The language problem is endemic to the Ignorance

Re: The Post-human, Evolution and the Avatar by Debashish on Wed 22 Nov 2006 08:11 PM PST Profile Permanent Link The language problem you have raised is endemic to the Ignorance. Nor does one have to name it the Ignorance (though again it can be so named in a "tradition" of practice where its name has been verified in collective experience and new epistemologies and phenomenologies are being built on it - partly why if the transition is to be via yoga, the renewal of and participation in the discursive tradition of Indic spirituality is so useful and part of a cross-cultural enlargement) for this problem to be phenomenologically endemic. Logical statements may be "at home" in the house of "human" language (a static humanism) but Being is not at home in it either without aporetic violence or mantric implosion. (T.S. Eliot likened the overt language of poetry to the bone the thief throws through the window to occupy the watch-dog before he enters to do his hidden work).

Aporia are the staple of a transitional being and any aporetic statement is only as contorted as its receipient's distance in consciousness from it. This is why Zen teachers encourage novices to mediate on the absurdity of the koan, which seems like nonsense but turns out to be profound in experience. Given this fact of disjuncture between language and the paradoxical transitionality of the human, we can either remark on the need for a new language (which would be incomprehesible to us until we rise into its consciousness) and sit silent in the meantime or accept human language as it is - a vehicle of transition (and transformation through practice) like the human body for the birth of a consciousness for which it does not have adequate systems, but towards which it stretches (or contorts) its resources. Felicity or infelicity of language to express aporia is however not an absolute function of language (in spite of its grammatology) but of consciousness which experiences the expression.

The contortion may turn out to be the perfect asana once the consciousness which it facilitates is intuited. Hence it is better to state your experience as yours (or some specific others' whose experience you may be privy to). I can say for myself that I experience no infelicity or contortion in Sri Aurobindo's languaging of the Time-Body of the Supermind. Collective use of the language of "a" transition alows it to become phenomenolgically effective to a habitus, tradition or field. As an "episteme" gathers weight languaging also becomes more effective phenomenologically. Vocabularies and grammars of aporia are inevitable in a time of evolutionary transition. We may expect a bankruptcy (or transformation) in the language of science just as we have seen in the language of philosophy. Or else specialized vocabularies and grammars of practice will bifurcate and once grown more adequate to their own transitional needs, be assimilated into a common transformed language. My own interest in the questions re. the historicty of rupture belong to such a (sub)culture of practice and the need for an accumulation of collective objectivity and subjectivity (or objective subjectivity) there.

As mentioned earlier, for me it is important to sort these things out for the Integral Yoga community - that accepts the transition spelt out by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and are involved in the process of validating it (to whatever degree and in whatever way) in their lives. Otherwise a big mishmash and confusion will characterize this field in the name of the uselessness of language and terminology. Apart from this these matters are of practical concern to a community of practice, because they are keys to our progress. And I am not referring to a "date" such as 2/29/56. Sri Aurobindo was talking in his letters to disciples about dependence on a descending Shakti long before that. What is he talking about here? What relation does this have to the will of the supramental purusha? Does he highlight it in the Synthesis of Yoga? Is it a universal phenomenon? Is it available to us now? Is something more or other available to us since then? Does this add to, modify or enlarge earlier formulations of an Integral Yoga? DB