Abbasid Gardens in Baghdad and Samarra

Not Mecca the birthplace of Mohammad nor Medina where he became the Prophet and King, but Baghdad of the Abbasids was the centre of Islamic culture and civilization for five great centuries. Founded in 762 by the mighty Caliph al-Mansur on the banks of the Tigris this old Babylonian city, aptly called the Gift of God, remained in its conquering glory until the Mongols subjugated it in 1258. Baghdad as capital of the Caliphate became in the Middle Ages the seat of power and also had the distinction of being the intellectual centre of the world. A blaze of philosophical, scientific and literary creations brought to mankind another spirit of life’s opulence. The poet Anwari praised it as a seat of learning and art, with gorgeous crafts on display in streets and marts. Here were a thousand splendid mansions, villas and palaces “simple without, but within, nothing but azure and gold…. The royal palace at Baghdad had on its floors 22,000 carpets and on its walls 38,000 tapestries out of which 12,500 were of silk.”<br>
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When Mahomedanism appeared, Christianity vanished out of Asia, because it had lost its meaning. Mahomed tried to re-establish the Asiatic gospel of human equality in the spirit. All men are equal in Islam—whatever their social position or political power—nor is any man debarred from the full development of his manhood by his birth or low original station in life. All men are brothers in Islam and the bond of religious unity overrides all other divisions and differences. But Islam also was limited and imperfect, because it confined the ideal of brotherhood and equality to the limits of a single creed, and was further deflected from its true path by the rude and undeveloped races which it drew into its embrace. Another revelation of the old truth is needed ...   more »

...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 »

The latest grandiose and probably unrealistic idea for establishing a world-class university is Anil Agarwal’s Vedanta University, planned to be opened in 2008 in Orissa. Mr. Agarwal, a mining magnate, has pledged an initial $1 billion for the project. International architects have been hired, the State authorities are on board, and a group of academic leaders is being hired from around the world. The idea is to create a university with 100,000 students, offering degrees in the major fields and stressing an interdisciplinary approach. While the details of the university’s organisation have not been revealed, it is intended to look like Harvard and Stanford. While it is always a good deed when one of the world’s richest men takes an interest in higher education, it is unlikely that Vedanta University will achieve the desired results, no matter how much money Mr. Agarwal spends on it. In India, where so much of the emerging private higher education sector is de facto for-profit and narrowly focusses on a few high-demand vocational fields, it is good that a major industrialist is investing in higher education. The clear public interest motivation for the university is also heartening as is the goal of planning an institution that will offer an array of disciplines and not just business administration or information technology.   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 »

As if inclined before some gracious god Who has out of his mist of greatness shone To fill with beauty his adorer's hours, She bowed and touched his feet with worshipping hands; She made her life his world for him to tread And made her body the room of his delight, Her beating heart a remembrancer of bliss. He bent to her and took into his own Their married yearning joined like folded hopes; As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed, Wedded to all he had been, became himself, An inexhaustible joy made his alone, He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.   more »

Burning Man 2006 satellite view. (~ 40,000 participants)

Well, I'm off to Burning Man 2007 tomorrow (Saturday) and will be pretty much out of touch with SCIY (no phones or Internet access out there on the remote playa). Rumors are that this year's festival will be the biggest in its 18 years, even more than the record 40,000 last year. This is truly a remarkable experience when you realize that all the infrastructure for a self-contained international city is literally created by volunteers out of nothing in a few days on a barren, hot, lifeless desert site. It's fully populated for a week, and then completely dismantled, in accordance with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management regulations for use of the site, with no evidence of it having been there, not even a flake of glitter! ...   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 »

A very beautiful poem, one of the very best you have written. The last six lines, one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank—these eight lines—with the very best in English poetry.   more »

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Originally published in Dutch, an English version of Beyond Man was brought out by HarperCollins in 1997. The present edition is an exact (and perhaps photographic) reprint. Some spelling mistakes have been set right. Ten years ago it was very refreshing to read Van Vrekhem’s child-like approach to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The same holds true today as we turn the pages steadily to learn about these two brilliances who brought back the Vedic spirit of exploration to our days with the promise that life on Earth can definitely be transformed into the life divine. ...

As an Aurobindonian poet wrote at that time: “A light is lit in everyone, and those/ emblazon the Living Flame.” The Aurobindonian yoga being a collective yoga, this conclusion is inevitable. Having listed the questions, Beyond Man signs off with the seal of faith: “The Great Change in evolution is happening around us and within us, whether we want it or not.” For a world caught in despair and defeatism, this is nectarean hope.   more »

His name means the Green One or Verdant One, he is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities ...

And I have felt....a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

~ William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey   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 »

Every year, tens of thousands of participants gather to create Black Rock City in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, dedicated to self-expression, self-reliance, and art as the center of community. They leave one week later, having left no trace. Read Burning Man's mission statement, 10 Principles, and learn more about this incredible experience. ...   more »

Descend, O Happiness, with thy moon-gold feet,
Enrich earth's floors upon whose sleep we lie.

O my bright beauty's princess, Savitri,
By my delight and thy own joy compelled
Enter my life, thy chamber and thy shrine.

In the great quietness where spirits meet,
Led by my hushed desire into my woods
Let the dim rustling arches over thee lean;
One with the breath of things eternal live,
Thy heartbeats near to mine, till there shall leap
Enchanted from the fragrance of the flowers
A moment which all murmurs shall recall
And every bird remember in its cry.   more »