Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Sri Aurobindo has linked our individual psychology with the workings of the universe

[Home > Library > Literature & Language > Classical Literature Companion
harmony of the spheres or music of the spheres a Pythagorean concept (see PYTHAGORAS), harmony having cosmic significance for the Pythagoreans. It seemed to them, as to others, that the heavenly bodies (the spheres) must, like other large bodies moving at speed, produce a sound as they whirl through space, and that since the bodies move at different speeds they must each produce different (but harmonious) notes. Plato's version of this idea, expounded in the Myth of Er (Republic, book 10), is that on each of the eight concentric circles in which the bodies rotate stands a Siren uttering a note of constant pitch, the eight notes together making up a scale. Because the sound is with us constantly from birth and there is no contrasting silence we are unaware of it.]

[Divine Comedy... is an allegory telling of Dante's vision of heaven, guided by Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman. In the poem, Paradise is depicted as concentric spheres surrounding the earth... These are concentric and spherical, similar to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. Dante admits that the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see. Thus, the vision of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal vision, ambiguous in its true construction. The addition of a moral dimension means that a soul that has reached Paradise stops at the level applicable to it. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia]

[Amazon.com: Dante and Sri Aurobindo: A Comparative Study of the ...
Amazon.com: Dante and Sri Aurobindo: A Comparative Study of the Divine Comedy and Savitri (9780391023918): Prema Nandakumar]

[The title of my presentation perhaps requires a little explanation: Savitri as a Key to Sri Aurobindo’s psycho-cosmology. “Psycho-cosmology” is my own coinage—a kind of shorthand term for what forms the conceptual basis of our research here—a basis which to Sri Aurobindo himself was of course not “conceptual”, but experienced. This coinage evokes two aspects that are of cardinal importance in Sri Aurobindo’s message. While he has explored and revealed the complexities of individual psychology with unprecedented completeness, he has at the same time linked our individual psychology with an explanation of the workings of the universe, giving the human individual a meaningful position in the cosmos.
At the beginning of Book Two of Savitri the protagonist, King Aswapati, the father of Savitri, has a vision of the many planes of consciousness rising like one of the temple towers that we see here in South India, with many levels, each peopled with their own beings, animals and houses, rising one above the other up into the sky... This “psycho-cosmology” is the consistent basis of all Sri Aurobindo’s major writings.
home authors subjects events Consciousness and Its Transformation Shraddhavan]

[Very roughly, the symbolic can be thought of as a sort of web thrown over the world that allows the world to appear organized, totalized, and well sorted into a system of categories. Here there is no better reference for understanding the symbolic than Levi-Strauss and, in particular, The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked. Through the simple semiotic categories of the raw (nature) and the cooked (culture), contends Levi-Strauss, the “primitive” mind is able weave a web of signs and narratives that creates an interface between nature and culture. Through this activity, the alien world of nature becomes heimlich or a “home” with familiar coordinates and relations that we can navigate.
The unheimlich, by contrast, are those moments where this symbolic skein breaks down either through the appearance of some Thing that fits in none of these categories, or that paradoxically twists the categories... In the case of Levi-Strauss’s sorting of the world into the opposed categories of the raw and the cooked, the moment of the uncanny would perhaps lie in something raw (natural) that is nonetheless cooked (cultural), or vice versa.
Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects]

[On the one hand, contemporary thought is saturated by new age obscurantisms such as those we find in Kaufmann’s brilliant and irritating At Home in the Universe, or some of the less attractive movements in ecological thought. These forms of thought enact the discourse of the master by preaching a sort of cosmic harmony that knows in advance that nature is a harmonious place where it is simply a matter of humans living in accord with nature. On the other hand, we have the reign of the correlationisms that place humans at the center of all relations, preaching that we can never talk of objects independent of their relation to human language, social forces, power, history, minds, etc. This discourse enacts the discourse of the master by suppressing the uncertainties that characterize objects and feeding us a bromide wherein we will always be able to trace unsettling objects back to human categories. Here philosophy remains Ptolemaic. We even get nice terms like “fundamental ontology” where the human necessarily precedes any other engagements. Object-oriented ontology, by contrast, presents a strange ontology where we never know what objects can do, where we cannot decide who or what is acting, and where there is no question of mastery because we’re perpetually caught up in imbroglios and controversies emerging as the result of strange new objects that demand to be heard. As such, onticology occupies the position of the analyst, refusing to say in advance what the world is or what objects populate it, instead siding with the remainders that do not fit with categories of mind or language, signs, encyclopedias, or any other pacifying bromides we might concoct to render the world heimlich. Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
from Larval Subjects . by larvalsubjects]

[Complexity theorist such as Stuart Kaufmann (2007) and others at the Sante Fe Institute offer a new scientific paradigm that posits emergence instead of reduction, self-organization instead of natural selection in a complex reorientation from materialism to a view of nature that may resacramentalize her. While their new vision of the sacred does not conform to traditional spiritual narratives the approach of complexity theorist at least promises to lead us in a direction that over time may collapses the house of cards that materialist reduction is built on and toward an emergent conception of life, mind, and perhaps spirit as well. Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution by Rich on Sun 23 Mar 2008 09:56 PM PDT Permanent Link Sri Aurobindo complex understanding and his particular way of articulating truth correspondences between matter, life, mind and the particular moment in history under pressure of transformation would not have necessarily avoided narratives of biological evolution that include natural selection, so long as everything is not reduced to natural selection.]

Semiology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and deconstruction have armed us with myriad modern tools for grappling with the symbolic, yet their performative propensity depends on our willingness for participation and permitting the cosmic turbulence reaching a point of tranquility in a moment of harmony within us. [TNM]

1 comment:

  1. Not only Sri Aurobindo but also the Mother has has linked our individual psychology with the workings of the universe. I discuss this linkage in my article: 'The Triune Formula of the Supermind' which may be read in its entirety at: http://rigvedacos.blogspot.com/

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