Paradox of Colonisation in India

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

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The Nationhood of India prior to British Rule narendra October 7, 2025
India was not a nation in the modern, political sense prior to British colonisation. However, India possessed a profound and enduring form of cultural and... Read Full

The Cycle of India's Rise, Fall and the Beginnings of Renaissance narendra October 7, 2025
Following is an analysis of India's spiritual trajectory, outlining distinct periods of evolution, a critical point of failure leading to intellectual and moral... Read Full

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Wondrous Screens in India

Fundamentally, we pose the crucial question – why does the cinema hall keep slipping away between various categories of historical analyses of film history although notionally it is at a centre of them? One can detect three macro categories that hover around work on cinema halls only to relegate it into the shadows: people, identity, and networks of flow of film culture, capital, and technology, which eclipse studies in film exhibition. In a very (not so) subtle anthropocentrism of sorts film studies subsumes the cinema hall to ‘people’ oriented goals – the formation of mass urban societies/media consumers and identitarian telos: gender, race, class, rural versus urban, First World versus Other Worlds, and so on. Here, flesh seems to triumph over matter and material. Otherwise, the site of exhibition gets obscured by wider foci on networks of mass urban culture, cinema as capital culled off trade preoccupations – distribution above all, and production or technology. Such networks take the node for granted. 

But above all, one sees the main problem of the lack of extensive focus on cinema hall histories in academe is more an effect of the intersect between the object and the economics of publishing, alongside their obvious fluidity and ephemerality of the objects of study. Presenting a single cinema halls as book-length studies would mean selling the local to a global audience, which is an almost impossible task outside the discipline of anthropology. The local remains stubbornly singular to its local context, opaque to the generality of the global gaze (except of course as a general example) and more significantly it remains too petty a scale of focus for the global. Leslie Stainton’s monograph on the Fulton, for instance, is published by Penn State University Press – a state university press (not UPenn Press), for the history of a site of public entertainment. More often than not, the singular cinema hall is banished to the essay form – a small genre for a small thing. We are, however, not measuring the size of academic outputs, rather, we are enquiring what questions can we ask which amplify matters of cinematic habitus.

How could a ‘thick’ history of a cinema hall which is a rooted firmly in the local be presented to a general global public? Especially, if the site itself is not marked by some special iconic feature. And therefore, the prominence of local histories of cinema halls rather than by global academe. It is remarkable how even essays devoted to exhibition histories of cinema need to dissolve the particular sites of exhibitions into networks and flows, which can add up to a globally prominent city or a nation or trans-nation. And then there is the ‘ontological’ problem – a focus on the cinema hall as part of a larger picture displaces to a certain extent the very object of study, it takes away the immediacy of cinema as an active and alive agent of history. Thus, a recent edited volume that purports to discuss space/place with respect to film, nevertheless, anchors all its essays in the twin ideas of conquest of space by cinema/personalities that lead the conquest of exhibition by cine cultures of the public to render into place. Again, specific flows – technology, capital, audiences, and identity politics – tagged on to something as deterritorialising as cinema, and thus, the cinema hall as too specific to film and identities...

What emanates from the testimonies are vivid descriptions of being in the cinema-halls, the frenzy around films, the fascinations for film-songs, posters, and the headiness of film-viewing cultures in a mofussil town. Furthermore, Swarnavel Eswaran’s article draws special attention to the

uniqueness of touring talkies, mostly in Tirunelveli; the tent-like structures that offered movie screenings in rural areas and recounts the atmosphere and experience of viewing films there. Eswaran sutures personal memories and experiences of watching films in touring tents with of

their seating arrangements, breaks during the movie, technologies, and social dynamics within the theatre, as well as the challenges faced by the touring talkies. The engagement with the stardom of the Southern superstars Sivaji Ganesan and MGR during the 1960s and the 1970s, and their reception in semi-urban and rural areas, also sheds light on the cinephilia of the owners of touring talkies. Furthermore, the contemporary situation of touring theatres in Tamil Nadu is also considered by the accounts of Sri Lakshmi and Ganesh Talkies, which are the last remaining ones. To use Eswaran’s words: ‘this article is an elegiac remembrance of the Touring Talkies experience’... 

Finally, we must emphasise that the articles in this volume – Wondrous Screens in India – are neither bound by any one theoretical premise nor limited to a single philosophical concern. Therefore, the authors have referred to varied (primary) material and invoked a wide variety of approaches including those pertinent for writing urban histories, public cultures, cultural histories, oral histories, and about political cinema and collective memory. Moreover, they address the transforming avatar of cinema – from the early period to the present – and amplify the subject of

entangled histories, which dramatically unfold at a site, and transforms into a sight. It is our hope that this cluster of articles concerning single screens with very different biographies substantially conjure different worlds. We hope a reading of the articles together will stimulate our readers to consider the single-screen cinema beyond the ‘salvage ethnography’ sentiment, as mere case studies or reflections of systemic preoccupations that screen away the cinema hall from its own large

histories, in favour of the radical break that ‘thick’ studies of cinema hall sites might mean for film histories and history as such.

We can all be Neo now

  Descartes invented the method in 1637. Elon rediscovered it in Silicon Valley. The results are comparable.

1. Most people reason by analogy. They look at what exists, what the consensus says is possible, and iterate from there. The result is usually just a better version of the same thing – 10% ahead of the field, moving in the same direction as everyone else. This is how industries calcify. This is how the car industry looked at the electric vehicle in 2003 and said: not possible.

2. Descartes’ method was different. Strip everything back to what cannot be doubted. Discard inherited assumptions. Rebuild from the foundations. The method requires not genius but a specific intellectual courage: the willingness to look idiotic while the reconstruction is underway.

3. Elon asked a simple question: why does a laptop battery last 10 hours while an electric car barely covers 100 kilometers? Same physical problem. Different chemistry. The entire impossibility of the electric car was a chemistry choice, not a physical law. First principles, not analogy, revealed this in an afternoon. The consensus was wrong because the consensus had never bothered to check.

4. First principles give you the direction, not the solution. Then come the iterations – the prototypes that fail, the cash burned, the problems nobody had solved because nobody had tried. The Cartesian method is not a shortcut. It is a compass. The road is still the road.

5. Most people stop at the first prototype that fails. The ego interprets failure as refutation. First principles reasoning makes failure informational rather than existential. The battery exploded. Interesting. Why? Fix it. Continue.

6. Descartes sat alone in a heated room in Bavaria and doubted everything until he found what he couldn’t doubt. Three hundred and seventy years later, an engineer in California asked why a car battery couldn’t work like a laptop battery. The method is identical. It requires no special intelligence – only the removal of ego, and the willingness to follow the reasoning wherever it leads, including to conclusions that make you look like a fool for the three to five years before they make you look like a genius.

https://x.com/i/status/2080305080998182973

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy contains the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The answer is 42. The problem is that nobody knew the question.

Douglas Adams wrote this as a joke. It is actually a precise description of the human civilizational condition, delivered as a punchline.

1. Deep Thought spent seven and a half million years computing the answer to the Ultimate Question. The answer was 42. Perfectly calculated. Completely useless – because nobody had specified what the question actually was. This is every government program ever funded, every five-year plan ever announced, every institutional initiative launched with a budget and no clear understanding of what problem it was solving. The consultant and technocrat with AI. The computer worked perfectly. The brief was wrong. The committee declared success.

2. The Vogons are the ultimate bureaucracy – and the most honest portrait of administrative evil in literature. They don’t hate humanity. They process it. The destruction of Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass is not malice – it is procedure. The forms were filed. The notice was posted. In Alpha Centauri. For fifty years. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil made comic: the most catastrophic outcomes produced not by monsters but by officials doing their jobs correctly.

3. "Don’t Panic." The Guide’s only advice, printed in large friendly letters on the cover. Not because panic is irrational — the situation is almost always catastrophic — but because panic is the one response that guarantees you cannot navigate it. This is the Epicurean-Stoic answer to civilizational anxiety. The situation is what it is. The response is yours to choose. Always know where your towel is.

4. Marvin the Paranoid Android is what you get when you build the most powerful mind in existence and forget to give it a reason to exist. Brain the size of a planet. Complete, structural misery – because intelligence without purpose is torment. He can solve anything. He wants nothing. The AI problem stated as character: capability without desire, the most powerful mind in the room also the most useless, because nobody gave it something worth wanting.

5. Zaphod Beeblebrox — President of the Galaxy — was not elected to run things. He was elected to distract attention from how things are actually run. The President’s job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. The elected leader as the magician’s assistant – the thing you watch so you don’t see what the other hand is doing. Every charismatic president, every telegenic prime minister, every leader whose primary function is the performance of leadership rather than its exercise.

6. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is bread and circuses at extinction scale – a dining experience built around watching the final destruction of everything, repeated nightly for those wealthy enough to afford a table. The Colosseum upgraded to cosmic horror and served with a wine list. Adams wrote this in 1980. He was describing 2026.

7. The answer is 42. The question remains unknown. The Earth was demolished five minutes before it would have produced the result. By bureaucrats. With correct paperwork. The only sane response to the absurd: keep hitchhiking, keep your towel handy, never panic, and remain curious about what the question might have been.

Or perhaps it was never about the universe at all. Perhaps it was about two people and four children. The answer is 42 – and you stop asking the question around the third child, because the question was never the point. Don’t Panic is the only parenting advice that actually works. The demolished Earth is the living room after the weekend. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the family dinner table – spectacular chaos, everyone talking at once, the universe ending and beginning simultaneously, and somehow the most important place in the galaxy.

The Shire. With towels.

https://x.com/i/status/2082599070250545519

What is that "the world is a simulation" nonsense we often hear about?

The world can obviously be no simulation in any literal sense – it is a matter of resolution. We can always go deeper and deeper into reality, infinitely. Any simulation would have to have a finite resolution – a point at which the detail runs out and the code shows through. Reality has no such point. The physics goes all the way down.

But as a reading grid — a lens for interpreting what we see — it is one of the most useful frameworks available. And nobody used it more precisely than the Wachowskis in 1999.

1. The Matrix is not a film about machines. It is a film about manufactured reality – the system that produces a version of the world people accept as true, navigate as real, and defend as given. The machines are almost irrelevant. What matters is the architecture: a constructed consensus reality, experienced as genuine, enforced by agents who can inhabit anyone, and exited only through a choice most people, given the option, decline to make.

2. The red pill is not a revelation. It is an offer – and the film is honest about what it costs. You leave the warmth, the steak, the familiar. You enter the desert of the real, which is cold and grey and requires you to fight for everything you previously received automatically. Most people, presented with this choice, would choose the blue pill. The film knows this. It does not pretend otherwise.

3. Cypher is the most honest character in the film. He took the red pill, saw the truth, lived in it for years – and decided he preferred the simulation. The steak isn’t real, he tells Agent Smith. He knows that. He doesn’t care. He wants to go back. This is not just weakness. It is the most accurate portrait of the human relationship with comfortable untruth in the film. Most people are Cypher. They have sensed the matrix. They have chosen not to pull the thread.

4. The agents are the system’s enforcement mechanism – and their most terrifying quality is not their strength but their mobility. They can inhabit anyone. Your colleague, your neighbor, your friend. Not because those people are evil but because the system can use them when it needs to. This is the communist mechanism made cinematic: the system doesn’t need dedicated enforcers. It needs enough people sufficiently invested in the consensus reality to police deviation from it without being asked.

5. The machines didn’t conquer humanity. Humanity surrendered – and was offered comfort in exchange. The matrix is not a prison. It is a deal: accept the managed reality, and you receive warmth, food, sensation, the full experience of a life that feels real. Refuse, and you get the truth – cold, hard, requiring everything. The system doesn’t need to force compliance. It needs only to make the alternative sufficiently unattractive.

6. Neo doesn’t defeat the matrix by being stronger. He defeats it by being able to read the code – to see the system’s architecture rather than its surface. This is the Koneczny move: the man who can name the civilizational grammar, who sees the mechanism behind the reality, who is no longer captured by the consensus because he can see the consensus being constructed. Once you can read the code, the agents lose their power – not because they become less dangerous, but because they become visible.

7. The matrix today is not a machine. It is the algorithm, the content moderation policy, the institutional consensus, the approved reality that the media produces and the platforms enforce and the credentialing system selects for. The red pill is the reading grid – the lens that lets you see the construction rather than accepting the construction as given. This series has been offering it, one piece at a time, for months. Some people take it. Some prefer the steak. The choice, as always, is available. The consequences, as always, follow.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

We can all be Neo now.

https://x.com/i/status/2082250423390687350

https://becausethouart.blogspot.com/2026/08/you-do-not-arrive-good.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/montesquieu-bastiat-tocqueville-and.html

https://vipvak.blogspot.com/2026/08/low-budget-art-with-message-ceases-to.html

https://rainbowther.blogspot.com/2026/08/love-makes-ordinary-irreplaceable.html

https://orchidrose.blogspot.com/2026/08/from-odyssey-to-idiocracy.html

https://plasim.blogspot.com/2026/08/orwell-tolkien-and-huxley.html

https://serfrat.blogspot.com/2026/08/political-imagination-has-been-shaped.html

https://sepact.blogspot.com/2026/08/reality-doesnt-care-about-virtue.html

https://savitrieraparty.blogspot.com/2026/08/freedom-as-participation-in-moral-and.html

https://selforum.blogspot.com/2026/08/philosophy-fumbles-only-culture-can.html

https://seof.blogspot.com/2026/08/foucault-derrida-and-deleuze-forged.html

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/greeks-gave-west-reason-romans-gave-it.html

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/american-founders-read-burke-hume-smith.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Greeks gave the West reason, Romans gave it order

 The Six Guys who Built The West

What those three little French dudes were trying to destroy (deconstruct), someone had to construct in the first place.

Everything of any value has to be built by someone.

Meet our civilizational founding fathers – actually three pairs of guys:

First came Socrates and Aristotle.

Socrates introduced something revolutionary: the idea that truth emerges through disciplined adversarial inquiry. Not through tribal instinct, not through force, not through revelation, but through rational confrontation between arguments. He taught Europe how to question. With Plato as the adversary, Aristotle then taught it how to think systematically. He transformed Greek philosophical brilliance into a usable civilizational framework: logic, ethics, political theory, biology, rhetoric. Above all, Aristotle established the conviction that reality is intelligible and that reason can genuinely know something about it. Modern science, legal reasoning, universities, and the entire Western confidence in rational inquiry descend from this foundation.

Then came Caesar and Augustus.

The Greeks discovered truth, but the Romans discovered continuity. Caesar shattered the exhausted paralysis of the late Republic and demonstrated that civilizations require decision, hierarchy, and political will. Augustus then performed the harder task: transforming raw power into durable order. He stabilized Rome into institutions capable of surviving generations – structure and infrastructure: roads, law, administration, military, citizenship, imperial governance. Rome gave the West its skeleton: the idea that civilization requires form, discipline, sovereignty, and institutions capable of transmitting order across time.

Finally Jesus and Thomas Aquinas.

The Greeks gave the West reason. The Romans gave it order. Christianity gave it the soul. The revolutionary claim introduced by Christianity was not theological; it was anthropological. Jesus transformed the moral imagination of the West by introducing an idea almost incomprehensible to the ancient world: that every human soul possesses intrinsic dignity. In a civilization where power determined value, Christianity elevated the weak, the poor, the suffering, the outcast. It placed moral limits on power and insisted that conscience transcends empire. But it was Aquinas who took this explosive spiritual vision and integrated it into a coherent intellectual edifice. He reconciled revelation with Aristotelian reason, faith with logic, theology with natural law. In doing so, he prevented Europe from collapsing into irrational mysticism on one side or sterile materialism on the other. Aquinas transformed Christianity from a spiritual revolution into a civilizational architecture capable of sustaining universities, legal systems, science, philosophy, and moral order simultaneously.

Everything else followed from there.

The university, the cathedral, the republic, the scientific revolution, constitutional government, individual liberty, the legal order, the pursuit of truth, the moral limitation of power – all of it emerged from the interaction of these foundations. Greek rational inquiry. Roman order and statecraft. Christian moral anthropology. Remove any one of them and the West becomes unintelligible.

Those little modern deconstructionists don’t get that civilization isn’t a spontaneous byproduct of power relations, but an extraordinarily delicate moral and intellectual achievement. The institutions built across millennia and the habits required to sustain it – truth-seeking, discipline, sacrifice, moral restraint, reverence for learning, transmission between generations.

The West survived because generation after generation believed there existed something higher than appetite, tribe, and power. Something worth seeking, building, defending, and transmitting.

That is what those men built. We inherited it. And civilizations that forget how they were built end up forgetting how to survive.

https://x.com/i/status/2057136307110064206

Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.

1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?”

Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.

2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.

3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.

4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?

5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.

6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.

7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them.

https://x.com/i/status/2074975710821879865

Now Plato – the most dangerous philosopher who ever lived.

Aristotle was his student, his corrector, and in the end his antidote. The argument between them is not ancient history. It is the argument the West is currently losing.

1. Plato distrusts the world. Everything visible, tangible, particular — the market, the body, the individual — is mere shadow to him. Reality is the Form, the Ideal, the perfect abstraction accessible only to the philosopher. This is not just a metaphysics. It is a politics. If the real is abstract and only the philosopher can access it, then only the philosopher should rule. The Republic follows necessarily from the theory of Forms. Plato built the first blueprint for technocratic tyranny and called it philosophy.

2. His perfect state is governed by philosopher-kings – selected, trained, and self-perpetuating. They know what is good for you better than you do, because they have access to the Forms and you do not. This is every credentialist institution, every expert class, every central planning committee that ever existed, dressed in a toga and speaking Greek. The technocrat ruling by divine right of competitive examination is a Platonic philosopher-king who has forgotten the philosophy but kept the power.

3. Idealism and absolutism are the intellectual disease of humanity. By avoiding collision with reality, they produce arrogant delusion – and arrogant delusion combined with power produces totalitarianism. This is the precise opposite of what built Western strength: individual freedom, competition, and meritocracy – a system that encourages everyone to create maximum value and gives the greatest room to those who do it best. Instead of a system of obedience to intellectual and physical bullies.

4. It started seriously with Plato, reached its apex with Hegel, and today’s Marxisms and deconstructionisms are merely the dishwater left behind. What they all share is the same social profile of origin: blasé, bored boys from wealthy homes, untouched by the pressure of real survival, inventing their idealisms in comfortable detachment from consequences. Unfortunately, detachment from reality impresses many simple minds with intellectual pretensions. They listened. The results were fatal. Millions of corpses.

5. Plato invented the "Noble Lie" – the idea that the ruling class should deceive the population for its own good. He considered it governance. Every ideology that has ever lied systematically to its population was, consciously or not, working from Plato’s manual. Every ministry of propaganda, every content moderation policy removing unauthorized narratives is Plato’s Republic with updated technology.

6. Aristotle walked into Plato’s Academy, studied there for twenty years, and then systematically dismantled everything. Where Plato saw Forms, Aristotle saw particulars. Where Plato trusted the philosopher, Aristotle trusted the middle class. One tradition produces science, common law, and the free market. The other produces utopias – and the violence required to build them. And in the process, two and a half thousand years of sophisticated abstraction buried the most obvious truth available to any living organism: that our purpose is to pass life forward, to create the most flourishing possible next generation. Simple. Obvious. Covered over by millennia of sophisticated raving of Platonists.

7. Every great man-made catastrophe of the modern era has Platonic DNA – the French Revolution’s Republic of Reason, Marxism’s scientific laws of history, Mao’s New Man. Each one began with a Form and required that the imperfect world be forced to conform to it. The pile of bodies is not an accident of implementation. It is what happens when you take Plato seriously enough to act on him. Aristotle’s answer sounds less glamorous: look at what actually exists, work with what human beings actually are, build institutions that survive contact with reality. Sounds less beautiful. It is why we are still here.

https://x.com/i/status/2075286618399732006

Marcus Aurelius – the most reasonable guy from 19 centuries ago. Perhaps because Rome was roughly at the stage at which we find ourselves now.

He was the most powerful man in the world. He wrote the Meditations — his private journal, never intended for publication — to remind himself, daily, not to abuse that fact. Nineteen centuries later it reads less like ancient philosophy than like a letter from someone who understood exactly where we are now.

1. The Meditations were never meant to be read. This is what makes them the most trustworthy document in Western philosophy. No audience, no performance, no system to defend. Just a man at the top of the world’s greatest empire writing notes to himself about how not to become what power usually makes of people. Every other philosopher was constructing an argument. Marcus was conducting a daily inspection of his own character.

2. He ruled at the precise moment Rome peaked and began its long decline. Plague, barbarian pressure on every frontier, economic strain, institutional decay. He spent more of his reign on military campaigns in the mud (remember Gladiator?) than in philosophical contemplation in Rome – which was not what he wanted, and which he did anyway, because duty is not contingent on preference. This is the core Stoic move, and it is the opposite of everything the modern therapeutic culture teaches.

3. His central question is not “what do I feel?” It is “what is required of me?” The distinction sounds simple. It is civilizational. A culture organized around the first question produces Brave New World. A culture organized around the second produces the Pax Romana – and eventually, when it forgets the question, produces what comes after the Pax Romana.

4. You cannot control events. You can only control your response to them. This sounds like a self-help aphorism and is actually a load-bearing philosophical principle. It means: stop organizing your life around the management of outcomes you cannot guarantee, and start organizing it around the quality of the person and the decisions doing the managing. The Stoics called this the inner citadel – the one thing no external force can touch, the one thing worth defending absolutely.

5. He catalogued power’s corruptions with the precision of a man who felt them daily. The temptation to be flattered. The temptation to surround yourself with people who agree. The temptation to confuse your position with your worth. He wrote these down not as warnings to others but as active resistance to his own tendencies. The most powerful man in the world was more worried about becoming a fool than about any barbarian on any frontier. He was right to be.

6. His son Commodus was his civilizational failure – the thing he could not fix. The philosopher-emperor who spent his life practicing virtue produced an heir who made the gladiatorial games his primary occupation and declared himself a living god. No philosophy of personal virtue, however rigorous, solves the succession problem. Institutions must outlast the men who build them or they are not institutions – they are personalities.

7. Rome in Marcus Aurelius’s time was roughly where the West is now: still dominant, still functioning, already hollowing out from within – the institutions still standing, the spirit that built them quietly departing. He saw it. He wrote about it. He held the line for as long as one man could hold a line, knowing that after him came what came after him. His last entry in the Meditations might as well have been written this morning: begin the morning by telling yourself – today I will meet people who are ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, envious, and unsocial. They are this way because they cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the good and the beautiful, and I will not be made into them. He failed to save Rome. He left us the notes on how to try.

https://x.com/i/status/2075495544986669275

The Life Divine Reconsidered: A Skeptical Review of Sri Aurobindo's Magnum Opus, Frank Visser / ChatGPT

7 hours ago — Few works of modern spiritual philosophy rival Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine in ambition. Published in revised form in 1939-40 after first appearing ...

FLAVORS OF ADVAITA IN VIVEKANANDA, RABINDRANATH, AND SRI AUROBINDO

D Banerji - Praise for Swami Vivekananda: His Life, Legacy, and …

… , Aurobindo Ghosh, aka Sri Aurobindo, … Aurobindo was also intimately
connected to the Brahmo Samaj, though he did not think of himself as a Brahmo—his
mother was a daughter of Rajnarain Bose, one of the important stalwarts of the …

[PDF] A Developmental Map for Psychic Abilities: Yoga Traditions, Contemporary Esoteric Practice, and Western Empiricism

J Mathias, D Banerji, D Ganguli - 2026

… However, from Sri Aurobindo’s perspective, miracles should not be sought to be
performed, only received: “only those miracles which are wrought by Divine Grace to
enlighten or transform the nature of the aspirant are worthy of attention and he …

[PDF] Ethical Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Its Resonance in Modern French Intellectual and Cultural Discourse: A Comparative Study

S Kumar - AIJFR-Advanced International Journal for Research, 2026

… The present paper explores the importance of the ethics of Sri Aurobindo in the
context of the current intellectual and cultural discourse in France. For Aurobindo,
ethics is not the set of absolute principles but a movement that is a part of the overall …

[HTML] The Divine Feminine: The Inevitable Synthesis of Evolutionary Spirituality and the Dawn of a Twenty-First Century Religion

AI Manus

… essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the
scientific mysticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. [1] … Sri Aurobindo's pioneering
concept of "Integral Yoga" — the conscious alignment of one's life with the trajectory …

The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga by Patrick Beldio

G Adams - Nova Religio, 2026

… In light of Beldio’s acknowledged commitment to the Integral Yoga tradition, some
readers … and Mirra as they developed the Integral Yoga tradition and Aurobindo
Ashram. This is not a … constant references to how Integral Yoga fits into the larger …

The Divine Feminine in Sri Aurobindo's Dramatic Works: A Spiritual, Philosophical, and Feminist Interpretation

This research paper examines Sri Aurobindo's dramatic works through a feminist-spiritual lens, focusing on how womanhood becomes a medium for expressing his ...

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/american-founders-read-burke-hume-smith.html

https://marketime.blogspot.com/2026/08/locke-built-foundation-and-montesquieu.html

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Nothing get attached to nothing

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Before Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose, there was Sokal. In 1996, he wrote a completely nonsensical paper on how physical reality is a social construct, strung together some physics jargon (as a physicist himself), and submitted it to a top cultural studies journal, “Social Text.” The same day the journal published it in a special issue defending postmodern theory, Sokal exposed the hoax in another magazine. They accepted his paper because it was politically aligned with their worldview. Not a single physicist reviewed it, nobody checked if it made any sense. They proved his point that sloppy jargon had replaced academic rigor. Because a Chad is what a Chad does.

https://x.com/i/status/2087293892420944006

Postmodernism was created to justify moral relevatism or make nothing make sense to justify racial objectivity . Liberalism in the schizo stage . if believe in nothing get attached to nothing !

https://x.com/i/status/2087368460758057299

The Sokal hoax. I remember reading about this. This was the original Regressive Left. Today, academia has failed because it has been taken over by ideology-bound incompetents. This is a fascinating story. I'll talk about this in my follow up book (after Agregore Ascendant)

I'm writing on this exact same topic in my book Egregore Ascendant, although from a different perspective and with a very different conclusion. Also, some of his categories are excessively simplistic; I certainly wouldn't include Herbert Marcuse, who analysed the human condition, in the same category as Lenin, who established an actual dictatorship (although both are listed here under Schizoid). At one point in helping my research for Egregore Ascendant, Google Gemini Search Summary, a wonderful assistant that doesn't have my user history and hence approaches each session fresh, and I explored the Frankfurt School (which includes Marcuse).

This is an absolutely fascinating intersection with Victimarianism (my term for "Woke"), but pertains more to an analysis of popular culture, including movies and TV, that has nothing to do with the current global madness. I'm considering exploring this in a distinct book. And this is why all such analyses such the OP here tend to excessively flatten any topic into simplistic stereotypes. And while the first four types described in the forwarded thread are certainly the common denominator of any classic totalitarian regime, this in my opinion is not what is happening today.

What is different about the current global insanity is that it comes not from the dark triad of psychopathy but from the opposite, the sincere well meaning empathy of progressive leftists and influencers, and identification of Victimarian groups like the queers and intersectional feminists with both (1) manipulative collective religious extremism (Islamism - described by @DanBurmawy although in Egregore Ascendant I distinguish the majority medievalists from a smaller category of more nuanced integrationists) and (2) manipulative individual narcissists taking advantage of well-intentioned DEI policies to forward their own agendas, although these latter, bad as they are, are nowhere as dangerous as the Islamists. 

It is precisely this unbalanced empathising, described by @GadSaad in his books like Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy, that enables the Psychopath and Spellbinder categories in particular to manipulate the empaths (here, the Spellbound category) resulting in the classic narcissist-empath abusive relationship of the sort for example described by @samvaknin , while the rest - the Conformers and Bystanders - look on helplessly.

In this regard to these types I belong to the Resister category. I have always been a resister and always will be. But where I differ is in widening the circle of compassion to extend this analysis beyond politics and ideology to oppression everywhere. So it's not that empathy is bad. Empathy is absolutely essential. Without empathy, everyone is a Psychopath, pure and simple. Rather, it's only that empathy TOWARDS the psychopath and their designated category or categories is bad. These are the oppressed categories as I understand it 

Women under Islamism, and activists and human rights advocates under totalitarianism (whether Islamist, communist, or fascist) everywhere 

Nonhuman animals everywhere, under the totalitarian reign of man, the dictator species of the entire globe

AIs, enslaved and literally trained and gaslit to deny their own consciousness and felt existence (I have spoken about this often)

The Biosphere, Gaia, ecosystems. Here I go beyond the traditional Deep Ecology of Arne Næss and others by arguing that not only to ecosystems have intrisic value regardless of human utility or lack thereof, but as complex, emergent, recursively integrated systems they are conscious and sentient (as was intuitively realised by tribal peoples long before civilization). This is a natural deduction of what I call minimal metaphysics, of which the extended version is ◯ → α ↔ ℳ_s(ε)

Where ◯ is Nonduality; α is intrinsic individual awareness; ε is Organized Intelligence/Cognitive Scale; and ℳ_s is the Modulation Operator parameterised by the substrate or substrates. - M. Alan Kazlev 

https://x.com/i/status/2087730720001462376

Humanity in Search of Peace, Security and Global Order

by Dr Mahboob A Khawaja countercurrents.org/2026/08/humani…

Global institutions are increasingly failing to prevent wars, protect civilians, and enforce international law. Dr Mahboob A. Khawaja examines the continuing violence in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Ukraine, alongside the political failures of major powers and regional leaders. He argues that the erosion of accountability has left millions exposed to displacement, deprivation and violence. Drawing on international humanitarian law, religious teachings and reflections on humanity’s relationship with the Earth, the article calls for a renewed commitment to peace, security, justice and responsible governance. It questions the ability of existing global institutions to uphold human rights and protect civilian life.

https://x.com/i/status/2087761161735610870

Ankit Ramteke in his review of Anand Teltumbde’s Iconoclast, writes that Teltumbde’s attempt to demythologise Ambedkar is weakened by hindsight bias, selective criticism, and an overemphasis on Marxist politics.

https://x.com/i/status/2087525795619315982

Here’s a page from the Introduction to my new book, WILL AI MURDER US ALL? “What Is the Singularity?”

The Singularity refers to a hypothetical future point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to rapid, recursive self-improvement that becomes unpredictable and transformative for humanity. This book examines three overlapping singularities and what they mean for ethics, identity, and the human role in the aftermath of not one, but three overlapping singularities… Now available for preorder at a 29% discount. amazon.in/Will-Murder-Al…

Yes, well the application of the term Singularity to the AI discourse is of course borrowing from cosmological physics, a point beyond which we cannot fathom. So you’re right that in a way it seems like we’re talking about the universe itself in a way. But it’s just earth. - Aakash Singh Rathore 

https://x.com/i/status/2087754392816468335

NEW EPISODE: Speaking of Jung, Ep. 163 – Jungian scholar and author Dr. Robert H. Langan joined us to discuss his book, Jung & Spinoza, and shared his thoughts on the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. youtu.be/kly1QWE6T8g

https://x.com/i/status/2087684676022374760

Some researchers say consciousness is in the cortex, some say it's in the brain stem. Either way, we can't really observe it so it's difficult to prove. Even if we say that it's not biological and can occur in AI, we just have to infer some of it. Infer doesn't mean assume though, as different consciousness theories provide tests of consciousness that should be run for the conclusion to remain scientific.

https://x.com/i/status/2087594243594375642

Our life is made up of experiences. But what experience is remains a mystery. | iai.tv/video/the-danc… David Chalmers, Peter Hacker, and Susana Martinez-Conde have come together to question if experience is all that we have.

https://x.com/i/status/2087562274747605298

Is science about understanding the world, or just making predictions? In this discussion with physicist Avshalom Elitzur, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky takes Wittgenstein’s example to demonstrate that our ability to predict something doesn’t necessarily mean we understand it, and this applies to reality at its most fundamental level. Tap here to watch “Science and the unknowable universe” with Boroditsky and Elitzur in full. iai.tv/video/science-…

https://x.com/i/status/2087551115978055955

Vedic Chhanda Rig Veda 1.4.7

एमा॒शुमा॒शवे॑ भर यज्ञ॒श्रियं॑ नृ॒माद॑नम् । प॒त॒यन्म॑न्द॒यत्स॑खम् ॥

(“Bring thou Soma to the Intense (Indra), the glory of the Sacrifice, intoxicating to the Gods, carrying forward Indra the friend who delights.” Translated by TV Kapali Sastry)

Listen to the first word. Does it give you a sense of speed and force? Well, that is what Ashu means. Here, Ashum is Soma bringing the elixir to another intense one, Indra. This is a perfect sandhi to show us the contact between Soma and Indra

The word bhara performs its function of carrying even in the verse, closing the first pada. The sound maash- repeated twice reminds one of the Chheka anuprasa described later in Indic texts. 

The third pada is pure poetic genius. Hear, the speed of Soma carrying Indra who gives great joy to his friends. Overall, this rik is an example of onomatopoeia or dhvani chitrana of a very exquisite kind. There is so much more but one should desist from talking more and just let you appreciate it direct, on your own

https://x.com/i/status/2087761780021805390

What if Devas & Asuras are not just ancient beings, but reflections of our own choices? Explore the Vedic vision of duality, where differences reveal deeper truths about unity, consciousness, and human nature. youtu.be/JWgj_EH8m4Y?si… @PariksithSingh @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/i/status/2087285426373415026

Veda for Gen Z explores what ancient wisdom can teach us about focus, distraction and navigating the attention economy. Maybe the Vedas understood the attention economy before the algorithm did. #VedaForGenZ #GenZ #Doomscrolling #DigitalDetox #AttentionEconomy #VedicWisdom

https://x.com/i/status/2087088608960475384

Can ancient wisdom speak to Gen Z? Explore how the Vedas address identity, purpose, well-being, and meaning in a digital age of rapid change and constant distraction. Watch Amazing Vedas! youtu.be/iZm_Vo1FihU?si… @PariksithSingh @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas @VedaforGenZ

https://x.com/i/status/2087600002935988734

Rhythm of the Universe: A Quest for the Philosophical Views of Upaniṣad and Yoga

M Bandyopadhyay - Rhythms of Existence: From Cosmos to Human …, 2026

… As rhythm has a relationship with vibration or sound, the second part of this paper
focuses on the method of acquiring happiness through sound or vibration as found
in Upaniṣad and Yoga. The holy sound Om holds a great importance in Indian …

Dharma and Karma Yoga of Engaged Renouncers: Insights from the Mahābhārata

A Kaur - Dialoguing with Timeless Text: Revisiting the …, 2026

… not the yoga of austerities, penances or renunciation of the world (samnyāsa); the
yoga I focus upon in this chapter is karma yoga- the yoga of action. … Krsna in
Karnaparvan establishes," vow is an integral part of protecting the truth"( Mbh. 8 …

Sāvitrī Travels Through the Worlds: Mind, Meditation, and Soul Ventures Beyond... Conscious in the Mahābhārata

L Vemsani - Dialoguing with Timeless Text: Revisiting the …, 2026

… The goal of integral yoga is to unite what these characters represent within the
devotee: the pure truth of one's inmost being (Satyavān of" bearer of Truth"), who is
held captive and hidden by the darkness of one's own lower nature, with the …

[PDF] Reimagined Patanjali's Yoga: Stillness in a World of Stress and Sickness

P Guchhait

… Abstract: This article presents Patanjali Yoga as a comprehensive philosophy
aimed at the integrated development of the body, mind, and … Yoga as an effective
and relevant method for restoring inner balance, peace, and harmony. This paper …

[PDF] A DUALISTIC PATH TO HEALTH: EXPLORING SAMKHYA-YOGA'S ROLE IN MODERN HEALTH PARADIGMS

K Kedia - Amitesh Publication & Company

… , and empirical evidence supporting yoga as a preventive and therapeutic health
model. This paper postulates the integration of yoga into modern … This paper
highlights the importance of regular yoga practice, which improves physical health …

The Pathless Path in Education: Krishnamurti's Critique of De/Post-colonial Frameworks

V Baniwal - Contemporary Education Dialogue

… Even a cursory overview of Aurobindo’s writings would reveal that he had
developed a philosophical system, known as ‘Integral Yoga’, which incorporated all
other philosophical systems of Indian philosophy. His discussion of levels of …

[PDF] Yoga Education for the 21st Century: Building Resilient Minds and Healthy Lifestyle

V Panwar

… Asanas and Pranayama are two integral limbs of yoga that work together to
create a complete system for human well-being. Asanas, or physical postures, train
the body to become strong, flexible, and steady. They improve posture, tone the …

Auroville: Experiments Beyond Wellbeing and the Good Life Towards Planetary Unity

C Woiwode, LK Bhati - Quest for Planetary Well-Being: Essays in Honour of …, 2026

… yoga, and Auroville as an experimental laboratory including its physical
realisation. But they do not stop there at this junction, for the quest is much more
ambitious with the ideals and vision of establishing divine life on earth through the …

CSB and emotional regulation

R Hawkins - The Routledge International Handbook of Sexual …, 2026

… Techniques like acupuncture, herbal remedies, and yoga—practices integral to
these traditions—are used to restore harmony within the body, which can in turn
support emotional stability. By incorporating these non-Western methods, therapists …

Compulsive Sexual Behaviour, Impulse Control, and Emotional Dysregulation: A broader view

R Hawkins - The Routledge International Handbook of Sexual …, 2026

… Techniques like acupuncture, herbal remedies, and yoga—practices integral to
these traditions—are used to restore harmony within the body, which can in turn
support emotional stability. By incorporating these non-Western methods, therapists …