What led to ten centuries of decline

Mirra Alfassa, disciple of #SriAurobindo better known as 'The Mother' - the hidden freedom fighter for India's Independence. Read her full story at - https://t.co/I3DZgv0TB4

https://twitter.com/djjssantulan/status/1300122794286444545?s=19

On these thoughts, you may enjoy looking at Henri Bergson's 'Creative evolution' and the Elan Vital. Also Sri Aurobindo's treatment of the Vedanta from a life affirming and evolutionary perspective.

https://twitter.com/LifeIllumine/status/1300198102150926336?s=19

I can suggest that universal consciousness is purely instinctual as opposed to self authoring and therefore non intercedent or participatory at our 'level'. At the 'god' level, consciousness does not plan, reflect or meta-cognize.

Hard to say. Gebser's drew from D.T. Suzuki's Zen on arationality, acknowledged Sri Aurobindo's integral yoga. 

You could also go back to William James, re: post-rationalism. 

But Gebser does develop a robust, phenomenological description for integral arationality in his work.

https://twitter.com/jdj_writes/status/1299801958170189826?s=19

If you're interested in cosmological alternatives to mechanistic materialism, there are no better sources than Schelling & Whitehead.

In this dialogue, @aufgehendeRest (Christopher Satoor) & I discuss their historical context & continued relevance today https://t.co/hfmDt2wmWf

https://twitter.com/ThouArtThat/status/1300189367919456256?s=19

This year is the 250th birth anniversary of the great racist philosopher Hegel. Please do yourselves a favor, Indians, and read about Hegel’s force of history, the vigor in a civilization to churn the dialectic of change, and how Hegel thought Indians are devoid of that vitality.

https://twitter.com/vakibs/status/1300064068796022785?s=19

This is Bishop Robert Caldwell, celebrated missionary and scholar, who published in 1856 the "Comparative grammar of Dravidian or South Indian Languages". 

Link: https://t.co/886h6mWJMP

It has a large appendix devoted to racist theories. In this thread, I will discuss them. https://t.co/68JLWFO9PD

https://twitter.com/vakibs/status/1276507867634438146?s=19

Bishop Caldwell might have long been dead, along with the British Empire of which he was a servant, but his theories about the Dravidian race are an active force in Indian politics. They are the mainstream dogma in books and academia.

But many people have not read them at all.

In order to understand our present predicament with any degree of accuracy, the present-day thinkers, scholars, academics and bureaucrats do require a holistic understanding of where the story began, at the turn of independence. https://t.co/LLDoC3dSVA

https://twitter.com/epw_in/status/1300194091947483138?s=19

Book Review by Dr. Pingali Gopal: The Indian Renaissance, Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) looks at what led to ten centuries of decline and also examines the economic and social forces that are working together to transform India. @IndicAcademy #BookReview https://t.co/Xi2PhL7G8F

https://twitter.com/indictoday/status/1300184016461553665?s=19

Archives | Gandhi advocated that the untouchable castes give up meat-eating altogether. Yet he never asked the Brahmins and Baniyas who stood behind his “cow service” to graze cows or try their hand at leatherwork or agriculture. 

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd: https://t.co/W5Jl0npszw

https://twitter.com/thecaravanindia/status/1300184016105037825?s=19

Environmentalism in Hindu Thought Part II by Rahul Goswami (@rahul_goa): The Hindu View of Nature and the Environment. #Hinduism #Environment @IndicAcademy 

https://t.co/rsxfdunnYv

https://twitter.com/indictoday/status/1300214215165140992?s=19

Among the many things to fix democracy under a new administration, I would put reform of the federal bureaucracy near the top of the list: https://t.co/UlqU4YHwsi

https://twitter.com/FukuyamaFrancis/status/1300207572499066881?s=19

Viruses are masters of coercion, @DavidEnard tells @kncukier. “They’re really like pirates hijacking a boat.” Listen to our "Babbage" podcast on how viruses have shaped the world—and humanity https://t.co/oxltmukCbY https://t.co/Ir6NXpUwYk

https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1300209949990060032?s=19

Bollywood is Pakistan’s soft power. Narrative of evil, violent, superstitious Hindus constantly pushed. Even movies which cloak itself as “nationalist” featuring India’s armed forces subtlety push Pakistan agenda. Bollywood needs annihilation. If #SSR case can lead to it, good.

https://twitter.com/aaryabharata/status/1300207666057289729?s=19

Missionaries come claiming to "save" natives from "social problems."

In India, the narrative is "caste" to hide the $billion resources of the evangelical war machine.

Africa was converted in the last 50 years with no "caste" It is still reeling from it.

https://t.co/PWOJ7M7vt9

https://twitter.com/sankrant/status/1300195302704476162?s=19

"History will tell you that there’s always a thirst and a search for prophets at a time when there’s turbulence and transition" —@peterfrankopan 

Check out our history book recommendation interviews—370 published so far and counting... https://t.co/MWqjZKf7XQ

https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1300199117021483008?s=19

Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember the Colfax massacre of 1873 and the lasting harm it wrought, write William Briggs and Jon Krakauer https://t.co/lIZMuFKvpm

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1300215194552012800?s=19

Eric Weiss was an integral philosopher of Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo

Another teacher of mine, Eric Weiss, died yesterday.

He was an integral philosopher, scholar of A. N. Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo. 

Eric initiated me into the Whitehead mystery school back in my first semester at CIIS in Fall 2008. I was a night owl back then but still dragged

Something about internally related drops of experience perishing into objective immortality in the consequent nature of God... Again, no idea what that might mean at the time,

but the passion in his voice and the vortexes streaming from his eyes had me convinced it was worth trying to figure out. 

Bon voyage, Eric

PS- How auspicious that you passed on Aug 15, which is Sri Aurobindo's birthday as well as the date of the Assumption of Mary.

https://twitter.com/ThouArtThat/status/1295136840765251584?s=19

Probabilistic this-world karma

The fundamental issues are about karma, but they also encapsulate larger issues about Buddhist modernism. I say that the concept of karma is inherently eschatological-theodicean (I’ll say more about these Greek words below); Lele denies this, and says that the concept is inherently only eudaimonistic (another Greek word). Note that I don’t deny that the concept of karma has a eudaimonistic element. Rather, I say that this element by itself isn’t sufficient for what karma means, because the concept of karma necessarily includes eschatology and theodicy. So, the crucial issue is whether can you remove the eschatology-theodicy from the concept of karma and still legitimately claim to be talking about karma. Lele thinks you can, whereas I think you can’t.

What Lele does is to invent a new concept. He deletes the idea that karma operates across former and future lives. This immediately raises the problem of how karma can possibly work, given that many people act in good ways and experience bad results, and act in bad ways and experience
good results. Lele’s answer is that karma works probabilistically: good actions are more likely to produce experienced good results in this life, and bad actions are more likely to produce bad experienced results in this life. Karma is “probabilistic this-world karma.”

I’d call this shwarma, not karma.

If Lele were to say something like this, I’d have no objection (at least not yet). This is what philosophers do, in contrast to historians and philologists. He’d be owning up to cherry picking, and so wouldn’t be trying to have his cake and eat it too

(to mix metaphors). He’d be thinking as a Buddhist and as a cosmopolitanist (in
the philosophical sense of cosmopolitanism I advocate in Why I Am Not a
Buddhist). I’d say, “I sympathize with your situation, more power to you,
let’s see what you can do, and let’s see how others inside and outside the tradition respond.” For me, the proof would be in the pudding (to add another metaphor).

In the case at
hand, the pudding is “probabilistic this-world karma.” This is the conceptual
engineering we’re being offered. I don’t think it works.

“Probabilistic”
properly speaking applies to a scientific causal model. When we have a causal
model consisting of a set of variables, we can define a probability measure
over propositions about the variables and their values. But what is the model
in the case of eudaimonistic karma? What are the variables and parameters? Unless
we can specify these, we don’t really know what we’re talking about. Are we supposed
to use game theory and decision theory to answer these questions? But these
theories typically abstract away from individual moral virtue, which is the key
concept of eudaimonistic thought. These theories and the concept of karma don’t
seem to fit together very well.

I worry that we’re
dealing with the same kind of scientism that infects much of Buddhist
modernism. By “scientism” I mean using scientific concepts where they’re not
appropriate. “Eudaimonistic karma” is a normative concept. It refers to good
and bad individual mental intentions and actions. Normative concepts operate in
the logical space of reasons—the logical space of being able to justify what
you say in relation to norms and values. The concept of probability, however,
is a descriptive one that operates in the logical space of causes. When you say
“probabilistic karma” you just code switch between the normative and
descriptive languages without helping us to think about their relation.

There are other
problems. As I wrote before, ...

Evan Thompson

elisa freschi | August 11, 2020 at 2:17 pm | Tags: Gananath Obeyesekere, Stephen Harris | URL: https://wp.me/p486Wp-1b6

http://indianphilosophyblog.org/2020/08/11/losing-the-thread-a-response-to-lele-guest-post-by-evan-thompson/