Auroville Foundation purchased 7.40 acres while 5.91 acres were secured by way of land exchange

Thoorigai Written by Miriam Tuesday, 17 November 2009
On Saturday the 14th of November in Gallery Square Circle at Kala Kendra an exhibition of Tamil artist Anbazhagan was inaugurated. The event started with a short performance by Mohanam Sound Crew. Thoorigai is the title of the artist's opus focused on his own symbolic world and life. In English the word means something like “Journey Toward Colorful Soil”, and on beautiful, mostly oil on canvas paintings, we can clearly see India in its rich textures. From the soil to the fine ornaments of daily life, from people in their motions to vast symbolism. Interview with Anbazhagan is in Tamil. To download the magazine clich here

A Guest Shares Her Experience Written by Radio Team Monday, 16 November 2009
Today's news features an interview with a guest from Belgium, who shares her impressions, what she has experienced and what she feels. Also there's a notice from the newly formed Entry Service which has been processing a great number of pending Newcomer requests since its re-opening two weeks ago. Plus news of an Auroville International Meeting which will take place in Bhubaneswar, Orissa 1st to the 6th of February 2010. To download the news cick here.

Resources & education Written by Radio Team Monday, 16 November 2009
On 19 September Vikram, Martin and Harini presented the results of a socio-economic survey conducted over the last year. The focus on this survey was mainly on youth of Auroville and on commercial activities. Part of the research also centered on the expectations of young Aurovilians residing in the city and the capital need to implement projects in order to create new job opportunities. The important role of education and to achieve higher standards was one of the results of this research. In the second part, an interaction between the researchers and the audience made this presentation rich in answers as well as in unanswered questions.Can a survey made on 12% of the commercial units give a precise figure of Auroville's actual economy? That may or may not be the case, but the value remains as an important research completed. To download the presentation click here for the part one, here fort the part two.

Land Annual Report Written by Radio Team Sunday, 15 November 2009
During the period under review, Auroville Foundation purchased 7.40 acres in the planned township area while 5.91 acres were secured by way of land exchange with the unutilized land outside the planned township area. Of the total 13.31 acres that were secured during the year, 11.86 were in the Green Belt and 1.45 in the City Area of Auroville. An amount of Rs. 46,72,695 was received by way of offerings and donations from friends and well-wishers of Auroville as well as from guests and residents of Auroville. Cick here to downaload the full report as pdf.

Harmony, peace and unity Written by Miriam Saturday, 14 November 2009
Second meeting of Asian Unity was held at Pitanga, and as East Asian traditions are, it started with excellent tea, and quiet conversation of arriving guests. From the first meeting in September things started to move for Asian community, and many plans are in the progress. On 17,5 acers of land in Iternational zone proposed for Asia, idea came up to sart to build at least small Tea pavillion with which they could establish Asian zone, and could been used as a place for meeting, for meditation and tea ceremonies. In Asian culture tea ceremony is important part of the culture, it's related to art in general; important part of it is spritual passage without religious projections. To download this program click here.

Rainwater, Lake Water Written by Marlenka Friday, 13 November 2009
Today's news presents first a few words from Sauro of l'Avenir on water: the proposed water body on the grounds of Matrimandir. And an announcement from Auroville's Youth Centre, also known as Peaceful City, which is in the planning stage of holding a youth event in Auroville this coming March 2010. Anima Mundi (Latin for cosmic breath, the world soul, the life force, the spirit of nature) is the name of the Auroville World Youth Event. To downlod the news click here

A vision for Universal Design Written by Rose Thursday, 12 November 2009
The first and second day of a three-day workshop focusing on Universal Design, the emerging global trend which aims to create environments with greater access for people with special needs. Topics for discussion include the different challenges faced by those with disabilities in Auroville today, and how existing designs should be adapted to make our surroundings more user-friendly. Also on the agenda are Professional Access Audits, which judge the accessibility of existing structures. Introduction with music, followed by a Q&A session. Hosted in association with the National Centre for Accessible Environments, New Delhi. o download the day one click here.To download the day two click here.

Land, Housing in the Monsoon Written by Marlenka Friday, 06 November 2009
Today's news includes several topics: the housing situation still in crisis mode, lands required to fill in the existing city-in-the-making not yet acquired, interfacing happening with PondyCan (Pondicherry Citizens Action Network) to find solutions to the rapid erosion of the beach at Quiet and, a joint offering by the University of Human Unity and the educational program 'Living Routes―Auroville' offering an Integral Sustainability Seminar Series on various sustainable practices in Auroville, with the topic Nutrition: organic farming, agricultural activities, Foodlink, Holistic Food Systems and Raw Food Philosophy on offer this week. To download the news click here.

Racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism

Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal Symptoms of Empire
By Ishita Pande

This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of ‘pathology’ - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire.

Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism.

Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal brings together the study of modern South Asia, race theory, colonialism and empire and the history of medicine. It highlights the powerful role played by the idea of ‘pathology’ in the rationalization of imperial liberalism and the subsequent projects of modernity embraced by native experts in Bengal in the ‘long’ nineteenth century. ISBN: 9780415778152 Published November 09 2009 by Routledge.

Excavation of hidden sources to understand the complex history of both human personality and culture

The Cambridge Torres Strait expedition and British social anthropology from The Memory Bank by keith

Anthropology, the aspiration to place knowledge of humanity as a whole on a rigorous footing, has been through three phases corresponding roughly to the last three centuries. In each case its object and method reflected the movement of world history when seen from a European perspective. Anthropology grew out of the critique of the old regime of agrarian civilisation as part of a search for the universal foundations of democratic society.

Locke, Rousseau and Kant wished to found the social contract on human nature and to that end their method was philosophical reasoning, supported by the best information available on the uncivilised peoples of North America and the South Seas. Indeed Kant was the first to use the word “anthropology” in anything like its modern sense; but you will not find references made to that in today’s courses on the history of social anthropology.

The 19th century put the spirit of democratic revolution firmly behind itself and addressed a world brought into being by western imperialism, an imperialism powered by mechanisation. The question Victorians asked was how they were able to conquer the planet with so little effective resistance. They concluded that their culture was superior, being based on reason rather than superstition, and that this superiority was grounded in nature as racial difference. Their perspective on world society was inevitably one of movement, so that the racial hierarchy they found there was understood to be still evolving. The object of 19th century anthropology was thus to explain the origin of the continuing inequality between the races of mankind; its method was evolutionary history based on widespread comparison of examples linked by an assumption of human psychic unity. In other words, they could become like us once they submitted to an appropriate form of government and education by us.

In the 20th century anthropology took the predominant form of ethnography. That is, individual peoples, studied in isolation from their wider context in time and space, were written up by lone ethnographers whose method was prolonged and intensive immersion in their societies. Nowhere was this project pursued more rigorously or exclusively than in the British social anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. By the end of the century, most professionals in social and cultural anthropology around the world pay at least lip service to this ethnographic ideal, although in the other imperial centres (the United States, France, Russia, India etc) the methods employed are more varied. And within Britain the basic model of functionalist ethnography has been undermined from numerous quarters for several decades now. [...]

Rivers went on to compile The History of Melanesian Society in two volumes (1914) which sought to explain cultural variation within the region in part as the result of successive waves of migration. He eventually aligned himself with Eliot-Smith and Perry whose revival of diffusionist world history featured Egypt as the source of a widely distributed cultural complex (an echo of the Lost Tribes of Israel discourse of the previous century). There is no doubt that Rivers and his colleagues generated some pretty wild stuff in reconstructing the history of human movement along lines unconsciously imitating the British imperialism of the day (“navigators in search of precious metals” and so on). And this provided a convenient target for the functionalist ethnographers.

Malinowski published his functionalist manifesto in a series of short pieces which came out between 1922 and 1926: the introduction to Argonauts, two papers in Nature and an encyclopaedia article. It boils down to this. Culture is something people everywhere generate as a vehicle through which they live their everyday lives. It has to work for them on a daily basis and that includes the requirement that the different parts add up to something reasonably coherent. It does not matter where the bits of culture come from; what matters is the integrity of the pattern expressed in everyday life, in the here and now. It is worth recalling that 1922 was the year when audiences everywhere queued up to watch Flaherty’s movie, Nanook of the North. After the slaughter of the trenches, confidence in western civilisation was shaken. The resilience of an Eskimo pitted against nature underscored the message that ways of life we may once have dismissed as primitive had their own legitimacy and might even be a source of inspiration for a West on its knees. [...]

It is paradoxical that British anthropologists often wrote of African peoples as if they lived in bounded, timeless units outside the currents of modern history, on metaphorical islands, as it were, to set against the real historical islands that Haddon and Rivers studied. For the ethnographers of the interwar period were also heavily engaged with the problem of social change (which they called “culture contact”). Without exception they were forced to come to grips with the concrete realities of their colonial field situation, even as they also constructed insular laboratories detached from the movement of 20th century society. It is notable that the principal source of their funding, by Rockefeller, went under the rubric of “Social change in Africa”. Even more than most, these ethnographers had to struggle with the contradictions of doing intellectual work in the modern world. It is convenient, but lazy to typify them as just one thing. They themselves recognised that they were trying to reconcile at least two things — hence the double descent mythology personified by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.

If ideology is classically the attempt to derive life from ideas, the British school sought to derive ideas from life, devising a special style of writing in which concrete descriptions of live activities were used to support generalisations whose debt to western intellectual traditions was never made explicit. In the hands of Malinowski this could be a romantic literary exercise, linking individual actors and concrete events to a self-conscious narrative. Radcliffe-Brown’s influence was aimed at professional consolidation, the promulgation of a scientific ethos, objectifications of structure, abstract conceptualisation. The truth is that the functionalist ethnographers had to mediate between contrasting social situations — their own isolation as individual fieldworkers exposed to the lives of exotic peoples and their collective reproduction in an academic milieu as a caste of professional experts. They were pulled in two directions: towards joining the peoples of the world and back into the insularity of academic bureaucracy. [...]

Rivers between anthropology and psychology
William Rivers started out as a physiologist and had already established the first two experimental psychology laboratories in England before joining CAETS to which he contributed both studies of perception and the genealogical method. As a result of his neurological experiments with Head, he developed a two-stage model of nerve regeneration, the protopathic and the epicritic. He elaborated the sociological study of kinship and social structure. Took his ethnological enquiries in the direction of German historicism and beyond, into the wilder regions of global speculation. Became a psychoanalyst who applied Freud’s ideas critically. Served as an army psychiatrist in the war, finding in the treatment of shell-shock victims a new version of social psychology. He ended his life as a socialist politician and friend of progressive literary men. In the last few years before his death, 1917-1922, he appears to have had a personality transplant, the first stages of which are depicted by Pat Barker in Regeneration. Once a conservative member of the academic establishment, a recluse with a stammer, he became the very model of an outgoing public intellectual.

Now there is much more to this fascinating story than can be told here. But I wish only to point to the way Rivers approached the disciplines of psychology and anthropology (in which he included ethnology and sociology). His first preoccupation was to build up several academic specialisms of which he was a practitioner. Indeed he subscribed to the compartmentalisation of knowledge to the extent of serving as president of both the national bodies responsible for supervising professional practice in anthropology and psychology in Britain. He brought to these various enquiries a common methodological outlook which never sacrificed the active engagement of the investigating subject to an objectifying positivism which was taking root in the universities at the time. It is indisputable that he sought to separate the study of society from that of individuals, in much the same way that chemistry was hived off from physics. At this stage he seems to have made little of the fact that he combined these branches of study within himself.

Rivers’s war experiences changed all that. In the last five years of his life he produced some forty pieces of work, of varying quality and length, while maintaining a punishing regime of professional and public commitment. Inevitably he wrote these pieces off the top of his head, relying on whatever was stored in his memory from decades of specialist practice. In the process his method became more autobiographical and self-reflexive; the boundaries between disciplines became blurred in a synthesising drive to comprehend and influence individual experience of society.

In his posthumous book, Conflict and Dream (1923), Rivers recalls one of his own dreams whose preoccupation was with “Hidden Sources”. His initial explanation is that the dream referred to his frustration in not being able to reply to mistaken American critics of his kinship theories, because of overwork as an army psychiatrist. In a practical sense, but possibly more seriously, a conflict existed between psychology and ethnology. But, pushing the analysis further, Rivers concludes that the dream reveals the fundamental harmony between psychoanalysis and ethnology which are based on the same method, the excavation of hidden sources which help us to understand the complex history of both human personality and culture.

Armed with this integrated vision of self and society, Rivers came out of the war ready to change the world, not just to understand it.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects

With the emergence of memes a new replicator enters the world, very different from genes. Memes or cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, are like genes in that they aim to get themselves replicated, however as unique replicators they do not act at the behest of genes. In other words, we now get what could be called a “conflict of the replicators”. Genes can struggle with memes. Memes can struggle with genes. Memes and genes can collaborate with one another. However, like all alliances, a collaboration of memes and genes is a temporary strategy to advance the replication of genes and the replication of the memes that can be dissolved when this relationship no longer advances one or the other. It is even feasible that memes, at some point, could dispense with genes altogether if they find new and more effective ways to replicate themselves, no longer requiring organic bodies like brains to be passed along. This, for example, is what is depicted in films like Terminator or The Matrix where the machines (and machines are memes) have been liberated from human bodies and strive to replicate themselves apart from humans. [...]

In this respect, we can think of memes as strategies for seducing brains. Some memes get themselves replicated by being useful for the organisms that host them. Others get themselves replicated by playing on the architecture of our brains in rhythmic and imagistic terms. Yet others get themselves replicated by playing on our worst characteristics such as envy, hatred, narcissism, and so on. [...]

Generally when we think of meaning we think of it as something that doesn’t have a geography or that isn’t located in time and space. No doubt this error emerges as a result of certain confusions surrounding the iterability of memes giving the illusion that memes aren’t localized in space and time. But insofar as memes must spread, insofar as they must be copied, memes have a geography or a geographical distribution which is, in principle, mappable. Indeed, this is part of what the ethnographer does implicitly when she does field work, investigating the unique practices, technologies, laws, morals, cosmologies, economies, etc., of a particular group of people.

Sociology is the study of one’s own society, anthropology is the study of other cultures

VIEWS FROM AFAR - Lévi-Strauss’s great gift was the gift of imagination
André Béteille The Telegraph > Front Page > Opinion > Tuesday , November 10 , 2009

The passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) marks the end of an era in the study of human culture. He was in his time the most renowned anthropologist in the world, and perhaps more renowned than any other anthropologist at any time or in any place. But he was much more than that. He was a pioneer of a whole intellectual movement that came to be known as ‘structuralism’, and his thought influenced scholars and writers in many different fields. My sense is that his standing as a man of letters in France will outlive his technical innovations as an anthropologist.
Lévi-Strauss’s first major contribution to anthropology was a work on kinship published originally in 1949. That work, entitled The Elementary Structures of Kinship, took time to secure worldwide attention since an English translation did not appear until twenty years later. To the English-speaking anthropologists who read it in the original, the arguments of the book appeared strange and unfamiliar, and its theoretical claims too sweeping. But it did secure a commanding position in course of time, and came to be much admired even by those who had little knowledge of the literature on kinship.
The Elementary Structures propounded a new approach to the study of kinship that came to be known as ‘alliance theory’ as against the ‘descent theory’ favoured by the British anthropologists who had dominated the field until then. Descent theory focuses on the transmission of rights and obligations across the generations, whereas alliance theory dwells on the chains of relations established by matrimonial exchange between bride-givers and bride-takers. An early proponent of alliance theory in the study of Indian kinship was Louis Dumont, the author of a magisterial work on caste.

Like other anthropologists before him, Lévi-Strauss assigned great significance to the incest rule, but gave a new twist to the interpretation of that rule. He argued that it should not be viewed only negatively, but also positively; not just as a prohibition, but, above all, as a prescription. A man is not told simply that he must not marry his own sister, he is asked to give his sister in marriage to another man and, in turn, to receive someone else’s sister as his wife. In his own words, “the prohibition of incest is a rule of reciprocity”. Exchange and reciprocity, which constitute the core of social life, follow directly from the incest rule, hence its great social significance. Lévi-Strauss would go so far as to say that it was that rule that provided the first foundation of social life among human beings.
Lévi-Strauss’s great gift was the gift of imagination, and he was a master of the art of interpreting symbols. As such, his best work was not his work on kinship, but his work on mythology. It was through a series of studies of the myths of primitive people that he gave free rein to his talent for demonstrating unsuspected, not to say startling, connections among symbols, and established his position as a structuralist. He was a rationalist who took a lofty, not to say disdainful, view of the empiricist bias in most of Anglo-American anthropology. If such a distinction is permissible, he always chose ideas over facts, and symbolic, as against utilitarian, interpretations.
Shortly before he launched on his massive enterprise on the study of myths, he published a brief study of totemism, which had been a favourite subject among anthropologists since the end of the 19th century. Earlier anthropologists, particularly in Britain, had been inclined to argue that among primitive people totemism fulfilled the function of ensuring the maintenance and reproduction of plant and animal species. Lévi-Strauss insisted that its primary significance was to provide symbolic markers for the differentiation of human groups through the differentiation of the natural world.

Lévi-Strauss saw himself not just as a rationalist but also as an explorer in far-away places among little-known people. Not long after his work on kinship, he published a book called Tristes tropiques in French and A World on the Wane in English. It is a fascinating and tantalizing book, part travelogue, part ethnography and part philosophical speculation. Because that book was translated into English before the book on kinship, and because of its richly evocative literary style, it received more attention than The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Lévi-Strauss’s many admirers in India should know that he has not always been well served by his English translators.
If his studies of kinship and myth bring out the rationalist in Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques brings out the romantic in him. In it, he gives us glimpses into the lives of some of the forest-dwelling communities of the Amazon basin: the Bororo, the Caduveo, the Nambikwara and others. Their technological equipment might not be much to boast of, but their tattoos, their folk tales and their mythology show a richness and variety that is almost inexhaustible. Lévi-Strauss has done more than any other anthropologist to show that the poverty of material technology need not be an impediment to the proliferation of an exuberant symbolic life.
The standard method of fieldwork established by Malinowski and his followers came to be known as the method of ‘participant-observation’. It is respected, though not always faithfully followed, by anthropologist in most countries, including India. Lévi-Strauss has insisted on the maintenance of distance between the observer and the observed as an essential part of the work of the anthropologist. There is little place in this scheme of things for the anthropologist to go native. Perhaps this was his way of showing respect for the communities about which he wrote. On the other hand, the British anthropologists of his generation whom I knew, such as Meyer Fortes and Max Gluckman, had little praise for the quality and reliability of his empirical material.

The relationship between anthropology and sociology has been a subject of debate and discussion among students of society and culture throughout the world, and particularly in India. Few scholars have expressed themselves more clearly and consistently on the subject than Lévi-Strauss. For him, sociology is the study of one’s own society, in his case French (or European) society, whereas anthropology is the study of other cultures. As he sees it, what is distinctive of anthropology as a discipline is not any peculiarity of the communities it studies but the relationship of the investigator to the object of his investigation. In his own striking words, “The anthropologist is the astronomer of the social sciences.”
The natural tendency among students of society and culture in India has been to stress not the separation between sociology and anthropology, but their unity. This is as true of G.S. Ghurye as of M.N. Srinivas or S.C. Dube. N.K. Bose began his career by studying a small tribe of shifting cultivators in Orissa, and later made a masterful study of the social structure of his own city, Calcutta. For him, the unity of sociology and social anthropology followed directly from the belief in the unity of India. This presents a paradox to the Indian followers of Lévi-Strauss who have sometimes adopted the subterfuge of being sociologists at home and anthropologists abroad, where the study of Indian society, no matter by whom, is a part of anthropology, not sociology. The author is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, and National Research Professor

Man is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations

Sri Aurobindo Studies

Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga

Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga has enormous implications for the time we find ourselves in. As we systematically destroy the basis of life on the planet, and wall off one another through ultimate fragmentation, we are left with the stark contrast of choosing between survival and destruction, life and death, growth or decline. Sri Aurobindo recognizes the necessity of the individual within the context of the collectivity, universality and the transcendent consciousness of Oneness. The individual is the nexus or hub of the evolutionary urge, but not separate from nor at the expense of the life of the cosmic whole.

We also have a daily twitter feed on Sri Aurobindo’s studies at www.twitter.com/santoshk1

We are systematically working our way through The Life Divine. The newest posts appear near the top. If you want to start at the beginning, go to the oldest post and roll forward until you reach the present day posts immediately after this introductory note.

You may also want to visit our information site for Sri Aurobindo at Sri-Aurobindo.Com

Sri Aurobindo’s major writings are published in the US by Lotus Press. Tags: Integral Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Posted in Introductory Leave a Comment »

Man’s Greatness Lies in His Discontent By sriaurobindostudies

Life brings to man the urge to exceed himself, while dealing with the colliding and conflicting whirl of energies that sweep him along and provide him the impetus and the impulse for self exceeding. Out of the conflict and chaos, some higher order or harmony needs to be worked out. Man’s role is not simply to recreate some kind of self-satisfied balance between life and being, avoiding conflict, and wallowing in the fulfillment of desires, but to seek a higher good, a more perfect being, the realization of an as yet unknown ideal. “But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 6, Man in the Universe

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Sri Aurobindo. for detailed and systematic study of The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo join us at sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com daily new 5 hours ago
Sri Aurobindo. process involves moving from the sevenfold ignorance toward the sevenfold knowledge. this leads to an integral knowledge. 5 hours ago
ayurveda. kapha adjustment to motivate. pitta adjustment to reduce strain. vata adjustment to ground the body. http://www.lotuspress.com/ 5 hours ago
Sri Aurobindo. physical, vital and mental levels are taken up and transformed as they are taken up by the spiritual energies at work. 1 day ago
ayurveda. hatha yoga should not strain, so physical condition needs to be evaluated & poses adjusted and extended over time. lotuspress.com 1 day ago
Sri Aurobindo. process is heightening to achieve new realization, then widening and integralisation to make it stable for the lower levels 2 days ago
ayurveda. kapha benefits from hatha yoga that is warming and that adds flexibility, & supports function of lungs. such as bends & breathing 2 days ago
Sri Aurobindo. not sufficient to simply experience higher consciousness, to live in a state of bliss disconnected from life, but to live it 3 days ago
ayurveda. pitta benefits from hatha yoga that is cooling, supports the function of the liver and that reduces stress. such as corpse, fish 3 days ago
ayurveda. vata benefits from hatha yoga that provides balance and grounding and works on colon or intestines, such as backward bend, plow 4 days ago

My Integral Praxis emphasizes the three-fold practice of transparency, choice, and accountability

My Integral Practice Daniel O'Connor Integral Ventures, LLC
In the context of personal development, an Integral Practice may be defined as an integrated set of developmental practices designed to enhance one's experience of life and support one's contribution to the world.

I first encountered the idea of an Integral Practice in 1993, in the final chapter of a veritable encyclopedia of human potential: The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature by Michael Murphy. Based on a breathtaking variety of research accumulated over the years, Murphy outlined in considerable detail about a dozen different types of metanormal human capacities that appear to be latent in us all, awaiting development through various transformative practices. With these metanormal capacities in mind and evidently drawing inspiration from Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, Murphy proposed a contemporary approach to personal development that would integrate physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual practices into what he called Integral Practices, flexibly self-designed to gradually awaken one's latent human potential.

This idea of Integral Practice and the research behind it was particularly appealing to me because, in 1993 at the age of 27, I had just completed an intensive wilderness sabbatical in which I engaged in my own self-designed Integral Practice of solo backpacking and mountaineering, journaling and reading in psychology and philosophy, and sitting and walking meditation. In fact, I could trace my experience with various approaches to Integral Practice all the way back to the age of 14, when I began training in Shaolin Kung Fu, one of the oldest forms of body-mind-spirit cultivation. Murphy's book gave me a language to describe what I had figured out for myself through a combination of intuition and experimentation. I have since then been engaged to varying degrees from one year to the next, during the many ups and downs of my life, in a slowly evolving Integral Practice that supports all my work in the world. For whatever it might be worth to those who read this article, I would like to share a general outline of the core components of my Integral Practice.

My Integral Practice
In one sense, my whole life is an Integral Practice, simply because there is no aspect of my life that I do not consider to be a field of practice or an opportunity for personal development. Nevertheless, what really matters in this context are those relatively few personal practices that are essential to my development as a whole person in every aspect of my life. [...]

In plain English, Yoga is a whole lot more than isometrics and stretching. It is a comprehensive practice of personal transformation and self-realization with enough diversity in specific techniques to suit the personal diversity of countless spiritual aspirants. In fact, it may just be the original Integral Practice, as my wife Karen so provocatively proposed in this wonderful introductory article.

While I have been inspired since 1994 by the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the first teachings of which came to me through The Life Divine, I have found myself in need of far more body-mind Yoga discipline than Aurobindo might have required or desired. My first experience with the now-ubiquitous body-mind Yoga known as Hatha, was when Karen taught me some postures in 1995, when I was 29. I took to it rather easily and have practiced it regularly and intensively, meaning just about every day for nearly an hour, for roughly 7 of the past 14 years, and for about 15 minutes every day during all but a few of the remaining years. My experience with the more philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Yoga has been much the same, waxing and waning in multi-year periods, while always remaining in the background of my mind, as if it belongs there. Every time I return to intensive daily practice after some multi-year partial hiatus, I discover a new level of depth to this amazing discipline. [...]

With the gradual emergence of the real-time social web currently being led by Twitter and Facebook, the potential for world-wide, collaborative, experiential learning about a great variety of Integral Practices seems significant, to say the least. If nothing else, we may find that the increased Transparency, Choice, and Accountability of such Open Integral Practices helps each one of us maintain our respective commitments to ourselves while inspiring others to make and keep their own. It is in this spirit that I am beginning to open my own Integral Practice.

Post-Script: Further Reading on Integral Practice
Those of you who would like to explore the idea of Integral Practice might consult Murphy's The Future of the Body, particularly if you have some skepticism about the very prospect of metanormal human potential. Those looking for more practical guidance on the design of their own Integral Practices might appreciate the follow-up book Murphy co-authored with George Leonard, The Life We are Given: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul, in which they present a trademarked approach called Integral Transformative PracticeTM. More recently, Ken Wilber and his colleagues at Integral Institute designed their own trademarked approach called Integral Life PracticeTM, which can be explored through the book Integral Life Practice: A 21st Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening, co-authored by Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard, and Marco Morelli. Posted by Daniel O'Connor on August 13, 2009 Permalink Technorati Tags: advaita vedanta, hiking, integral practice, integral praxis, open practice, weight training, yoga

Health & Healing in Yoga

Techniques for Health [pranayama] - words from the Mother...
Posted by kalpana on August 9, 2009 at 8:56pm View kalpana's blog

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo never endorsed any particular techniques, as They did not wish their Yoga to become a rigid system, or for their disciples to promote any techniques in particular. They prefered to discuss questions of health on an individual basis, oe within the system of Ashram Education.

However, with this caution in mind, if one reads carefully, widely and deeply, one will find some practical suggestions for physical health and how to train mind/body. Of course with techniques such as pranyama, a qualified teacher is important. Having said that, calm, slow deep breathing does steady the mind and boost the health.

There is an excellent little book called Health & Healing in Yoga, compilation of the Mothers answers to particular questions related to health, the consciousness of the body, ways of relaxation etc. Tags: cautions, mother, pranyama, satprem, suggestions

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A horse and a crocodile

Although we often refer to our brains as a single, solid unit, it is clear that this is not an accurate description. Rather, our brains consist of a conglomerate of various sub-brains and sections, all interconnected. Dr. Pau! D. MacLean, a prominent brain researcher, has developed a model of brain structure which he calls the "triune brain." In other words, humans have not one brain but three. (Actually, even this is an oversimplification; but this model has the adVantage of displaying our evolutionary heritage.) MacLean states that the human brain amounts to three interconnected biological computers," with each biocomputer having its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space its own memory, motor, and other functions." Each of the three brains corresponds to a major evolutionary development and are categorized as follows: the reptilian brain the old mammalian brain and the new mammalian brain. MacLean illustrates this point facetiously when he points out that when a psychiatrist asks his patient to lie down on the couch he is asking him to stretch alongside a horse and a crocodile.

According to the triune model of the brain, evolution has simply added new sub-brains to preexisting ones like a man who keeps building additional structures onto an old house However, to continue with the analogy, with each new addition to the house the physical structure of the older components were altered or modified to some extent. In other words the reptile brain m humans is not exactly the same as the brain of a lizard. That is not to say we haven t retained any reptilian functions in our brains; we most certainly have. MacLean has shown that our reptile brains play a major role in our aggressive behavior, territoriality ritual and social hierarchies.

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Thinking Animal Thoughts - TIME One medical theorist. Dr. Paul D. MacLean, has suggested that when a man lies down on a psychiatrist's couch, a horse and a crocodile lie down beside him. People, according to MacLean's theory, have not one but three brains: neomammalian (the human), paleomammalian (the horse) and reptilian (the crocodile). Certain primitive tribesmen make no distinction between human and animal life but assume that all life is roughly the same. It simply takes up residence in different forms, different bodies. Higher cultures do not make that organic assumption; they are haunted by the animal in man, by the idea of animals as their lower nature, the fallen part, the mortal. The clear blue intelligence of civilization, they think, is imprisoned in the same cell, the body, with its Caliban, the brute undermind.

That assumption is a bit of a slander upon the animal kingdom, of course. It arises from an egocentric and spiritually complicated habit of mankind. People use animals not only for food and clothing and scientific experiment and decoration and companionship, but also, most profoundly, for furnishing the human mind with its myths. Victor Hugo wrote, "Animals are nothing but the forms of our virtues and vices, wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls." We become those elaborately varied creatures, we take their forms. Odysseus' companions were transformed into swine, but in the metamorphosis, their intelligence remained human, unaffected. In reality, when men are transformed into beasts, for whatever reason (anger, greed, lust, drugs), their intelligence is usually very much affected, for the worse. Unlike Odysseus' men, they keep their human forms but assume the character of beasts.

Heideggerian critical philosophy of technology provides a useful counterbalance

Thinking about the moon landings, I can't help thinking about the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, and the massive technologization of society that followed world war two... But I also think about how the photographs have affected people on a deep, and not only conscious, level, making it that much more possible for us to think of humanity as a single entity, and more importantly, of the earth as a single interconnected set of living processes. anotherheideggerblog Saturday, July 25, 2009
Interview with Adrian Ivakhiv
Our latest interview is with Adrian Ivakhiv, Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture with a joint appointment in the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. He is also runs one of my favorite blogs over at Immanence.

Heideggerian pessimism regarding technology, including that represented by the moon landings, is a perspective that has influenced me, and it's one I continue to consider important for any future environmental or ecological thought. Along with the writings of a more Marxist-influenced kind of geography (such as Denis Cosgrove's work on environmental and global visuality), a Heideggerian critical philosophy of technology provides a useful counterbalance against those in the environmental movement for whom the photos of Earth from space are nothing but a positive cultural touchstone in the movement toward global environmental awareness. Thinking about the moon landings, I can't help thinking about the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, and the massive technologization of society that followed world war two. In fact, I think of a television ad that played some years ago for "Tang," the orange flavor-crystal soft drink that made its name when it was used by NASA in its Gemini flights. In the ad a couple of animated "moon men" come to Earth bearing rocks which they want to trade for Tang, the drink they apparently gained a taste for when astronauts brought it to the moon. So I think of the moon landings also as part of the commercialization of massive technological enterprise - a way to get the American people on board in something much larger, and much less salutary, than the "one small step for man" that Neil Armstrong famously referred to. [...]

There is a strong resonance between Heideggerian thinking and deep ecology (or biocentrism). Many of the influential thinkers associated with the deep ecology movement - Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions, Neil Evernden, Dolores LaChapelle, among others - refer to Heidegger at least in passing. Some, like Evernden and LaChapelle, have worked with Heideggerian ideas fairly extensively. And ecophilosophers including Michael Zimmerman, Bruce Foltz, Laura Westra, and Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic, while not necessarily identifying themselves as "deep ecologists," have brought a fair bit of refinement into the environmental application of Heideggerian concepts.

The key Heideggerian ideas that have been taken up within biocentric writing are, first and foremost, his critique of technology, i.e. its essence as Gestell, the disclosure of things as raw material for human use, and, secondly, his notion of Gelassenheit (commonly translated as "letting things be"). Heidegger's later writings on poetry, art, and language as the "house of being" have also influenced a certain subset of ecocritics (ecologically oriented literary and cultural critics) including Jonathan Bate, Greg Garrard, and Kate Rigby.

That said, Heidegger has been critiqued (rightly, I think) for a residual anthropocentrism and human-animal dualism, and his involvement with Nazism has negatively affected the extent of interest among environmentalists in his philosophy. In the end, I would say his philosophy has been one among several sources, often taken up somewhat superficially (as in the influential 'Deep Ecology' text co-written by Devall and Sessions in the 1980s) though at least occasionally with a fair bit of rigor, but it has been a crucial one only for a limited subgroup of biocentric thinkers, and less so for activists. Deep ecology, it should be mentioned, evolved in constant conversation with the activities of movement activists, including the radical wilderness activism of Dave Foreman and other founders of Earth First! and the more broadly political work of later Earth First! activists and related groups. Its theoretical positions have also been refined and developed in dialogue with those of social ecologists, ecofeminists, postmodern and poststructural ecologists, pragmatist ecophilosophers, more mainstream (rights based, etc) environmental ethicists, and perhaps most closely with Buddhist and process-relational environmental thinkers (some of whom, like Joanna Macy and Freya Matthews, identify with the "deep ecology" label and others of whom do not). Within this broader field of critical environmental thought, Heidegger is one of many reference points, but he does constitute an important link between ecophilosophy and continental philosophy. [...]

(I also find Bakhtin's emphasis on the dialogical nature of meanings useful; without Heidegger, there'd be no Derrida, no Foucault, and perhaps a different deep ecology as well. But then Heidegger makes room for all these things; he just didn't analyze technology with the nuance and refinement that we can apply in a post-McLuhan, post-Latour, and indeed post-Heidegger world.) ... Posted by Paul Ennis. Labels: Adrian Ivakhiv, deep ecology, environementalism, Interview, martin heidegger, philosophy

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Amazon.com: Heidegger and Asian Thought: Graham Parkes: Books
By S_Mir (Pala) - See all my reviews Furthermore, it has also been claimed that a number of elements within Heidegger's thought bear a close parallel to Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism. An account given by Paul Hsao records a remark by Chang Chung-Yuan claiming that "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought."

Mechanosphere

Digital Individuations from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects

I have often argued that the task of philosophy is to think the present. In my recent interview I observed that philosophy cannot proceed without its others. These two issues are interrelated. In striving to think the present, philosophy strives to think the differential of its time and of a life that requires new conceptual creations seeking to comprehend the real of reality. If there is a greatness to Marx and his historical materialism, it is in the manner in which he strives to think the present. When Marx analyzes, for example, the factory and the working day, the aim is not simply to engage in a moralistic exercise of denouncing exploitation.

No, Marx is no Luddite, nor is he a moralist. He is not a Luddite because his aim is not to return us to a prior form of pastoral social organization. He is not a moralist because he does not begin with a set of pre-defined, a priori normative values, but instead seeks to determine how particular sets of values emerge out of the organization of the historical moment. Rather, while Marx sniffs out forms of alienation and exploitation in these new forms of social organization, he also seeks to determine the affordances or potentials that have been rendered available as a result of how bodies are individuated or formed within these new machines.

For example, Marx argues that the factory disciplines the worker and forms a collective organization that affords the possibility of a revolutionary overturning current regime of production. The factory is not simply a site of alienation and exploitation for Marx, but is a milieu of individuation that forms a new type of body and subjectivity that opens the possibility of a new social order.

I think this sort of analysis is what is missing in a number of the conservative critiques of the new technology. Rather than lamenting the manner in which people are not good readers and writers in the way they were fifty years ago– which is much like lamenting the manner in which workers are not like feudal peasants, i.e., apples and oranges –we should instead seek to determine the new individuations that are taking place within this mechanosphere, the emergent forms of subjectivity, the new structures of cognition, and the new affordances for very different ways of living.

Thursday, July 23, 2009 Interview with Levi R. Bryant
Today we interview Levi R. Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence and co-editor (along with Graham Harman and Nick Srnicek of the forthcoming The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Many of you will also know Levi from his excellent blog Larval Subjects.

I thus think there are two Heidegger’s. There is the Heidegger that went very far in the deconstruction of ontotheology and what I like to call the “little demiurge” or the sovereign subject, but there is also this other Heidegger that seems to perpetually recoil from this destitution, striving to discover some new ground, meaning, or identity. This has led to a lot of mischief both in his own life and in subsequent engagements with his work. For example, technology studies have been pushed back a great deal as a result of his moralizing and Luddite attitude towards enframing. anotherheideggerblog

Integral well-Being based on the consciousness perspective of Sri Aurobindo's teaching

The Institute Mirravision Trust Sri Aurobindo The Mother Our Guide Predecessors Our Mission Our Vision Integral Yoga Psychology
MIRRAVISION TRUST

Mirravision Trust is formed with a professional group of psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists along with spiritual sadhaks. The aim of the trust is to study, design and implement and encourage the implications of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's thought in the areas of psychology, mental health. Psychiatry, health and well-being, education and social sciences at large. The central aim of Mirravision is to bring into light Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's teachings to the professional world with a goal to implement it in academic as well as in applied fields.

Mirravision Trust is named after Mirra Alfassa, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, who is the executrix of Sri Aurobindo's vision as well as his collaborator in the new evolutionary work that is to manifest the future models of human being. Mirravision Trust is being formed as a non-profit, public charitable trust encouraging education, training, research and deliverance of its applications to humanity at large, with a special focus on mental health. Mental health with its unique nature and complexities needs a novel approach. In fact, any approach to mental health remains incomplete unless it is integrates cultural, subjective and spiritual dimensions.

Mirravision will combine all the three dimensions to formulate a new approach with both conceptual clarity and practical applications. Keeping this in view, it would undertake an innovative understanding of the human psyche, designing of psycho-spiritual spaces (akin to ashram-based communities) that facilitate development of various dimensions of consciousness and provide training of people in personal growth, psychological perfection and transformation of consciousness. Besides sponsoring the Institute for Integral Yoga Psychology, Mirravision Trust also strives :

1. To establish specialized clinics, community centers, hospitals for the public and community rehabilitation centers for the mentally ill and psychosocially maladjusted, physically handicapped, mentally challenged and drug- dependent subjects based on Integral perspective.
2. To promote, develop, run, and manage specialized community spaces for practical programs of personality development, psychological growth , integral health, and integral well-being based on psycho-spiritual space approach with special emphasis on mental health.
3. To integrate community / Ashram life based on psycho-spiritual spaces into psychotherapy, counseling, and psychopharmacology with special emphasis on mentally ill and mentally challenged.
4. To promote the concept of Integral well-Being based on the consciousness perspective of Sri Aurobindo's teaching and develop appropriate curriculum, research, training program, professional net-work and practicing fields for the purpose.
5. To promote the cause of Integral health including mental health based on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother through research, action oriented strategies, social support system and liaison with other like-minded organizations/movements.
6. To help the aged, sick, helpless and indigent persons and set up special geriatric services based on dignity and values of living and dying.

Pride characterizes modern life

Nietzsche’s Prophetic Voice Still Speaks

from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

On a close, non-literal reading of the text, Nietzsche’s madman is not rejoicing in the death of God but is deeply troubled by it. As he says, “We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murders. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’” What does Nietzsche mean by horizon, and what happens when the horizon is erased? A horizon carves out a space for vision. Or you might say the horizon creates a space within which we can live because it sets a boundary of sorts for what we can see. So what happens when I “wipe away the entire horizon?” I destroy the very boundaries that define human existence. Again, the madman does not take joy in this situation. Rather, he is describing where we are in history, what we’ve become as a society. We are a people who think we don’t need God; we’ve become, as Nietzsche says explicitly, a prideful people. In fact, pride characterizes modern life (and a good bit of postmodern life as well)...

According to Nietzsche, we’ve become prideful in a number of ways. First of all, we built grander and grander conceptual edifices (what Nietzsche poetically calls, “columbaria”) that lead us away from the forces of life and toward a culture of death. We forget that our metaphors have lowly origins and believe that our columbaria are impenetrable. Having such great confidence in the progress of modern science, we believe that with enough time we can even overcome death. In such an environment, Nietzsche asks, who needs faith? We have denied our finitude, have made ourselves gods; thus, practically speaking God is dead. The madman laments this situation. Do we? Or do we continue by the way we live our lives to confirm Nietzsche’s prophetic judgment? Я виновна, as the Russians say.

On Early and Late Derrida

from Critical Animal by Scu

As the question of the animal intensifies in Derrida's thought we see a continued distance being placed between Derrida and Heidegger, and so often and repeatedly over the question of the animal (from the 1968 The Ends of Man, to his 2001-2002 lectures The Sovereign and the Beast). And if we are to take Derrida at his word, that the most fundamental disavowal for him is the disavowal of the animal, then it should come as no surprise to us that his more political and ethical writings should become more central in his work at the same time that the question of the animal enters his work with a stronger and greater frequency. The argument here isn't just that you can't understand Derrida without understanding his work on animals, though that is part of my argument, it is also that you can't understand the specific shift of his work away from a strong heideggerianism and towards a strong political and ethical focus without understanding the way the question of the animals plays in the economy of Derrida's writing.

Become a member of Healing International

from Temple of Peace akhnaton@templeofpeace.net to tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com
date 22 June 2009 17:45 subject Healing International

You are very warmly invited to become a member of the prestigious Healing International. There are now more than 6700 healers and/or therapists who have already become members of Healing International.

Healing International is an excellent way in which to exchange news, views and ideas on many healing and natural health subjects with like-minded people throughout the world. And, of course, to make many new friends!

To become a member of Healing International, please click below:- http://healinginternational.ning.com/?xgi=c0P7rM0

One of the major challenges for us healers and therapists is that we are all much too fragmented on the internet; Healing International represents all healers and all therapists!!

I shall look forward to seeing you on Healing International With many healing blessings Geoffrey Keyte

A powerful maritime centre of Byzantium

Monemvasia A Byzantine City State
By Haris A. Kalligas

This lavishly illustrated book stands out in its field as the only book currently available on the best-preserved Byzantine city in the Peloponnese – Monemvasia. Haris A. Kalligas, a world authority on Monemvasia’s history and architecture, here explores the city’s foundation, its status as a powerful maritime centre of Byzantium, and its gradual decline after the fall of the Empire.

Founded on a rock off the eastern shore of the Morea in the late sixth century A.D, Monemvasia was populated by the inhabitants of Sparta and was to become an important port. The citizens retained their ancient institutions, while they developed maritime activities, both military and commercial. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were particularly prosperous for the city, and it remained a centre of commercial activity during the last Byzantine period. When the Turks seized Byzantium, Monemvasia came first under papal and then Venetian rule and changing conditions led to its gradual decline. The Venetians handed the city over to the Turks in 1540 and returned in 1690 for a period of 25 years. After a second Ottoman occupation, Monemvasia was the first city to be liberated by the Greeks during the War of Independence in 1821.

Using sources from all periods, along with original material based on research on the architectural and urban history of the city, Monemvasia is a comprehensive study of a unique city – a city within the Byzantine Empire which preserved institutions of municipal autonomy and self government originating from the Roman period. ISBN: 9780415248808 Published June 19 2009 by Routledge.

Donna Haraway's When Species Meet is a strange and frustrating book

The biopolitics of Michael Pollan and Donna Haraway
from Critical Animal by Scu
Most of you, by now, have seen this blog, which asks the question, Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

Michael Pollan goes on to contend that without humans eating animals, many domesticated species would die out. So, at the level of the population, we now have a moral imperative to eat and kill animals so that the population does not die. We have to kill in order to make life live (to steal a phrase from Michael Dillon and Julian Reid). However, one might be willing to let Pollan off the hook. He isn't a trained philosopher, and he probably couldn't care less about the question of the biopolitical. Let us turn our attention, now, to someone who should know better.

Donna Haraway's book When Species Meet is a strange and frustrating book for anyone who is serious about questions of animal ethics. It also contains several remarkable similarities to Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma (my brother likes to point out that the books end in exactly the same way, with a bunch of professors roasting a pig in California). It is exactly to this pig roast I would now like to turn. Before turning there, I guess I should stay that until her specific turn to discuss animals, Donna Haraway was an essential and keystone philosopher for much of my early theory days. I even sent her a fanboy email once. And I want to say, I still find her writing and style intoxicating.

Even so, let us look at her position on flesh eating in the "parting bites" of WSM. She describes how her friend Gary Lease is a hunter who is incredibly concerned with hunting in ecologically sustainable ways. She further describes "[h]is approach is resolutely tuned to ecological discourses, and he seems tone deaf to the demands individual animals might make as ventriloquized in rights idioms" (pp. 296-297).

Sustainable food growing classes; integral dance of the five elements; chant the rainbow

The Hindu Metro Plus Chennai Travel This is Auroville for you Weve all heard of the universal township Auroville which exists just three hours south of Chennai and celebrated its 40th birthday last year Cofounded by ...

This is Auroville for you
Here’s a beginners’ guide to discovering Auroville
PHOTOS: SEEMA SANGHI FARM STORY Visitors looking around Solitude
We’ve all heard of the universal township, Auroville, which exists just three hours south of Chennai and celebrated its 40th birthday last year. Co-founded by The Mother and Sri Aurobindo, with the purpose of “creating a place where men and women of all countries can live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities”, Auroville’s population consists of 2,000 people from 40 nations.
What we might not know is what one can actually do there, to be a part of this experiment of human unity, without actually moving in. The Auroville website (www.auroville.org) is as bewildering as the place itself, so here’s a brief guide to discover Auroville. Be warned though, that Auroville doesn’t encourage indiscriminate tourism; the Outreach Centre states clearly: “Only people who are genuinely interested in its ideals and projects and willing to participate in the community life are most welcome.”

Getting introduced
A three-day seminar conducted by an Aurovilian during the guest season (November to April) provides a comprehensive first insight into Auroville. The seminar takes you to different communities to meet Aurovilians and presents the ideals and reality of Auroville. Those intending to join Auroville can attend a more in-depth one-week to three-week seminar. Phone: 0413-2623019
Guest Service
Located upstairs at the Solar Kitchen, it offers a wide range of information and guidance. Open from Monday to Friday, 9.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Phone: 0413-262 2704

PUBLIC BUILDINGS
The Visitors Information and Reception Centre Usually the first stop if you’re visiting Auroville. The architecturally brilliant buildings house photographic exhibitions and the Charter. Shop at the various boutiques and bookshops and try delicious home-grown, organic food at the café/restaurant. Get tickets here for the Matrimandir. Open daily from 9 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.
Matrimandir The spiritual and physical centre of Auroville contains the meditation chamber and houses a solid crystal, 70 cm in diameter (supposedly the world’s biggest). The inner chamber is open to visitors only on Sundays, but the tickets (free) must be collected between Monday and Friday. The Solar Kitchen, the popular, inexpensive collective kitchen for Auroville with a solar bowl on its roof, provides energy for cooking. About 600 meals are prepared daily for the community and guests, largely made from vegetables and grains grown organically in and around Auroville.

EDUCATION
Convergence This innovative environmental education centre offers experiential environmental programmes for anyone interested in making their world a better place. Visit: www.thepointogconvergence.org
LEAP The Learning Experience Auroville Program offers a range of courses - sustainable food growing classes; integral dance of the five elements; chant the rainbow, and many others. Visit: www.leap-auroville.com

GUEST HOUSES ( www.aurovilleguesthouses.org)
There are about 40 guesthouses of varying comfort; some have a minimum-stay requirement.
Quiet Healing Centre A “special kind of hotel” on the beach envisioned by The Mother where people could ‘recharge and heal’. Therapies used here ‘honour and strive to work in harmony with the body’s own deep wisdom’. Phone: 0413-2622329
Gaia’s Garden Focusses on ecology and education. It is a well-maintained guesthouse with an ‘aspiration for beauty.’ Phone: 0413-2622739
Youth Camp For people of all ages, with an easygoing multi-cultural atmosphere. Orients guests on the activities of Auroville and interacts with neighbouring villages. Phone: 0413-2622357

FARM STAYS
Only for those with a serious interest in experiencing farm life and learning skills. Accommodation varies from capsules (pyramid-shaped hut raised on pillars) to brick rooms. Often, the payment is respect, a lot of hard work and a small donation.
Annapurna The largest Auroville farm of 135 acres, grows rice, varagu, rosella, millet, firewood crops and uses solar and diesel power. Also an active research centre for ecological farming and has a local seed stock. Basic accommodation for volunteer farm workers. Contact: tomas@auroville.org.in
Buddha Garden Has vegetables, orchards, forest and 65 chickens. Guiding principles: health and well-being and to grow food with love and awareness. Provides a place where people can share this process and learn what it means to tread lightly on the earth. Visit: www.buddhagarden.org
Solitude Farm Restaurant Founded by Krishna in 1996, Solitude tries to be wholly sustainable through its food production. Says Krishna: “Solitude is about harmony, both environmental and social, and sustainability in all facets of life.” Experience organic food, lovingly grown, harvested and prepared. You can taste the freshness of the grains, vegetables and fruits with each bite. American chef Cody creates a global menu of Italian, Mexican, Thai and Israeli food, including a unique pasta made from traditional millets, vegetable wraps and ragi dosa (staple food in this area before the introduction of rice). Relax under trees and enjoy the peaceful, green farm atmosphere. Reservation is a must. Phone: 0413-2622068
SEEMA SANGHI

Host families say they receive more from the experience than they give

from Sara Wilson sara@freshair.org to tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 29 May 2009 00:21 subject Please help a child this summer Hi Tusar

I thought you would be interested in helping out The Fresh Air Fund by posting a mention of this exciting news on Marketime. The Fresh Air Fund received a tremendous offer by some very generous donors. Any gift given from now until June 30th will be matched dollar-for-dollar. We are so excited and thought you could help by posting a mention, tweet, or by putting up one of our new banners on your site. I've set up this news release which explains everything, so please feel free to use any of the images, logos, videos, banners, buttons, etc: http://freshairfund-newsrelease.com

We are also still in need of hosts for this summer. Host families open their hearts and home to a child to give a fresh air experience that these children never forget. Please let me know if you are able to post and if you could send me the link that would be fantastic. Thank you so much, Sara

--Sara Wilson, The Fresh Air Fund sara@freshair.org www.freshair.org

Auroville’s growth as an ecocity has slowed to a crawl

Cities Can Save the Earth
Richard Register May 12, 2009 Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
The climate crisis won’t be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It’s going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them.

The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well. Big auto companies, are rapidly building car factories and highways in China and India. Many cities, like Berkeley, California where I lived for 30 years, don’t have a single pedestrian street — and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Only one out of 10 people on the planet actually drives cars, but drivers are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage through the automobile-sprawl pattern of development.

The concepts behind the ecocity are fairly simple. They involve a shift in development toward centers of high diversity:

• Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
• Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
• Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.

A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit...

A Good Start
Ecocities have their antecedents in the Garden City movement in the first half of the 20th century and in the critiques by Lewis Mumford of the rapidly spreading city of cars. The cultural flux of modernist, can-do thinking after the World War II laid the conceptual groundwork for the modern ecocity.
Three cities — Auroville, Arcosanti, and Curitiba — set the parameters of the ecocity. In Auroville, India, Mirra Alfassa, a devotee of the revolutionary mystic Sri Aurobindo, founded an international experiment in living and thinking in 1968. Their philosophical idea was to further human evolution toward higher consciousness, partially through the building of an international city where everyone was citizen of the world, dedicated to peace and an exploration of human enlightenment and higher fulfillment. Auroville soon became famous as a city restoring the forests and regenerating the degraded landscape near Pondicherry, India.

At the same time Paolo Soleri, an architect, philosopher, and student of Frank Lloyd Wright, was thinking through his vision of the compact ecological city. He envisioned a city much more three-dimensional than the flat, automobile-dominated giants spreading out rapidly at the time. He pointed out the paradox that a compact city rising tall from its foundations — which didn’t have cars and highways or need the oceans of gasoline for everyday functioning — was actually far smaller and more efficient in terms of energy, land, and time. He dubbed his idea of cities with much smaller ecological footprints “arcology,” the synthesis of architecture and ecology. He set out to build an example in the high desert city of Arcosanti, located halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff in Arizona.

Curitiba, in Brazil, was an already-existing city that moved in an ecological direction. Mayor Jaime Lerner, with a team of architects and planners, began shaping the city around transit-oriented compact development. They planned five long arms of tall buildings to reach out from a city center, where dozens of city blocks had become pedestrian streets. Streets dedicated to busses and emergency vehicles only served these arms of high-density development. With this pedestrian and transit-oriented basic form, the city went on to grow around open spaces preserved as public parks. The city planted millions of trees in denuded former ranching land, instituted stringent recycling including trading groceries for garbage in poor areas, and built inspiring libraries called “lighthouses of learning” in the city’s neighborhoods that rose up five or six stories. In general, this visionary leadership released a torrent of creative innovation with an ecocity base unlike anything before.

These innovations haven't realized their potential. Auroville’s growth as an ecocity, despite significant support from the Indian government and official UN endorsement as an international city, has slowed to a crawl. Arcosanti, in contrast, has received relatively little support from government, foundations, and the general public, and it too hasn't really gotten off the ground. Curitiba is today overrun by cars despite its early leading ecocity role.

Humanity failed to heed the lessons these pioneers offered. What we could have done by creative initiative we now must do out of necessity. Oil is running short, the climate is changing, and species are disappearing: We can no longer indulge in isolated experiments. We must redesign every city, and soon.

Next Steps
There are several ways to begin turning our cities into ecocities. First, there is ecocity mapping. This amounts to mapping your city plan so you have a clearer sense of your centers of most vitality. The map shows where to increase density and diversity of development, which is in those centers, and where to best open up the landscape for such features as restored creeks, expanded community gardens, and parks, which is often in the areas farthest from those centers.

The ecocity general plan, like any other general plan, lays out policies for developing and maintaining the city’s physical expression and functionality. Those policies have to also include specific reference to financial investment; if the city doesn't allocate money for the transition, its plan is just symbolic window dressing. If no serious money is spent, no serious progress will be made...

There are many other tools to create ecocities. Car-free-by-contract housing, for example, encourages building apartments and condominiums with no car parking provided because residents don’t need or want cars. Any policy that establishes and expands the pedestrian environment is a tool for building ecocities. Such policies can be used to shape buildings that utilize the sun’s energy, eliminating the necessity of having to pay for a car to get access to the city’s benefits, or help restore natural landscapes. Such tools produce pioneering transit systems that fit low-energy infrastructure, like that in Curitiba, and provide free public transportation, like that in downtown Portland. They are the wave of the future — if we are smart enough to get to that future in one piece. Richard Register, the founding president of Urban Ecology and founder and current president of Ecocity Builders, convened the First International Ecocity Conference in 1990. He is the author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god

He stood erect, a God like form and force
Her animal experiment began,Crowding with conscious creatures her world-scheme;But to the outward only they were alive,Only they replied to touches and surfacesAnd to the prick of need that drove their lives.

Animals are driven by that quality of Nature - Rajas, by which there is “the first light of conscious mind but buddhi or intelligent Will is absent,” says Sri Aurobindo in The Essays on Gita. This is why there is intelligence in them but they are not conscious of it and hence they reply to ‘touches and surfaces and the prick of need” which drives their lives and hence in the luminous words of Sri Aurobindo,

Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,But knew not who they were or why they lived:Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joyAnd the stimulus and delight of outer things;They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more,Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,Identified with the spirit’s outward shell.

The Mother says that there is an intelligence which acts and organizes animals but they are not conscious of it. Hence they are absorbed in the events happening at the present moment but there is aimlessness to animal existence. That is why sometimes we hear people yell in frustration “Don’t be like an animal!” There is in them the delight in outer things, and they are satisfied if their bodily needs are met and they are contented to just “breathe, feel, sense, act” as they are always identified with their “outward shell”.

The veiled spectator watching from their depthsFixed not his inward eye upon himselfNor turned to find the author of the plot,He saw the drama only and the stage.

The lines above describe so evocatively the animal or man dominated by his lower nature. The “veiled spectator” refers to that capacity in us to detach from the act and watch the drama unfold as the witness, without participating or getting involved in the drama. However, in the animal, the spectator is veiled and hence it does not turn inwards to “find the author of the plot” and just sees the “drama and the stage”. The animal does not ponder on the deep secrets of the laws of Nature, nor is in them a thirst for Truth, but they are content to hunt, “sniff the winds, or sloth inert in sunshine and soft air”

A formless yearning passions in man’s heart,A cry is in his blood for happier things:Else could he roam on a free sunlit soilWith the childlike pain-forgetting mind of beastsOr live happy, unmoved, like flowers and trees(“Savitri”, Book 2, Canto 4)

However, in man there is a yearning and aspiration to rise above his lower Nature and he seeks to release himself from the chains and bonds which restrain him, if this was not in him he would be like a beast roaming around aimlessly not reflecting or feeling the “touch of the soul within” and be like the beasts in their “childlike pain-forgetting mind” or happy and immobile like the flowers and trees. He also has the capacity to rise to greatness and explore his hidden realms and become a “mind, a spirit and self “

The animal’s thoughtless joy is left behind,Care and reflection burden his daily walk:He has risen to greatness and to discontent,He is awake to the Invisible.Insatiate seeker, he has all to learn:He has exhausted now life’s surface acts,His being’s hidden realms remain to explore.He becomes a mind, he becomes a spirit and self;In his fragile tenement he grows Nature’s lord. (“Savitri” Book 2 , Canto 4)

A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter is a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terrestrial existence.(“The Life Divine”, Sri Aurobindo)

The very form of man is thus capable of manifesting the Spirit says The Mother as the upright position is itself symbolic of this capacity to manifest the Spirit. There is a Tamil song in which the poet says “Oh Lord this form itself is created to worship and manifest thee”. Hands held together in prayer seem to at once connect us with deeper feelings of love and togetherness. This human physical form is most appropriate to express the Spirit. If we compare man to the higher living being we will fall short as we have a lot of imperfections but in the words of The Mother,

“…if we put ourselves in the place of the animals which immediately precede him in the evolution, we see that he is endowed with possibilities and powers which the others are quite incapable of expressing. The mere fact of having the ambition, the desire, the will to know the laws of Nature and to master them sufficiently to be able to adapt them to his needs and change them to a certain extent, is something impossible, unthinkable for any animal.”

“You may tell me that I don’t usually speak very kindly about man (laughter), but that’s because he usually thinks too kindly of himself !”

“If we compare him with other products of Nature, unquestionably he is at the top of the ladder.”

In the prone obscure beginnings of the raceThe human grew in the bowed apelike man.He stood erect, a Godlike form and force,And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earthborn eyes;Man stood erect, a Godlike form and force,And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earthborn eyes;Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:He looked at the heaven and saw his comrade stars;A vision came of beauty and greater birthSlowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of lightAnd moved in a white lucent air of dreams.He saw his being’s unrealized vastnesses,He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god (“Savitri”, Book 7, Canto 2 )

Recently, we saw a remake of the old classic, “The Planet of the Apes” on television, in which an astronaut is sucked into a bizarre planet in the distant future where intelligent talking apes are the dominant species and the humans are treated brutally and oppressed. Apparently, the advertisement for this movie said “Somewhere in the universe there must be something better than man". The humans and apes in this movie have similar capability in intellect and speech but it is the ape’s physical strength, which makes them dominate the planet and treat the humans as slaves. It was a fascinating movie. One highlight was the advice given by a philosophical wise ape to the commander-in-chief. Which went something like this ….

“You have no idea what these humans are capable of, we have physical strength but his technology and ingenuity are no comparison to our physical strength. Be careful of the power of the human and what he is capable of.”

It reminds me of what Sri Aurobindo once told a sadhak…..if only we knew of what lies beyond this mental state we would leave everything this very instant and chase after it. In conclusion, let us reflect on these words of The Mother…..

Can we hope that this body which is our present means of earthly manifestation, will have the possibility of transforming itself progressively into something which will be able to express a higher life, or will it be necessary to give up this form entirely to enter into another which does not yet exist on Earth?

That is the problem. It is a very interesting problem. If you will reflect on it, it will lead you to a little more light.

We can reflect on it just now. Posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore at 7:10 PM

Unlike Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo has not been so profuse and open in denouncing technology

India
Shyamala A. Narayan The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1980; vol. 15: pp. 87 - 101.
...Chaitanya and Mira: Two Plays 197 Sri Aurobindo Ashram ( Pondicherry) pa Rs40.00...Short Stories in the Background of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda...Chaitanya and Mira: Two Plays 197 Sri Aurobindo Ashram (Pondicherry) pa Rs40.00... Check item Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Editorial From Rights to Duties
Journal of Human Values, Oct 1998; vol. 4: pp. 131 - 132.
...correct sequence-from duties as cause to rights as effect. Sri Aurobindo says, 'no such general thing as duty exi~sts' .2 But...and moral purification to- wards spiritual preparation. Sri Aurobindo also adds in the same breath that duties `are of great... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Wilber's Integral Philosophy: A Summary and Critique
Daryl S. Paulson Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Jul 2008; vol. 48: pp. 364 - 388.
...Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Aurobindo. (1976). The synthesis of yoga. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Beck, D.E...synthesis of yoga. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press. Beck, D. E., & Cowen... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Indian Writing in English: An Introduction
C.D. Narasimhaiah The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1970; vol. 5: pp. 3 - 15.
...of arts and sciences as Sri Aurobindo. He also had what T. S...fashioned, according to Aurobindo, to 'serve the greater...light. It is as though Aurobindo is ready to reverse Keats...dawn co-exist and jostle. Sri Aurobindo no doubt sees... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Evolution, Religion, Science and the Creative Spirit
Raja Ramanna Journal of Human Values, Apr 2000; vol. 6: pp. 51 - 56.
...many aspects of animal behaviour. Sri Aurobindo offers a deeper psycho-spiritual...God. There may be real hope in Sri Aurobindo's description of existence in terms...question just as in the Rigveda. Sri Aurobindo deeply analyzed the creative spirit... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

India
Shyamala A. Narayan The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1997; vol. 32: pp. 41 - 72.
...pp21-9 [see Criticism: General]. Aurobindo, Sri Sri Aurobindo and the Poets of...evaluation of the Romantic poets. - 'Sri Aurobindo's Poetics' R.K. Singh Indian Response...Hour of God: Selected Writings of Sri Aurobindo comp with intro Manoj Das x+336pp... Check item Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Book Reviews : Arun Wakhlu, Managing from the Heart: Un folding Spirit in People and Organizations. New Delhi: Response Books, 1999, 240 pp. Rs. 245
S. Elankumaran Journal of Human Values, Apr 2001; vol. 7: pp. 98 - 102.
...prerequisite for long-term survival and excellence. RANJAN MITTER MCHV IIM Calcutta NOTE 1. Sri Aurobindo, The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram), Vol. 25, 217- 18. Arun Wakhlu, Managing from the Heart: Un- folding Spirit...
Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Traditional Indian Personality Concepts and the Unrealised Potential for Paradigm Shift
Radha Krishna Naidu Psychology & Developing Societies, Mar 1994; vol. 6: pp. 71 - 85.
...Aurobindo. (1965). Isha Upanishad. Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Sri Krishna Prem. (1969). The Yoga of the Bhagvad Gita...AUROBINDO. (1965). Isha Upanishad. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. SRI KRISHNA PREM. (1969). The Yoga of the Bhagvad Gita... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Rising Technology and Falling Ethics?
S.K. Chakraborty Journal of Human Values, Apr 1997; vol. 3: pp. 103 - 118.
...noble living. We will now explore Sri Aurobindo's thoughts on a few fundamental...science and scientific know- ledge. Sri Aurobindo goes to the very root of the theme...bottomline is that both Tagore and Sri Aurobindo assert the primacy of a conscious... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Book Reviews : Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Technobrat. New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1997, 313 pp. Rs 395. D.L. Johnson, Indian Thought: Between Tradition and the Culture of Technology. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1995, 140 pp. Rs 160
S.K. Chakraborty Journal of Human Values, Apr 1999; vol. 5: pp. 77 - 80.
...sure of what he is trying to say. For, unlike Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo has not been so profuse and open in denouncing technol...own characteristically profound and controlled style Sri Aurobindo has posed the modern problem as one of a long-term choice... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Library Automation and Networking Software in India: an overview
Anil Singh Information Development, Mar 2003; vol. 19: pp. 51 - 56.
...Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi-110016 (India). rathoreas...Iceland, Singapore, Malaysia, India and Sri Lanka. It is a complete, integrated...Educational Research and Training (NCERT), Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi - 110016 (India... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Science, Culture and Conflict in India
Dhirendra Sharma Cultural Dynamics, Jul 2000; vol. 12: pp. 164 - 181.
...some 5000 years ago), and Sri Aurobindo (18721950), the commentator...later life. He founded an Aurobindo Ashram movement along...avoid commenting on them. Aurobindo extensively commented...the Universal Mother! Sri Aurobindo writes in his... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Routes to Reality: Scientific and Rishi Approaches
Subhash Sharma Journal of Human Values, Apr 2001; vol. 7: pp. 75 - 83.
...ultimate intuition of rishis such as Sri Aurobindo has given us deep insights to the...transcendental or 'supra- mental' (to use Sri Aurobindo's expression) view to reality is...power of the word or the mantra. Sri Aurobindo has provided us a pathway for... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

India
Shyamala A. Narayan The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1999; vol. 34: pp. 37 - 66.
...Thomas The Quest 12(1) pp39-43. Aurobindo, Sri Beyond Man: The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother George Van Vrekhem...pp23-7. `The Mystic as Critic: Sri Aurobindo's Critical Methods' Sachidananda... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Managing the Earth-System: The Millennial Choice before the World's Policy-makers
S.K. Chakraborty Journal of Human Values, Apr 1995; vol. 1: pp. 37 - 48.
...whatever be its apparent features. Sri Aurobindo expresses this principle in the...1980), Vol. 1. i. 27, p. 30. 9. Sri Aurobindo; RightAttitude in Work (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Society, 1991), p. 33. 10. Swami... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

Indian Literature in English Translation: An Introduction
G.N. Devy The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1993; vol. 28: pp. 123 - 138.
...awarded to an Indian author so far. Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, and Gandhi were at the...Hindi poet to translate. As for Sri Aurobindo, he was at home in various languages...translators too. Among them are: Sri Aurobindo, R.C. Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

India
Shyamala A. Narayan The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1991; vol. 26: pp. 87 - 111.
...Discourse apropos of a Phrase in Sri Aurobindo's Savithri' R.Y. Deshpande Mother...Discourse apropos of a Phrase in Sri Aurobindo's Savithri' R. Y. Deshpande Mother...Mother India ed K. D. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry 605002... Check item Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

India
John Ferguson and Nissim EzekielThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan 1966; vol. 1: pp. 43 - 54.
...Ahmedabad. Ghose, Aurobindo. The Significance of Indian Art. Sri Aurobindo Ashram...been abstracted from Sri Aurobindo's work left unfinished...Ahmedabad. Ghose, Aurobindo. The Significance of Indian Art. Sri Aurobindo Ashram... Check item Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

Book Reviews : D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Science Technology Philosophy and Culture. PHISPC Monograph Series on History of Philosophy, Science and Culture in India, 1996, XLVIII + 323 pp. Rs 390 (Distributed by Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi)
C. Panduranga Bhatta Journal of Human Values, Apr 1999; vol. 5: pp. 80 - 84.
...true today. Having recourse to Sri Aurobindo's theory of involution-evolution...later restores the practical aspect of Sri Aurobindo's reservation to a certain degree...slighted the warnings of men like Sri Aurobindo and Gandhi (pp. 116-17). For him... Check item Full Text (PDF) Table of Contents MatchMaker

The Ethics of Managing Corporate Identity
Bengt Gustavsson Journal of Human Values, Apr 2005; vol. 11: pp. 9 - 29.
...Management Review, 14(1), 20- 39 . Aurobindo (1998), The Human Cycle ( Pondicherry:Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department...The Human Cycle (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department... Check item Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Table of Contents MatchMaker

One of the problems in India is the waste management, which is to say, they have none

musings... Monday, April 20, 2009
Earthday celebrations in Auroville, and a commentary on the weather...

iGoogle tells me it is currently 99 degrees in Pondicherry, with a humidity of 42%. With a humidity that low, it can be called a dry day. True story. iGoogle also tells me that it is currently 39 degrees in Colorado Springs, with a 54% humidity. I question the validity of the humidity reading, but i do not question the temperature at all. Consequently, i am melting into a puddle of goop, much like the paper pulp we played with in English class today.

In honor of Earthday, and as a way of doing something with the load of scrap paper in our classroom, we made home-made paper today by mixing paper bits with water over the weekend, and mixing it with a hand-held blender before putting the goop onto little round screens and pressing it down into something resembling paper. The result will be lumpy and slightly gray, as we used paper with mostly black print on it, but it was good fun to make, and a nice way to spend the afternoon. We have two weeks of school left, so it's totally time to spend our energy doing art projects in English class. No more grammar for me.

Auroville had a big Earthday celebration on Saturday. In the morning I went with some of the students from the school to pick up trash in the cashew fields. We filled half a dozen bags in an hour or so. Big bags. Lots of trash. Also lots of sun. Joy oh joy. When we finished, the kids asked "Will we pick up trash next weekend too?" to which i had to say, "No." Two weeks in a row of picking up trash at nine am in the morning is enough for me, and the kids will have ample opportunity to clean up their environment without the assistance of me on a Saturday morning. One of the problems in India is the waste management, which is to say, they have none. And dumping your trash on the road side is sort of the standard method of disposal. It's not particularly sanitary.

Later in the day on Saturday there was a concert that i started to help set up, but then i was viciously attacked by a rogue piece of metal that fell down from the grid at the auditorium, and so i was out for the count. I have a gouge by my right eye, but two days later it's looking quite nice, and i don't think it will scar. The way to assure that is to keep it cleaned and covered, of course, and so i will spend the next eleven days with a band-aid next to my eye. It will be the source of many questions, i'm sure.

The Earthday concert was good hippy fun. It was "world music" which is code for "hippy love the earth-mother music." As i say, good hippy fun. I really enjoyed the show, especially because it was a live show. I really will miss all the free concerts i'm able to attend here. Cover charge? What's that? It's pretty neat. Before the concert, there was a delicious vegan dinner at the Visitor's Center, which i enjoyed. They had an almond fig cake that was delicious.

And now it's Monday evening, and windy outside. Hopefully the wind is blowing in a storm, or at least circulating some of that ridiculously hot air. 99 degrees. Ugh. Sleeping tonight should be hot. be well. om shanti shanti shanti Posted by sally at 5:49 AM

Marc speaking about the Earth Days in Auroville

From the Earth to our soul Written by Marlenka & Mas Friday, 17 April 2009

Today's news features an excerpt of an interview with Marc speaking about the Earth Days in Auroville. The Earth Day, celebrated over the world April 22, is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. It is held annually during both spring in the northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern hemisphere. Mentioned also in the news: a live jazz concert coming up, tango class and practice every week and, guest speakers to be heard at Savitri Bhavan. AurovilleRadio

All kinds of sports at Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Puducherry

Features: Magazine Literary Review Life Metro Plus Open Page Education Plus Book Review Business SciTech NXg Friday Review Cinema Plus Young World Property Plus Quest Metro Plus Bangalore Chennai Hyderabad Queen of the sea
Adventurous Chaitanya Datla won the NGC’s docu-reality series “Mission Navy”
Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P. RIDING THE HIGH WAVES Chaitanya Datla The Hindu Tuesday, Apr 07, 2009 Metro Plus Chennai

Life was monotonous for the HR executive, until she decided to seek some adventure. And, Chaitanya Datla went on to challenge her physical, mental and emotional limits to emerge the winner of the National Geographic Channel’s “Mission Nav y: Lehron Ke Sartaj”.
“There were 50,000 civilians who applied for this docu-reality series. Finally, five were chosen. It was not easy, and I had to work really hard for this,” says the 28-year-old, who is said to be the first woman to sail on an Indian Navy warship.
“It’s not about being a man or a woman, but about being an individual who perseveres his / her dreams," she says. “I’ve always had a fascination for adventure and armed forces. I also participated in NGC’s ‘Mission Udaan’ three years ago, reaching the finals.

When I read about Nat Geo’s project, I just applied, and one thing led to another,” says this winner, who had to undergo physical tests, run races, take on stress interviews, underwater rescue missions and tasks, and also do a 10-metre jump!
We had training in the Naval Academy in Goa for three days. Our day would begin at 5 a.m. and goes on till 10.30 p.m.” I have evolved
“Sometimes it was like hell, but I enjoyed every bit of it. Each day was unique, and there was always something new to learn,” says Chaitanya, who sailed for six days and had to jump from a chopper, “do a lot of stunts and firing stuff”.

“It sounds tough, I know, but I thank my school, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Puducherry. It gave me a chance to try all kinds of sports. I also thank my parents and office for the support.”
The aim of National Geographic Channel was to give the common people a chance, just as the naval force gives viewers a glimpse of the Navy... SHILPA SEBASTIAN R.

I changed my entire lifestyle and my house is now solar-powered

Auroville takes out green rally
1 Mar 2009, 0257 hrs IST, Bosco Dominique, TNN PUDUCHERRY:

Electric cycles, motorbikes and cars took off in a convoy from the solar kitchen at Auroville on Saturday evening in a bid to raise awareness about climate change. As the rally touched major landmarks in the town from Darkali and international zone to Savitri Bhavan and Aurodam, the scores of participants drew curious stares and encouraging cheers.

“The response has been terrific. There’s been so much enthusiasm. What started as a little movement on environment-friendly transportation has gained momentum. We propose to make the event an annual feature,”

said Luigi Zanzi of L’avenir d’Auroville, one of the organisers of the event, told The Times of India. Participants included Aurovillians and residents from neighbouring regions. Manoj from Kerala, who made Auroville his home 14 years ago and works as a web developer, bought an electric cycle for Rs 24,000 a month back, though regular cycles cost less than half that.

“It is an investment based on a philosohy of caring for the world and sustainable development. The price doesn’t matter,”

he said. Manoj said research on utilization of renewable energy required great investment and added that he was proud to be among the pioneers patronising eco-friendly projects.

“I changed my entire lifestyle and my house is now solar-powered,”

he said. Another participant Pashi Kapoor, who owns a Reva electric car, settled in Auroville in the late 1960s.

“The rally is an occasion to reaffirm our commitment to preserving and protecting our environment. It is unfortunate that a serious issue like degradation of environment is given little prominence. Campaigns like this rally will enlighten the public,”

Kapoor said. Akash Heimlich and Auro Sukrit, who were inspired by former US vice president and environmentalist Al Gore’s film on the environment ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, established an electronic cycle and motorcycle manufacturing unit, ‘EVFuture’ in Auroville. “We have launched trial versions of 15 different types of electronic motorcycles and 30 electronic cycles. The response is terrific and most of our clientele participated in the rally,” Heimlich said.