Swapan Dasgupta
Tapan Raychaudhuri's study of Bengal's responses to the West in the 19th century dealt with three intellectual stalwarts - Bhudeb Mukherjee, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Swami Vivekananda. All three focused on issues that related to Hindus as Hindus. To them, modernity did not mean discarding the Hindu inheritance but reshaping (and in Bhudeb's case rediscovering) the Hindu inheritance.
In the realms of political activism too, the movement against the Partition of Bengal had explicitly Hindu overtones - take Aurobindo Ghose and Bipin Chandra Pal as foremost examples - and this religio-political aspect was embraced by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore's shift to universal humanism was a subsequent development and his trenchant critique of Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement did not endear him to most fellow Bengalis. However, his iconic status, particularly after he won the Nobel prize, insulated him from any politically-inspired criticism. Arguably, C.R. Das was an exception but his legacy of communal power-sharing collapsed rapidly after his untimely death. From the late 1920s till Independence, there was often very little to distinguish the Bengal Congress from the Hindu Mahasabha. In spite of the parallel attraction of Marxism, the upper echelons of bhadralok society did not shun explicitly Hindu mobilization. The Hindu Mahasabha boasted of the involvement of intellectual stalwarts such as Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee and even Ramananda Chatterjee.
The Spiritual Nationalism & Human Unity: approach taken by Sri Aurobindo in Politics
D Banerjee
Abstract: Sri Aurobindo's theory of Politics is quite extraordinary than other contemporary politicians of India. It also has several parts like Swaraj, boycott, resistance, national education as necessary ingredient of Indian political agitation started from 1905. But it has
Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion
JN Ferrer - 2017
Page 1. PARTICIPATION AND THE. MYSTERY Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion |ORGE N. FER RER Page 2. PARTICIPATION AND THE MYSTERY Page 3. Page 4. PARTICIPATION AND THE ...
iasscore.in › upsc-prelims › terrorist-and-...
12 hours ago - The people associated with this samiti were Sri Aurobindo, Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das, Surendranath Tagore, Jatindranath Banerjee, Bagha Jatin, Bhupendra Natha Datta, Barindra Ghosh etc. Bhupendra ...
Daily Mail-18-Apr-2017
The original founders were Sri Aurobindo and his younger brother, Barindra. Both, along with 47 other accused stood trial for the Alipur bomb blast case or the ...
Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)-19-Mar-2017
Like a lot of academics, I have long harbored the desire to write a popular book — in my case, something like Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. But sadly, I ...
By Michael Ruse MARCH 19, 2017
The future of our species is surely rich material, something many of us have speculated about. Will we have massive brains, dwindling little bodies, and highly functional genitalia? I tend to think so. In fact, with five kids, I rather pride myself on being an advanced specimen. Then again, maybe I’m not. From Darwin on, experts have worried that big brains are not that adaptive. Think of all of the great philosophers — Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Plato, Wittgenstein — who died childless.
Mad In America-13-Mar-2017
Is the suppression of spirituality in the West the reason for our struggle and suffering labeled as mental illness? Are we medicated to numb the pain and ...
On 20 Apr 2017, at 09:12, priyedarshi jetli wrote:
Diego,
I am not promoting logicism. Some logicists believed that you can construct all of mathematics from logic. The Intuitionists don't accept this. Neither do I. My point was a simple general one, logic is mainly about inferences and has no content, therefore free of ontology or epistemology. This is what alternative systems of logic have in common. Further, as far as I know most systems of logic can be translated into each other or shown to be extentions of classical logic. Of course it takes some doing to accomplish this.
...
Logicism has failed. No (reasonably serious) logicians would assume it. We know that elementary arithmetic cannot be deduced from any logic. If fact, we can prove in arithmetic that arithmetic does not follow from logic. Russell and Whitehead claims that 1+1=2 can be proved in their logical system, but they assumed a part of set theory, which assumes much more than arithmetic.
We know also that arithmetic is Turing equivalent. It realizes all computations, and this lead to the problem of recovering physics from a statistics on all computations see from inside (that is: structured by the modal logic of self-references imposed by the Incompleteness Phenomenon).
Bruno
...
My point is more technical: if we are machine, there is no primary physical reality, only a first person locally sharable infinities of number's "dreams". It makes me say that in Occident, we have to backtrack to Pythagoras and Plato (and the neopythagoreans + the neoplatonists) in the field of (scientific/modest) theology. I appreciate the antique greeks mainly because they do not oppose mysticism and rationalism.
My feeling, coming from my interest in buddhist mahayana is that in India, there has been always a bigger open-mindness about immaterialism, or, to put it in another way, a bigger skepticism toward the material explanations. India, and China for a long time, seem to not have separated rationalism and religion/theology as much as Europa. But of course, all civilisation has its dark period and witches hunts.
Best,
Bruno
...
In today's quantum mechanics, all matter (some of which is perceived directly by senses and called classical) is made up of quantum particles. A quantum particle is said to be a packet of de Broglie phase waves, each of which is supposed to have a speed greater than that of light in vacuum. Thus the phase wave is a mathematical abstraction, it is non-material in that you cannot perceive it by senses. So, one may say all matter is made of ideas.
Syamala
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Dear all,
I would like to suggest something here, so many on this forum are attempting to explain the infinite and infinitesimal complexities of matter and spirit, body, mind, soul, consciousness and the unconscious. And Deepak seems to want to throw all that aside and suggests that nothing of matter subtle or gross actually exists, except for consciousness which according to him is all one non personal oneness of bliss. My own opinion is that neither of these approaches is being realistic, and I'll try to explain why.
First, Deepak's theories make no sense when put to any test, he postulates that nothing in the world exists, but we are all aware that it does, even if transitory and temporary we know something is there, we are there, the body is there, mind, universe, stars and sun, oceans etc. And we know that we didn't create all of that, something else must be the source. So it's nice to think that all phenomena are our own creation as he states, but obviously something else is there to discover.
Then the physicists and other scientists are so expert at breaking down the complex functioning of that phenomena which Deepak is claiming does not exist, that is true. But how to actually empirically explain the origins of such phenomena to get to the actual root of it? Obviously this cannot be done through speculation, why? Because our minds and intellect used for speculation are themselves products of the material process itself, and the product cannot fully explain the source, logically. Therefore Deepak's attempt to simplify things. But again that falls short, he's only partly right after all, true that consciousness is more subtle than matter, superior to matter, subjective. But we ourselves as consciousness are not the source of all matter, else we would not be "bamboozled" by it as he likes to say, one cannot be bamboozled by something he has himself created, not possible if he is the source of that.
That does leave the one logical explanation, and which I believe Bhakti Madhava Puri has been trying to explain further, that we ourselves as limited subjective conscious entities are ourselves objects of a greater unlimited subjective consciousness, infinite absolute consciousness which is the source of both individual consciousness and matter both subtle and gross. That's my conclusion anyway, it makes sense in explaining reality, I welcome any comments on this. I do have admiration for the subtle complexities of all the physicists' and philosophers' explanations on this forum but this is my own contribution, I think it makes sense. In this world we are simply the conscious agent, the minds, bodies, even thoughts, we are not the source of all these, they are under control of and the property of something else, someone else. To accept that idea is to me the key.
Regards, Eric Reyes
...
Proofs apply to mathematical theorems not to things like matter or consciousness. And even in mathematics if something cannot be proven it does not mean that it is not true. Take Fermat's last theorem for example. It took 300 years to prove it. It is like saying that if no one had ever climbed the peak of Mount Everest it did not exist. The metaphoric statement of the type Deepak Chopra makes is meaningless. There is a very old fallacy that is commonly used: No one has proven that God does not exist. Therefore, God exists. It is an obvious fallacy. In any case the burden of proof lies on the one who accepts the existence of God or a non-material consciousness for that matter and not on those who do not accept them. The fallacy is surely obvious to those who are committing them as well. They are a disguise for covering up the issue.
The issue is that once stated as alternative hypotheses, idealism, dualism, materialism and perhaps other isms regarding the mind body problem are dogmas. None of these hypotheses can be proven and all attempts to prove them beg the question. But among dogmas we can choose the one that seems most plausible to us. To me the materialist or physicalist dogma is the most plausible. There is no emergent mental (non-physical) world, there is no non-physical or mystical forces that causally act on the physical world. The physical is causally closed. To deny this people often equate 'physics of the day' with 'everything that is physical'. I need not spend time to dispel this fallacious equivocation. We need only reflect on the statement that "everything is in principle explainable physically."
Priyedarshi
Dear Siegfried,
Thanks for the comments. It seems that you agree that the quantum classical divide is not about spatial dimension in the way often talked about. I agree that the quantum level is the level of the individual quantum of action. So very often the amount of energy involved ins small. However, if we take a Bose mode as an indivisible quantum of action (as contemporary field theory generally does) rather than the notional single photon or phonon or whatever, then there is actually no limit to the energy in a quantum of action. It will be h x frequency x the notional ‘number of particles' quantum number. So a military LASER beam or a seismic mode that informs us of the chemical composition of the centre of the earth may have huge energy.
I agree that uncertainty is not present in the Schrödinger equation. But that is just a bit of writing on a piece of paper. A wave equation is not a mode or entity. It does not ‘evolve’. As an outsider it seems to me that the term ‘wave function’ encourages the belief that somehow the wave equation is a description of a mode. As I understand it, any given wave equation is a look up table for the probabilities of actualisation of a slew of modes with certain common parameters. A mode appears to have some sort of dynamic field structure with values that relate in spacetime according to complex harmonic math but being an indivisible action I can see no legitimate concept of ‘progression from state to state’. The more I get to know about modern physics and the more I talk to physicists (including Basil Hiley who was kind enough to give me some private tuition) the more it seems to me that the traditional ‘interpretations’ are all metaphysically unsound and counter to the basic concept of a theory of indivisible dynamic units. Douglas Bilodeau wrote a very nice article in 1996 in J Consc Studies to that effect. He also makes some remarks in the article about the conflation of different meanings of ‘quantum’ and ‘classical’. These are probably rather unhelpful terms that lead to misapprehensions. I think Leibniz does better in simply distinguishing descriptions of individual actions and description s of aggregate mechanics.
I am not quite sure why you say that the quantum of action does not determine the quantised mode. My understanding of recent developments in condensed matter physics is that the mode is considered the quantum of action.
As far as I can see uncertainty remains an essential feature of a world constituted by discrete instantiations of symmetric continuous dynamic laws, just for basic logical reasons, as pointed to by Leibniz.
Best wishes
Jo
