Thursday, December 17, 2009

Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic

     Sri Aurobindo - A Contemporary Reader Edited by Sachidananda Mohanty, Routledge India 2008

This book compiles some of the finest writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) — the nationalist, visionary, poet-philosopher. It reflects the range, depth and outreach of the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision of this versatile and multifaceted genius. It aims at providing, at one place, access to the key concepts, tenets, and the spirit of the extraordinary range of texts authored by him.

Although concretely grounded in contemporary times — with its location in a specific socio-cultural matrix — this work projects a body of writings that is certain to have lasting value. In particular, the compilation brings forth Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic: his views on ethnicity, his exposition of the key role language plays in the formation of communitarian identities, his crucial understanding of self-determination which has incidentally become an important aspect of human rights discourse today.

Situating the writings in a specific intellectual, spiritual and historical context, this collection will enable readers to appreciate the overall vision of Sri Aurobindo, in what can be conceived as a caravan of history of ideas in terms of a common heritage of humankind, and recent developments in theory and disciplinary practice, especially those pertaining to consciousness and future studies.

Other titles by Sachidananda Mohanty:

K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran) A Centenary Tribute

In Search of Wonder 

Literature and Culture

Travel Writing and the Empire

Gender and Cultural Identity in Colonial Orissa

Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Defeat of Fascism


 Reading Hegel: The Introductions (Transmission) Edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra ► re.press 2008

Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel’s major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel’s systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel’s Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel’s Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel’s thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another.

Hegel’s reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law—all included here—have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan’s famous Kyoto School or India’s Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel’s writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel’s worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.


Indian Political Thought: A Reader Edited by Aakash Singh and Silika Mohapatra ► Routledge 2010

This Reader provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of contemporary Indian political theory. Tracing the development of the discipline and offering a clear presentation of the most influential literature in the field, it brings together contributions by outstanding and well-known academics on contemporary Indian political thought. The Reader weaves together relevant works from the social sciences — sociology, anthropology, law, history, philosophy, feminist and postcolonial theory — which shape the nature of political thought in India today.

Themes both unique to the Indian political milieu as well as of universal significance are reflected upon, including tradition, secularism, communalism, modernity, feminism, justice and human rights. Presenting a canon of names and offering a framework for further research within the broad thematic categories, this is a timely and invaluable reference tool, indispensable to both students and scholars.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Rich and I have tried to make these kinds of hybrid extensions

Re: LACMA 111909 - Debashish Banerji
by Debashish on Sat 05 Dec 2009 08:02 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

This train of conversation arose because of my attempt to relate the Subject/Substance debate of Hegel/Spinoza returned in Zizek/Deleuze with Sri Aurobindo's dealing with sarvam and anantam in the Record of Yoga: http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2009/11/20/4385355.html#1279216

The western debate remains an aporia because there is no passage out of its contradiction in the Avidya. But there is an experiential way out as delat with by Sri Aurobindo. To insert this into the discourse enlarges and extends its horizon. By introducing Sri Aurobindo into an unfamiliar terrain it also reconstellates and recontextualizes him.

This is a specific case, but in general, in sciy, Rich and I have tried to make these kinds of hybrid extensions. I believe in your own specialized field of writing you do the same - reconstellate Sri Aurobindo by introducing him into an existing contemporary discourse as a new perception which therey alters the discursive topography. Science, Culture and Integral Yoga Recent Articles
A Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Provincializing Europe" by Amit Chaudhuri (London Review of Books) Debashish
Darshan Day Message: Justice! (Heehs case stayed by Orissa High Court) Rich
Within the limits of capitalism, economizing means taking care - Bernard Stiegler Debashish
AntiMatters vol 3 no 4 is out koantum
Classicism, post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s work: re-defining the terms of Indian contemporary dance discourses by Alessandra Lopez y Royo Debashish
Three Poems: After the Flip (III) Rich
Three Poems: Playground Meditation (II) Rich
Three Poems: Balloon Boy (I) Rich
Review: Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood by Fredric Jameson (LRB) Rich
Review: Genorosity by Richard Powers (NY Times) Rich
Systems Evolution & Bio Feminism: Move Over Darwin by Rachel Armstrong (C Theory) Rich
Shifting Blame is Socially Contagious koantum
LACMA 111909 - Debashish Banerji Debashish
The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger review by David Shulman (NYRB) Rich
Do not go gentle into the night (Dylan Thomas d. Nov 9, 1953) Rich

In memoriam Ron Jon Anastasia d. October 20th 2009
* The SCIY Index * Article Links: January-October 2009
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David Hockney's iPhone Passion by Lawrence Weschler (NY Review of Books)
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A reprieve from Arctic ice meltdown?
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Jackson 2Bears: The Technological Unconscious, Animism and the Uncanny
• Global warming impacts sooner & worse than expected ?
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You shouldn't believe everything you read, yet according to a classic psychology study at first we can't help it
• Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India
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Conference Proceedings: Fundamentalism and the Future
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A Life Of Its Own: Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? by Michael Specter (The New Yorker)
• New direct-drive turbines to lower cost of offshore wind energy.
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Tribute to J.C. by K. Curtis Lyle (from Electric Church)
• John Coltrane, Avant Garde Jazz and the Evolution of "My Favorite Things" by Scott Anderson
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The Holy Grail of the Unconscious : Jung's Red Book (N.Y. Times Magazine)
• Advanced Solar Panels Coming to Market
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Toward a Theory of Phantasmal Media: An Imaginative Cognition- and Computation-Based Approach to Digital Media D. Fox Harrell (C Theory)
• The Irony of Time: Baghdad in early Islamic History - Gaston Wiet
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Astronomers Plan Galaxy-Sized Observatory For Gravitational Waves
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Group Polarization: The Trend to Extreme Decisions
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The Alien Home by Pico Iyer
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How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things
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Hindutva Undermines the Pristine Values of Hinduism
• The Rise of the Rest by Fareed Zakaria
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Crisis of the Mind by Paul Valery
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Censorship as its own art form: 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour (review LA Times)
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Health Insurance, Pure Economy of Desire by The Critical Art Ensemble
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Objectivity by Lorraine Datson & Peter Galison (Book Review by Norberto Serpente)
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Integral Psychology – Theorizing its Disciplinary Boundaries
• On Universalism: In Debate with Alain Badiou by Etienne Balibar
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Capitalism a Love Story by Michael Moore
• An Interview with Alain Badiou: “Universal Truths & the Question of Religion” by Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture • The Fundamentalism Project: A series from the University of Chicago Press Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Editors • 15th August 2009: 137th Birth Anniversay of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
• The Myth of the New India by Pankaj Mishra
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AntiMatters New Issue Released
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Les Paul 1915-2009
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White Noise by Don Delillo - review by Jayne Ann Phillps (Ny Times)
• Conference: Fundamentalism and the Future
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Code Drifts: Tethered to Mobility, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
• White Noise - a book review by William E. Connolly
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Technology in a Global World by Andrew Feenberg
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Cosmiccomics by Italo Calvino (review Ursula K Le Guin: The Guardian)
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Slavoj Žižek - A Lacanian Plea for Fundamentalism (8/9)
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Mullahs and Heretics by Tariq Ali (LRB)
• From Post to Neo and back: Habermas and Derrida by Raymond van de Wiel
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Zizek: A Lacanian plea for Fundamentalism (part 6 or 9)
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The Other of Derridean Deconstruction: Levinas, Phenomenology and the Question of Responsibility by Jack Reynolds • Jacques Lacan and the Other
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“It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour
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The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard
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Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education in Contemporary Higher Education
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Into the Inferno: Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies by Arundhati Roy
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An Imaginative Geography - Chapter One of "The Myth of Shangri-La" by Peter Bishop
• Cogito in the Matrix by Erik Davis
• The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized) by Jean Baudrillard
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A Critical History of Architecture in a Post-Colonial World: A View from Indian History By Swati Chattopadhyay
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Born Again Ideology (religion, technology and terrorism) by Arthur Kroker
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Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 Reviewed by Daud Ali
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Fundamentalism and the Future
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Fascism and False Guru Sects (Kheper.net)
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The Resonant Soul: Gaston Bachelard and the Magical Surface of Air by Robert Sardello
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Gaston Bachelard: poet/philosopher of the imagination and epistemological rupture
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Towards a Postcolonial Modernity: AsiaSource Interview with Partha Chatterjee
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Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (C Theory)
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Waltz with Bashir
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Phalange Party
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Rushdie's Satanic Verses and Khomeini's Reaction By Eric Hutchinson
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Twenty years on: how the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has gagged our society By Anthony Drew (The Observer)
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Amos Elon (1926-2009) by Tony Judt (NYRB)
• Esalen Conference on Fundamentalism: Jewish Fundamentalism
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A Matter of Mind by J. Kepler
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Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism book review by Ray Takeyh (NYRB) / interview with Abbas Amanat (U Tube)
• Unending Desire: De Certeau's Mystics
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Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Sarod Virtuoso, Dies at 87
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Heterologies of the Spiritual and the Everyday: The Quest of Michel de Certeau
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Esalen Conference on Fundamentalism
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Tariq Ali: the Duel (Pakistan on the Flight Path of America Power)
• This guy won! (or so they say) L.A. Times
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The road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir by Graham User (LRB)
• Much ado about Ganesha: Paul Courtright, Wendy Doniger, and the Hindu Right (Rajiv Malhotra) by Amardeep Singh - (w/ Courtright review)
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Further evidence of Ranade's and Pandey's involvement in legal action
• The Monstrosity of Christ by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank (M.I.T)
• Spiritual Authoritarianism (P2P)
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Knowledge and Human Liberation - Excerpts from Ananta Kumar Giri Annotated by Debashish Banerji
• Heidegger, Habermas and the Essence of Technology by Andrew Feenberg
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Evidence of Sraddhalu Ranade’s involvement in legal action
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Occidentalism by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit (NYRB)
• Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s unfinished critique (Boston Review)
• The Third Eye and Two Ways of (Un)knowing: Gnosis, Alternative Modernities, and Postcolonial Futures: Makarand Paranjape,Professor of English, JNU, New Delhi
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Cogito in the Matrix by Erik Davis
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Progress and Violence, by Shiv Visvanathan
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The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener by Stephen Pfohl (C Theory)
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100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity (part 5 of 6)
• Postsecular Interrogations: AsiaSource Interview with Talal Asad
• A response to the organizers of AUM 2009
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Neo-Liberalism as Doxa and India Discourse on Globalization by, Rohit Chopra [Full paper added by ron]
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Atheists: No God, no reason, just whining
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Response to Sraddhalu, Alok letter of May 10th on Heehs reintegration
• A Proposal - Shifting From Words to Action by Savitra
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Law Suits, Sraddhalu and the Fraternity of Conspiracy Theorists
• Active Omissions: A Review of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Manoj - Annotated by Debashish
• Congress Wins (The Guardian)
• AntiMatters new issue alert
• Prana, Kratu, Jazz II: Ali Ahmad Hoosain, Hasan Haider, Ahmad Abbas and Subhen Chatterjee at UC Irvine, May 10, 2009 by Debashish Banerji
• David Hutchinson, Debashish Banerji and Rich Carlson Respond to Sraddhalu
• SCIY Response to Sraddhalu
• Kepler's response to Sraddhalu
• Surendra's letter to Sraddhalu
• A Pleasing Secret History: Andrei Codrescu's Posthuman Dada Guide (Village Voice)
• Sri Aurobindo: Man or Messiah by Carter Phipps (EnlightenNext executive editor comments on Heehs affair)
• G.K. Chesterton on Fanaticism by James V. Schall (Gilbert Magazine)
• The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Kellner (Salon.com)
• Economic Recovery? No Thank You
• Creationism and/or Religious Fundamentalism vs. Evolution and/or Science
• John Templeton Foundation: Celebrating the Bicentenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin
• Goodbye To All That: Nature and the Future Body in Sri Aurobindo
• The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin
• We're all getting sick of being bullied by bad values
• Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist by Brett Clark and Richard York (Monthly Review)
• equanimity? Miles davis et John Coltrane - So what.
• Devolution: Why Intelligent Design isn't by H. Allen Orr (The New Yorker)
• 'The God Delusion' by Richard Darwkins, a review by H. Allen Orr (NYRB)
• Is Capitalism a Disease? The Crisis in U.S. Public Health by Richard Levins
• Fundamentalism in Integral Yoga - New Website Announcement
• In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson
• At 200, Darwin Evolves Beyond Evolution by Brandon Keim (Wired Magazine)
• Accelerated Evolution: They dont make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To: Kathleen AcAuliffe (Discover Magazine)
• Evolving Evolution by Rosenfield & Zeff (evo-devo, hox genes, etc)
• Lewontin's Living Legacy: Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical and Political Perspectives (Val Dusek)
• Pleasures of Pluralism by Stephen Jay Gould
• Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Tech and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition: Metnexus (Global Spiral)
• Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman (preface)
• Present Bodies: Gene, Organism, Environment: Richard Lewinton lecture (U Tube)
• The Future Body: Tissue engineering (Toward an Aurobindonian Bio-ethics?)
• From Biopower to Biopolitics by M.Lazzarato
• The Mother's Agenda Original Tape Recordings
• 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution (complete text with links)
• 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity (part 5 of 6)
• Discussing The Divine Comedy with Dante
• 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in Intelligent Design (part 1 of 6)
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The Lives of Sri Aurobindo: the aggrieved victim
• The Soul of a City: The Crystal Cathedral as Organizing Metaphor for (post)Modern Architecture at the Bauhaus
• Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers N. Katherine Hayles
• AntiMatters Vol 3 No 1 (2009) Released
• Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I
• The BioArt of Eduardo Kac
• Proust was a Neuroscientist: N.Y. Times Review
• A Chronology of Modern Indian Art and Thematic Considerations By Debashish Banerji
• Beyond Postmodernism?: Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory by John Armitage (C Theory)
• The Evolution of Discourse and The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
• The evolution of discourse: Rhizomes (A Thousand Plateaus)
• James Joyce and the pre-history of Cyberspace by Donald Theall (Hypermedia Joyce Studies)
• The Future Body: Disappearances
• Savitra: Reflections of an Evolutionary Activist: The Shadow of Fundamentalism in the Integral Yoga
• Biophilosophy for the 21st Century by Eugene Thacker (C Theory)
• My Back Pages
• Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton
• Creative Myth-making
• A Cultural Misunderstanding
• Against the grain and With the Grain: A Short Review of "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by J. Kepler
• Yoga, religion, and fundamentalism in the Integral Yoga Community by Lynda Lester
• Savitra speaks out on The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
• The Genesis of a Controversy
• The Strange Case of Dr. M and Mr. S
• The Core Problem
• Larger Issues of "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" Controversy
• The Core Problem Part II
• Review of Lives of Sri Aurobindo: Religious Studies Review
• Peter Heehs called to appear in Court
• An examination of the criticism against The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Larry Seidlitz
• Representing Swami Vivekananda: Some Issues and Debates By Makarand Paranjape
• Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism in a Global World by Mark Juergensmeyer
• Corrections to textual excerpts of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs
• Competing Visions of History in Internal Islamic Discourse and Islamic-Western Dialogue - ABDULLAHI A. AN-NA'IM
• The Mother: "No one with an atom of intelligence would fall into such a hole!"
• The Mother's war for the Truth against all conceptions of the truth
• The Greyscale Between Religion and Spirituality by Rick Lipschutz
• Explanation of my Stand wrt The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
• Orissa court stays release of book on Sri Aurobindo (Tainidan news)
• Auroville Today Interview with Peter Heehs
• Prisons We Choose to Live Inside - an Introduction by Diane Christine
• Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber
• An experience by the Mother: the basis and foundation of all materialism
• A fundamental error with altogether disastrous consequences
• “A journey from the human to the perfect” – François Gautier’s review of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo
Article Links: July-December 2008
• Critical Digital Studies
• Trane: Alabama
• The BioArt of Eduardo Kac (cont)
• Who Carries Out Spectacular Acts of Terrorism and Why? Nitasha Kaul (C Theory)
• The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski
• Man on Wire (movie review)
• George W. Bush: "Iraq" (The Farewell Tour)
• 9 is not 11 by Arundhati Roy (TomDispatch)
• The Theory of Positive Disintegration by Kazimierz Dabrowski
• Why Save Capitalism?
• The Mother's challenge to the financial world - 50 years ago
• Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Upanishads in the life of Rashaan Roland Kirk: Aug 7, 1936 - Dec 5, 1977
• AntiMatters - New Issue Released
• Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies interview Radio Open Sorce/ review TimesOnline
• Heaven's Smiley
• The Mother addresses a materialist
• An Indian Patriot Act post-Mumbai? by Kanishk Tharoor (Open Democracy)
• Eric Dolphy - God Bless the Child
•
Setting the Record Straight: An Open Letter from Michael Murphy
• Pops for Inauguration Day
•
Samjnana, Ajnana, Vijnana, Prajnana, by Dr. Vladimir Iatsenko: Indian Psychology Institute • Going Crazy in India by Rosemary Dinnage (NYRB)
• Dylan Thomas: died 9 Nov 1953
• American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip F. Gura Reviewed by Laura Miller
•
Cornel West: Hope on a Tight Rope (AfroToronto)
• Aravind Adiga's Man Booker Prize Winning Novel: The White Tiger, review by Sanjay Subrahmanyam
• The Phenomenon: The Audacity of Hope (a review by M. Tomasky)
• City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (C Theory)
• Jimmy Cobb: Kind of Blue 50 years later (Village Voice)
• Xul Solar
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Shahzia Sikander
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Drill baby drill (C Theory)
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What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue By Judith Butler
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The Flames - a short story by Olaf Stapledon
•
Welcome to Wasilla Alaska. Home of Sarah "small town" Palin
•
What is the Question? Slavoj Zizek: radio open source
•
Fredric Jameson's anti anti Utopianism: Archaeologies of the Future a review by P. Fitting
•
Banning Books, Censorship in the 20th Century (ALA)
•
MAYAN SYNERGY, by Alehandra Libelula
•
Sonnet Morph'
• 'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson
•
The Yoga of Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation, by Richard Hartz
•
Panoptic to Cyberoptics by Alexander Ried
•
Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III
•
Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II
• Trajectories of the Catastrophic
• US Nationalizes Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac - Outcome Uncertain (NYT)
•
Building the 'Big Bang machine': LHC Startup on Monday (10sep08)
•
Gold and the Collapse of Fiat Paper Money
•
Volcker Says Finance System`Broken,' Losses May Rise
•
In the Eye of the Storm of the Credit Crisis Hurricane
• Stronger Hurricanes Result of Global Warming? (NYT/Nature)
•
"Once By The Pacific" by Robert Frost
•
Integrity Bank Becomes 10th U.S. Failure This Year [Bloomberg]by ronjon on • A Nasty Twist to the Cartel “End Game”?
•
Have we really never had it so bad? [Scotland Sunday Herald]
•
SCIY's Page Views and MBs Transferred reach new highs in July 2008
• Meet the Economist Who Thinks We're Doomed: Dr. Nouriel Roubini (NYT)

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Emerson says that Plato is the epitome of the European mind

the greatest Platonic dialogue?
from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) Having been on a renewed Plato kick lately,

However, if someone were to use the same standard and ask: “who are the two greatest philosophers of all time?”, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer Plato and Aristotle. Though I’m obviously not one of those “ancients vs. moderns” antiquarians who views all of modernity as a degeneration, total mastery of the complete works of Plato and Aristotle would be a better philosophical training than anything else I can imagine.

Heidegger’s view (though I guess it’s really Nietzsche’s view) that Plato marks a step down from the pre-Socratics strikes me as one of the most fateful errors one could make in assessing the history of Western philosophy. I love the pre-Socratics, but none of them is in Plato’s league. [...]

While reserving the right to change my mind later (and I mean that), my instincts still lead me to choose the Meno. It’s certainly not his greatest literary masterpiece (that would probably be the Phaedrus). But I can’t think of another dialogue where all of the most powerful Platonic weaponry is deployed so successfully, and so economically, against anti-philosophy.

A note on Orientalism from The Joyful Knowing by Mike Johnduff

Harman has actually been pretty good about trying to historicize his own concepts, at least on the personal level (I've never heard a person so frankly admit exactly when they really figured out Husserl before, as he does in Prince of Networks)--and philosophy, as history of philosophy as an area of study grows, is no doubt getting better in general in this area. 2:29 PM

Re: Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age by Kishor Gandhi—an Appraisal by RY Deshpande Mirror of Tomorrow
by auroman on Fri 11 Dec 2009 07:46 PM IST Profile Permanent Link
Of course, the Greeks did not link their division of society to the four divine powers. These are discussions from the Evening talks.

"Disciple : Plato says that each form has its own "Idea" that is, behind the form is a fixed Idea of the type a and it is that which persists while it is the individual that varies. The genus remains the same on the plane of Idea ?

Sri Aurobindo : But where is the Idea ?

Disciple : In Plato. (Laughter)

Disciple : I do not suppose Plato meant a mental abstrac­tion by his "Idea". It may mean "creative conception"

Sri Aurobindo : Plato had very mathematical ideas about these things. If he meant by it the creative conception then there are several things in it. First of all, it is not a mental idea but what I call the Real-Idea : that is Idea with a Reality and a Power. Now, corresponding to every form there is what may be called the "archetype" ;the type-form, and it already exists in the Idea – the ; Real-Idea – before it exists in matter. Everything exists first in consciousness and then in matter.

Disciple : Could that be the Mahat-Brahma of which the Gita speaks ?

Sri Aurobindo : I do not know if Plato had some dim inti­mation of the Supramental; but as his mind was mathematical he cast it into rigid rational and mental forms. That was the Greek mind.

----

Disciple : Writing about Plato, Emerson says that he is the epitome of the European mind for the last 2000 years.

Sri Aurobindo : It is true; – the European mind got every- thing and owes everything to the Greeks. Every branch of knowledge in which human curiosity could be interested has been given to Europe by the; Greeks. The Roman could fight and legislate, he could keep the states together, but he made the Greek think for him. Of course, the Greeks also could fight but not always so well. The Roman thinkers, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, all owe their philosophy to the Greeks. That, again, is another illustration of what I was speaking of as the inrush of forces. Consider a small race like the Greeks living on the small projecting tongue of land : this race was able to build up a culture that has given everything essential to your modern European culture and that in a span of 200 to 300 years only !

Disciple : And the number of artists they produced was remarkable.

Sri Aurobindo : They had the sense of beauty. The one thing that modern Europe has not assimilated from the Greeks is the sense of beauty. One can't say the modern European culture is beautiful. The same can be said of ancient India, it had beauty, much of which it has since lost. And now we are fast losing more and more of it under the European influence. It is true that the Greeks did not create everything, they received many elements from Egypt, Crete and Asia."

No one has done a comparison of William Blake's vision with Nietzsche's Life Philosophy

Last Days of the Dark Age Blog
by longsword on Mon 07 Dec 2009 09:57 AM CST
Time to retire the blog. more » Comments (13) Permanent Link Cosmos I have received notice from the service provider that the domain darkage.ca is due for renewal. After much pondering, I have decided that I will not be renewing The Dark Age Blog.

After five years, it's time I minded my own shop for a while. Hopefully, TDAB has dispelled more fog (and smog) about the times than it has generated. I am at least gratified to learn from correspondents and commentors that it has helped them gain some degree of orientation amidst the current "sound and fury signifying nothing" -- nothing here being the contemporary plague of nihilism -- the anatomy of human destructiveness, to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm.

But this nihilism is also, potentially, a clearing of the deck -- a kind of return to the tabula rasa as the Dance of the Nataraj. Everything today called "loss of self", "post-history", "post-Enlightenment", "culture of narcissism", "infantilisation" (and which is known by a hundred other names as well), can also be appreciated as the work of the hand of the tillerman who ploughs the field and prepares the soil for another season's sowing and harvest. Nihilism is like a plough wind that flattens everything.

The consistent message of The Dark Age Blog is that The Modern Era is over and with it, the modern ethos, which I have described as essentially perspectivist. We should, as they say, truly "get over it", for it has now become a patch of weeds and an obstacle to the realisation of the Planetary Era -- the holistic or integral era that is now in formation and which has been in formation since the First World War announced the creation of the world, so to speak. Whether we realise it or no, we are the posterity of that event in the sense that "the sins of the fathers shall be visited down to the third and fourth generations".

But that also implies that it is the fourth or fifth generation that redeems the meaning of the past and absolves it (frees it and liberates it) from its generational chain of fateful consequences. It will do so when it realises the implicit meaning of the World War as birth of the Global Era as the Integral Era. It was no accident that the man who invented the science of ecology -- the web of inter-being or inter-connectedness -- was also the first to give The Great European War its true name -- World War. While others only saw the event from their narrow nationalistic perspectives, Ernst Haeckel perceived the event in the context of the entire field -- the planet as a whole. It is also no accident, too, that at the same time, quantum field theory was emerging, followed by Chaos Theory for climatology, Picasso in art and, belatedly, the recognition of the fact that we now lived in a "postmodern" era -- an era of the maximum confusion of values.

That confusion, I am persuaded, is the current clash between past and future forms of society, between the old narrowly perspectivising consciousness of the modern ethos, now become reactionary (change from Promethean to Epimethean Man), and the emerging field (or integral) consciousness of the still embryonic Planetary civilisation. But the word "integral" and "whole" mean "healthy" and "health". As such, health, which is the meaning of integrity, has become the central value and organising principle of the emerging holisitic consciousness.

The core message of The Dark Age Blog has been that narcissism is the human condition, whether we call this narcissism by its true older name "idolatory", or by more current terms like "the anthropocentric attitude". Christopher Lasch coined the phrase "culture of narcissism" to describe the perspectivising consciousness become diseased, but even Lasch did not completely understand the meaning of this narcissism and the present "epidemic of narcissism". It is essentially the fuller meaning of Nietzsche's "all-too-human" as something which informs his judgement that "man is the sick animal" -- the estranged animal, the alienated animal now become, as nihilist, the suicidally self-destructive animal. William Blake also knew this narcissism in other terms as "single vision and Newton's sleep" and "the sleep of reason". What Blake referred to as "man closed up within the narrow chinks of his own cavern" -- a characterisation of diseased perspectivism now become the cultural norm, he described more extensively in his poem Jerusalem,

Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shut in narrow doleful formCreeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the groundThe Eye of Man a little narrow orb closed up & darkScarcely beholding the great light conversing with the VoidThe Ear, a little shell in small volutions shutting outAll melodies & comprehending only Discord and HarmonyThe Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloysA little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heardThen brings forth Moral Virtue the cruel Virgin BabylonCan such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro’ its tubesMeasure the sunny rays that point their spears on UdanadanCan such an Ear fill’d with the vapours of the yawning pit.Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a hand divine?Can such closed Nostrils feel a joy? or tell of autumn fruitsWhen grapes & figs burst their covering to the joyful airCan such a Tongue boast of the living waters? or take inOught but the Vegetable Ratio & loathe the faint delightCan such gross Lips perceive? alas! folded within themselvesThey touch not ought but pallid turn & tremble at every wind…But in the wine presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:They howl & writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,In chains of iron & in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,In pits & dens & shades of death, in shapes of torment & woe –The plates & screws & racks & saws & cords & fires & cisterns,The cruel joys of Luvah’s daughters, lacerating with knivesAnd whips their victims, & the deadly sport of Luvah’s sons…

The other insistent message of The Dark Age Blog is that it is possible to "get over it" -- as Nietzsche's "self-overcoming". And since TDAB has taken much inspiration from William Blake, too, I will allow Blake also to speak to this possibility of self-overcoming of the merely perspectival and limiting mind of the Cartesian cogito,

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:Fibres of love from man to man thro’ Albion’s pleasant land.In all the dark Atlantic vale down from the hills of SurreyA black water accumulates, return Albion! return!Thy brethren call thee, and thy fathers, and thy sons,Thy nurses and thy mothers, thy sisters and thy daughtersWeep at thy souls disease, and the Divine Vision is darken’d:Thy Emanation that was wont to play before thy face,Beaming forth with her daughters into the Divine bosomWhere hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely JerusalemFrom the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!…Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal EyesOf Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into EternityEver expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human ImaginationO Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages…

"Become what you are", therefore. I still marvel, in fact, that no one, to the best of my knowledge, has done a comparison of William Blake's vision with Nietzsche's Life Philosophy.

What is Transmodernism?
by longsword on Wed 09 Mar 2005 02:46 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

Transmodernism, then, restores the temporal dimension to thought. It is the spirit of emigration renewed in the form of a new aspiration, as the desire to overcome modernity and transcend it altogether. If anything, its goal is more akin to Blake's New Jerusalem (as opposed to the "dark satanic mill"), and not as some social utopia (all "utopias" are now suspect) but as the consciously integral human being and cosmos. The themes of holism, fulfillment, authenticity, and integration dominate transmodernism throughout precisely because they have absented Modernism. Both words, "holistic" and "integral", descend from words meaning "health", and so personal, social, environmental, cultural health necessarily become thematic to its concerns.

The Buddhist Peril by longsword on Sat 07 Mar 2009 11:14 AM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

Although I am not a Buddhist per se (or leastwise as men understand the name "Buddhist") I am intrigued by the possibilities of Buddhism as a social critique and theory. I am also intrigued by the possibilities of Islam, particularly its Sufi branch, for the same reason. I can also say the same for Nietzsche's philosophy and for the intriguing possibilities of the "shamanism" described by Carlos Castaneda and his confederates, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner-Grau. So, while I am none of these things really, there is also a sense in which I feel I am also all of them and more besides. I am also attracted by "the Eastern Nietzsche" Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga". 9:47 AM

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Jung wrote for the Westerner and Sri Aurobindo & The Mother for Humankind

Sanatana Dharma XXVI—the Four luminous Powers and the Story of Creation
Mirror of Tomorrow Comment posted by: Joan Price

Jung wrote for the Westerner and Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for Humankind. Sri Aurobindo emphasized the national spirit of India and Jung of the West. Why, then do we wish to pit them against one another?

Yes, Jung was an empiricist, because he knew Western empiricists would listenn to nothing else. But if one would read his "VII Sermones ad Mortuous," "Memories, Dreams and Reflections," and the recently published "The Red Book," one would gain some insight into his spiritual and mystical side.

Mirror of Tomorrow :: Jung, Philemon and the Fourfold Psyche—by ...
I am always in awe with the range of the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness, .... As with Sri Aurobindo's soul-force and the fourfold personality, ...

Mirror of Tomorrow :: Poetry Time: 28 November 2009—in Just Spring ...
Poetry Time: 21 November 2009—Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God and its Poetic Appreciation by RY Deshpande · A case of mistaken paternity?—by Mahir Ali ...

India 2009 Thanksgiving, Fulbright Style
I introduced Sri Aurobindo's social philosophy and explained the challenge ... After all, in The Human Cycle Sri Aurobindo writes, "The possible godhead of ...

The Metamorphosis of a Sadhak-Scholar -- by Raman Reddy
24 Nov 2009 by Raman Reddy On the one hand, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have given us absolute certainty with regard to the general direction we should be heading in, that is, if we don't want to get into unnecessary difficulties. On the other hand, ...

Aurora Mirabilis: Barin Ghose, Dilip Kumar Roy, and Anna Bogenholm ...
Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother. ... That is why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have so often advised us not to play with Doubt, ...

Your own Path - ASPIRATION
As Jordi and Barin, point out, Mother and Sri Aurobindo had a lot of ... Sri Aurobindo also admonished in one of his letters to a sadhak not to be ...

Silensing the mind - ASPIRATION
Sri Aurobindo stressed on a silent mind and a desire less vital to begin with for the ... Sri Aurobindo on several occasions discussed the matter with his ...

A Vision of Sujata Nahar « The Mother's Lasso
24 Nov 2009 She had seen it in 1907-1908 or may be even before that period. She didn't have the experiences of Savitri then. Mother's experiences were noted down by Sri Aurobindo much later. I don't recall well but Mother read Savitri much later. ...

Sri Aurobindo on shadow and light
19 Nov 2009 by Michelle It is up to you to know how to use one to realise the other.” - Sri Aurobindo. Posted in quotes Tagged: Indian freedom fighters, Indian nationalists, Indian philosophers, Indian poets, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo quotes, yogis.

The Triple Status of Supermind « Sri Aurobindo Studies
26 Nov 2009 by sriaurobindostudies Sri Aurobindo Studies. Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. « Supermind Manifests Defined Creation through Space and Time. The Triple Status of Supermind. By sriaurobindostudies. It is quite clear that the power of creation that, ...

Fwd:-The Sunlit Path: November 15, 2009
19 Nov 2009 by RAHUL GANDHI SRI AUROBINDO CHAIR OF INTEGRAL STUDIES SARDAR PATEL UNIVERSITY Dear all, I am happy to send herewith the November 15,2009 issue of " The Sunlit Path", e magazine of Sri Aurobindo Chair of Integral Studies, Sardar Patel University