From: "Debashish Banerji" <ewcc@
Date: Wed Feb 23, 2005 12:35 pm
Subject: Fw: snip:the immortal cell

- Original Message -

From: <rcarlson@
To: <amritabanerji@
Cc: <ewcc@
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 10:21 PM
Subject: snip:the immortal cell

Hi Amrita,

First of all I think your response to my initial email might serve as a good intro to the email list for all particpants coming to AUM. that said Glad to hear you are recovering from you surgery. Hope you will be all put back together by the time of the AUM. I hope this email formats correctly as I have had some trouble sending from a distance and today I am in New Orleans.
you wrote:

It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyse, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, signicance and circles of the Lila." Truly, the key is to ENTER into the consciousness of the Magician and not just scan the surface mentally. Wouldn't this apply to all persuits of knowledge? - Not just the sciences? (In this context, of-course, Sri Aurobindo has refered to the sciences). But the nature of man is such that he is easily prone to the shortcomings of his 'mental instrument' no matter what he is trying to study or even discuss - psychology, history, art, Sri Aurobindo's yoga, etc So, once again i feel the need to re-iterate Sri Aurobindo's 'enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself..'

Thank you for continuing to -with the help of Dorian- extend my metaphor taken from Arthur C Clarke. "That any sufciently advanced technology is indisinguishable from magic" by providing what is to be done about it, Namely by entering in to the consciousness of the magician. Naturally that is the thing to be done by all aspiring on the integral yogic path. Now however, I see the scientist are on to this in some manner. At least some steps towards this comes through in the work of David Bohn in his attempts to describe the implicate order, or Stuart Kaufmann and the project of the Santa Fe Institute to understand complexity and self-organizing systems. This view of science eshews a reductive approach in the search for laws hidden governing the self-organizing systems. From cells to stock markets. A very clumsy short explaination of their world view is the notion of the irreducibility of phenomena to simple causality, but rather to look at the interplay of complex systems from whose bifrucation, the "magic" of order emerges. A whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is not surprising that many scientist in the two eld Bohms Quantum Physics, or Kaufmanns Complexity Theory have taken up some sort of spiritual practice as both Bohm and Kaufmann have.

I feel that molecular biology is a very receptive field - and that the Divine is inuencing it.

Hooray for us anti-Luddites. Although I am not equating yoga to science but rather see Yoga as the conscious attempt to dovetail ones activities with the divine. On the other hand science rather unconsciously - attempts to detail the laws of matter.. Although as Sri Aurobindo also reminds us Matter is in some obscure sense Brahma too! However, given such a fundamental split in intention, epistemology, and methodology between both courses of human aspiration one does wonder if the two activities can ever be thought to be working toward the same end. My own notion is rather simple, and maybe too simple. I see the integral yogi aspiring for the Divine to bring down the spirit into consciousness and matter, and the scientist aspiring to give Humanity more mastery of matter or perhaps more plasticity for the receptivity of something it knows not what of and due to its its non-teleological nature it can not even begin to postulate. The yogi's concern is the Brahma and universal truth while the scientist seeks instrumental truth to nd the secrets of matter but then matter is also Brahma.

- One could also address artistic aspiration here but lets skip it for now -

The scientist, the politician, the historian, the psychologist, etc must all transcend their respective elds of persuit and become yogis or rather, the yoga will inevitably 'do' the scientist, the politician, the historian, . etc. and inuence their elds of persuit till the truth of the 'Lila' is revealed. Is it not?

I agree that the ideal is for everyone to become yogis. however even Sri Aurobindo in my reading did not think this would happen, At least the Gnostic race and the human race were suppose to dwell for a long period together no? But lets just say that the Divine of couse knows that not everyone is going to become a yogi, but still wishes to effectuate some transformation of mind, life, and matter, isn't the point of the whole Lila a vast game of hide and seek? In whichthe divine slowly unveils itself to discover its essence. If so it seem perfectly logical -and there I go again mentalizing - that the divine would be using the scientist . the historian, and the artist as its instruments even though the individual embodied soul may never even know it?

I guess this is my intro to the AUM theme. That regardless if science or art can be called a spiritual activity, they are still an instrument for the evolution of consciousness. As it adds together parts to construct wholes, perhaps there will be wholes much greater than the sum of their parts which emerge, which will have as the famous phrase of progress goes "unintended consequences" My great concern is that these unintended consequences while perhaps furthering the evolution of spirit in matter, may in fact crush the whole enterprise. I think the chapter Civilization and Barbarism in the Human Cycle is quite instructive here. In it while outlining the promise of science , Sri Aurobindo talks of the danger to progress life itself if the Economic Barbarism which drives science prevails. He speaks that the Titan that this creates will at the end fall under its own weight. My hope is for all of us to get out of the way before that happens. for this reason I think the integral psych movement jumped the gun by bypassing this chapter and founding their movement with the wholly optimistic notion that they were helping to annunciate the "subjective age". - I rather think its more complex- Regarding the work of Michael West and such bio-tech rms as Advance cellular technology.

There were a few errors which you caught, because he does not refer to zygotes as germline cells and of course germline cells have 23 chromosomes. Pardon the misprint, but in researching the AUM I have gone through about 20 or so books on future technology and culture and countless article on the subject and since I found out Marshall McLuhan was really inuenced by James Joyce, who maybe the rst prophet of the information age, I took up Finnegan's Wake, which requires a frontal lobotomy to get through.

At any rate West is the consummate techno-optimist such as Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravac and others. However he is looking at bio-tech in terms of curing disease or as a prosthetic whereas the otherfolks I mention see it as a way of enhancing the human species or what I call a cosmetic application. There is a radical difference here, I think between the attempt to make people well, and the attempt to make them better as the notion of designer babies suggest. I guess in regards to gene therapy however, there is also a gulf between somatic gene therapy and germline gene therapy. The latter could create traits passed on to offspring, this is why this form of therapy is of such interest to those trying to enhance the human race. which I believe by denition makes it a type of eugenics It is just this notion of bio-tech to enhance the species that alarms Bill McCabe in his book "Enough", -McCabe is well known in environmental circles, the author of the end of nature on greenhouse gases and often a contributor to the New York Review of Books. Whereas West only mentions the dangers of germline genetic engineering in his book. It is front and center in McKibbens.

The dangers associated with creating self-replicating organisms are profound, not only in genetic engineering but in nano-technology as well. For example if the creation new strains of bacteria, or nanobots could escape into the environment, some pathogens could destroy all life forms on the planet within weeks. None other than Bill Joy, the genius who invented Unix and chief scientist at Sun Microsystems endorses McKibbens book. If you get a chance read the article from Wired magazine in April 2000 which Joy wrote entitled Why the future does not need us!

This email is starting to get way too long - Dorian always chides me about this - but in short where I and West and the techno-optimist to unself-critical for myself, I also nd McCabe and his nostalgic waxing for the species homo-sapiens as perhaps a bit short-sighted as well. One must just look at our species blood stained history to know improvements can be made. But by whom, hopefully the divine and not some mad scientist Of course in Sri Aurobindo in many places there are references to our limited conception of what can be called good and evil. He even says that what is perceived as evil can be a vehicle of the evolution of consciousness.

Just think of how global culture has been spread by the evils of Imperialism and Colonialism to underline a point. So if we look today at clones, cyborgs, and other mind/machine mixes what appears to us now as evil, maybe the vehicle to bring the evolution to the next step. I don't think the well being of the current human race is necessarily a concern to the project of conscious evolution. But here's the rub. How do we gain a perspective into the future of science and technology when no simple moral judgments can be made? Could we speak of an Aurobindian bio-ethic or does the perspective of integral yoga do away with such mentalizations. If so could there be a integral-bioethics? same problem.

Dr Nardkarni in his paper for the AUM 2003 went into great detail on the program of the techno-optimists such as Kurzweil and Morovac who would see all our brains scanned by nanobots, awlessly recorded in electronic media and then uploaded into a machine, and other aspects of the techno-utopia. In short he ended by outlining why they were different from the integral yoga. I agree, however the project for this AUM hopefully then can ask: ok so we are different, but we still are living with these amazing advances and the exponential acceleration of technology. Just think it took 10,000 years to go from walking to the horse then perhaps 3000 years to car and then in less than 100 years suddenly presto zowie puff we are all ying around the globe, and thinking about mars. The same trends one nds in computing (Moores Law) and bio-tech. In 1965 I have heard no one ever thought the genome would be sequenced. Even as late as 1980 they thought a good 100 years, in 1995 they thought maybe 2010 and it was nished in 1999.

So my feeling is that this exponential increase in rational thought, what I call a hyper-rationality, although perhaps has a mathematical explanation just maybe due to the pressure of the Supermind. If so -or perhaps especially if not - then as a community I do not think it is enough to just say integral yoga is a different domain from technology and the future of the techno-utopians but to perhaps begin to outline how the community orients itself in such a world.

Is there a dialog which needs to take place between the yoga and the cells and the bio-tech century? What are the consequences for the yoga of the mind as it wanders the cathedrals of cyber space and becomes enclosed in virtual environments? How does the yoga of the heart speak to the cyborg? Is there some dialog the collective of integral yogis should be having with this new weird culture we nd ourselves in? Would it just serve us within the community to become self-aware of the affects of the changes upon our inner consciousness? or should I start looking for a new job rather than Aum organizer Any way its a theme I choose knowing no answers. I feel like Gloucester from King Lear wondering blindly around the country side. I am longing for an Edgar in the cloak of a fool perhaps to set me straight.

best
Rich