Again, when I pointed out to him how some seekers,
not all of them disciples of Sri Aurobindo, had profound spiritual experiences
while reading the book, he struggled his shoulders disdainfully with a “may
be”… Truth cannot be ascertained by democratic opinion and feeling.
Just because many or even a majority of humanity has a similar feeling does not
necessarily mean that it is true. For in our present condition of human
evolution only a few can feel or perceive the deeper truth… If truth can be
known by democratic feeling, then there is no need of philosophy, science or
spirituality and great thinkers, scientists or sages. A ballot-box is
enough to know the truth!]
[Mimicry, mockery or mumukṣutva?
A response to Deepak Sarma, by Jeffery D. Long from Love of All Wisdom I have my white Hindu convert experience.
Sarma has his diasporic Hindu experience. Are one of these experiences
authentic and the other somehow fraudulent? Or are they both simply
different experiences and expressions of an ancient, diverse, yet emerging and
ever new, religious tradition? 9:52 AM]
[“The metaphysical order of the invisible hand” Chris
Allsobrook 29 November, 2012 Thought Leader (Mail & Guardian), South Africa HERE. Three hundred years earlier, when Hobbes argued,
“there is no such thing as ‘the people’ ” he, admittedly, supported monarchy.
But his enlightened point was we should never forget the faces of real human
beings, with artificial, abstract concepts like “we, the People” (or, to
emphasise this “they, the Africans”). It’s fine to raise appeals on behalf of
“society” but who represents individuals on the ground, if not they themselves,
in person or in contract? Thatcher was right, sociologically, there is no
“society” in the real world; only the members which make up the set. But her
anti-essentialist kudos (also in vogue, at the time, like big hair) was
unmatched by naïve faith in economic entities of mythic proportions, like, the
“market” and its omniscient, omnipotent author, the “invisible hand”.
There is no invisible hand guiding the market; just
the grubby hands of individuals engaged in transactions. Moreover, the
“market”, like “society”, is not a category into which each member identically
fits. Offending Markets or the Gods? from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy]
[R November 14, 2012 Permalink But if one speaks
of an immanent experience of Divinity why limit the experience to yogis?
Doesn’t everyone have experiences of things sublime or beautiful that are
incomprehensible? – and I dont mean just the experience of artist or poets – R+
November 16, 2012 Permalink I certainly do not
question the magnitude of experience you have personally had, it was obviously
profound and in fact perhaps I have had the same experience myself. But, …
my point is not that some people may or may not have had any particular
experience including a “spiritual” one but rather, the fact that the very act
of labeling the spontaneous experience as “spiritual” is itself an act of
faith, namely faith in a signifier to describe what is real.
In this instance one has faith that the culturally
or systematically determined signifier “spiritual” in fact signifies ones
personal experience. The process entails one matching up ones subjective
experience (signified) with its objective social definition (signifier). In
this instance the signifier is spirituality. But spirituality has in fact meant
many different things to many different cultures and systems of beliefs and so
the process of signification as relates to spirituality is a complex one…
I am voicing the concern that for the purposes of
intersubjective communication, for achieving understanding within a civitas or
polity constituted by a population with a multiplicity of beliefs that
intersubjective comprehension has to be anchored in a system in which truth
claims can be measured by evidence… But some valuations of standards of
competing truths claims are needed for that matter even within a particular
community such as a community of sadhaks – as evidenced in the Ashram, where
conclusions are reached about text without even reading them- here too there
maybe a multiplicity of competing interpretations as to what the spiritual life
means.]
[1h - inpondy @PondyTweets - @Back2Vedas Don't know if it
offends him. (Does anything?) But standing rule for disciples was abstain from
petty politics. 1h If you don't consider yourself one it
doesn't matter. Don't know why it struck me today. Btw I am apolitical and dnt
care abt it.]
[Difference
between religion and spirituality by Sandeep on January 24, 2010 The spiritual approach to such
confusions is to neither
believe nor disbelieve the problematic assertions in question but to
lay them on the side for later resolution… Truth has to be rediscovered. Until
then, everything one reads and receives is second-hand knowledge. 12:12 AM ]
[Surrealism & Automatic Writing: The politics of destroying
language Death and Taxes - Nov 28, 2012 By DJ Pangburn
At this moment, I, the writer, and you, the reader,
are partaking at a banquet of language that we did not create—a system
superimposed on our consciousness. The raw material of our minds is rendered by
the symbolic aspect of language, and there is no escaping it; unless one takes
psychedelics, descends into madness, attains a heightened non-symbolic spiritual
state, or disrupts the historical, psychological superstructure of language.
Breton and the other Surrealists realized that
language, its traditional structure (syntax, morphology, semantics and
phonology, to varying degrees) and expectations, needed to be destroyed and
rebuilt. While the group’s efforts in automatic writing never produced writing
as famous as T.S. Elliot “The Wasteland,” for instance, automatism accomplished
something far more important: it struck a blow to the politics of language.
By politics of language, it should be taken to mean
the inherited system of thought and communication. We are defined by the words
we use, yet we had no part in the construction of the system. This word
means such and such. This is how one writes a sentence, a
paragraph, an essay, a poem, a novel, a letter, etc. What we think is
heavily influenced by the signs and signifiers we use in the form of words (to
say nothing of visual cues), and when we attempt to express a thought verbally
or through the written word, we must again revert to an imposed system to do so.
4:58 AM]