January 10, 2013

Entropy & evolution, resistance & purification

I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is the super-epic, it is super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines he has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperbolas to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is; at least I do not find them. It is of immense value—spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in the subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come in contact with this, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is most beautiful thing he has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be known.

Mother's Agenda - Sri Aurobindo Ashram Home E-Library Works Of The Mother Agenda Volume-05 1964-03-11
Sri Aurobindo has told us (c'est lui-même qui l'a dit) and we are convinced by experience that above the mind there is a consciousness much wiser than the mental wisdom, and in the depths of things there is a will much more powerful than the human will.
All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action and organise all our activities. It is the way in which the Ashram has been created. Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created not by any artificial planning but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. The present difficulties come chiefly from psychological resistances in the disciples who have not been able to follow the rather rapid pace of the sadhana and the yielding to the intrusion of mental methods which have corrupted the initial working.
A growth and purification of the consciousness is the only remedy. Page 85

Latour’s _Reassembling the Social_ is indispensable reading on this. His thesis is that these big terms do more to *obscure* than explain... As Laruelle might argue, the problem with these big master-signifiers (society, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, environment) is that they seem to be saying something without really saying anything… “Society” explains nothing, but is what we’re supposed to explain.  Of course, much of this goes unexplored in the humanities and social sciences because the concept of entropy is completely absent from their thought and there is almost no concept of work or energy at work in these theoretical frameworks.  There are either concepts or brute material things, but no work to maintain them.  No, the only agency is ideas.  This is why Marx had to turn Hegel on his head– he understood fatigue –but us academics all forgot that. We forgot that everything is perpetually disintegrating, subject to entropy, precisely because things require energy and work.  Who among us has written about fatigue save some spare pages in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition that no one ever notices? … Yet if we bothered to actually trace networks and get out of our master-signifiers, we would discover that there are sites of resistance that we never before imagined because we bothered to trace the network.  

The Steubenville rape case along with the horrific gang rape in India has brought sexual violence to the media’s attention… I suspect that the astonishing behavior of these men is indicative of a culture that normalizes sexual violence… What I also find is disgusting is how quick the media is to pathologize all of Indian culture after that horrible gang-rape while failing to raise fundamental questions about misogyny, childhood abuse, domestic violence and sexual violence that continues to terrorize women in this country.  

Among the most sought-after schools in Delhi, The Mother's International School, Sri Aurobindo Marg, has come up with a baffling criterion for nursery admission -- parents of the applicant should own a house in the city… A professor at IIT-Delhi, which is right across the road, for example, will not be able to get her child admitted in the school even if she is an alumna of the school.

The Mother had once called the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry a veritable ... About Sri Aurobindo Among the leading lights of India's resurgence the ...


Sri Aurobindo Reader - Page 113 - Makarand Paranjape - Preview It is this energy of the individual which is the really effective agent of collective progress. The State sometimes comes in to aid it and then, if its aid does not mean undue control, it serves a positively useful end. As often it stands in the way and ...
Philosophy Of Education - Page 222 - S.S. ChandraS.S. Chandra & Rajendra Kumar Sharma - 2006 - Preview - Compatibility and not uniformity is the law of collective harmony. The roles of the male and female, the different types of individuals in a community are not identical but diverse and therefore complementary. Thus Sri Aurobindo proposes an ...
The Aims Of Education - Page 248 - Promila Sharma - Preview - One seeks a collective reorganization, something that would lead towards an effective unity of mankind: the other declares ... It is in answer to this pressing need that Sri Aurobindo conceived the scheme of his International Center of Education,...
Education In Emerging Indian Society - Page 340 - Y.K. Singh - Preview - Explaining this ideal of Sri Aurobindo's scheme, The Mother said, "For all world organisation, to be real and to be able to live, must ... It is only in me collective order and organisation, in a collaboration based upon mutual goodwill that lays the...
Sri Aurobindo and Karl Marx: Integral Sociology and Dialectical ... - Page 101 - Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya - 1988 - Preview The main point of Sri Aurobindo's argument seems to me very important. And it is this. We cannot decide a priori the ideal type of the collective life, unless we are clear about the true character and purpose of the individual human life. Man is ...
The Lives of Sri Aurobindo - Page 289 - Peter Heehs - 2008 - Preview - The problem with this is that “it is this energy ofthe individual which is the really effective agent of collective progress.” If the individual is suppressed, society suffers. Therefore, Aurobindo concluded, the “healthy unity of mankind” cannot be... 
Inspiration Divine: Your Purpose and Path to Health, Happiness and ... - Page 147 - Darwin Stephenson - 2009 - Full view Sri Aurobindo described collective consciousness (he called it Infinite Consciousness) as creating the Universe to extend its own static delight into the dynamic delight experienced by "forms of force" (e.g. human beings). Sri Aurobindo ...
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: Glimpses of Their Experiments, ... - Page 77 - Kireet Joshi - 1989 - Preview - One of the first questions that was raised when Mother met Sri Aurobindo was whether they should do the yoga and go right to the end without involving ... But the aim of yoga was not individual salvation; the aim was collective, even cosmic.
Perspectives On Sri Aurobindos Poetry Plays & Crit. - Page 107 - Amrita Paresh Patel, Jaydipsinh Dodiya - 2002 - Full view - Meenakshi Bana, in her recently published book, Symbolism in Sri Aurobindo'splays, hopes : " Perhaps, his plays will receive ... Sri Aurobindo's life-long aspiration to realise consciously evolving collective human existence on earth is found ...
Foundations of Indian Psychology Volume 1: Theories and Concepts - Page 197 - Cornelissen R. M. Matthijs - 2011 - Preview But most important in the present context are the insights provided by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, for attaining individual and collective transformation, leading to a lasting human unity and global peace. Guided by their vision, I continue to ...
Sri Aurobindo's ideal of human life - Page 113 - M. Rafique - 1987 - The development of this collective being and the individual is very closely related with each other. The more conscious the individual is, the more conscious is the collective being. The growth of the individual, according to Sri Aurobindo, is very...
Sri Aurobindo and Iqbal: a comparative study of their philosophy - Page 182 - M. Rafique - 1974 - There is yet another view-point from which Sri Aurobindo justifies the need of the society. During the course of evolution, according to him, as there come into existence different individualised beings, so also there are also born "Collective ...
Understanding Med. Physiology - Page 876 - Bijlani - 2004 - Preview - ... with asceticism. Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have made powerful pleas in the recent past for correcting ... The collective effort would facilitate the elevation of the level of consciousness of the human race. This point would ...
Critical Companion to George Orwell - Page 55 - Edward Quinn - 2009 - Preview - ... their highest spiritual development, while they worked toward collective “unification.” When in 1956 the Mother finally experienced the “Supramental manifestation on earth,” which Sri Aurobindo and she had anticipated, she understood that ... Encyclopedia of Hinduism - Page 55 - Constance JonesJames D. Ryan - 2007 - Preview 
Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays - Thomas Lombardo - 2011 - Preview - The ideas of evolution and progress can even take a spiritual form, such as in the writings of the Hindu philosopher and Yoga master, Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo weaves together evolution with Hinduism in a holistic system, rejecting both the ...
The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of ... - Page 372 - Pitirim A. Sorokin - 2002 - Preview - Its objective is not only and not so much a transcendental liberation of the individual, as it is the divinization of the whole embodied life and the collective liberation of mankind. The Purna Yoga strives ... called metaphorically by Sri Aurobindo.
Neoplatonism & Indian Philosophy - Page 157 - Paulos Mar Grēgorios - 2002 - Preview - Sri Aurobindo on the contrary is intensely interested in the future society as is evident from his book The Human Cycle. He has ... His idea of the plan of the Divine in the collective, i.e. in society and in humanity is expounded in the two works ...
Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation - Page xv - G. N. Devy - 2002 - Preview - Sri Aurobindo represents the most idealistic in Indian Romanticism. Tagore stands as a colossus among modern Indian writers. ... in however modest a measure, to curing our collective cultural amnesia. June 1993 G.N. Devy When I typed the ...
Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology - Page 546 - The Louis P PojmanMichael Cannon Rea - 2008 - Preview - Zaehner looks to the integration of the personal and collective; Kant holds that true religiosity is identical ... Sri Aurobindo sees the world religious process converging on Mother India rather than the Cosmic Christ, and Sir Muhammad Iqbal ...
Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion - Page 188 - Hugh B. Urban - 2003 - Preview - ... developed a highly original interpretation of Tantric yoga that aimed at collective liberation for all humankind. Born to a Brahman ... Gopinath was a regular reader of Sri Aurobindo's Vande Mataram and engaged in political discussions.

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