SCIY's Purpose Statement

Vision: To consider emerging planetary science and culture in the context of the "Integral Yoga" of Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual colleague the Mother.

Mission: To explore trends within contemporary science and culture fostering the co-evolution of integral spirituality, scientific research and emerging planetary culture.

Goals: To encourage mutually respectful dialog among those who aspire to create a world of increasing truth, beauty and sustainable human unity.

Who we are: The founders and core group of SCIY are engaged in the study and practice of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga," a non-sectarian spiritual path toward realizing "a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity."* - Our aspiration for SCIY is to foster inclusive scientific, cultural and spiritual research that serves this realization. We invite those who share this aspiration to join us.

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* Quote from the Mother in her Charter for the Auroville universal township project being built near Pondicherry, India.
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"There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this:

'I invite you to the great adventure...' "

~ The Mother
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I have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to situate: films which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun with protagonists who are just as interested in character development as we are. While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997),  Vanilla Sky (2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman."

The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age" tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common usage is not entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated with Western Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. [1] Outside of non-modern folk tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition, nonhuman characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth.

In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces. The story remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent representation of the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural milieu (or, perhaps, the genre). ...   more »

Greens have brought much laughter to the world, but most of it has been at their expense. The British comedian, Marcus Brigstocke, says he struggles with this problem on a daily basis, more so since he increased his riffs on global warming in his routines following his 2007 Arctic voyage with Cape Farewell, an organisation that brings together artists and scientists to raise awareness of climate change. “It’s far and away the most difficult comedy subject IR 17;ve ever dealt with,” he says. “It’s tested me to the outer reaches of my ability as a writer.” Mr. Brigstocke is one of a small but growing number of comedians trying to wrestle some humour from climate change. Fellow British comic Rob Newman has been a committed environmental and political campaigner for many years. Recently he was at Hebden Bridge, northern England, doing stand-up at the town’s monthly Climate Chaos Kitchen on the subjects of peak oil and climate change…    more »

This is a good summary of the historical and current scenarios created by computer modeling. All but a few exceptional scenarios continue to show a horrific overshoot of the Earth's ecological carrying capacity and resulting collapse of human population and civilization as we know it. This analysis is by Ugo Bardi, a chemistry professor at the University of Firenze, Italy. ...   more »

A new Salman Rushdie novel is always a big event, filled with the anticipation and the expectation of the momentous. It seems that Rushdie knows this — or maybe the disappointment of the last three novels has forced him to face this reality. So what does he do? He weaves the magic of storytelling, the expectation of the listener, and the hopelessness of the artiste all into his tenth novel, and let it be declared at the outset: it is an enchantment. In the way that once you enter a hall of mirrors, you see a multiplicity of reflections, so can you see a multiplicity of alter egos that are the loci of The Enchantress of Florence. You see Rushdie as a prestidigitator, a nimble-fingered writer able to produce dizzying tricks with the stroke of his pen/keyboard, much like Mogor dell’Amore, a yellow-haired, lozenge-coated foreigner who turns up at Emperor Akbar’s court, with a story to tell, and whose own identity is the final twist of his story-within-a-story...   more »

This is Chapter 3 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first two chapters, go to:

Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis
Chapter 2: The End of Civilization

I hope you find this book as interesting and important as I have, ~ ronjon   more »

              Michel Foucault
In speaking of the disciple of the body especially, when the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault's: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault's archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves, as William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things". The future is a random other. For example, what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive, paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the discipling machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. rc..

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The first impression is of simple beauty: a tenor voice, cushioned by the ebb and flow of repeating cadences from the orchestra. The stage, enclosed in a curving wall of corrugated metal, evokes a prison: We will be trapped for hours in a world in which nothing happens. But as the music morphs from one pattern to another, the stage picture reveals new vignettes. Piles of wastepaper rise up rustling from the chorus as giant homunculi. A bird walks past on stilt legs. And the corrugated wall opens to admit the towering pale figures of giant puppets, doughy men gathering briefly, like monsters or magi, around the central figure of the singer before departing again as if they had never been, in an evening that moves forward like a dream. The Improbable theater company's production of Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night (11 April 2008), represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art…   more »

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation... And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. -- The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007 ...   more »

They say it was the mother of all cosmic explosions. The blast, which took place on June 30, 1908, in Tunguska, Siberia, also remains one of the greatest mysteries of the world. Russia is now organising an international conference in Moscow to mark the centenary of the explosion. The Siberian riddle has fascinated the world since an object entered the atmosphere over western China and whizzed north, leaving a 5,000 degree hot trail in the sky, to hit the banks of the Tunguska river. The explosion has exposed the fragility of mankind to a blitzkrieg from outer space. It has also led to a wide range of theories. A virtual search for an explanation in the company of scientists engaged in unraveling its mystique is revealing…    more »

...Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms
Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!
Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life
The great laws thou hast violated, moved,
Open at last on thee their marble eyes…   more »

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

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An ancient Greek tomb thought to have held the body of Alexander the Great's father is actually that of Alexander's half brother, researchers say. This may mean that some of the artifacts found in the tomb—including a helmet, shield, and silver "crown"—originally belonged to Alexander the Great himself. Alexander's half brother is thought to have claimed these royal trappings after Alexander's death. The tomb was one of three royal Macedonian burials excavated in 1977 by archaeologists working in the northern Greek village of Vergina...    more »

Available Today May 2nd 2008. "Here are details that are not only reliable but transparent in letting their sources speak. Throughout we hear the voices of Sri Aurobindo and his contemporaries. Peter Heehs has written the definitive biography and a superb introduction to the life and thought of Sri Aurobindo." — Stephen Phillips, professor of philosophy and Asian studies, University of Texas at Austin   more »

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is a subject that has fascinated Hawking very much and on and off he speculates its possibility in a vigorous way. In fact he holds such a possibility quite firmly, perhaps more as a matter of a scientist’s faith than anything based on observed or observable facts. In one of his lectures he says: “Meeting a more advanced civilisation, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t think they were better off for it.” But that will hardly be of any consequence when it comes to the procedural aspects of scientific observations and conclusions. ~ RYD   more »

After years of piling up debt and neglecting to save, Americans are reining in their free-spending ways -- which could signal a long road ahead... -- "We're at a watershed moment," said Jay P. Feldman, an economist with Credit Suisse in New York. "The era of consumers living beyond their incomes is at an end."

Most economists expect the gross domestic product for the first three months of the year to show that consumption inched upward a few tenths of a point, enough to keep the economy above the zero mark -- though barely. That pales next to the 2.5% and 3% leaps of recent years, and much of the rise will be the result of Americans' paying more, especially for food and gas, not buying more.

"This is going to usher in a period when consumption is going to be as weak as we've seen it in two decades," predicted Edward F. McKelvey, senior economist with Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. ...   more »

SCIY's page views totaled 1,986,013 hits through the end of April 2008.

We reached a new high of 36,102 Distinct Hosts Served (Distinct Readers) during the month of April 2008, a substantial 22% increase from March's previous record.

We had 158,669 total Page Views during the month of April 2008, a decrease of 8% from the record number of Page Views in March.

Our Bandwidth during April was 12,213 Total Megabytes Transferred, a slight decrease of 4% from the record Megabytes transferred in March.

These numbers indicate that our average Distinct Reader viewed slightly fewer pages during April than they did in March, possibly due to the longer average length of the articles posted during April. ...    more »

“That which has reached us from the discoveries of their clear thinking and the marvels of their inventions is the (game) of chess. The Indians have, in the construction of its cells, its double numbers, its symbols and secrets, reached the forefront of knowledge. They have extracted its mysteries from supernatural forces. While the game is being played and its pieces are being maneuvered, there appear the beauty of structure and the greatness of harmony. It demonstrates the manifestation of high intentions and noble deeds, as it provides various forms of warnings from enemies and points out ruses as well as ways to avoid dangers. And in this, there is considerable gain and useful profit.” …    more »

Albert Hofmann was a synthetic chemist with Sandoz Laboratories, now Novartis, in Switzerland when in 1943 he stumbled on the hallucinatory effects of LSD. After it became seen by Harvard's Timothy Leary and others in the '60s as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, and then as a major recreational drug, ...   more »

This is Chapter 2 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted "Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first chapter (including the Title Pages, Acknowledgements, Introduction & Table of Contents), go to Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have,

~ ronjon

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Je pense, donc je suis: I think, therefore I am—that is René Descartes. A Philosophy course introduces him as follows: "Modern Philosophy is the name traditionally used in Anglo-American philosophy departments to denote the period of philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) to Kant (1724-1804). A better description would be seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, or early modern philosophy, but that's the tradition. In our class we focus on seven philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Again, tradition tells us that the first three are 'Continental Rationalists' and the next three are 'British Empiricists,' but like all brief descriptions these are only partly accurate. Because the class is only one semester we can't do more than get a first taste of each philosopher. Even that requires a lot of thought (and reading)."

The present article by Asok Kumar Ray, retired Professor of Mathematics, Jadhavpur University, is from his recently published book Truth Nothing Else Than. It is apt that Prof Ray should combine in him the Cartesian qualities of a mathematician and a philosopher more felicitously integrated in the Aurobindonian vision and thought. ~ RYD ...   more »

...This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of "The Long Emergency" accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. We'd like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up -- what's wrong with that?

But there's an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We're on the edge of something. We're at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you're spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There's no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days? ...   more »

In 1879, when the British were ruling over India, Lt. Col. Martin of Agar Malva was leading the army in the war against Afghanistan. Col. Martin used to regularly send messages of his well-being to his wife. The war continued for long and Lady Martin stopped getting messages. She was very upset. Once riding on her horse, she passed by the temple of Baijnath Mahadev. She was attracted to the sound of Conch and Mantra. She went inside and came to know that the Brahmanas were worshipping Lord Shiva. They saw her sad face and asked her problem. She explained everything to them. They told her that Lord Shiva listens to the prayers of devotees and takes them out of difficult situations in no time. With the advice of the Brahmanas she started the Laghurudra Anushtthāna of the Mantra Om Namah Shivāya for 11 days. She prayed to Lord Shiva that if her husband reaches home safely, then she would get the temple renovated...   more »

This book seemed relevant to some of the recent discussions here... rc

The theory of evolution connects us to the natural world, explaining how and why we are a part of nature. The idea of progress, on the other hand, projects a destination. "If nature can supply wonderfully elegant solutions to the problem of survival by trying out test models derived solely by chance, then surely it's possible for us to find our way forward," write David Rothenberg and Wandee Pryor, setting the terms of the discussion. But is society going somewhere in particular? Is nature improving? The stories, poems, essays, and artwork in Writing the Future examine the concepts of evolution and progress through a variety of artistic and scientific lenses and speculate on how these ideas can help us appreciate our place in the world....   more »

Once the highest expression of Chinese culture, the Peking Opera is a dying art today. Efforts to revive it have met with a mixed response. The current decline in interest in the opera is attributed to the global phenomenon of a tension between the classical and the modern...   more »

The question of identity is a clear postmodernist concern, and critic Scott Bukatman has added that he believes the issue of human definition is clearly central to the work, and thus the ambiguity is crucial'(14). This view is similar to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He argues that Blade Runner' stages a confrontation with our own replicant-status', so it is only when we as humans realize that our notion of self is very much constructed by the world around us, that we can become a truly human subject' ...   more »

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night
All stood as if a world were doomed to die
And waited on the eternal silence' brink…
Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.
But still in its lone niche of templed strength
Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,
Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room
Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.
The Woman first affronted the Abyss
Daring to journey through the eternal Night.
Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge
Into the dread and hueless vacancy;
Immortal, unappalled her spirit faced
The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste…   more »

The Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Republican Party (funny how those two organizations seem to fit together) have succeeded in characterizing the Pastor Jeremiah Wright as the new American BoogeyMan. By managing to decontextualize a few sound bits from a sermon he gave after September 11, 2001, in a nutshell they have managed to label him, and by association Barak Obama, as the voice of [both] Black Hatred of White America and Islamic Terrorism. By comparisons some of Dr. Kings speeches which castigate the Union for its racial inequality, its genocide of American Indians, and enslavement of Africans may be a bit tamer.

In short, the political strategy pursued by Clinton and the Republicans is to have this man condemned by playing on the fears of White America and disrupt the message of hope and change of Obama (which one hopes not to be a cynical hope). Two disclosures, I certainly am not a fan of the Christian hell fire and damnation sermons, that go on in either the White of Black Churches. I do not have any illusions that an Obama presidency would be significantly different than previous democratic failures, but since he takes less blame for supporting the politics of empire over the past eight years, by default [he] gets my vote.

The alarming fact is that in the age of Utube and FOX News that someone can edit and pervert ones words to the extent that nothing remains of the larger historical context in which they are embedded, and cause almost a whole nation to fear and hate a new boogyman. This should be a concern of any nation which calls itself a democracy; the failure of history. Here is Rev. Wright from an interview on 4/25/08 with Bill Moyers: ...    more »

I've been reading Corbin for about 25 years now. After Sri Aurobindo's writing Corbin's has been the most significant to me in providing a cartography of the inner life; the world of soul making. James Hillman cites him -along with Carl Jung- as one of the fathers of Archetypal Psychology. I believe that his writing on Mundus Imaginalis, although they concern esoteric practices, are in need of a revival today, in an age when our encounters with imagination are increasingly as projected telemactic images. rc

What is that intermediate universe? It is the one we mentioned a little while ago as being called the "eighth climate." For all of our thinkers, in fact, the world of extension perceptible to the senses includes the seven climates of their traditional geography. But there is still another climate, represented by that world which, however, possesses extension and dimensions, forms and colors, without their being perceptible to the senses, as they are when they are properties of physical bodies. No, these dimensions, shapes, and colors are the proper object of imaginative perception or the "psycho- spiritual senses"; and that world, fully objective and real, where everything existing in the sensory world has its analogue, but not perceptible by the senses, is the world that is designated as the eighth climate. The term is sufficiently eloquent by itself, since it signifies a climate outside of climates, a place outside of place, outside of where (Na-koja-Abad!).

The technical term that designates it in Arabic, 'alam a mithal, can perhaps also be translated by mundus archetypus, ambiguity is avoided. For it is the same word that serves in Arabic to designate the Platonic Ideas (interpreted by Sohravardi terms of Zoroastrian angelology). However, when the term refers to Platonic Ideas, it is almost always accompanied by this precise qualification: mothol (plural of mithal) aflatuniya nuraniya, the "Platonic archetypes of light." When the term refers to the world of the eighth climate, it designates technically, on one hand, the Archetype-Images of individual and singular things; in this case, it relates to the eastern region of the eighth climate, the city of Jabalqa, where these images subsist preexistent to and ordered before the sensory world. But on the other hand, the term also relates to the western region, the city of Jabarsa, as being the world or interworld in which are found the Spirits after their presence in the natural terrestrial world and as a world in which subsist the forms of all works accomplished, the forms of our thoughts and our desires, of our presentiments and our behavior. It is this composition that constitutes 'alam al-mithal, the mundus imaginalis....   more »

In 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms. While all the flowers had both male and female parts — anthers and pistils — in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented in his home laboratory and greenhouses, cross-pollinating some plants with their anatomical opposites. The results were striking. “He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings,” said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution’s way of increasing cross-pollination, she said. Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin’s Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.” …   more »