Welcome to the SCI-Y Home of Debashish Banerji

All postings, reflections, selections and writing projects by SCI-Y author Debashish Banerji are archived here in the following subcategory structure:

JYOTI - AN ONLINE JOURNAL

The online journal Jyoti was started in 2000 as an attempt to carry cultural articles and information related to the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the collective life of the Sri Aurobindo Center of Los Angeles, also known as The East-West Cultural Center.

The online journal took its name both from the founder of the Center, Jyotipriya and from the essential meaning of the name, which is LIGHT.

At present, the editor of Jyoti is no longer connected with the Los Angeles Center and the journal in its present incarnation has therefore divested itself of its Center-specific content. Moreover, the journal will henceforth appear within the web portal SCIY. Here, Jyoti will continue in a new form - that of a continuously expanding magazine. SCIY provides enhanced opportunities for extended dialogs around its Articles through an organized structure of Comments. It is thus hoped that entries in Jyoti will become occassions for interaction and expansion of knowledge among the community of its readers.

Subscribers to Jyoti will receive automatic notifications for every new Article or Comment posted in the journal. A link will take them to the post. Below the post, they will see a space for comments. To add a comment, one will need an username and a password. By default, all jyotilist members have been granted the username jyotilist (all lower case) and the password jyoti. A reader is encouraged to enter into the different areas of Jyoti as well as of its parents, SCIY. It is hoped that once familiar, readers will choose to subscribe themselves individually to the SCIY web-portal and will not need the generic jyotilist access.

The subcategories for Jyoti, will be found in the Categories Tree on the left margin, under 'Jyoti' and can be opened and read by clicking on them or on the links below. These subcategories, as before, are:

Note:

Earlier issues of the journal may be found by going to:

JYOTI ONLINE

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 »

Links to Debashish Banerji's SCIY articles –

---

• Review of Sri Aurobindo and his Contemporary Thinkers

---

• Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo, Ed: Indrani Sanyl & Krishna Roy
by Debashish on September 7, 2007 12:48AM (PDT)

---

• Five Auroville Artists at the Cymroza Gallery, Mumbai

---

• The Yoga of Self-Perfection and the Triple Transformation, by Richard Hartz
by Debashish on August 5, 2007 04:58AM (PDT)

---

• Life Divine classes via Skype by Debashish Banerji (Apr.07)

---

• Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III (Jan.07)

---

• Global Warming and Economy: a Conscious Shift in Economy (Jan.07)

---

• A Second Response to Daniel Gustav Anderson's "Towards a Critical Integral Theory" (Dec.06)

---

• (BR) "The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri" - by J.K. Mukherjee (Dec.06)

---

• (BR) 'The Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular' by Robert Minor (Dec.06)

---

• Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II (Dec.06)

---

• Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I (Dec.06)

---

• Instruments of Knowledge and Post-Human Destinies (Dec.06)

---

• April 23 and 24, 2005 - Debashish Banerji at Arcosanti (Nov.06)

---

• Derrida, Death & Forgiveness by Andrew McKenna (Nov.06)

---

• Derrida the Movie - a Review by Debashish Banerji (Nov.06)

---

• A Chronology of Modern Indian Art and Thematic Considerations By Debashish Banerji (Nov.06)

---

• Phenomenology of Non-Factual Intersubjective Practice - Translation Exercise by Debashish Banerji (Oct.06)

---

• The Psychology of Creativity Course Outline (Oct.06)

---

• Reflections on THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY (Oct.06)

---

• Two Poems on Durga by Debashish Banerji (Oct.06)

---

• Detachment and The Integral Yoga (Oct.06)

---

• Introductory Notes to "Hinduism" (Oct.06)

---

• Welcome to the SCI-Y Home of Debashish Banerji (Oct.06)

---

• (BR) 'India and Europe' by Wilhelm Halbfass (Sep.06)

---

• Jyoti Editorial - February 2006 (Feb.06)

---

• Intro. to JYOTI Journal (Feb.06)

---

• (BR) 'Fahrenheit 9/11' by Michael Moore (Dec.05)

---

• Savitri Classes at LA Center (Dec.05)

---

• Ongoing and Present Projects of the Center (Dec.05)

---

• Sales and Circulations (Dec.05)

---

• February 2005 EWCC-LA Collective Walk (Dec.05)

---

• February 2005: Contours of Modernity - An Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art (Nov.05)

---

• Contours of Modernity - A Picture Gallery (Nov.05)

---

• A Chronology of Modern Indian Art and Thematic Considerations (Nov.05)

---

• "The Divine Mother and the Triple Status of the Supermind" by Debashish Banerji (Oct.05)

---

• (BR) 'Mysteries of Death, Fate, Karma and Rebirth' by Jugal Kishore Mukherjee (Oct.05)

---

• (BR) 'The Religious, the Spiritual and the Secular' by Robert Minor (Oct.05)

---

• The Forgotten September 11 - An Article by Richard Hartz (Oct.05)

---

• Two Japanese Poems by Debashish Banerji (Oct.05)

---

• Modern and Contemporary Indian Art - an Encyclopedia Article (Oct.05)

---

• Jun.04 EWCC-LA Collective Nature Walk (Oct.05)

---

• Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Eight, "The Divine Life" (Part 6 of 6) (Sep.05)

---

• 130 db. Re: Matthij's AUM talk (Aug.95)

---

• 102 db. D&J's chart on "The Evolution of Mental Consciousness (Jul.05)

---

• 097 rc. Msg. from Guy Burneko, linguist philosopher who spoke at AUM05 (Jul.05)

---

• 096 db. Co-existence of Unity and Infinity in the Truth (Jul.05)

---

• 094 db. I'd like to see an "affective intersubjective space" based on a real community (Jul.05)

---

• 040 db. Questions re Rich’s post (Jul.05)

---

• 029 db. Matthij's AUM talk (Jul.05)

---

• 028 db. Shyam Maniyedath has transcribed Matthij"s AUM talk (Jul.05)

---

• 005 b. db. Transcript: The Promise of the Future (Jun.05)

---

• 005 a. db. Link to The Promise of the Future (Jun.05)

---

• The Promise of the Future #1 (Jun.05)

---

• 004 db. Link to The Vision (Jun.05)

---

• 002 db. File Archiving Enabled (Jun.05)

---

• 001.db.Vision Statement for the postaum2005 Message Board (Jun.05)

---

• Invitation to the Post-AUM2005 discussion group (Jun.05)

---

• Availability of Anie Nunnally's book - "The Golden Path" (Mar.05)

---

• From Amrita - an older preAum posting which never got onto jyotilist (Mar.05)

---

• the immortal cell (Feb.05)

---

• The preAUM2005 elist (Feb.05)

---

Following the publication of “Understanding Thoughts of Sri Aurobindo,” Indrani Sanyal and Krishna Roy of the Centre for Sri Aurobindo Studies, Calcutta have complied a set of eighteen scholarly essays on Sri Aurobindo and his contemporaries in the ideational context of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance. Sri Aurobindo’s physical involvement in the politics and culture of early Bengal nationalism was of relatively short duration (1905-1910), albeit an intense and all-sided participation which internalized the entire regional history of the movement and left a powerful creative impress in the milieu of its time and space. Moreover, the discursive background of this involvement continued to develop organically and find voice throughout his life in his subjective articulation just as his own situated contribution continued to resonate in later Indian nationalism. Thus this collection of considered interpretive contemplation fills an important need in our historical understanding. But more importantly, it is the post-colonial legacy of these engagements which draws us today by their fertile and future-gazing content, inviting reflection not merely for India’s but the world’s re-generation at a time of global ferment.   more »

In spite of some surface infelicities, a very fine collection of essays on various aspects of Sri Aurobindo's "thought."

...The book concludes with an article “Sri Aurobindo – A Century in Perspective” by Aster Patel. Sri Aurobindo became the first principal of National College, Calcutta, now known as the Jadavpur College, about a hundred years ago. In the century which has elapsed since then, humankind has experienced its most intense period of collective growth and crisis throughout the world. Human consciousness is poised on a brink where it is faced either with the specter of oblivion, the horror of the abyss or a leap into another modality of being, the integral consciousness of the overman. Mediating this critical choice is the life and work of Sri Aurobindo, throwing a powerful beacon ahead of us into the century to come. Aster Patel draws out some of the implications of this work ahead of us in following the light of Sri Aurobindo in the coming century. Can we equal in consciousness the integral vision of reality which contemporary Science is indicating to our minds and our technological practice? Are we even ready to engage with the fullness of the term “integral”? How can we draw together our past and our present, our fractured personalities, our fragmented disciplines, our physical matter and our mental, vital and spiritual substance into the Oneness of integral being which Sri Aurobindo lived and wrote about? His integral consciousness is still fully alive in his words and each word is an invitation and a fire to kindle in us his life and reality. This is the ever-living fire of Heraclitus, the living legacy of the “thoughts” of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

... The personal yoga of Sri Aurobindo, as he himself once characterized it, was an "incalculable" one, leading from realization to realization in a journey without end. Through his life, Sri Aurobindo attempted to chart this journey in the form of a darshana (or philosophy) and a yoga (a process leading to experience and transformation). His earliest formulation to himself of this journey with its goals and processes is what he called the Sapta Chatusthaya (Seven Quartets) which form the background to his private notes to himself of his own yogic progress, kept mostly between 1912-1920 and now publshed as The Record of Yoga. Between 1914-1920, he wrote most of his major works in the serialized journal, Arya, where he outlined his yoga, philosophy of evolution and social philosophy in terms which may also be thought of as contemporaneous with the Record of Yoga. Particularly, in his principal work on yoga, The Synthesis of Yoga, the fourth part, the Yoga of Self-Perfection, can be thought of as a yoga of transformation, a new formulation for the future which followed the achievements of the more traditional yogas of Works, Knowledge and Divine Love, comprising respectively the first three parts of Sri Aurobindo's synthesis in this text. This Yoga of Self-Perfection can largely be correlated with the Sapta Chatusthaya and thus, the Record of Yoga.

Later, after 1926, we have Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Yoga and later still, after 1932, further revisions to his other texts, including the Synthesis of Yoga and the Life Divine. In these writings, Sri Aurobindo introduces a new terminology and what may seem new emphases to his yoga and darshana.

Richard Hartz, who works at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram archives, has studied Sri Aurobindo's texts and revisions intensively as an editor of his Complete Works and takes a historical view of the development of Sri Aurobindo's yoga and writing. Here, he raises and tries to answer some of the questions pertaining to the changes and revisions in Sri Aurobindo's understanding and teaching, by looking at the Record of Yoga, the Yoga of Self-Perfection and other key texts of Sri Aurobindo such as the Life Divine and Savitri. He also considers what may be the special contribution of Sri Aurobindo to the Indian tradition of yoga and touches on the part paid by Vivekananda as a precursor. ...   more »

Five artists from Auroville will be exhibiting their works jointly at the Cymroza Gallery, Mumbai, this September. These artists include 4 women painters - one German, one Indian Parsee, one Italisn and one Belgian and a Dutch male sculptor. Here, Debashish Banerji previews the work of these artists.   more »

Prof. Debashish Banerji is now teaching online classes on Sri Aurobindo's opus "The Life Divine." You can listen to recordings of these classes here on this page or in Debashish's JYOTI Journal on SCIY at:

Life Divine classes via Skype, by Debashish Banerji, Ph.D.

Highly recommended!

---

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 is a slightly reworked transcript of a talk given by Jean-Yves Lung at the conference on "The Collective Yoga of Man: A World in Process" held at Auroville from Jan. 12-14, 2007. Here, Jean-Yves sees the direction towards the restoration of the ecological balance of the earth in a reformulated economics.

...Each time we give our time and work instead of selling it, we interrupt the heating system or slow it down. And it doesn’t mean that nothing has been produced or consumed, it means only that it has not been egoistically done so. And this is why it doesn’t count. We have to remember the basic assumption of Adam Smith who created the capitalist model of the invisible hand of the market resolving spontaneously our egoistic activities into a collective harmony: by pursuing egoistic aims, people tend to specialize into what they do best, thus creating a diversified economy of complementary activities, and unknowingly contributing to the general good. That was the good news of the century: “Yes, your egoism can make a difference!” Kama is the only dharma and even the only moksha, the only thing to be released (mukta) in man. Here is the rajasic component of Dana: “Don’t give, take! Bargain!”. This theory has been very seriously accepted as a realistic model in the West (and that means now everywhere) but from the point of view of Indian psychology, it would be unthinkable, except in some obscurity of the mind and soul, dreamed maybe by the slayers of the soul âtmahanah, as the Upanishad says, to build up such a fallacious theory, so contrary to all the established facts of life and consciousness. ...   more »

The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...   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 »

Sri Aurobindo is not just the "foundational thinker" of "Integral Theory" – in Anderson’s back-handed compliment “To adapt a meme attributed to Whitehead: if European philosophy amounts to a footnoting of Plato, Integral theory may very well amount to a conversation about Aurobindo.” As I proceeded to read I could see how this is possible if one takes Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic darshan, Purnadvaita Vedanta (inseparable from its corresponding yoga, Purna Yoga) as a western style speculative metaphysics purporting to be a Theory of Everything, an ideology which maintains itself as Truth through the Will-to-Power and becomes the defining hegemonic ideology of late Enlightenment Neoliberalism through the production of its world-subjects, something perhaps possible. But to attribute the foundation of such an ideological field to Sri Aurobindo is, certainly a new wrinkle to the abuses/misuses of his text which seem to be multiplying lately (as for instance through left and right perceptions of it as the foundational text for Hindutva). ...   more »

The two postings on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies (I and II) generated a thread on the relationship between physical instruments of observation and knowledge in the scientific sense (microscopes, telescopes, nuclear accelerators), human organs of observation and knowledge (mind, intelligence, sense organs) in the cognitive / psychological sense and possible mutations of human consciousness in the ontological / phenomenological / epistemological sense (change of being, change of consciousness, change of modalities of knowledge). The last (possibilities of a change of modalities of knowledge) opened up a consideration of Sri Aurobindo’s phenomenology of supramental knowledge and its subsidiary action in human forms and instruments of knowledge – specifically sense-knowledge through the sense organs with the “sixth-sense” of the “sense mind,” manas in the Indian Sankhya formulation behind them at/as their origin and the supramental Samjnana further behind/beyond but with a concealed and subsidiary operation in/through manas. Here we are reproducing the relevant parts of this very fertile thread for focused consideration.   more »

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.   more »