If non-Western people regain a position of equality and recover their own deepest values, they may contribute to the solution

“Look at where you want to go and put all your efforts into it”
Staff Reporter The Hindu Saturday, Feb 16, 2008 Other States - Puducherry
Meet on Sri Aurobindo conducted at Auroville
Photo: T. Singaravelou ON TRUTH: Michael Murphy, member of the International Advisory Council, Auroville Foundation and chairman of the Esalen Institute, speaking at the inauguration of a three-day meet at Auroville on Friday. —

PUDUCHERRY: Michael Murphy, member of the International Advisory Council, Auroville Foundation, who is also co-founder of the Esalen Institute, said transformation of matter was just a matter of time. It was better not to think of how far have we gone and how far we still had to go.
“Its better to think only of running and nothing else… you look at where you want to go and put all your efforts into it. Sri Aurobindo has said that transformation of matter will be the final stage and before that happens, you have supermental methods of finding the truth.”

Mr. Murphy was speaking at a meet, ‘Sri Aurobindo… the new dynamism of the material and the spiritual,’ organised by the Centre of Indian Studies, Bharat Nivas in Auroville on Friday.
Sri Aurobindo had discussed various methods by which the final transformation may take place. But there is no question that such a transformation will take place. The question now was perhaps whether the beginnings of this transformation of matter could be detected.
When evolution has taken place the lower consciousness does not know about it, he said and added that it was simply not possible for us using merely mental processes to detect the workings of the supermental consciousness.

Richard Hartz, who has studied philosophy and Indian languages at Yale and the University of Washington, in his paper titled ‘This Little Whirling Globe’ said globalisation was the culmination of a process that has been going on for millennia.
It is now entering a new phase. If non-Western people regain a position of equality and recover their own deepest values, they may contribute to the solution of problems that have been created largely by Western domination and exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants.

Ram Sehgal, Group Advisor, Rediffusion DYR, in his paper on ‘Can technology lead us to our goal - divine, the explorer, the innovator,’ said globalisation, knowledge explosion and its democratisation and technology were converging in a manner as never before.
Man, he said, would continue to resist change as it is part of his nature. Till a few decades ago, things happened at much slower pace and time for absorption was granted. Today the speed of change and the turmoil it was creating is testimony to the new force and consciousness that is forcing the issue. Man was being thrown into situations meant to wake him up and sooner or later he had to wake up to the fact.

Kittu Reddy, who teaches at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and is a founding member of the Academic Advisory of the Army Welfare Education Society, presented some points on organisational structures.
If man could realise a perfect spiritual unity, no sort of uniformity would be necessary; for the utmost play of diversity would be securely possible on that foundation. In order to realise a spiritual unity in a group, it is indispensable that there are at first a few individuals who have spiritualised themselves. If and when such a thing takes place, then the organisation may be securely centred on these spiritualised individuals.

Jean-Yves Lung, who has been in Auroville since 1993 and is a teacher there, spoke about a psychological approach to global warming. Global warming is mainly addressed as a technical problem to be solved. Only a few dare to think that it questions our psychology, what we have chosen to become and embody in our consciousness.
The technical approach, he said was an easy one and was based on the belief that science and technology would always save us from our psychological mistakes and erase the consequences of our unfortunate choices.

Aster Patel, member of the Governing Body, Auroville Foundation, said we live increasingly in a world where the material borders on the immaterial, where the objective loses its domain to a widening expanse of the subjective. And a new seeking for the spiritual rises up in us.

Sri Aurobindo's importation of the Latin-Greek-Sanskrit morphology to English

The economy of classical language ... lexicontrol
The economy of classical language (Prose and Poetry) is relational, which means that in it words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships. In it, no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of the thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection. Far from plunging into an inner reality

Examples: 1) Aurobindo's "Involution and Evolution" writings for the most perfect example of direct importation of the method or mindset of Latin-Greek-Sanskrit morphology to English. 2) Colebrooke's translation of the Sankhya Karika. 3) Dr. Johnson.... lexicontrol

Archetypal relationship between sounds and ideas

Sound symbolism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes (the written representations of sounds, transcribed between slashes like this: /b/) carry meaning in and of themselves.

Origin
In the 18th century, Mikhail Lomonosov propagated an idiosyncratic theory that words containing the front vowel sounds E, I, YU should be used when depicting tender subjects, and those with back vowel sounds O, U, Y - to when describing things that may cause fear ("like anger, envy, pain, and sorrow").
However, it is Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) who is considered to be the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements:

• firstly, he says that "the sign is arbitrary". This means that he considers the words that we use to indicate things and concepts could be any words - they are essentially just a consensus agreed upon by the speakers of a language and have no discernible pattern or relationship to the thing. Thus, the sounds themselves have no linguistic meaning.
• Secondly, he says that, because words are arbitrary, they have meaning only in relation to other words. A dog is a dog because it is not a cat or a mouse or a horse, etc. These ideas have permeated the study of words since the 19th century.

However, Saussure himself is said to have collected examples where sounds and referents were related. Ancient traditions link sounds and meaning, and some modern linguistic research does also.[edit]

Types of sound symbolism
Margaret Magnus is the author of a comprehensive book designed to explain phonosemantics to the lay reader - Gods of the Word. This work describes three types of sound symbol using a model first proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt ...

History of Phonosemantics
Several ancient traditions exist which talk about an archetypal relationship between sounds and ideas. Some of these are discussed below, but there are others as well. If we include a link between letters and ideas then the list includes the Viking Runes, the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Arab Abjad, etc.. References of this kind are very common in The Upanishads, The Nag Hammadi Library, the Celtic Book of Taliesin, as well as early Christian works, the Shinto Kototama, and Shingon Buddhism.[edit]

Plato and the Cratylus Dialogue
In Cratylus, Plato has Socrates commenting on the origins and correctness of various names and words. When Hermogenes asks if he can provide another hypothesis on how signs come into being (his own is simply 'convention'), Socrates initially suggests that they fit their referents in virtue of the sounds they are made of:
"Now the letter rho, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion" - Cratylus.
(note this is an open source translation available at Internet Classics Archive)
However, faced by an overwhelming number of counterexamples given by Hermogenes, Socrates has to admit that "my first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous".[edit]

Upanishads
The Upanishads contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance:
"The mute consonants represent the earth, the sibilants the sky, the vowels heaven. The mute consonants represent fire, the sibilants air, the vowels the sun… The mute consonants represent the eye, the sibilants the ear, the vowels the mind" - Aitrareya-Aranya-Upanishad [edit]

Shingon Buddhism
Kūkai, the founder of Shingon wrote his Sound, word, reality in the 9th century which relates all sounds to the voice of the Dharmakaya Buddha. [edit]

Early Western phonosemantics
The idea of phonosemantics was sporadically discussed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In 1690, Locke wrote against the idea in an essay called "An Essay on Human Understanding". His argument was that if there were any connection between sounds and ideas, then we would all be speaking the same language, but this is an over-generalisation. Leibniz's book New Essays on Human Understanding published in 1765 contains a point by point critique of Locke's essay. Leibniz picks up on the generalization used by Locke and adopts a less rigid approach: clearly there is no perfect correspondence between words and things, but neither is the relationship completely arbitrary, although he seems vague about what that relationship might be.[2][edit]

Modern phonosemantics
In 1836 Wilhelm von Humboldt published Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. It is here that he establishes the three kinds of relationship between sounds and ideas as discussed above under Types of Sound Symbolism. Below is a sample of researchers in the field of phonosemantics.
Otto Jespersen suggests that: “Sound symbolism, we may say, makes some words more fit to survive.” Dwight Bolinger of Harvard University was the primary proponent of phonosemantics through the late 1940s and the 1950s. In 1949, he published The Sign is Not Arbitrary. He concluded that morphemes cannot be defined as the minimal meaning-bearing units, in part because linguistic meaning is so ill-defined, and in part because there are obvious situations in which smaller units are meaning-bearing.
Ivan Fónagy (1963) correlates phonemes with metaphors. For example, nasal and velarized vowels are quite generally considered ‘dark’, front vowels as ‘fine’ and ‘high’. Unvoiced stops have been considered ‘thin’ by European linguists, whereas the fricatives were labelled ‘raw’ and ‘hairy’ by the Greeks.
Hans Marchand provided the first extensive list of English phonesthemes. He wrote, for example, that “/l/ at the end of a word symbolizes prolongation, continuation” or “nasals at the end of a word express continuous vibrating sounds.”
Gérard Genette published the only full length history of phonosemantics, Mimologics (1976). In 450 pages, Genette details the evolution of the linguistic iconism among linguists and poets, in syntax, morphology and phonology.[3]
Linguist Keith McCune demonstrated in his doctoral thesis that virtually every word in the Indonesian language has an iconic (phonosemantic) component. His two-volume doctoral thesis “The Internal Structure of Indonesian Roots” was completed at the University of Michigan in 1983 and published in Jakarta in 1985. [edit]

Relationship with neuroscience
In the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran outlined his research into the links between brain structure and function. In the fourth lecture of the series he describes the phenomena of synesthesia in which people experience, for example sounds in terms of colours, or sounds in terms of tastes. One type of synesthesia has people seeing numbers, letters of the alphabet, or even musical notes, as having a distinct colour. Based on his research Ramachandran proposes a model for how language might have evolved. The theory is interesting because it may explain how we make metaphors and how sounds can be metaphors for images – why for example sounds can be described as bright or dull. In explaining how language might have evolved from cross activation of adjacent areas in the brain, Ramachandran notes four crucial factors, not all related to language, but which combined might well have resulted in the emergence of it. Two of these processes are of particular interest here.
Synesthetic cross modal abstraction: i.e. we recognise properties that sounds and images have in common and abstract them to store them independently. The sounds and shapes of the objects have characteristics in common that can be abstracted, say a sharp, cutting quality of a word, and the shape it describes - what Ramachandran called the 'Bouba/kiki effect' based on the results of an experiment with two abstract shapes, one blobby and the other spiky, and asking people to relate the nonsense words bouba and kiki to them. The effect is real and observable, and repeatable.
Built in preexisting cross activation. Ramachandran points out that areas of the brain which appear to be involved in the mix-ups in synesthesia are adjacent to each other physically, and that cross-wiring, or cross activation, could explain synesthesia and our ability to make metaphors. He notes that the areas that control the muscles around the mouth are also adjacent to the visual centres, and suggests that certain words appear to make our mouth imitate the thing we are describing. Examples of this might be words like "teeny weeny", "diminutive" to describe small things; "large" or "enormous" to describe big things. [edit]

Relationship with poetry
The sound of words is important in the field of poetry, and rhetoric more generally. Tools such as euphony, alliteration, and rhyme all depend on the speaker or writer confidently choosing the best-sounding word. John Mitchell's book Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments collects lists of words of similar meaning and similar sounds. For example, the entry for V begins:
Vital and vigorous but vain and vicious.
Vitality is in words which relate to the Latin vita (life), vis (force) and vigor. In English are vim and vigour, vitality and velocity. The effect of V can be described as very vivacious. Like several other sounds V has a second, opposite meaning. In accordance with its relationship to the sounds W and F it is sometimes weak and flustured (German verwirrt), as in the words vain, vacuous, vapid, vague, vacillate, vagrant, vaporous, vertigo, veer, and vary.
Likewise, "gl-" words for shiny things: glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glam, glimmer, glaze, glass, glitz, gloss, glory, glow, and glitter. In German, nouns starting with "kno-" and "knö-" are mostly small and round: Knoblauch "garlic", Knöchel "ankle", Knödel "dumpling", Knolle "tuber", Knopf "button", Knorren "knot (in a tree)", Knospe "bud (of a plant)", Knoten "knot (in string or rope)".

Are we entering into a Dematerialized Economy?

Conference on Sri Aurobindo: The New Dynamism of the Material and the Spiritual
SAWCHU (Sri Aurobindo World Centre for Human Unity) ::: 9:00 AM
February 16, 2008
As Life Re-creates Itself
9 a.m. Recitation from Isha Upanishad: Deepshikha
Speakers and titles of their presentations
9.20 - 11 a.m.
Michael Murphy … Evolution of Beauty
Anu Majumdar … Towards a New Imagination
Deepti Tewari … Evolution Accelerated, Auroville’s Paradigm: A Search
Mustansir Dalvi … Looking for Affirmative Architecture.. in a Disenchanted Age
11 - 11.15 a.m. Tea
11.15 - 12.45 p.m.
Matthijs Cornelissen … Fostering an increasingly Refined Self-Awareness
Alok Pandey … A Greater Psychology of Man
Suneet Varma … Love… and the Triple Path
Rani Jethmalani … Consciousness in the Body: An Experience
1 - 3 p.m. Lunch break
3 - 3.30 p.m. Marc Luyckx Ghisi … Are we entering into a Dematerialized Economy?
3.30 - 4 p.m. Tea
4 - 5.30 p.m. Collective Interaction
6 - 7 p.m. Infinite Matter
Inauguration of an Exhibition by Auroville Artists
Kala Kendra Bharat Nivas
posted by jill

Three layers of culture are part of our learned behavior patterns and perceptions

Our Cultural World What is Culture?
The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.

Layers of Culture
There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.

The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture . In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.

The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:
1. communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2. using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3. classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer tothem (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4. raising children in some sort of family setting
5. having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6. having a concept of privacy
7. having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8. distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9. having some sort of body ornamentation
10. making jokes and playing games
11. having art
12. having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions
While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.

Culture and Society
Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.

While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.

Is Culture Limited to Humans?
There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture. The answer to this question depends on how narrow culture is defined. If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture. Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive. This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys. Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants. Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities. As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults. Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies. Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse. This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth. They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans. Welcome to the 34th edition of Four Stone Hearth

Pinker & Bloom and Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch

Thursday, February 7, 2008 Language Evolution II: Pinker & Bloom
If there is one paper you definitely should cite when writing about Language Evolution, it is the seminal article “Natural Language and Natural Selection” (the prefinal draft can be found here) by Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, which offers a good starting point for giving an overview of discussions about language evolution (Christiansen/Kirby 2003b: 15) because they review the contemporary theoretical paradigms of the field – like that of Chomsky, which I described in my last post – and then argue against them. They refute the view that language is wholly incompatible with Darwinian theory as well as the theory that language could be an exaptation (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 707).

In their opinion, language shows signs of “adaptive complexity”, the term describing “any system composed of many interacting parts where the details of the parts' structure and arrangement suggest design to fulfill some function” (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 709). Natural selection, that is the hypothesis that “the differential reproductive success associated with heritable variation is the primary organizing force in the evolution of organisms”, is the only scientific explanation for the development of such complexity (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 708), which could only have evolved gradually (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 711).The function language evolved for was the communication of complex propositions. As the authors themselves point out, their paper does not so much present a new theory of language evolution as set the methodological framework for a new scientific research program (Pinker/Bloom 1990: 726f.)... Posted by Michael at 10:22 Labels: Adaptation, Language Evolution

Monday, February 11, 2008 Language Evolution III: Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch 2002
When Hauser, known for his strong continuist position, and Chomsky, known as a strong discontinuist, collaborated on the programmatic paper “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” together with W. Tecumseh Fitch, it was, as Derek Bickerton states, “almost as if Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat had coauthored a position paper on the Middle East” (Bickerton 2007: 519).

Just as the 1990 paper by Pinker and Bloom, this paper reviews other hypotheses about language evolution and then, synthesizing a massive amount of comparative data, proposes a new research agenda. It gives a good impression of the state of the discussion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, especially when taking into account the heated debate that revolved around this research program between these authors and Pinker and Jackendoff, which I will describe in my next post.

HCF distinguish between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN). FLB consists of a “sensory-motor” system, including phonetics and phonology, as well as a “conceptual-intentional” system, including semantics and pragmatics (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 182), and may be other systems (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1571f.). It
“includes all of the many mechanisms involved in speech and language, regardless of their overlap with other cognitive domains or with other species”. FLB also comprises FLN, a subset which contains the aspects of language that are responsible for the fact that humans are the only species capable of language, and thereby should be a unique aspect of language as well as humanness (Fitch/Hauser/Chomsky 2005: 180f.).

Thus, research into the evolution of language is divided into three different areas of inquiry, according to the computational systems that comprise the faculty of language, as well as a fourth that is concerned with the interfaces between them. For each component, it has to be assessed whether the capacity is a uniquely human trait or if it is shared with other species, second, whether it developed gradual or saltational, and third, if it was an adaptation for communication or an exaptation of some other computational function (Hauser/Chomsky/ Fitch 2002: 1571).

HCF present three hypotheses which display the opinions of various scholars, with the third as their own viewpoint. The first hypothesis assumes that the faculty of language is strictly homologous to communication components of animals. The second hypothesis, which for example is stated by Pinker and Bloom, is that the faculty of language is a derived, uniquely human and highly complex adaptation for language “and many of its core components can be viewed as individual traits that have been subjected to selection and perfected in recent human evolutionary history”, and can be accounted for by natural selection (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572). HFC take a different stand. Their hypothesis is that only the core component of recursion, that is narrow syntax and the mappings to interfaces of FLB, “is recently evolved and unique to our species” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1573).

Furthermore, they argue that “FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1571), and that recursion could be an exaptation that originally “evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1578). FHC emphasize that their hypothesis needs further empirical research (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1578) but is superior to many other theories because it presents itself in a tentative and testable manner (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572). They advocate that inquiry into problems of language evolution is in need of massive multidisciplinary efforts and much more sampling of comparative data to assess whether a trait evolved specifically for human language or is homologous to animal computations, “although it may be part of the language faculty and play an intimate role in language processing” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1572).

One thing I have to say about the article is that, although I wrote that it offers a good starting point, it actually is pretty murky and unclear, and without reading their “Carifications and Implications” I probably wouldn’t have understood what the whole paper really was about. And I think that the description of the language faculty as “narrow syntax and the mappings to interfaces of FLB,” doesn’t really tell us much regarding explanatory adequacy or how the thing really is supposed to work.

Nevertheless, or maybe even because of this, their proposal caused quite a fuzz, both in the blogosphere (An excellent discussion by Carl Zimmer can be found here (Part I) and here (Part II) and in the form of other articles launched to attack or to enforce HCF’s theory. The most prominent attack probably came from Steven Pinker and their paper “The Faculty of Language: What’s special about it?” I will describe the debate between those two ‘teams’ in my next post.

P.S.: Over at the Language Evolution blog, you can find the second presentation in a series about "Major Language Evolution Papers", this time about a paper by Mesoudi et al. (2004), which discusses the cultural dynamics of evolutionary processes.

References: Bickerton, Derek 2007. “Language Evolution: A Brief Guide for Linguists.” In: Lingua 117, 510–526. Fitch, W. Tecumseh, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky 2005. “The Evolution of the Language Faculty: Clarifications and Implications.” In: Cognition 97, 179-210. Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579. Posted by Michael at 10:50 Labels: Language Evolution, Recursion

Without Pinker and Bloom, linguistics in a Chomskyan vein wouldn’t amount to much more than to some speculations

Shared Symbolic Storage Embodied Evolutionary-Developmental Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and other Stuff Monday, February 4, 2008
Language Evolution I: Noam Chomsky's Earlier Theories
Noam Chomsky is known as one of the strongest and most prominent opponents of the idea that Darwinian natural selection alone can account for the evolution of language...

Chomsky thinks language should be seen as a “spandrel” of some other structural change. The “answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on earth and why, ultimately because of physical principles” (Chomsky 1988: 167). Though he does not deny that evolution played a role in the development of language, he stresses that it possibly emerged only via a small mutation and that ultimately only unknown operations of “physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity” could explain the origin of the language faculty and its properties (Chomsky 1988: 170)...

With the rise of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program this view became more concrete: if only few principles ultimately comprise Universal Grammar (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 219),

“one does not need to advance incremental, adaptationist arguments with intermediate steps to explain much of natural language's specific syntactic design” (Berwick 1998: 322).

Still, without Pinker and Bloom’s seminal article in 1990, on which I will post next, and the work they inspired, linguistics in a Chomskyan vein probably still wouldn’t amount to much more than to some speculations when regarding the question of the evolution of language...

However, in 2002 Chomsky, who by now shruggingly admits that he ‘never would have imagined it would go this far“ (Kenneally 2007), presented an updated, drawn up and more elaborate version of this proposal together with Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch.It is interesting in this regard to look at Marc Hauser's reply to the Edge Annual Question - 2008"What have you changed your mind about?" In it he writes:

"I must admit, however, that in recent years, I have made less use of Darwin’s adaptive logic. It is not because I think that the adaptive program has failed, or that it can’t continue to account for a wide variety of human and animal behavior. But with respect to questions of human and animal mind, and especially some of the unique products of the human mind — language, morality, music, mathematics — I have, well, changed my mind about the power of Darwinian reasoning."

These notions can probably be partly attributed to Hauser's contact with Chomsky's ideas... Posted by Michael at 11:25 Labels: Exaptation, Language Evolution, Noam Chomsky

‘Anthropological Linguistics’ concentrates on the socially-contextualized study of linguistic form

Greater Blogazonia Language and Society in Greater Amazonia
Is it time for a ‘new’ Anthropological Linguistics?
December 27, 2007
Just a few days ago I finally obtained a copy of Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle, which drew my mind back to an issue that has concerned me for several years. Let me explain.
To risk stating the obvious, linguistic form and social action are complexly intertwined: linguistic form is instrumental in social action, and social action both affects the selection of particular elements of linguistic form in communicative interaction, and through the cumulative effects of such selection, drives changes in linguistic form, through processes such as grammaticalization. Nevertheless, there are domains in which, as an idealization, we can usefully treat linguistic form as largely independent of social action, and conversely, social action as largely independent of linguistic form. The viability of these idealizations is evident in the institutionalization of the disciplines of Linguistics, on the one hand, and disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology, on the other. I have no quarrel with the fact that these disciplines are oriented towards research in which the idealizations based on the relative independence of linguistic form and social action hold sway. However, I believe that this institutionalization of the division of the linguistic-formal/social-actional continuum has had an unfortunate effect on the study of the vast middle ground of phenomena for which these idealizations are untenable. Numerous scholars have, of course, recognized that the idealizations in questions are problematic in certain respects, leading to the rise of several hybrid sub-disciplines: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology/conversational analysis, and the sociology of language among them.
Each of these subdisciplines has made important contributions to understanding the middle ground in which linguistic form and social action are irreducibly intertwined, but I also believe that the disciplinary centers of gravity around which they orbit have tended to pull each subdiscipline towards the respective idealizations of independence of linguistic form and social action that characterize the core of each institutionalized discipline. To be clear, this has not affected each sub-discipline’s capacity to do valuable work, as each still focuses on some portion of the linguistic-formal/social-actional spectrum that merits attention. But the overall consequence has been, in my opinion, to create (or recreate, or perhaps, leave) a gap in attention to the middle of the spectrum where linguistic form and social action are so tightly intertwined that serious attention must be paid to both.
This problem is revealed clearly, in the realm of Anthropology, at a number of points in Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle, which examines issues of subdisciplinarity in Anthropology. There are several relevant and thought-provoking passages in this collection, but I’d like to zero in on one in James Clifford’s contribution which speaks directly to the issue of the institutional division of labor with respect to the intersection of linguistic form and social action. Since he articulates the view from the anthropological hill so nicely, I quote him at length:
Perhaps the most dramatic disarticulation of the four fields ensemble [i.e. archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and physical anthropology] has taken place with respect to “linguistic anthropology.” Most departments today do not feel the need for a distinct linguistic track or faculty cluster. The study of linguistic process is very much part of anthropological work, but it tends to be seen as one of sociocultural anthropology’s many provinces. Few anthropologists now study “languages” in the sustained descriptive/analytic way that was common to the generation of Sapir or Kroeber. As Silverstein argues (this volume), “Linguistic anthropology is sociocultural anthropology with a twist, the theoretical as well as instrumental (via ‘discourse’ or ‘the discursive’) worrying of our same basic data, semiosis in various orders of contextualization.
Here Clifford alludes to two related processes: the progressive elimination of linguistic anthropology from anthropology departments, and, in the minority of cases where it survives or flourishes, the ascendance within linguistic anthropology of theoretical concerns and methods dominant in cultural anthropology, and the concomitant marginalization of theory and methods related to linguistic form. As far as I see the disciplinary situation, the convergence of linguistic and cultural anthropology in recent decades is in itself a fine development; there is much interesting work being done in this vein. However, I do see a regrettable side-effect: the emergence of a significant gap in research coverage of a part of the linguistic-social spectrum to which linguistic anthropology used to attend. Specifically, I see a significant gap emerging in the area of the study of linguistic form as a socially-embedded phenomenon — that is, linguistic form as an instrument of social action and conversely, social action as a factor that affects linguistic form.
Lest I be seen as exaggerating the problem, let me point out that there is some work that I believe focuses on precisely the area in question, such as Bill Hank’s work on referential practice, John Haviland’s work on spatial deixis and evidentiality, and some of Alessandro Duranti’s work on Samoan ethnopragmatics, among others. However, work of this type is becoming rarer in the pages of journals like the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and Language and Society.
My sense is that linguistic anthropology’s estrangement from the close study of linguistic form constitutes a major change in the orientation of the discipline, and one that is unlikely to be reversed in the near future. It seems to me that those of us who believe that the socially-contextualized study of linguistic form is important and valuable need to find a new intellectual space in which to organize our efforts, and new institutional spaces where such work can be based. As my post title suggests, I am fond of the new-old name ‘Anthropological Linguistics’ as a denomination for a field that concentrates on the socially-contextualized study of linguistic form, but I could imagine others. Regardless, I think the real question is whether Anthropological Linguistics, so defined, can organize itself into a productive community and find an institutional home. Posted by Lev Michael Filed in Academia 7 Responses to “Is it time for a ‘new’ Anthropological Linguistics?”

Lev Michael Says: January 1, 2008 at 11:40 am
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — or the congerie of ideas under the rubric of ‘linguistic relativity’ — does still get attention. There was quite a surge of interest in the area during the 1990s, at least in part driven by work at MPI. However, as thinking about linguistic relativity has gotten more sophisticated and more empirically grounded, the old idea that a people’s ‘language’ (normally contrued by enthusiasts of this idea as its lexicon and/or some of its inflectional categories) can be used to explore or deduce a people’s ‘world view’ or the like, has come to seem less and less viable. One major difficulty with successfully implementing this idea is that the correspondence between how peoples perceive their surroundings and the lexicons and the grammars of the languages peoples speak is sufficiently loose that it is in general it is not feasible to reach both reliable and interesting (to a cultural anthropologist or archeologist) conclusions about a people’s world view on the basis of lexical or grammatical information alone.
Grammatical systems are frequently embedded in complex and interesting conceptual schemes, but I don’t think that these schemes are, in general, on the order of the kinds of ‘world view’-type insights that certain versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seem to promise. To take an example, Iquito, an Amazonian language that I have worked on, exhibits a combined lexico-grammatical system for expressing location, orientation, and direction in space, based in large part on a system of orientation relative to rivers (e.g. upriver, downriver, away from the river, towards the river, etc) and isomorphisms between the river-based system and interior-exterior and horizontal-vertical systems of orientation. The system is fascinatingly complex, as it has grammaticalized spatial relationships that take into acount the simultaneous positions and orientations of the referent, speaker, and hearer relative to the river. Based on this, one can work out all the spatial relationships a speaker of Iquito needs to consider in order to use the lexico-grammatical spatial system correctly, and I suppose it would be reasonable to consider the conceptual schemas involved to form part of how Iquitos think about the world around them. But at the end of the day, what does one have? In my view, simply the observation that Iquito speakers attend to positions and orientations relative to rivers, and that they divide up space in certain ways based on those relative positions and orientations.
So, while I find the study of conceptual schemes underlying lexico-grammatical systems like the one I just described to be interesting for its own sake, and for its ability to answer questions about how people lexicalize and grammaticalize their conceptualizations of space, I’m not sure that this kind of work goes very far in the direction of providing the kind of ‘emic’ approach you would see as being helpful to archeologists. But maybe archeologists would find these kinds of results useful. What do you think?
I want to add that I can think of at least two other ways, apart from traditional comparative linguistics, to which you allude, that the study of language could be helpful to archeologists. First, the study of language contact has really begun to take off in the last decade, and it looks like the study of areal linguistic phenomenon, coupled to traditional historical linguistics, could be a powerful tool to uncover prior contact between groups speaking different languages, and even deduce certain aspects of the nature of that contact.
The second area is the systematic use of linguistic reconstruction to reconstruct the lexicons of protolanguages, which can give us significant insight into cultures of the speakers of those protolanguages, and even, in some cases, the locations of those peoples. Emile Benveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society is an example of some of the things that can be done in this area.
Unfortunately, neither of the two approaches that I mentioned are of any significance in current linguistic anthropology. I do think that they are prime candidates for important areas in a newly-reconstituted anthropological linguistics, however. Welcome to the 34th edition of Four Stone Hearth

Distinct social identities by exaggerating differences in language

New languages evolve in rapid bursts
Posted on 2 February, 2008 by Ed Yong
The birth of new languages is accompanied by a burst of rapid evolution consisting of large changes in vocabulary that are followed by long periods of relatively slower change.
Languages are often compared to living species because of the way in which they diverge into new tongues over time in an ever-growing linguistic tree. Some critics have claimed that this comparison is a superficial one, a nice metaphor but nothing more.
But the new study by Quentin Atkinson, now at the University of Oxford, suggests that languages evolve at a similar stop-and-start pace, which uncannily echoes a long-standing theory in biology, known as ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The theory’s followers claim that life on Earth also evolved at an uneven pace, full of rapid bursts and slow periods.
Famously championed by the late Stephen Jay Gould, the punctuated equilibrium theory suggests that most species change very little over time and big evolutionary changes are concentrated at rare moments where new species branch off from existing lineages. Together with colleagues from the US and New Zealand, Atkinson found similar patterns in three of the worlds’ largest families of languages.
Three families
They compared lists of words from the Indo-European group, which include English and Hindi; the Bantu group, consisting of several hundred African languages; and the Austronesian group, which includes over a thousand tongues from Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Polynesian islands. Between them, these three families account for a third of all the world’s languages.
Of course, languages borrow words from each other all the time and indeed, 50% of English words are loans from French and Latin. That was a potential pitfall of the study and Atkinson avoided it by only considering basic words such as numerals, body parts and pronouns that are very unlikely to have been co-opted from another tongue.
For each group, Atkinson built a family tree showing how newer languages split off from ancestral ones. The trees mirrored those that biologists use to chart the evolutionary relationships between species.
In the model, the birth of new languages is represented by new branches on the tree and the length of each branch depends on the difference in vocabulary between the new tongue and its parent one. The greater the changes, the longer the branch.
In each family tree, Atkinson saw that the parts of the tree with the most branches also had the longest ones. So groups that spawned the highest number of new languages also diverged most significantly in their repertoire of words. That’s the pattern you would expect if the birth of new languages triggered bursts of rapid evolution. If the pace of evolution was more constant, the number of branch points would have no effect on overall branch length.
The need for speed
These rapid bursts accounted for 31% of the vocabulary differences between Bantu speakers, 21% of the differences in Indo-European languages and 10% of the variation in the Austronesian group. For comparison, team estimated that these fast and slow evolutionary cycles explained about 22% of the genetic differences between biological species.
As they split from each other, new sister tongues begin to adopt new words at a fast pace and these are probably accompanied by equally quick changes in pronunciation, spelling and grammar. As their identities become clearer, the pace of change slows.
Atkinson thinks that this process happens when different groups of people try to establish distinct social identities by exaggerating differences in language. American English may have developed along these lines and the need for a unique identity was at the forefront of Noah Webster’s mind when he published his first American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. “As an independent nation, our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,” he said.
For more on the evolution of language, have a look at this post on the evolution of the past tense in English verbs. Filed under: Evolution, Language Tagged: language evolution, linguistics, punctuated equilibrium

Harmony between a thing and its name

The First Congress of Ethnozoological Nomenclature
By establishing a harmony between a thing and its name, we conform to a psychic habit as old as humanity (Vendryès) ...www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00271.x -

Joseph Vendryes (1875-1960) was a French linguist. After studying with Antoine Meillet, he was École Pratique des Hautes Études's chairman of Celtic languages and literature. He founded the journal Études celtiques. He was a member of Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.

Quote
Language is a physiological act since it uses many organs of the human body. It is a psychological act since it supposes the willing activity of the spirit. It is a social act since it fulfils a need for communication between men. Lastly it is a historical fact, attested under various forms. — Le Langage, introduction linguistique à l'histoire. 1921.

This dominant idea India has never quite forgotten

Sri Aurobindo

The master idea that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life - subject to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature - as a frame and means for that discovery and for man's ascent from the ignorant natural into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite forgotten even under the stress and material exigencies and the externalities of political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social life an expression of man's true self and some highest realisation of the spirit within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art, literature, and while in these India reached extraordinary heights and largenesses, she could not in the outward life go beyond certain very partial realisations and very imperfect tentatives, - a general spiritualising symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain cast given to the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the spiritual idea. Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two first and grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian system, interest and hedonistic desire: Dharma, the higher law, has nowhere been brought more than partially into this outer side of life, and in politics to a very minimum extent, for the effort at governing political action by ethics is usually little more than a pretence.

The coordination or true union of the collective outward life with moksa the liberated spiritual existence, has hardly even been conceived or attempted, much less anywhere succeeded in the past history of the yet hardly adult human race. Accordingly, we find that the governance by the Dharma of India's social, economic and even, though here the attempt broke down earlier than in other spheres, her political rule of life, system, turn of existence, with the adumbration of a spiritual significance behind, - the full attainment of the spiritual life being left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual, - was as far as her ancient system could advance. This much endeavour, however, she did make with persistence and patience and it gave a peculiar type to her social polity. It is perhaps for a future India, taking up and enlarging with a more complete aim, a more comprehensive experience, a more certain knowledge that shall reconcile life and the spirit, her ancient mission, to found the status and action of the collective being of man on the realisation of the deeper spiritual truth, the yet unrealised spiritual potentialities of our existence and so ensoul the life of her people as to make it the Lila of the greater Self in humanity, a conscious communal soul and body of Virat, the universal spirit.

Another point must be noted which creates a difference between the ancient polity of India and that of the European peoples and makes the standards of the West as inapplicable here as in the things of the mind and the inner culture. Human society has in its growth to pass through three stages of evolution before it can arrive at the completeness of its possibilities.

The first is a condition in which the forms and activities of the communal existence are those of the spontaneous play of the powers and principles of its life. All its growth, all its formations, customs, institutions are then a natural organic development, - the motive and constructive power coming mostly from the subconscient principle of the life within it, - expressing, but without deliberate intention, the communal psychology, temperament, vital and physical need, and persisting or altering partly under the pressure of an internal impulse, partly under that of the environment acting on the communal mind and temper. In this stage the people is not yet intelligently self-conscious in the way of the reason, is not yet a thinking collective being, and it does not try to govern its whole communal existence by the reasoning will, but lives according to its vital intuitions or their first mental renderings. The early framework of Indian society and polity grew up in such a period as in most ancient and mediaeval communities, but also in the later age of a growing social self-consciousness they were not rejected but only farther shaped, developed, systematised so as to be always, not a construction of politicians, legislators and social and political thinkers, but a strongly stable vital order natural to the mind, instincts and life intuitions of the Indian people... Page-336 Location: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Foundation Of Indian Culture Volume-14 > Indian Polity

Sri Aurobindo uses Supermind as a vehicle to reconcile history and spirit, the temporal with the eternal

Re: Sri Aurobindo and Evolution: A Critical Perspective : 2008 (occult slippages and cultural considerations) by ned on Sat 09 Feb 2008 03:20 PM PST Profile Permanent Link

I have been discussion the whole idea of evolutionary spirituality with a Sufi friend. There is "horizontal" (biological and cultural) evolution and "vertical" evolution. When we speak of the "vertical" ascension of the soul to the Divine, I feel Sri Aurobindo is only really using "evolution" as a metaphor. Because in this process, what's happening is not really a progression in time, but a transcendence of history altogether (time emerges as the Eternal Now). So the process of Supramentalization would presumably lead to the end of history. Thoughts, anyone?

Reply by Rich on Sun 10 Feb 2008 09:09 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

Certainly there seems to be a rupture with our present experience of history, but he does suggest a supramental time vision -trikaladristi-. So rather then being an end to history it maybe better understood as a radical discontinuity, or a transformation of history in which we -or the superman/woman- will come to experiences it not as the linear progression of time but rather in its simultaneity of past, present, future.

Sri Aurobindo uses Supermind as a vehicle to reconcile history and spirit, the temporal with the eternal. Unfortunately, the complexity in such a bold vision is that in asserting that the “progressive evolution of history” through the descent of a timeless spirit, will result in the salvation of history itself, one must engage two very different interpretative schemes, one physical/historical the other mythological/metaphysical.

We mortals seem to have problems reconciling those perspectives. Which means there is the same tendency in a belief system which envisages salvation trough supramentalization as prevalent among those religions whose revelation is the transformation of history through a final rapture, namely to collapse the multi-dimensionality with which it resonates in our soul life to a one dimensional literalization as historical prophecy

It is high time that the world opened its heart to him

You Asked About Sri Aurobindo - 25 Answers
- Arun and Pavitra Amin Other titles by Authors
( Format of Book - PDF )
This book gives an insight into the life of Sri Aurobindo. Through Twenty-Five questions and answers the authors introduce the reader to Sri Aurobindo's experiences and teachings.

"This is a charming, insightful, wholly delightful book. But far more important, it is a book that teaches us so very much. Again and again in their writings the Amins have guided us to face the inspiration and wisdom of the East. Now here in a gentle, original way they present questions that gracefully reveal Sri Aurobindo. This saintly man is said to have "carried the world in his heart." It is high time that the world opened its heart to him. The Amins' latest book enables us to do so." reviewed By Harry Cahil
Part 1 - Front Cover Part 2 - Inside Pages Part 3 - Back Cover
click here for Windows version click here for Macintosh version

Classical-bred artists have invested their learning in the old questions, the old inquiries, the old truths

The end of the leading edge of consciousness from The Daily Goose by Matthew

No one can point to the influence of the idea of “the leading edge of consciousness” upon genuinely timeless fine art. Thinking that way on the part of art lovers is a manner of actually avoiding the specific qualities and internal logic that the object of fine art possesses (due to the nature of the New Age being generic boilerplate thought). Thinking that way for artists is nothing but a shortcut around the hard work of fine artistry that is bound to fail, precisely because the hard work of fine artistry is avoided. Any fine artist can claim their fine art is at the leading edge; any lover of fine art can claim that fine art they love is at the leading edge. But why should I believe them, and why should I even care? It is a tag applicable wherever one wants. It is crack for the artistically lazy and narrow-minded. It is propaganda meant to sell something in the marketplace that otherwise is pathetic kitsch...

What is the reason we return to the work of classical-bred artists time and time again? It is because they have invested their learning in the old questions, the old inquiries, the old truths. It is because their mastery of chosen discipline is impeccable. There simply is no other demonstrable way that we know about for a work of fine art to reliably go timeless than to undergo deep learning in the liberal arts (the classical liberal arts), and then move into deep learning in the chosen discipline of fine art through apprenticeship over many years, and then converse with thought from other disciplines (i.e. interdisciplinary learning), and then to create fine art in a syntopical fashion where one’s original classical liberal arts-born learning returns full bore as the timeless content of the reactions to the work on the part of the audience (i.e. transdisciplinary learning). This begets something remarkable—a work of fine art, by means of its aesthetic symbols, is finally a participant in the Great Conversation.

The term “original” should mean nothing of what it means today. The term should mean — and does mean under the layers of industrial age, postmodern, progressive and New Age gunk — “born of the path that returns to one’s origins”; i.e., original means nothing outside the context of tradition, of classical thought, of conservatism in its broadest sense (broader than politics, but in general contours, inclusive of political conservatism of the American variety, the ideas and principles of which itself goes back to ancient Greek and Roman thought, which directly and demonstrably informed the Founding Fathers, and classical liberalism in general).

Being original is the entire game of fine artistry. Nothing else is important. Nothing else matters. Nothing, including the endless blather about “leading edge of consciousness”. Which is a pipe dream concocted by stoners and other drug addicts and then peddled into the wider world for general consumption by those who don’t have the constitution or discipline to enjoy anything but thin soup and will make nothing except disposable art-like substance. Talk of “the leading edge of consciousness” is coward talk, pure and simple.

If you are genuinely interested in great artistry, then you will drop all pretensions to “leading edge of consciousness” and get to work understanding the origins of your assumptions, the origins of the old knowledge, the origins of your aesthetic discipline, and the origins of the ideas that animate and touch the best minds throughout recorded history. It is a lifetime of work, the best I can tell. But how could it be any other way? Who would want it to be? For knowledge of our origins comes as the return on our investment of enormous time and energy it takes to earn a right to utter or evoke originality, in the first place.

The moment that you objectify anything you automatically seek to control it

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "A profoundly atheistic interpretation of the natur...":

Exoteric religions (as per "faith" and theology) and scientism, share the same basic reductionist presumptions. Namely that we are inherently separate from the Divine Conscious Light, from the world process altogether, and from each other. All of these are presumed to be entirely "other" are are thus objectified.

One of the Upanishads tells us that whenever there is presumed other then fear spontaneously arises. What is more the objectified "other" is always thus your enemy, and you are always thus at war with everything "other" including the Divine Coscious Light. Plus the moment that you objectify anything you automatically seek to control it (the "other"), and will thus eventually destroy the "other". So how "profound" could anyones understanding of anything possibly be when they are completely wrapped up in this (hell deep) fear based asana?

And what has the "resurrection of jesus" got to do with anything? What about the tooth fairy, santa claus, and the easter rabbit, all of which belong (with "jesus") to the same pantheon of childhood cartoon characters. Theology reduces the Divine Conscious Light to the merely mortal meat-body human scale. And thus both controls the Divine and uses the "divine" to justify the inevitable horrors produced, justified, and promoted by the ecclesiastical "authorities". Murder and mayhem, imperial conquest, and empire justified by the genocidal tribal deity. Posted by Anonymous to Savitri Era Open Forum at 10:47 AM, February 06, 2008

Judeo-Christian and Esoteric Hindu traditions are the missing parts of one another

Combining Western Know-How with Eastern Be-Who from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

As the two world-historical streams -- the Abrahamic and Brahmanic -- meandered and ramified, they took very different courses before arriving at oddly parallel conclusions. In the West, science pursued the material world down to the atom, eventually passing beyond it to discover an implicate realm of unbroken wholeness flowing beneath our misleading perceptions of duration and solidity. Vedanta proceeded in the opposite direction, tracing the illusory contours of our world-representation down to the explicate self, and then smashing it to discover another vast realm of unbroken wholeness and unity beneath our contingent and transient egos...

After Schopenhauer had already completed his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, he discovered one of the first available copies of the Upanishads to appear in the Western world, a poor Latin translation of a Persian translation of the original Sanskrit. And yet, he immediately recognized that the Vedic seers had come to the identical conclusion about the world that he had -- except that they had found a way to pass beyond it, not through thought, but by somehow transcending thought.

For the rest of his life, Schopenhauer read a few pages of the Upanishads every night before going to sleep. He called it "the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world; it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death." It is one of the ironies of Western civilization that its elites -- often for good reason -- rejected Christianity, only to rediscover some of its buried truths in a form more acceptable to them in Eastern religions. Obviously the same thing occurs today among the non-elite, with countless people embracing pseudo-forms of Eastern religion (i.e., "realizationism"), since big-box Christianity continues to bury much of its own mystical and intellectual Light under a bushel of divine salesmanship.

In any event, the problem that developed in India was that, in recognizing the illusory nature of the phenomenal world, they focussed only on escaping it. The only true reality was Brahman, transcendent, immobile, unchanging, beyond this world of illusion and suffering. It is fair to say that this dismissive attitude toward the world hindered economic and political development in India for hundreds of years, for the world is real, just not ultimately real -- or, if you like, it is illusion, but not only illusion.

In the West, we enthusiastically plunged into the external world, and yet, we are in danger of being marooned there in a spiritual wasteland of material abundance and sensory pleasure. Throughout history, human beings have been dreaming of the amenities we take for granted, and yet, it is never enough.

I am anything but a free-market basher, but our material abundance has become spiritually problematic for many -- who are like those bleating last men prophesied by Nietzsche, wallowing in their pitiable comfort. Obviously, most Americans still hunger for spiritual experience, and yet, all too often they don't seem able to make religion "work" for them -- something seems to be missing, some key that would unlock the inner significance of religious belief and practice. If a religion is working, it should lead to real knowledge and real change. It shouldn't just come down to simply accepting this or that doctrine and hoping for the best.

In my view, the Judeo-Christian and Esoteric Hindu traditions are the missing parts of one another, at least in form if not in substance. In exploring and conquering the material world, the former extends from the center to the periphery, or from the One to the many. Vedanta proceeds in the other direction, from the periphery back to the center, from the many back to the One. In reality, neither approach is completely valid or invalid. Rather, the Real would be a dynamic synthesis (not mere blending) of the two, a "transcendent position" that unifies the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the global brain, allowing us to live in a third dialectical or "transitional" space between the external world and the mysterious Subject that is the source of both the world and ourSelves.

V. Madhusudan Reddy writes that "Mankind has benefitted broadly by the two central spiritual streams which were complementary to each other. The one that watered the West has been essentially the aspiration for the salvation of the world, the emancipation of humanity [through] the descent of God's grace.... The [stream] that was perfected in the East and especially in India was the liberation of the individual through his ascent into the Divine himself. An exclusive stress on the first results in preoccupation with the material world, whereas the all too exclusive preoccupation with individual liberation leads to complete disregard of the world of humanity. An integration of these two ways, a wider and luminous fusion of their insights, will provide a tangible and enduring basis of spiritual life on the earth."

In the last 6,000 years, human beings have undergone various revolutions. The agrarian revolution involved learning how to grow things, while the industrial revolution involved learning how to make things. The current information revolution involves knowing things. The coming onto-noetic revolution will involve learning how to be something. Or more simply, knowing how to be (which is to say, unKnow and non-do in order to grow into no-thing).

Language relationships are accurate but many languages are left out

The Indo-European Language Tree from Anthropology.net by Kambiz Kamrani

To supplement last week’s discussion on language evolution, I stumbled upon an Indo-European language tree posted on Jonathan Beaton’s blog. Neither Jonathan nor do not know where it was published, nor what data was used to construct the tree and its relationships. So it may not be completely accurate… but it is a nifty illustration. Just cause I’m curious on how accurate the tree is, I’ve compared to Ethnologue’s report on Indo-European languages. The general trend on language relationships are accurate but many languages are left out.

Bible is primarily a linear account of the historical dealings of God and man, whereas the Upanishads are mainly timeless accounts

This is Not a Post About Vedanta and Christianity
from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

Just finished a serious and challenging book called Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism, by an anonymous French "Monk of the West" (although his identity is known). This is an area that is particularly dear to me, since I find myself equally drawn to Yoga and Christianity. Being that I am unable to choose between the two, perhaps it is my destiny to try to recooncile them. Of course, that doesn't mean blending them, which would only reconsully both. Rather, it's more like "cross referencing." In so doing, one must proceed very cautiously, because it is possible to use words in a manner they were never intended just to achieve a superficial ecumenism.

For example, the idea that Jesus was "just another guru" -- or an instance of the avatar principle (the descent of the divine in human form, or "Godman") -- would be a non-starter, doing violence to both Christianity and Yoga. One has to be willing to consider the idea that avatars exist, but that there is only one begotten son. Likewise, although "ascended masters" have surely passed this way, to restrict Jesus to the category of a mere fleshlight would be to miss the whole point.

In the end, the Monk makes only the claim that Orthodox Christianity and the classic Vedanta of Shankara are not incompatible, as opposed to being identical. For example, Meister Eckhart, according to no less an authority than Vladimir Lossky, expresses "a vision of the unity of being which is not pantheistic monism, but rather a Christian 'non-dualism,' appropriate to the idea of the world created ex nihilo by the all-powerful God of the Bible -- 'He who is.'" In other words, at the very least, Christianity is capacious enough to formulate a doctrine of non-dualism in its own terms...

In the preface to the book, Alvin Moore describes Christianity at its core as "a bhaktic esoterism," while in common practice it is "an exoteric religion of love," thereby accessible to "a considerable sector or mankind." He goes on to say that since only God can truly know God, to know God is to "become him." Or, if that doesn't sound quite right, our knowledge of God "is God's knowledge of Himself through man as instrument," a formulation that might well have come from the pen of Meister Eckhart.

Now, exactly what is Vedanta? Unlike Christianity, there is no doctrinal unity in Hinduism, but Vedanta is essentially the experiential confirmation of "the mystery of the divine Absolute, the transcendent Self which constitutes the deepest stratum of our being." It is the highest sacred and esoteric wisdom of Hinduism, preserved in the Upanishads, which one might roughly say are to eternity as the Bible is to time. That is, the Bible is primarily a linear account of the historical dealings of God and man, whereas the Upanishads are mainly timeless accounts of purely vertical encounters between the ancient "Vedic seers" and the Absolute.

In turn, the Bhagavad Gita may be thought of as an attempt to "horizontalize" the vertical message of the Upanishads in a mythological form for a more popular audience. This is only superficially analogous to the Bible, because the Bible's theology is derived from the story, so to speak, whereas in the case of the Gita, the story is the instantiation of the theology (although there are purely philosophical/theological parts of the Bible, e.g., Proverbs, and purely metaphysical rants by Krishna, the god-man of the Gita).

I suppose it's no coincidence that my favorite Christian theologians (e.g., Dionysius, Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, John Scottus Eriugena) often sound like vedic seers. For example, I might well have cited Nicholas to support the Cosmogenesis section of my book: