Fanaticism is often associated with religious practice and its mystical tendencies. In this article on G.K. Chesterton view of the fanatic, the reviewer notes that Chesterton rather associated fanaticism with a particular logic that is derived from mystical experience and not from mystical experience itself.

Today, we often hear it said that “fanaticism” is the consequence of religion, that science is its alternative. If I understand Chesterton's view of both the scientists and Islam, it is that “fanaticism” stems from both. But it comes not from the original mystical insight but rather from the “logic” that flows from it and subsumes all else in its wake. Scientism denies any place for revelation in its “logic.” Islam's “logic” ends up denying secondary causes or an understanding of the divinity in which diversity in the Godhead and Incarnation are impossible. The subduing of the world to Allah is a conclusion not of the mystical insight but of the logic that follows from it.

In the end, “fanaticism” is not a product of mysticism, but of logic. By looking for its causes in the wrong place, we often reveal our own “fanaticisms.” The “fanatical” concern about the religious cause of “fanaticism” has blinded us to the “fanaticisms” that stem from science itself and has caused us to misunderstand what it is within Islam that often makes it so “fanatical.”...   more »

Dear SCIY readers,

Because Sraddhalu Ranade and Alok Pandey have been invited to the US for the AUM conference this year, we wish to place certain facts about them before those who may be considering support or sponsorship of these people or their projects. These facts concern their involvement in what we regard as promotion of religious fundamentalism, censorship, distortion of truth, and defiance of Ashram rules and authority carried out by Ranade and Pandey recently, so that you may assess any possible support for them.

To make people aware of the misleading activities of Ranade, Pandey, and others, and to increase awareness of an unfortunate growing trend among some who claim to be followers of Sri Aurobindo, a website has been started website, http://www.iyfundamentalism.info.   more »

Responses to Sraddhalu's amusing letter keep coming in. This one is from Filio, an ex-student of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram writing on the discussion list of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram International Centre of Education (SAICE).   more »

As the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species take place this year, it is easy to overlook the fact that 2009 also marks the 100th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo's first major text on evolution and consciousness. In Process and Evolution and Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) Sri Aurobindo begins to comprehensively articulate his vision of human evolution. Just as Darwin's book became the foundation for a science of evolution, what has been called evolutionary spirituality can be traced back to Sri Aurobindo's work. Many are acknowledging this bi-centennial year of Darwin's birth with a reassessment of his work in light of what we now know about evolution it therefore, also seems to be a good time to reassess Sri Aurobindo's vision of human evolution in terms of our contemporary understanding of the phenomena......

Even though his view of history is essentially cyclic he starts his consideration of evolution by writing in Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) the following:

“Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact” (Aurobindo)

However, by the early1940s when he is revising the last chapters of The Life Divine he writes:

“the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature “ (Aurobindo 1949 p832)....

There are six sections in this paper:

I) Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in Intelligent Design
2) Darwinian Fundamentalism: reductionism, pluralism, play
3) Anticipating Science & Society
4) Complexity and the Dialectics of the Visible and Invisible
5) The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity
6) The Dialectics of Biology and Culture: science, ecology & economics    more »

Since Peter’s book got published we have heard voices from both sides. We are of course all too familiar with what the loud and vociferous critics of the book have had to say. But we have also heard people who have liked the book, drawn inspiration from it, got closer to Sri Aurobindo, etc.; in other words appreciated and benefited from it. And many others, the VAST majority, have just not bothered about it and have kept quiet.

Even the website www.thelivesofsriaurobindo.com, so strongly recommended by Peter’s critics could not prevent the following poll information (screenshot image of the result is also attached here) from appearing on its website some time last month:.



The Poll indicated: I find the book “The Lives of Sri Aurobindo” by Peter Heehs to be: .

Offensive – 19 votes - 13% .

Deceptive – 18 votes - 13%

Boring – 10 votes - 7%

Representative – 63 votes - 45%

Useful – 113 votes - 82%

   more »

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 at Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius, was arguably the most influential school of design in modern times, set up in the form of a residential creative community of designers, craftsmen, architects and artists. As part of its central ideal, Water Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, envisaged a world made up of creative communities united spiritually in and around a materialized soul, which he likened to "a crystal cathedral." Today, Bauhaus influenced architecture is ubiquitous as the symbol of world modernity, but Gropius' dream is far from fulfilled. This article explores the historical dimensions of this ideal, the causes for its failure and the possible conditions for its postmodern manifestation.   more »

The Heehs biography controversy is unfortunately a symptom of a much deeper crisis in the Integral Yoga community, with future repercussions which are hardly optimistic. In this consideration of some of the larger issues involved, the editors of sciy and other concerned viewers of the phenomenon draw attention to what is at stake for all those interested in the Integral Yoga. These are only a few of the more serious ramifications. Readers are welcome to add their own concerns as comments.   more »

Controversy surrounding the representation of a "nationalized" Indian mystic comes late to Sri Aurobindo. Pre-dating the latter in personal chronology as in nationalism and the modern articulation of a global Vedantic spirituality, Vivekananda precedes also in the matter of contemporary debates on representation. In the present 2005 piece by Makarand Paranjape, some of the recent histories of representation and the all too familiar stakes are rehearsed and can be instructive to our consideration of the present controversy raging around "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo." Who gets to authorize the representation? What are the relative uses of hagiographny and biography? Are not both of these varieties of fiction? What purposes do they serve? Where does cultural tradition come in? What is the place of hermeneutics in all this? Paranjape's reflections and call for a balanced realism is much needed for us to heed and reflect on in these times of myth-making and madness.   more »

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Originally from Sudan, An-Na'im is a disciple of nationalist leader and Islamic reformer and Sufi, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed in 1985 by the regime of President Gaafar Nimeiry. Taha's pronouncement of his first political incarceration by the British is reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's: "When I settled in prison I began to realize that I was brought there by my Lord and thence I started my Khalwah with Him."

An-Na'im's specialties include human rights in Islam and cross-cultural issues in human rights. He is the director of the Religion and Human Rights Program at Emory. He also participates in Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. An-Naim was formerly the Executive Director of the African bureau of Human Rights Watch. He argues for a synergy and interdependence between human rights, religion, critical thought and secularism, instead of a dichotomy and incompatibility between them.   more »

Rick Lipschutz reflects here on the continuum which stretches from religion to spirituality. Drawing on the Mother's distinction between spiritual realization, spiritual philosophy, occultism and religion and her perception of a complementarity in their workings, the author calls for a more integral understanding of the yoga and its stages and processes.   more »

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.   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 »

... The personal yoga of Sri Aurobindo, as he himself once characterized it, was an "incalculable" one, leading from realization to realization in a journey without end. Through his life, Sri Aurobindo attempted to chart this journey in the form of a darshana (or philosophy) and a yoga (a process leading to experience and transformation). His earliest formulation to himself of this journey with its goals and processes is what he called the Sapta Chatusthaya (Seven Quartets) which form the background to his private notes to himself of his own yogic progress, kept mostly between 1912-1920 and now publshed as The Record of Yoga. Between 1914-1920, he wrote most of his major works in the serialized journal, Arya, where he outlined his yoga, philosophy of evolution and social philosophy in terms which may also be thought of as contemporaneous with the Record of Yoga. Particularly, in his principal work on yoga, The Synthesis of Yoga, the fourth part, the Yoga of Self-Perfection, can be thought of as a yoga of transformation, a new formulation for the future which followed the achievements of the more traditional yogas of Works, Knowledge and Divine Love, comprising respectively the first three parts of Sri Aurobindo's synthesis in this text. This Yoga of Self-Perfection can largely be correlated with the Sapta Chatusthaya and thus, the Record of Yoga.

Later, after 1926, we have Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga and later still, after 1932, further revisions to his other texts, including the Synthesis of Yoga and the Life Divine. In these writings, Sri Aurobindo introduces a new terminology and what may seem new emphases to his yoga and darshana.

Richard Hartz, who works at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram archives, has studied Sri Aurobindo's texts and revisions intensively as an editor of his Complete Works and takes a historical view of the development of Sri Aurobindo's yoga and writing. Here, he raises and tries to answer some of the questions pertaining to the changes and revisions in Sri Aurobindo's understanding and teaching, by looking at the Record of Yoga, the Yoga of Self-Perfection and other key texts of Sri Aurobindo such as the Life Divine and Savitri. He also considers what may be the special contribution of Sri Aurobindo to the Indian tradition of yoga and touches on the part paid by Vivekananda as a precursor. ...   more »

The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...   more »

SCIY Editor Vladimir Yatsenko will teach an online course in the Vedas starting in October 2008. We carry the details here as well as a link to one of the lecture transcripts posted earlier in SCIY.   more »

This article attempts to sketch out Sri Aurobindo's contribution to the future of humanity as carried in his major texts. In doing so, it also tries to underline the cross-cultural nature of these texts and the disciplinary redefinitions implicit in them.   more »

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.   more »

Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...   more »