I appreciated your most recent email for its civil tone and relative lack of demonization of PH. I have to say your suggestion that the anti-Heehs activists have been purely dignified and scholarly in their methods while the pro-Heehs camp has inexplicably responded with ad hominem invective, seems a bit disingenuous to me. Although both sides should be chided for some harsh and excessive rhetoric, it was the rush of letters last fall charging PH with diabolical motives and asuric status, phrased in highly inflammatory language, that most upset those who were familiar with PH as a published scholar and who didn't find anything particularly outrageous about his latest book.

Personally I don't think very highly of the Lives, as I noted in my review (now posted here: http://iyfundamentalism.info/j/content/view/15/35/). Some points and issues you raise in your email I could agree with. Your conspiracy-oriented claims involving Jeffrey Kripal have been denied by others, so I don't have any way to determine the facts there (apart from the generally high probability that any conspiracy theory is false). But my primary feedback concerns the list of “conclusions” you maintain the book asserts:

- that Sri Aurobindo was a frequent liar, and, among other things, that he lied about his supramental experiences,   more »

shadow cornered

(C.G. Jung)
I have continued to follow the extensive sustained outpouring of responses, comments and discussions surrounding the conflict which erupted like a chemical reaction to the catalyst of Peter Heehs' Lives of Sri Aurobindo. For it has indeed revealed and exposed much hidden beneath the surface of our spiritual demeanor.

Unfortunately for us transitional humans, Transformation can be such a messy business. Messy because it forces us to see precisely what we don't want to see in ourselves. Which are precisely the things that need to be transformed. So despite our primitive genetic predisposition for self-deception and self-deceit, light eventually lasers through, mercilessly revealing even our most sacred and sacrosanct shadows, "outing" that strange cast of characters we harbor in ourselves -- in our personal, collective and culture-conditioned selves.   more »

In response to the exaggerated outrage of the anti-Lives proponents, Larry Seidlitz had penned his mild-mannered detailed review of the work, which was carried earlier in sciy (An Examination of the Criticism Against The Lives of Sri Aurobindo). Here we field another review which while eschewing the colorful hyperboles of "Mahakali's wrath"-mongers, attempts a nuanced reading sympathetic to the sentiments some of the aggrieved.   more »

Until recently, I had not actually read Peter's book. So, despite the polarizing atmosphere and escalating polemics surrounding its publication, I refrained from taking a position or passing judgment. For how could I come to conclusions about something that I myself had not personally experienced?

As a published author myself, my own natural writing style tends more toward the creative rather than the academic or scholarly. So to be honest, I was not sure if I could wade through more than 400 pages of biographical details drawn from decades of archival research. After all, I was, I believed, sufficiently familiar with the essential outline and major events of Sri Aurobindo's life. And as a dedicated practitioner of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga as well as a serious student of his own writings since the mid-1960s, having read all of his major works before coming to Pondicherry to meet the Mother, I wondered how I could possibly benefit from pouring through the micro-facts and minutia of such a figure whose Life was so much greater than the sum of its parts. I also had reservations about whether such an academic approach would turn out to be a boring compilation or disconnected series of meticulously-researched historical details which would simply drone on, failing both to hold my attention or hold together as a whole....   more »

Heehs, therefore, has done us a great service by organizing vast amounts of primary and secondary sources, including Aurobindo’s own diaries and unpublished letters, to produce a compelling biography that intelligently discusses the main themes of Aurobindo’s epic political, literary, and metaphysical canon. He is also to be congratulated for resisting the tendency to mythologize and perpetuate the romantic mystification of earlier hagiographies.   more »

“One of my countrymen has put the matter very simply,” as Burnham says in the novel. “‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God’s will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it. For myself, I confess I can see no reason why any Englishman should abet the Manchu tyrant in depriving the people of China of this miraculous substance.”

Popular will, democracy, representative government have as little to do with the action of Ghosh’s novel as Congress did with the war in Iraq. “Parliament?” Ben Burnham scoffs to a disbelieving Indian raja. “Parliament,” Burnham laughs, “will not know of the war until it is over. Be assured, sir, that if such matters were left to Parliament there would be no Empire.”

Our free-ranging conversation touches on, among other things,Niall Ferguson's apology for empire; the narrowing discourse in American media; Afghanistan and Pakistan today; the polyglot world of sailing ships; the anthropological eye; and the history of Asian words in English.

It is not his project as a novelist and an Indian, Amitav Ghosh remarks, to break the “imperial gaze” of British writers from Kipling to Conrad. Rather he would love to recapture the cosmopolitan vision of the American, Herman Melville — the real precursor, he says, of Barack Obama..... radio open source.   more »

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, the Materialists and the Idealists; the first class beginning on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell." (Ralph Waldo Emerson in a lecture at the Masonic Temple in Boston in 1842.)

Philip F. Gura's history of American Transcendentalism was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction in 2008. In this work, Gura brings us into close contact with some of the deeper aspirations underlying American idealism. At once universalist, intuitional and critical, the contextual and social development of Transcendentalism in mid-19th c. America, drawing on mystic Christianity, Vedanta, German Romanticism, Enlightenment Philosophy and other sources, continues to flow like an invisible river under the surface of American capitalism, inspiring a vision of the future convergent with that held up by Sri Aurobindo. A luminous moment in American history, this movement and its founders are discussed in this work as struggling with its complexities with a prophetic intuition but without adequate internal or external resources. In today's America and today's world, the legacy of the Transcendentalists opens once more a chapter of hope and an invitation to further its projects with renewed understanding and care.   more »

Dr. Cornel West is one of the most eloquent scholars on Race Matters in America. In his new book " Hope on a Tightrope, West indirectly challenges Obama to prove that the “Audacity of Hope” is more than a campaign slogan “ asking, “What price are you willing to pay?” And the author goes on to warn that “American politics has a way of grinding the best out of a person” and that “it reduces their prudent judgment into opportunistic behavior.”    more »

Anyone who has read the inside pages of Indian newspapers over the past few decades will be familiar with the recurring stories of violent urban crime. Some concern ‘crimes of passion’ and use a peculiar Indian English journalistic vocabulary, involving such terms as ‘eve-teasing’, ‘absconding’ and ‘paramour’. Some of the stories have to do with incest or close family relationships – say, between father-in-law and daughter-in-law – while others are tales of paedophilia and ‘child molestation’. Another popular subject of which Delhi residents will be well aware are the crimes committed by the ‘criminal castes’, often linked in the neocolonial imagination of the city’s bourgeoisie to the villages and smallholdings that are gradually being asphyxiated by Delhi’s expansion. It’s been an urban legend since the 1990s that people are being bludgeoned to death in their houses with blunt instruments even though they haven’t resisted; and that the intruders show their contempt for their victims by defecating in their living-rooms. Class elements are present in the reporting of crimes of passion, which the elite naturally associate with slum-dwellers and squatters: the second type of crime involves something approaching class warfare.

Some two decades ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote a celebrated essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ At the time, a folklorist is said to have responded: ‘More importantly, can the bourgeois listen?’ ....   more »

I first posted this article here in Nov 2006 before Barack Obama declared his intention to run for president. Since then his historic candidacy has changed the political landscape of the United States, or at least that is the promise should he be elected.

This article is a review of Obama's book: The Audacity of Hope by Michael Tomasky, an especially astute political journalist. The article is an interesting read now fast forwarded two years into the future.

The word "phenomenon"—from the Greek word phainesthai, "to appear," and related to another Greek word that is the root of the English word "fantasy"—possesses a unique potency in our culture. While scientists may use it to mean anything observable, it is popularly applied to rock stars, movie stars, top athletes, and the like. Even today, in our hype-drenched society, it is not used promiscuously. It is reserved for that special minority of people who seem to have singular talent and potential; for those with the ability, that is, to fulfill our collective fantasies.   more »

In New York on the last day of an American tour, absorbing the demise of Yankee Stadium and maybe of Wall Street as we thought we knew it, Zizek’s talk is a blast-furnace but not a blur. The theme through all Zizek’s gags is that the financial meltdown marks a seriously dangerous moment — dangerous not least because, as in the interpretation of 9.11, the right wing is ready to impose a narrative. And the left wing is caught without a narrative or a theory. “Today is the time for theory,” he says. “Time to withdraw and think.”

Dangerous moments are coming. Dangerous moments are always also a chance to do something. But in such dangerous moments, you have to think, you have to try to understand. And today obviously all the predominant narratives — the old liberal-left welfare state narrative; the post-modern third-way left narrative; the neo-conservative narrative; and of course the old standard Marxist narrative — they don’t work. We don’t have a narrative. Where are we? Where are we going? What to do? You know, we have these stupid elementary questions: Is capitalism here to stay? Are there serious limits to capitalism? Can we imagine a popular mobilization outside democracy? How should we properly react to ecology? What does it mean, all the biogenetic stuff? How to deal with intellectual property today? Things are happening. We don’t have a proper approach. It’s not only that we don’t have the answers. We don’t even have the right question.   more »

I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "   more »