Table of Contents

Introduction to the Sixth Issue	PDF
Ulrich J Mohrhoff	1-6

Articles

Money and the Crisis of Civilization	Abstract PDF
Charles Eisenstein	7-13

‘I’ = AWARENESS	Abstract PDF
Arthur J Deikman	15-21

Evaluating Spiritual and Utopian Groups	Abstract PDF
Arthur J Deikman	23-32

The Psychology of Atheism	Abstract PDF
Paul C Vitz	33-44

A Mathematician’s Lament	Abstract PDF
Paul Lockhart	45-71

Lockhart’s Lament — the Sequel	Abstract PDF
Keith Devlin	73-79

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us (abridged)	Abstract PDF
Bill Joy	81-91

Life-Energy and Spiritual Experience	Abstract PDF
Steve Taylor	93-106

Interview

The Birth of “Ecological Sustainable Society”	Abstract PDF
Charles Birch	107-118

Book reviews

Review of Ghisi: The Knowledge Society	PDF
Ulrich J Mohrhoff	119-133

Review of Sartori: The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients	PDF
Ulrich J Mohrhoff	135-143

Review of Carter: Parapsychology and the Skeptics	PDF
Ulrich J Mohrhoff	145-153

Book excerpts

Will the Real Charles Darwin Please Stand Up?	PDF
David Loye	155-185

Intuition and Human Knowledge	PDF
Sri Aurobindo	187-204

AntiMatters is an open-access e-journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives. It is published quarterly by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry.

Due to the controversy over The Lives of Sri Aurobindo with many in the Aurobindo Ashram either screaming loudly or conspiring secretly to ban the book, I thought it was a good idea to put some context to the issue by exploring the history of book censorship. So I am reprinting here a list of some of the more notable banned or challenged books from the 20th Century. Its a history which unfortunately we seemed doomed to repeat in the 21st.   more »

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.   more »

This is an unusually long article for SCIY. It's copyrighted by Eric M. Weiss, and was his dissertation for his Ph.D. at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. I'm taking the liberty of posting it here because, in my opinion, it's one of the most thorough and insightful treatments of the core concern of SCIY; the multiple & interpenetrating relationships between science, culture, and consciousness, placed within the contextual framework of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. - Warning: This is challenging material, but I believe working through it and contemplating its implications is well worth the effort. - My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Eric Weiss for his extraordinary and groundbreaking work. ~ ron

...Here we are, at the dawn of the Twenty First Century, and I have awakened to find myself living in a science fiction novel. If this novel were to be written from the standpoint of the 23rd century, looking back to the beginning of the 21st, it might start something like this:

At that time, the certainties of science had faltered. The great charism of the men in white lab coats had faded. The bastions of materialism had crumbled from within, and the civilization that it had fostered was losing its way.

Meanwhile, three centuries of rapacious assault on the biosphere were, at last, showing decisive results. The globe was poisoned, people were sick, species were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, global temperatures and global sea levels were both beginning to rise. A civilization was ending, and in its death throes, it was bringing to a close the Cenozoic Era. The Earth was preparing for a fresh creation.

Looking back, too, we can see that the promise of the new civilization had already begun to shine. The iron cage of the material world, in which the species had been trapped for centuries, was starting to dissolve. Here and there, the experiences of the subtle worlds were breaking through. A few intrepid explorers had seen the promise, and had just begun to glimpse the vast freedoms and the limitless horizons that we now enjoy, but the darkness was still thick and Kali was dancing wildly across the face of the globe. This is the story of those early pioneers…   more »

Debashish asked me to post this review by Prema Nandakumar of J.K. Mukherjee's book: "The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri."

Re-reading Savitri is ever a new experience. One may keep reading the epic for half a century like Jugalda, and each reading brings a fresh insight into the inexhaustible springs of the narrative. The process of ascent from an ordinary seeing to the spiritual vision in the higher ranges of thought and beyond as stated in Savitri is a fascinating phenomenon. Especially so, when Jugalda is our Paraclete. As always, Jugalda does not tease us with an impossible mystic diction. He is the ideal acharya who swoops down like the eagle in the classroom and then rises slowly and majestically past the green crests of life holding the hands of the reader-student. ...   more »

In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life’s work on Germans, Jews and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then the German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between the path taken by Germany in the years leading up to Hitler and the path being taken by the United States today. He talked about a group of 1920’s intellectuals known as the “conservative revolutionaries,” who “denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture,” and about how Hitler had used religion to appeal to the German public. In Hitler’s first radio address after becoming chancellor, Stern noted, he declared that the Nazis regarded “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.” ...   more »

This is a fascinating, though quite speculative, website:

The Bible tells us that God created Adam and Eve just a few thousand years ago, by some fundamentalist interpretations. Science informs us that this is mere fiction and that man is a few million years old, and that civilization is just tens of thousands of years old. Could it be, however, that conventional science is just as mistaken as the Bible stories? There is a great deal of archeological evidence that the history of life on earth might be far different than what current geological and anthropological texts tell us. Consider these astonishing finds: ...   more »

...A cultural revolution is a revolution in thinking. Profound change in the world only happens when thinking changes, and in What Is Enlightenment? magazine, we’re endeavoring to communicate with our growing body of readers in ways that are going to compel all of us to think more deeply. We seek out those individuals who challenge us to stretch beyond familiar mindsets in order to meet the overwhelming demands of our time. And as we learn from this ever-expanding network of leading thinkers, we simultaneously try to create an enlightened context in which their voices and visions will be amplified. It is my firm conviction that through the practice of sincere inquiry, of honest dialogue together, we can discover new perspectives that will enable all of us to make much greater sense of our shared human experience."
- Andrew Cohen, WIE Founder & Editor   more »

Here's one example of the many, many people and organizations inspired by the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and deeply involved in "the wake up call for humanity." Barbara is an old friend and former colleague who is an amazing example of someone who has been deeply vitalized by personal experiences of the sacred. (She's well over 70 years old and keeps on going in spite of a serious bout with cancer that would have hospitalized or killed most of us.)

"It is clear that we have reached “Critical Mess.” Our problems cannot be resolved by doing more of the same. The dysynergy among these problems is rapidly leading to devolution. Yet, out of the crisis, even in the last few months since the awareness of global warming, there has been an increase in mass awakening. This crisis is vital for the next stage of our evolution. It is the wake up call for humanity. ..."   more »

I'm slowly working my way through Shantaram, the remarkable book by Gregory David Roberts I referred to in a previous post. Here's another sample of Robert's evocative writing. The setting is a discussion group of men, all of whom are leaders of the Bombay "mafia." These weekly discussions are organized and led by Khaderbhai, the charismatic "Godfather" of Bombay's officially tolerated organized crime scene.

Khaderbhai has invited a new guest to this week's session. He is known as Linbaba, a cover identity being used by the book's namesake, "Shantaram," when he arrived in Bombay after escaping from prison in his native Australia.

As is the custom in the group, Khaderbhai calls on the new guest to suggest the topic of discussion ...   more »

The International Center for Peace and Development was established as a non-profit, non-governmental organization in 1997 to continue the work initiated by the International Commission on Peace and Food (ICPF). The Commission was constituted in 1989 by a group of 25 concerned scientists, professionals, international administrators, business, social and political leaders from 15 nations to promote global peace and development in the post-Cold War world. Over a six year period ICPF conducted a series of international conferences and research projects on a wide range of issues concerning global security, conversion of resources from military to civilian purposes, food security, employment, economic development, and the environment. ...   more »

... This paper identifies the central principle of development and traces its expression in different fields and levels of social advancement. Development is a function of society’s capacity to organize human energies and productive resources to respond to opportunities and challenges. The paper traces the emergence of higher, more complex, more productive levels of social organization through the stages of nomadic hunting, rural agrarian, urban, commercial, industrial and post-industrial societies. It examines the process by which new activities are introduced by pioneers, imitated, resisted, accepted, organized, institutionalized and assimilated into the culture.

Organizational development takes place on a foundation of four levels of infrastructure – physical, social, mental and psychological. Four types of resources contribute to development, of which only the most material are inherently limited in nature. The productivity of resources increases enormously as the level of organization and input of knowledge rises. The theory identifies the human resource as the driving force and primary determinant of development. ...   more »

"I [believe] that the group is the art form of the future. ... {E}very great culture has created forms of sacred art that were needed in order to transmit and ... discover by experience the truths which were necessary to absorb into one's life. ... In our present culture, as I see it, the main need is for a form that can enable human beings to share their perception and attention and, through that sharing, to become a conduit for the appearance of spiritual intelligence."   more »

You would never guess it from the news, but we're living in a peculiarly tranquil world. The new edition of ''Peace and Conflict,'' a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world. By JOHN TIERNEY New York Times, May 28, 2005   more »

I've just come across a good example, imo, of the kind of multimedia magazine, multi-editor weblog, that we're moving SCIY toward. It's called Boloji, and describes itself as:

Boloji.com.. is a website dedicated to study India in particular and expressions on the diversity of life. We welcome articles relating to any section specified under "Channels". We also welcome Photo Essays..

Here's a sample of the writing of one of their columnists, which includes several Sri Aurobindo quotes relevant to, e.g., the "Virtual Class" discussion we've been having: ...   more »