This Topic contains the entire text of the remarkable new science fiction book "Accelerando," by Charles Stross.

I recommend reading it for a mind-blowing near-future drama documenting a series of "Singularities" caused by continuing exponential evolution of science and technology. It presents in vivid terms one scenario for the intricate potential interactions between science, technology & culture. It's fine food for thought and discussion about how Integral Yoga might interact with and perhaps modify such singularities.   more »

This posting includes links to blog postings during 2005 that mention Auroville. It's a fascinating collection of articles posted by people from around the world who represent a wide range of contacts with Auroville, some brief, some by Auroville residents themselves. Reading them has given me a whole new sense of the diverse impacts & impressions that Auroville is making. I recommend checking this out for yourselves. ...   more »

"The neo-Darwinian synthesis conceptually separates evolutionary dynamics into two components: genetic diversification and selection. Selection has been the main thrust of much research while diversification is often considered essentially random and largely context-independent. Experimental studies showed however, that the mechanisms responsible for genetic variation are not purely random, and that the sequence-specificity, spectrum and timing of various mutational or DNA repair mechanisms is quite variable. Consequently, the population of genetic changes exhibits significant structure, both temporally and with respect to position in sequence space. Evolutionary models do not, in general, take advantage of the fine structure of the population of achievable genetic variants of genes. ..."   more »

I've uploaded a selection of photos from the Auroville website to my account at Flickr.com.

To see them read the rest of this post and then click on the provided link. ...   more »

The following posts are Chapter by Chapter copies of Sri Aurobindo's classic work, The Life Divine. To facilitate dialogue using the comments tool, each chapter is also posted paragraph by paragraph ...   more »

"It is important, in my opinion, for the name to connect with both simplicity and complexity. What is most exciting about our work is that it illuminates the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is the heart of our subject. ..."   more »

"What is complexity? A great many quantities have been proposed as measures of something like complexity. In fact, a variety of different measures would be required to capture all our intuitive ideas about what is meant by complexity and by its opposite, simplicity. ...   more »

"In discussing the fundamental sources of unpredictability, I shall concentrate on those indeterminacies that are definitely required by theory. Let me therefore begin by eliminating from consideration supposed indeterminacies stemming from doubts that some people may entertain about basic principles or from certain kinds of ignorance that I believe to be temporary and likely to be remedied in the relatively near future. I assume the following: ..."   more »

"Why are elegance and simplicity suitable criteria to apply in seeking to describe nature, especially at the fundamental level? Science has made notable progress in elucidating the basic laws that govern the behavior of all matter everywhere in the universe--the laws of the elementary particles and their interactions, which are responsible for all the forces of nature. And it is well known that a theory in elementary particle physics is more likely to be successful in describing and predicting observations if it is simple and elegant. Why should that be so? And what exactly do simplicity and elegance really mean in this connection? ..."   more »

Reading from Aster, You and John had me pondering and collecting my thoughts.

Hansa and I just moved to southern California after living in Chicago for 40 years.

An evening walk on the beach to watch the sunset has become a daily pilgrimage. Watching the Sun, bright golden red as it kisses the ocean in the distant horizon, a Light bright yet not overpowering, warming every part of our being with its rays. ...

...The Mother in trance, The Golden Sun in our midst with Infinite Patience waiting for us to awake from our slumber. ...   more »

Thanks Rich and Aster for beautiful meditations. Below is a nice meditation on the mindset that, without too much effort, can be tied to (corporate) globalization and many other (non-conscious) materialistic events of the day. It is from www.darwinismrefuted.com. don

Self-Organization: A Materialist Dogma

The claim that evolutionists maintain with the concept of "self-organization" is the belief that inanimate matter can organize itself and generate a complex living thing. This is an utterly unscientific conviction: Observation and experiment have incontrovertibly proven that matter has no such property. The famous English astronomer and mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle notes that matter cannot generate life by itself, without deliberate interference: ...   more »

From: "Rohini Verma" <verma_rohini@yahoo.com> 
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com 
Subject: From Aster  
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:36:03 -0400

Message - 162/162

Here u go.

From: "Charles Flores" <auroman302@yahoo.com> 
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com 
Subject: Re: Fw: From Aster  
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:45:04 -0700

Message - 161/162

Hi Amrita,
 
Sorry, I was not able to read any of the message - it looks all garbled.
 
Charles
____________

Charles I. Flores, Ph.D.c., NCC
Executive Coordinator, Auroville International USA - www.aviusa.org
Director of Development, Enlighten Games Inc. - www.enlightengamesinc.com

Rich,

Thanks for the article below.

amrita   more »

Nope, I still live in CA - JFK University is on the East Bay. Hope you don't mind my using your recent article on Sri Aurobindo and Transpersonal Psychology, since my course is called "The Fundamentals of Transpersonal Counseling," and there isn't a lot of brief non-Wilber Integral that I can give students in an overview course (and its a great article!) ...   more »

Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 05:34:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: MICHAEL MIOVIC <mmiovic@yahoo.com>  
Subject: Re: FYI - Esalen Inst. spring workshop

Message - 158/162

wow—congrats professor! so you are living in NYC now?

michael

Congratulations, Savitra, on gettingthe workshop in Esalen! Sounds a bit like what you did in AV, with some exercises added.

I'd like to hear more about the trip with Kathy and Barbara Hubbard some time.

BTW, I'm now an adjunct prof. at JFK University. ...   more »

FYI, I enclose below the weekend workshop title/description which Esalen Institute has invited me to do next Spring. This workshop will be formally posted on Esalen's website and listed in their 2006 Catalog in December. It reflects a personal sense of urgency to bridge from words and concepts to actions ("And God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep") — to heal our disconnects and the tendency toward "spiritual bypass", integrating evolutionary vision with evolutionary practice, in effect, applying Sri Aurobindo's Yoga in the criticality and convergence of 21st Century realities. ...   more »

I just came across an annual award of c795,000 sterling, called the Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize is awarded annually by an international, multifaith panel of judges to a living person of any religious tradition who has made a unique contribution to progress in research or discoveries about spiritual realities. ...   more »

Keka, please say a little more here about the sense of your question. I think we should do that for every "? of the week" that we post, so readers focus on what the poster had in mind.

Rule #1 of a succesful forum is to keep the postings and comments "On Topic," so they make a coherent corpus of info that can be followed by new people joining the forum.

Thanks Keka, I think this is a great topic, and I'm looking forward to seeing it develop.

~ ron

Interesting, thanks--but it doesn't feel like my brain is evolving:) michael   more »

Keka suggested this new Topic titled "Question of the Week."

It's available to all SCIY Members (have Posting privilege). The idea is to propose a relevant interesting question once a week that all Members and Commenters (have Commenting privilege) can respond to via Comments.

Interesting article and even more interesting is its prominent placement. On the front page of The New York Times ...   more »

I caught the word "emergence" in one of the recent posts. Here's a letter from the "Journal of Consciousness Studies" egroup which, I think, shows how far the predominantly objectivist viewpoint is from an understanding of consciousness - and this letter is from someone who is trying to get beyond objectivism. ...    more »

In Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo writes about the Avatar, and the necessity for Avatarhood. Don't forget that, in the Aurobindonian world-view, the emergence of the new Consciousness, while involved in, and prepared to some extent by the development in Matter, is precipitated by a Descent from the pre-existent inner world or plane which is the home of that which is to be realized. The Descent of the Supramental, announced by Mother on February 29, 1956, was not in any way caused by the circumstantial or developmental stage of the earth, of Matter. Rather, it was brought about by the concentrated Action of the two-in-one Avatar. ...    more »