One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe... The seed could be a black hole. Not the big black holes that sit near the centers of so many galaxies, but a "mini black hole." ... They can, in theory, be very small. ...   more »

...a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.
The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.” ...    more »

Humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
This might mean such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests the basis for complex brains either evolved more than once, or has gone unused by most species of animals, the researchers said.
The finding may help explain some of the behaviors seen in whales, such as intricate communication skills, the formation of alliances, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage, the researchers report in The Anatomical Record.    more »

Dennett's singularly contentless commentary reminded me of this motto and its corollary, "When you have nothing to say, say it louder"—a tactic that got 450 prophets of Baal into terminal trouble with Elijah. Dennett devoted the longest chapter of his recent book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to what I described as "an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism." In two recent articles in this journal, I presented a response that, although strongly worded in my own defense, presented a series of general intellectual arguments and specific documentations. In Part 1, I critiqued the three metaphors (and metaphor-making as a scientific tactic in general) that underpin the logic of Dennett's entire case: Darwinism as a "universal acid"; the image of cranes vs. skyhooks as explanatory principles; and the claim that evolution is algorithmic. In my own defense in Part 2, I then explained the potential importance to evolutionary theory of three arguments associated with my work, and falsely branded as trivial by an uncomprehending Dennett: punctuated equilibrium, spandrels, and contingency of evolutionary patterns. Finally, I quoted specific examples of his unfair rhetorical tactics in four categories: false assimilation to statements made by others, false characterizations, high density of factual error, and gratuitous speculation about motives.   more »

This article publihsed in Philosophy of Mind was among those read at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, in Boston, Massachusetts from August 10-15, 1998. It presents an overview of Sri Aurobindo's ontology of Mind.   more »

"Derrida" - a 2002 documentary on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman is reviewed here by Debashish Banerji. In the course of the review the principal ideas and neologisms by this founder of the seminal reading practice termed deconstruction, are briefly introduced and the reflections on self, other, biography, deconstruction and singularity within the movie are discussed.   more »

Some questions on the evolution, the descending consciousness and the avatar - a continuation from RC's questions on the Post-Human, the evolution and the avatar.   more »

There is inevitable great difficulty in translating from noumenal experience to the realm of discourse, from raw reality to abstract concept. Experience is the forerunner of all spiritual teachings, though similar experiences may come to be articulated differently; the Vedas say, "The Truth is one, only the sages call it by different names." In any given exploration of higher states of consciousness, the version set down in words is of necessity an arbitrary, and perhaps nebulous, delimitation of states, their characteristics, and their bounds...
... the Tibetans recognize two levels of religious doctrine and practice: "The Expedient Teaching" and "The Final Teaching." The Expedient Teachings are the multitude of world religions, each shaped by and for the people who adhere to it; the variance among faiths is accounted for by these shaping factors. But the Final Teaching at the (often esoteric) core of all faiths is essentially one and the same. The typology of techniques which follows here is aimed at the level of Final Teaching, where doctrinal differences fall away, the unity of practice coming into focus. Religious systems differ by virtue of accident of time and place, but the experience that is precursor to religion is everywhere the same. The unity in Final Teaching underlying the various techniques is inevitable: all men are alike in nervous system, and it is at this level that the laws governing Final Teaching operate. ...   more »

Dipesh Chakrabarty's book "Provincializing Europe" is an important theoretical study of colonialism and its legacies in India. While [many] works outline the atrocities and dleterious effects of colonialism abound, Chakrabarti, one of the founder-members of the Subaltern Studies movement in Indian (and world) history tells the story from the lesser known side of the strategies used by Indians (in colonial Kolkata) for making an "alternate habitation" of modernity - i.e. adapting it to their own uses. In doing this, he also makes a number of important theoretical points about cultural situatedness and conditions for effective cross-cultural dialog. This review, taken from the London Review of Books is by Amit Chaudhuri, a well-known younger Indian novelist and commentator.   more »

As Suzuki (1958) points out, in every religion it has been the core experience of an altered state which has preceded and been foundation for the subsequent structures of institution and theology. Too often it is the latter that have survived rather than the former; thus the modern crisis of the established churches might be seen in terms of the disappearance in our age of personally experienced transcendental states, the "living spirit" which is the common base of all religions. Still, for each being who enters these states without a guide, it is as though he were discoverng them for all the world for the first time. A biographer of Sri Aurobindo, for example, notes (Satprem, 1970, p. 256):
"One may imagine that Sri Aurobindo was the first to be baffled by his own experience and that it took him some years to understand exactly what had happened. We have described the ... experience ... as though the stages had been linked very carefully, each with its explanatory label, but the explanations came long afterwards, at that moment he had no guiding landmarks."
This paper begins in Part I with a detailed discussion of the 'Visuddhimagga' account of Gotama Buddha's teachings on meditation and higher states of consciousness––perhaps the most detailed and extensive report extant of one being's explorations within the mind. ...   more »

...The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, ...   more »

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has just taken another step forward by shipping the first 10 computers from the manufacturer in Taiwan, to the US State Department for testing. This is the first batch of the $100 laptops for children in poor countries such as Nigeria, China, Brazil, Egypt and Thailand who have already placed an order for 1 million laptops... India was part of the program initially until Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reversed the decision to back the OLPC project. ...   more »

I think this article, from the November06 issue of Discover Magazine, is a nice complement to the "Evo-Devo" NYRB article Rich posted below.

"People used to think that once your epigenetic code was laid down in early development, that was it for life," says Moshe Szyf, a pharmacologist with a bustling lab at McGill University in Montreal. "But life is changing all the time, and the epigenetic code that controls your DNA is turning out to be the mechanism through which we change along with it. Epigenetics tells us that little things in life can have an effect of great magnitude." ...   more »

Terence McKenna is a psychedelic explorer, ethnopharmacologist and theorist of time. Rupert Sheldrake is a controversial biologist, best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance, the idea that there is an inherent memory in nature. Ralph Abraham is a chaos mathematician and pioneer in the field of computer graphics.

TERENCE: In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors.
RALPH: It's true. We have to misuse our language even to talk about these things.
RUPERT: If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe.
TERENCE: Humans are said to be the measure of all things.
RUPERT: This is humanism. To adopt the alternative tradition of animism and to recognize the living spirits and souls of all nature is profoundly repugnant to humanism, yet it is the common ground of all human civilization, thought, and tradition. As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called Mephistopheles. ...    more »

I've just come across an interesting blog called "Evolutionary Mind: Science and Spirituality for the New Millennium." It's administered by Daniel Rizzuto, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). -- Here's a sample posting:

"Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found that experienced meditators have a thicker cortex in brain areas associated with attention and sensory processing. ...   more »

"As one would expect from Buddhist practice, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, believes that there is a place for compassion in all aspects of life, even within the hallowed halls of science. In his most recent book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, he uses logic and specific examples to build a case for adding compassion, a broader view, and some degree of subjectivity into what many see as the otherwise sterile, reductionist practice of modern science. But how can this be done? In his far-ranging treatise, the Dalai Lama explores this question as it applies to physics, neuroscience, genetics, and ethics. Using a classic Buddhist approach, he does not provide answers, but--through comparisons and contrasts of Buddhist analytic thought and the scientific method--challenges us to think of our own solutions. ..."   more »

Scientists yesterday unveiled a partial draft of the genetic code of Neanderthals, a close relative of humans whose genome, when completed, could provide profound insights into what makes us human. -- The achievement demonstrates the feasibility of determining the entire genetic makeup of Neanderthals, as well as other extinct species, using DNA from fossils, the researchers said. The draft includes less than 1 percent of the DNA from a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil, but the researchers said they expect to have a complete draft in two years. ...   more »

A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace. -- Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos. ...   more »

I've copied here part of the prior ongoing discussion re "Derrida, Death and Forgiveness" by Andrew J. McKenna. This part begins with Rich's posting about Herbert Guenther's book "From Reductionism to Creativity, rDrogs-chen and the New Science of Mind," and continues through a fascinating dialogue re systems theory, the Vedas & the Vedantic Method, Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Integral Yoga. - I noted Debashish's comment that he finds a lack in Buddhism (or Guenther's version of it) related to the "Divine Maya of Supermind." -- However, my personal impression is that the Buddhist ontology/method now has significantly more influence on Western intellectuals and opinion makers (especially Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps because of the work of the Dali Lama) than does Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, which most Westerners have little or no awareness of.

My questions are:
1) Is Buddhism in fact somehow lacking in its ontology and/or its methods, compared to those presented by Sri Aurobindo as Integral Yoga? If so, why has it become so much more well known in the West than Integral Yoga?
2) Is there anything those of us who are partial to Sri Aurobindo's approach can do to increase its influence in the West?
3) Is there a possible integration between Buddhism and Integral Yoga, perhaps along the lines hinted at by Debashish as a "gnosis ... which involves entire realms of practice through transformed ontologies (the triple transformation) ?" ~ ron   more »

... All across this country, the voices of the American people have called out for peace. All across this country, the American people's votes have registered a strong vote of confidence in a process that will take us out of Iraq. We have to now harness this energy. Let's continue to work together to take steps towards organizing this powerful peace movement in this country so that, not only do we get out of Iraq, but we stop the wars of the future. ...   more »

Part 1 was, after the two introductory cantos which set up the central conflict of Savitri, the story of Aswapati, the Traveller of the Worlds, who explores all the levels of Consciousness and beyond, and calls down the Missioned Soul, Savitri. ...   more »

FORESTS are increasing in countries across the world after centuries of being destroyed for their wood and to make way for people, according to [new] research.
By measuring the density of trees rather than simply the area on which they grow, scientists have calculated that forests are increasing in almost half of the world’s 50 most wooded nations. -- Forests are still diminishing in some countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia. In others, such as China, they are now expanding, although world stocks are still about 2.5 per cent lower now than in 1990. ...   more »

... India’s current level of consumption (ecological footprint) is .8 gha (global hectares per capita) - already double India’s biocapacity of .4 gha, although it is significantly below humanity’s consumption level of 2.2 gha, which is 25% above the planet’s biocapacity of 1.18 gha. At India’s current level of exponential economic growth (7.5%) and population growth (1.7%), its economy will quadruple and its population will double by 2050. If Auroville doesn’t take this situation seriously and manifest a viable alternative infrastructure and economy that works, its real reason for existing, along with humanity’s as a whole, may never be realized. ...   more »

I felt this email from Frances Beinecke, the President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was worth sharing.

You and I have got a lot to celebrate -- finally!
We have fought so unbelievably hard for six long and difficult years to defend our environment against a House and Senate leadership that has endeavored -- often on a weekly basis -- to sacrifice our natural heritage for the sake of Big Oil and other powerful special interests. ...consider this: of the "Dirty Dozen" (the 13 members of Congress targeted by the League of Conservation Voters for the poorest environmental voting records), nine were defeated.
On the flip side, eight out of nine of the League's "Environmental Champions" won their races. Dozens of candidates -- from both parties -- who ran on forward-looking energy policies were chosen by voters. At least 20 pro-environment challengers unseated anti-environment incumbents in the House. And Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger won strong voter support by signing a Global Warming Solutions Act.
Last Tuesday may well go down as one of the greenest days in American political history. ...   more »

Phil Psilos is a researcher in contemporary spiritual art throughout the world who is in the process of preparing an art archive. At present he is headed for India where he will travel extensively. He will be in Pondicherry and Auroville just after the New Year (2007).   more »

I'm posting the following interview with Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley, by Melvin McLeod, the Editor of the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun, to provide a bit more depth on Peter's views than given by my partial transcript of his 5-minute 'QuickTalk' that I posted a few days ago ...

Increasingly, we’re directly incorporating into our work different practices that have been around for a long time, such as various types of meditation. It started with the work on dialogue. We found that dialogue often involved silence, and so maybe we needed to actually cultivate the capacity to sit in silence. And guess what? That started to look a lot like traditional forms of meditation or contemplation. ...   more »

This is a chapter on Evolution from R.Y. Deshpande's just published book based on Book VI of Sri Aurobindo's "Savitri, The Book of Fate" - which deals with Narad's Arrival at Ashwapathy's kingdom of Madra. Deshpande reviews here the philosophical approaches which try to explain Becoming in the Cosmos, the meaning of Time and human destiny. His wide-ranging contemplation includes the nature of Time as seen through determinism and probability in the debates of Science, early Greek phulosophy in Heraclitus and Paramenides, Kant's reflections on the limits of rational knowledge and empirical experience and more recent evolutionary thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Samuel Alexander and Teilhard de Chardin, before settling on Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of Integral Non-Dualism.   more »