Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Vedic Paradigm: Duality versus Unity
There is confusion yet about adhyatma versus the adhi daivika. It is difficult and subtle but must be caught
Sankhya is dualistic. It is not applied to Vedanta. Sri Krishna spent a few chapters in the Bhagavad Gita reconciling Sankhya with Yoga and eventually with Vedanta but then his Sankhya is no longer the Sankhya of Kapil muni
The adhi daivik approach is to see the devas outside. And that is ok for the minds that see the world dualistically.
And yet there is the egoless I. It is what Sri Krishna mentions in the Gita. Agni is Tejas, the Shakti of the Pure Chitta. Thus, Agni is the energy of the pure Chitta which is my true nature inseparable from the universe
When we apply dualistic mindsets to the Veda it is still an intellectual exercise. It is only when we move to the Atman where the separation between consciousness and the cosmic powers disappears
This is difficult for most to follow for the fundamental approach to the Veda is still adhi daivik or adhi bhautik which is dualistic. How to move beyond the duality? To discover the Agni that burns through the aham and beyond the aham. Not sure if this is understood but we must at least know that Vedanta comes out of the unitary consciousness of the Rishis that yet sees the unique expression of multiplicity in the universe
https://x.com/AmazingVedas/status/2095014483856900392
What if the Vedas hold clues to unlocking your highest intelligence? Discover Indra, mantra, sound, and the fascinating bridge between ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience. Watch now! with @PariksithSingh & @MakrandParanspe youtu.be/lmrR0O3SjiY?si… @AmazingVedas
https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2094849769952666013
Unlock the secrets of Vedic grammar! Explore how Vyakaraṇa connects language, consciousness, and spirituality—and discover the profound power of sound and vibration in the Vedas. Join @PariksithSingh & @MakrandParanspe on Amazing Vedas! youtu.be/J38A3f1qT5s?si… @AmazingVedas
https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2094485377352446164
Explore the enduring relevance of the Vedas in today’s world—from education & Swaraj to self-governance, heritage, and darshan. Reflect on Vedic thought and its profound vision of the unity of existence with @PariksithSingh & @MakrandParanspe youtu.be/5iJrq2ypIWM?si… @AmazingVedas
https://x.com/sriaurobindochr/status/2094531674327421093
Many view the questions of consciousness as fundamentally unanswerable. But evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka argues that by studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness, we can better understand its nature and work out what we should and shouldn't attribute consciousness to. Jablonka argues that a certain type of learning actually constitutes consciousness and satisfies all the conditions that philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists point to. According to these criteria, plants and fungi are not conscious, and AI in its current form certainly isn't. In fact, Jablonka argues tentatively that AI may never achieve consciousness, given the sheer level of complexity we find in biology. Tap here to watch her full studio interview. iai.tv/video/consciou…
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2094842755457405098
Husserl felt the need to appeal to a radicalized reduction that calls into question the very apperception of the transcendental ego, pointing toward something more originary than the subject–object dualities themselves. The task is to uncover a phenomenality that transcends such dualities—a proto-phenomenon—beyond the distinctions between essence and existence (Husserl), beings and Being (Heidegger), object and Flesh (Merleau-Ponty), the phenomenality of the world and the phenomenality of life (Henry), and object and event (J.-L. Marion), in order to reach the ground of an Originary Unity that governs every intentional lived experience and which these dualities continuously and interminably disrupt, in a movement analogous to Schelling’s Grund or Fink’s meontic Absolute.
https://x.com/enzo_stilianidi/status/2094598810215330200
Two Men: One as great as America ever produced, and the other Elon Musk
by Bill McKibben countercurrents.org/2026/09/two-me…
Wendell Berry’s death prompts Bill McKibben to reflect on a writer whose life joined literature, farming, community, and political engagement. He contrasts Berry’s ethic of humility, place and moral responsibility with Elon Musk’s wealth, technological ambitions and political influence. The article examines Musk’s promotion of geoengineering as a response to climate change, his role in dismantling USAID programmes, and questions surrounding the loss of Himalayan disaster-monitoring and early-warning systems. The recent floods in Nepal provide a stark context for considering the consequences of decisions that affect vulnerable communities. McKibben closes with Berry’s poem, “The Loved Ones,” reflecting on death, memory and absence.
https://x.com/Countercurrents/status/2094989980657672691
We hear from all sides that perfection is an "impossible dream" and that "nobody is perfect." But what if that idea is dangerous nonsense? Discover the rational, this-worldly meaning of perfection in Harry Binswanger's republished 1981 essay, "The Possible Dream. Read it below
https://x.com/AynRandInst/status/2094795211100639490
I'm developing Gad Saad's ideas, exploring the psychological implications, and exploring the implications of parasitic cognitive capture. A central recurrung theme behind the Left's gaslighting is anti-semitism and scapegoating and covertly (sometimes even overtly) wanting the non-existent of Jews, heterosexual men, white people, and Christians.
Imagine the outroar if a trans/feminist/black AG called on queers/women/POC to place the needs of the world even their own survival, because these would be what trans/feminist/black values would tell them to do. That's how you test the authenticity of a narrative, by flipping the script and seeing if the logic still holds.
https://x.com/akazlev/status/2094837913402146845
One of the extraordinary capacities of the human mind is therefore cognitive flexibility: our ability not merely to change what we think, but to change the frame through which thinking itself occurs. We can see something psychologically, scientifically, mathematically, symbolically, emotionally or spiritually. And as we become conscious of these different frames, we become less imprisoned by any single one. Perhaps expanded consciousness involves developing something like panoramic cognition: the capacity to hold multiple perspectives within a wider field of awareness without immediately collapsing reality into one interpretation.
This doesn’t mean reality itself is entirely relative although I do believe much of it is. It means our access to it is perspectival. Every frame reveals something and conceals something. And perhaps some of what we experience as the limits of mind are not limits of consciousness at all, but limits of the configuration through which consciousness is currently looking.
https://x.com/ElenaRae644820/status/2094501955662139750
This paper by JP Sydnor which puts Christian theology in conversation with Ramanuja is stunningly good and thought provoking.
https://x.com/anwesh_satpathy/status/2094479352268509449
Sri Aurobindo’s Engagement with Wisdom Literature in Sanskrit | Lopa Mukherjee | Bharat Nivas | Auroville #Auroville #BharatNivas #SriAurobindo #Sanskrit #WisdomLiterature #IndianWisdom #IndianCulture #IntegralYoga #TheMother
https://x.com/AurovilleMedia/status/2095012617970680249
Kannadiga intellectual U.R. Ananthamurthy once observed that whenever a Liberal grows bored, he tends to become a Conservative. Some might argue that this observation might well apply to Hindi Modernist writer Nirmal Verma. Chandravir Dev (@devoffice) writes on the Life and Times of Nirmal Verma jungindien.in/blog/the-life-…
What makes Verma’s work distinctive is his refusal to offer solutions. Unlike French Existentialist Philosophers of the 20th century like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, he does not propose any cohesive philosophy to solve the riddle of existence. Instead, he offers contemplative silence. It is a space where man is alone with his thoughts, pondering, ruminating, simply living. In “Parinde,” one character asks, “Sometimes, I just wonder, what is man staying alive for? Can’t he find anything better to do?” There is no answer, only the quiet acknowledgment of the question.
https://x.com/JungIndien/status/2094774598172832085
As philosophy departments in India took to teaching Indian and Western philosophies as distinct courses, scholars largely abandoned their earlier efforts to overcome the colonial stereotype of Indian philosophy as an other-worldly, metaphysical tradition. Instead, they took to mobilizing Indic concepts to add new perspectives to what they saw as universal philosophical problems. Remembering Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Arindam Chakrabarti writes that Mohanty was a rare philosopher who read and taught (in Sanskrit, German, and English) Patañjali, Vyāsa, Śan˙kara, Gangeśa, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Wittgenstein, Hume, McTaggart, Russell, Davidson, and Dummett with equal expertise—showing how ‘fusion philosophy’, rather than a swaraj in ideas, had become by the 1970s the preferred stance of academic philosophers (Chakrabarti and Weber 2015; Chakrabarti 2024).
This volume unfortunately does not have a chapter by a philosopher who could reflect on why philosophy departments came to be somewhat marginal to postcolonial epistemological imaginaries, despite the history within philosophy of an intense debate on intellectual decolonization. But an analogous debate, without explicitly invoking the idea of swaraj,took place within the discipline of literary studies (often under the rubrics of ‘comparative literature’ and later ‘world literature’), reflecting on what it meant to teach English literature in a colony and whether something called ‘Indian’ literature was conceivable in the first place in a nation that spoke multiple tongues (Devy 1995; S. Joshi 1991; Sunder Rajan 1992; Tharu 1998; Viswanathan 1989). Baidik Bhattacharya’s chapter, ‘The Curious Case of “Indian literature”’, in this volume squarely addresses this question. Also worth mentioning here is the philosophical salience of literary figures who reflected on the question of whether or not there was an identifiable Indic way of thinking. Poet-scholar A. K. Ramanujan argued that Indic thinking—deeply heterogeneous, if not self-contradictory—was about a refusal to posit context-free ideas. It consisted of a diversity of perspectival ideas and so was not readily reducible to the European image of philosophy as a meta-discipline made up of systematic, coherent, universal propositions (Ramanujan 1989). The playwright Girish Karnad, who acknowledged Ramanujan’s influence on his theatrical experiments with figures from Indian history and mythology, and the caste-radical historian D. R. Nagaraj were also public philosophers, who are seldom written into the history of Indian philosophy as a discipline (Karnad 1989; Nagaraj 2014).
In India, thus, the culture critic (not to be confused with a ‘cultural studies’ scholar) seemed to take the place of philosophers, re-reading myths, popular common sense, and pre-colonial spiritual-cum-aesthetic oeuvres, including Bhakti and Sufi expressive forms, in order to discuss Indic modes of being, thinking, and speaking. (The ‘Indic’ was different from the Indological, in that it deliberately went beyond textual study and engaged with both historical and contemporary aspects of the popular, the vernacular.) Social psychologists like Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar also emerged as culture critics of this variety, contesting the universality of modern epistemologies (Nandy 1983; Kakar 1978). The sociologist J. P. S. Uberoi too assumed a similar stance, writing an essay titled ‘Science and Swaraj’ (Uberoi 1968). He set up a European Studies Programme at the Department of Sociology in Delhi as a laboratory for the development of Indian sociological perspectives on Western theory and philosophy. As much a culture critic as a sociologist—discussing agrarian technology, the atom bomb, Sikhism, the university in India, the US military-industrial complex and diverse other topics of currency—Uberoi also wrote the essay ‘Metaphysics of the Indian Modernity: The Theory of the Name’, anchoring Indian modernity in the sixteenth-century Bhakti devotional tradition and in Sikh political aesthetics (Uberoi and Tyabji 2019).
Baidik Bhattacharya and Prathama Banerjee
India-Indonesia Relations: From Civilizational Memories to Strategic Institutional Frameworks
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ascendance of ‘Hindutva’as the governing ideology, following … Hindutva, in terms
of a crude definition, can be described as a right-wing ideology that is based on …
'Heathen 'to Vishwa-Guru
considerable attention in the past (Chakrabarty 2015). This chapter argues that there
is yet another disciplinary site that ought to be marked as the grounds on which the …
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as well as communal violence in the context of the Ramjanmabhumi movement (Nandy
et al. 1997; Nandy 2013). These powerful analyses raise the question: what would a …
India in Film Studies
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History Wars
Ambedkar’s conversion, along with thousands of Dalits, to Buddhism in 1956, in a
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Dalit Studies and the Life of the Mind
rescued away from the entrapments of modern society by aristocratic/ascetic
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10. Past Politics and Future Environments 259 Rohan D'Souza 11. India in Film Studies 288
occasion to take stock of how the social science and the humanities disciplines, as
well as interdisciplinary fields, have evolved in India, and where we can and should …
Prathama Banerjee is a historian and professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She works at the cusp of political theory, cultural studies …
Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. His research focus relates to environmental history,
technology studies, and environmental politics in the context of global warming and …
Please note that page numbers referring to Figures are followed by the letter 'f'
3 Hindu nationalism in see Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) … ethnoreligious/religio‐
ethnic identity as functional equivalent of religion 480 in India see Hindutva (Hindu …
