Intelligence is an impartial seeker of the truth

Alethetics from Larval Subjects

Every great philosopher proposes a frame, a new window through which to encounter the world… We no less frame selections of the world than we are seized by selections of the world. 

The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji permalink

The book is dedicated to Richard Hartz who completed the Herculean task of making the diaries of Sri Aurobindo available for the first time and who served as an important guide to the text for Banerji. It is Banerji’s genius however, to have offered an interpretation of the text that both renews Sri Aurobindo’s relevance for 21st century intellectual culture and also provides the follower of Aurobindo’s yoga with an exegesis of the Record of Yoga that enables them to comprehend this extremely important text. POSTHUMAN DESTINIES

Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji Posted March 14, 2012 Permalink

How does one know what he has abandoned? SA used different terminologies and different formulations in different texts; this doesn’t necessarily mean he abandoned one for the other. 

Finally, the siddhis and anandas spoken of in the Record are not addressed anywhere else but can clearly be seen in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s own functioning. Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji by debbanerji from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji

debbanerji Posted March 15, 2012 at 1:16 am | Permalink

I may add that in my opinion, in the physical absence of the Mother, the danger of distortion by the vital emotional being that Sri Aurobindo wrote about in the chapter on the Intuitive Mind is very much increased, so that the demand for the shuddhi of the prana and the importance of the emergence of the mental pursha as a purifying agent, is greater today. Without these, we are seeing the repeated and insistent mouthing of the need for psychic emergence accompanied by fanatical narrowness and disturbed emotionalism.

debbanerji Posted March 15, 2012 at 1:54 pm | Permalink

Of course, this is the guru tradition of India and it was undoubtedly a tremendous advantage to have the physical presence and action of the Mother, but I think it was reduced to a formula by the devotees and reified into a habitus, that “helped cultivate an atmosphere that over time has facilitated the development of fanatical extremism in certain followers.”

debbanerji Posted March 15, 2012 at 3:59 pm | Permalink

What he taught to disciples after 1930 seems to me to be a fomulation which he found most suitable to its practice for those disciples given the prevailing conditions of the ashram, not necessarily a formulation he privileged over others which he saw or practised himself…

According to Sri Aurobindo, terminology and structire are never absolute, they are devised to follow process. Changes of emphasis in practice would demand a change in terminology and structure. Practices, on their part, would change depending on milieu and circumstance, not necessarily due to new understandings…

The yoga the Mother made available arose from the direct access to the psychic being which her physical presence and occult action made possible. However, even this needed the sadhak to distinguish between an active and a passive surrender and open to the detailed work (which I believe is what is given in the Record) whose possibilities the Mother’s action would open up. The Record equally relies on the Mother’s (the Divine Shakti) and the Ishwara’s power and presence, only here the physical component of the shakti avatar is missing.  

debbanerji Posted March 16, 2012 at 8:47 pm | Permalink

Sri Aurobindo privileges the purification of the buddhi and the emergence of the mental purusha in the Synthesis (not only in Part IV), calling man primarily “a mental being” and saying that the evolution of nature has prepared in man an intelligence (buddhi) which is an impartial seeker of the truth and saying that it is easier to build a quiet mind (silence in the inner mind) or even to still the mind for the emergence of the mental purusha and rise to the planes above the mind. For this reason also, he calls for the Shakti to be invoked from above the mind, to descend and purify the lower parts of the being. A quiet mind or silent mind also facilitates this descent of the Shakti. With the Mother’s presence in the ashram, this necessity is replaced by the Mother’s physical action (though this also aids in the descent of Shakti from above)…

I do think he felt the psychic change to be difficult before the Mother came. The Indian tradition has developed schools of bhakti yoga to aid in the purification of the emotional being and Sri Aurobindo gives us his own integral version of this in the Yoga of Divine Love; but the kind of access to the psychic being provided by these traditional schools are generally partial at best. All I’m saying is that the access to the psychic being was made much easier by the physical presence of the Mother;

Kepler Posted March 16, 2012 at 10:27 pm | Permalink

Baring that, it would seem at least as plausible to me that the meeting of the oceans of spiritual consciousness that were Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the flesh resulted in some genuinely new yogic possibilities and orientations, and some of the terminology subsequently developed (e.g. psychic being) reflected that. In this view the reason he didn’t use the same language and give the same stress to the psychic earlier was not that he thought it was too difficult and dangerous, but that it wasn’t as fully known or experienced (or experienceable) in quite the same way earlier. There are a number of places where Sri Aurobindo refers to earlier stages of his sadhana and the writings corresponding to those periods, as having been superseded in various ways by later developments in his sadhana. (Given that sadhana is all about ever-increasing consciousness and experience, this doesn’t really seem surprising.)

Nothing wrong with making a bold claim, but if the primary support of yours is that some of the people violently upset by PH’s book also talk a lot about the psychic being, thus the pursuit of the psychic opening must have become dangerous, I guess I’m still looking for some additional justification.

debbanerji Posted March 16, 2012 at 11:29 pm | Permalink

At one place, he writes about the development of the “yogic consciousness” as a prerequisite to the emergence of the true soul. The yogic consciousness is the purified inner being under the control of the mental purusha. [Yoga of Works, Supermind and the Yoga of Works: Synthesis, CWSA: 281-82]. In this light, one may think of four transformations, not three. A part of the Record could be thought of as relating to the development of a yogic consciousness.

Comment on The Seven Quartets of Becoming by Debashish Banerji by Kepler from Comments for Posthuman Destinies by Kepler

I don’t think you can take texts from very different periods and assume he is talking about exactly all the same things and only choosing a different word here and there. Thus there’s reason to give more importance to his later expressions over much earlier ones.

Rupturing self-referential circles

Ancient Indian Wisdom and Contemporary Challenges

Kireet Joshi

The hope built up by the Reason that humanity can be so rationally governed that liberty, equality and fraternity can be actualized in the life of humanity has now been demonstrably proved to be unrealisable, since rationality is unable to provide equality, even at the minimum level, without strangulating freedom, and fraternity does not find even an elbow room when Reason goes on constructing, mechanising and dehumanising edifices. And yet it is not possible to remain reconciled with the failures of the powers of Reason and to forget the dreams of freedom, unity and brotherhood. The soul of humanity cries out to look for the means by which the ideals of progress can be actualised as urgently as possible…

We may hasten to add that while the importance of the ancient wisdom of India is to be underlined, we should not be blind to the need of exploring other systems of wisdom and even new knowledge. Ancient Indian wisdom has always counselled us to rise higher and higher and to be always more and more luminous, unfettered by the past and any dogmas or preconceived beliefs. In India, we speak of the Aryan spirit, and the Aryan spirit is not something narrow or communal or racial, but the spirit of the free man that wants to labour and work with wisdom and with one supreme motive of loka sangrah, the motive of preserving and creating solidarity and unity of the people. (Reproduced from the author’s book entitled Indian Identity and Cultural Continuity, 2011, pp. 35-49, with the kind permission of The Mother’s Institute of Research, New Delhi) Sraddha February 2012 Sri Aurobindo Centre for Research in Social Sciences, Kolkata

Peter Heehs - Shades of Orientalism: Paradoxes & Problems in Indian Historiography Peter Heehs  [published in History and Theory 42 (May 2003), pp.169-195 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656] 

Such scholars stress Aurobindo’s nationalistic premises but miss the broader thrust of his arguments… The approach of the nationalists was a product of their age, and much of it is obsolete. Their essentializing of the Indian soul, for instance, is unjustifiable on historical or anthropological grounds, and politically dangerous. On the other hand, the dissolution of all cultural distinctiveness in the name of political stability, which Said seems sometimes to propose,[109] would also be bad social science and would not provide a solution to our political problems.

Writers like Chatterji, Tagore and Aurobindo laid stress on India’s distinctiveness because it seemed threatened by absorption into a universalized Europe. But they were also internationalists who knew and respected Europe and worked for intercultural understanding.[110] Their defenders and detractors lay stress on their essentialism, but they themselves went beyond it, contesting the validity of Eurocentrism without promoting an equally imperfect Indocentrism. Pondicherry, India 11:14 AM

"Sri Aurobindo on Hinduism" by Peter Heehs -- reviewed by Raman Reddy 12 Aug 2010 – The following paragraph is from a booklet by Peter Heehs entitled Sri Aurobindo on Hinduism and published by the Sri Aurobindo Society, ...

What is postcolonial predicament? Ranabir Samaddar, EPW

One of the reasons behind this return to antiquity in the metropolitan world today is possibly due to an ahistorical notion of critique, produced from within the realm of theory, that delinks knowledge from social practices and makes critique an element in the self-referential cycle of ideas and discourses, be they philosophical, literary, or scientific. This was the reason why Marx broke with this idea of critique, argued that we must begin critique by arms, expounded the famous theses eleven, in particular the 11th thesis (1845), wrote the critique of political economy, and grounded critique in modern empirical reality to show the inexhaustible nature of the reality that a formal discipline cannot subsume. Knowledge, as distinct from theory, which now appears rechristened as critique, on the other hand, progresses in a continuously developing frame of ideas and material practices, perched on the borderlines of these two domains. The question of limits, plasticity, etc, is linked to this borderline existence. Therefore it is not enough to assimilate humanities with critique or criticism unless we know what we are critiquing and the limits we are reflecting thereby, the limits produced by the outside – the reality – that we have to invoke in order to produce a critique. Through all these we have before us emerging two worlds or styles of knowledge: In one, the self-referential nature of producing knowledge is supreme, in the other the production of data is supreme leaving no time for self-referential exercises in terms of genealogy of knowledge, perhaps to its own good…

In our time Foucault became the American Foucault through translation inasmuch as Tagore became the mystic Oriental in Europe, and Karl Marx became the academic Marx in the Anglo-American universities. This is because in this site called translation there is no engagement with the world and the milieu these figures represent or represented. If there were some, it was only engagement with discourses. There are all kinds of translation programmes (perhaps the most under-researched ones by translation theorists are the Foreign Language Publishing Houses in erstwhile socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, possibly the largest), not only translation between languages but between mediums also. Therefore there cannot be any general theory of translation, save the fact that it is part of the logistics of the global production of knowledge.

Stumbling and bumbling

A response to three readers from The Immanent Frame by Robert N. Bellah

Doniger’s doubts about the actuality of the axial age focus mainly on India: Wasn’t something like theoretic culture, my index for the axial transition, already present in the Vedas, well before the Upanishads and the Pali Canon of early Buddhism, which are usually seen as exhibiting axial traits? My answer is that no, it wasn’t: the Vedas are largely tribal ritual poetry with a few moments of riddling that could be seen later as foreshadowing metaphysical developments, but are not that different from riddles in many tribal cultures. The startling thing is that the tribal poetry of the Vedas remained the basis of later Hinduism, or at least the Brahmins claimed it did, though it took an awful lot of interpretation to make it seem so. Something similar can be seen in the reworking of tribal myth in Genesis in the Hebrew Bible to make it conform to much later ideas.

The contraception mandate from The Immanent Frame by Daniel Maguire, Professor of Theology, Marquette University

Galileo would have welcomed the bishops’ current fixation on sexual-reproductive issues. In his day their focus was on the stars; their attention has shifted to the pelvic zone where they are once again stumbling and bumbling, claiming authority on issues where they have no privileged expertise. Increasingly, Catholic laity no longer dance to their music, especially on sexual reproductive issues where they and their theologians have long since had a change of mind. On issues like birth control the bishops are effectively in schism.

Their current zeal and bullying tenor has more than a tinge of panic. Their seminaries are emptying, clergy sexual crimes and hierarchical cover-ups are being exposed, whole dioceses are going bankrupt. Time for a little diversionary stress on birth control?

James Hillman on Metaphysics and Cosmology from Footnotes to Plato by Matthew David Segall

Back in 1983, Claremont Graduate School invited Whiteheadian philosophers and Jungian psychoanalysts to a dialogue concerning possible cross-fertilizations between process metaphysics and archetypal psychology (published as Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman in 1989). James Hillman gave the keynote, wherein he admitted that “something further [was] needed” than his typical psychologizing [...]

Sri Aurobindo revolutionizes the Vedic tradition with evolutionary consciousness

Aurobindo's Super Mind, an Heroic Epic, and the shape of things to come joe-perez.com February 19, 2012 By Joe Perez 

Sri Aurobindo, with the shining light of a truly enlightened being, revolutionizing the Vedic tradition with evolutionary consciousness, writes of the further reaches of development which he calls Supermind (and Ken Wilber correlates to Clear Light):

As the summits of human kind are beyond animal perfecption, so the movements of Supermind are beyond the ordinary human mental conception: it is only when we have already had experience of a higher intermediate consciousness than any terms attempting to describe supramental being could convey a true meaning to our intelligence; for then, having experienced something akin to what is described, we could translate an inadequate language into a figure of what we knew. If the mind cannot enter into the nature of Supermind, it can look towards it through these high and luminous approaches and catch some reflected impression of the Truth, the Right, the Vast which is the native kingdom of the free Spirit.” — Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Sinopse - The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo By David Frawley:

There are very few great spiritual classics that each century produces. The Life Divine is one of these great spiritual classics, one of the key spiritual studies of the twentieth center, perhaps of all time. There are few great mystics and enlightened masters who are able to express themselves in extensive philosophy and profound poetry. Sri Aurobindo was one of these, and the Life Divine is probably his magnum opus. The Life Divine is no mere call to a life of piety, asceticism or outward religious fervor. It is a call to bring the Divine as a force of higher consciousness into all that we are and do, both individually and as a species. The Life Divine unfolds a panoramic exploration of consciousness from the Absolute (Brahman), to the Cosmic Creator (Ishvara), to the individual soul (Jivatman), and all the realms of existence, manifest and unmanifest, known and unknown.

There are few books that cover such an expanse and with such depth, direct knowledge and clarity. For those who want to widen their horizons and extend their awareness into the realms of higher consciousness, there is perhaps no other book that is as complete, comprehensive and challenging. Reading it requires both concentration and meditation of a very high order, but brings great riches of inner insight in return. As someone who has studied the main religious traditions of the world, and has written extensively on the traditions of India, this book has remained with me as life time companion. I recommend it to all those who are looking at the spiritual life as a quest for a higher consciousness and grace that can transform all that we do. One can continue to delve into the book for new wisdom and insight year after year.

The Life Divine teaches us in depth about the great spiritual traditions of India, Veda, Vedanta, Samkhya, Yoga, Tantra and Buddhism, but from a view of practice and realization, and a seeking for the universal truth behind all these great teachings. Most notably, the Life Divine outlines the spiritual purpose of the soul and of our human lives. It charts a way to a future in which we can go beyond our current mentality of ego and strife to a world of Divine peace, bliss and knowledge. It charts the transformation of our species from a confused adolescence to the maturity of wisdom and grace. Sri Aurobindo shows how the Divine Shakti can descend into our minds and lift us to a higher level of intelligence as our natural state of existence. The book is perhaps the best study of the spiritual evolution of humanity, the evolution of consciousness in man and nature, which is available.

Home Page << The list of all forum topics << Keka Chakraborty's Comment From The Essence of Truth by Martin Heidegger Comment by Rod Hemsell in reply to Keka Chakraborty last updated: October 30, 2011

I think the diagram is especially interesting. The origin of hiddenness is is Being, in order for it to become deconcealed. Soul is the unifying ground of the striving for Being. The first part of the course was based on another lecture where H speaks about the emergence of beings from the infinite and returning back as the ever-present origin, which is Being. That work is the basis of Gebser's philosophy. And Gebser confessed in the preface to the later edition of his work that he came to known after the fact that Sri Aurobindo was guiding his vision. The point of my course is to show how H can be read in this way, if we know SA. Of course H has his limits as well.

Overthrowing Indo-European tradition from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele

All of this helps me return to a question I addressed two years ago, about the online philosophical movement of Speculative Realism. I suggested that the Speculative Realists want philosophy to become less Indian and more Chinese. And while there is much they reject in Heidegger, I think in many respects it’s because they think he didn’t go far enough: his emphasis on Dasein, which is something like human subjectivity, still leaves him too wedded to the Indo-European subjective self. The overall project of trying to make Western philosophy less Indian and more Chinese seems to come from him – with perhaps a dash of Wittgenstein for good measure.

The Mandir Annual Posted on 21/10/2011 by admin Sunayana Panda's blog

The annual publication of the Pathamandir in Kolkata is out. Popularly known as the “Mandir Annual”, it is a magazine of high calibre and has been coming out since the 1940s. I remember seeing copies of the magazine in my father’s bookshelf. I also remember Kishore Gandhi sometimes informing me of certain essays by prominent writers being first published in the Mandir Annual. It is a matter of great honour for me that this time one of my own essays is included in it… My own essay is the one read out during the “Reflections on the Way” talks on the occasion of the April Darshan this year. It is titled “The Significance of the Mother’s Final Arrival in Pondicherry” and highlights the importance of the April Darshan and how it was started.

To speak about knowing Reality in our Consciousness is a joke

Re: THE SUBJECTIVE REALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE from sbicitizen at Yahoo! Groups by Major(Retd).R.Rudra Narasimham http://bhavanajagat.com

To speak about knowing Reality in our Consciousness is a joke. 

Comment on The brain is not the mind as per Yoga psychology by Sandeep from Comments for Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Sandeep

The closest equivalent to Dehatmabuddhi in contemporary neuropsychological parlance seems to be “Body ownership”.

The Complex and Difficult Transformation of the Lower Nature « Sri ...

Sri Aurobindo Studies. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga ... transformation.”Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 25, “The Triple Transformation”...

Feel Philosophy: Sri Aurobindo proffered a complex and ...

Sri Aurobindo's Opposition. Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Thursday, February 16, 2012. Sri Aurobindo ...

Thill - February 6th, 2012 on 3:55 am

I was a “fan” of Wilber’s writings during my days as a doctoral student in Canada working on my dissertation, in a predominantly analytically-oriented philosophy department, on Aurobindo. But I can hardly bring myself to read either of them these days and I don’t feel I am missing anything important! LOL

Auroville Radio - Sharing Auroville`s life and spirit

She introduced them to the life and teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and to an extent, also demystified the concepts such as 'consciousness', ...

resurgentindia.org | The Aryan System of Education in Ancient India

Sri Aurobindo has shown that the truth does not lie in running away from earthly life but in remaining in it, ... Sri Aurobindo always loved deeply his Motherland. … The object of these articles has been to indicate the nature and psychological ideas of the old system and point out its essential relation of cause and effect to the splendid achievement of our ancestors. How its principles can be reapplied or be completed and to some extent replaced by a still deeper psychology and a still more effective discipline is a subject fit for separate treatment.

There is a demand for Indian thought and culture by Maria Wirth Comment posted by: Vikas

You have a healthy skepticism and were able to quickly dissociate NASA from this article.

On spirit possession and mental imbalances from Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Sandeep

It depends on the degree of the possession. Usually it is something progressive. First there is an influence under which one comes, and comes in a fragmentary way, not even totally in his being, but in certain parts and for a time. This is the first stage. The second: the influence becomes permanent and there is one part of the being which deteriorates, which is constantly under this influence and expresses it. Continue reading →

Two Letters from Sri Aurobindo from Savitri: the Light of the Supreme 17 Feb 2012 - 03:00 AM

There is very little argument in my philosophy—the elaborate metaphysical reasoning full of abstract words with which the metaphysician tries to establish his conclusions is not there. read more - Weird ways of the Revised Edition

M.P. Pandit is a wonderful thinker and bright mind

The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo; epub, mobi v.1.0 | Integral Library

This time author is different – M.P. Pandit whose books I personally like very much – he is a wonderful thinker and bright mind, always faithful to the Sri Aurobindo ... Here are e-Pub and Mobi files of “The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo” by M. P. Pandit: M.P.Pandit – The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo.epub

M.P.Pandit – The Teaching of Sri Aurobindo.mobi

Plans Of O'Neill Wetsuits - The Latest Insights - PDF pdfcast.org › World & Business - GrowthOnline.org author and founder Roy Posner presents a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical treatise The Life Divine, perhaps the ...

This Month | Savitri: the Light of the Supreme

But then the question is, how will the body of the supramental Avatar be prepared ? Sri Aurobindo assured the ...

Helios' Books: Publishing High-Quality Books in Various Genres

The target audiences for the republication of the first edition of Savitri were devotees of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo across India. This strategy has helps us ...

Delicate Thoughts: Some thoughts about Yoga

Teachers and centers: Inspired by the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Purna Yoga was officially founded by Aadil and Mirra Palkhivala in 2003. The main ...

We are planned not to be sure that Nature has a plan

Nature's Plans? Dear Devinder, I am not sure that Nature has a plan. Where do we find a plan that nature has? Would like you to educate me on that. Regards, Viswa RE: [sbicitizen] Nature's Plans? Dear Nilanjan, I am sorry to say that it is incurred to say that Quantum-physics has revealed anything about nature’s consciousness. 

Nature simply has no goals about anything. Nature can evolve conscious beings like humans across many planets and nature can finish off these creatures in a matter of few seconds. Just as it can create universes, even multiple parallel universes, it can also destroy them along with any conscious creatures that may have evolved over millions of years. We know the story of dinosaurs who lived for more than million years and perished. 

The closest that our Indian philosophy has come to scientific data is the doctrine of unending cycle of birth, evolution and destruction (Siva’s pralaya). 

As I write this note, the two galaxies “Andromeda and our own Milky Way” are hurtling towards each other for a collision. We have no idea what will happen when the collision gets into full swing. Our own Sun will evolve into a brown dwarf in a few million years and will swallow up our own earth in its expanded version, our planet will be completely scorched by this expanded Sun. You can be sure that we will not survive this brown dwarf. 

Over the last two months, two large meteors hurtled past earth “one as close as 21,000 kms to the earth. They could have easily crashed into our planet” which would finished us off just as the dinosaurs disappeared. 

And, these are events we know. There are zillions of events that are happening that we have no idea of simply because the light rays have not reached our powerful telescopes mounted on satellites. 

I hope we will do more due diligence rather than simply claim that nature has plans. Regards, Viswa

Re: Nature's Plans? Viswa's question cannot be indubitably answered by pointing to Sri Aurobindo's remarks on the matter.  Such a response is no different than asking someone to read the Bible or Koran and believing in whatever is written there!
One would have to have first-hand experience of a greater reality in order to decipher if Nature has a plan, and that is only possible when one has advanced beyond a certain level in Yoga.  For the rest, it should be a hypothesis which is provisionally accepted because various yogis have averred on the existence of a plan of Nature.  Ancient seers called it Mula-Prakriti or Apara-Prakriti and Sri Aurobindo called it SuperNature (to avoid overloading the term "Nature")

So Viswa, you should continue with the assumption that Nature does not have a plan.   At some point in the future, if you have get initiated onto the spiritual path, and have some spiritual experiences, you might feel inclined to accept that Nature might indeed have a plan. –Sandeep [February | 2012 | Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother This blog primarily discusses the Integral Yoga (Интегральной Йоги) of Sri Aurobindo (Шри Ауробиндо) & the Mother Mirra Alfassa (Мать Мирра Альфасса)] 

Religion and Philosophy: Thinking, Feeling, and Willing the Absolute Posted by Matthew David Segall on February 7, 2012 Footnotes to Plato

“The object of religion is the same as that of philosophy; it is the eternal verity itself in its objective existence; it is God. Nothing but God and the unfolding of God… [P]hilosophy in unfolding religion merely unfolds itself, and in unfolding itself it unfolds religion.” -Hegel

“Philosophy is the intellectual search for the fundamental truth of things; religion is the attempt to make the truth dynamic in the soul of man.” -Sri Aurobindo

“Religion, whatever it is, is man’s total reaction upon life.” -William James

What is the relationship between religion and philosophy? Some philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, believe it is philosophy’s job to lift the human intellect above the childishness of religion. Reason and science alone are supposed to guide our species into its adulthood. Levi Bryant’s recent post complicates this picture:

…the choice of philosophy over religion…cannot be completed by demonstrating that philosophy is the “rational” choice over religion, nor that the claims of religion are inadequate as descriptions of reality. Rather, philosophy only surmounts religion in completing its project of thinking being…

Bryant’s post is a challenge to philosophy to think not only the eternality of being (noun: “is” or “I”), but the contingency of existence, of being (verb: “to be” or “am”). Until philosophy is able to absolutize itself in this way, says Bryant, the mind (philosophy) inevitably leaves itself vulnerable to possession by the spirit (religion). (Kantian) Philosophy tends to bracket the flesh and blood of existence from its metaphysical inquiry into pure possibility, and in so doing forfeits any challenge the mind might make to the spirit’s will to believe. But we need not oppose religion and philosophy. Their object, as Hegel says, is the same. Philosophy, to remain relevant to actual life, must itself become religious. Without the madness of spirit, there is no such thing as philosophy, anyway.

Spirituality claims knowledge of something immediately (perceptually) that it has not (“yet”?) succeeded in thinking mediately (conceptually). The philosopher’s task, if it is the Absolute she seeks, is to think herself thinking being, and so to come to know who it is that she is in the world. She is pressed for time, death potentially waiting around every corner. “Who am I?” “What is this?” — these are not neutral or optional questions for her. The meaning of human life depends on these questions. If she cannot think the answer, the All, for herself before the sun sets on another day, she has no other choice but to believe being exists. If she is able to say “I am,” it is because she believes, she knows existence intuitively, without the mediation of any concept other than her “own” being. To believe being exists is not to march in step with the masses, to buy into the dogmatisms of traditional religion despite the challenges of modern science and philosophy. Faith in God need not be faith despite knowledge, but faith in order to know what/who the mind cannot (“the heart has reasons reason doesn’t know”). Faith is a movement of the heart, a love seeking the highest knowledge: knowledge of the Good. It is the kind of knowledge that requires our heartfelt participation in order to be known. Goodness is not an abstract idea, it has no essence outside its existence; it is always discovered in the act of loving.

The reality of God is not just a postulation made by morality; rather, only he who recognizes God — in whatever way — is a truly moral person. Moral laws ought to be obeyed not because they are related to God as the lawmaker (or whatever other relationship the finite mind is able to conceive) but because the essence of God and that of morality are one and the same and because by acting morally we are revealing the essence of God. A moral world exists only if God exists, and to postulate His existence in order for a moral world to exist is a complete reversal of the true and necessary relations. -Schelling, Philosophy and Religion (1804).

Religion, as James put it, is the human being’s “total reaction upon life”; it is the soul’s response to the actual time and place of its incarnation. If God exists, and it is possible not only to think, but to feel and to will the Absolute, it is because the human soul has made room within itself for God to be born into the world.

When Love said that word, my soul melted and flowed away. Where he comes in, I must go out! -Meister Eckhart summarizing the Song of Solomon (5:2-7) 

On the Relationship Between Economics and Philosophy from Coordination Problem by Peter Boettke

Here is my most recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.  There I ask professional philosophers what they think of the relationship is between the two disciplines.  Here it would be wise to reverse that question, what do professional economists (this is not a conversation for amateur economists) think about the relationship between economics and philosophy.

Human societies are built on analogue processes

Auro Truths aurotruths commented on New content: Attempts to create an "Aurobindonian religion".

Truth and Facts have the inherent property of being monolithic. It is the perception of these that have various shades. Each perception has its purpose as well as its place and it is therefore only natural that one should be tolerant to each of these perceptions. However, when one of these singular perceptions tries to mask or take over the Truth and Facts that it originates from and seeks to impose an exclusive right over it, that perception inevitably looses its plurality; such a perception then becomes neither interesting, nor convincing or constructive.

A call for revival from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko

I have been teaching Buber’s I and Thou and finding it amazingly productive of thought and discussion. I wonder if, after such a long period where Levinas has had a corner on the “ethics of respect for the Other” market, the time may be ripe for a Buber revival.

Re: Organising Action from sbicitizen at Yahoo! Groups by devinder singh gulati

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It states that …

The human economy in a revolutionary moment: political aspects of the economic crisis from The Memory Bank by keith

Three things count in our societies — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead.

Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue from The Immanent Frame by Jeremy Webber

Bilgrami makes an eloquent plea for the capacity of believers’ commitments to evolve with time, as a result of history, so that it is wrong to think that they are locked within an inescapable relativism. But he applies the insight only to believers. Aren’t rationalists also historical beings, whose most cherished commitments evolve with time, in ways that are similarly a product of experience? If so, we should open ourselves to the possibility of change.

This militates in favor of an ethic of engagement that is very different from lexical ordering. At the very least we should understand the beliefs and practices that we are encountering, so that we know accurately how our principles interact with them. And we might stumble upon something unexpected in the encounter: market interactions tempered by ethical injunctions to an extent that we in the non-Islamic world have neglected; an idea of gender equality that is genuinely equal but that de-sexualizes the public space; or something else…

What matters most, then, are the ethical practices one adopts for maneuvering in the face of these provisional, never fully resolved or elaborated assertions of ideals. They are practices of deliberation and decision-making, where no one’s cherished commitments are relegated to the second stage of a lexical ordering, but where one seeks to understand and, if possible, respond to deeply held opinions. Sometimes the disagreement will be so acute as to render imposition inescapable. Sometimes it will be possible to live and let live. Often there will be room for adjustment by all parties – and that adjustment may even represent a normative advance for all parties, as they take into account insights drawn from a broader range of experience…

Secularism is the attempt to preserve the independence of the state from identification with particular religious doctrines so that the state remains open to individuals of different beliefs. But that does not mean that it can be insulated from those beliefs, or that it can satisfy them equally in every decision, or that it must subject them as a matter of lexical ordering to “the ideals that the polity seeks to achieve.” It involves the managing of continual encounters between religiously and non-religiously motivated reasons. The solution involves an ethic of dialogue prior to decision, not peremptory imposition.

When left doesn't imply sinister

Re: His Mind of Knowledge

by RY Deshpande on Fri 03 Feb 2012 04:59 AM IST |  Profile |  Permanent Link

When the reference is to the Veda we must take things always in the most positive sense. Truly speaking, “left” is the Vedic vāmam. In a hymn to Indra we’ve Vamadeva’s prayer [4.30.24] to bestow the finest riches through Aryaman, Pushan, and Bhaga:

vāmam-vāmam ta ādure devo dadātv aryamā|
vāmam pūşā vāmam bhago vāmam devah karūļati||

He uses the word vāmam five times, meaning beautiful-splendid-noble-lovely-dear. Here we’ve not only a magnificent prayer for the plenitudes sought; it is also excellent poetry with the full force of consonants, ringing through the lines with a certitude that the incantation will bring what it desires. That is Vamadeva the greatest of the mystic singers, as said by Sri Aurobindo. 

The Mother’s pre-Ashram years

Publication of ‘The Mother: The Birth and Growth of a Flame’ by Anurag Banerjee

Overman Foundation has published its seventh book ‘The Mother: The Birth and Growth of a Flame’ on 8 January 2012. Written by Anurag Banerjee and with a preface by Dr. Ananda Reddy (Director, Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, Pondicherry), this book is a detailed account of the Mother’s pre-Ashram years and covers the cou... from Overman Foundation - Jan 25, 2012

Publication of ‘Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore’.

It gives me immense pleasure to announce that on 31 December 2011 Overman Foundation has published its sixth book ‘Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore’—a bilingual anthology of articles written on the two great luminaries of the bygone century. This book—which is a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore on the occasion o... from Overman Foundation - Jan 23, 2012

Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities—A Review by Deepali Gupta

Published by Overman Foundation, Kolkata. Price—E-copy: Rs. 200. (Hard-copy: Rs. 450). “Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities” by Anurag Banerjee presents to the reader a well researched account of Sri Aurobindo’s life as a nationalist, a political revolutionary, an educationist in the truest sense, and an inspirer of the youth and co... from Overman Foundation - Jan 20, 2012

Sri Aurobindo on Ethics—A Review by Deepali Gupta

Published by Overman Foundation, Kolkata. Price—E-copy: Rs. 20. (Hard-copy: Rs. 60). “The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.”— Meister Eckhart. The above quote wonderfully weaves the ideas of Karma and Dharma to give us a right vie... from Overman Foundation - Jan 10, 2012

Publication of ‘Sujata Nahar: Loving Homage.’

It gives me immense pleasure to announce that on 12 December 2011 Overman Foundation has published its fifth book, Sujata Nahar: Loving Homage. Edited by Nirmal Nahar and Anurag Banerjee with a foreword by Samir Kanta Gupta, this tri-lingual book is a collection of tributes paid to Sujata Nahar, the noted authoress... from Overman Foundation - Dec 23, 2011

Sri Aurobindo on Ethics and Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities: A Review by Dr. Prema Nandakumar

Published by Overman Foundation, Kolkata. Price— E-copy: Rs. 20. (Hard-copy: Rs. 60). Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities: compiled and edited by Anurag Banerjee with a preface by Prof. Kittu Reddy. Published by OvermanFoundation, Kolkata. Price—E-copy: Rs. 200. (Hard-copy: Rs. 450). Anurag Banerjee rightly refers to “the ocean of ... from Overman Foundation - Dec 19, 2011

Sri Aurobindo on Ethics, The Alipore Bomb Trial Judgment and Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities: A Review by Surendra Singh Chouhan

Published by Overman Foundation, Kolkata. Price— E-copy: Rs. 20. (Hard-copy: Rs. 60). The Alipore Bomb Trial Judgment: Compiled and edited by Anurag Banerjee. Published by Overman Foundation, Kolkata. Price—E-copy: Rs. 50. (Hard-copy: Rs. 150). Sri Aurobindo: His Political Life and Activities: Compiled and edited by Anurag Banerjee with a prefac... from Overman Foundation - Dec 13, 2011

The Tale of My Exile: Twelve Years in the Andamans — Barindra Kumar Ghose

ISBN: 978-81-7058-991-4 Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, Pondicherry. Binding: Soft Cover, Pages: 143, Price: Rs 95

Barindra Ghose, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, was sentenced to death in 1909 in the Alipore Bomb Case, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life in the Cellular Jail at Port Blair in the Andamans. He was released from there in January 1920 as part of a general amnesty. Told with honesty and humour, this book is the story of his imprisonment with some of his fellow revolutionaries, from the Alipore Jail to the hold of the SS Maharaja to the Cellular Jail and a hard life of deprivation, forced labour, and humiliation by the prison authorities. Translated from the original Bengali into English by Nolini Kanta Gupta and first published in 1922, this new edition includes an introduction and editorial notes.

Anandamath — Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

ISBN: 978-81-85289-13-7 Publisher: Ashir Prakashan, Saharanpur. Binding: Soft Cover, Pages: 203, Price: Rs 200

The famous Bengali novel Anandamath was first published in 1882. It is set in Bengal during the famine of 1770 and tells the story of an armed band of Sannayasis who lead a rebellion against the British East India Company. The book later became a symbol for the struggle for independence and its well-known hymn Bande Mataram a rallying cry for the freedom movement. Bankim’s writing was much admired by Sri Aurobindo, and his translation of the Prologue and the first thirteen chapters of Part I of Anandamath first appeared in the Karmayogin. The rest of the work was translated by his brother Barindra. This book is a reprint of an earlier edition which contained both their translations.

Asian Philosophy Edited by JeeLoo Liu

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Sri Aurobindo traces the potential journey of the soul

Internatal Journey of the Soul Through Vital Or Mental Worlds - Sri Aurobindo Studies on 13 Oct. 2011

At the time of the separation of consciousness from the physical body at the time of death, there is the soul and its formed mental and vital sheaths which now become free of the physical impediment. Sri Aurobindo traces the potential journey of the soul through a series of planes or worlds that successively become more subtle and refined as they move further away from the physical and into the vital and mental ranges that have been developed as capacities during the physical embodiment.

The first possibility is for the soul to move temporarily into what Sri Aurobindo calls the “subtle-physical” which has many of the characteristics of the physical world, but without the limitations imposed by physical existence. There are also life-worlds which embody the vital principle that helped to form and fix the vital life and personality of the embodied soul. In the life-worlds one would see the vital power predominant and not limited by the physical limitations. The vital forces which held the attention of the evolutionary soul in life will clearly have strong influence on the direction and focus after death, and the soul may, for a time, get caught up in one of these vital realms as a result. Eventually the soul, however, cannot be totally limited by the physical or vital sheaths. To the extent there was a strong mental or mental-spiritual development, the soul may spend some time in one of the corresponding worlds between births. One may also find that the soul traverses some of these worlds but cannot consciously participate in them if there was insufficient vital, mental or spiritual development in the immediately past lifetime to create a capacity of resonance with what is going on in those worlds. “Any residence of the soul in annexes or in its own constructions could be only a transitional stage of the consciousness in its passage from the physical to the supraphysical state; it must pass from these structures into the true worlds of supraphysical Nature.” The driving force will in any case be the “influences which have shaped his earthly existence…” Eventually all of these intervening stages must be overpassed so that the soul can move to its next evolutionary phase.

Powerful Words: Bennett - Larval Subjects on 12 Oct. 2011

In The Enchantment of Modern Life Bennett addresses some of the less attractive problems that emerge from the project of secularization, enlightenment, and disenchantment... Bennett’s worry is that the project of disenchantment generates a sense of meaninglessness (so nicely described by Nietzsche in The Gay Science when he discusses the death of God) where it becomes impossible to be ethically and politically committed to anything. What she seeks is a form of secular enchantment, of captivation with the world, that might propel and motivate us to ethically and politically engage with the world. In short, her idea is that ethical and political engagement require certain affects to be efficacious. Even Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason had to appeal to a peculiar sort of affect (respect for the moral law) to account for our obedience to that law.

Ultimate questions of existence and causality

UNIVERSITY | 2:30 p.m. | Oct. 11, 2011 | By Clinton Wang
Philosophy conference questions everything
Philosophy professor Michael Della Rocca, who organized the conference, said the idea behind it emerged over coffee between physics professor Priyamvada Natarajan and theology professor Denys Turner “after we had walked out of yet another disappointing interdisciplinary talk.” They decided to create a new dialogue that would connect experts from their fields as well as philosophy, based on ultimate questions of existence and causality that shape all three fields, Della Rocca said.
“The hope is to initiate a significant and vital encounter among the three great magisteria dedicated to the pursuit of fundamental truth,” read the official statement.
The guests discussed the origin and nature of the Universe, time and creation, and whether their efforts to address these topics were futile.
By the end of the conference on Sunday, no verdict had been reached.
“But the absence of a consensus is a sign of a successful conference as are the connections between fields and people that were forged,” said Della Rocca.

Imagination as a Creative Force For Post ... - Sri Aurobindo Studies
sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com/.../imagination-as-a-creative-force-for- ...
Sri Aurobindo elucidates another possible location for the soul's sojourn after death, at least temporarily, and that is to reside in an artificial construct built by ...