We encourage uneasiness for it often precedes opportunities

Re: Re: Post Human Variations by Richard Carlson Rich Sun 28 Jan 2007 12:34 AM PST Which is why we encourage uneasiness for it often precedes opportunities ...And here you have presented some promising semiotic roads we could go down, ... However regarding the authenticity of experience, these descriptions Corbin provides of the “intermediate worlds” of soulmaking are taken from experiences of yogic-poets of the “Orient” from whose biographies Corbin narrates: Stretching from Zarathustra to Suhrawardi, Ibn’ Arabi, Fayz Kashani, Ahmad Ahsai, Kahn Ibrahimi.

I am again not sure one has to be a Structuralist to perceive certain similarities and affinities between experiences of the intermediate worlds of visionaries be they Zarathustra, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Suhrawardi, Ibn’ Arabi, and “some descriptions” which the Traveler of Worlds recites in Savitri. It seems to me that reports of similar psychic terrain and topography in those doing intense sadhana is a verification rather than refutation of inner experience. One should however recognize that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s experience of material instantiation is an evolutionary advance from the imaginal 8th or 9th Climes of Shi-ite theosophy in its syncretism with Mazdean angelology. Theirs is not only the experience of the yogi-poet but the yogi-pioneer as well.

• Material instantiation takes on a completely new meaning after SA/M and it is precisely the importance they lay on material instantiation which leads me to questions concerning of technology?
• Are we simply patterns of information to be harvested for computation or are we material instantiations of psychic beings?

It is SA/M insistence of maintaining a poise of intuitive discrimination and psychic discernment which leads me to interrogate the imagination of technology. In an world increasingly permeated by ubiquitous computing and the tyranny of code what happens to creative imagination? Can we perceive a vanishing point beyond which purusha disappears into the calculations of prakriti? Descriptions of imagination should also be further refined here: “Imaginito vera” is more properly described as an “organ of meditation”. It is from “imaginito vera” e.g. meditation that its “organ of perception” or “active imagination” arises, and to which it leads back to, if it is properly effectuated.

As far as I can discern Corbin’s translation of “active imagination” appears to fall along the same mental/intuitive axis as Sri Aurobindo’s use of creative imagination, which also emerges from the silent intensity of meditative aspiration. I think we could all agree that without creative imagination the evolution of homo sapiens would have been stifled long ago. So the topic does have merit in Aurobindian studies of Culture and Evolution as he demonstrated in Future Poetry. But of course more fundamental to the worlds well being than even “active imagination” is the intensity and purity of the instrument of meditation “imaginito vera”, or the field, from which the creative movement emerges. Here again is a description of the intermediate worlds and the Earth of Hurqalya: ...

I think we all could also agree that one must be especially careful when translating and interpreting the categorical taxonomy and imaginative topography of different cultures, epochs and individual experiences. However, if I were to attempt to poet a translation which accounted not only for similarities, but also for ruptures between the Mazdean/Sufi discourse and that of Sri Aurobindo, it would certainly take account Sri Aurobindo’s view of spiritual evolution and I’d venture to say that the “evolutionary” chasm Sri Aurobindo and Mother crossed over was to make Flesh (on this terrestrial earth) “the Earth of Resurrection”.

Re: Post Human Variations by Richard Carlson Debashish Sun 28 Jan 2007 04:01 AM PST
RY, I was playing along here with the taxonomy of Corbin, which undoubtedly, has been developed with different goals, siddhis, in mind than those of the Integral Yoga, but we may see an overlap. In the passage I quoted, it is not the yogi-poet's "imagino vera" but that of Savitri in her psychic journey that I am referring to. And the imaging power here described (as also in Crobin, I believe) is a perception or truth-seeing, not an imagination in the mental sense. DB