Sorry, Rich, I had written a rather long reply to this important question, but the "virtual fascists" of the Will to Technology gobbled it up in some occult cyberspace. So, here is a more modest attempt to engage with your questions: The Enlightenment project of the disembodied production and archiving of world knowledge for the "benefit" of all humankind was seen as a way to rational Omniscience and infinite Progress. The problem with the approach is beginning to become more and more apparent - that the lack of fundamental integrality in the faculty of knowledge-acquisition coupled with the will to Omniscience ends up producing ideologies claiming Omniscience and attempting to police the human aspiration into acceptance of their supremacy. The hallmark ideology (or religion) related to the Enlightenment and making such claims in our age is of course Science. But as the Francophone philosophers of the late 20th c. (along with their German predecessers) have now established (institutionalized, as you say, in the academy), this seeking for Knowledge is preceeded by and itself a form of the seeking for Power - in its glorious formulations, for creating a "fairer" world, for bringing "civilization" to the "darker continents", for bettering God's incomplete plan but in its unmasked formulation, this is the Will to Technology, a totalitarian projection of Power, lending itself to possession and exploitation of the human soul and of the earth by the forces of greed and desire. No doubt, as you say, both of these, the Will to Science and the Will to Technology (now morphed into "virtual fascism") are very much with us today, more powerful than ever, at the service of national and other obscurer (fundamentalist) ideologies and transcending these, of global multi-national capitalism. The ideological rhetoric of the Enlightenment continues unabated and though the inevitable failures of its promises/premises and the ugly face behind the benevolent mask have been amply exposed by critical thinkers, this exposure, as you have also highlighted, has become institutionalized in the academy and thus normalized, rendered passe, tamed. The Aurobindonian promise of a supramental world ("the promises that were made have been fullfilled" - The Mother, 1956) conflates easily with the promise of the Enlightenment - Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, in short Godhood as a terrestrial possibility, universalized and individualized divinity. The dynamics of global subject formation ("the world citizen"), control under the metaphysic of "the world picture" by power brokers of various dubious kinds, reduced to its flash-point of virtuality by global technologies, substitutes easily in the tamasic mind for the processes of supramentalization. To sift these very different trajectories, it is imperative to bring to mind the key injunction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that their teaching is not a religion, not an ideology or belief-system, not a prophecy fullfilling itself through external means, for the enjoyment of human spectatorship, outside and in spite of our stunted consciousness. The Omniscience and Omnipotence of a supramental future is nothing if not a realization in consciousness by the species (or by expanding representative collectives of the human species) where consciousness must be understood not as restricted to rationality but as that which is free of all mechanism, external or internal. Can transformations of human consciousness be "managed" by technology and can the Enlightenment project derail the project of supramentalization? Certainly the management of consciousness by technology is what all ideologies set forth to do - from the rituals of religion to the rituals of the state or the corporation - this is the internalization of ideology as subjectivity, internally policed by an introjected conscience. But many processes of consciousness beyond these continue simultaneously except they may remain hidden to the reflexive intelligence because unvoiceable within the discourse pegged to a permitted and authorized version of reality by the doxa of ideology. Even to become aware of these processes we need to transcend the hold of the authorized discourse and look for alternate processes and languages of consciousness. For me, these are the subtler transactions of cross- or inter-cultural consciousness which accompany ideological discourse and practice subliminally and only partially translate themselves through critical and creative efforts into the language of reflection (bounded by doxa). This is what I meant when talking about the possible universalization of ethics (not as a belief system through rationality but as a function of expanding human consciousness). For example, 9/11 has universalized the field of Islamic Studies in the American academy. From a Foucauldian perspective this may be seen as the predictable and inevitable opening of a field of knowledge all the better to control through power the object of knowledge. But a subtler consequence of this opening has been the hermeneutic engagement with alien cultural premises by a large number of American students, in whom there is thereby a loosening and tendency to dislodgement of both their own and "the others'" doxa and the resulting freedom of an enlarged domain of creative choice. This may not be the expected result but processes of feedback amplification in the interstices of contemporary technology ("the ghosts in the machine") may push the process in unpredictable directions through ongoing cultural engagements of this kind. What is clearly a must though, in this scenario, is the operation of critical and creative thinking and their everyday practice in our lives. Neo-Aurobindian ideology or apologetics, like all other religion, is no less subject to the same co-optation by false futurities without this practice. Debashish