A Shield, a Scepter and a Crown: Enlarging the Circle of the
Natural
from An und für sich by Rocco Gangle
If Ramey is right, then to be true to our vocation as teachers of
philosophy we must necessarily incorporate practices of objective indeterminacy
and even explicit esotericism into our classroom teaching in order to make room
for genuine thought to take place between ourselves and our students as well as
among our students themselves. Philosophy itself is an introduction of
indeterminacy into the complex sensible, perceptual and cognitive semiotics of
life for a variety of purposes, from the sheer joy of experimentation to
personal sanity and healing to political resistance and social
transformation. In light of this, the classroom must for certain ends become
an objectively indeterminate zone of risk and attunement to powers that are
and cannot by nature be vested in professorial or institutional authority…
And the power it conserves supports our
right as teachers of philosophy and religion to the creative transformation of
how philosophy and religion are propagated and studied in the academy
today. Something esoteric or hermetic may indeed be the true source of
our legitimate authority to speak and teach effectively in the name of
philosophy. To quote Ramey quoting Deleuze, “To what are we dedicated if
not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our
language?” (Difference and Repetition, 192 in The Hermetic
Deleuze, 18).
Comment on Developing one’s own spiritual atmosphere (Gita
3:17) by Mark An additional Quotation from The Mother on the topic of
‘Developing a Spiritual Atmosphere’:
“The inner law, the truth of the being is
the divine Presence in every human being, which should be the master and guide
of our life.
When you acquire the habit of listening to
this inner law, when you obey it, follow it, try more and more to let it guide
your life, you create around you an atmosphere of truth and peace and harmony
which naturally reacts upon circumstances and forms, so to say, the atmosphere
in which you live. When you are a being of justice, truth, harmony, compassion,
understanding, of perfect goodwill, this inner attitude, the more sincere and
total it is, the more it reacts upon the external circumstances; not that it necessarily
diminishes the difficulties of life, but it gives these difficulties a new
meaning and that allows you to face them with a new strength and a new wisdom;
whereas the man, the human being who follows his impulses, who obeys his
desires, who has no time for scruples, who comes to live in complete cynicism,
not caring for the effect that his life has upon others or for the more or less
harmful consequences of his acts, creates for himself an atmosphere of
ugliness, selfishness, conflict and bad will which necessarily acts more and
more upon his consciousness and gives a bitterness to his life that in the end
becomes a perpetual torment.” Collected Works of the Mother 3:279
All existence is a nexus between the
individual, the universal and the transcendent. The law of Karma, therefore, in
order to be fully understood, must take into account each of these three
aspects. Most people look at the law of Karma from a purely individual
standpoint. This obviously is too simplistic a view and does not provide much
guidance or real understanding. It is just one aspect and not the complete
picture. The idea that a person is reborn from life to life with a consistent
personality that is subject to some kind of retributive justice is clearly not
the meaning of the law of Karma.
We have explored the interaction of the
individual and the society and world within which the individual lives and acts
and determined that part of the action of Karma is the impact of the individual
on the world and the world on the individual. The individual as a manifestation
of the universal force of Nature expresses larger forces that are a work
generally and which have consequences generally. This too, however, does not
present us a complete picture.
In order to complete the view we need to
remind ourselves that the ultimate significance of our lives lies in the
connection to the transcendent Spirit which is manifesting itself through Time
using both the individual and the universal as the field of that manifestation.
Sri Aurobindo integrates these three together:
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