It's much easier to answer out-and-out materialists who are convinced and sincere ("sincere" within the limit of their consciousness, that is) than to answer people who have a religion! Much easier.   more »

The juxtaposition is what creates the magic

— Suketu Mehta

Our recommended links represent some of the best resources we have found on the web for integrating global perspectives with critical reflections....

Open Democracy and Global Voices (who it seems C.N.N has just discovered) move along complimentary liminal pathways in the cybersphere of global journalism to engage important perspectives left out in the corporatist Media-net

Kanishk Tharoor is an assistant editor of Open Democracy and he raises an interesting question regards the agenda post-Mumbai for a similar Patriot Act in India as in the States post 9/11.   more »

Thanks to Rich for a taste of pure jihadi heaven with Madhubala: Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazmakar from Mughal-e-Azam. But if the jihadis fail, this is where they may find themselves.   more »

Madhubala: Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazmakar from Mughal-e-Azam:

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"The secret of success in Yoga is to regard it not as one of the aims to be pursued in life, but as the one and only aim, not as an important part of life, but as the whole of life." (Sri Aurobindo)   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 »

In other articles, I have argued that in her book: The Shock Doctrine (the rise of disaster capitalism) Naomi Klein has located the current economic ideology that Sri Aurobindo, more than ninety years ago in a work now known as "The Human Cycle", called economic barbarism. Interestingly, if one takes George Soros seriously (see comment) Sri Aurobindo was also prescient about the collapse of the Titan he speaks to in concluding the chapter Civilization and Barbarism

In these interviews Naomi runs the voodoo down on the rescue of the Titan and the possible criminal mismanagement of the largest economic bailout in history:




Click on "more" to see part 2 and 3...

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Not only have the detractors of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo done violence to the text through selective omission and decontextualization to distort its meaning and make it appear degrading to Sri Aurobindo, but some folks, who should know better, have also been spreading rumors, making innuendos, and telling downright falsehoods regards the intention that the author Peter Heehs had in writing the book

One allegation is that Peter and an associate had taken and sold documents from the Sri Aurobindo Archives that concern the Record of Yoga. The way the story is told is that these documents were suppose to have been purchased by Jeffrey Kripal, the Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies/Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University and author of Kali's Child, who with the support and financial backing of Michael Murphy founder of the Esalen Institute were going to publish some type of Freudian account of the Record of Yoga. This conspiracy theory goes on to allege that the Lives of Sri Aurobindo was a just prelude to the distortions of Sri Aurobindo and The Record of Yoga yet to come.

Oddly enough even though the people making these allegations have never been privy to conversations between any of these parties (aka Peter Heehs, Michael Murphy, Jeffrey Kripal) that has not discouraged them from making these charges, that in short are based on wild speculation. To set the record straight on this issue and the value of the work Peter Heehs has done in his critical biography of Sri Aurobindo and that Richard Hartz has accomplished in his painstaking work making The Record of Yoga available to us all, I would like to publish an open letter to SCIY from Michael Murphy

Dear Rich Carlson-

Rumors that I asked Jeff Kripal to write a "Freudian" study of Sri Aurobindo are completely false, and Kripal has no intentions to do so. But I am indeed deeply fascinated (and indebted) to Sri Aurobindo, who remains the chief inspiration for my life work. I discovered his writings in 1950, at Stanford University, as a 19-year old undergraduate and would not have started the Esalen Institute without his inspiration.

Lately, I have been newly inspired by Peter Heehs's magnifcent Aurobindo biography and by the historic scholarship conducted by Heehs and Richard Hartz at the Aurobindo Ashram Archives. Their work on Aurobindo's extraordinary Record of Yoga will one day help revolutionize psychology and transformative practice, and Heehs's book is bringing new awareness of Sri Aurobindo to countless people worldwide. I hope that the book's detractors will eventually come to appreciate the good it is doing for the very cause they celebrate.

Peter Heehs and Richard Hartz are expanding the frontiers of Aurobindo scholarship with the courage and dedication that Aurobindo embodied and recommended to us all.

Michael Murphy

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In honor of this date when G.W. Bush will finally return to his ranch/compound outside of Waco Texas, where he will await the Rapture with his millennialist Christian neighbors.... The thought of him soon departing keeps me humming this tune. If you never saw Pops perform then watch closely, he's the real thing!    more »

In the second of two articles I am posting on psychology in India, I am posting this article from Vladimir, as an example of just how different psychology is treated in Indian spirituality. In this article he considers and quotes extensively from one of my favorite chapters of Sri Aurobindo namely, chapter 8 of his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, that demonstrates a radical discontinuity with Western theorizing of the phenomena of Mind. No matter how many times I read this chapter I take away something new. Since I believe the best platform for a conversation between Sri Aurobindo and a Western philosophical conception of mind is to be found in the realm of imagination. In this reading the last sentence stands out because it sheds some light on the ontology of the imagination

From the beginning of time man has been preoccupied with the phenomenon of Consciousness. His understanding has found its expression in the religious and ritualistic texts.

The Aitareya Brahmana 25. 7 depicts Vedic ritual, agnihotra, as consisting of three priests: hotar, adhvaryu, and udgatar, reciting texts from Rig, Yajur and Sama Vedas, corresponding to the three spheres of the Sacrifice: earth, air and heaven, respectively. The fourth one—brahman, who is silent during the performance, observing all the actions as well as listening to all words uttered by the priests. His function is to be a witness of all what is happening and in case of some imperfection in action or in speech to cure and correct it in his mind, praya-citta....   more »

This article from the New York review although a bit dated (1981) I find fascinating, not only because its includes a perspective in Indian Psychology that is located in the work of Sri Aurobindo, but because of its continuing relevance for cross cultural studies, ethnography, psychology, especially in the work of Matthijs and the Indian Psychology Institute in Pondicherry.

Some facts stated by the author in the article have surely changed for instance:
“When India gained independence, there were about fifty psychiatrists in the country, many of them army doctors; now the number is estimated at only about 500 for India's 640 million people; others—perhaps too many—leave India to practice abroad. “

“ a seminar led in India by Erik Erikson presents a picture of increasingly prevalent anomie, Eastern-style. In it the associate director of the BM Institute argues that there is an "identity vacuum" for Indians at the present time: values that are appropriate in an uncompetitive agrarian society break down under modern pressures; traditions and established roles are threatened by the mass media.”

No doubt India has changed and the outsourcing of IT jobs makes it no longer so dependent on agrarian economics. It is also certainly much more infiltrated by western medicine and practices of psycho-therapy, but aside for such obvious changes in the society I find much of the article still relevant for the current day.

For example, I would think much of the critique of the article regards the questionable appropriation of Western psychotherapy to Indian society is still valid -although as India accepts many of the urban values of the West, along with its neurosis perhaps that is changing a bit as well-. But it also speaks to such intellectual imperialism of its spiritual tradition by folks like Jeff Kripal who reduce complex Indian spiritual practices and questions of alterity to concerns of Freudian analysis

As an example of just how different psychology is treated in Indian spirituality I will also post a paper from Vladamir in which he considers and quotes extensively from one of my favorite chapters of Sri Aurobino namely, chapter 8 of his commentary on the Kena Upanishads, that demonstrates a radical discontinuity with Western theorizing of the phenomena of Mind. No matter how many times I read this chapter I take away something new. In this reading its last sentence sheds some light on the ontology of the imagination In researching this I also came across a correspondence between Mathiis to a sponsor of his project for a renaissance of Indian psychology in which he draws some interesting conclusions. I will post these as well with some comment I find applicable. rc...

Going to India from the West is like stepping onto another planet; but is having a mental illness in India any different from having it in Manhattan? Is treatment similar—if it is available? Do you get ill as often there, or less, or more? Do poverty and overwork leave any time for mental illness, is it a side effect of affluence—or do the hardships of a poor country provide all the more cause for disintegration? Are there differences in the Indian character structure itself that make mental illness and its treatment take different forms from those in the West? And does a third world country, obviously so much less well equipped with psychiatric and psychotherapeutic services than affluent societies, need more mental health care—or does greater provision for illness conjure up the illness to meet it, as new roads bring out more traffic?....

South to Pondicherry, ceded to India by the French in 1954, home of the Aurobindo ashram. It was here that the distinguished psychiatrist N.C. Surya came when he threw up his job as director of the National Institute of Mental Health at Bangalore. Trained in Europe and the US, formerly a Marxist, he was following an Indian tradition of abandoning the world for spiritual concerns when the moment is right; Aurobindo, founder of the ashram, did the same when he gave up his fight for Indian independence and retreated to Pondicherry. While outside Pondicherry steams in the sun, the ashram library is all greenery, coolness, and hush. Dr. Surya comes out of the library carrying the rolled umbrella (against the sun) that, like an Englishman, he seldom opens.   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 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a "global accident" that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 -- exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 -- is it possible that Virilio's "global accident" has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective "no" at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air. It's the electricity of the technological noosphere. It's the primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts.    more »

Despite its obvious legs, Kind of Blue exists in many ways as a mysterious, transitory moment in time. By its official release in August of 1959, Coltrane had recorded his own groundbreaking Giant Steps (another album with a Jimmy Cobb credit); Chambers and Adderley had quit the band over monetary disputes (a recurring theme with Davis); and Bill Evans, already on the outs, would soon be completely gone as well, upset (with good reason, it appears) over not receiving songwriting credit on "Blue in Green" and "Flamenco Sketches." Though Cobb remained in Davis's employ until just prior to 1963's Seven Steps to Heaven, the constant personnel changes may very well have contributed to Kind of Blue's seemingly atemporal state, transcending a mere two days spent within an Eastern European cathedral turned recording studio. "I don't know if he ever played all of those tunes off of that record live like that," Cobb says.   more »

 

 

"A man well versed in all disciplines, curious about each and every mystery, father of alphabets, languages, utopias and mythologies, host of paradises and infernos, author, pan-chess player, and perfect astrologer in indulgent irony and generous friendship, Xul Solar is one of the most peculiar events of our times" - Jorge Luis Borges

If the essence of critique, as per Foucault, is the desubjugation of the self in the politics of truth, and if utopias, as per Jameson, represent the limit condition of social critique, Argentinian Xul Solar (1887-1963) is one kind of subject exemplar of the wholesale reconfiguration of modernity. Standing at the initiation of an age of world history which harvests humanity for a totalitarian global market, offers alienation and conditioning in the name of freedom, policed uniformity in the name of creativity and multiculturalism, dromologic deformation in the name of progress, animal lust and aggression cloaked as civilization, Xul Solar, like his friend Jorge Luis Borges, made of his life and its expressions a performance at the margins which opened the cracks to alternate worlds of creative communitarian self-fashioning, poised between internal coherence and external noise, negotiating their realities and truths in real-time. An epic personality, Solar leaves his legacy of the message that it is not through the politics of the democratic vote but through what may seem an eccentric creative aspiration towards global and teleological alternate integralities, resistances to assimilation and an assimilation of resistances, that we may gather the invisible threads and weave the text of a world which makes possible the gnostic community.

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Shahzia Sikander is a Pakistani born artist primarily working in the highly detailed medium of miniature painting, a tradition that stretches back at least to Mughal India. Spiritual has been one adjective applied to her art work that often blurs traditional distinctions that define cultural life on the subcontinent such as Hindu/Muslim, ancient/modern, male/female.

A defining trait of Shahzia Sikander's artwork, but also her life, is the persistent impulse to cross boundaries. Born in Lahore, Pakistan and trained in the traditional art of Persian miniature painting, Sikander later emigrated to the United States, earned an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently a rising star in the New York art scene.

Her paintings often address the cultural cross currents that she embodies: East vs. West, tradition vs. invention, spirituality vs, capitalism. Sikander's story might be the latest version of the classic immigrant tale: a young woman from a third world Muslim country leading a very independent life in 21st Century Manhattan.

Here is some of her art work as well as an interview with this talented artist....   more »

A few last words before the election: revised and re--posted from C Theory:

The trajectory of global temperatures since the Enlightenment
is a trajectory of the catastrophic,
in 1800 some ten million tons of coal were mined annually,
as steam engines raged in Yorkshire,
when Blake was born in 1757 the atmospheric concentration
of “fixed air” was two hundred eighty ppm,
when he left his body in 1827 it had risen to two hundred eight five ppm,
in a life span of seventy years ending today CO2 would have increased
at a rate of more than fifteen times that,
that's the tipping point, that's exponential acceleration,
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"Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth." (Michel Foucault, What is Critique?)

In this article, Judith Butler, renowned feminist postmodern theorist from UC, Berkeley discusses Michel Foucault's late thoughts on critique. While it is usually thought that "truth" for Foucault is entirely socially constructed and maintained by acts of knowledge-power, Butler's creative reading of Foucault probes some of his aporias. Truth, for Foucault, is what makes itself knowable to a people in an age, thus an episteme. Such a mode of knowledge becomes manifest as a mode of being. More focused on the structures and processes by which truth maintains itself ontologically through power and its exercise, Foucault nevertheless does not assign a human origin to the appearances and disappearances of epistemes.

Governmentality, the way in which social institutions wield power to form subjects and constrain the limits of their existence, knowledge and exercise of imagination and will aims always at hiding itself, becoming invisible within the ontology of its subjects. Critique, here is the ceaseless scrutiny and revelation of the hidden grounds of truth-claims within governance, in and through one's social enactments. These are the acts of self-creation, the ethics and aesthetics of subjective transformation and the basis of epistemic change.

In this reading, Judith Butler, shows how in the late Foucault, the subject, like truth, arrives at its aporia in the profound thought of Foucault - where subject encounters self and the originary aspiration of the aesthetics of self-creation. In exposing the truth-claims of governmentality, what datum of truth can the constructed subject find support in? Ultimately, this datum cannot but be the unmentionable self-evidentiary truth within the self which is ever active in probing the pretenses of the abuses of social law in the name of truth. This is the basis of critique, which humans, as truth-seeking social subjects are called upon to exercise ceaselessly.

A good read in conjunction with or after this essay, would be Sri Aurobindo's chapter from The Synthesis of Yoga: "Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom."

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William Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) was a British writer of Science Fiction, who dealt with themes which explored heightened utopic possibilities of human subjectivity. As one may see from his dates, he lived somewhat contemporaneously with Sri Aurobindo and it is not unlikely that he may have come across his writings or ideas. Stapledon's philosophical explorations into collective consciousness led him to use the term "supermind" for a global consciousness related to the mutual resonance and union of all human minds. Such ideas as also those of communication between different life forms and explorations of humanity's seeking for Truth and future perfection form the subject of many of his books. Stapledon may be thought of as one of the founders of modern Sci-fi and had a strong influence on other such masters of the genre as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith. In this short story, The Flames, Stapledon brings together many of these themes and explores them from a certain perspective.   more »

For the Republicans the election has come down to rousing up their political base in small town USA. Their vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been condemning liberals in big cities as she champions Joe Sixpack and Mary the Hockey-Mom, who reside in that down home bastion of popular American fanaticism.

This tour through Sarah Palin's home town, in which she cites having executive experience by virtue of being its mayor is eye opening fun. In this video the current mayor of Wasilla Ak. as well as some of its typical residents are interviewed, so I do forewarn those who are easily offended by fat hairy men with tasteless tattoos.   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 »