture and experiencing the best and noblest expressions of the West. Returning to India after fourteen years in the West, he dived into the deep foundations of the Eastern culture, as expressed and seen in India’s ancient culture. Thus gathering with his consciousness the best of the Western and Eastern cultures plumbing into the depth of the divine achievements in the past of humanity, Sri Aurobindo launched himself on a perilous adventure towards a new spiritual power, as yet unknown to man.

For achieving this stupendous task, Sri Aurobindo yoked a greater Power than all the powers that existed upon earth – all the religious, political, social powers were not sufficient to awaken and to bring together humanity and to tie it up in a unity expressing itself as a World-Unity. Sri Aurobindo did not work for humanity on the basis of the religious ideal of human brotherhood, or equality or liberty, but, he saw all humanity as ‘the self-same being and personality’ of the one supreme Divine Consciousness. And for realising this vision of man and mankind and to make it not a remote probability but an immediate possibility, Sri Aurobindo concentrated all his yogic energies in bringing down the Dynamic Force of the Divine: the Supramental Consciousness and Power.

Up until now man has been striving to raise himself both spirituality and materially through his own imperfect ways – such as science, technology, philosophy, occultism and arts – and also through narrow religious ideology and theology seeking help from lower powers than the Divine. So, man’s progress has been slow, tardy and full of wars and suffering. And, at present, mankind has reached a cul-de-sac, a crisis of consciousness. Mind is unable to extend any solution nor solace to his war-battered psyche and his materialistic death-traps. That is why Sri Aurobindo seeks to transcend the Mental Man and bring down the Supramental Man who alone can deliver the suffering soul of mankind, bringing him peace and prosperity – both inner and outer.

Towards such an ascent of man and mankind Sri Aurobindo worked for all his life: to lift mankind from his mental to the supramental level which alone assures the continuity of mankind as well as its fulfilment...Such is the consciousness of Sri Aurobindo – a cosmic consciousness manifesting gradually what is there in the womb of the future. He is not only a pointer to the New Consciousness, but also the focus for the manifestation of the Supramental Force and Consciousness...And Sri Aurobindo is indeed the Pioneer to transform this earthly life into a life of divine.

Sri Aurobindo's challenge to orthodox or organized religion

HUMANITY AT THE CROSSROADS: DOES SRI AUROBINDO OFFER AN ALTERNATIVE?

SHAKUNTALA A. SINGH

To say that Sri Aurobindo is not easy to comprehend would be a huge understatement, if nothing else. While that can dissuade a number of people from going any further, it can motivate a number of others to study that much the more closely. Let us hope some of us fall in the latter category.

Moreover, Sri Aurobindo has written voluminously, and he has expressed himself on a vast array of topics. That makes him that much more significant to study, as well as makes him liable to the barbs of critics itching to point out loopholes, of which too there are not a few around. I mean not loopholes, but the critics with that attitude. Let us also hope most of us do not belong to that category.

Humanity today is indeed passing through numerous crises and yet surviving. While we all no doubt wish to continue to evolve through all this survival (hopefully even reaching the supramental state promised by the great seer of Pondicherry), my concerns here are a little more pedestrian. I propose to look into some of the problems of contemporary man as an individual, a member of society, a citizen of his country, a component of this world, and of nature itself. Come to think of it, the concerns are not that pedestrian. So far, so good.

Some concepts like Science, Nature, Matter, Mental Being, Nation-ego and Nation-soul, True and False Subjectivism, World-state and World-union, and The Religion of Humanism will be the focus of this paper. Not that the others are not important. But I believe these deserve our focus here, and today, as humanity finds itself at the crossroads, and gropes around rather gingerly for some tentative answers, which may hopefully translate into permanent solutions.

The challenge that Sri Aurobindo throws to orthodox or organized religion is but appropriate. For, in sustaining and perpetuating the outer symbols and structures of religion, man may forget to resurrect the inner spiritual symbols and structures, which alone can sustain true religiosity. And any religion which neglects the advancement of man’s spiritual quest so as to sustain its dogmas, rituals and blind obedience, will, in the final analysis, turn out to be a false God. His accent on the religion of humanity is to make organized religion beware of the dangers of fossilization and make us aware once again of the fundamental tenet of humanism...

Paper read at National Seminar on Sri Aurobindo and the Future of Humanity, 17-19 Jan. 2005, New Delhi, India.**Reader and Head, Dept. of Philosophy, Joshi-Bedekar College, Thane, India. Correspondence: 14, Shiva Kripa, Trimurty Road, Mulund, Mumbai, India. Tel: 022 25682740. Email: mensanamonographs@yahoo.co.uk

Poetry transcends to become mantra

Sri Aurobindo falls into the exclusive category of poet-seers who have achieved the highest realisations and have endeavoured to share that experience with the rest of humankind. The teachings and very utterances that spiritual masters of this calibre offer to the world come from the most sublime realms of consciousness that human beings can attain to. Their poetry transcends the page to become mantra, an invocation to the transcendental consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo, Indian nationalist, poet, philosopher and Spiritual Guru was born in Calcutta on 15th August 1872. Sri Aurobindo spent his formative years in England studying at St Paul’s and Trinity College where he excelled in the study of Literature and the Classics. In 1892 he returned to India where he became heavily involved in the Indian independence movement, he was a natural leader and one of the most radical nationalist politicians. Because of his radicalism, in 1908 Sri Aurobindo was arrested on suspicion of being involved in a bomb plot and was remanded in Alipore jail. It was here in jail that Sri Aurobindo had significant spiritual experiences, he became aware of a divine inner guidance and also realised the omnipresence of God even in a darkened prison cell.

Due to the commitment of Sri Aurobindo’s lawyer C.R.Das, Sri Aurobindo was released without charge. However this experience had changed Sri Aurobindo’s outlook. Henceforth he retired from politics and focused his energies on spirituality. Sri Aurobindo travelled to Pondicherry, where he could practise yoga undisturbed. In 1914 he was later joined by a french women, Mira Richards who would later became known as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Together they founded the Sri Aurobindo ashram, which began to attract disciples attracted to their dynamic reinterpretation of yoga.

As well as being a spiritual Guru to many disciples Sri Aurobindo was a noted poet, philosopher and writer. His main works were The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita and Savitri. Savitri was an epic work of poetry that he worked on for over 20 years. Sri Aurobindo did not negate the world like Indian yogis of the past. Instead Sri Aurobindo affirmed that all life is Yoga; through a conscious aspiration it is possible for man to evolve into a higher consciousness – a consciousness of truth and inner harmony. Sri Aurobindo called this new consciousness the Supramental.

For over 40 years, Sri Aurobindo worked tirelessly for his vision of a divine life on earth. Through his writings and poetry he left a legacy which reflected his hopes of a golden future for humanity. Sri Aurobindo entered mahasamadhi on Dec 5th, 1950 By: Richard View: Sri Aurobindo Poetry View: Biography of Sri Aurobindo PoetSeers > The Poet Seers

The unity of matter and spirit

By Kiara Windrider

Near the beginning of the 20th century the great Indian freedom fighter and yogi-sage, Sri Aurobindo, began to express a truth which had not been expressed before. In his high states of divine union he saw that the time had come for a new stage in the evolution of mankind. He saw that the divine was to manifest right here on earth and that the time for this divine emergence into earth life was now. He spoke of heaven descending to earth, even as earth experienced a breakdown due to the intrinsic resistance held within her material body towards this "descent". Sri Aurobindo was joined in Pondicherry, India, by a French mystic, Mirra Alfassa, who later became known as the Mother.

Together they embarked on a journey of intensive cellular and collective transformation that is very relevant to the colossal uncertainties we face today.. Sri Aurobindo saw that the divine force permeates all matter, and that all matter therefore has a force of consciousness. The process of the divine spirit descending down into matter is called involution. The process by which the divine ascends back upwards out of matter is called evolution. According to Sri Aurobindo, humanity has reached a stage where these two events are occuring simultaneously, and in his inner visions, he foresaw that we would soon be experiencing a descent of what he called "supramental consciousness" that would entirely change everything on Earth.

When does all this happen? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother believed that the world stage was set for this quantum descent, and that it was quite imminent now. The Mother said in 1968 that the supramental transformation was a certainty now, and that it would come about with a minimum of destruction, "although this minimum is still considerable". She said that there would be a turning point around the year 2000.

Sri Aurobindo, before his death in 1950, gave five indications that would precede the dawning of the New Era. To summarize them briefly, knowledge of the physical world would increase exponentially, people would start becoming more psychic, there would be a concerted effort from the dark forces to maintain control, the world would move towards increasing unification through technology, and finally, many would rise up such as Hitler with the power to influence large numbers of people.

When I confront the ecological and political realities of our modern world, I realize that our 3rd dimensional problems cannot be solved through 3rd dimensional means. I find myself greatly comforted by spiritual researchers like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, whose visions and understandings derived from a direct experience of a more expanded cosmic paradigm. Global Oneness

Supramental awakening

In an interesting Net article titled 'Earth Changes And Planetary Transformation - The Supramental Awakening And Planetary Hope' by Kiara Windrider, I found some relevant discussions of Sri Aurobindo on the subject of the supramental mind:

"The great work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was in bringing supramental consciousness down into the cellular consciousness of their own bodies. Since this is a unified consciousness, this meant that the supramental consciousness was simultaneously being brought into the consciousness fields of the Earth, awaiting the moment when it would flower into its full manifestation in collective matter. With the descent of this new vibratory consciousness all our old obsolete human structures will be demolished. During this process, there would be a transition period which would be chaotic, extremely chaotic, as the last strongholds of greed, fear, and darkness, came up to the surface to be dispelled.

Sri Aurobindo emphasized that although the changes will be enormous they did not have to be necessarily catastrophic. The power of Truth automatically erases Falsehood, and our world for the most part consists of Falsehood. Yet, the Supramental, he maintained, carried a power of harmonization which could overcome this resistance by means other than dramatic struggle and violence. The Asuras will eventually be absorbed into their original emanations of Light, Life, Beauty and Truth, and our fractured consciousness will eventually heal. It may be interesting to speculate, with all the violence in the world today, the destruction we might be experiencing if not for this power of harmonization!"

Worth a read...In the supraconscious sparking of the current species mindfield, there is great need now to ground ourselves as some frequences are becoming chaotically 'vibrant'! The Great Plan is indeed in motion... posted by Kingsley Friday, March 03, 2006 @ 16:26

Dynamic Evolution through successive Kingdoms: Jantsch, Haskell and Young

Arthur M. Young and Edward Haskell have each independently incorporated the findings of science into a larger theory of spiritual evolution, and extended the traditional human, animal, vegetable, and mineral categories with kingdoms representing photons, atoms and molecules. (Haskell 1972, Young 1976).

Arthur M. Young goes further in considering the human state as a subset of a larger kingdom of "Dominion", of which the sixth stage is represented for example by Christ and Buddha, and the seventh (final) stage an even higher level of Enlightenment or God-realisation. (Young 1976, see diagram pp.86-7).

Moreover, both Haskell and Young present profound accounts of evolution through these kingdoms in terms of cybernetic principles. A more "mainstream" scientific presentation of this same idea is provided by Erich Jantsch in his consummate account of how self-organising systems evolve and develop as a series of "symmetry breaks" through the sequence of matter, life, and mind (Jantsch 1980).

Although abiding strictly by the understanding of science, Jantsch arranges the various elements of cosmic, planetary, biological, psychological, and human evolution in a single overall framework of emergent evolution that may or may not be considered teleological (see Jantsch 1980 p.224). Wikipedia

Blake, Nietzsche, and Sri Aurobindo

The Transmodern Transubtantiation

by longsword on Thu 10 Mar 2005 04:28 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

Nietzsche came at the riddle of humanity by asking two questions. First, how do you make a human being out of an ape? And second, how do you make the transhuman (the overman) out of the human being? (This was also Aurobindo's question).

• The first question addresses itself to all previous human history and is riddled out in Nietzsche's earliest works. It is that history which Fukuyama concludes with his End of History thesis. His triumphalism is the triumphalism of the "all-too-human" Last Man.
• Nietzsche's second question, however, addresses itself to the future. And it is this question that, insofar as we accept it as addressed to us, will propel us beyond the End of History and into the transmodern era.

Fukuyama simply failed to understand this about Nietzsche, if he considered it at all. It is the unwitting privilege of Fukuyama to conclude this all-too-human era, and go down with it, but it is an era which must now be overcome and transcended. What Nietzsche described as the revaluation of value is only a variant of Christian transubtantiation. In the Christian Eucharist, bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Nietzsche proposes to effect the same magic with mere morality. The revaluation of values is the transubstantion of all earlier ideas and values into specifically transhuman ideas and values. What is despised and debased is redeemed as "the good", while much that has been deemed "the good" and "the true" is shown to be demonstrably wicked and false.

Pity, for example. But then, even William Blake did not think much of the value of pity, considering it something that "divides the soul". Transmodernism, to be successful at all and to outrun the fate that befell post-modernism, must effect a similar transubtantiation of the gross materiality of modernity into the spirit. I have already pointed to this kind of transubtantiation of the lower into the higher (or the ignoble into the noble form) in the case of "solidarity" (or universality) into "unanimity"; of the transubtantiation of the whole idiom of "totalism" into "wholism"; of all logic and monologic into ecologic and dialogic.

First and foremost, a kind of alchemical transmutation of all mere rationality into true Reason (instrumental rationality being only the leaden and debased form of Reason); of the transmutation of mere fantasy into creative imagination, of knowledge into wisdom; and of science into gnosis. These are some of the processes of transmutation required of an authentic transmodernism. For virtually every value that modernity clings to as its "good", I have found its contradiction to already exist in a higher and nobler form in language.

Transmodernism is not so much a case of getting rid of modernity as it is of alchemically transmuting its coarser, leaden, and ignobler aspects into the gold of nobler ones. In my own table of values (see the end of my previous post), I have already pointed to just such a process of transubtantiation. This transubtantiation of the lead of all previous human history into the gold of a new "transhumanity" will take steady work. But this work is itself an alchemical process in the mind unfolding into metanoia. Gradually and suddenly, both, a new consciousness takes form and blossoms. Eureka! Language itself reveals a pattern, albeit a non-linear one, to all previous human history. And perhaps to a future history as well."...and life outruns the already present danger."

The Double Crisis of Modernity

Kishore Ghandi has written that "the double crises of civilisation and evolution today is the product of the human mind". What he means by this is that modernism has led finally to a crisis of space and time -- of the social organisation of space and time -- represented as "civilisation" on the one hand, and as "evolution" on the other, and that the roots of this disorganisation of space and time lie in the mind itself (or what I prefer to call a "mentality").

Nothing is more fundamental to our reality, and therefore our conception of ourselves, than the organisation of space and time. What we call "reality" is fundamentally an organisation and arrangement of space and time. It is, after all, what we mean by the word "Cosmos" (ie, order) as opposed to Chaos (the Void as the absence of space and time; or what terrified Pascal as "the silence of the infinite", and horrified Blake as the "Soul Shuddering Vacuum").

The part is made to swallow the whole and mind becomes totalitarian and self-enclosed (or what some have called "the Age of Monologue"). Only the indicative/analytical, third-person form of speech is credited with true reality, while the other social forms of speech -- narrative/epical (past), optative/lyrical (subject), or imperatival/dramatical (future) -- are dismissed as derivative and secondary. by longsword on Thu 10 Mar 2005 12:06 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

Transmodernism

I do not know who deserves the credit for the word (possibly it was first used by Paul H. Ray. It was Ray who first used the phrase "cultural creatives" to describe a significant segment of the American population that he identified as pioneering, or otherwise contributing to, a newly emergent integralist culture in the United States... "Transmodernism" is, firstly and obviously, a name. More than any condition or doctrine, what it names is primarily an aspiration. It is the name given to a desire to transcend the perceived limitations and constraints of a narrow modernity or post-modernity -- a desire to rise above and beyond both Max Weber's "iron cage" of modernity's narrow instrumentalism as well as post-modernity's dissolute fragmentation and relativism.

Transmodernism is a spiritual emigration from the present. This is represented in the current effort to restore to mind the whole temporal dimension in thought which was methodologically excluded in Newtonian "single vision" and in Cartesian dualism. Transhumanists (or transmodernists. I intend to recapture the term "transhuman" from the cyborgs) are spiritual emigres, which necessarily highlights the temporal dimension in transmodernist thinking. To my mind, the foremost exemplar of that effort to restore the time dimension to thought has been the speech-thinker Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

Even while Fukuyama was declaring the inevitable triumph and final closure of the "iron cage" of bureaucratic and instrumental rationality in his End of History, and the reign forever more of what Blake would probably call the "soul shuddering vacuum", the interfaith dialogue had already released the explosive potency of the transformative spirit from the shackles of mere religionism, just as Blake had prophetically envisioned: "The war of swords departed now, The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns" ("Science", that is, in the sense of Wisdom or Gnosis, or as Reason rather than rationality. Blake had his own understanding of the meaning of "Enlightenment" and it didn't quite jibe with that of the Newton and the philosophes).

This is the dialogical principle in action. It bridges the times as well as the spaces of life (or, as Rosenstock-Huessy himself put it, dialogue both synchronises and coordinates). Once the so-called "cultural creatives" identify the source of that vocation or imperative, they will also know the goal, and will be able to profess it unanimously (or what the spatially and materialistically minded once called "solidarity" in the classic idiom of Newtonianism). Unanimity is only solidarity carried to a higher level of awareness by the penetration into it of consciousness and the conscientiously dialogical, which in turn transforms mere "social movement" into deliberative "social action", and mere "social forces" into consciously inspired and aspiring "social actors". Superficially, unanimity and solidarity are treated as synonyms. But there is a world of difference between conscious "actors" and mere functionaries or cogs in the machine. "Unanimity" is time-binding speech. "Solidarity" is space-bound thinking.

Instead of assimilation to the One, it pursues the integration of the Many, instinctively seeking to preserve and conserve their distinctive integrity. "Health", in its fullest meaning, is the revolutionary value of the future, as Rosenstock-Huessy anticipated decades ago. Modernity, as Nietzsche wrote, subjected life to a radical devaluation. Life became "nothing but..." this or that. It declared that life had no purpose and was merely mechanical. In the end, Modernity iself became what it beheld, a thing mechanical and without purpose. Consequently, it has become something that must be outrun, overcome, and transcended. by longsword on Wed 09 Mar 2005 02:46 PM CST

Transhumanism

Everything that today goes by the name transhumanism is a mistake and a misunderstanding. It should properly be called posthumanism (or perhaps even dehumanism), certainly not transhuman. It is only a masquerade of modernism, projecting itself into a future to which it does not belong. There is nothing transcendental about it; certainly nothing that would qualify in the sense of self-overcoming.

The only true contemporary transhumanists were Friedrich Nietzsche (the Overman) and Aurobindo. (And perhaps might be added the name of Teilhard de Chardin. There are probably others). Anything else is simply a misunderstanding. Keywords: Transhumanism, Nietzsche, Consciousness, Aurobindo by longsword on Thu 20 Jan 2005 02:06 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

Eternal Night

Antiquities of the Illuminati™ Grey Lodge Occult Review™
Sri Aurobindo, "Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol"
Book Nine THE BOOK OF ETERNAL NIGHT

Canto II THE JOURNEY IN ETERNAL NIGHT AND THE VOICE OF THE DARKNESS

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night

All stood as if a world were doomed to die
And waited on the eternal silence' brink.
Heaven leaned towards them like a cloudy brow
Of menace through the dim and voiceless hush.
As thoughts stand mute on a despairing verge
Where the last depths plunge into nothingness
And the last dreams must end, they paused; in their front
Were glooms like shadowy wings, behind them, pale,
The lifeless evening was a dead man's gaze.
Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.
But still in its lone niche of templed strength
Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,
Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room
Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.
The Woman first affronted the Abyss
Daring to journey through the eternal Night.
Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge
Into the dread and hueless vacancy;
Immortal, unappalled, her spirit faced
The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste.
Against night's inky ground they stirred, moulding
Mysterious motion on her human tread,
A swimming action and a drifting march
Like figures moving before eyelids closed:
All as in dreams went slipping, gliding on.

Evolutionary cosmology

The two great forerunners of evolutionary cosmology were Hegel in the West and Sri Aurobindo on the East. The former is widely mis-or disunderstood, while the latter is simply not understood, or not widely known, anyway. However, I also believe that Christian metaphysics, properly understood, is evolutionary to the core, and entirely compatible with a philosophy of cosmic evolution. It could hardly be otherwise.

In fact, that gives me an idea for something I should post about--Jesus as the divine emissary who brings the "good news" of cosmic evolution. Teilhard de Chardin certainly recognized this, seeing Jesus as the "omega point" or fulfillment of the cosmic drama. This omega point--which lies outside space and time and is already complete in itself--operates like a telos that draws us toward our own spiritual completion. In Jesus, "alpha and omega"--the completed whole--meet in the middle of history, and he comes to telos all about it. It is accomplished. So relax already. Better yet, relux and call it a deity.

Hegel's philosophy is so difficult and so capacious that it has been used by mystagogues and demagogues of both the left and right to prop up their own sorry philosophies. For example, it is well understood that Marxism was largely a recasting of Hegel's philosophy in materialistic terms. But whenever we adopt a materialistic view, we are turning reality on its head. Materialism is deceptively and seductively simple, but it is an insidious metaphysic that does great violence to our humanness. Frankly, it posits a cosmos that is not worthy of our being in it.

Hegel was obviously ahead of his time, in that contemporary physics now requires us to regard the cosmos as a seamless and indivisible whole in which every part is internally related to every other part. Wholeness in both space and time is the prior condition of reality, not something we arrive at inductively by somehow adding all of the parts of reality together. Physics forces us to take seriously the idea that the Truth is the whole, the whole is the Truth, and that the Whole Truth is a result of systematic development. It is not a static truth, but a dynamic, unfolding truth--or more accurately, an ongoing revelation of truth as it discloses more of itself in the fullness of time.

Hegel's central lesson is that the Whole--what he called the concrete universal--is not an amorphous blob--"the night in which all cows are black"--but that it has an internal, trinitarian logic all its own, the infamous "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" that subtends all evolutionary progress. The whole is an infinitely complex system, and human beings are self-aware images of that system. We are conscious Spirit because the absolute is conscious Spirit, and conscious Sprit is immanent in the cosmos. Likewise, we have an underlying subjective wholeness because we partake of the prior wholeness of reality. Neuroses and mind parasites disrupt this wholeness and create all sorts of irreconcilable divisions in the psyche.

However, now that we are hovering around the penumbra of the concrete universal, I think we will spend a few more days here, synthesizing some further insights as they apply to Christianity and perhaps even getting into some Aurobindo. As I have mentioned before, this East-West synthesis will be the way of the mankind's spiritual future, so we might as well get to working on it now. Sure, its inevitable anyway. But it's always a good idea to bow before the inevitable. posted by Gagdad Bob Thursday, March 02, 2006 at 5:30 AM

Calvin, Dante and eternal Hell

The Mother on Sri Aurobindo's Thoughts and Aphorisms Bhakti (Devotion) Page 4

474. Calvin, who justified eternal Hell, knew not God but made one terrible mask of Him His eternal reality. If there were an unending Hell, it could only be a seat of unending rapture; for God is Ananda and than the eternity of His bliss there is no other eternity.

475. Dante, when he said that God's perfect love created eternal Hell, wrote perhaps wiselier than he knew; for from stray glimpses I have sometimes thought there is a Hell where our souls suffer aeons of intolerable ecstasy and wallow as if for ever in the utter embrace of Rudra, the sweet and terrible.

The divine splendours are too marvellous for human littleness, which finds it hard to bear them, and an eternity of delight may well be intolerable for a human being. 14 April 1970- The Mother

Thank God, they were not academicians!

Avijit Pathak

These days many of us are fond of presenting Bankim and Ramakrishna to the Western audience. And we do it by using the categories evolved by Foucault, Derrida and Habermas. We are so colonised that even when we evolve a critique of modernity (something that allows the West to colonise the world), we are not very confident about the critique that emerged in India. Instead, we rely heavily on either the Frankfurt School of Marxism or the recent post-modern assertion. In other words, there is no escape from the West, its categories.

Not surprisingly, from a postgraduate student to a university professor - everyone is taking about ‘discourse’, ‘contestation’, ‘site’, ‘imagined communities’, ‘constructed categories’ and ‘deconstruction’! This imitation is utterly disgusting, almost life-killing. No wonder then, great innovative Indian minds - Gandhi and Tagore, Aurobindo and Vive­kananda - did not belong to the university system. Thank God, they were not academicians!

Suppose a social scientist is writing on intel­lectuals. It is certainly not impossible for him to write the way he has felt about intellectuals and theorise the practices in which, as he has seen, intellectuals engage themselves. Yet, more often than not, he would deny this original intervention. Because he would feel terribly insecure if he doesn’t quote, say, Grams­ci, his categorisation of traditional and organic intellectuals and hegemony...Or take another example. In India, there are social scientists who would repeat a formula (a fash­ionable formula, indeed): Ambedkar cannot be wrong; Gandhi cannot be right!

FREEDOM is an assertion of faith - faith in oneself, in one’s ability to look at the world with one’s own eyes...FREEDOM is also an assertion of authenticity. It requires the courage to say ‘no’ (if necessary) to all that is tempting and fashionable. Not novelty, but authentic search is what character­ises a free thinker.

We have multiple selves

"Gandhi or Gramsci? The Use of Authoritative Sources in Anthropology"

Murphy Halliburton

Anthropological Quarterly - Volume 77, Number 4, Fall 2004, pp. 793-817

George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

I became interested in the many Indian philosophers and philosophies that focused on the nature of the self, consciousness, emotion and related issues well before entering graduate school in anthropology. My attraction was partly due to what I felt to be the inadequacy of western philosophy and psychology—with which I was more familiar—to help me understand issues of the self's relationship to the mind, body and emotion and even to comprehend my own sense of self. Some Indian philosophers, such as those who identified with a school of thought called Advaita Vedānta, explored the self and related issues with great subtlety seeming to capture at times what I considered to be the complexity of existence and the fleeting, changing nature of the self.

Western philosophical and psychological perspectives were intriguing yet felt fixed and mechanical, unable to reflect the elusiveness and multiplicity of the mind, emotion and human nature (though psychoanalysis seemed more reflective and better able than others to account for subtlety, change and context). Basic insights of some of the Indian thinkers, such as that we have multiple selves coexisting with one stable or enduring self, which doesn't have fixed characteristics, or the belief that the self is distinct from the mind, I found original and at times even therapeutic... Project MUSE

Phylogenic Memory

Types of Phylogenic Memory: The Intersecting Theories of Memetics, Morphic Fields, Semiotics, Collective Agency, and Theatrum Mundi- There are at least 3 kinds of phylogenic memory:

• (1) genes (DNA);
• (2) mind-stuff that is somehow passed on (propagated) as well as acquired by imitation (and which resides in organic carriers); and
• (3) memorabilia (human cultural artifacts and tools).

It is the purpose of this workshop to describe these organic, endogenous and social modes of inheritance, relate this bio-psycho-social memory to earlier dual systems of genetic and cultural, and adjoin multidisciplinary expertise to integrate and restructure existing points of view. The principal discourses that will be reviewed are

• (1) memetic theory which epitomizes the cultural turn;
• (2) Sheldrake and his morphic fields (a Goethean lineage);
• (3) Semiotics as an alternative transdisciplinary method (linguistic turn);
• (4) theatrum mundi, viz. world-as-stage, with two dimensions:
• (4a) a literary criticism dealing with works of fine arts on this subject, and
• (4b) referring to the work of Halbwachs, Assmann, Burke and Nora on cultural production, historiography and the deep structure of history itself; and
• (5) collective agency as one of the central themes behind all other perspectives, one that concerned authors from all ideological angles, from Marx and Durkheim to Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (more narrowly it calls on Lukács and Gramsci and the inevitable coexistence of differences).

Foundational issues of deep psychology, physics (quantum theory vs. psi-fields), and the biomedical sciences will provide support. Communication among contributors will benefit from a history-of-ideas approach and comparative paradigm analysis. The workshop agenda will provide a comprehensive perspective about a putative second phylogenic system with methods contributed from all disciplines and should be highly able to address some timely concerns of science and society alike:

• Are the Laws of nature mere habits?
• How does the science of the genome relate to certain aspects of brain research and to our understanding of cultural deep structures as studied by the humanities?
• Do we need paradigm shifts in developmental biology and evolution theory? What moral implications follow for stem cell research and abortion policy?
• Is the public instrumentation of genetic screening flawed?
• Do we need collective human rights to protect what cannot be reduced to individual interest?

Chaired by Martin Potschka (Section I) International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Sri Aurobindo, Aldous Huxley and Human Potentialities

brave old world In 1962, Michael Murphy and his partner Richard Price founded Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Price died in a hiking accident in 1985, but Murphy has continued -- and expanded -- the work of Esalen.

• Alan Hunt Badiner: In the past, we've talked about Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts being at Esalen.... what, essentially, is the psychedelic history of Esalen.

Michael Murphy: I'd been influenced by Sri Aurobindo, who saw human nature as part of cosmic evolution and participating in the awakening of the latent divinity in all things. In framing the language about Esalen, we got considerable help from the last essays of Aldous Huxley, who was writing about human potentialities. His language was more accessible than Aurobindo's. So, our first brochure was titled "Human Potentialities"...

• Alan Hunt Badiner: So while Esalen had significant psychedelic origins, you weren't there yet?

Michael Murphy: I was not impelled by any knowledge of or interest in psychedelics, but once we started, there it was. It was there, first of all, among the first famous figures who came here -- like Aldous Huxley. In Mexico, he gave me Sandoz laboratory LSD and his wife Laura was my sitter. ~ Michael Murphy, as interviewed inZig Zag Zen: Buddhism and PsychedelicsChronicle Books, 2002 posted by clocke at # Tuesday, February 28, 2006