A soft sensuality dressed up as spirituality

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Vedic Chhanda Rig Veda 1.1.1

We have discussed the special design of matras in the first rik of Agni Suktam in a previous post

We have seen that making the first Varna a deergha or long gives a special force right at the beginning of the hymn and the entire Veda. This technique is later seen in Ancient Greek poetry where the Dactyl (Long-Short-Short) is what creates the rhythm of the hexameter

Let us look at the energy and its movement in the first rik. We begin with an open airway and the sound is coming from deep in the chest as we pronounce a- अ .We move immediately then to ga- which is a kanthavya or guttural. Now there is a constriction in the air with force and a vibrating vocal cord सघोष 

How does this feel? The energy will move upward with the next word and will come to the lips, the face, the brain, and the cells. And as energy changes so does the psychology

Please test this. For this is not theory. The Veda is direct practice and experience. Never abstractions but pramaana 

https://x.com/AmazingVedas/status/2092926340232098201

As concepts go, intersectionality is deservedly iconic. Few terms have been as successful in conveying that gender simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, other social categories such as caste, class, race, religion. Long before the term was coined, activists and thinkers in many parts of the world recognised that isolating gender from other axes of analysis could not adequately capture the constraints on women’s lives. It was Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 intervention that rendered this insight portable, citable and usable. An interesting new article in Identities takes this distinction—between a widely held understanding and the term that organised it—as its point of departure. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

https://x.com/ASR_Metta/status/2093185202663063971

Minding the modern: Human agency, intellectual traditions, and responsible knowledge by Thomas Pfau

by JK TSE · 2015 — Cyril O'Regan wants Pfau to think critically about his genealogical framework, asking him to clarify why exactly the particular thinkers he has chosen ( ...

traditions, and responsible knowledge - Scholars@Duke publication

1 Jan 2013 — Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through ...

Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that the humanistic concepts they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages.

Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.

https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/1011380

"Coleridge does talk a lot about his own failure, that’s true."

fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

https://bsky.app/profile/fivebooks.com/post/3mu57lq76h52e

Lewis Carroll was a mathematician before he was a storyteller, and Wonderland is laced with mathematical ideas, argues Minh-Hoang Nguyen. Science and mathematics once promised that reason could reach a complete, final understanding of the world. But from Carroll's paradoxes to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, mathematics tells a different story about itself. Nguyen argues that reality, like Wonderland, is fundamentally incomplete. The belief that we live in a closed system awaiting full explanation is a philosophical mistake. Read the full article. iai.tv/articles/godel…

https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2093050979507671166

Central to its laws from Newton to Einstein, science is unable to describe time itself. Strangely, in the so-called "block universe" of contemporary physics, the direction of time disappears, yet time remains without our being able to say what it is. Join Tim Maudlin, Hilary Lawson, Ivette Fuentes, and Wahida Khandker as they debate. Tap the link to watch now: iai.tv/video/times-gr…

https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2093024426367287379

Abolishing private ownership of the means of production does not abolish power; it concentrates it. Without private property and market prices, rational economic calculation becomes impossible. Planners lack the information required to allocate resources efficiently. The result is not emancipation but shortage, coercion, and a new ruling class that controls both the economy and the state. Marx offered a total explanation of history and a total solution. Reality refused both. 

https://x.com/CreativeDeduct/status/2093057897018143048

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2064309615651668179

When everything requires permission, permission becomes the currency – and the people who master it are the ones who always did: the post-communists and their networks. Forty years of practice in navigating the apparatus didn’t disappear in 1989. It got a Brussels upgrade. So the connected do anything. For everyone else, everything is illegal or very, very hard. The system doesn’t select for the best builders. It selects for the best-connected askers – same as before 1989. Meanwhile in the US, they just build.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2092943665102483495

My Ayn Rand Phase: The Dangers of ‘Dead Dogma’

by Robert Jensen countercurrents.org/2026/08/my-ayn…

Robert Jensen reflects on his four- or five-year immersion in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism during his twenties and examines why its ideas appealed to him at the time. Looking back, he connects Rand’s emphasis on individual autonomy and freedom from obligation to his own desire to escape the emotional burdens of family, history and community.

He also revisits the philosophical limits of Rand’s rejection of altruism, empathy and emotion. Drawing on John Stuart Mill’s warning about “dead dogma,” Jensen considers how certainty can turn ideas into closed systems and argues for a more open-ended approach to questions of meaning, human nature and the limits of our knowledge.

https://x.com/Countercurrents/status/2092993854471614587

The older hippie fascination with Indian mysticism helped carry such ideas to Western seekers of peace, authenticity, and “living in the moment.” This has fed the New Age beliefs that now permeate many reform circles, replacing the philosophical and moral foundations of the West with sentiment, therapy-language, and magical thinking, and a soft sensuality dressed up as spirituality. The pull is not upward toward civilization, but downward toward the primitive.

https://x.com/JayantBhandari5/status/2093157316501671961

This reflects a total misunderstanding of my position. The first clause (religions are solutions to human problems) is precisely why I resent the hegemonic position of Hindu Nationalism vis-a-vis Hindu spirituality. Whatever problems Hindu Nationalism addresses in India are not our problems.

https://x.com/vjgtweets/status/2093084208881336554

The appeal of universality is an argument in favor of adapting Hindu spirituality to local cultural and social conditions precisely so it can address “human problems.” What we have now is a set of ossified cultural and ritual norms preserved as “Hinduism”

https://x.com/vjgtweets/status/2093086080358928644

This is related to your post, which I still need to address, but the bigger issue is that we lack an institutional mechanism to make exactly this determination. Why should I care if someone else asserts these as universal or not? If I deny they are, does that make me a lesser Hindu? Who makes that determination? These arguments about what constitutes “authentic Hinduism” are little more than idiosyncratic preferences asserted as normative.

Yes so that’s a good answer. One voluntarily associates with a sampradaya that presumably has views on this question and others. In that sense, i am spiritually homeless

I’ve written about this before but I find discussions on the sampradaya-level far more productive than pontificating about “Hinduism”

And what happens when that ecosystem no longer exists, as is the case in the diaspora?

https://x.com/vjgtweets/status/2093089183225278926

The Sangh’s consistently articulated goal is to cleanse, and then become, this organism. This commitment to sangathan, or collective, the RSS’s leaders have long insisted, is understood as a necessary part of overcoming an alleged Hindu emasculation and disunity. For the Sangh, sangathan is both the means and the end: the path to Hindu Rashtra.

This organicism, therefore, is not simply metaphorical. It is an ecological organising principle, part of the Sangh’s stated goal of “Sangh samaj banega”—the Sangh will become society. The RSS understands that having spawning diverse organisations is not incompatible with organisational singularity... Felix Pal (@FelixPal8) explains: caravanmagazine.in/politics/unvei Explore the network map here: rssproject.caravanmagazine.in

https://x.com/thecaravanindia/status/2092926887773556778

Savarkar's greatest sin was that he and his ideology were thoroughly democratic - he was blinded by an "enlightened" form of nationalism while totally disregarding the high noon of "enlightened" nationalism in Europe culminated in Bonapartism

https://x.com/HinduEvolian/status/2092950505270243545

True. This is the "The Constitution of the Hindusthan Free State Act, 1944" passed by the H.M.S. Nothing interesting, for we have seen the effects of liberal democracy. This is why there is a need to innovate politically. Indo-Futurism is the natural extension of Hindutva into the modern day constitutionofindia.net/historical-con…

https://x.com/CivitasSameer/status/2092979564645368092

What shapes a civilization’s narrative? In this Book Talk, historian Meenakshi Jain reflects on Ayodhya, intellectual debates, publishing challenges, and reclaiming India’s civilizational heritage. youtu.be/4ZDcOcculEw?si… @MakrandParanspe @PariksithSingh @AmazingVedas

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2093037075759067209

From finance to spirituality, discover Smt. Radhe Pfau’s transformative journey at the Lagrasse Sri Aurobindo Integral Life Center, her path to Vedic astrology, and the influence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. youtu.be/rkaqX6zC-3M?si…

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2093084639065936266

Exploring Sri Aurobindo’s engagement with wisdom literature in Sanskrit with Lopa Mukherjee at Bharat Nivas, Auroville. #Auroville #SriAurobindo #TheMother

https://x.com/AurovilleMedia/status/2092979195508830245

“Let THY Will be done & not mine.” Dr. Monica Gulati explores the deeper art of living truly in the light of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, at Unity Pavilion, Auroville, as part of the 154th Birth Anniversary celebrations. #Auroville #SriAurobindo #TheMother #UnityPavilion

https://x.com/AurovilleMedia/status/2092566880754217174

Creativity, whether in literature, theatre, music, painting, or any other art form, for that matter, is an act/art of discovering fresh power(s) [shakti] of shabda/abhinaya/svara/rang to realise the svabhava (inherent nature) of the self, the beings in nature and the vibrations (spanda) in space. Shall share my thoughts today on the poetics of emotive revelations/illuminations in poetry that builds on the resonances in the human consciousness and the word/world consciousness in Nature. @icssr @EduMinOfIndia

https://x.com/DhananjayaJnu/status/2092838268136296941

Creativity is an act of discovery ! Consider that ancient Indian philosophy understood the limitations of language to express the nature of ultimate reality! Looking forward to listening to @DhananjayaJnu !

https://x.com/ProfessorPuri/status/2092874105800491188

Integral Yoga Psychology

D Banerji - The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal …, 2026

To arrive at a clearer understanding of this goal, it is instructive to ground it in its
emergence in Sri Aurobindo’s experience. From 1906 to 1910, Aurobindo Ghosh

was among the leaders of an anticolonial political movement in Bengal, India. It was … Sri Aurobindo invoked Vivekananda in making this assertion and retrospectively read... This is also what Sri Aurobindo referred to as integral in integral yoga. Haridas Chaudhuri, one of the scholars and commentators of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, identified this integral … Sri Aurobindo asserted this in Synthesis of Yoga as follows: “… the perfection of the integral Yoga …

The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, Second Edition Chapter 34 Integral Yoga Psychology Debashish Banerji Book Editor(s):Glenn Hartelius, Jenny Wade, Harris L. Friedman First published: 20 August 2026 Summary

This article begins with a discussion of an appropriate theoretical framework for introducing a modern yoga psychology in a transpersonal frame. From this, it derives a goal of becoming as the primary determining factor for a structural psychology (darshana) and a transformational psychology (yoga). It then discusses the goal of becoming of the integral yoga as proceeding from the transpersonal experiences of Sri Aurobindo. It identifies the goal of becoming as the recognition of a fragmented ontology (Avidya) and its integration (Vidya) in a transformed individual and social life. It further subdivides the ontology of fragmentation in terms of a psychological, a cosmological and an ontological fragmentation and the need for their integration. From this, it discusses a practical metaphysics or structural psychology and a number of approaches given by Sri Aurobindo towards a transfrormational psychology or yoga praxis.

References

Banerji , D. ( 2012 ). Structure and process: Integral philosophy and triple transformation . Integral Review , 8 ( 1 ), 11 .

Banerji , D. ( 2018 ). Sri Aurobindo's formulations of the integral yoga . International Journal of Transpersonal Studies , 37 ( 1 ), 6 

Forman , R. K. C. ( 1998 ). The innate capacity: Mysticism, psychology and philosophy . Oxford University Press 

Hacker , P. ( 1983 ). Inclusivism . In G. Oberhammer (Ed.), Inclusivismus: Ein Indische denkform . Institute of Indology, University of Vienna .

Lucid Dreaming

T Stumbrys, N Atlas - The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal …, 2026

Despite a history of anecdotal reports dating back hundreds if not thousands of
years and fairly extensive scientific research over the last four decades, the
phenomenon of lucid dreaming (awareness of dreaming while dreaming) remains …

Joining the Widening Circles: How Transpersonal Psychology Can Contribute to Global Social Movements

KE Coder, D Rothberg - The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal …, 2026

… Karma yoga infuses its practitioners with courage, resilience, and calmness amid
challenge, and was a key founda… The liberation of one is seen as integral to the
liberation … In addition, integral theory offers a multiperspectival framework for …

[PDF] Nature and Self: The Bhagavad Gita's Direction to Psychological Health and Ecosystem Sustainability

A Dhawan - Journal of Haryana Studies ISSN

… This connection is stressed in the Bhagavad Gita through teachings on self-realisation,
which help people recognise that they are not distinct from nature but rather an
integral part of it. This viewpoint cultivates an excellent appreciation for nature and a …

[PDF] WE THE PEOPLE OF BHARAT: CONSTITUTIONAL DUALITY AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

S Mondal

The Indian Constitution presents a profound duality in the naming of a nation. The
Preamble opens with, ’We the People of India’ while Article 1 declares, ‘India, that is
Bharat, shall be a Union of States’. This paper explores the historical, cultural and …

Practices, spaces and species: Rethinking human–mosquito interactions and disease transmission

K Broome - Social Practices and Microscopic Matter, 2027

… Here, the amphitheatre’s stone tiers and surrounding vegetation are not mere
backdrops but integral elements of a practice- arrangement bundle that makes yoga
both possible and meaningful. The aesthetic qualities of stone and greenery reflect …

[PDF] ATTITUDE TOWARDS YOGA AMONG HIGHER SECONDARY STUDENTS

ARA Krishnaveni, AJS Ida - AKCE QUEST

… The findings of the study will be useful for educators, parents, and policymakers in
promoting yoga as an integral part of student … towards yoga among higher
secondary students and create an environment that supports the practice of yoga as …

Transpersonal Education

P Cunningham - The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal …, 2026

This chapter presents a definition of transpersonal education, explains why
transpersonal learning is important, and describes two models of transpersonal
education. The contributions of transpersonal education to advancing the …

The risk of iatrogenesis in schools: When well-intentioned interventions do more harm than good

R Brito, E Sellman - Exploring Mental Health in Education

This chapter examines growing debates about how schools respond to rising
concerns around student mental health. It argues that dominant approaches, often
grounded in simplified and individualised understandings of mental health and …

Toward a 'Responsibilist' Feminist Epistemology: A Study of Lorraine Code's Views of Epistemic Responsibility and Literature

BP Anthony - 2026

functions as a site of epistemic responsibility through the lens of Lorraine Code’s
feminist epistemology. The notion of epistemic responsibility re-conceptualizes the
knower as a socially and morally accountable agent embedded in specific historical …

[PDF] INDIAN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM AND SELF-REGULATED LEARNING: AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR MODERN EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

BA Chavan

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) has become one of the most important concepts in
the educational psychology of today. The learners are identified as capable of
planning, monitoring, controlling and evaluating their own learning. Though the …

Human worth exists independently from performance

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

Vedic Dhyana: Indra

Why did Indra diminish in importance in post-Vedic India? It is one of the mysteries of the evolution of the Indic civilization

I offer my hypothesis here. Indra’s decline in importance in post-Vedic India may partly reflect a shift in the Indic approach to spirituality. We moved away from a spirituality concerned with illumination and enlargement of mind towards traditions that emphasized transcendence of mind. Sri Aurobindo did not accept mind as an enemy, nor as destination. According to him the mind has to be transformed and used as an instrument

Indra may have fallen because he succeeded. Vedic India said break the enclosure of ordinary consciousness. Later spirituality tried to break the enclosure of Indra himself and bypass him at times. This is only a theory. Feel free to disagree 

https://x.com/AmazingVedas/status/2090621516492788036

What if the meaning we give our experiences shapes our consciousness? @PariksithSingh explores Semantic Positive Feedback Loops through Vedic wisdom—language, intention, & thought as pathways to clarity, purpose, and growth. @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas youtu.be/xuq5crfsqXE?si…

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2090490294206865551

What does the night reveal that daylight hides? Discover Ratri, the Vedic Goddess of Night—guardian of stillness, reflection and renewal—and the deeper wisdom of darkness with @PariksithSingh @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas youtu.be/fPN4zKtxXoE?si…

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2090545659434955042

Aditi: the Infinite Mother. Boundless, free, and the source of divine order. Explore the Vedic mystery of Aditi—and what her infinite nature reveals about consciousness, creation, and existence. @PariksithSingh @MakrandParanspe @AmazingVedas youtu.be/DfO3ggEuEnI?si…

https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2089821386667630805

Professor Murali Shivaranakrishnan receiving Sri Aurobindo Puraskar on 15th August 2026 from the Governor of West Bengal in Kolkata. I missed the program because I was in Auroville. Congratulations to Murali, who is also an environmentalist.

Two pioneering books by Dr Sarani will formally be released by Prof. Swapan Datta , ex-Vice-Chancellor, Visva-Bharati, from Oxford Book Store, Kol, on 25 Aug at 5 PM. Prof. Siddhartha Biswas(CU), Prof. Indrani Sanyal n Professor Aparajita Mukherjee (JU) will grace d occasion.

https://x.com/GoutamGhosal3

Sarvodaya—the classic Indian idea of universal welfare—reimagines global environmental politics through a sociopolitical-legal nexus of justice & normativity. This article traces how this moral norm spread via India’s environmental movements and gained legal force through ESCR in the ICESCR. Situated in constructivism, norms research & critical legal studies.

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… #Sarvodaya #EnvironmentalJustice #HumanRights #ICE SCR

https://x.com/ASR_Metta/status/2090652559023169613

"Affect theory has become, Downing says, the dominant episteme of our time, which is not to the collective good." New in review, Laura Kipnis on Lisa Downing's Against Affect: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/laura_kipnis_r…

https://x.com/CriticalInquiry/status/2090561715230405003

Asko Parpola, Professor Emeritus of Indology at the University of Helsinki, is the leading scholar of the ancient Indus script. He came to it as a Sanskritist — his doctorate was on the Sāmaveda, and he has spent a lifetime editing Vedic ritual text. In the mid-1960s he turned... 

https://x.com/roshendalal/status/2090648680286335434

Hatred Towards the Mughals Is a Colonial Construct

As India celebrates 80 years of Independence, we must ask whether we are celebrating an India that values diversity, or one that selectively rejects parts of it. Lubna Irfan writes

https://x.com/thewire_in/status/2089857376614518887

One century. Ten organizations. The same destination reached from different directions – through culture, education, finance, regulation, and the formation of the people who would run everything.

And on the other side? Nothing comparable. No institution with a long term mandate. No formation pipeline for the next generation of civilizational builders. No coordinated funding of the alternative. No Davos for those who believe in Western civilization rather than its managed dissolution. We need a Council of Western Civilization.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2090143270093373932

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2090436888276385892

The cultural layer is the most insidious. The network funds literary prizes that go to authors advancing the agenda. They fund film festivals, journalism awards, university chairs. None of this requires explicit editorial control. You don’t tell the prize committee who to select. You fund the prize committee. Over time the selection reflects the values of the funder.

5. In America, Soros-backed political groups have funded progressive prosecutors and district-attorney campaigns. The money is visible in campaign-finance records; the resulting policies are visible in the cities where they were implemented.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2090554004023738706

1. You can, certainly, be unhappy. That is real, and it is the natural mechanism whose entire job is to drive you into action. We are organisms wired by evolution with a long list of needs, and with the mechanisms built in to satisfy them – that is how we function. Otherwise, we would not exist at all…

2. Leave one of the deep needs of our nature unmet, and it will chafe at you without rest – that is the whole point of the mechanism, that is how we are built. That is unhappiness: a state we want to escape, by satisfying whatever chafes hardest. Satisfy one, and another always rises to take its place... 

5. But above all, there is life – which means action. And what drives that action is wanting something: a need the organism signals through some kind of chafing, a form of pain – which, when it’s your whole life situation doing the chafing, we call unhappiness…

https://x.com/i/status/2076272047286575548

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/there-is-no-such-thing-as-happiness.html

The Architecture of the Self

Chapter 5 (The Digestive Tract) probes the layered nature of human consciousness. Blood, Dr. Anand reminds us, is not merely a biological liquid; it is a repository of ancestral memories, reflexes, and cosmic continuity. Within our minds, a destructive division exists between the upper, formal layer (the social self that play-acts, fakes emotions, and satisfies societal norms) and the underpass (the real self that inwardly protests against these fabrications). The “Digestive Tract” is that deep, internal sanctuary where formal pretense and personal truth meet in raw nakedness. Here, before leaving the world, man sits in judgment of his own lifework, incinerating hypocrisy in ordealic fires and passing the ashes into the Ganges of consciousness. Unlike nature, which possesses serene, unpartitioned wisdom, man’s divided self generates internal turmoil and external destruction.

https://sindhcourier.com/conversing-across-the-threshold-of-eternity/

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/world-union-day.html

[HTML] Tag: leadership

L Tabatabai, M Staby

… Remote work and hybrid models are becoming integral components of
organizational strategies, necessitating a reimagining of the traditional office. As
businesses navigate this evolving landscape, they must address the challenges …

The term “imposter phenomenon” was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who studied 150 high-achieving women in the United States. Each had been formally recognised for her professional and academic success. And yet, despite the external validation, nearly all struggled to internalise their accomplishments, attributing their achievements to luck, timing, or the inability of others to see through them. What Clance and Imes identified was not simply low self-esteem. It was something more specific: a persistent disconnect between objective achievement and subjective self-perception. Success, no matter how documented, failed to silence the internal voice insisting it was undeserved. Decades later, this phenomenon remains stubbornly persistent, and its roots, research suggests, run earlier and deeper than the workplace.

... a person’s value can never be reduced to their achievements, productivity, or moments of failure. The way we perceive ourselves should not fluctuate entirely according to success or inadequacy, because human worth exists independently from performance. In many ways, the very existence of doubt can also reflect awareness. The more we grow, learn, and understand ourselves, the more questions naturally emerge. Perhaps insecurity is not always a sign of weakness, but sometimes the consequence of complexity, sensitivity, and intelligence itself. What truly matters is ensuring that these doubts do not turn into self-destruction, but instead become the starting point for building a stronger and more conscious sense of self-worth.

And while research often highlights differences in the way confidence manifests across genders, these reflections ultimately speak to something deeply human and universal. People are inherently different from one another, in personality, experience, emotion, and perception, and it is precisely this diversity that gives richness both to human relationships and to collective environments. The goal, then, is not uniformity, but the creation of spaces where vulnerability does not diminish value, and where uncertainty can coexist with growth. Perhaps true confidence is not the absence of fragility, but the ability to carry it without allowing it to define our  worth.

https://theawarenessnews.com/tag/leadership/

[PDF] MISSING VOICES, MISSING VOTES

A Raj, BA Pursuing

1) Abstract Although India is a democratic nation, it has almost 48% women as voters,
but the electoral numbers show a paradoxical situation that women are vastly
underrepresented as candidates and elected representatives. Using the data of the …

[PDF] DARK ANTHROPOLOGY, MIGRANTS AND OTHERS

BL Sinha

Ethnic minorities (Gujaratis and Punjabis) constitute the largest diasporic Indian
communities globally, yet there is insufficient research on the history, culture, 1 and
migration patterns of these ethnic groupings. Studies that focus on Gujaratis in South …

Introduction: Salient Features of Cinema Studies Abroad and in India

A Deshpande, A Kamble - Critical Social Science Perspectives on Indian Cinema

… The evolution of cinematic Muslim masculinity has been moulded by Hindutva
since the 1990s. Several movies with prominent Muslim characters have been
analysed but the movie Kesari (2019) is especially observed for its visualising the …

Violent Belongings: Gender, Communal Identity and Nation-Making in Partition Cinema

P Chakrabarti - Critical Social Science Perspectives on Indian Cinema

… India had already begun to see a tidal rise in Hindutva politics and the slow
demise of Nehruvian secularism was already underway. The pluralistic fabric of the
nation was being tested to its limits while there was a steady increase in right wing …

[PDF] India's Ganga and Yamuna rivers as legal persons

A Borchgrevink, K Upadhyay - The Politics of Riverine Rights, 2025

This chapter explores the 2017 orders by the Uttarakhand High Court in India that
declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, and nature in Uttarakhand state, as legal
entities with the rights, duties and liabilities of a living person. The rulings responded …

[HTML] We Will Need to Be Lucky: The Problem of Leadership in a Deep Pluralist World Order Facing a Climate Crisis

B Buzan - The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2025

This paper assesses the problem of leadership in the contemporary world order. It
starts by looking at how leaders are chosen. The argument is that this process is
diverse to the point of randomness, and unlikely to change much. The selection …

Cultural Survival and National Belonging: Minority Politics of the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora

E Mangiarotti - Indo-Pacific Diaspora in Peace and Conflict, 2026

Offering a perspective on the minority politics of diaspora communities, this chapter
focuses on the discursive repertoires of the Kashmiri Pandit European diaspora,
following the passing of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act (2019) …

India: The (Dysfunctional) State of Human Rights

P Balcerowicz - Advances in African Economic, Social and Political …, 2026

… The negative developments are attributable to the ideology of Hindutva (‘Hinduness’),
or deeply politicized Hinduism, that forms the cornerstone of policies of the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party and the prime minister Narendra Modi. The paper aruges …

The Origin of Indian Nationalism: Mazzini's Influence on Savarkar, Gandhi and other Freedom Fighters

MK Oza - 2026

… Savarkar, a central and contested figure in the articulation of Hindutva and
militant Indian nationalism. Situating Savarkar within a modernist … , Savarkar
reformulated these ideas into a secular, geopolitical ideology of Hindutva aimed at …

Beyond the British Raj: Coloniality, Caste, and Race in South Asia

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Some human beings can reach heights

 The Iliad is not about the Trojan War. It opens in its tenth year — the war almost over, the men exhausted, the end in sight — and closes before the war concludes. It is about what war costs from the inside, without distance, without the mercy of a conclusion.

1. The first word of the poem is “rage.” Not glory, not war, not courage. Rage. The entire catastrophe — ten years, thousands of deaths, a civilization destroyed — flows from one man’s wounded ego. Agamemnon takes Achilles’ prize. Achilles withdraws. The Greeks start dying. Homer names this on the first line because he wants you to carry it through every death that follows: all of this, for this.

2. Achilles is not a hero in any sense we find comfortable. He is the greatest warrior who ever lived, and he knows it, and he uses that knowledge as a weapon against his own side. He is capable of tenderness — his love for Patroclus is the emotional spine of the poem — and of something barely human in his rage. He desecrates Hector’s body, dragging it behind his chariot. He is magnificent and monstrous simultaneously. Homer doesn’t resolve this. He holds both at once.

3. Fate is known in advance. Achilles has a choice – long life in obscurity, or glory and early death. He chooses glory with full knowledge of the cost. This is the Iliad’s answer to the Odyssey: two poems, two heroes, two opposite arguments. Odysseus chooses home, mortality, the particular. Achilles chooses legend, death, the eternal. Both poems know what the other costs.

4. In the middle of the war, Homer stops everything to describe the shield Hephaestus forges for Achilles. On it: cities at peace, weddings, harvests, dancing, the ocean, the full richness of the world not at war. Homer inserts the entire civilization inside the weapon – showing what is being destroyed by it. This is the greatest anti-war statement in the poem, and it contains not a single pacifist word.

5. The gods make everything worse. They intervene not to save anyone but to extend the suffering on behalf of their own favorites and quarrels. The Iliad’s cosmos is not just. It is beautiful, terrible, and indifferent. Men die heroically for causes the gods treat as entertainment. There is no meaning assigned from above. Only the meaning the men make for themselves – which is the most modern thing about a poem three thousand years old.

6. Priam walks alone into Achilles’ camp to beg for his son’s body. Achilles, who has been barely human in grief and rage, looks at the old king and sees his own father. They weep together. Two enemies who have lost everything, sharing grief in a tent, in the middle of a war that has destroyed both their worlds. The most human moment in Western literature – inside the most brutal text. Homer puts it there deliberately: the war doesn’t pause. The humanity doesn’t disappear. Both are true simultaneously.

7. The Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral. Troy has not yet fallen. Achilles has not yet died. Homer closes on grief, not victory – because that is what he thought the poem was actually about. Not who won. What it cost. Every war since has had its Iliads – the official version that records the outcome, and the true version that records the cost. Homer wrote the true version first. Most wars are still waiting for theirs.

https://x.com/i/status/2077729845107134737

Troy – I remember laughing a bit at Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom back then with their overly pathetic ways, but in retrospect it was a great movie.

Hector (Eric Bana) was the real hero. And Helen was German, just to get it out of the way.

1. The whole war was started by one man’s inability to resist temptation – and sustained by another man’s wounded ego. Paris steals another king’s wife because he can’t help himself. Achilles withdraws the best army in Greece because Agamemnon bruised his pride. Thousands die for these two reasons. The Iliad is not a celebration of war. It is the oldest and most honest account of why wars actually happen – vanity, lust, and the management failure of great men.

2. Achilles is not a hero. He is a weapon with feelings. The greatest warrior in the world spends half the film sulking in his tent while his countrymen die. His moment of peak destruction comes not from duty or courage but from grief and rage. He is extraordinary and catastrophically selfish. The film knows this even when the audience doesn’t.

3. Hector is everything Achilles is not. He didn’t want the war. He told Paris to return Helen before the ships left. He fights not for glory but because Troy is his – his city, his father, his wife, his son. He stands at the gates knowing he will lose, because his people’s courage depends on his. He dies for the same reason all the best men die in all the best stories – because someone had to, and he wouldn’t send anyone else.

4. The scene before Hector faces Achilles — saying goodbye to Andromache and his infant son — is the emotional center of the entire film. Not the battles. Not the gods. A husband and a father who knows what is coming and goes anyway. Eric Bana in thirty seconds makes every Brad Pitt slow-motion combat sequence look like what it is: spectacle. Hector is the substance.

5. Agamemnon is the political lesson – the man who uses other men’s causes to advance his own. He doesn’t care about Menelaus’s honor. He wants Troy’s position, trade routes, gold. The noble justification is the packaging. The empire is the product. Every leader who ever sent other people’s sons to die for reasons he couldn’t state publicly.

6. Paris is the most honest character precisely because he is so consistently useless. He started the catastrophe, hides behind Hector throughout, survives everything, and ends up killing Achilles with a lucky arrow. History is full of Parises – the reckless, charming, consequence-free man whose disasters are cleaned up by better men until there are no better men left.

7. The film was dismissed as Hollywood excess. In retrospect it is one of the last major productions that took the original moral seriously: that the most important thing on the battlefield is not who wins, but who deserved to. Troy fell. Hector was right. And the man who was right, who fought for the right things, in the right way, for the right people – died first. The Iliad has been saying this for three thousand years. We keep making films about Achilles anyway.

https://x.com/i/status/2077296468675731811

The Sistine Chapel ceiling is the most important artwork in Western civilization. Not the most beautiful – the most important. And it was painted by quite the character.

Michelangelo didn’t want the commission. He was a sculptor. He said so, repeatedly, to a Pope who did not care. Julius II needed a ceiling painted and had decided Michelangelo would paint it. The Pope was wrong about almost everything – the timeline, the assistants, the right to inspect the work in progress. He was right about one thing: that this was the man. The ceiling is what happened when an unstoppable institution met an immovable genius and neither yielded.

He fired his assistants one by one. Repainted sections over and over. Built his own scaffolding – suspended from the walls, not the floor, so the chapel could remain in use below. Spent four years on his back on it, paint dripping into his eyes, going progressively blind, complaining constantly in letters and poetry. What the ceiling required, the ceiling got.

The system tried to manage the genius. The genius ignored the system – fired the assistants, rebuilt the scaffolding, refused inspection, repainted what wasn’t right. This is the precise opposite of what the current system produces: not the compliant, the credentialed, the adequately average – but the immovable mind that cannot be managed into mediocrity. The Idiocracy selects against exactly this. The Sistine Chapel is what happens when it fails.

The Creation of Adam is not what you think it is. The finger of God touching the finger of Adam — the most reproduced image in Western art — is surrounded by a shape that is anatomically precise: the human brain in cross section. The mantle around God and the figures inside it match the brain’s architecture with a precision that cannot be accidental from a man who dissected corpses illegally to understand the human body. The most sacred image in Western civilization may be Michelangelo’s statement that the divine gift to man is not life. It is the mind. It is Reason. He hid it in plain sight, on the ceiling of the Pope’s chapel, for five hundred years.

The ceiling is not one image. It is a complete philosophical system painted across 500 square meters – nine scenes from Genesis, surrounded by prophets, sibyls, ancestors, and architectural illusions that create a three-dimensional space that doesn’t exist. Every figure anatomically precise, dynamically posed, psychologically present. The scale of the achievement has no precedent and no successor.

The Last Judgment — painted on the altar wall twenty-three years later, when Michelangelo was sixty — is the ceiling’s dark twin. Where the ceiling shows creation and promise, the Last Judgment shows finality. Christ is not the gentle shepherd of medieval iconography – he is a young, muscular figure of terrifying authority. Michelangelo painted himself into it as the flayed skin of Saint Bartholomew, hanging in Christ’s presence. The self-portrait of the greatest artist in Western civilization is a hollow, empty skin. He understood, by then, what the work had cost.

The Sistine Chapel is Western civilization’s most complete statement about what human beings are capable of – made by one man, in four years, on his back, under institutional pressure, half-blind, largely alone. It is the permanent answer to the Last Man. The proof that some human beings, given conditions of resistance and refusal and impossible stubbornness, can reach heights that no system produces and no ideology explains. It has been looking down at us for five hundred years. We keep not learning what it is trying to teach.

https://x.com/i/status/2079705254719795387

https://feelphilosophy.blogspot.com/2026/08/there-is-no-such-thing-as-happiness.html

https://evergreenessays.blogspot.com/2026/08/we-can-all-be-neo-now.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra