Friday, February 15, 2013

Fiery intensity may look like fundamentalism

What’s at Stake in Hermetic Reterritorialization? from An und für sich by Jacob Sherman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Joshua Ramey’s The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal is such a rich, provocative, and deliciously inconclusive book that I have had trouble deciding upon the shape of a response. The details of the book – the excavation of Deleuze’s hope for an eschatological community of immanence, the reading of the Deleuzean (and Peircean) sign as a kind of arcanum, the rigorous thematization of the shamanic in Deleuze’s process philosophical wagers, etc. – all demand careful, further engagement. Ramey’s work has the potential, alongside Kerslake’s, to change how many of us read Deleuze – not because the Deleuze he shows us is entirely foreign or monstrous, but because he seems to be a Deleuze we suspected of being there all along but could never quite catch sight of.
I am left with the strangely giddy feeling that I won’t really have finished Ramey’s book until I’ve gone back and reread an entirely nonidentical Deleuze all over again. Until then, however, I can venture an initial response to the book as a whole. The title and subtitle announce two different projects… Why risk this? Why risk Deleuze’s reputation (I am being serious here) and the future possibilities of philosophy as spiritual and transformative practice by tying them to something so spooky, so regularly reviled, so politically ambiguous as hermeticism? It cannot be simply a matter of rectifying a historical oversight in our interpretation of Deleuze… I suspect that Ramey seeks to divine a new shape for philosophy in the hermetic tradition rather than, say, in Hadot’s ancient philosophical schools, because of the degree of creativity that hermeticism not only thematizes but also unleashes… I’m sympathetic to this reading of Deleuzebut I am also not sure how finally to reconcile this with the Deleuze that I have been trying to read for years.  

Elisabeth Ellis (ed.), Kant's Political Theory: Interpretationsand Applications, Penn State University Press, 2012, 256pp., ISBN 9780271053776. Reviewed by Helga Varden, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Although Habermas has increasingly become preoccupied with and inspired by Kant's legal-political philosophy -- and especially Kant's main writing on the issue, the Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals -- the same was never true of Rawls. Rawls was clearly inspired by some of Kant's shorter, political essays, primarily in his thinking about global justice in The Law of Peoples, but most of the Kantian ideas developed as part of his theory of "justice as fairness" utilize core ideas in Kant's ethical writings, including some of those captured by the categorical imperative… Ripstein argues that even if we assume away our "crooked timber," or our typical tendencies to act in ignorant, biased, selfish, or vicious ways, we still need justice. And to fully establish justice, we need states (the rule of law). Against much Kant interpretation (including the majority of the other articles in the anthology) and other prominent theories of justice, such as those we find in Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, Ripstein defends the claim that for Kant "neither justice nor the law is remedial." … Hence Kant asserts that a united will provides a means for overcoming or, to use Ripstein's language, "remedying" antagonisms (163). Similarly, contemporary Kantian approaches, like those of Rawls and Habermas, mistakenly search for the construction of some procedures, "rational will formation," or "cosmopolitan institutions that could guarantee peaceful and just relations around the globe." (153) … To understand what Kant really means in his legal-political writings, we need to look elsewhere. In particular, we need to appreciate a particular (also controversial) interpretation of Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the plausibility of which is seen as stemming from a particular interpretation of various historical facts that influenced Kant deeply (including in ways Kant himself wasn't aware).

With the advent of the vital life force into the world we see what some have called “the law of the jungle” and others “survival of the fittest” as the basic principle of the life energy. Even for human beings, we start from this basis and only add ethical and moral considerations later as mind-nature begins to develop and make itself felt in transcending the basic instincts of the vital force.
Sri Aurobindo comments on the nature of the vital power in its action in the world… The rule of return on energy is operative here by providing results based on the ability to harness and master the powers of the vital force. There may be an element of self-control, discipline or focus of energy, but these are implementations of the law of vital force and their goal, and their result, is to enhance the success of the vital life nature.

Our growth from "inadequacies and flaws" are not better achieved on the mountaintop; it is through action that we must grow.  5:17 pm on Tue 27 Jan 2009 07:21 PM PST Permanent Link Well said, Mr. Sane! An effort in this direction, to create a culture of dialog and social forums for conducting these, is the need of the hour. But all this presupposes the acknowledgment of personal finitude, the openness to the other and the willingness to aim for integrality, as you point out. 
Re: Yoga, religion, and fundamentalism in the Integral Yoga Community by Lynda Lester by Rick on Sat 24 Jan 2009 10:35 AM PST |  Profile |  Permanent Link
I feel that “Evolution II” is a powerful account, though filtered through Satprem’s sensibility. “The Tragedy of the Earth” is a wonderful book; Aeschylean, Sophoclean. Because a human is fraught and peppered with imperfections need not stop that human from attempting the transformation where others are standing back, commentating and clucking away. I see Satprem a flawed hero. I feel that Sri Aurobindo and Mother must value all the better angels of our nature (for instance, the more successful parts of the recent biography); and feel they value Satprem for his courage that resonates in the very cells of being.
Satprem at his best—is Satprem. Fiery intensity may look like fundamentalism but it was not religion he was founding—it was yoga he was doing and that he is living in its authentic fires. It was not what he was looking behind at; it was what he was always moving towards that interests me. It was no belief to merely warm our pale hands at as we stand, not too close, to the thin little fires of the mind. (I would look more at the mental fundamentalisms that limit the perspectives—of us all.)

The term “outrage industry” seems to have been coined in 2008 by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj of Tufts University. They used it to describe the methods of “certain kinds of advocacy organizations and media outlets” who promoted “a highly polarized view of American politics”. Berry and Sobieraj concluded that, for such groups, manufacturing outrage was an effective strategy that was “likely to persist”…
Here I must pause to look at the terms “hurt sentiments” and “hurt feelings”. When I first came to India years ago I was puzzled whenever I read in the newspapers that a riot had been started by a group whose feelings had been hurt by something another group was supposed to have said or done. In the US, at least when I was growing up, “hurt feelings” were something that only little children were likely to be troubled by. 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Darwinism hardly resembles what Darwin wrote

I would strongly suggest that you consider looking at Joshua Ramey’s new book The Hermetic Deleuze… While a lot of my earlier years were spent reading esotericism, gnosticism, hermeticism and occultism, I have been incrementally distancing my philosophical self from such potential contaminants to reason for twenty years now. And this is despite teaching both philosophy and contemporary incarnations of such esoteric traditions at university. I only started to forcefully question the viability and value of this bracketing quite recently: Posted by Paul Reid-Bowen at 13:38
The Yogi and the Devotee (Routledge Revivals): The Interplay ... - Ninian Smart - 2013 - Preview - More editions Aurobindo, Sri 145–146, 166, 172 Avalokiteshvara 38, 48 Baillie, ... 95, 100–101, 142, 163–165, 167–169 Cicero 20 Darwin, C.143–144 Dayal, H.171 Dutt, S. 171 Eckhart 30, 44 Edgerton,...
Readings in Sri Aurobindo's the Life Divine: Covering Book One, ... - Page 141 - Santosh Krinsky - 2012 - Preview - More editions ... principle in action here brings us beyond the idea of “mutual devouring”, and thus, is the next evolutionary phase beyond a pure darwinian “survival of the fittest. ...reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 21, The Ascent of Life, pg.
Future of Anthropological Knowledge - Page 259 Henrietta Moore - 2012 - Preview - More editions Sri Aurobindo (1972) Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Pondicherry: SriAurobindo Ashram, Vol. ... King and A. Cameron (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East H: Land Use and Settlement Patterns, Princeton: Darwin Press.
Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers - Page 927 Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson, Robert Wilkinson - 2012 - Preview - More editions ... Feng Youlan Darwin, C.: Abbott; Haeckel; Liang Qichao; Lu Xun; Morgan; Pound; Schiller; Sun Zhongshan; Swabey; ... Valéry Devi, llllahasweta: Spivak Dewey, J.: Aurobindo; Beardsley; Blanshard; Buchler; Brodbeck; Burtt; Cannabrava; ...
Inclusive Humanism: Anthropological Basics for a Realistic ... - Page 253 - Christoph Antweiler - 2012 - Preview - More editions ... 173, 195 Assmann, Aleida 103, 195 Assmann , Jan 126 Atran, Scott 152, 162 Aurobindo, Sri 62 Babha, Homi 70 Barkow, ... Judith 64 Carrithers, Michael 95 Connolly, Bob 31 Cook, James 35 Cronk, Lee 84–86 Darwin, Charles 98 De Waal,...
Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of ... - Carter Phipps - 2012 - Carter Phipps calls them Evolutionaries. His groundbreaking book provides the first popular guide to these exciting minds who are illuminating the secrets of our past and expanding the vistas of our future.
Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God - Georges Van Vrekhem - 2012 - Besides, what is nowadays generally labelled as Darwinism hardly resembles what Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, but is the result of scientific developments at times considered anti-Darwinian. This book narrates the relevant events in ...
The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: ... - Page 63 - Michael R. Page - 2012 - Preview - More editions King-Hele here mistakes a restrictive biological evolution, more fitting with the later ideas of Charles Darwin, for the ... the Indian mystic and political leader, Sri Aurobindo, considers the Romantics “the poets of the dawn,” initiating a new ...
Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the ... - Page 359 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2011 - Preview - More editions ... W. Y., 242, 251 Everrett, Bill, 139 Evolution (Huxley), 186 evolutionary mysticism: of Aurobindo, 323; of Gerald Heard, 75; ... See also ancient-astronaut theory; Darwinian biology; Mutation mytheme; primate-alien hybrid Exegesis (Dick), 275, ...
Encyclopedia of Creativity, Two-Volume Set: Online Version - 2011 - Preview - More editions The conception of an evolution of consciousness was elaborated by Sri Aurobindo most extensively in his main philosophical work, The Life Divine. Sri Aurobindo starts by pointing out that the gradual evolution of which Darwin had found his proofs...
Science and Religion Around the World - Page 204 John Hedley Brooke, Ronald L. Numbers - 2011 - Preview - More editions One of these was Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), an English-educated Bengali nationalist and philosopher, who repudiated the materialism of Darwinian evolution for the “involution” of divine consciousness. Hindu creationists, however ...
Cornelissen R. M. Matthijs - 2011 - Preview ... and Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga claims that the goal of liberation can be reached within everyday life (Sri Aurobindo, ... The metatheory might be given a similar status as the (Darwinian) theory of evolution, or its aspect more relevant here ...
How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization: A Few People Can ... - Page 267 - Amit Goswami - 2011 - Preview Aurobindo, S. (1996). The Life Divine. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Bache, C. (2000). Dark Night, Early Dawn. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ... New York: Bantam. Behe, M. J. (1996). Darwin's Black Box. New York: Simon & Schuster.
A More Perfect Union:Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of ... - Page 179 - Linda Sargent Wood - 2010 - Preview - More editions ... an Episcopal priest, but he discarded Christianity when introduced to Darwinian ideas: “I became an instant atheist at ... 43 In 1949, Spiegelberg traveled to Asia on a Rockefeller grant to meet mystics, including Sri Aurobindo Ghose, who ...
A New Paradigm Of Development : Sumangalam - Page 11 - GuptaBajrang Lal - 2010 - Preview To my mind, the Cartesian and Newtonian theories of duality the philosophy of life built on Darwin's evolution theory has proved more detrimental ... In modern time also, Sri Aurobindo tried to end the isolation of materialism and spirituality.
Inspiration Divine: Your Purpose and Path to Health, Happiness and ... - Page 317 - Darwin Stephenson - 2009 - Full view Aurobindo. After the editing was nearly complete, I began searching for related bodies of work that proposed the same conclusions as the message that I ... Page 144 scholar, poet, mystic, evolutionary philosopher, yogi and guru) Sri Aurobindo wrote that there is taking place a gradual awakening of consciousness over ...
Stones of the New Consciousness: Healing, Awakening and ... - Page 78 - Robert Simmons - 2009 - Preview Elsewhere in this book I have mentioned Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and her confidant Satprem. ... They each explored the possibility that evolution is more than a Darwinian game of adaptation and survival—that it is the playing-out of the ...
Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality - Page 558 - James M. Nelson - 2009 - Preview - More editions Aumann, J. (1980). Spiritual theology. London: Sheed and Ward. Aurobindo, S. (1996). The synthesis of yoga. ... Darwin's devotion: Design without Designer. In R. Russell, W. Stoeger S. J., & F. Ayala (Eds.), Evolutionary and molecular biology ...
The Yoga Party: Philosophical Writings - Page 63 - Douglas E Frame - 2009 - Preview While this may go beyond the methods of Sri Aurobindo let me say that the egoistic being being part of the physical and ... it achieve integrity as a being in seeming competition (in the Darwinian sense) with other organisms in the web of life.
Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion - Page 169 - Purushottama. BilimoriaAndrew B. Irvine - 2009 - Preview - More editions Unlike Darwin, M̈uller does not see human evolution as beginning with the beast, but with the child. In his letter to the Duke of Argyll dated 22 ... Aurobindo, Sri (1971) The Secret of the Veda, Vol. 10. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Evolutionary, Spiritual Conceptions of Life - Sri Aurobindo, ... - Page 36 - Michael Leicht - 2008 - Preview Up to what level is Darwin's theory relevant to Aurobindo's evolutionary theory? –Darwin explains the part from small and simple organism to large and complex organism by ways of evolution, i.e. 'survival of the fittest'. Matter does not play a role...
The Lives of Sri Aurobindo - Page 482 - Peter Heehs - 2008 - Preview - More editions ... 134, 135, 149; Aurobindo visits after his marriage, 54; bomb experiments near, 153 Deshpande, Keshav Ganesh, 60; ... 203, 271, 277; conscious, 274; Darwinian, 6; human being a middle (transitional) term in, 352; of poetry, 304; spiritual, 6, ...
Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality ... - Page 183 - Ervin Laszlo - 2008 - Preview ... 58 Smolins, Lee, 100 social and political crises, 30 Social Darwinism, 57 social evolution, 23–26, 72 social structures, ... 97 Sri Aurobindo, 122 St. Augustine, 25 steam engine, 36 stimuli-transfer experiment, 105 subsystem, 32, 34 Sumer, ...
Science, Spirituality And The Modernization Of India - Page 162 - Makarand Paranjape - 2008 - Preview The genius of Charles Darwin pervaded the scientific West in the 1890s. Europe was gripped by the theory of evolution during the formative years of Sri Aurobindo's personality. When he returned to India in 1892 to take up his assignment at ...
Dwapara Yuga and Yogananda: Blueprint for a New Age - Page 29 - Poor Richard - 2007 - Preview 1859 Origin of species by means of natural selection (UK) Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) 1860 End of second Opium War ... 200,000 libraries worldwide 1872 Birth of Swami Aurobindo (India) 1872 Jehovah's Witness Church 29 Poor Richard.
Shades of Truth - Page 281 - J. K. Scott - 2007 - Preview Tyler and Kate's Readings and Selected Books from Crypto's Collection Aurobindo, Sri. Sri Aurobindo or The Adventures of Consciousness. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo ... Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and ...
Was Darwin Wrong? Yes - B a M DIV Richard PittackRichard B. Pittack - 2007 - Preview Pittack's book entitled "Was Darwin Wrong - YES!" is a counter argument and direct refutation of the principle arguments Quammen has extrapolated from Darwin's writings and which is based on Biogeography, Paleontology, Morphology, and ...
Understanding thoughts of Sri Aurobindo - Page 4 - Indrani SanyalKrishna RoyJadavpur University. Centre for Sri Aurobindo Studies - 2007 - and enriched in Sri Aurobindo's theory of involution and evolution. "Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo" by Kireet Joshi covers the following three themes: (1)Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theories, (2) The evolution in ...
Philosophy As Life Path - Page 195 - Romano MàderaLuigi Vero Tarca - 2007 - Preview - More editions ... 144 Aurobindo, 25 Augustine, 145, 167 Avicenna, 37 Baal-Shem-Tov, 81 Baha'Ullah, 113 Bergson, 66 Bernhard, 32, ... 82n Dante, 69 Darwin, 75 Debord, 69n Deleuze, 154n Della Rocca, 74n Demetrio, 65n Derrida, 12, 154n Descartes, ...
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion - Page 292 - Jeffrey J. Kripal - 2007 - Preview - More editions we like, two bodies, for as Darwin sees in a dream and notes in his secret diaries, even a book may be thought of as a ... involution and evolution that is eerily similar to that of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine (with the divine embodying itself as ...

Sunday, February 03, 2013

Transformation of our body and our language

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:

Saturday, February 02, 2013

What was an aesthetic choice has become a survival strategy

Leather, Fur, & Legendary Joy: A Response from Joshua Ramey to Beatrice Marovich’s “‘We Dance These Beasts’: Capitalism, Animism, Believers of the Future” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey
Deleuze was always, in a typically French way, reticent about being anecdotal, and I think he knew how to be revealing enough without anecdotes.  I’m not quite that refined… At any rate, I have often thought to myself that from the 1960’s to 2013 the spiritual stakes of experimentation have changed:  what was an aesthetic choice, then, has become a survival strategy, now.  For those of us with anything left to experiment with, survival itself has become experimental.  In the context of endless and irremediable debts, of a totally debt-leveraged existence, everything is improvisation, everything is experimentation.  Existence itself is spiritual ordeal, for those who manage to survive the imperative to “invest in oneself” at the cost of everything, and at the cost of everything manage to pretend to be an “entrepreneur of the self,” while in fact this means to take on the weight of the world, the burden of the global, ever-imploding debt. On the Occasion of the Ordeal: A Response from Joshua Ramey to Dan Barber’s “Experimental Life and Ordeal’s Necessity” from An und für sich by Joshua Ramey
But from my perspective, and the perspective that I call “the hermetic Deleuze,” since every ordeal potentially is unlimited, any ordeal can exemplify any other, to the degree that it resonates with any other ordeal. 

In this book, Scott Campbell traces the development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. He contends that Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein as the Being of factical human life. Emphasizing the positive aspects of everydayness, Campbell explores the contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average, everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle. He shows how Heidegger presents a way of grasping human life as riddled with deception but also charged with meaning and open to revelation and insight.

The meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy - Page 165 - S.K. Maitra - 1956 - This statement we can look upon as containing the essence of Sri Aurobindo's conception of yoga, as, in fact, the text of integral yoga. The first thing which it asserts is that yoga is a birth. It is not a dissolution, nor an absorption, nor a swooning away into the Divine, but it is a birth. That is to say, the human being retains his character as a human being, which means as a being with a body, life, soul and mind, and having a part to ...

Fathoming the Depths of Reality: Savita Singh in Conversation with - Roy BhaskarSavita Singh - 2003 - This book presents the main features of Roy Bhaskar's philosophy in a readily comprehensive form. The result is probably the simplest and clearest statement of the themes and development of his philosophy ever published. Prof Savita Singh is Professor and Director of the School of Gender and Development Studies, IGNOU. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on 'Discourse of Modernity in India: A Hermeneutical Study', and earned her degree from Delhi University. 6:48 pm

Savitri Era - Spinning mythology - Ashis Nandy had mauled the memory of Sri Aurobindo like a bull in a china shop which Savita Singh has now ably countered by juxtaposing the hermeneutical reading of J.L. MehtaSavitri Era Learning Forum - Meeting of the East and the West in Sri Aurobindo, Bergson, Heidegger, and Deleuze - THERE IS NO SHORTCUT TO HAPPINESS times of india - speaking tree By: Ramesh Bijlani on Feb 01, 2013 What it means is that happiness resides not in the car, ...  kkk

Are we facing an evolutionary crisis? The Hindu February 2, 2013 MANOJ DAS
According to Sri Aurobindo, “At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way.” Sri Aurobindo envisions a future when the mind could be transformed into a Supramental gnosis…
To a professor who was logically convinced of Sri Aurobindo’s vision but wondered if the ugly man of today could really grow into something beautiful, a rustic school teacher told, “If a wonder like the lotus could bloom out of mud with the Sun’s Grace, why cant out of our muddy mind bloom the Supramental with the Divine’s Grace? We may replace Divine’s Grace with Evolutionary thrust, if we please.

Sri Aurobindo Ashram -Delhi Branch founded on 12 Feb 1956. The Mother had once called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry a veritable laboratory to ...

S A K S I is a Spiritual movement. The aim is to spread the message of Veda and Sri Aurobindo, which imparts awareness to lead a beautiful, harmonious, creative...

We welcome you to the Sri Aurobindo Society, Hyderabad, (Musheerabad X Roads) which was founded in 1972 by ...

(M.P. Pandit 'Yoga in Sri Aurobindo's Epic 'Savitri', published by Dipti... In his dissertation, Chanel goes farther: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother 'may from many ...

And in this passage from The Letters on Yoga , he elucidates on the manner in which the human consciousness navigates the recondite “dream worlds”: Ordinarily when one sleeps a complex phenomenon happens.

Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication, New Delhi, India. 1252 likes ·

There he discovered Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and their “new evolution”. He resigned from the civil service, and went in search of adventure in French...
Satprem relates that on 19 May 1973, six months before The Mother’s death he was barred admission to her room, the beginning of a serious falling out between the Ashram leadership and himself. Moreover, Satprem and his followers believe there is evidence in the recorded audiotapes that the Mother did not actually die but rather entered a “cataleptic trance” or state of suspended animation in which there would not even be a detectable heartbeat.