From: "Richard" (rcarlson@olympus.net)
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com
Subject: musing on a continuing conversation
Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 22:48:31 +0200

Rod and I had a nice visit the other day in which he briefly described a lecture he had heard from Barbara Marx Hubbard, which if I remember
correctly touched on the pending global crisis and the coming
"apocalypse" in which Supermind would finally descend (hope I remembered
that right). What Rod said basically was that all she perhaps was doing
which was different from Christian prophecy in her alternate narrative
of the future, was basically substituting Sri Aurobindo where the name
Jesus would be mentioned in the evangelical account.

This all made good sense to me as Rod explained that the supramental
manifestation did not depend at all on any outer circumstance and that to tie its advent with an advancing crisis was to misread the fundamental ontology of Supermind.

A question though which later                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               arose, not so much about Supermind and its dependence on global
conditions but more specifically about integral yoga as an evolutionary
yoga was as follows:

As IY was articulated, a
structuralist reading would considered it as "one of the narratives" of
an evolutionary account of the earth's history. And indeed to some
extent IY itself is dependent on the theory of evolution (a.go. Darwin
and Huxley). Or more generally to some extent IY's emergence as a novel
yoga of evolution is dependent on the cultural circumstances in which
it was born. Would we even have a notion of Supermind as the
transformative evolutionary force of a yoga of evolution minus the
scientific accounts of evolution? Could IY as practice or praxis exist
in the intellectual structure and life worldof the 17th century? I
would think not,… because its emergence at a certain point in history
seems all too appropriate and necessarily fixed by circumstance of
history. Therefore IY as all other spiritual practices is in its
historical articulation somewhat dependent on its cultural context, and
perhaps IY is even more dependent on its historical context than its
more transcendent or mythic spiritual kin, because it is a process
which emerges within an evolutionary movement of consciousness and this
movement (process) only unfolds during the course of a History; and it
is so by necessity. It is precisely this historical context denoting
evolution as an intellectual activity within the cultural lifeworld of
the Present which makes IY unique in the spectrum of contemporary
spiritual practices.In fact, IY is unique because it transcends its
mere intellectual context which is defined by an "intellectual" study
and a focus on an evolutionary past withan "embodied" praxis intenton
transforming our evolutionary future. ( If the foregoing statement is
true, it would mean that exploring culture in the light of the practice
of IY is a practical necessity and not a mere intellectual enterprise
or just a mere "mentalization")

So the question could be
formulated if only more clumsily: If the yoga of Sri Aurobindo is
revealed within a phase space within the shifting coordinates and flux
of world history, it would appear IY must be dependent on a cultural
context (time constrained) which envelops its own internal coherence
(which is timeless). More specifically, IY's emergence would appear
dependent on the Zeitgeist of the early 20th century (outer
circumstance) in which evolutionary theory inspired a entirely new
narrative of existence and with it a corresponding transformation of
the intellectual lifeworld (such as saturated the atmosphere
surrounding Sri Aurobindo’s formative early years at Cambridge).
Perhaps upon closer examination this demarcation of external or outer
circumstance is a false distinction and the crux of this conundrum and
is itself a product of false consciousness; but, herein lies the rub;
if the advent of Supermind is not itself dependent on an outer or
external circumstance but, the very formulation of Supermind as an
evolutionary transformative force and the practice of integral yoga,
which is the vehicle to hasten its appearance, emerges only from within
a cultural context - which was set in motion by accounts of a Darwinian
universe-; do we have quite a confounding paradox? Or structurally seen
as just a variant of the "one paradox" of spirit emerging from matter?

……..

and
Rod also mentioned that which is common terminology in both Gebser and
Aurobindo, and for that matter in Chaos and Complexity theory or
Non-Linear Dynamics is the word: Emergence: so the antonym would
follow: to disappear or, to vanish…..

so to follow up on my
metaphor regarding the disappearance of our species: is it the
vanishing of the Being into beings (becoming), or of beings (becomings)
into Being which is the issue when considering of the "difference" of
vanishing into (and emergence of) the divine or into the machine
(samsaric)?

and what is that state which is in between a vanishing and emergence?

the vanishing of an I ,which is always, never quite ,

into a emerging moment which forever, never was……

rich