Debashish Banerji conducts Skype-based online studies on Sri Aurobindo's opus "The Life Divine" every Wednesday from 7:30-9:30 PST. The audio recordings are archived. You can listen to recordings of these classes here on this page or the most updated versions in their archived location at:
Life Divine studies via Skype, by Debashish Banerji, Ph.D.

To join the Skype conference, please send your Skype Id to Debashish at debbanerji@yahoo.com

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Notes:

1) These online classes began on March 22, 2007. To hear the early classes, go here, then scroll to the bottom of the page.

2) Click on the more » link below each Hipcast.com icon to see the beginning and end of each LD quote being discussed, and a link to an online version of the text graciously provided by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

This article attempts to sketch out Sri Aurobindo's contribution to the future of humanity as carried in his major texts. In doing so, it also tries to underline the cross-cultural nature of these texts and the disciplinary redefinitions implicit in them.   more »

When this conference was formulated, in the mind of Richard Carlson, he had certain pressing objectives in mind. And we started an email forum to discuss some of these; and at this conference it is hoped that some of these objectives, issues, debates will come to surface in the minds of all the people here, and we take back with us something that fertilizes our lives and our sadhana, our yoga, our engagement with the world, our orientation towards the future.    more »

I've taken the liberty of re-posting here all of the comments ("Replies") to Debashish's earlier posting: "Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY By Debashish Banerji." -- My reasons:

1) The set of responses in this thread was getting so large that we were starting to experience some oddities in BlogHarbor's reply functions.
2) I was concerned that we could delete the entire thread due to some technical or human error, thus losing this fascinating & important discussion.
3) By posting all of the comments as this article, we can go back in and re-format them if we wish; e.g., correcting typos & adding italics for quoted passages.

PLEASE CONTINUE OUR REPLIES ON THIS TOPIC HERE, IN THIS ARTICLE, NOT IN THE PREVIOUSLY POSTED ONE.

Thanks,
~ ron   more »

In these last chapters of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo draws together the threads that he has introduced earlier in the work, leading to his conclusion. Though Jan Smuts was yet to coin the word "Holism" to encapsulate the idea that a directed tendency towards the formation of ever-larger aggregates is observable in Nature, each such distinct stage marked by the presence of an identity and properties exceeding those of the sum of their parts, Sri Aurobindo's model of History follows this course. Indeed, this teleology follows naturally from Sri Aurobindo's master-idea of the progressive manifestation of intrinsic spiritual Oneness in Time, expressing itself politically as the drive towards world-union.    more »

Detachment in a spiritual sense is the development of another dimension within us, a dimension which coexists with our active personality but is outside of it. It is to find an inner freedom, to discover a part of the being that cannot be touched by external circumstances or by the outer being’s activities – a separation within between what we know as ourselves in the world and something which is intrinsic and connected to an infinite being, a sort of an immutable witnessing.   more »

This topic includes past & ongoing audio recordings of "Savitri" classes led by Debashish Banerji, at the Los Angeles Sri Aurobindo Center. They're also available as podcasts on Apple's iTunes site. Read the rest of this article for instructions ...   more »

A transcript of the Guru Pershad Lecture given at the Sri Aurobindo Society Beach Office in Dec. 2004, this article links a key chapter in The Life Divine with the Mother.   more »

Any such complete transformation of the earth-life in a number of human beings could not establish itself altogether at once; even when the turning-point has been reached, the decisive line crossed, the new life in its beginnings would have to pass through a period of ordeal and arduous development. A general change from the old consciousness taking up the whole life into the spiritual principle would be the necessary first step; the preparation for this might be long and the transformation itself once begun proceed by stages. In the individual it might after a certain point be rapid and even effect itself by a bound, an evolutionary saltus; but an individual transformation would not be the creation of a new type of beings or a new collective life. One might conceive of a number of individuals thus evolving separately in the midst of the old life and then joining together to establish the nucleus of the new existence. But it is not likely that Nature would operate in this fashion, ...   more »