What is the post-human destiny to which we are called as humans in contemporary times? In this transcript of a talk given for the AUM conference in Los Angeles in 2003, Debashish Banerji compares Nietzsche's call for the Overman with that announced by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to point to the similarities and differences. How can we pick our way through the maze of choices held up at this end-time of human becoming? Is it by remaining complacent or by using our wills or by surrender to a greater force than ours? And if so, what force - the vitalism of an unconscious Nature-force, the deceptive "universality" of the world market or an unpredictable future which calls our arduous attention? These and similar questions are posed and discussed in this article.   more »

If anything Sri Aurobindo's vision is its own genre of Utopian vision. In a very real a sense it is the “completion of Utopian visions” (the divinization of Earth) Anyone in fact living in a community dedicated to Sri Aurobindo's vision lives in an Utopian community, which today might be called an intentional community. Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, is in an omni-directional interrogation of history, class, structure, wish, will, imagination, transcendence, and post-humanity of Utopias

Jameson begins his study in full recognition of the spiritual Utopian urge. He quotes here from the evolutionary Science Fiction of Olaf Stapleton :

“It must not be supposed that this strange mental community blotted out the personalities of the individual explorers. Human speech has no accurate terms to describe our particular relationship . It would be as untrue to say that we had lost our individuality , or were dissolved in a communal individuality as to say that we were all the while distinct individuals . Through the pronoun “I” now applied to us all collectively, the pronoun “we” also applied to us."

I one respect namely unity of consciousness we were a single experiencing individual , yet at the same time in a very important and delightful manner distinct from one another. Through there was only a single communal “I” there was also, so to speak, a manifold and variegated “us” an observed company of very diverse personalities , each of whom expressed creatively his own utpian contribution to the whole enterprise of cosmical exploration, while all were bound together in a tissue of subtle personal relationships.”

Along with Lyotard, Jameson is one of the two beacons of post-modern cultural history. Although Jameson is perfectly cognizant of the failures of Utopian vision and the most recent anti-Utoipianism that runs through post-modernism, he probes the issue further to uncover what he calls an anti-anti Utopianism.

In this work rather than just applying post-structuralist scholarship as a solvent for exposing the ideologemes of Utopian fantasies, or simply deconstructing the “doxa” couched within the discursive formations of social, economic, and psychic, Utopian dimensions, his aim is also to reconstruct - and like Zizek whose wish it is to redeem the history of failed totalizing Utopian visions - he seems to wish to recover a vision of a new imaginative totality, while suggesting ways to remain mindful of the reification involved in collapsing the Utopian vision into any one of its dimensions

Utopian communities and Ashrams that aspire to something exceeding their humanity would do well to heed Jameson's warning below. If the intentional community one resides in fails to be mindful of how its multi-dimensional values and vision can collapse into class, cultural, ethnic, or personal battles its evolution will not end in the Superman, but rather as Nietzsche phrase it the contemptible Last Man.

" In addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation: the post-human thereby seeming more distant and impossible than ever"

The review of a portion of Jameson book is insightful even though its author Peter Fitting self-revealingly discloses he does not completely have his hands around it. (rc)   more »

I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "   more »

A final post in this series on language concerns the mutation of consciousness triggered by the shift away from the word as signature of the thing in the world, to word as signfier. I again use Foucault's Order of Things as reference, (even though it like all other text has its critics).

According to Foucault's history this shift from words as signature of the thing, or as pure representation occurs through the advent of “General Grammar” in the 17th and early 18th century. He traces the shift through the work of such Grammarians as Bopp and Rask Foucault's method here is different than most historians who trace history through the linearity of ideas or the impact of individuals by establishing historical continuity. Rather he follows a method he calls an Archaeology. The study of Archaeology proceeds with the analysis not of individuals or specific events, but rather through the systems of thought and apprehension present in a given era which determine its discourse. He calls these eras epistemes. Moreover, Foucault says : “Archaeology is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistribution (Archaeology of Knowledge)

Foucault does not treat the history of grammar - later to become the science of philology and linguistics - in isolation but rather excavates it in the episteme of the Classical Age. He connects the history of Grammar with the study of Natural History -which will later become Biology - and the History of Wealth -which will later become the science of Economics-. Its probably not to much of a stretch to see this threefold study of history in comparative terms to Sri Aurobindo's method of analysis as follows: biology (physical) economics (vital) linguistics (mental)

Here Foucault describes the interrelatedness of these three domains:

The history of grammar is not the projection into the field of language and its problems of history that is generally that of a reason or of a particular mentality , a history in any case that it shares with medicine, mechanical services, or theology but that it involves a type of history -a form of dispersion in time, a mode of succession of speed of deployment or location,- that belongs to it alone even it is not unrelated to other types of history, (Archaeology of Knowledge) and here is how he traces back the origins of the study of general grammar:

.. the practice of the history of comparative grammar was to rediscover -beyond Bopp and Rask- earlier research into the filiation and kinship of language it was determined how much Anquuetil-Duperron contributed towards the composition of the Indo-European domain it was to uncover the first comparison of Sanskrit and Latin Conugations it may even lead back to Harris or Ramus (Archaeology of Knowledge)

One must first understand how Foucault perceives the episteme of the Renaissance which precedes the Classical Age in which General Grammar emerges to fully appreciate the mutation of consciousness that occurs. Knowledge in the Renaissance was concerned with knowledge by Resemblance and Similitude, while the Classical age is annunciated through an knowledge of Difference.

( It may be worthwhile to explore the similarities and differences between knowledge by Resemblance and Similitude in the European tradition and Sri Aurobindo's metaphors, tropes, discourse, and the Indic sources he draws on, in speaking of a knowledge by Identity)

The divergence of epistemes of the Renaissance and the Classical Era is explored below. Its annunciating figure is Don Quixote who reads the world through a book.

“The four modes of resemblance are pretty straightforward: 1) convenience = spatial proximity, which relies upon and breeds resemblance; 2) emulation = resemblance at a distance; 3) analogy = resemblance of relation; man is center of world; 4) sympathy = resemblance provoking spatial and qualitative change....   more »

Rooted within language, even in its most holistic form, is the pregnant push towards sequencing, sparing, punctuation -- differentiation in time and space. In the Vākyapadīya, the Śabdatattva, symbolized by the seed sound AUM, [48] is sequenced by the power of time into the various recentions of the Veda and all spoken words. [49] For Derrida the image is one of the sign, as the linguistic whole, being differentiated by spacing (on the page) and interval or pause (in speaking) into articulated meaning and sound-image. It is the actualizing of this inherent force for differentiation that enables language to function. But it is, at the same time, the limit of language. As Derrida puts it, since a sign (the unity of signified and signifier) cannot be produced within the plentitude of absolute presence, there is, therefore, no full speech, no absolute truth or full meaning. [50] In the words of Lao Tzu, "The tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao" [51] Or as Hegel once put it, "When speaks the soul, alas, the soul no longer speaks." [52] But whereas Lao Tzu and Hegel are mourning the inability of manifested language to make present the soul or the tao, Derrida and Bhartṛhari emphasize the positive contribution of articulated speech. The sphoṭa and the sign (Derrida's whole) are manifested, and in the dynamic tension of that manifestation lies truth.

Rather than arriving at a skepticism of language, namely, that it is devoid of any truth content (the conclusion of the Buddhists and many modern skeptical critics of language), truth is seen to be contained in the very dynamics of language itself. Thus Derrida's thesis that there is no referent outside of the text is not as nihilistic as it at first sounds, and Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa is not as artificial an entity as much Indian philosophy has assumed.

In Vākyapadīya I:5, there are two terms which Bhartṛhari uses to describe the Veda: it is the prāptyupāya or the means for the attainment of Brahman; and it is the anukāra or symbolization of Brahman. For now let us confine our attention to the term anukāra, which comes from the root kṛ, "to do" or "to make" and suggests the dynamic activity of the Word-Principle. The Vṛtti elucidates the verse by stating that the activity of the Vedic seers in speaking the mantras is the criterion case of word-making activity. The term mantra, notes Aurobindo, signifies a "crossing over" through thought (root man, "to think," and tṛ, "to cross over") from the Absolute or Unmanifested to the human experience of manifested language. [53] As pure Sanskrit language, the mantras are conjunctions of certain powerful seed syllables which induce a particular rhythm or vibration in the psychosomatic structure of consciousness and arouse a corresponding psychic state. Such seed sounds can be differentiated in a great variety of ways producing an immense progeny of language. The evocative power is at its height before the mantras become too locked into particular forms of articulation. Poetry is at its peak before language becomes too fully elaborated. Then it must be deconstructed or evolved backwards to recover its original power for signification. Articulation is necessary, but the further it goes the greater the loss of freedom and power within language.

This also seems to be what Derrida means when he refers to the prose book as a corpse of language which must be exited from or transcended [54] -- the delimiting of the multisignificant roots has been pursued to its logical conclusion, and the power of the word has been exhausted. The aim of the project of deconstruction, says Derrida, agreeing with Aurobindo, is to get back to metaphoric, poetic language, where the power for signification has not yet been used up. [55] Bhartṛhari also reminds us that as language divides and separates, this necessary process in the end can become a source of confusion. The process of difference, pushed to its logical conclusion, produces such a plethora of speaking accents that communication of knowledge is obstructed. [56] Unlike Derrida and Aurobindo, Bhartṛhari's solution is not to deconstruct or reverse the process of differentiation, but to control it by the imposition of strict grammatical rules (the science of the Grammarians) by which the power of the root mantras to convey knowledge and action will not be obfuscated. [57] Bhartṛhari, along with the other Grammarians, claims to have uncovered the pure forms of the correct unfolding of the patterns of differentiation inherent in the Śabdatattva and symbolized (anukāra) in criterion form in the initial speaking of the Vedas... [58]   more »

The chapter on the philological method of the Vedas in The Secret of the Vedas is a fascinating one in which Sri Aurobindo traces the genealogy of Sanskrit back to its origins in onomatopoeia. If correct words at the dawn of language acquisition were not simply arbitrary signifiers chosen conventionally to represent things but corresponded directly to the signified as a natural (human) sound articulation of the phenomena itself. That is there is an actual resemblance between the sound vibration of the word and the phenomena itself. From these ur-utterances are derived a small number of roots in which the subsequent nominative conventions and evolution of vocabularies can be located.

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault arrives as a similar conclusion which he derives from the work of some of the French philosophers of the Enlightenment. Foucault's ascribes the power of attribution and the propositional function of language to verbs which trace their origins back to the most basic verb “to be”. At the root of all attributions is the verb “to be”. The verb to he is found in all propositions, because we cannot say that a thing is in such and such a way without at the same time saying that it is “ .

For its part the nominative function of language is implicit in the designating power of adjectives and nouns. As such Foucault locates the primitive origins of language through its role as pure designation. In tracing back its earliest designative function Foucault ascribes to the originating process of naming things a very similar role between the non-arbitrary articulation of sound and the actual phenomena itself as does Sri Aurobindo. Additionally, in tracing language back to its function of pure designation Foucault also concludes that our vocabularies can be traced back to a small number of originating roots.

The following post is a comparative exploration of the origins of words as described by Sri Aurobindo and Michel Foucault. Below are a few excerpts from the texts included in this post.

Sri Aurobindo:

“The Rishis' use of language was governed by this ancient psychology of the Word. When in English we use the word "wolf" or "cow", we mean by it simply the animal designated; we are not conscious of any reason why we should use that particular sound for the idea except the immemorial custom of the language; and we cannot use it for any other sense or purpose except by an artificial device of style. But for the Vedic Rishi "vrika" meant the tearer and therefore, among other applications of the sense, a wolf; "dhenu" meant the fosterer, nourisher, and therefore a cow. But the original and general sense predominates, the derived and particular is secondary. Therefore, it was possible for the fashioner of the hymn to use these common words with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward the image of the wolf or the cow, sometimes using it to colour the more general sense, sometimes keeping it merely as a conventional figure for the psychological conception on which his mind was dwelling, sometimes losing sight of the image altogether. It is in the light of this psychology of the old language that we have to understand the peculiar figures of Vedic symbolism as handled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common and concrete. It is so that words like "ghritam", the clarified butter, "soma", the sacred wine, and a host of others are used.(Secret of the Veda, Chapter 5)

Foucault:

“Roots may be formed in several ways. By onomatopoeia, of course, which is not a spontaneous expression, but the deliberate articulation of a sign that is also a resemblance: 'to make the same sound with one's voice as the object that one wishes to name'[70]. By employing a resemblance experienced in one's sensations: 'the impression made by the colour red, which is vivid, rapid, harsh to the eye, will be very well rendered by the sound R, which makes an analogous impression upon the ear'[71]. By imposing movements upon the organs of the voice analogous to those one wishes to signify: 'so that the sound resulting from the form and natural movement of the organ when placed in this state becomes the name of the object'; the throat rasps to designate the rubbing of one body against another, it hollows itself inside to indicate a concave surface [72]. Finally, by employing the sounds an organ naturally produces to desig­nate that organ: the glottal stop determined the name of the throat in which it occurs, and the dentals (d and t) are used to designate the teeth [73]. Using these conventional articulations of resemblance, every language is able to provide itself with its pack of primitive roots. The pack is a small one, since the roots are almost all monosyllabic and exist only in very small numbers - two hundred for Hebrew, according to Bergier's estimate [74]; and even smaller when one remembers that (because of the relations of resemblance that they establish) they are common to almost all of our languages: de Brosses thinks that all of them together, from all the dialects of Europe and the Orient, would not fill 'a single sheet of writing paper'. But it is on the basis of them that each language develops its own particularity: "their development is prodigious. Just as one elm seed produces a great tree, which by growing new shoots from each root produces in the end an entire forest'[75]” (The Order of Things, p.106-109)....   more »

Given the Supreme Court decision to grant rights of Habaes Corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was 5 to 4 it is not real comforting to know that here in America we are just one vote away from a full dictatorship.

If one wants to explore the devolution of a justice system founded on Enlightenment Values, the history of the US Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan's presidency would be a text book example. The original interpretation philosophy of the most conservative justices correlates well with fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Fortunately however ,this time the stench of totalitarianism was too much for the majority. Unfortunately, in this case both the executive branch and a democratic congress were also complicit in legislating high crimes against the justice system rc....

Congress, in turn, twice tried to eliminate habeas rights for detainees. The Supreme Court rejected the first attempt in 2006, ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the legislation did not apply to pending cases. So Congress tried again with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which made explicit that the elimination of habeas rights applied to all Guantánamo cases, past, present and future. The issue before the Supreme Court in Boumediene was whether the MCA violated the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, known as the "Suspension Clause..."   more »

...The transition model emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye and unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this big question: for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how are we going to:

    * significantly rebuild resilience (in response to peak oil)
    * drastically reduce carbon emissions (in response to climate change)?

Typically, self-determined solutions will involve some flavour of relocalisation. -- We're building a range of materials, training courses, events, tools & techniques, resources and a general support capability to help these communities. ... We're hoping that through this work, communities across the UK will unleash their own collective genius and embark on an imaginative and practical range of connected initiatives, leading to a way of life that is more resilient, more fulfilling and more equitable, and that has dramatically lower levels of carbon emissions. ...   more »

Erik Davis is one of the most talented authors writing on the subject of technology, culture, and spirituality. This article from the book prefiguring cyberculture from MIT University Press is representative of the insightful work he has done. The concern of this piece revolves around the construction of subjectivity in an epoch which can perhaps best be called posthuman.rc

Of all the lumbering giants of the Western philosophical tradition, none resembles a punching bag more than René Descartes. He gets it from all sides: cognitive scientists and phenomenologists, post-structuralists and deep ecologists, lefty science critics and New Age holists. The main beef, of course, is the stark divide that Descartes drew between mind and body, a dualism that, by its very claim of rationality, now appears even more obscene than the religious dualisms that stretch back to Zarathustra. Nearly across the board, contemporary thought calls us to defend and affirm the body that Descartes rendered a machine, a soulless automata under our spiritual thumb. It doesn't really matter that the body so affirmed is itself multiple and even contradictory: the materialist object of biology, the phenomenological bed of Being, a feminist site of anti-patriarchal critique, the New Age animal immersed in Gaia's enchanted web. Regardless of the framework, the song remains the same: we are bodyminds deeply embedded in the world. For many thinkers now, the sort of abstract, disengaged soul-pilot pictured by Descartes -- the "I" immortalized in the famous cogito ergo sum -- is not only bad thinking, but, ideologically speaking, bad news.

In many ways I share this urge to trace the networks that embed consciousness in phenomenal reality, and to insist on the extraordinary (though not exclusive) value of causal explanations rooted in the history of matter. But I am no absolutist. The fact that Descartes keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box suggests that a splinter of the cogito remains in our minds, some fragmentary intuition or insightful glimpse that we cannot accommodate and so wall off in order to reject. I am not interested in philosophically defending the cogito, or at least the metaphysical cogito we are familiar with: the rational and disengaged instrumentalist manipulating the empty machinery of matter. But I am interesting in probing for that splinter, which I suspect is lodged somewhere in the apparently yawning gap between self-conscious awareness and the phenomenal world -- a gap that, despite some hearty attacks from nondualists East and West, continues to inform subjectivity. ....   more »

I met Paul Lonely last night at a friend's gathering. When I told him a bit about SCIY, he said he was an admirer of Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri, and graciously offered to send me a link to his own new book of "post post-modern" poetry: Suicide Dictionary. I've been looking over his website and his work is quite impressive. E.g., see below the words of one of his many enthusiastic reviewers, the artist-musician Michael Garfield.  ~ ronjon

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I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision - the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the cafe trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you'll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that. What Paul is doing for us - the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory - is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. ... Freed from the conventional trappings of historical spiritual texts, blindingly aware of its own cultural embeddedness and laughing at it compassionately, Suicide Dictionary belongs in a thin pantheon with the paintings of Alex Grey as a message for and from our collective future. It is playful and colorful and fluid, in stark opposition to even the most inspiring theories of the world into which we walk with one eye open. That Paul has used language to communicate this utterly translinguistic vision is a testament to his cleverness his book is winking at all of us from behind the veil, like the Tao Te Ching or its formal predecessor, the Upanishads. Every page rings brightly with the cause to which he is devoted. ...   more »

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 »

              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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(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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I just received an email from SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kotke announcing the publication of the first reprint of his underground classic: "The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future," first published in 1993. I just downloaded the E-book version (for just $6.95) and after a quick scan through its 600+ pages, I'm convinced this is a significant read for those SCIY readers concerned about Earth's sustainability crisis. As an Amazon reviewer said:

"This is an incredibly well documented and prophetic book. Prophetic in the sense that when I first read it over ten years ago, I was skeptical of many predictions. They have all turned out to come true. This book is indigenous and inspiring in the sense that it offers practical earth friendly strategies that affirm the possibility that man is part OF nature, not apart FROM it. Well written! Real history and facts, vitally relevant, and hence empowering! Good medicine for all earthlings. A powerful gift! Thanks Bill!" ...   more »

Mary Magdalene has finally begun to regain her rightful place in history, after being portrayed in church history for centuries as a penitent prostitute. In 591 AD Pope Gregory pronounced that Mary Magdalene, Mary the sinner, and Mary of Bethany from the gospels were one in the same. But there has never been evidence of that, and in 1969 the Catholic Church restored them to three separate identities, ending 14 centuries of mischaracterization. ...


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