Tuesday, March 29, 2016

World Union ushering in global peace and human unity

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo happened to see each other for the first time on March 29, 1914. Their legacy, today, flows in manifold directions and multifarious areas. But one running theme of their teachings is philosophy. And, therefore the notion that all life is yoga. It is individual, collective, and universal at the same time. Academic philosophy, on the contrary, is a maze which refuses to accept any purpose of its own. Creating collages in delectable prose seems to be the whole game. Its entertainment value for the connoisseurs is handsome but whether it can lead one in the right direction is uncertain.

The Mother & Sri Aurobindo also help in keeping a safe distance from Hindutva. They espouse a vision of India which is liberal, modern, and forward-looking. They also foresee a World Union ushering in global peace and human unity. And, they posit this as an Evolutionary inevitability. So, following their philosophy is far more important than mere intellectual surfing or skiing. However, it doesn't appear that tenured Professors will submit themselves to learning. [TNM55]

References:
1. Whose Philosophy Lost Its Way? (Post 1 of 3)
March 22, 2016 by Blog Contributor by Anand Jayprakash Vaidya
In the past 15 years, academic philosophers have engaged in a tremendous amount of navel-gazing about their discipline and its value. It is safe to say that the turn into 2000 brought with it a renewed interest in philosophical methodology... Just as 2016 got under way, Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle put out “When Philosophy Lost its Way” in The New York Times. On March 7, Scott Soames wrote a response: “Philosophy’s True Home.” This exchange calls for some reflection and examination from another perspective. Whose Philosophy Lost Its Way? (Post 2 of 3) - Whose Philosophy Lost its Way? (Post 3 of 3) - Pingback: Has Philosophy Lost Its Way? — Vaidya on the Case of Indian Philosophy The Indian Philosophy Blog | The Indian Philosophy Blog

Who is the ideal insider? What is Philosophy’s proper home? - [PDF] Sri Aurobindo's Yogic Discovery of the 'One Original Language'of Mankind: A Linguistic Exploration N Kumar - Theory and Practice in Language Studies,

Light reading that does not challenge the reader - Where bad literature makes good reading - A professor and students in an English course at Juniata College discuss what makes a book ‘crap’ By Bill Schackn...

Comparing the Methodology of the Gnosis With the Reasoning Intellect - The reasoning intellect begins its process by a process of observation of external facts through the sense-organs. From these facts, it applies the faculti...

5. Preliminary reflections on Harman on Žižek on Bryant By Jon Cogburn 

6. PDF of Noah Roderick book now available Posted by doctorzamalek 
March 25, 2016 - You can find The Being of Analogy at the OHP website, HERE. It’s such a nicely written book, and filled with fresh insights. In this witty and erudite gem of a work, Roderick pushes the thesis of the metaphoricity of being
"The more you understand your debts to others, the harder it is to articulate them." 

7. Rajeev Srinivasan March 23, 2016
There is also the sad fact that there is a #DeepState that controls those in the West... European domination of the world, although it looked pretty much like Manifest Destiny, is only a blip in the relentless march of time. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on... Like Ozymandias's vanities, the ancien regime of the West is collapsing, that's about it. There is a new, Indo-Pacific century, and India has to decide whether it has its eyes on the prize. It is there for India to lose. 

www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/.../article8408053.ece
At a recent one-day seminar on “Harmony in Management” organised bySri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research (SACAR), speakers from a wide ...





Monday, March 28, 2016

Fight over Sanskrit is proving why India was divided into small kingdoms

Being born and brought up in a village in Odisha, I have a fair amount of first hand knowledge on an agrarian as well as non-egalitarian society; its pervading poverty and deprivation. I came to Bhubaneswar, the new Capital, in 1971 for college education and those were the tumultuous days of Bangladesh liberation, JP movement, and Emergency. It was also the time when movies like Johny Mera Naam, Mera Naam Joker, Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Bobby, Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, Deewaar, and Sholay left a lasting impression. Armed with an integrated B.Sc.,B.Ed. degree with Botany Hons. and Agriculture for vocational education, I returned to my village in 1976 as a teacher in the same High school I had passed out from. (I took the picture below during my last visit in February 2014)


Dealing with the students with the lens of my freshly earned insights of educational psychology was interesting but the fun didn't last long. Fifteen months later, I joined Punjab National Bank at Sundargarh, primarily a tribal locality while business was dominated by the Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi community. After a stint in Sambalpur and Gop, I migrated to Delhi in 1988 and took VRS in 2000. Internet opened new opportunities in 2005 and I launched Savitri Era Party in 2007. I was a science student and served a commercial bank having an abiding interest in the arts and humanities. Preferences and ideologies, however, have taken many abrupt turns over the years.


Tusar N Mohapatra11:56 PM, December 18, 2009 
Y2K spurred me to survey the 20th Century thought and 5 years later when I stumbled upon SCIY, it was no alien territory. Banerji’s dense compositions used to surprise, Carlson’s forthright interventions evoked curiosity; the overall concern always levitating at a certain height and encompassing a wideness while pursuing an integral spirit all through. Right in the prescribed path: heightening, widening, and integration, as it were.
Nolini, Purani, Amrita, Pavitra – great as they are – but are poorer by not having a chance to read the rich discourse that SCIY harbored. Even the Heehs imbroglio that raged for over a year brought out unexpressed dimensions of theory as well as practice in the open, the finer threads of which would be explored in the years to come.
With its founder-editor dead, and it metamorphosing into a more conventional site, albeit with an ultra-futuristic theme, SCIY, like Arya, comes to an end. Its illustrious career would remain a beckon of light for a long time. Ideological commitment may have prevented its contributors to espouse the idea of religion openly, but the way the journal ran is in the best of religious spirit. SCIY is dead, long live SCIY. [TNM]

Tweets:
Savitri Era Party ‏@SavitriEraParty
Apr 7 I love reading Western philosophy but mercifully could not develop any attraction towards their fiction, movies, or music, not even poetry.
Apr 7 Why the Western music seems like a roller-coaster journey while our Hindi evergreen old movie songs are so neatly symmetrical is beyond me.
1d1 day ago Zero interest in TV serials, Cars, or Cricket is also something which I consider as a blessing. The time however is consumed by Twitter!
24h24 hours ago As a child I had promised to myself: No cosmetics and no narcotics which continues to be in force. So, many assume me to be ten years older.
23h23 hours ago Grey hair is also a good teacher. It alerts to be socially responsible so that one is saved from the temptation of stupidly playing younger.
23h23 hours ago Community life suffers a lot due to disproportionate reliance on cosmetics especially by women who feel younger & avoid normal conversation.
Apr 7 Savitri Era: Warp and woof of attraction and repulsion harnessing space and time 
Apr 7 Ghaziabad, India No one should occupy office for more than two terms and twelve years in aggregate. Don't vote for those who have already served two terms.
23h23 hours ago How Casteism and consequent discrimination can be eradicated as long as Indian Constitution recognises castes, is the most difficult puzzle.
23h23 hours ago Modi used to be portrayed as a superman who will usher in change in minutes. Now his supporters are blaming either RSS or IAS. AchheDin gone
Apr 5 Despite coming to power BJP has not been able to build an iota of intellectual legitimacy for any of its pet agenda on socio-political front
@saliltripathi Konark Temple was built by a King as per his whims. It need not be a reference point for choices in Democracy and Modernity.
Apr 7 Ghaziabad, India @picadoress This should be a general principle whether Kings built temples or destroyed them. India after 26-Jan-1950 should be the focus.
14h14 hours ago @picadoress A Democracy should be able to formulate ethics and take its own decisions without being bound by the actions of the past Kings.
"Each country or region can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs," Pope Francis wrote
23h23 hours ago Why maintain a separate IST and INR? Why can't India switch to GMT and adopt Euro? 24X7 life surely needs a common currency and single time.
@brumbyOz Each of us can have his own version of Evolution but it's worth consulting what Sri Aurobindo thought about it in The Life Divine.



The latest fight over Sanskrit is proving vividly why India was divided into small kingdoms in the olden days. Be it religion, culture, or language, allowing market forces to operate freely is the best course for the future. Govt. should adopt a hands-off approach in all these matters. Civil society must raise institutions to cater to niche interests. People must understand that Market is not about economy alone but covers all aspects of life. Even man's need for spirituality and necessary infrastructure can be taken care of by the Market. Thus, unshackling from the Govt. patronage system in all spheres of life should be the right attitude. [TNM55] 

References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDWORHdkyAs
Mar 17, 2015 - Uploaded by Satya YRDVisit Us YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/user/satyaYRD Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/satya ...

Some Thoughts on l’affaire Malhotra-Pollock-Murty-Ganesh http://kiranbatni.com/2016/03/some-thoughts-on-laffaire-malhotra-pollock-murty-ganesh/ …

My critique of Dr.Ganesh's review of @RajivMessage 's "The Battle for Sanskrit", which I thought was very unfair. https://vicharamandala.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/a-critique-of-dr-ganeshs-review-of-rajiv-malhotras-battle-for-



Clinical demolition of sex-baba supporter Rajiv Malhotra's quackery by the one and only Shatavadhani R Ganesh! - http://www.sandeepweb.com/the-bhagavad-gita-before-the-battle/ …

Ironic that Malhotra goes out of his way to prove R Ganesh's point about his 'exclusivism' with his boorish behavior towards any criticism

Honestly, S.Ganesh's review and manner of its spread smell like an attempted strategic take-down of Rajiv Malhotra.

Savitri Era: Sandeepweb had rebuffed me on Twitter apropos of Sri Aurobindo and I still nurse a grouse against him.. http://savitriera.blogspot.com/2016/03/combat-intellectual-dishonesty-in.html?spref=tw …

Such shallow references to Sri Aurobindo are published but no article quotes from my sites although I am writing for more than ten years now.

Sri Aurobindo remarked that India needs a real Kshatriya to guide it. Shivaji remains a great role model to follow! 

Pliz honor the first and true nationalists of India, Sri Aurobindo & Tilak, who long before Gandhi fought British 

46th All Orissa Sri Aurobindo Study Circle Conference to be held btwn 4th -7th April 2016 at Matrubhaban, Cuttack http://auroramirabilis.blogspot.in/2016/03/april-2016-conference-at-matrubhaban.html?m=1 …


Light reading that does not challenge the reader - Where bad literature makes good reading - A professor and students in an English course at Juniata College discuss what makes a book ‘crap’ By Bill Schackn...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLFbU3Q_oMApr 18, 2011 - Odia Folk Number Voice: Tusar N. Mohapatra Visuals: Chilika lake, Puri, Konark, Bhubaneswar. Khili Khili Nali (Odisha Smiles)


Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Weaning away students from Leftist ideology

Though born in Kolkata on August 15, 1872, Sri Aurobindo attended school and college in England from 1879 to 1893. Had no attraction for ICS. Sri Aurobindo launched a frontal attack on the senior Congress leaders in 1893 for their weak-kneed policies. Wrote admiring Bankim Chandra. Sri Aurobindo became the first Principal of Bengal National College, Kolkata in 1906 before which he taught at Baroda. Resigned a year later. In 1907 Sri Aurobindo was instrumental in engineering a split in the Congress in association with Lal-Bal-Pal and gave voice to radical view. Sri Aurobindo had to suffer jail for one year from 1908 to 1909 as an undertrial for alleged violence against the British but was acquitted. In 1910, Sri Aurobindo turned over a new leaf by migrating to Puducherry where he established his Ashram and wrote extensively till 1950. Instead of wasting time and energy with Sanskrit texts, it's definitely more profitable to read Sri Aurobindo's translations & poetic works. Not as part of Perennial philosophy, Sri Aurobindo's own innovations & synthesis need to be presented with precision http://savitriera.blogspot.in/2016/03/satprem-mangesh-v-nadkarni-and-georges.html …

When the elders ignore an intellectual giant like Sri Aurobindo, young people are forced into friendship-oriented Marxist or Hindutva camps. It's a matter of manipulating thought and Sri Aurobindo's philosophy has power to convince and convert any brand of violence espousing cult. Most people push their party line and hence real intellectual quest is absent here. The vision of Sri Aurobindo holds the key to the future. Escape from the orbit of Gandhi and Nehru, Vivekananda and Tagore, Radhakrishnan and Coomaraswamy, Subhas and Savarkar, Ambedkar and Periyar. Sri Aurobindo is to be studied not to cater one's personal or political preference but for satisfying the demands of intellectual excellence. It was a moment of pride when I could manage a copy of "Sri Aurobindo: A Descriptive Bibliography" by H.K. Kaul (1972) twenty years back. http:// savitriera.blogspot.in/2016/03/jnu-and-pollock-episodes-have-raised.html …

Just read diatribes against Ananya Vajpeyi and Swara Bhaskar. It's pathetic and pathological on the part of Hindutva supporters to attack so. Ideologies are intellectual constructs and they are to be confronted and vanquished in that realm. Hatred for the person and family, absurd. Weaning away students from Leftist ideology is an intellectual exercise and only Sri Aurobindo holds the key to such an eventuality; not RSS. For understanding the true significance of the cow vs. horse debate, one has to read The Secret of the Veda by Sri Aurobindo and his Savitri. Election is like a game; one may win or lose. But if politics is hinged to religion, then religion suffers setback like multi-product brand. 

Failure to offer anything modern or innovative as ideology is a cause for frustration for Hindutva enthusiasts and so, surrender to Sri Sri! Let not quacks & impostors in impeccable costume steal the limelight while sincere seekers go unnoticed & die unsung http://savitriera.blogspot.in/2016/03/m-alan-kazlev-levi-r-bryant-and-elisa.html …
@TheJaggi This shows the scant weightage Yoga and Self-culture command in the scheme of things of modern Indians. http://savitriera.blogspot.in/2016/03/m-alan-kazlev-levi-r-bryant-and-elisa.html …
@maidros78 I don't think you have written any 3-4 part article by examining the whole issue enumerating evidences that have surfaced so far.
@shaviro But, you think and write in the same language unlike we in India who have to juggle between three or four languages, all the time.

Recent Posts:

Friday, March 18, 2016

Debashish Banerji, Rod Hemsell, and Matthew David Segall

“Many who have read Sri Aurobindo have never read Nietzsche and acquire some preconceptions of what the Nietzschean Superman is all about. I’d encourage them to divest themselves of these ideas.” 

That was Debashish Banerji on Nietzsche in Mother India (March, 2004). I had no access to Internet then and his was a new name but it had hit me hard. More recently, a decade later, a comment by Casey that "Emerson is perhaps in fact Nietzsche’s most important influence" teased my ignorance strongly. Kundan Singh's portrayal of Nietzsche, therefore, should be taken with a pinch of salt, although it's more about his reception by some famous persons. If one would believe Rod Hemsell, instead, all ensues from Aristotle, as I discovered yesterday, and his tone is uncompromising:

"What I would like to point out today, definitively, is that this movement of evolutionary thinking originates with Plato and Aristotle. I could not have said this so definitively before today, so for me this process has been very fruitful. I have approached this project on the philosophy of evolution with the purpose of discovering something, and I have come to the conclusion that Aristotle’s thinking is not something that belongs to the past. It is something which has experienced many rebirths in the last 2400 years, and in the work of the philosophers we are considering, Sri Aurobindo, Heidegger, Whitehead, and others, Aristotelian thinking is still very much alive."

"What I have discovered in my study of Plato and Aristotle and various 20th Century as well as medieval interpreters is that there is an essential intuition of the relationship between spirit and matter that runs throughout this tradition. ... What unites these thinkers from Aristotle to Bergson and the others, can be called intuitionism. ... Now, what Sri Aurobindo does to put this Hindu conception into the context of Platonic/Aristotelian metaphysical thinking is this. ... I call this “extreme subjectivism”. (p. 326)" [PDF The Philosophy of Evolution: Auroville - Auro e-Books]


Amal Kiran's heroic response to the following accusation comes to mind, in this context.


"I hero worshipped Aurobindo in my college days; but now half a century later, I am terribly disappointed. His discussion of time and eternity is wholly derived from that of Boethius; Page after page in Life Divine is watered down Plotinus. -Krishna Chaitanya (K.K. Nair)" 12:55 AM 11:50 AM

But, then, a doubt lurks still; what about Heraclitus whom Sri Aurobindo has presented to us so elegantly? [TNM55] 

References: 
Draft of my dissertation: Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead - If anyone wants a PDF of my dissertation, shoot me an email at msegall@ciis.edu and I’ll send you a draft.

Publication of Altizer letters - Mike Grimshaw passes along the following announcement: On the 50th anniversary of the famous TIME Magazine “Is God Dead?” cover, Radical Theologies has pub... edited and with an introductory essay by Mike Grimshaw.
Drawn from more than 300 e-mail letters written to friends and colleagues, these epistles are a series of meditative essays and mini-essays on religious, theological, political, and philosophical matters that are central and vital to our contemporary era.
In these letters Altizer reminds us that theology, especially radical theology, is nothing less than a continual reflexive and critical yet celebratory engagement with all of life and its possibilities. Nothing is outside the scope of theology and theological discussion. But also, in these letters, Altizer provides a crucial reminder that to attempt to do theology, to attempt to think and write theologically, to attempt to enter an understanding of modern life through the death of God, demands a deep and wide engagement with the intellectual and cultural expressions of modern life, with all that has contributed to it.

Vatican Radio - adopted to honor and respect the sacrifice of more than 101 people who lost their lives during the anti-Christian massacres in 2007 and 2008 ... from Kandhamal district
The Conference of Bishops of Orissa has already appointed a special team of priests and researchers to document the incidents that caused the deaths of 101 Christians in Orissa.
Father Ajaya Kumar Singh, human rights activist and director of Odisha Forum for Social Action, lauded the OCBC decision of Martyrs Day. The local Catholic community in Orissa has welcomed the Bishops’ decision to celebrate the Day of the martyrs on August 30 with joy. (Source: Agenzia Fides, Matters India)

bhubaneswar Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Under plutocratic intoxication mainstream authors of Orissa, who dazzle with awards and decorations, have thrown the splendid Oriya language into such distance from the people that the language has lost its relevance to almost all city dwellers and rural elites. These fellows, supposed to act leaders of Oriya language, are so busy in ingratiating themselves with the power that be for awards and further awards that...

Each one of us has a hierarchy of identities. National identity. Regional Identity. Religious identity Etc. Soon after independence the need of the day was to create a unifying National Identity and the government of the day dedicated a lot of resource in creating, sustaining and proliferating our National Identity.
This did not suit the agents of various religions and the RSS/MIM worked tirelessly to ensure that Religious Identity of their respective constituencies was promoted above our National Identity. We are witnessing the conflict no being waged on our streets.

Kundan Singh - Indology | 15-03-2016 Classless society of Marxism turned into State and Nation in the Fascist imagination where all differences among individuals were obliterated.
Given that I have compared the Indian left-wing thinking with the fragmentary and deceptive asuric forces, it is only a matter of time that an article or commentary comparing my writings with Fascism will appear. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand some characteristics of Fascism so that we educate ourselves regarding the nuances involved.
Fascism began by appropriating the denunciation of rationality and reason. It was a reaction against Enlightenment and Positivism. Very briefly, Enlightenment was the movement, which emerged at the culmination of Renaissance in Europe. It privileged science and reason, and held that the panacea of all ills facing humankind was through science and through pursuit of pure reason. Positivism is that aspect of science, which holds that only that phenomenon is real and worth investigating, which can be accessed through the five senses.
The Fascists appropriated the writings of some of the leading intellectuals of the age or preceding it for their purpose. The first and foremost thinker—and the most crucial one at that—which comes to my mind serving the fascist agenda was Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s anti-science stand is clear from his numerous aphorisms in the Gay Science. Critiquing that reason produces herd mentality, he attacked Enlightenment, favoring instinct over reason. Disputing Kant that it is through the use of pure reason on which we should base our morality, Nietzsche favored sound instinct for the pursuit of morals. In the scheme of Nietzsche, irrationality and instinct had the upper hand as opposed to rationality. ... On the surface, my discourse and Nietzche’s discourse will look the same but these similarities have the same connection that dharma swastika has with Nazi swastika: look the same superficially but completely inverted when one looks closely. ... It is time that the Left intellectuals in India inquire within, and stop yelling fascism the moment they encounter a scrutiny of their writings and ideology, particularly when it comes from the dharmic traditions.

7. Living Laboratories of the Life Divine by Debashish Banerji I would like to back up a little in time and consider the idea of the Superman as it makes its modern appearance in the utterance of Frederick Nietzsche. In many ways Nietzsche, as a philosopher, can be said to inaugurate the modern age. Modern philosophy, where it has been fruitful, has been largely an engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche is a controversial figure, a very complex figure. Complex because he received intuitions from above and uttered them in a new kind of way which challenged the metaphysical tradition. from Science, Culture and Integral Yoga by Debashish 
What is the post-human destiny to which we are called as humans in contemporary times? In this transcript of a talk given for the AUM conference in Los Angeles in 2003, Debashish Banerji compares Nietzsche's call for the Overman with that announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to point to the similarities and differences. How can we pick our way through the maze of choices held up at this end-time of human becoming? Is it by remaining complacent or by using our wills or by surrender to a greater force than ours? And if so, what force - the vitalism of an unconscious Nature-force, the deceptive "universality" of the world market or an unpredictable future which calls our arduous attention? These and similar questions are posed and discussed in this article. 1:16 PM

Jun 19, 2008 - Debashish Banerji, by far the most erudite among the Sri Aurobindian scholars today, wrote a very perceptive essay on Nietzsche that was ... [The tension between Hegel and Nietzsche, or that between historicism and individual will is a constant and living dialog in Sri Aurobindo and it is this dialog which he is directing us towards. Unfortunately, humankind finds it more convenient to rest in belief systems which they can adulate and have no need to emulate. DB Re: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity (part 5 of 6) by Debashish on Fri 03 Apr 2009 12:19 PM PDT Profile Permanent Link 10:15 PM] 3:53 PM

May 30, 2014 - The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche Mikics, David, The Romance of .... Posted by Tusar Nath Mohapatra at 6:02 PM.

The Possibility of a Supramental Transformation of Consciousness - The physical-vital-mental framework of human consciousness creates tremendous barriers to the working of the spiritual principles from the higher planes of Sat-Chit-Ananda and the supramental “knowledge-plane” which mediates between them. The higher planes are active and control the action of the lower, but remain hidden behind the outer forms and forces of the material universe. One can see, for instance, the intense consciousness and energy hidden within the atomic structure of Matter; yet it does not appear on the surface. Spiritual endeavors have generally treated the higher ranges of consciousness as something “other than” what we experience here in the world of mind-life-matter, and this has led to the basic view that the life in this world must be abandoned in order to achieve the higher spiritual conscious existence. The transition from one status to the other is considered to be difficult.
Sri Aurobindo reminds us that existence is ONE and thus, all the planes of consciousness are active at all times, and are connected. This implies that it is both possible to contact the higher planes of consciousness and to eventually bring about a transformation based on their action into the world of Matter.

https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn=8132222237
Sharad Deshpande - 2015 - ‎Philosophy - As Margaret Chatterjee points out, both Aurobindo and Nietzsche were Heracliteans and 'philosophers of the dawn.' They sought to infuse their philosophies ... 12:37 PM

March 18, 2016 - On 29 to 30th December 2015 Om Prakash Dani, Vice Chairman of SAFIM and Executive Committee member of Sri Aurobindo Society delivered Valedictory Address at the 2 days’ Annual Conference of Justice K S Hegde Institute of Management, Nitte, Udupi, Karnataka on the theme ‘Ethics and Governance in Management' which was attended by around 200 students and faculty members . Earlier on 29th December he also presented a paper on the subject ‘Governance by Consciousness' . 


Thursday, March 17, 2016

We must re-imagine Sri Aurobindo

A common complain against Sri Aurobindo is that he hardly ever gives any chance to glance into his mind as an ordinary person, or his feelings as a human being. He concerned himself with the top level politics of the day when he started writing in the public domain and since then his writings and correspondences have always been to teach and reach some higher plane of truth. No doubt, the colonial status of India and other world crises formed the background in many cases but his explorations into yoga psychology running parallel to poetic adventures and analyses had pedagogic and motivational intention. Thus, instead of saying Sri Aurobindo was a product of his time, it would be more appropriate to say his writings were a product of the time.

The modern civilisation, however, has moved a long distance forward, despite customary criticisms. (In this context, a piece of woolly prose, which can beat Sokal, is up at Overdose!) But the human situation doesn't seem to have progressed much beyond what was characterised by Sri Aurobindo in The Bourgeois and the Samurai. Thankfully, the West has nothing new to offer as three formidable philosophical movements have bitten dust during the last decade. They are, Postmodernism, Ken Wilber, and OOO or Speculative Realism. So, the expectation from Sri Aurobindo, today, is much more than what he wrote or his role in the freedom struggle; transcending even his poetry and strains of prophecy.

This is a challenge which needs utmost sincerity, humility, and empathy. The future is going to throw unprecedented situations for which one may not find suitable quotations and there pure intuition would be the only companion which, obviously, will be challenged and derided. History and Mythology will be presented as authority whereas the task is to fly away from the past orbits and establish new ones with greater velocity. Such is the manner in which we must re-imagine Sri Aurobindo and the beauty, definitely, lies in endeavoring to fabricate the details. The Mother, let's remember, has already created such a template by interpreting the flowers invoking the Vedic virtues. [TNM55]

References:
suniv.ac.in/upload/Sri%20Aurobindo's%20Anticolonial%20resistance.pdf
With a view to exploring Sri Aurobindo's political creed as well as revolutionary ... an Introduction. Each chapter maps out the contours of Sri Aurobindo's anti-.
BY DR. NANDA KISHORE MISHRA & DR. SABITA TRIPATHY, JULY 2013 
Sri Aurobindo at the age of 23 launched vitriolic attack on our national body, Indian National Congress, through a series of pungent articles written under the title of “New Lamps for the Old” which were published in the Indu Prakash from 1893 to 1894 in Bombay at the behest of his Cambridge friend, K.G. Despande. These articles catapulted the image of Sri Aurobindo in the then political firmament as an astute political thinker, a conscientious analyst, and a fearless critic. 

worldlitonline.net/sri-aurobindo-indian-critical.pdf
by VK Dwivedi - ‎Related articlesIRWLE VOL. 6 No. II. July 2010. 1. Sri Aurobindo and the Indian Critical Tradition. - Vivek Kumar Dwivedi. Sri Aurobindo did not address himself to a number of ...
The first question that comes to mind is why did Sri Aurobindo write the kind of literary theory that he did? Difficult though it is to arrive at an answer, I will make an attempt to do that because in the answer lies the key to some vital aspects of Indian literary theory. Sri Aurobindo happens to be the Indian in whom there was the desire, and its accompanying anxiety, to express what to him seems to have been the Indian point of view on matters of culture and life. This point of view was not the narrow vision of a sectarian poet, or the stunted worldview of a polemical strategist. Nor, on the other hand, was it merely the creed of one who was merely a patriotic nationalist battling against the injustice of a vast colonial empire; there were other Indians, sometimes much greater in stature than Sri Aurobindo, sacrificing their lives in the process of achieving that end. 
Then, what was it that drove Sri Aurobindo to write The Future Poetry, a work that first appeared in parts, published in Arya between 1917 and 1920? The answer to this question seems to lie in a medley of speculations. The first of these was that Sri Aurobindo, who had a pride in his sense of belonging to India and its culture, was conscious of the lack of a living Indian critical tradition. He did see, no doubt, that India had a glorious ancient past in literary aesthetics, a past that matched up to if it did not excel the ancient past of Greece. But that tradition had come to a point of saturation and Sri Aurobindo’s critical mind informed him that the classical fixity of this tradition was limiting it from accommodating contemporary human experience 1. 
The human mind has always come up with newer ways of expressing itself and, what is more, it has found newer ways of judging the words, images and metaphors of others. That there had been a rather long lull in the Indian’s discovery of these newer ways of judging and creating seems to have troubled Sri Aurobindo. This second anxiety that Sri Aurobindo probably experienced seems to have been largely a result of the British rule in India. The British Empire brought along with it the rich English language, which made certain sensitive Indians realise that the critical tradition in the West was neither dead nor confined by classical fixity. They seem to have become conscious of a difference between their Indian “Self” and the Western “Other” in regard to the critical dimension. Sri Aurobindo was conscious of the fact that Indians were deficient in criticism. His very first sentence of The Future Poetry describes this feeling: 
It is not often that we see published in India literary criticism which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism that forces us both to see and think (Aurobindo 3). 
This anxiety, in my assessment was one of the key factors for the creation of Sri Aurobindo’s literary and critical theory. However, it wasn’t just this anxiety that gave birth to Sri Aurobindo’s theories of literature. There was a feeling of anti-imperialism that gave impetus to his critical expression. He had read and delighted in his study of British and other literatures. His soul had revelled in the Humanism of Western literature, philosophies and critical systems. He found that his own country’s critical and literary situation was different to the West’s. Being the patriotic Indian that Sri Aurobindo was, he wanted to write something that could fill the gap that was emerging between the East and the West. He did not want the West to believe that the ancient glorious past of his country had given place to a kind of critical and literary vacuum. He seems to have written in a spirit of defiance, as it were; a spirit that said, “You are not that great, even though you are our masters, and we are not that low even if we are just men!” 
He spoke to his countrymen in one breadth, trying to show their lack in the critical dimension, and very soon he spoke to the British showing them that they were not perfect. The lure of British and other literatures made him conscious that in these literatures lay something valuable for his countrymen to read and experience. However, from his essays on British Poetry one can see that he does not, on the face of it, show an admiration for it. On the contrary, he tries to reveal wherein its shortcomings lie. This is the spirit in which he wrote his literary theories. He wrote about where the weakness in the British poet resided. 
[1 The feeling that Sanskrit Poetics cannot accommodate contemporary experience has been shared by several recent authors. An interesting article on this aspect of Sanskrit Poetics can be seen in Basavraj Naikar, “Need for Adaptation of Sanskrit Poetics”, Dialogue: A Journal Devoted to Literary Appreciation (Vol. III, Number ii, December 2007), pp. 24-38.] ...
The influence of Matthew Arnold on Sri Aurobindo is obvious. But this influence can be traced back to writings of earlier romantic poet-critics like Keats and Coleridge. For Sri Aurobindo “beauty” and “truth” are criteria with great relevance. To scholars of our times, such criteria are somewhat vague. But for Sri Aurobindo these are valid criteria deserving our serious attention. Coleridge-like, Sri Aurobindo also speaks about the relevance of the imagination in the creative process. He speaks with a sense of authority as though what he says is the final truth. This could be a result of his study of Sanskrit poetics and otherwise spiritual concerns which often grapple with a sense of right and wrong and sometimes deal in absolutes. Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken certain literary concepts from Coleridge. ...
It cannot be denied that Sri Aurobindo’s contribution to literary criticism was phenomenal and needs greater attention. One of the few Indians who worked hard in this direction is C. D. Narasimhaiah. ...
C. D. Narasimhaiah’s belief that Aurobindo, like William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot, wrote criticism in order to justify or commend his kind of poetry (Narasimhaiah 88) could also be true. But it seems more likely that, as Narasimhaiah himself has said, may be unconsciously, that Aurobindo began a critical tradition, and I believe that he did this in a spirit of defiance to the British. In conclusion it can be said that Sri Aurobindo’s literary theory was unique because it was a result of his anti-imperialist stance. This anti-imperialism made him acquire a critical attitude that would shun anything merely British. Thus whereas he imbibed some part of his understanding of poetry from British poets and critics, he made a conscious effort to oppose and sometimes even belittle them. In the process he found his anchor in ancient Indian critical theory on which he superimposed his own understanding of the nature and function of literature. He thus began a tradition of Indian literary theorists in English – a tradition that looked at the West both in approbation and in disagreement. 

https://smuralis.wordpress.com/.../on-reading-sri-aurobindo-blindness-ins...
Sep 17, 2015 - Sri Aurobindo needs to be read and those possibilities of reading never ... MURALI SIVARAMAKRISHNAN .... In the early eighties when I was taking up my studies on Sri Aurobindo, CD Narasimhaiah, the doyen of Indian ...

> To take with a reverent hand the old myths and cleanse them of soiling accretions, till they shine with some of the antique strength, simplicity and solemn depth of beautiful meaning, is an ambition which Hindu poets of today may and do worthily cherish. To accomplish a similar duty in a foreign tongue is a more perilous endeavour.
> Sri Aurobindo, [*Autobiographical Notes and Other Writings of Historical Interest: Extract from a Letter to His Brother*](http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/36/extract-from-a-letter-to-his-brother#p6)

Surendra Singh Chouhan’s Review of J. B. P. More’s A Critique of Modern Civilisation and Thought: Facts, Non-facts and Ideas - Title: A Critique of Modern Civilisation and Thought: Facts, Non-facts and Ideas. Author: J. B. P. More. Publisher: TLPMS & Illakiya, Pondicherry. Number o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by AlanSokal, a physics professor at New York University and University ...

7. Part VII / Writings from Manuscripts The Bourgeois and the Samurai

S Ward - Past & Present, 2016
The 'decline of the West' had been a recurring prophecy of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century political thought, from Charles Henry Pearson's doomsday scenario of a
resurgent Asia in National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893) to Aurobindo Ghose's pre-war ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polyglots
3 hours ago - Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), an Indian philosopher who, apart from his native Bengali and educational English, knew ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, ...

There are many complains against Integral Yoga and there is no gainsaying that it’s complex and unwieldy lacking in easy formulation. The vast and wide-ranging resource material spanning over several generations also pose a quandary. There used to be murmurs always as regards the results but the present shape of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Puducherry has made it amply clear with nothing left to imagination or mystification. Further, it has become fashionable to say that the utterances of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are synthetic and universal whereas the truth is that the bulk of their teachings arose out of personalized guidance to specific disciples in the restricted Ashram situation. Posted by Tusar Nath Mohapatra at 8:20 PM Thursday, February 14, 2013 ... there is no gainsaying of some level of over-promise involved. 10:54 PM

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

K. Amrita, P. Munian, and Alistair Wicks

Current issue of Auroville Today, "Auroville’s Monthly news magazine since 1988" is making waves in the Google search results but its articles can be read up to the first paragraph. Such rationing is reminiscent of the socialist years to which Auroville perhaps sticks to fondly while the rest of India has moved on. Today, one can access any number of newspapers and journals without subscribing or logging in but why Auroville Today insists on that, in the enclave of Freedom, is really laughable. 

Further, the very significance of Auroville is to publicise its existence and its intention, its experience and its experiments. So, hiding content when technology has become an enabler is nothing but criminal. Interestingly, "Auroville Organization in decline" tops the list of Most Read Articles. So, no further comments but they must listen to Rod Hemsell exhorting "the urgent need for critical thinking in Auroville."

Just discovered that Amrita is missing from the list of Early Disciples at the "peace, harmony and love" site. His place is definitely after Nolini and Purani in importance and hence such a lapse is horrendous. His Reminiscences book also seems to be missing in the page dedicated to him. Maintaining the chronological order seems to be in order in this respect. Moreover, how notes and updates to the site can be notified separately in the web is a matter which needs to be considered. [TNM55]

References:
www.auroville.org/contents/3973
Issue No: 320, March 2016 - Dave David Hutchinson has been deeply involved with the Integral Yoga for 35 years. He has been a member of the Sri Aurobindo Association in the U.S., co-editor of the magazine Collaboration, organizer of AUM conferences, and moderator of several online lists on yoga. Recently he made a brief visit to Auroville for the first time in twenty years. Here is an edited version of his reflections. Auroville exists outside – of India, time, place.

2. Most Read Articles This Month This Year All Time

www.aurovilleradio.org/rod-critical-thinking-is-needed/
Rod talks on; Idealogy, Growth, Statistics, Working Groups and the urgent need for critical thinking in Auroville.

▶ 4:56
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMX7xw54ZBY
5 days ago - Uploaded by AurovilleRadio Auroville For more visit http://www.aurovilleradio.org/rod-critical-thinking-is-needed Rod revisits the topic of change in ...

5. Early Disciples
Our Aspiration And Commitment
This website is a place of peace, harmony and love, above all conflicts and disagreements. It is a collective effort of many souls united in their aspiration and devotion to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and the Supramental Force which they have brought down and is now in the process of transforming this earthly life to a life divine.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Reminiscences.html?id... Reminiscences. Front Cover. Nolini Kanta Gutpa, K. Amrita. Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram; [selling agents: Sri Aurobindo Book Distribution Agency, 1969 ...

https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn=1136516549
Sachidananda Mohanty - 2012 - ‎History - K. Amrita's reminiscences of this period are remarkable for their vividness and sensitivity to men and matters.