Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Absurdities, ironies, tragedies, and cruelties

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Part 1: Sri Aurobindo's study of Vedic texts reveals a profound psychological and spiritual framework that challenges Western interpretations. This scholarly article by @pingaligopal critically examines the contrasting views of #SriAurobindo and Western Indology, emphasizing the depth of Vedic symbolism beyond mere ritualism and its connection to cosmic principles and human consciousness.

#Aurobindo_Indology #TheSecretOfTheVeda #Indology @IndicaOrg

indica.today/long-reads/par


Divine Secrets for the Blessed Life - Ashutosh Kumar
The Journey Towards Greatness : Learning From the Lives of Legends - Ashutosh Kumar 
The Friendless God - S. Anuradha

Foundations of Tilak's Nationalism: Discrimination, Education & Hindutva by Parimala V. Rao (Jun 1, 2010) amazon.com/gp/product/812… via @amazon

https://x.com/SavitriEra/status/417696909814296576?t=QnLLZ7uzZVLf2K2shxmWVg&s=19

Among a crisis in the humanities, scholars debate whether literary theory is avant-garde or lyric. But why choose? 
To them, literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.
If faith in something as abstruse as literary theory seems absurd, consider a more familiar vehicle of human knowledge: the novel. As a form, “the novel” has the capacity to operate in two registers simultaneously, representing both the enormous breadth of the social world and the intricate minutiae of the individual life. There is no reason why theory, taken collectively, cannot or should not do the same, providing us with the language to describe the abstract operations of cultural systems and the concrete foundations of everyday experience. Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.
https://x.com/aldaily/status/1833174780087799897?t=gw7541wELGxwWRCGFfD1oA&s=19

“Beauty, in the modern sense, has been reduced to the image of it rather than also embracing the process of it. For in doing the latter, we see beauty as something much more than a vanity.”

Some thoughts about beauty as a process on @Rasajournal here.

rasajournal.substack.com/p/a-thing-of-b

https://x.com/gar_i_ma/status/1832678250729918576?t=hONdnD3Q5CHdp8pBf4iqxg&s=19

Western intellectuals for decades have had access to teachings of the great gurus of India like Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Yogananda, Vivekananda. Yet still adulate Marx and Freud who had no idea of any higher consciousness beyond the body or reality beyond the material world.

https://x.com/davidfrawleyved/status/1833373477954257070?t=2i5V_LIV7DT8f1RD2dKX_w&s=19

I found that western scholars typically undermine spiritual ideas and categorize them as pseudoscience. I believe this reflects the human mind’s tendency to cling onto material things that it can easily perceive. 

Exploring the realms of consciousness requires humility and a willingness to surrender the ego. This won’t happen anytime soon because academia today is purely about reputation. If anyone even dares to speak about formless consciousness they are frowned upon and quickly blacklisted by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, this even applies to brahmin Hindu professors from reputed universities. Their cowardice might spell doom for the entire civilisation.

https://x.com/the_chakra_guy/status/1833379899932840020?t=Gn_NwuyQ8XrlL5nXTSQxrQ&s=19

In ‘Long Island’, the sequel to his novel ‘Brooklyn’, Colm Tóibín weaves together desire, compulsion and motivation

https://x.com/Mint_Lounge/status/1833156613890347220?t=0SM32ebhCyzTevD0m-q4_A&s=19

Once Upon a Forest - Documentary Film - Auroville Botanical Gardens youtu.be/d8e4u3joO0k?si… via @YouTube

https://x.com/AZShado/status/1832909731205456378?t=t04IlQbETbnPB1Vhr2x-Og&s=19

"Walking is the ultimate in slow travel, and therefore in immersive travel. With books about walking, you really feel like you are traveling in the company of that person, you are with them every step of the way." The Best Hiking Memoirs
Western-Islamic and Native AmericanGenealogies of Integral Education
Gary P. Hampson

Through the power of its music, through the dialectic of its juxtapositions, through the pressure of its metaphors, through the variety of its registers the [new] poetry comes to enunciate its meanings.—Abbs, 2003, p. 108

Introduction
What apt meanings or identifications can be given to integral education?1 To address this question one might imagine a dimension of semantic possibilities ranging from the contracted to the expansive. The former might involve (i) restriction to integrative notions arising from the lineage of one author such as Aurobindo or Wilber; (ii) restriction to explicit usage of the term integral itself—thus for instance including Bakunin, Maritain (Molz & Hampson, current volume), Soloviev, Sorokin and Kremer (1996) but excluding pre-1997 Wilber and various holistic educators and; or (iii) restriction to a default, loosely pragmatic, cluster of ideas where identification might be made more in relation to, say, the signifier holistic than anarchist, Catholic, or indigenous. Such contracted interpretations could be understood as pertaining to a modern worldview which de facto moves toward prosaic, instrumental closure of the literal and/or conventional (regardless of discursive use of such terms as “integral” or “postconventional”)2—an economical perspective (in deference at least to Occam’s razor) on what could potentially be usefully true or appropriate. Such interpretations no doubt have validity for certain contexts. However, given the heterogeneity of both the use of the term and also that potentially signified by such uses, explorations involving more expansive accounts would appear to be in order.

Published by SUNY Press 2010
Elements of the Underacknowledged History of Integral Education
From the book Integral Education
Markus Molz and Gary P. Hampson

Elements of the Underacknowledged History of Integral Education Markus Molz and Gary P. Hampson Introduction This chapter seeks to facilitate adequate breadth and depth in integral education theorizing through identifying hitherto underacknowledged yet pertinent historical streams (focusing on mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) which have explicitly embraced the term integral education. Emphasising leading protagonists, prioritization will be given to socialist and Catholic integral education streams, with additional mention of the (perhaps more familiar) Aurobindean and Gebserian threads.
These—along with other integral approaches such as those in relation to Steiner (Gidley, 2007; current volume) and Sorokin (Jeffries, 1999; Snauwaert, 1990)—may fittingly be viewed as part of an ecology of (variously overlapping and particularised) integral education streams potentially in “deep dialogue” with each other. Such identification can form part of a yet larger picture including an extensive global history of integral education incorporating the contemporary situation.
Socialist Integral Education
Early use of the term integral education can be found in the approaches of a few French and Russian socialists. Charles Fourier (1772–1837), Victor Considérant (1808–93), Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817–88)
Fourier, a founder of the socialist movement, had developed a system of harmonic education by 1829. Attendant to gender equality, inter-individual and social differences, 

The Complete Yoga
The Lineage of Integral Education
Jim Ryan
The word “integral” has entered the vocabulary of higher education. It has no single defi nition, admitting of a myriad of meanings and understandings in practice. But many in the West respond to the word nearly instinctively, as if it provides a resonance of possibility that is lacking in contemporary experience, not only in the educational realm. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the meaning of the word Integral as it is infl ected in the Integral Philosophy and Integral Yoga of Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri, who drew his central insights from the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo and from the ideas of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa (referred to as The Mother. Also referenced as M. Richards.) (I term these three and their followers as “Integralists.”) Taking Chaudhuri’s notion of Integral for this discussion on education is by no means arbitrary. Chaudhuri founded the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 1968, a graduate school, which was dedicated to the ideal of providing an integral education in the West.1
The word, Integral, in the tradition of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother is a term that comes from the Sanskrit word purna, which means complete. When Sri Aurobindo examined many of the ancient yogas of India, he found that each focused on a particular aspect of the human being. One yoga might focus on the physical body (hatha yoga), one might focus on the emotional (bhakti yoga), one might focus on a factor of knowledge (jnana yoga), or one might focus on action (karma yoga.) Sri Aurobindo, acknowledging and affi rming the positive elements of these many yogas, endeavored to develop and practice an “Integral Yoga,” a “Complete Yoga,” that would serve the complete human being.I will not dwell here on certain of the basic and unique philosophical assump-tions that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother made. I will touch on them only later, in order to put them in proper context. For now let me summarize the notion  

[The Complete Yoga - The Lineage of Integral Education - Jim  Ryan - Sri  Aurobindo, acknowledging and affirming the positive elements of these many yogas, endeavored to develop and practice an "Integral Yoga," a "Complete Yoga," that would serve the complete human being.]

A century later, Kafka still haunts our imagination, immortalised in the word “Kafkaesque", liberally invoked across cultures and languages to describe the systemic absurdities, ironies, tragedies and cruelties that plague the human condition. Kafka’s writing continues to inspire a burgeoning ecosystem of films, books and artwork, bolstering a bustling tourism industry in Prague, the city of his birth.

Kafka’s literary genius is, no doubt, at the centre of his enduring global appeal. But there is also a certain je ne sais quoi about his mystique, an ineffable quality that “makes Kafka Kafka", as scholar Karolina Watroba writes in her recent book, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s sceptre casts a long shadow on Asian writers, including in India, where his novels have been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam, writes @somakghoshal

https://x.com/Mint_Lounge/status/1832664863937544520?t=5KiPTnt_1RNLixXGMw0IJA&s=19

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