Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra (b. 1956), Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum (2005)
VIP VAK: Competition of ideologies is as real as the competition for products or services
vipvak.blogspot.com/2022/10/compet
Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra (b. 1956), Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum (2005) H/T
Savitri Era of those who adore,
Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.
Evolution with Harmony: Integral Yoga and Its Transformational Potential in the Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
N Kumar - Reading Sri Aurobindo, 2022
Although the philosophy of Integral Yoga matured during Aurobindo’s retirement from politics and his relocation to Pondicherry, it could be viewed as an evolution from his earlier phase of life as a revolutionary nationalist as in both phases his philosophy was governed by a sensitivity towards the harmony between individual liberation and social unity.
As a revolutionary nationalist thinker, his vision of unity and oneness epitomized in the ideal of the nation, whereas in the post-Alipore phase, it was elevated to a search for universalized human experience, thereby propagating a constructive ideal of spiritual oneness of all humanity or sarvamukti. During his later days, he advocated Integral Yoga as a means for self-liberation and self-perfection through a process of evolution of consciousness. By Integral Yoga Sri Aurobindo aimed at a complete transformation of human nature through three stages of transformation: pshychic, spiritual and supramental—to raise human consciousness to the level of ‘divine gnostic consciousness’, which he called the supermind.
This evolution was complimented by a necessary harmony that Aurobindo visualized between the temporal and the transcendental reality, along with the harmony between individual’s quest for liberation and its collective experience, and the harmony between different paths of yoga. So evolution with harmony represents the central tenet in Aurobindo’s ideation of transformation achieved through Integral Yoga.
A speculation on Ken Wilber’s experiences
A theme throughout Wilber’s work is the importance of experience to knowledge, a view that Wilber’s late work comes to call “radical empiricism”. He claims throughout his work that the essentials of premodern wisdom traditions – Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity – are to be found in mystical experiences, and in replicable practices that lead up to those. Some years ago I wrote an article debunking this claim: I don’t think that a reasonable historian can look at the evidence we have of Confucius or Moses or Jesus or Zhiyi (Chih-i) and still say that the essentials of their teachings come from replicable experiences. (We could reasonably say that Moses at the burning bush was having a mystical experience, but it was not in any way replicable.)
I’ve moved away from my early enthusiasm for Wilber’s project because, as my article argued, his project fails at its goal of trying to integrate everything: it is just not the case that every tradition is based on replicable experiences. But replicable experiences may well play some role in various traditions, and psychedelics may well be the most replicable route that we have to mystical experiences – and Wilber’s work may turn out to be genuinely helpful in understanding what’s involved in those.
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