Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Sri Aurobindo's Gayatri Mantra, in his hand

ronjon — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:11:00 -0700

Let us meditate on the most auspicious form of Savitri
on the Light of the Supreme
which shall illumine us with the Truth.

What is SCIY ?

ronjon — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:00:00 -0700

Welcome to the Science, Culture and Integral Yoga webzine - "SCIY"

SCIY (pronounced "sci-y") is a free webzine. Start by scrolling down this page.

SCIY's Purpose Statement

Vision: To consider emerging planetary science and culture in the context of the "Integral Yoga" of Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual colleague the Mother.

Mission: To explore trends within contemporary science and culture fostering the co-evolution of integral spirituality, scientific research and emerging planetary culture.

Goals: To encourage mutually respectful dialog among those who aspire to create a world of increasing truth, beauty and sustainable human unity.

Who we are: The founders and core group of SCIY are engaged in the study and practice of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga," a non-sectarian spiritual path toward realizing "a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity."* - Our aspiration for SCIY is to foster inclusive scientific, cultural and spiritual research that serves this realization. We invite those who share this aspiration to join us.

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* Quote from the Mother in her Charter for the Auroville universal township project being built near Pondicherry, India.
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"There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this:

'I invite you to the great adventure...' "

~ The Mother
_____________

SCIY is a large site with thousands of articles & comments. Click here for important usage tips & posting policies.

Atlantis—True Story or Cautionary Tale?—by Willie Drye

RY Deshpande — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:22:16 -0700

If the writing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had not contained so much truth about the human condition, his name would have been forgotten centuries ago. But one of his most famous stories—the cataclysmic destruction of the ancient civilization of Atlantis—is almost certainly false. So why is this story still repeated more than 2,300 years after Plato's death? "It's a story that captures the imagination," says James Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York. "It's a great myth. It has a lot of elements that people love to fantasize about." Plato told the story of Atlantis around 360 B.C. The founders of Atlantis, he said, were half god and half human. They created a utopian civilization and became a great naval power. Their home was made up of concentric islands separated by wide moats and linked by a canal that penetrated to the center. The lush islands contained gold, silver, and other precious metals and supported an abundance of rare, exotic wildlife. There was a great capital city on the central island.

May 17 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Live within;
be not shaken by outward happenings.

~ Sri Aurobindo

May 16 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

True love,
that which fulfills and illumines,
is not the love one receives
but the love one gives.

~ The Mother

Neural Buddhists—by David Brooks

RY Deshpande — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:42:51 -0700

…In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I'm not qualified to take sides, believe me. I'm just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We're in the middle of a scientific revolution. It's going to have big cultural effects.

The Reason Behind High Oil Prices

ronjon — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

...Commodities have often been the refuge for investors who have lost money on equities or fixed-income investments. Moreover, the commodities rush today is not limited to oil; now we also have runaway food and feed prices. Could it be that all the financial losses on subprime mortgages, plus the anticipation that the option ARM mortgages about to reset could be an even bigger problem, combined with the huge losses in securities last year, are why investment money today is flooding into often unregulated commodities, where the demand pricing of the final goods is inelastic? Consider this: You may not buy gasoline or even eat today, but by next Monday you'll probably have to do both, no matter what it costs. Basically, besides enabling the Fed to bail out Wall Street and our banks again, every time you gas up or eat you may be paying investors to cover other financial losses. We know that investors can't control their losses on mortgages, securities, or bad loans. But, demonstrably, if not restrained they can drive up the price of goods that we can't get out of buying. Odds are, that's what's really been going on. ...

May 15 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

When you no longer possess anything,
you can become as vast as the universe.

~ The Mother

"The Final Empire," by Wm. H. Kötke. Chap. 4: THE FOREST

ronjon — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

This is Chapter 4 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first three chapters, go to:

• Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis
• Chapter 2: The End of Civilization
• Chapter 3: Soil-The Basis of Life

I hope you find this as interesting and important as I have,

~ ronjon

May 14 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

You have no right
to use any material object whatsoever
if you do not take care of it.

~ The Mother

May 13 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Divine is in things also and that
is why they must be treated with care.

~ The Mother

Passing Moments

RY Deshpande — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:48:38 -0700

Passing Moments
Here is a set of poems selected from my book Passing Moments that was brought out by M/S Ultra Publications, Bangalore, India, in 2002, ISBN # 81-87544-03-1. These poems, totalling 49, were written during 19 June-18 July, 1998; another, a much longer narrative running into 40 stanzas, dated 18 August 1998, also followed generally the same style of composition but it has been kept aside from the present selection. While taking the opportunity of presenting these selected poems here I have touched them up lightly at places. But the important feature of this presentation is that of illustrations accompanying them. For this purpose I have capitalized on the Google Images quite extensively, Images with all their amazing variety and abundant creative excellence. But then at the same time there are also several limitations, they kind of putting rigid geometrical boundaries around what the swift and supple enthusiasm of inspiration can convey, they not seizing the much subtler and suggestive feeling of the poetic language. Yet it is believed that one can leap over this not really frozen sense of the image-phrases, even as they do possess a loaded multi-meaninged softness if one is insightful to see what lies behind them; the visual impact they provide can bring something of it when seen in inner association with what the hues and shades are trying to communicate. Perhaps in that respect the revelatory power itself can come out in another living and vivid language of sight and sound, each enhancing the sense more perceptively. But this is an attempt and I do not know how far it has succeeded or is going to be acceptable. In any case, I must express my silent but sincere gratitude to the numerous authors of the Images for this use of their works for my purposes, sometimes with free adaptations of their imaginative and artistic creations, a use which is not for any commercial gains. I hope in the process I’ve not infringed on any copyrights.

Happy Days Are Here Again - Not!

ronjon — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

...The risk analyst Sayajit Das has had the most insight into the financial markets dimension of this meltdown. Well before the credit crunch hit, he was warning that it was coming and what would bring it on. So what's his take now? That what's happened so far is only phase one in a massive deleveraging of a world addicted to debt. ...

It's a classic asset price cycle. Look at just about every boom and bust cycle in history, and you'll find it was built on cheap credit, easy lending and lax underwriting standards. And this boom was the biggest. The legacy is a burden of household debt without precedent. As real estate prices boomed, households felt wealthier and borrowed against their (inflated) assets. As the price of property soared way beyond the growth in wages, people borrowed more and more to break into the market, running up debts on credit cards to make ends meet. In countries such as the US, where wages were stagnant or falling in real terms, people borrowed against property to maintain their lifestyles.

Now the easy finance is drying up. If there's a serious global downturn that pushes up unemployment rates, it could get ugly, as people unable to service their debts are forced to sell assets causing a further downward spiral. Default rates will rise and financial institutions will suffer further losses. Beyond the household sector, there's the vast army of self-employed workers who set up small businesses after the corporate downsizing cycle of the 1990s. Many borrowed against their homes to do so, and have survived on thin margins during good economic times. In any downturn, they'll be the first to go. ...

May 12 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

To establish order around oneself
helps to bring order within oneself.

~ The Mother

Effects of the US recession on Asian growth, by Nouriel Roubini

ronjon — Sun, 11 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

In early 2006, economist Nouriel Roubini broke rank from the prevailing consensus opinion and blew the whistle on the US housing bubble and held out grim warnings of a US ‘recession’. That contrarian bearish outlook has been proved spectacularly right two years later, and Roubini, a former White House aide and chairman of the Roubini Global Economics Monitor, is justifiably credited with having first ‘called’ the sub-prime crisis. Here are his latest forecasts:

"In the last few day I have been at the Asian Development Bank meetings in Madrid and then visited Hong Kong and China. I have presented my view on the severity of the US recession and its potential effects on economic growth in China and Asia. Will this region decouple from the US economic contraction?

The answer depends on the severity of this recession. If the US recession is short and shallow (a V-shaped recession lasting six months) then there is enough of a domestic growth dynamics in the rest of the world and in Asia that the global economic slowdown would be very modest. But if the recession is more severe (a U-shaped recession lasting 12 to 18 months) then that US contraction, together with the sharp slowdown in the other G3 economies (a good fraction of the EU could be soon in a recession - specifically UK, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal - and the rest of the EU is sharply slowing down; while Japan is also headed towards a recession) will negatively affect growth in China and Asia, much more than currently expected by macro analysts and markets. Direct and indirect trade channels, financial channels, credit crunch channels, dollar weakness channels and confidence channels would lead to a signifcant slowdown of growth in Asia. ..."

May 11 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

To do with care all that one does
is the basis of all progress.

~ The Mother

Suicide Dictionary, by Paul Lonely

ronjon — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:42:15 -0700

I met Paul Lonely last night at a friend's gathering. When I told him a bit about SCIY, he said he was an admirer of Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri, and graciously offered to send me a link to his own new book of "post post-modern" poetry: Suicide Dictionary. I've been looking over his website and his work is quite impressive. E.g., see below the words of one of his many enthusiastic reviewers, the artist-musician Michael Garfield. ~ ronjon

I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision - the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the cafe trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you'll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that. What Paul is doing for us - the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory - is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. ... Freed from the conventional trappings of historical spiritual texts, blindingly aware of its own cultural embeddedness and laughing at it compassionately, Suicide Dictionary belongs in a thin pantheon with the paintings of Alex Grey as a message for and from our collective future. It is playful and colorful and fluid, in stark opposition to even the most inspiring theories of the world into which we walk with one eye open. That Paul has used language to communicate this utterly translinguistic vision is a testament to his cleverness his book is winking at all of us from behind the veil, like the Tao Te Ching or its formal predecessor, the Upanishads. Every page rings brightly with the cause to which he is devoted. ...

74: My God is will and love

RY Deshpande — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:21:42 -0700

World-spirit, I was thy equal spirit born.
My will too is a law, my strength a god.
I am immortal in my mortality.
I tremble not before the immobile gaze
Of the unchanging marble hierarchies
That look with the stone eyes of Law and Fate.
My soul can meet them with its living fire.
Out of thy shadow give me back again
Into earth's flowering spaces Satyavan
In the sweet transiency of human limbs
To do with him my spirit's burning will.
I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,
I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.
Else shall the eternal spaces open to me
While round us strange horizons far recede,
Travelling together the immense unknown…
Wherever thou leadst his soul I shall pursue...

Design and the Elastic Mind: N.Y. MOMA

Rich — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:45:31 -0700

Design and the Elastic Mind at the New York Museum of Modern Art

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user's interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Please visit the online exhibition of this mind blowing exhibit of futuristic design at the link here....

May 10 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

...a little true love does more than
the most beautiful speeches.

~ The Mother

Posthuman Film Reveiws: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman by Davin Heckman (C Theory)

Rich — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:41:22 -0700

I have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to situate: films which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun with protagonists who are just as interested in character development as we are. While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman."

The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age" tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common usage is not entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated with Western Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. [1] Outside of non-modern folk tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition, nonhuman characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth.

In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces. The story remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent representation of the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural milieu (or, perhaps, the genre). ...

Ethical living: finding a laugh in climate change—by James Russell

RY Deshpande — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:27:54 -0700

Greens have brought much laughter to the world, but most of it has been at their expense. The British comedian, Marcus Brigstocke, says he struggles with this problem on a daily basis, more so since he increased his riffs on global warming in his routines following his 2007 Arctic voyage with Cape Farewell, an organisation that brings together artists and scientists to raise awareness of climate change. “It’s far and away the most difficult comedy subject IR 17;ve ever dealt with,” he says. “It’s tested me to the outer reaches of my ability as a writer.” Mr. Brigstocke is one of a small but growing number of comedians trying to wrestle some humour from climate change. Fellow British comic Rob Newman has been a committed environmental and political campaigner for many years. Recently he was at Hebden Bridge, northern England, doing stand-up at the town’s monthly Climate Chaos Kitchen on the subjects of peak oil and climate change…

May 9 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Do not look behind, look always
in front, at what you want to do -
and you are sure of progressing.

~ The Mother

Peak oil and The Limits to Growth: two parallel stories

ronjon — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

This is a good summary of the historical and current scenarios created by computer modeling. All but a few exceptional scenarios continue to show a horrific overshoot of the Earth's ecological carrying capacity and resulting collapse of human population and civilization as we know it. This analysis is by Ugo Bardi, a chemistry professor at the University of Firenze, Italy. ...

May 8 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Never grumble.
All sorts of forces enter you
when you grumble and
they pull you down. Keep smiling.

~ The Mother

The Wand of Awe—A Book Review by Aditya Sinha

RY Deshpande — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:11:07 -0700

A new Salman Rushdie novel is always a big event, filled with the anticipation and the expectation of the momentous. It seems that Rushdie knows this — or maybe the disappointment of the last three novels has forced him to face this reality. So what does he do? He weaves the magic of storytelling, the expectation of the listener, and the hopelessness of the artiste all into his tenth novel, and let it be declared at the outset: it is an enchantment. In the way that once you enter a hall of mirrors, you see a multiplicity of reflections, so can you see a multiplicity of alter egos that are the loci of The Enchantress of Florence. You see Rushdie as a prestidigitator, a nimble-fingered writer able to produce dizzying tricks with the stroke of his pen/keyboard, much like Mogor dell’Amore, a yellow-haired, lozenge-coated foreigner who turns up at Emperor Akbar’s court, with a story to tell, and whose own identity is the final twist of his story-within-a-story...

"The Final Empire," by Wm. H. Kötke. Chap. 3: SOIL-THE BASIS OF LIFE

ronjon — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

This is Chapter 3 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first two chapters, go to:

Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis
Chapter 2: The End of Civilization

I hope you find this book as interesting and important as I have, ~ ronjon

May 7 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

None can reach heaven
who has not passed through hell.

~ Sri Aurobindo

Future Bodies: Discipline, Control, & "the Yoga of Resistance"

Rich — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:58:01 -0700

Michel Foucault
In speaking of the disciple of the body especially, when the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault's: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault's archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves, as William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things". The future is a random other. For example, what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive, paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the discipling machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. rc..

Satyagraha: Simplicity & Splendor in the Glass—by Anne Midgette

RY Deshpande — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:14:23 -0700

The first impression is of simple beauty: a tenor voice, cushioned by the ebb and flow of repeating cadences from the orchestra. The stage, enclosed in a curving wall of corrugated metal, evokes a prison: We will be trapped for hours in a world in which nothing happens. But as the music morphs from one pattern to another, the stage picture reveals new vignettes. Piles of wastepaper rise up rustling from the chorus as giant homunculi. A bird walks past on stilt legs. And the corrugated wall opens to admit the towering pale figures of giant puppets, doughy men gathering briefly, like monsters or magi, around the central figure of the singer before departing again as if they had never been, in an evening that moves forward like a dream. The Improbable theater company's production of Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night (11 April 2008), represents the kind of work the Met should be doing. It is an important revival of a major recent piece. It is a significant work of theater. And it provides an all too rare demonstration of the fact that new opera can indeed be a contemporary art…

Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger

ronjon — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation... And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. -- The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007 ...

May 6 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Take Truth for your force,
take Truth for your refuge.

~ The Mother

Cosmic Conundrum—by Manoj K Das

RY Deshpande — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:40:35 -0700

They say it was the mother of all cosmic explosions. The blast, which took place on June 30, 1908, in Tunguska, Siberia, also remains one of the greatest mysteries of the world. Russia is now organising an international conference in Moscow to mark the centenary of the explosion. The Siberian riddle has fascinated the world since an object entered the atmosphere over western China and whizzed north, leaving a 5,000 degree hot trail in the sky, to hit the banks of the Tunguska river. The explosion has exposed the fragility of mankind to a blitzkrieg from outer space. It has also led to a wide range of theories. A virtual search for an explanation in the company of scientists engaged in unraveling its mystique is revealing…

May 5 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

There is no greater courage
than to be truthful.

~ The Mother

May 4 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

To be able to be regular is a great force,
one becomes master of one's time
and one's movements.

~ Sri Aurobindo

73: A sound pealed through the monstrous realm

RY Deshpande — Sat, 03 May 2008 21:56:30 -0700

...Back from the grandeur of my perilous realms
Go, mortal, to thy small permitted sphere!
Hasten swift-footed, lest to slay thy life
The great laws thou hast violated, moved,
Open at last on thee their marble eyes…

Future Bodies: Evolution & Progress

Rich — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:44:42 -0700

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

Alexander the Great's "Crown" Shield Discovered?—by Sara Goudarzi

RY Deshpande — Sat, 03 May 2008 02:43:12 -0700

An ancient Greek tomb thought to have held the body of Alexander the Great's father is actually that of Alexander's half brother, researchers say. This may mean that some of the artifacts found in the tomb—including a helmet, shield, and silver "crown"—originally belonged to Alexander the Great himself. Alexander's half brother is thought to have claimed these royal trappings after Alexander's death. The tomb was one of three royal Macedonian burials excavated in 1977 by archaeologists working in the northern Greek village of Vergina...

May 3 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Perfection is not a maximum or an extreme.
It is an equilibrium and a harmonisation.

~ The Mother

The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (available May 2, 2008)

Rich — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:38:28 -0700

Available Today May 2nd 2008. "Here are details that are not only reliable but transparent in letting their sources speak. Throughout we hear the voices of Sri Aurobindo and his contemporaries. Peter Heehs has written the definitive biography and a superb introduction to the life and thought of Sri Aurobindo." — Stephen Phillips, professor of philosophy and Asian studies, University of Texas at Austin

A cosmic insight from Stephen Hawking

RY Deshpande — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:20:47 -0700

The possibility of extraterrestrial life is a subject that has fascinated Hawking very much and on and off he speculates its possibility in a vigorous way. In fact he holds such a possibility quite firmly, perhaps more as a matter of a scientist’s faith than anything based on observed or observable facts. In one of his lectures he says: “Meeting a more advanced civilisation, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t think they were better off for it.” But that will hardly be of any consequence when it comes to the procedural aspects of scientific observations and conclusions. ~ RYD

As consumers step on the brakes, will the economy hit the wall?

ronjon — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

After years of piling up debt and neglecting to save, Americans are reining in their free-spending ways -- which could signal a long road ahead... -- "We're at a watershed moment," said Jay P. Feldman, an economist with Credit Suisse in New York. "The era of consumers living beyond their incomes is at an end."

Most economists expect the gross domestic product for the first three months of the year to show that consumption inched upward a few tenths of a point, enough to keep the economy above the zero mark -- though barely. That pales next to the 2.5% and 3% leaps of recent years, and much of the rise will be the result of Americans' paying more, especially for food and gas, not buying more.

"This is going to usher in a period when consumption is going to be as weak as we've seen it in two decades," predicted Edward F. McKelvey, senior economist with Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. ...

May 2 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Go within your little person and
you will find the key which
opens all the doors.

~ The Mother

SCIY's Readership sets new record in April 2008

ronjon — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 -0700

SCIY's page views totaled 1,986,013 hits through the end of April 2008.

We reached a new high of 36,102 Distinct Hosts Served (Distinct Readers) during the month of April 2008, a substantial 22% increase from March's previous record.

We had 158,669 total Page Views during the month of April 2008, a decrease of 8% from the record number of Page Views in March.

Our Bandwidth during April was 12,213 Total Megabytes Transferred, a slight decrease of 4% from the record Megabytes transferred in March.

These numbers indicate that our average Distinct Reader viewed slightly fewer pages during April than they did in March, possibly due to the longer average length of the articles posted during April. ...

Islamic Scholarship on India by Rajiv Malhotra

RY Deshpande — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:35:45 -0700

“That which has reached us from the discoveries of their clear thinking and the marvels of their inventions is the (game) of chess. The Indians have, in the construction of its cells, its double numbers, its symbols and secrets, reached the forefront of knowledge. They have extracted its mysteries from supernatural forces. While the game is being played and its pieces are being maneuvered, there appear the beauty of structure and the greatness of harmony. It demonstrates the manifestation of high intentions and noble deeds, as it provides various forms of warnings from enemies and points out ruses as well as ways to avoid dangers. And in this, there is considerable gain and useful profit.” …

Albert Hofmann, 102; Swiss chemist discovered LSD

ronjon — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

Albert Hofmann was a synthetic chemist with Sandoz Laboratories, now Novartis, in Switzerland when in 1943 he stumbled on the hallucinatory effects of LSD. After it became seen by Harvard's Timothy Leary and others in the '60s as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, and then as a major recreational drug, ...

May 1 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Awaken our slumbering energies,
stimulate our courage, enlighten us,
O Lord, show us the Way.

~ The Mother

"The Final Empire," by Wm. H. Kötke. Chap. 2: THE END OF CIVILIZATION

ronjon — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:00:00 -0700

This is Chapter 2 of SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kötke's recently reprinted "Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. It's so relevant to SCIY's core concerns that, with William's full support and permission, we're going to be serializing all 20 chapters here on SCIY (at an average rate of a chapter per week). -- To see the first chapter (including the Title Pages, Acknowledgements, Introduction & Table of Contents), go to Chapter 1: Pattern of the Crisis.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have,

~ ronjon

April 30 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Only were safe who kept God in their hearts...

~ Sri Aurobindo

Descartes by Asok Kumar Ray

RY Deshpande — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:31:08 -0700

Je pense, donc je suis: I think, therefore I am—that is René Descartes. A Philosophy course introduces him as follows: "Modern Philosophy is the name traditionally used in Anglo-American philosophy departments to denote the period of philosophy from Descartes (1596-1650) to Kant (1724-1804). A better description would be seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy, or early modern philosophy, but that's the tradition. In our class we focus on seven philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Again, tradition tells us that the first three are 'Continental Rationalists' and the next three are 'British Empiricists,' but like all brief descriptions these are only partly accurate. Because the class is only one semester we can't do more than get a first taste of each philosopher. Even that requires a lot of thought (and reading)."

The present article by Asok Kumar Ray, retired Professor of Mathematics, Jadhavpur University, is from his recently published book Truth Nothing Else Than. It is apt that Prof Ray should combine in him the Cartesian qualities of a mathematician and a philosopher more felicitously integrated in the Aurobindonian vision and thought. ~ RYD ...

James Howard Kunstler: April 28, 2008 - A Collective Psychic Bubble

ronjon — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:34 -0700

...This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of "The Long Emergency" accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. We'd like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up -- what's wrong with that?

But there's an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We're on the edge of something. We're at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you're spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There's no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days? ...

The Only Hindu Temple Built by the British

RY Deshpande — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:18:51 -0700

In 1879, when the British were ruling over India, Lt. Col. Martin of Agar Malva was leading the army in the war against Afghanistan. Col. Martin used to regularly send messages of his well-being to his wife. The war continued for long and Lady Martin stopped getting messages. She was very upset. Once riding on her horse, she passed by the temple of Baijnath Mahadev. She was attracted to the sound of Conch and Mantra. She went inside and came to know that the Brahmanas were worshipping Lord Shiva. They saw her sad face and asked her problem. She explained everything to them. They told her that Lord Shiva listens to the prayers of devotees and takes them out of difficult situations in no time. With the advice of the Brahmanas she started the Laghurudra Anushtthāna of the Mantra Om Namah Shivāya for 11 days. She prayed to Lord Shiva that if her husband reaches home safely, then she would get the temple renovated...

April 29 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

But few are they who tread the sunlit path;
Only the pure in soul can walk in light.

~ The Mother

Evolution and Progress: Writing the Future: MIT Press

Rich — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:07:08 -0700

This book seemed relevant to some of the recent discussions here... rc

The theory of evolution connects us to the natural world, explaining how and why we are a part of nature. The idea of progress, on the other hand, projects a destination. "If nature can supply wonderfully elegant solutions to the problem of survival by trying out test models derived solely by chance, then surely it's possible for us to find our way forward," write David Rothenberg and Wandee Pryor, setting the terms of the discussion. But is society going somewhere in particular? Is nature improving? The stories, poems, essays, and artwork in Writing the Future examine the concepts of evolution and progress through a variety of artistic and scientific lenses and speculate on how these ideas can help us appreciate our place in the world....

The Trajectory of Change—Pallavi Aiyar reports about the Peking Opera

RY Deshpande — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:09:50 -0700

Once the highest expression of Chinese culture, the Peking Opera is a dying art today. Efforts to revive it have met with a mixed response. The current decline in interest in the opera is attributed to the global phenomenon of a tension between the classical and the modern...

April 28 Quote of the Day

ronjon — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

His is a search of darkness for the light,
Of mortal life for immortality.

~ The Mother

Postmodern Film Reviews: Bladerunner by Giovanni Ferri

Rich — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:11:47 -0700

The question of identity is a clear postmodernist concern, and critic Scott Bukatman has added that he believes the issue of human definition is clearly central to the work, and thus the ambiguity is crucial'(14). This view is similar to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He argues that Blade Runner' stages a confrontation with our own replicant-status', so it is only when we as humans realize that our notion of self is very much constructed by the world around us, that we can become a truly human subject' ...

72: On the dreadful edge of Night

RY Deshpande — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:36:08 -0700

Awhile on the chill dreadful edge of Night
All stood as if a world were doomed to die
And waited on the eternal silence' brink…
Hungry beyond, the night desired her soul.
But still in its lone niche of templed strength
Motionless, her flame-bright spirit, mute, erect,
Burned like a torch-fire from a windowed room
Pointing against the darkness' sombre breast.
The Woman first affronted the Abyss
Daring to journey through the eternal Night.
Armoured with light she advanced her foot to plunge
Into the dread and hueless vacancy;
Immortal, unappalled her spirit faced
The danger of the ruthless eyeless waste…

The New American BoogeyMan: Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Rich — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:52:17 -0700

The Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Republican Party (funny how those two organizations seem to fit together) have succeeded in characterizing the Pastor Jeremiah Wright as the new American BoogeyMan. By managing to decontextualize a few sound bits from a sermon he gave after September 11, 2001, in a nutshell they have managed to label him, and by association Barak Obama, as the voice of [both] Black Hatred of White America and Islamic Terrorism. By comparisons some of Dr. Kings speeches which castigate the Union for its racial inequality, its genocide of American Indians, and enslavement of Africans may be a bit tamer.

In short, the political strategy pursued by Clinton and the Republicans is to have this man condemned by playing on the fears of White America and disrupt the message of hope and change of Obama (which one hopes not to be a cynical hope). Two disclosures, I certainly am not a fan of the Christian hell fire and damnation sermons, that go on in either the White of Black Churches. I do not have any illusions that an Obama presidency would be significantly different than previous democratic failures, but since he takes less blame for supporting the politics of empire over the past eight years, by default [he] gets my vote.

The alarming fact is that in the age of Utube and FOX News that someone can edit and pervert ones words to the extent that nothing remains of the larger historical context in which they are embedded, and cause almost a whole nation to fear and hate a new boogyman. This should be a concern of any nation which calls itself a democracy; the failure of history. Here is Rev. Wright from an interview on 4/25/08 with Bill Moyers: ...