From: "Richard" <rcarlson@…>
Date: Sat Apr 2, 2005 4:12 pm
Subject: aum conference clarification

Since the aum theme has been quite complex to work out, I'd like just to elaborate on what the central organizing ideas and questions which the conference poses:

1) In a world characterized by the hegemony of empire, corporate self-aggrandizement, an egoistic will-to-power (which Sri Aurobindo in the Human Cycle refers to as economic barbarism) that is driven by the advances of science and technology and is resisted by a fundamentalist religious fervor; how can we best cultivate the emergence of psychic discernment, intuitive discrimination, and a life-world characterized by the supramental truth consciousness and force?

2) What is the relationship of the evolution of consciousness whose trajectory foreseen by Sri Aurobindo heralds the coming of a spiritualized post-human species to that evolution of humanity driven by the exponential advances in science and technology which perhaps foreshadows the advent of a post-human species very different than one which fulfills the promise of the future in the supramental manifestation ?

3) Is any effort required of those practicing integral yoga to enter into a dialog with the emerging global culture in order to inform the larger world community of the light which the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and Mother's shed on the dangers and promises of l'Avenir?

Thus if we play with Marshall McLuhan?s notion that technological advances serve to turn the human consciousness inside out and contrast this with the perspective of integral yoga on the future evolution of consciousness please consider:

Cloths are an outering of the skin

The wheel the outering of the foot

Print an outering of the word

Electronic media an outering of the central nervous system

Cloning would be an outering of our individual DNA

But all this solves nothing for the yogi, for the yogi the challenge is to outer the psychic being e.g bring it to the front of our being. And for this the inner

technologies of choice are tapas, aspiration, sincerity, silence, surrender

All sufficiently advanced technology may as A.C. Clarke suggests be just like magic, and the engineer the occult scientist, but who is the Mage here?

To outer the collective vital and mind through electronic media, the internet, wireless technology and the physical body itself through bio-technologies of recombinant DNA and cloning without first outering the psychic being to lead the whole evolutionary advance seems a bit dangerous.

So if we as a species are turning ourselves inside out, if our physical (bio-technology) vital (electronic central nervous system) and mental (world wide web and wireless noosphere) instruments are now being extended chemically and electronically into the world to give birth to a hyper-modernist culture; how do we better facilitate the outering of the psychic being to take charge of the advance, of our terrestrial evolution and post-human future?

rc