As part of my preparation for an intensive training I'm starting in January on the Big Island of Hawaii with the innovative physicist Nassim Haramein, I'm now reading the book The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I recommend this book.

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...The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left Hand. we could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. ...   more »

Prabuddha Bharata of August 2005 carries an article by Dr Anil Baran Ray presenting Bankim Chandra Chattopadyaya’s ideas about Indian nationalism and emergence of the Indian identity. He introduces the author as follows: “Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya (1838¬-94), the master litterateur of Bengal, called the ‘emperor of literature’ mainly for his novels, was an essayist par excellence as well. Among the numerous essays and satires that he produced, quite a few focused on political themes and issues. Bankim Chandra’s political ideas can be gleaned from those essays and satires as also from his novels such as the Ananda Math. Drawing upon such sources, the present article proposes to reflect on Bankim Chandra’s concept of nationalism in terms of its sources and nature as also its characteristic contribution towards the development of the Indian identity.”

The present excerpt deals with one particular theme, Nationalism seen in the image of the Mother Goddess, culminating in his composition of Bande Matarm, the song that became the battle-cry of the awakened youth of the country, a song that inspired Sri Aurobindo to bestow Rishi-hood to its author. The present article could be read along with the two posted here recently: India’s Independence and the Spiritual Destiny by RY Deshpande and The Spirit of the Nation by Makarand Paranjape...   more »

Al-Kemi recounts the story of the eighteen months that Andrew VandenBroeck, a painter and writer, spent in daily contact with the remarkable French philosopher, hermetist, and Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961). Structured like a mystery, and distilled in the crucible of memory for fifteen years, Al-Kemi provides a passionately felt, personal, and dramatic introduction to the startling world of this contemporary alchemist (from back cover).

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What from a spiritual point of view might be the truth behind the recent history of India, particularly its independence? To answer this question, we will have to peep behind the veil of politics, economics, and culture. These are only the exoteric coverings of world events, the esoteric kernel of whose inner significance is usually hidden from most people.

Writing more than 100 years ago, Swami Vivekananda explained what this hidden truth about India was: "Here in this blessed land, the foundation, the backbone, the life-center is religion and religion alone. In India religious life forms the center, the keynote of the whole music of nation."

In other words, in India, religion forms the base, politics and economics, the superstructure. To change the latter, you have to act on the former. This is what revolutionaries in India have recognized down the ages. The greatest impact could be made by those who altered the religious and spiritual organization of society. Any number of examples can be cited: the Buddha, Shankaracharya, Basava, Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya, and in more recent times, Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and even Ambedkar.

The importance of dharma in Indian life has been summed up well by Sri Aurobindo in his famous Uttarpara speech in 1909: "When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatan Dharma (Hinduism) that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharma that shall expand and extend itself over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the Dharma that India exists. To magnify the religion means to magnify the country." When Aurobindo was in jail, the Divine actually spoke to him, giving him the following message:

Since long ago I have been preparing this uprising and now the time has come and it is I who will lead it to its fulfillment." At the end of this historic speech, Aurobindo repeated his main contention: "I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it, it moves and with it, it grows. When Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines.

Of course, it needs to be stressed that by Sanatan Dharma, Aurobindo meant the eternal, universal religion, not any particular sect or creed: "If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose."   more »

At the midnight hour of 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the solemn promise of India awaking to life and freedom. At that moment of history he was claiming Independence from the British. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge...At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Sixty years have passed today and it is time for assessment and introspection, as to what extent the soul of India has been able to find its authentic and fulfilling utterance, to what extent the pledges made have been implemented. Has India awakened to the greatness of her soul? Indeed, what is it that constitutes the greatness of a nation’s soul? If truth-values found the greatness of a nation’s or an individual’s soul, the question is: Are we living in them?

The real problem of the society, as in the case of the individual, is for it to find its soul, the true collective soul… There has to be a conviction that, culmination of the social development into the Age of the ageless Spirit is the secret urge and motivating force behind the evolutionary Nature’s long painstaking and patient working. Humanity’s conscious participation in it will assuredly hasten this triumph and this glory. The soul of India has the intuition of perceiving these possibilities and India’s freedom is meant for its growth in the progression of the manifesting spirit. If this can be kept as the focus, the celebration of India’s sixty years of independence will then be truly significant.   more »

A Power within her answered the still Voice:
“I am thy portion here charged with thy work,
As thou myself seated for ever above,
Speak to my depths, O great and deathless Voice,
Command, for I am here to do thy will.”
The Voice replied: “Remember why thou cam’st:
Find out thy soul, recover thy hid self,
In silence seek God's meaning in thy depths,
Then mortal nature change to the divine.
Open God's door, enter into his trance.
Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:
In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain
His vast Truth wake within and know and see.
Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit's sight:
In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shalt see the Eternal's body in the world,
Know him in every voice heard by thy soul:
In the world's contacts meet his single touch;
All things shall fold thee into his embrace.
Conquer thy heart's throbs, let thy heart beat in God:
Thy nature shall be the engine of his works,
Thy voice shall house the mightiness of his Word:
Then shalt thou harbour my force and conquer Death.”   more »

In March 1967 Huta began the work of expressing some of Sri Aurobindo’s poems through paintings. Under the Mother’s inspiration and guidance she selected certain passages from the poems and completed fifty-four paintings, which were all shown to the Mother in September of that year. This new book presents these paintings along with the lines which inspired them from some of Sri Aurobindo’s most well-known poems, such as Invitation, Who, Thought the Paraclete, and A God’s Labour. Appropriate quotations from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, some comments on the paintings by the Mother, and background information and photographs accompany the plates. The entire book is printed on art paper.   more »

An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. -- Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November.

The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75. -- A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood.

"We're used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million," Chesley said. "Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs." ...   more »

Thaindian News

New Delhi, Dec 20 (ANI): President Pratibha Devisingh Patil will pay an official visit to Andhra Pradesh from December 21 to January 6.

On Friday, President Patil will visit Puducherry where she will attend the inaugural function of the 34th Jawahar Lal Nehru National Science Exhibition for Children-2007.

The President will also visit the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Auroville on Saturday.

During her visit, President will tour the Andaman and Nicobar Islands from December 26 to 28 where she will be visit the rehabilitation work sites in the Tsunami affected areas and interact with the islanders.

In Hyderabad, she will attend various programmes organised by the State Government and the Ministry of Defence, including Defence Research Establishments and the Air Force Training Institute. (ANI)

Thanks to Ashok Hindocha for sending me the following details of a historically significant function that was held on 12 December 2007, at 49 St Stephen’s Avenue London W12. During the function English Heritage Blue Plaque for Sri Aurobindo was unveiled by Monnou Bhandari. ...   more »

This is the season for year-end lists of books in which the mainstream review media steer literate culture away from deep questions about how our world works and who we are and toward celebrations of narcissism, celebrity gossip, and literary cliques. What I wrote in 1991 in "The Emerging Third Culture", still pertains today:

A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages? ...   more »

Thanks to RYD for his previous article, 'Laws of Nature, Source Unknown'—by Dennis Overbye (from NYT), which led me to this article by the same author. ~ ronjon

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Ten years ago at the AAAS, Dennis Overbye, author of the classic 'Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos', found himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon in an auditorium watching a handful of historians and physicists arguing about whether Einstein's first wife Mileva had actually invented relativity. This was an eye opener to him, to put it mildly. He was astounded that there could be any mystery about either the origin of relativity or about Einstein's life. He had just assumed that he was so famous and so recent that everything that could be known about him was known.

What followed was a 10-year investigation in which Overbye immersed himself in Einstein's life and wrote his recently published book, 'Einstein In Love'.

"Romantically speaking, Einstein always felt — and always told his girlfriends — that Paradise was just around the corner," he says," but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time. During this project I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, simply because I have more a sense of what he actually did — and how hard it was — than before. If he was around now, I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister." ...   more »

[Further to Paul Davies’s article Taking Science on Faith in the New York Times, published
on 24 November 2007, and posted by Ronjon at the sciy, 3 December 2007, at:

http://www.sciy.org/blog/_archives/2007/12/3/3389652.html/

here in the sequel is Laws of Nature, Source Unknown, by Dennis Overbye appearing on 18 December 2007, at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html/

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, says the author, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers—all the way back to Augustine—suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe—in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

But the question that has to be asked is: What is it exactly that we mean by the expression laws of the physical world, by the mysterious word ‘law’? Possibly, we represent by it just our way of understanding the physical world, the comprehensibility of the incomprehensible, comprehending things in our own way, in our own terms, and never making an attempt to apprehend them. But the physical world itself might be thinking about itself in its own way and not necessarily in the way we look at it. The dichotomy between the ‘laws’ and the ‘universe’ exists in our mind and not in the mind of the physical world. The “chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws, which ‘came’ first—the laws or the universe?” exists in our mind and not in the physical world’s mind. If this is so, then we may have re-examine the following:

Maybe both alternatives—Plato’s eternal stone tablet and Dr. Wheeler’s higgledy-piggledy process—will somehow turn out to be true. The dichotomy between forever and emergent might turn out to be as false eventually as the dichotomy between waves and particles as a description of light. Who knows?

RYD]

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Thanks to Rich for recommending the excellent openDemocracy.net, in which this article appeared. ~ ronjon

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The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Where is leadership in the quest for a new model to come from? The results of a BBC opinion-poll inviting the views of 22,000 people in twenty-one countries, released in November 2007, included the striking discovery that the Chinese were the most willing to change their lifestyle and accept higher energy prices in order to save the environment. ...   more »

Cancer will claim 7.6 million lives worldwide this year, and more than 12 million people will receive cancer diagnoses, according to Global Cancer Facts and Figures 2007, the newest edition to the American Cancer Society's family of Facts and Figures reports. ...

Global Cancer Facts and Figures 2007 also includes data on growing tobacco use in developing countries, warning that if current patterns continue, the number of smokers worldwide will reach 2 billion by 2030. In 2000, an estimated 5 million people died from diseases related to smoking, and of these, about 1.42 million were from cancer. Approximately 84% of the nearly 1.3 billion smokers worldwide live in developing countries, says the World Health Organization. ...   more »

Dr. Mani Bhaumik is the co-inventor of the laser technology that made Lasik eye surgery possible. His contributions to science merited the rare dual election as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, while his successes won him a spot on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Eventually he discovered that :happiness is an inside job," and immersed himself in study of the hidden relationship between science and spirituality and the integration of mind and matter. He has published over fifty papers in professional journals and maintains a lively correspondence with other physicists around the world. His alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, bestowed him with an honorary D.Sc. degree for lifetime academic achievements. Dr. Bhaumik is the founder of the Mani Bhaumik Educational Foundation, which currently provides full scholarships to sixty seven extremely bright but underprivileged Indian young men and women to enable them to earn a university degree in science, engineering or medicine. His US Foundation, Cosmogenics, is set up to foster research in consciousness and healing as well as mind/body integration. ...   more »

Within a few days after my arrival as an aspirant to the Ashram, permission was granted to me to meet the Mother once a week. She even came to my room once in a while and sanctified it by her presence. It was on these occasions that I have been able to fill the pages of my "Book of Life" with her priceless instructions. It seemed as if she taught me to walk step by step, to see true by granting the inner vision, gave me the strength to know myself by sifting the rubbish heap of falsehoods to get at things that were true. She was moulding our entire life for a God-oriented existence, a birth into a new consciousness, an inner life. Before my coming here, Nolini once wrote to me: "Very few things of the ordinary life would be of use here". Gradually this remark of his was becoming clear while living here. …   more »

A jet of highly charged radiation from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting another galaxy nearby -- an act of galactic violence that astronomers said yesterday they have never seen before.

Using images from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory and other sources, scientists said the extremely intense jet from the larger galaxy can be seen shooting across 20,000 light-years of space and plowing into the outer gas and dust of the smaller one. ...

"What we've identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire," said Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. He said any planets orbiting the stars of the smaller galaxy would be dramatically affected, and any life forms would likely die as the jet's radiation transformed the planets' atmosphere. ...   more »

History of Religion in 90 Seconds. Good illustration.   more »

Recently, astronauts voted on the top photographs taken by Hubble, in its 16-year journey so far. Remarking in the article from the Daily Mail, reporter Michael Hanlon says the photos "illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but also almost impossibly beautiful."...    more »

As in the vigilance of the sleepless night…
She sat staring at the dumb tread of Time
And the approach of ever-nearing Fate,
A summons from her being's summit came,
A sound, a call that broke the seals of Night.
Above her brows where will and knowledge meet
A mighty Voice invaded mortal space.
It seemed to come from inaccessible heights
And yet was intimate with all the world
And knew the meaning of the steps of Time
And saw eternal destiny's changeless scene
Filling the far prospect of the cosmic gaze.
As the Voice touched, her body became a stark
And rigid golden statue of motionless trance,
A stone of God lit by an amethyst soul.
Around her body's stillness all grew still:
Her heart listened to its slow measured beats,
Her mind renouncing thought heard and was mute…   more »

The late Prof Mangesh V Nadkarni gave a talk at Savitri Bhavan on 5 March 2007, his last talk, and covered Canto 2 and Canto 3 of the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Book Two of Savitri. The talk is entitled The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, The Glory and the Fall of Life and has now been transcribed as an article that appears in Savitri Bhavan’s Invocation, Study Notes # 27 which has just been published. I am reproducing here the last paragraph of the article which can cause us some concern about the nature of Savitri as has been given to us, an epic embodying the transformative power which the Yogi-Poet has put in it, Savitri the Radiant Daughter, kanyā téjasvinī, of Sri Aurobindo. It is unfortunate that it has come out posthumously, otherwise I would have personally expressed my reservation to the eminent Savitri-expounder, about his statement that “Savitri is only an outer body, this form of Savitri is only an outer shell,” a statement which can rob it of its full and dynamic Mantric force working in the aspiring soul of man. Without a fuller elaboration of what is exactly implied by it, this can cause considerable uneasiness to us.   more »