Another great Jean Gebser quote:

If our consciousness, that is, the individual person's awareness, vigilance, and clarity of vision, cannot master the new reality and make possible its realization, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us have been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.

I think this perfectly describes the situation of IY folks ...   more »

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that we rewrite Sri Aurobindo, that we revision and rethink his vision as the background of this passing age of scientific and technological hubris, and that we narrate the necessary emergence of the trans-human. ...   more »

I gave a presentation at Auroville in Jan. 2006 exploring the possible relationship between recent published research on the neurophysiology of advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators, new tunneling electron microscopic images revealing complex networks of nano-scale microtubules interpenetrating human neurons which may provide a substrate for room temperature quantum effects in the brain, and the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the connections between the "Mind of the Cells" and an accelerated evolution of the human species. Examples were presented of a number of unanticipated positive events around the world during the last two decades and their possible relationship to the Mother's vision for Auroville and the Matrimandir. The event was sponsored by Auroville's Centre for International Research on Human Unity (CIRHU). Here are some photos and introductory text from the presentation which was attended by a standing room only audience at the Executive Conference Center of Auroville's Town Hall. ...   more »

"I [believe] that the group is the art form of the future. ... {E}very great culture has created forms of sacred art that were needed in order to transmit and ... discover by experience the truths which were necessary to absorb into one's life. ... In our present culture, as I see it, the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perception and attention and, through that sharing, to become a conduit for the appearance of spiritual intelligence."   more »

The following article is, in my opinion, a nice summary of Sri Aurobindo's (& the Mother's) life and potential impact upon the world. ~ ron Sri Aurobindo is the author and sage who, along with his partner The Mother, dedicated their lives to bringing about the next stage of evolution of life on earth. Throughout his life Sri Aurobindo worked outwardly on his massive body of writings, and inwardly to connect to the divine consciousness, to bring down its properties into the world. The Mother followed a similar path, focusing on the transformation of her own physical body in order to become the forerunner of a new type of human being, what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental being. ...   more »

Spain is not an easy reality to grasp: firstly because in spite of its relatively small size it is unbelievably diverse; secondly, because what it has shown to the world over the last five hundred years is not its soul but its shadow. Nevertheless, even in this asuric shadow that gave birth to the Inquisition, there has always been a nobility which not even its enemies could deny, as well as an obsessive sincerity in its service to the divine ideal it had assumed. Spain is a country of kshatriyas, which inherited its ideal of the Holy War from the East, through Islam. It is this, taken in its essentiality, that constitutes its profound attraction. ...   more »

- SA/M's ... warnings against an overly mental approach to the world make complete sense to me. Today's policy and economic experts use computer models with hundreds of thousands of interacting nonlinear variables which still can only accurately predict for a couple of years what a given policy intervention would actually do (& that's assuming no exogenous changes). I've come to the conclusion that the only hope is to somehow connect with a deeper wisdom than merely mental processes can achieve, and the only way I know how to do that is through a serious sadhana based on a long-term well-tested spiritual tradition. ...    more »

- ... The real horror is that many of these negative changes are the result of the best of intentions; e.g. the population explosion and accompanying suffering that occurred with the introduction of modern medicine in the East (thus dramatically decreasing the death rate) without also focusing on bringing down the birth rate. And of course the accelerating damage to the Earth's biosphere accompanying the spread of the West's consumerist lifestyles. Aren't most of us in this forum already painfully aware of the negative trends surrounding us? I admit that a real bias of mine for this forum is to focus on the many positive signs that the work done by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is in fact resulting in a discernible evolutionary transformation. ...    more »