My reading of the sublimation of desire as caring of the self Steigler speaks of is the same as yours - ie tapas. It converges here with the intent of IY (as also with the late Foucault's disciplines of the self). This is what made me locate Steigler in a comparative meditation with the Mother's call for heroism. The Mother's message, given in a late modernist context, is more psychologically centered, but we live now in an age where the psychological cannot be divorced from the social - individuation and transindividuation are inextrcably bound, as Steigler makes amply clear. The need for an individual orientation towards the "plane of consistencies." This phrase is also borrowed from Deleuze but Stiegler furthers it as that unrealized plane (I can only see it as transcendent but Deleuze is allergic to this term) which universal eros is supported by. Beyond the plane of the comparative (in sri Aurobindo's terms this sounds like the Overmind) is the unthinkable but intuitible idealization of the plane of consistencies. Here is where unity and infinity co-exist as radical realities not made into a function of each other. To return to the need for tapas through enablement of disciplines of the self (also implying the disablement of control societies which repress desire (socialism, nation-state, church) or consume it (global capitalism)), Stiegler is clear about its relation to the gnoseological: This is not to say that this mysterious object is miraculous or supernatural. It is to say that this object makes mystery, produces it, and requires, so as to become accessible, initiatory, mystagogic or esoteric discourses: it requires a discipline implying practices of the self. db