Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

A Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Provincializing Europe" by Amit Chaudhuri (London Review of Books)

Debashish — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:03:26 -0800

(recycled): Dipesh Chakrabarty's book "Provincializing Europe" is an important theoretical study of colonialism and its legacies in India. While [many] works outline the atrocities and dleterious effects of colonialism abound, Chakrabarti, one of the founder-members of the Subaltern Studies movement in Indian (and world) history tells the story from the lesser known side of the strategies used by Indians (in colonial Kolkata) for making an "alternate habitation" of modernity - i.e. adapting it to their own uses. In doing this, he also makes a number of important theoretical points about cultural situatedness and conditions for effective cross-cultural dialog. This review, taken from the London Review of Books is by Amit Chaudhuri, a well-known younger Indian novelist and commentator.

The Myth of the New India by Pankaj Mishra

Debashish — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:24:07 -0700

In this article, Pankaj Mishra considers contemporary India's middle class myth of emerging economic superstardom. Is this a reality or a make-believe narrative swallowed as part of neo-liberal globalization with its own convenient interests? According to Mishra, "Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths."

An Imaginative Geography - Chapter One of "The Myth of Shangri-La" by Peter Bishop

Debashish — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:35:25 -0700

As globalization strips the veil from the last inviolable topos of earth and real-time surveiilance renders every square unit of the planet physically transaparent in its utilitarian Google Maps and Star War strategies, the sacred plexuses of the earth also multiply in their resistant cultural geographies of surreal uptopia.

Peter Bishop teaches Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Australia. Bishop's entertaining and erudite analyses of contemporary material culture pry open the spaces where spirituality, imagination, cultural history and material practices intersect. In this first chapter from his book, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred landscape, he presents the makings of a theory of sacred cultural materiality - the spiritual, psychological, aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, economic and geographic transactions which establish the utopian spaces of contemporary spiritual desire. - DB

Towards a Postcolonial Modernity: AsiaSource Interview with Partha Chatterjee

Debashish — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:50:12 -0700

Partha Chatterjee, founding member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective, is director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and visiting professor of anthropology at Columbia University. Chatterjee's interests are diverse and include Bengali theater. He has acted in Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's story The Namesake.

Chatterjee's work on anticolonial and postcolonial nationalism has left a definitive mark on contemporary scholarship. He has grappled with the problem of an Euro-American modernity politically institutionalized by the nation-state, in its implementations in terms of resistant cultural nationalisms among non-western and colonized peoples and their imagined communities.

The present inflection of his work moves towards postcolonial governmentality and the grassroots cultural politics of claiming identities within its categoric specifciations.

Chatterjee points out how the standard secular form of post-Enlightenment nationalism has been adapted in attempts to arrive at alternate forms within non-western cultures, yet how such adaptations have been marked by serious ambiguity, becoming co-opted by the forms they have sought to resist, rendered impotent or transformed into fascict ideologies. He calls for a continuous popular/communitarian creativity in understanding and dealing with such transformations, though his voice in this matter, judging by India's postcolonial history, tends towards pessimism.

For example, this is what he has to say about the moibilization of religion in its anti-colonial adaptations:

The innovations in nationalist thinking and nationalist mobilizations which have occurred in the postcolonial world have tended to get repressed by the emergence of fairly standardized forms of governance. Many of these innovations were actually repressed because they were not seen to be consistent with the known forms of the modern state. For instance, if you had movements or parties which were largely based on religion, this was seen to be somehow inconsistent with the idea of a modern constitutional state. Therefore, there was always this problem of what to do with such movements. Yet, those movements have been very influential and powerful in terms of mobilizing people against colonial rule.

So, once the objective of decolonization and transfer of power to a new nationalist elite had been met, the question was how to contain or manage these forces that had been released in the course of the national movement. That is where many of these tensions remained unresolved. If you look at the case of post-independence India, this whole debate about the "secular" state and what the secular state must do and what it means, in a sense, reflected this unresolved tension. In the historical process of the emergence of that state, a great deal of the mobilization had used religion, had depended on extremely powerful religious reform movements, of actually shaping what were seen to be religious beliefs and religious practices but changing them, reformulating them, in order to conform to what were seen to be the new challenges of the modern world.

So these religious reform movements were often completely part of the broader set of social changes that brought about nationalism, that brought about the new state, that brought about new political formations. They were integrally tied with many of those movements and yet the requirements of the secular state presumably forbade religion in public places or public life, or forbade political parties based on religion, because these were somehow inconsistent with a modern nation-state. Very often, there were all kinds of shortcuts or repressive ways of keeping those things under cover, as it were. Many of the tensions around secularism, for instance, and the kinds of challenges that emerged later on, in the case of India's Hindu right-wing in the 1980s for instance, were very much part of these unresolved questions from within the national movement. What the Hindu right then appealed to was not to say that nationalism was all wrong; they said, in fact, that they were the "true" nationalists. The reason why that could be said persuasively was because of a great deal of religious-based rhetoric and the presence, as I said, of these powerful religious reform movements, which were always part and parcel of nationalism.

So these remained unresolved problems. The overall frames remained derivative, almost imitations of forms of the state as developed in the West, but in actual practice what had to be done was to find completely innovative practices at the localized level. The real problem occurred when many of these local adaptations and innovations required a new translation into the larger frame.

Heidegger, Habermas and the Essence of Technology by Andrew Feenberg

Debashish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:52:19 -0700

Andrew Feenberg is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. In this article he considers the specificity of our Modern Age as Technology, as identified and theorized both by Martin Heidegger and Jurgen Habermas. Both these seiminal modern/contemporary thinkers, though marked by divergence in important respects, see Technology as the determining agent for modern subjectivity as a condition of subjection, alientaion, instrumentalization, homogeniety and social fragmentation. Feenberg here analyzes primary and secondary characteristics of Technology and indicates possibilties of technological reform in a post-industrial context to reintegrate culture, community, creativity and participatory improvization into world culture. One may note that though for the purposes of his own transformative discourse, Feenberg construes Heidegger and Habermas oppositionally as essentialistic in their characterization of Technology, in fact his reformative possibiltiies return us to Heidegger's view of the essence of Techne as Poiesis.

Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s unfinished critique (Boston Review)

Ron — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:11:45 -0700

With the 1978 publication of Orientalism, Edward Said launched a critique of Western scholarship on the Middle East that still reverberates through academia and government. By characterizing Middle Eastern cultures as incapable of adapting to modern life, the early Orientalists, in Said’s view, hid their colonial, and indeed racist, biases. In the process, he suggested, Orientalists fooled themselves—and Westerners generally—into believing that their studies were undertaken with total neutrality. Said particularly attacked Bernard Lewis as the contemporary exemplar of this entrenched view. In a series of exchanges, Said argued that such scholarly bias contributed to the failure of the West to recognize Palestinians as a distinct people or to value Middle Eastern nations except for their oil. While Said did not live to see how Lewis’s views would influence the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, the terms of his critique still divide scholars.

Despite decades of controversy, however, neither Said’s most recent supporters, such as Juan Cole and Rashid Khalidi, nor his most ardent critics, Raphael Patai and Daniel Pipes, have succeeded in subjecting Said’s concerns to a serious analysis that might address the central question: can scholarship on the Middle East ever be freed from its political context? ...

• India and Europe by Wilhelm Halbfass

Debashish — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:38:27 -0700

With the ascendency to Indian politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a plethora of literature has appeared paying serious attention to the phenomenon of "Neo-Hinduism" in India, and by and large relating it to fascist possibilities. This postcolonial literature, swelling the shelves over the last five years, has piggybacked onto a larger more international body of postmodern writing on nationalism and its dangers that has been growing in stridency ever since the pseudo-religion ...

Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber

Debashish — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:17:03 -0800

Juergensmeyer's article on Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism in a Globalizing World, carried earlier in sciy, throws a clear interpretive light on our contemporary world situation, a context within which the present imbroglio in Pondicherry wrt. "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" may be framed (with whatever customized caveats). But perhaps the earliest intuitive ray on this dialectic fueling the present discourse was the publication in 1995 of Benjamin Barber's now classic study "Jihad vs. McWorld." The book itself was in fact preceded by a March 1992 article of the same name in The Atlantic by the author (which later became the Introduction chapter in the book). This article is worthy of our consideration (or reconsideration if already read) in the present circumstances.

'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson

Ron — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:57:32 -0700

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'. ... "

• Review of Sri Aurobindo and his Contemporary Thinkers

Debashish — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:32:49 -0700

Following the publication of “Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo,” Indrani Sanyal and Krishna Roy of the Centre for Sri Aurobindo Studies, Calcutta have complied a set of eighteen scholarly essays on Sri Aurobindo and his contemporaries in the ideational context of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance. Sri Aurobindo’s physical involvement in the politics and culture of early Bengal nationalism was of relatively short duration (1905-1910), albeit an intense and all-sided participation which internalized the entire regional history of the movement and left a powerful creative impress in the milieu of its time and space. Moreover, the discursive background of this involvement continued to develop organically and find voice throughout his life in his subjective articulation just as his own situated contribution continued to resonate in later Indian nationalism. Thus this collection of considered interpretive contemplation fills an important need in our historical understanding. But more importantly, it is the post-colonial legacy of these engagements which draws us today by their fertile and future-gazing content, inviting reflection not merely for India’s but the world’s re-generation at a time of global ferment.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive, ref. by Yatanti

Ron — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:18:14 -0700

Thanks to Yatanti for referring us to this site re "The Works of Rabindranath Tagore" and other sacred texts. ~ ron
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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, artist, playwright, composer and novelist. India's first Nobel laureate, Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature. He composed the text of both India's and Bangladesh's respective national anthems. Tagore travelled widely and was friends with many notable 20th century figures such as William Butler Yeats, H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and Albert Einstein. While he supported Indian Independence, he often had tactical disagreements with Gandhi (at one point talking him out of a fast to the death). His body of literature is deeply sympathetic for the poor and upholds universal humanistic values. His poetry drew from traditional Vaisnava folk lyrics and was often deeply mystical.

LAST night I dreamt that I was the same boy that I had been before my mother died. She sat in a room in a garden house on the bank of the Ganges. I carelessly passed by without paying attention to her, when all of a sudden it flashed through my mind with an unutterable longing that my mother was there. At once I stopped and went back to her and bowing low touched her feet with my head. She held my hand, looked into my face, and said: "You have come!"

In this great world we carelessly pass by the room where Mother sits. Her storeroom is open when we want our food, our bed is ready when we must sleep. Only that touch and that voice are wanting. We are moving about, but never coming close to the personal presence, to be held by the hand and greeted: "You have come!" ...

ISEC: The International society for Ecology & Culture

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:47:52 -0700

I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron

Forty Initiatives that are changing our world (Resurgence Mag.)

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12:56 -0700

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.

Is India headed the right way?, by Francois Gautier

Ron — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:35:11 -0800

Thanks to Koantum for suggesting this article by Aurovillian Francois Gautier.
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Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India... we see a much more dynamic and self-confident India, galvanised by the liberalisation taking place at this very moment.

But if one looks closer at what is happening here, one is bound to feel a little unsettled. For what we see today is an India veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation. — Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities. — But since the last two, three years, it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that 'we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are.' — Thus, democracy in India has been hijacked. It takes a fortune to be elected. Politicians, elected by and for the people, once they are locked in the ivory tower that is Delhi, forget all about the people.

This process of copying the West to the point of aping it has, of course, already happened many times in the developing world. And it killed the soul of many countries, making them just another replica of the West -- with a youth that wears the latest Calvin Klein jeans, knows the No 1 bestseller on the Time list, can quote a few lines from Dante, reads The Times of India, but knows nothing about pranayama, has never read a verse from Kalidasa and does not know who Sri Aurobindo is. ...

Clean air or TV: Where will Asia find more energy?

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:50:41 -0800

A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators. — Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. — They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world. — But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases...

Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere -- using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day -- has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive. — The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India. — "It's harder to do any solar energy projects in India," he said. ...

Chennai Declaration: UN urged to help achieve hunger-free world

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:05:11 -0800

The United Nations (UN) has been recommended to set up a Statutory Body comprising G8 and G20 nations to provide political oversight to the global and national efforts to achieve the goal of a hunger-free world by 2015. — The recommendation was made in the Chennai Declaration that was adopted yesterday on the concluding day of the three-day international workshop on "Food Security: A Great Threat to Human Security" held at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSRRF) in Chennai in India.

"The goal should be eradication of hunger by 2015, and not halving the proportion or the number of the hungry in relation to any chosen base year," the declaration recommended. — It said all the member states of the UN should make the right to a balance diet, clean drinking water, environmental sanitation, primary health care and primary education a basic human right...

The programme will be completed today (Thursday) through visiting Biovillage and Auroville, a MSSRF project in Pondicherry. ...

Welcome to world peace (Christian Science Monitor)

Ron — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:20:49 -0800

World peace was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be more - well, more peaceful. But a remarkable global phenomenon is being obscured by headlines about bombs and conflict in the Middle East. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of one government's army doing battle with another. — Last week marked 1,000 consecutive days with no wars between nations anywhere in the world, since the night in November 2003 when India and Pakistan instituted a cease-fire. This is the longest episode of interstate peace in more than half a century.

Other sorts of conflicts still rage around the world, but these are not wars of government against government. In this summer's bloodletting in Israel and Lebanon, for example, the Lebanese government took no military action to defend its territory, even as some of its bases came under fire. In Iraq, no government in the world has sent troops to support the insurgency. The interstate phase of the war for Iraq ended more than three years ago, when the United States and its allies removed Saddam Hussein's government. Despite the brutality in Darfur and elsewhere, even civil wars have become rarer. After rising steadily for half a century, the number of civil conflicts dropped by a third or more in the late 1990s. The world is far more peaceful than a dozen years ago, when slaughters in Rwanda and the Balkans led to gloomy predictions of rampant civil war. ...

'Waterworld China' wins top prize in international design competition

Ron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:27:26 -0800

Atkin's Architecture Group recently won the first prize award for an international design competition with this stunning entry. Set in a spectacular water filled quarry in Songjiang, China, the 400 bed resort hotel is uniquely constructed within the natural elements of the quarry. Underwater public areas and guest rooms add to the uniqueness, but the resort also boasts cafes, restaurants and sporting facilities.

The lowest level runs with the aquatic theme by housing a luxurious swimming pool and an extreme sports center for activities such as rock climbing and bungee jumping which will be cantilevered over the quarry and accessed by special lifts from the water. With a stunning visual presentation as shown here, it's no wonder this project took home the first prize. This is a fine example of an ultra modern facility co-existing amongst its natural environment. ...

China Needs to Embrace Its Feminine Side (NYT)

Ron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 11:54:34 -0800

A national report in China indicates that the country could face a rather staggering gender imbalance over the next 15 years, with as many as 30 million more men of marriageable age than women by 2020...

Industrialized nations typically produce between 105 to 107 boys for every 100 girls... China’s Family Planning Commission, however, found that there are currently 118 boys born for every 100 girls, and in some regions like the southern provinces of Guangdong and Hainan, according to an Associated Press report on the study, “the ratio has ballooned to 130 boys to 100 girls.” ...

"Response to my critics," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:11:11 -0800

"Prophets Facing Backward," my book under discussion here, claims that the cluster of social constructivist, feminist and postcolonial theories that deny any cognitive distinctions between warranted knowledge and collectively accepted beliefs ... have provided philosophical justifications for [a] kind of populist interpretive flexibility ...

Set against the backdrop of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the book argues that the relentless debunking the very idea of universally valid, bias-free facts has received in the hands of its many academic critics, has added to a culture of doublethink where truth has becomes infinitely malleable, open to all kinds of nativist, pseudo-scientific and faith-based interpretations.

Intellectuals, whose job it is to challenge such mystifications, I argue, have betrayed their calling by condemning the very possibility of impartial and universally valid truth that can cut through cultural and national boundaries. This betrayal has made it easier for the religious right to present itself as the defender of the tradition, dressed up as “alternative science”, which it claims has been unfairly rejected and willfully suppressed by the secular elite. The logic of deconstruction of modern science simultaneously provides the logic for the construction of “sacred sciences” by the resurgent religious-political movements that have sprung up among the Hindus, Christian and Muslims alike.

It is indeed high time for science studies to get engaged in the thorny issues raised by the attempt of religious extremists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmologies. It is gratifying to note that the debate I began in the "Prophets" has now been joined. My colleagues from science studies and postcolonial studies have done me the honor of critically engaging with the concerns I have raised regarding the political dangers of epistemic multiculturalism in this age of religious fundamentalisms. In this essay, I will respond at length to the issues my critics have raised in their readings of the "Prophets." ...

"Prophets Facing Backward," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:26:26 -0800

The leading voices in science studies have argued that modern science reflects dominant social interests of Western society. Following this logic, postmodern scholars have urged postcolonial societies to develop their own "alternative sciences" as a step towards "mental decolonization". These ideas have found a warm welcome among Hindu nationalists who came to power in India in the early 1990s. In this passionate and highly original study, Indian-born author Meera Nanda reveals how these well-meaning but ultimately misguided ideas are enabling Hindu ideologues to propagate religious myths in the guise of science and secularism.

At the heart of Hindu supremacist ideology, Nanda argues, lies a postmodernist assumption: that each society has its own norms of reasonableness, logic, rules of evidence, and conception of truth, and that there is no non-arbitrary, culture-independent way to choose among these alternatives. What is being celebrated as "difference" by postmodernists, however, has more often than not been the source of mental bondage and authoritarianism in non-Western cultures. The "Vedic sciences" currently endorsed in Indian schools, colleges, and the mass media promotes the same elements of orthodox Hinduism that have for centuries deprived the vast majority of Indian people of their full humanity.

By denouncing science and secularization, the left was unwittingly contributing to what Nanda calls "reactionary modernism." ...

"One Cosmos," Robert Godwin's Blog

Ron — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:26:21 -0800

This is the personal blog of Robert Godwin, the author of "One Cosmos under God," which he discussed in the WIE interview in my previous SCIY posting. Godwin describes his book as: "the fruit of a lifetime of thought attempting to synthesize material from a number of diverse domains, including cosmology, theoretical biology, quantum physics, developmental psychoanalysis, attachment theory, anthropology, history, mysticism and theology, into a coherent, self-consistent, non-reductionistic whole." — In "One Cosmos," Dr. Godwin reveals a humorous alter-ego whom he calls: 'Gagdad Bob.' His posting for today begins as follows:

Now, I'm not an anthropopogist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn, and I do know a thing or two about a thing or three. And one of the things I know is that pre-human hominids only became human because of the specifically trinitarian nature of the human developmental situation: mother-father-helpless baby. This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I do not believe intellignt life will ever be found on other planets, because genes and natural selection are only the necessary but not sufficient cause of our humanness.
In other words, even supposing that life arose elsewhere and began evolving large brains, a large brain would never be sufficient to allow for humanness. Rather, the key to the entire enterprise -- the missing link, so to speak -- is the extremely unlikely invention of the helpless and neurologically incomplete infant who must be born approximately 12 months "premature" so that his brain can be assembled at the same time it is being mothered. If we had come out of the womb neurologically complete, then there would be no "space" for humanness to emerge or take root. We would be Neanderthals. Literally. ...

The Challenge of Our Moment: A Roundtable Discussion with Don Beck, Brian Swimme, Peter Senge, & Andrew Cohen (WIE)

Ron — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:12:33 -0800

This seemed like an appropriate article to post in honor of Christmas Day. ~ ron

...if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic, this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years ahead.

So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future, and particularly with the role that religion will play in it, for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a more evolved course through our present and future world. ...

UN Study Shows Richest Two Percent Own Half World Wealth

Ron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:31:38 -0800

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.
The UNU-WIDER study is the first of its kind to cover all countries in the world and all major components of household wealth, including financial assets and debts, land, buildings and other tangible property. ...

The Buddha on Meditation & States of Consciousness, Part II

Ron — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:17:27 -0800

There is inevitable great difficulty in translating from noumenal experience to the realm of discourse, from raw reality to abstract concept. Experience is the forerunner of all spiritual teachings, though similar experiences may come to be articulated differently; the Vedas say, "The Truth is one, only the sages call it by different names." In any given exploration of higher states of consciousness, the version set down in words is of necessity an arbitrary, and perhaps nebulous, delimitation of states, their characteristics, and their bounds...
... the Tibetans recognize two levels of religious doctrine and practice: "The Expedient Teaching" and "The Final Teaching." The Expedient Teachings are the multitude of world religions, each shaped by and for the people who adhere to it; the variance among faiths is accounted for by these shaping factors. But the Final Teaching at the (often esoteric) core of all faiths is essentially one and the same. The typology of techniques which follows here is aimed at the level of Final Teaching, where doctrinal differences fall away, the unity of practice coming into focus. Religious systems differ by virtue of accident of time and place, but the experience that is precursor to religion is everywhere the same. The unity in Final Teaching underlying the various techniques is inevitable: all men are alike in nervous system, and it is at this level that the laws governing Final Teaching operate. ...

The Buddha on Meditation & States of Consciousness, Part I, by Daniel Goleman

Ron — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:06:31 -0800

As Suzuki (1958) points out, in every religion it has been the core experience of an altered state which has preceded and been foundation for the subsequent structures of institution and theology. Too often it is the latter that have survived rather than the former; thus the modern crisis of the established churches might be seen in terms of the disappearance in our age of personally experienced transcendental states, the "living spirit" which is the common base of all religions. Still, for each being who enters these states without a guide, it is as though he were discoverng them for all the world for the first time. A biographer of Sri Aurobindo, for example, notes (Satprem, 1970, p. 256):
"One may imagine that Sri Aurobindo was the first to be baffled by his own experience and that it took him some years to understand exactly what had happened. We have described the ... experience ... as though the stages had been linked very carefully, each with its explanatory label, but the explanations came long afterwards, at that moment he had no guiding landmarks."
This paper begins in Part I with a detailed discussion of the 'Visuddhimagga' account of Gotama Buddha's teachings on meditation and higher states of consciousness––perhaps the most detailed and extensive report extant of one being's explorations within the mind. ...

"Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity, and the Resacralization of the World"

Ron — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 15:04:08 -0800

Terence McKenna is a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist and theorist of time. Rupert Sheldrake is a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature. Ralph Abraham is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics.

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors.
RALPH: It's true. We have to misuse our language even to talk about these things.
RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe.
TERENCE: Humans are said to be the measure of all things.
RUPERT: This is humanism. To adopt the alternative tradition of animism and to recognize the living spirits and souls of all nature is profoundly repugnant to humanism, yet it is the common ground of all human civilization, thought, and tradition. As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called Mephistopheles. ...

Comments on "Reflections on Sri Aurobindo's THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY" (cont.)

Ron — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:10:20 -0700

I've taken the liberty of re-posting here all of the comments ("Replies") to Debashish's earlier posting: "Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji." -- My reasons:

1) The set of responses in this thread was getting so large that we were starting to experience some oddities in BlogHarbor's reply functions.
2) I was concerned that we could delete the entire thread due to some technical or human error, thus losing this fascinating & important discussion.
3) By posting all of the comments as this article, we can go back in and re-format them if we wish; e.g., correcting typos & adding italics for quoted passages.

PLEASE CONTINUE OUR REPLIES ON THIS TOPIC HERE, IN THIS ARTICLE, NOT IN THE PREVIOUSLY POSTED ONE.

Thanks,
~ ron

Phenomenology of Non-Factual Intersubjective Practice - Translation Exercise by Debashish Banerji

Debashish — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 01:20:49 -0700

This translation of an excerpt from Abanindranath Tagore's Apan Katha (Self-Story) presents an example of the artist's worlding - a willed disposition to experience by which we make for ourselves a home in the world through creative relationship. ...

Libya signs up for "One Laptop per Child." Will provide 1.2 million laptops for its students

Ron — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:44:44 -0700

The fifth developing country has signed up for MIT's "One Laptop per Child" program. This is the open-source project that India recently opted out of, reportedly because of fears of losing control of the education of their children.

The government of Libya is reported to have agreed to provide its 1.2m school children with a cheap durable laptop computer by June 2008. -- The laptops offer internet access and are powered by a wind-up crank. They cost $100 and manufacturing begins next year, says [the non-profit organization located at MIT's Media Lab] One Laptop per Child. -- The non-profit association's chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, said the deal was reached on Tuesday in Libya.

Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji

Debashish — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:33:43 -0700

In these last chapters of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo draws together the threads that he has introduced earlier in the work, leading to his conclusion. Though Jan Smuts was yet to coin the word "Holism" to encapsulate the idea that a directed tendency towards the formation of ever-larger aggregates is observable in Nature, each such distinct stage marked by the presence of an identity and properties exceeding those of the sum of their parts, Sri Aurobindo's model of History follows this course. Indeed, this teleology follows naturally from Sri Aurobindo's master-idea of the progressive manifestation of intrinsic spiritual Oneness in Time, expressing itself politically as the drive towards world-union.

S. Korean Diplomat All But Certain to Assume UN Top Job

Ron — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:31:44 -0700

South Korea's foreign minister is quite likely to be answering to a new title soon - United Nations secretary-general. Seoul's chief diplomat has cleared what is widely viewed as the last major hurdle to winning the post. -- South Koreans are enthusiastic about the prospect that Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon will soon replace United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is retiring. ...

Karl Grobl, Humanitarian Photojournalist

Ron — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 12:25:29 -0700

From an early age, my parents instilled in me, a desire to explore and learn first hand, about the world around me. Our family vacations and weekend excursions were general education courses disguised as fun. Knowingly or unknowingly they set me on course for a journey that today, I feel, is still just beginning.

The ongoing quest to document the world's people and the global events that shape our common humanity, has for me, been instrumental in breaking down stereotypes, preconceptions and prejudices. I believe that the more of the world we see and experience, the more we understand. It seems, people everywhere, share similar goals, aspirations, hopes and desires.

It is with a strong sense of obligation that I share, through photographs, the people, places and events that have profoundly shaped my vision of our world. By sharing these experiences with you, I hope to make a small, positive contribution to a heightened sense of world community.

"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." -Gandhi-

Google: Doing Good in India

Ron — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:50:26 -0700

The Aravind Eye Hospital performs 240,000 eye surgeries a year, making it the largest hospital of its kind in the world. Management guru C.K. Prahalad hailed it as a "gem at the bottom of the pyramid" in one of his management books. Brilliant, who joined Google in February, 2006, is a patron of the hospital and is also a close friend of Aravind's founder, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy.

Page and Brilliant were visiting Aravind for the Google Foundation, which has been quietly expanding its altruistic footprint in India. For instance, Google has invested in Planet Read, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve literacy by adding subtitles to Bollywood films and videos of popular folk songs, providing an easy way for Indians with limited literacy skills to practice reading. ...

"The World According to China," NYT Magazine

Ron — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:21:43 -0700

...China now aspires to play an active role on the global stage, which is why it sends skilled diplomats like Wang Guangya to the U.N. That’s the good news. The bad news is that China’s view of “the international order” is very different from that of the United States, or of the West, and has led it to frustrate much of the agenda that makes the U.N. worth caring about. The People’s Republic has used its position as a permanent, veto-bearing member of the Security Council to protect abusive regimes with which it is on friendly terms, including those of Sudan, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Myanmar and North Korea. And in the showdown with Iran that is now consuming the Security Council, and indeed the West itself, China is prepared to play the role of spoiler, blocking attempts to levy sanctions against the intransigent regime in Tehran. ...

The Forgotten September 11 - An Article by Richard Hartz

Debashish — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 00:27:43 -0700

On September 11, 1893, the world’s first Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago. Representatives of such a variety of religious and spiritual traditions had never before been assembled in one place. Delegates from every part of the globe read speeches before a huge audience at the inaugural session. Thirty-first on the list was a young, unknown Hindu. When his turn came, he rose to say the words the spirit would move him to speak. “Sisters and Brothers of America,” Swami Vivekananda began. What happened next was later described by a woman who was present that day. “I was at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893,” she recalled. “When that young man got up and said, ‘Sisters and Brothers of America,’ seven thousand people rose to their feet as a tribute to something they knew not what.” ...