"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issues raised by the attempt of religious extremists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmologies.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." ...   more »

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." ...   more »

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. ...    more »

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. ...   more »

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. ...   more »

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. ...   more »

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. ...   more »

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. ...    more »

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   more »

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. ...   more »

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.    more »

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.    more »

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. ...   more »

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-    more »

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. ...   more »