...Listening to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, one might think that the much-discussed power-sharing deal between her and embattled President General Pervez Musharraf is a done deal. And surely, both sides stand to benefit from what would undoubtedly be a marriage of convenience. But with increasing pressure from upcoming elections and difficult compromises demanded by both sides, the hastily arranged union may fail before it is sealed. ...   more »

Ok, the following is what I have come up with after researching the publication history of the Record of Yoga. After getting responses from very credible sources who have been close to the project what follows is a brief summary:

It is unlikely that Sri Aurobindo kept his diary with the idea of publishing it. If he had written it for that purpose, it would have been easier for skeptics to dismiss it. The fact that it lay around for 60 years or so before it was discovered shows that he had no such intention and enhances its credibility. Part of its value lies in the fact that he was not trying to prove anything to anyone except himself.

The Record of Yoga was found in Sri Aurobindo's notebooks among thousands of pages of writings he had not published and in many cases probably would never have published himself. If we went strictly by his stated intentions about the publication of his writings, his complete works might come to about ten volumes. For example, in 1949 he explicitly ruled out the publication of The Future Poetry, The Secret of the Veda and A Defence of Indian Culture without extensive revision which he never had time to do. So his final instructions regarding these books were that they should not be published. There is no such written statement barring the publication of the Record of Yoga. Of course the question simply didn't arise during his lifetime - or the Mother's. The actual decision to start publishing the Record was made after getting the approval of Nolini Kanta Gupta.   more »

A hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. With past support from the Getty Grant Program, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation. ...

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...India has had the master-key to this serious problem -- the key named 'spirituality' which looks at expressions of life, religions, art, science, businesses, services - all as forms and names of the single spirit, the Divine. A spiritual person is one who has the fundamental and essential experience of whatever religion he may choose to belong, and has a catholicity of understanding, which comes essentially out of his deeper inner self, of an appreciation of all facets and expressions of life as facets of a single Reality.

Secondly, we have to bring this inner-experience into our thoughts and emotions and actions - it is the best way to lead us beyond religions, into the spirituality of the future. This adherence to a higher truth without the barriers of customs, creeds, ceremonies is the thing that is wanted in India. It may seem an ideal that is beyond the possibility of the common man. But a spiritual symbiosis is the only way of the Future. The principle of symbiosis, exemplified in the 100th monkey, can come of use here: a strong nucleus of spiritual aspirants, a small group of seekers of the adventure of consciousness, seeking and assimilating the New Consciousness is enough to start an atomic reaction which could one day explode as a spiritual-bomb engulfing all humanity in a new Light and Life. ...   more »

Hyderabad, a city of around 6 million, has a long history of communal violence between Muslims and Hindus. On May 18, a bombing at one of India's largest and most historically important mosques, the Mecca Masjid, killed 11 people as Friday prayers were ending.

Hyderabad has recently become a symbol of India's economic boom, an increasingly cosmopolitan center and hub of software and call-center jobs. The city has a thriving Muslim quarter and is renowned as a center of Islamic culture.

Officials said the attacks on Saturday were an attempt by "anti-social elements" to spark a wave of communal violence. There was no immediate assertion of responsibility.   more »

On 11 May 1998, the Buddha's birth anniversary, India tested three nuclear devices. Two days later, two more tests were conducted. After these tests, the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee triumphantly announced that India was now a Nuclear Weapon State. Though India's nuclear capability has been public knowledge for quite some time, the tests took the world by surprise. The decision to test was an immediate, political one; however, India's nuclear weapons program has a long history.   more »

This is why I refer to this type of new media as "meta-media." A meta-media object contains both language and meta-language -- both the original media structure (a film, an architectural space, a sound track) and the software tools that allow the user to generate descriptions of, and to change, this structure.

If you think that meta-media is a conservative phenomenon which 'betrays' the movement of computer culture towards developing its own unique cultural techniques -- Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, simulation, database navigation, virtual worlds, etc. -- you are wrong. Since the 1970s modern computing has been grounded in Alan Kay's concept (influenced by previous groundbreaking work in human computer interface, most importantly Sutherland's 1962 Sketchpad software) of computers as "personal expressive media." After he arrived at Xerox PARC, Kay directed the development of a word processor program, a music composition program, a paint program, and other tools that redefined the computer as a simulation machine for old media. So while the routine use of computers as media simulators was not possible until the 1980s, the paradigmatic shift was already defined by 1970. Gradually, other roles of the modern computer -- a machine for computation, real-time control, and network communication -- became less visible than its role as "simulation engine." (Of course, the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s made the role of network communication quite visible to the public). The computer's ability to simulate other media (which means simulating their interfaces and "data formats" such as written text, image, and sound) is not an afterthought -- it is the essence of a modern post-1970's computer.

(It is possible to state this idea even more radically -- by moving the date even earlier, to the 1930s. When Alan Turing defined the computer as a general-purpose simulation machine that can simulate most other machines that have already been invented, the idea of media simulation was implicitly introduced. But it was only in the 1950s-1970s that the work of Sutherland, Engelhard, Kay, and others made this idea into a reality by allowing the computer to systematically simulate the operations of drawing, drafting, painting, photo manipulation, sound generation and editing, and so on.)   more »

Scientists have induced the age-old phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers for the first time. -- The technique, which uses a virtual-reality-style set up of cameras linked to a head-mounted video display, will help researchers understand how the brain assimilates sensory information to determine the position of its body.

The technique could also improve virtual reality games and remote surgery by creating the illusion that a person is somewhere other than in their own body.

Out-of-body experiences are defined as those where a person who is awake sees their own body from somewhere outside themselves. The experiences have been reported in situations where brain function has been damaged through a stroke, epilepsy or drug abuse. The most common cases occur in traumatic situations such as car accidents or on operating tables. ...   more »

In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding hero, has become a human being, and the god has retreated to the sky. His function now is primarily to remember. Memory, said Greek myth at the beginning of its historical period, is the mother of the Muses, who inspire the poets, but no longer in the same degree that the god inspires the oracle-though the poets clung to the connection as long as they could. In Homer, in the perhaps more primitive Hesiod, in the poets of the heroic age of the North, we can see the kind of thing the poet had to remember. Lists of kings and foreign tribes, myths and genealogies of gods, historical traditions, the proverbs of popular wisdom, taboos, lucky and unlucky days, charms, the deeds of the tribal heros, were some of the things that came out when the poet unlocked his word-hoard. The medieval minstrel with his repertory of memorized stories and the clerical poet who, like Gower or the author of the Cursor Mundi, tries to get everything he knows into one vast poem or poetic testament, belong in the same category. The encyclopedic knowledge in such poems is regarded sacramentally, as a human analogy of divine knowledge.   more »

The anatomy of criticism is such a gem, I would encourage everyone to also check out the links to ethical, historical and rhetorical criticism, this essay is on archetypal criticism ...rc

... Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using that term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the [p. 136] tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to "realism," to conventionalize content in an idealized direction. The central principle of displacement is that what can be metaphorically identified in a myth can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees. In more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery. In the dragon-killing legend of the St. George and Perseus family, of which more hereafter, a country under an old feeble king is terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands the King's daughter, but is slain by the hero. This seems to be a romantic analogy [perhaps also, in this case, a descendant] of a myth of a waste land restored to life by a fertility god. In the myth, then, the dragon and the old king would be identified. We can in fact concentrate the myth still further into an Oedipus fantasy in which the hero is not the old king's son-in-law but his son, and the rescued damsel the hero's mother. If the story were a private dream such identifications would be made as a matter of course. But to make it a plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable story a good deal of displacement is necessary, and it is only after a comparative study of the story type has been made that the metaphorical structure within it begins to emerge. ...   more »

...The subject-matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic as a parasite or artist manqué is still very popular, especially among artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between the creative and the procreative functions, so that we hear about the "impotence" and "dryness" of the critic, of his hatred for genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anticritical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but some of its prejudices are still around. [p. 3]

However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is [p. 3] instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through "popular" art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative "folk." These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the "art for art's sake" catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual Masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other. [p. 4]

One can find examples which appear to support both these views; but it is clearly the simple truth that there is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. Shakespeare was more popular than Webster, but not because he was a greater dramatist; Keats was less popular than Montgomery, but not because he was a better poet. Consequently there is no way of preventing the critic from being, for better or worse, the pioneer of education and the shaper of cultural tradition. Whatever popularity Shakespeare and Keats have now is equally the result of the publicity of criticism. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself. The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.

There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are as silent as statues. ...    more »

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop ...   more »

Basically I look at Deleuze/Guattari as two figures who act as translators of European philosophy and aesthetics into some kind of exit for people who are concerned with humanism. Think: Frantz Fanon wrote about this as a kind of update on Existentialism - the "gaze" that defines the world today is "brown" - but it is contained in a strange cadence. It's a visual rhythm that extended the idea of philosophy into spectrums that have yet to be mapped out. European philosophy has usually been totally eurocentric for the last several centuries, and Deleuze and Guattari are the two philosophers who have taken the idea of philosophy past the limits of previous thinkers. Aristotle created the idea of taxonomy for the West several thousand years ago. Deleuze and Guattari have taught us to move beyond the categories he defined, and have helped create tools for analyzing how complex out mediated lives have become. I think of their concepts like the "Abstract machine," the "body without organs," and the "immanent plane" of action/realization as almost beyond the categories of European philosophy. They are humanists who look for meaning beyond the norms. That's where my music and their thoughts intersect. ...   more »

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is one of the brightest lights in contemporary cultural and media studies. He first surfaced as the master of the re-mix aka DJ Spooky in N Y City in the 1980s. Although this was initially a prank his fame as a DJ spread thereafter and he has gone on to publish widely on everything from Deleuze and Guattari to the art of the Mix. A download of a seminar he gave at Arthur Kroker's Pacific Center for Technology and Culture in Victoria BC in which among other things he reconsiders McLuhan and Derrida can be downloaded here. What follows are links to his web site. His latest book Rhythm Science was published by MIT Press. - rc   more »

Another contextual posting here. 1) The Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham and re-envisioned by Michel Foucault and 2) An editorial by Helen Thomas one of the most respected US journalist who has been a White House Press reporter for more than 57 years.

The story line speaks for itself, democrats in the States are still having problems evolving a spinal chord... thats why their talking heads seem to flip, flop so badly.... among the new bunch of presidential contenders the only one so far I heard who even is able to stand up straight is Kucinich... but the issue here is the sacrifice of individual privacy rights versus the intrusive desire of the State and Corporate interest to extract as much information possible from the targeted population (in this case the whole world) . Its also a testament to how fear turns back to feed on itself, or as the title of a Fassbinder film reminds us: Angst isst Seele auf or Fear eats the Soul. At any rate Rudolph Giuliani the Republican presidential hopeful thinks thats pretty good campaign strategy.

Of course to the extent that new information and monitoring technologies can increase the expansive gaze of the Panopticon it is most troubling. - rc   more »

Launched in January 2007, IJŽS is a peer-reviewed, open access academic journal. As its title unambiguously proclaims, it is devoted to the work of Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher/cultural theorist. Despite such predictably caricatured media portrayals as "the Elvis of cultural theory" and "the Marx brother", Žižek has attracted enormous international interest through his application of otherwise esoteric scholarship to contemporary mass culture and politics.

With a desire to avoid "how many Žižeks can dance on the head of a pin?" types of debate, and mere hagiography, IJŽS aims to provide a valuable resource for those interested in his inimitable brand of critical thought. Just one small indication of Žižek's wide appeal is apparent from the diverse nature of IJŽS’s Editorial Board and the Journal will be devoted to engaging with the substantive and provocative implications Žižek’s work has for a range of academic disciplines. ...   more »

Esalen has always been on the edge. Famous for its natural hot springs and stunning locale on the face of the Pacific coastline, the institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education. Such luminaries as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and others have gathered there to develop their revolutionary ideas, transformative spiritual practices, and innovative art forms. ...   more »

The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heatwaves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months. ...   more »

I believe that in India there is a whole hearted embrace of targeting ethnic drugs, however the Marketing name for the pharmaceutical industry is "personalized" medicine. This appears to be a press release for the pharmacos in India rc...

Researchers believe that there can be a more focused, personalised and customised way of treatment wherein variations can be used to understand the genetic predisposition of ethnic groups to diseases and predict how a particular patient responds to a specific drug and prescribed accordingly.

...... A consortium of Indian scientists recently completed a genetic database and TCG Life Sciences is likely to become the first private player to use the database. "We have created a genetic database of 2,014 healthy individuals drawn from 55 populations of India covering over 800 million people. It will be helpful in deciding population based characterisation of good and poor effect of drugs," says Prof Samir K Brahmachari, Director, Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB). The use of this database is expected to have large implications on both affordable public healthcare system as well as successful launch of a drug in specific region of India by pharmacos in India. ...   more »

Bio-technology is making it increasingly possible to target populations for pharmaceuticals by ethnicity, making the bio-ethics of it rather complex

rc "Any GP worth their salt will assess a patient and try them on drugs they think will work with their genetic make-up." But he said the problem with BiDil is that it "looks like a racialised drug and that raises all sorts of concern". "Race is the lazy man's way to get a genetic marker. Genetic markers are not necessarily easily reflected as a visible marker "But the concept of different treatment for different people is not new. After all, men and women are treated differently as are children in comparison to adults."   more »

There are not sports heroes whose legacy ends when they leave the game, there are others however whose legacy begins at precisely that moment.

In 1969, when St Louis Cardinal's linebacker Dave Meggysey left professional football he said: "The Mitchell-Agnew-Nixon mentality is what football is all about. Politics and pro football are the most grotesque extremes in the theatric of a dying empire. It's no accident that the most repressive political regime in the history of this country is ruled by a football freak."

In the late 1960's David also began attending Esalen Institute and in addition to his studies in social justice he began exploring esoteric literature, including the works of Sri Aurobindo. While still in the NFL he read Sri Aurobindo's compilation: The Mind of Light. And it is perhaps no coincidence that I met him at a Sri Aurbobindo conference. rc....

“Meggyesy’s book, almost as much as his person, is a most moving instance of a man’s search to be honest and to find a decent alternative for this way of life.”—New York Review of Books

“Dave Meggyesy had been an outside linebacker with the St. Louis Cardinals for seven years when he quit at the height of his career to tell about the dehumanizing side of the game—about the fraud and the payoffs, the racism, drug abuse, and incredible violence. The original publication of Out of Their League shocked readers and provoked the outraged response that rocked the sports world in the 1970s. But his memoir is also a moving description of a man who struggled for social justice and personal liberation. Meggyesy has continued this journey and remains an active champion for players’ rights through his work with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA)

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Freak rains, which scientists describe as a hallmark of climate change, seemed to be responsible. The devastation was all the more severe because flimsy dams and embankments collapsed under the weight of floodwaters. The mud houses of the poor were the first to wash away.

Weather scientists have said South Asia is likely to get much more unpredictable rain in the coming decades, bringing greater challenges for its governments to prepare and cope with nature’s fury. I   more »

I didn't become a conservationist when I started working at The Nature Conservancy. I became a conservationist growing up in California, crawling all over the grassy knolls and in the oak forests that we called 'the jungle,' "said McCormick. "It was from this immersion in what seemed like a sacred place that I became so deeply committed to conservation. I'm worried about what children will lose by staying cooped up inside -- and I'm worried about losing the next generation of conservationists, too."

In the study, researchers pointed out that outdoor play and nature experience have proven beneficial for cognitive functioning, reduction in symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and an increase in self-discipline and emotional well being at all developmental stages. But American children, on average, are spending only 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors each week. ...   more »

and as the death toll in Iraq mounts:

FOR MY BROTHER: REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION, 1943 from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep My eyes are flowers for your tomb; And if I cannot eat my bread, My fasts shall live like willows where you died. If in the heat I find no water for my thirst, My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.   more »