Furtive vs. the five lives

Rumpus at the ashram telegraph 15 Apr 2012 – In his small flat not far from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, American writer Peter Heehs ... I wrote there was nothing furtive about these encounters.

Savitri Era Open Forum: Key source of confusion 13 Mar 2012 – A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs ... 18 May 2011 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they ... Cardinal Slur

A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs: 5 ... 1 May 2011 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ...

A critique of the book "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" by Peter Heehs ... - 18 May 2011 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ...

Romantic Relationship – page 326 | Lives of Sri Aurobindo – Errors - 5 Apr 2012 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ...

An examination of the criticism against The Lives of Sri Aurobindo ... Iyfundamentalism - There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of expressing their ... Distributed Extracts from The Lives of Sri Aurobindo - Page 10 20 April 2012: Yoga and philosophy of Sri Aurobindo is not a religion ... There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as ... A Discerning Tribute - Page 17 Iyfundamentalism - There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observers as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of expressing their ...

AUROBINDO UNDER SCANNER - thoughts.com Nnandhivarman 1 May 2010 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike the observer as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ... nnandhivarman - thoughts.com conversation engine

A Discerning Tribute anti-matters by Marcel Kvassay. Accounts of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual life often begin with his withdrawal from politics ...... she at once stood up. There was nothing furtive ...

Savitri Era: The touch that raised a storm - by Tusar N. Mohapatra - in 147 Google+ circles - More by Tusar N. Mohapatra 22 Apr 2009 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike observer as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ...

DEVOTEES KNOCK THE DOORS OF ATHEISTS scribd.com › Research › Literature 7 Apr 2010 – There was nothing furtive about these encounters, but they did strike the observer as unusual. Neither Mirra nor Aurobindo were in the habit of ...

Feminine Principle, the Earth, and the Becoming

Robert Wilkinson - robtw@sprynet.com - 11:58 PM, November 11, 2007 Dear Ned,

WIE is typical of an old patriarchal consciousness that evolved from the pressures of mind trying to exceed itself some 2500 years ago. The limitations inherent in the Mental consciousness when Buddha and others of that period made their discoveries could not admit of anything higher than a dissolution of the nexus of consciousness which held them in the world. Buddha called his experience of dissolution “Nirvana” - a state of pure Being, equanimity and peace. The Nirvanic realization, we are told, has the quality of an infinite Zero, or Emptiness without form that grants liberation from this so-called ‘illusory world of becoming’.
It is certainly no coincidence that Lao Tze, the Chinese sage who lived around the same time as Buddha expressed his ‘spiritual’ realization in much the same vein calling it, “The Nothing that is All.” We find this same language later on in the teachings of Shankara, founder of the Advaita Vedanta school, who described his realization as ‘Moksha’ or liberation, where one does not feel oneself any longer to be an individual with a name or form, but an infinite, eternal, space-less consciousness.
This drive toward Transcendence completely negated the Feminine Principle, the Earth and the Becoming. And for the last 2000 years we have suffered the consequences of that negation. Many who revere Sri Aurobindo, like Ken Wilber, make no distinction between his yoga and the old path of Transcendence. To them the Mother holds no special place of significance in the Supramental Descent. The Supramental Yoga is in fact very much like the Elusinian Mysteries. It is not until you understand and embrace the Feminine that you are qualified for the higher initiation.

Wilber and Aurobindo: A reply to Joe Perez, Alan Kazlev – integral world M. Alan Kazlev is a self-taught esotericist and metaphysician, science fiction writer ... His website is at kheper.net and he can be contacted at akazlev at bigpond dot com

In keeping with academic convention, I use surname as mode of address in this essay – e.g. “Wilber”, “Perez”. I make an exception with “Sri Aurobindo” because that is the name he requested to be addressed as (as opposed to just “Aurobindo”).

Wilber's interpretation of Sri Aurobindo here and elsewhere is deeply flawed, as Brant Cortright (Psychotherapy and Spirit: Theory and Practice in Transpersonal Psychotherapy, SUNY 1997, p78), Rod Hemsell ("Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo: A Critical Perspective") and I (“Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo” - and “An Aurobindonian vision”) have all shown.

There can be little doubt that the root of this problem lies with Wilber's own misunderstanding of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy. As Rod Hemsell has shown, this is apparent even in the earlier phases of his work (Atman Project – Wilber II). Wilber himself is certainly not to be blamed for this, as there is so much knowledge in the world today that it is simply not possible for one human being, no matter how intelligent or how competent a speed reader, to understand the whole world (see “Insufficient Study and Contemplation results in Superficial Understanding of Specialized Knowledge”). And to properly understand Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's Yoga requires tremendous sincerity and aspiration, not just a brief skim reading. The reading itself has to be a meditation, the pages returned to time after time. Just as with any authentic spiritual tradition.

Wilber's error here was then compounded through the memetic (sensu Dawkins) dispersal of his well-meaning misinterpretations, through his own work and that of others who have been influenced by him. As a result, more people are adopting a false version of what Sri Aurobindo taught and achieved. That he is, so Wilber informs us, a “theorist” (someone who spent forty years in intense practical yoga was a theorist?). That he ignores the “lower quadrants” (what about The Human Cycle, or his studies of Indian culture?). That his profound Synthesis of Yoga is just another version of Nondualism, and his Supramentalisation just another representation of the “Clear Light” (the last three chapters of The Life Divine and the entire Synthesis of Yoga says otherwise). To say nothing of the striking absence of any reference to Sri Aurobindo's co-worker, whom he advised all his own disciples to consider the physical incarnation of the Divine (hence Mirra's title “The Mother” - for more see Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Collected Works Vol.25, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram) by Wilber and his students.

from: Tusar N. Mohapatra tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com to:  debanjan nag debanjannag@gmail.com date: 26 June 2012 10:34 subject: Re: Revenge of Theosophy through Ken Wilbur

Wilber, by now it's clear, is setting up a cult and so he churns out new books but finds Sri Aurobindo's writings a stiff competition. With Theosophy he shares the common ancestry of Buddhism which is a known adversary of Sri Aurobindo's system of Yoga. Hence, nothing surprising in this war for supremacy. [TNM55]

Hume, Mendelssohn, and Meillassoux

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : Chennai today

Sri Aurobindo Society: Meeting, 5, Smith Rd., Anna Salai, 10.30 a.m.

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : Coimbatore today

Sri Aurobindo Devotees Prayer Centre: Prayer, Sasi Balika Vidya mandir, R.S. Puram, 9.30 a.m.; Annai Meditation Centre, Kovaipudur, 4 p.m.

Steered By Cells And Molecules - Science Of Spirituality Article - Speakingtree.in India's first Spiritual Networking Website By: Mukul Sharma on Jun 29, 2012 14 Responses Are we automated by constituents of the body rather than by free will and identity, asks MUKUL SHARMA.

Interestingly, two psychologists from Santa Barbara, tested the hypothesis using a couple of ingenious experiments to see if changing people’s sense of responsibility would change their behaviour…

Although the experimenters warned against generalising from their results, the findings do raise the genuine concern that widespread encouragement of a deterministic (read soulless) worldview may have the inadvertent consequence of encouraging immoral behaviour. The concerned participants did cheat and steal when they thought no one would know or there was no chance of getting caught, whereas the control group didn’t, in spite of the test situation being the same. Did they feel they were answerable to some internal core of control? Who knows? But if ever science does discover that it’s a totally deterministic universe with no free-will, we’d probably have to invent a fictive one for society to function optimally.

The Affective Life of Philosophy from Larval Subjects (Levi Bryant) Jun 30, 2012 

Whitehead is another thinker that comes to mind as being pervaded by these sorts of affective volumes. There is a delight here, a love of the world.

There are other philosophies that seem populated by a delight taken in organizing and whittling things down to their precise essence, like the sort of jouissance the bureaucrat draws from a well organized filing system. The bureaucrat, of course, has a purpose for filing things in this way. Yet it is difficult to escape the impression that he enjoys his filing system and forms for their own sake; that the organization is an end in itself. Here we might think of Hegel in the Science of Logic, or Husserl’s endless distinctions, Brandom’s endless distinctions in Making it Explicit, or Sellars. We might also think of certain moments in high scholasticism.

“has somehow chosen the excerpts maliciously” from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) Jul 1, 2012

But Meillassoux’s effect on continental philosophy has been precious, and he was able to pull it off initially with just one short but sublimely engineered book… Meillassoux is generally a perfectionist who doesn’t like releasing works to the public unless they are in ultra-fine condition. Levi Bryant insightfully compared Meillassoux to a “gem cutter.”

On Derrida's critique of Agamben - An und für sich

Agamben reads the Western tradition as a series of increasingly destructive failed attempts to separate them out in some kind of stable and sustainable way. Read more

A Treatise of Human Nature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia by Scottish philosopher David Hume  (1711 – 1776), first published in 1739–1740.

Hume himself described the (lack of) public reaction to the publication of the Treatise by writing that the book "fell dead-born from the press."^[1] Hume intended to see whether the Treatise met with success and, if so, to complete it with books devoted to morals, politics, and criticism.^[2] It did not meet with success, and so was not completed.

After deciding that the Treatise had problems of style rather than of content, he reworked some of the material for more popular consumption in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). It did not prove extremely successful either, but was somewhat more so than the Treatise. He later also "cast anew" Book 3 of the Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), which Hume wrote is "of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best."^[3] The Treatise is now in the public domain. Books 1 and 2 were originally published in 1739, while Book 3 was published in 1740.^[4] 

Moses Mendelssohn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1729 – 1786) was a German Jewishphilosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah (the 'Jewish enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) is indebted. 

Ever since his friend Lessing had died, he had wanted to write an essay or a book about his character. When Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, an acquaintance of both men, heard of Mendelssohn's project, he stated that he had confidential information about Lessing being a "Spinozist", which, in these years, was regarded as being more or less synonymous with "atheist"—something which Lessing was accused of being anyway by religious circles.^[15] This led to an exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn which showed they had hardly any common ground. 

Sabda - Sri Aurobindo Ashram Nov 2003 .pdf 

Sri Nolini Kanta Gupta has given us all a subtle body of literature bound to widely extend into the frontal consciousness.  What he said of Vivekananda’s words (which woke his courage up in Alipore) is true of his own: “These are luminous life-giving mantras and the world and humanity…have need of them.” One-volume editions include Lights from Nolini Kanta Gupta (highlights taken from individual essays) and Evolution and the Earthly Destiny (selected essays).  Education and Initiation, translated from the Bengali, more timely than ever, has now been released. His eight-volume Collected Works continue to grow in relevance and merit more detailed scholarly study.  Surprisingly, the eight volumes are as affordable as they are full of delights and unexpected turns.

Or one may prefer to read his translation of Savitri into Bengali.  The shining Arjuna of spiritual aspirants has left us a portion of the new creation, full of the force of yoga and packed with the light of Sri Aurobindo.

— Rick Lipschutz discovered the Integral Yoga after exploring other paths and has been a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother since 1997.  A member of the Cultural Integral Fellowship who attends retreats at Sri Aurobindo Sadhana Peetham in Lodi, he lives with his wife and son in San Francisco, USA.