Chikermane tears ‏

Tweets Gautam Chikermane ‏ @gchikermane Real issue: India - country of Gita, Vedas, Upanishadas - cannot tolerate truth or alternative points of view. Heehs is latest victim. 12:19 PM - 4 Apr 12 via web · Only security issue around Peter Heehs: religious fundamentalists organised a dharna, assaulted an Ashram Trustee and turned blame on Heehs. 12:17 PM - 4 Apr 12 via web · Religious fundamentalists all set to win: Chidambaram won’t allow US historian Peter Heehs to stay in India 12:15 PM - 4 Apr 12 via web ·

Zoom Indian Media ‏ @ZoomIndianMedia IE censors that "Peter Heehs" was ex-CABBIE, says SCHOLAR? Cric journo Guha certifies? PC interferes? http://is.gd/qoDNaJ HT @rupasubramanya 11:09 AM - 4 Apr 12 via TweetDeck - @gchikermane @monikahalan Can assertions by dubious make ex-CABBIE "Peter Heehs" a HISTORIAN/SCHOLAR? #scurrilous #propaganda

Violation of Visa Norms by PETER HEEHS from A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs by General Editor Background

1.    Peter Heehs, a US national who is a self-styled "scholar" and writer, published a book called The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, purporting to be a biography of Sri Aurobindo. By his own admission, Peter Heehs has no formal educational qualifications in any discipline, is a school dropout and was formerly a taxi driver in the USA. Heehs is no historian of any kind and came to India as an uneducated and unemployed youth seeking rehabilitation.

2.      In his offensive book titled The Lives of Sri Aurobindo Heehs has made elaborate and devious attempts to malign and defame the mahayogi, spiritual giant and freedom fighter Sri Aurobindo whose life-size statue stands in the parliament and who is a hero of India's freedom struggle at par with giants such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.

3. Heehs is a habitual and serial impersonator regularly indulging in academic fraudulence in order to hide his lack of credentials, and has declared to various publishers including Columbia Press in the USA that he is "one of the founders of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives". This is patently false. With other publishers, he has on other occasions declared himself as "curator", "director" and "director of historical research" of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives. All of these are false representations and amount to impersonation and academic fraudulence. […]

For the last twenty years and more, Peter Heehs has been conducting a personal business of authoring books and articles and receiving payments from their sales, which has nothing to do with the purpose for which he was granted his visa and is in flagrant violation of his visa conditions... Peter Heehs is not an income tax assessee in India and has evaded tax payments in India for all the income received both from within India and from abroad.

Graham Harman on Atheism Graham Harman recently posted about the tendency of atheist intellectuals to dismiss anyone with a theistic worldview:

“Disbelief in God was cutting-edge in the 1600′s and is still cutting edge at age 15. I’m not saying you should believe in God after those two landmarks; I’ll leave that up to you. I’m just saying, it seems a bit absurd to use the question of someone’s belief or disbelief in God as one of the chef pillars of your judgment about that person’s intellectual caliber.”

RECENT COMMENTS on Purpose in Living Systems

Matthew David Segall says: April 3, 2012 at 4:53 pm He consistently collapses a Whiteheadian reading of formal and final causes into the ID/Creationist reading. Its just sloppy. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I might be more allergic even to a panentheistic conception of the relation of God and the World if I lived in Texas surrounded by fundamentalists. But alas, I live in San Francisco surrounded by psychedelic shamans and new age Buddhists. Once in a while I run into an Episcopalian. I would really like to hear from the other SR/OOO thinkers on this issue. I can’t imagine Tim Morton, Graham Harman, or Iain Hamilton Grant being very sympathetic to his argument…

Scoping the Cosmic Competition from One Cʘsmos by Gagdad Bob

We are of course talking about Brendan Purcell's From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution, which, like our One Cosmos, attempts to pack the whole existentialida -- the whole cosmic drama -- into a combo-plate in the head of about 300 pages. It is the only other recent book of which I am aware that synthesizes everything from physics to anthropology to paleontology to biology to history to mysticism to theology to mind parasites into one convenient narrative -- but in a non-stupid manner, since anyone can do it the other way…

At the same time, we had some mutually exclusive influences, including some who are quite central to my approach, thus accounting for differences in sensibility and emphasis. For example, I don't expect that too many other people -- well, none actually -- will share my enthusiasm for W.R. Bion, Allan Schore, Robert Rosen, Valentin Tomberg, James Joyce, and Fritjhof Schuon, especially in combination.