February 10, 2013

Sri Aurobindo has lived to the meaning of his name

The Hindu : NATIONAL TAMIL NADU : Madurai today Aurobindo Society: Study circle meeting on ‘The Mother of Sri Aurobindo’ No. 3 Lajpat Rai Road, Chinna Chokkikulam, 10.30 a.m.
The Hindu : NATIONAL  TAMIL NADU : Coimbatore today Sri Aurobindo Devotees Trust: Prayers to Sri Annai, Sasi Balika Vidya Mandir, Azad Road, R.S. Puram, 9.30 a.m.; Sri Annai Meditation Centre, W7C, Kovaipudur, 4 p.m. Sri Annnai Ashrama: Prayers to Sri Annai, Sri Annai Ashram, Narayana Guru road, Saibaba Colony, 10.30 a.m.
Is art for art’s sake? The question that occupied the minds of thinkers, artists and writers for centuries was raised again at the 79th All India Kannada Sahitya Sammelan by Ko. Channabasappa in Bijapur on Saturday…
Dr. Chennabasappa quoted from Ashoka’s edicts to highlight the need for religious tolerance. Narrow-minded belief and appreciation of one’s own faith would lead to pitfalls. Assault on Buddhism had left an everlasting scar on India’s cultural history. The killings of Godhra had brought us global notoriety. We should ensure that such acts did not recur. Dr. Chennabasappa spoke about his upbringing and his evolution as a writer. He dismissed the view that “creativity is a flash of inspiration from heaven” and said it was the result of long years of hard work. The writer quoted from personalities who influenced him such as Pampa, Harihara, Raghavanka, Basavanna, Sri Aurobindo, Bendre, Kuvempu, Purandara Dasa, Nijaguna Shovayogi, and Dr. Ambedkar.

No harm in having a simplified version of Sanskrit - The Shillong Times FEBRUARY 10TH, 2013 By Our Reporter SHILLONG: 
Scholars, Indian and Foreign, from Pondicherry and other parts of the country who are well versed in the role of Sanskrit in the growth of Indic Civilization and culture and also the uniqueness of Sanskrit as a language in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s works were part of the first ever national seminar on “interrelation between Sanskrit and Indian culture with special reference to Sri Aurobindo” organized by Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan (RSS), New Delhi and the city based Sri Aurobindo Institute of Indian Culture (SAIIC) at its auditorium on Saturday…
Registrar of RSS, Prof KB Subbarayudu said that Sri Aurobindo has lived to the meaning of his name, that is, Lotus – which never gets polluted by the surroundings around. “He lived in UK for 14 years but was not influenced by westernization,” he said while drawing comparison with the modern civilization, who finds India dirty, its streets and roads and only wishes to return to the west…
Former Home Minister, RG Lyngdoh emphasized on the need to look back to Sanskrit as a language and continue to thrive on the spirit since Sanskrit is the mother of so many languages. He also spoke about the efforts of Sri Aurobindo, who wanted to see Sanskrit become the national language for its unifying pull. 

There is a story stemming from the Greek tradition which illustrates the role of man in physical nature–The story of Prometheus. The name itself stems from Greek roots that mean “forethinker”. The story goes that the Gods were withholding the power of fire from humanity. The allusion however widens to represent powers of understanding, progress and mastery over the forces of physical nature that enter into the world with the advent of human-embodied powers of creativity and originality and the corresponding application of the powers of mind and will to manifest what was formerly latent in Nature, in most cases against intense opposition (in the original story Zeus, king of the Gods opposed the action of Prometheus and penalized him with constant and ever-recurring pain and anguish). Zeus also created Pandora and gave her the famous “Pandora’s box” in retribution for the action of Prometheus. The symbolism of Pandora’s box represents all the “unintended consequences” that arise from the forward seeking mind of humanity attempting to understand, master and develop beyond the limits of physical nature.
This story illustrates the struggle of man to escape the control of the forces of Nature... The seeking for a moral law in the world is an attempt to understand a higher order or organization than the purely non-moral physical forces clashing and building. The manifestation of life, and later of mind, upsets the established order of action of the purely physical forces of Nature, and seeks to bring about a new and higher order based on the increased complexity of this new, higher expression of consciousness in the world.
The story of Prometheus is an allusion that has gripped the mind of man for ages, from the time of Aeschylus and his play “Prometheus Bound”, to the time of Shelley and his poem “Prometheus Unbound”. We see around us the tremendous development of new powers as we explore every aspect of physical Nature, and we see at the same time the enormous unintended consequences and both individual and collective suffering entailed in exceeding the original limitations placed upon us. We see here that Prometheus, the forethinker, represents the evolutionary process to bring about the expansion of consciousness in the world.

As natural selection is blind and may operate in other contexts with other males which have, or evolve, other rival advantages in their other characteristics, some of which may also be advantageously beneficial to rivals, it does not follow that the size characteristic alone, or any other specific characteristics evolving among individuals by natural selection, will ‘take over’ that group or the whole species of reindeers.  Natural selection is not tidy.   It operates naturally and over long time periods…
Over the many millennia of pre-history and history, societies have come and gone, their detritus scattered across (and usually under) the landscape.  There is no ever “upward” tidy progression of human societies in a straight-line.  Blind Natural Selection among humans is not like that.   There is no “invisible hand” that “winnows” the behaviours that do not work to make way for those that do.  I shall say nothing on this occasion about the myths of the “invisible hand” as ascribed wrongly to Adam Smith (scroll through my many posts of the IH metaphor to see my arguemnts).
Human behaviour that “works” is not an uncontroversial subject.  Certainly, since the re-emergence of commercial society from the 15th century in north-western parts of Europe and its associated Enlightenment in ideas, of which Adam Smith played his part with the rest of his colleagues in the Edinburgh of his day, some tentative steps have taken place – again from individuals, or mall teams, to the group, not the other way round. 
Like the wind, an individual’s motives are not seen by others, but the consequences of their buy-sell decisions are felt across the ever sensitive prices that their motives may occasion.  Those who supply goods and services in markets in supply or demand chains do not need to know the motives of everybody else whom they transact with.  Apart from any other issue, motives across a population vary and often conflict. Entrepreneurs who get their prices right more often than they get them wrong make profits, those who don’t make losses.
Of course there is a role for governments in market economies in the effectiveness of the State’s justice system that sets the rules for the conduct of producers and the rights of their employees, and the rights of consumers. Laws and regulations are inevitable in any well functioning market system. 

Do philosophers ever know what they want? What drives a philosopher? What makes them undertake an ordeal? Or is it simply that the ordeal comes to them, prior to their identity as philosopher, that the ordeal is simply human or creatural? I’ve already expressed my admiration for Joshua Ramey’s The Hermetic Deleuze, but it is the attempt in this book to connect up the philosophical task with a simple creatural ordeal I find most laudatory about the text. It’s combination of the personal with the scholarly, sacrificing neither for the sake of the other…
But the reflective moment that follows that lived moment, the act of asking ourselves “what is it that we’ve been doing with our lives?”, a moment that doesn’t always come so late, is separate from the act of doing philosophy and yet is the philosophical act par excellence. In a way this is the challenge that hermeticism presents to philosophy, as Joshua presents it, for hermeticism is lived, it is practiced, it involves flesh and the manipulation of nature. These active forces within religion are in motion, they move forward, often blocked, often pointless, but they move. Philosophy so often becomes moribund, even McDowell sees that in his theory of philosophy’s purely therapeutic value. Yet, the danger with religion is the same danger with all those aspects of our human experience that lie outside of the rational. 

We must accept the many-sidedness of the manifestation while asserting the unity of the manifested. The Divine in this world becomes the subconscious, conscious and superconscious. The subconscious is not aware of the oneness, the conscient can become aware of the oneness, the oneness with the universal and the oneness with the Transcendent. The point at which the ego becomes aware of the Oneness is the turning point where the Divine become manifested in the Many. The perception of unity is not only with the Transcendent but also with other points in the Multiplicity. Therefore when One becomes liberated, this becomes contagious and cannot stop until everyone is liberated. Was this what Buddha was referring to when he said: never to make the irrevocable crossing so long as there was a single being upon earth undelivered from the knot of the suffering, from the bondage of the ego?
Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. While God combines and synthesises, why should we not do the same?
Through the Multiplicity we have to attain to the Unity and then express that Unity again in the Multiplicity. We invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in humanity.

From SELF-Shelf

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