Saturday, November 28, 2009

Spirituality divides

[The fact that the subjective age - which aside from Sri Aurobindo was conceived in many modernist writings of the late 19th and early 20th century - has not smoothly transitioned into a spiritual age, but rather an age of late Capitalism, post-modernism, post-humanism or whatever one wishes to call it, does not shed light on either the success of failure of the project of Integral Yoga, because as you say the current age in itself is equally an expression the multiple worlds at play within the infinite's self-conception. But this matter brings up an issue concerning a wider dialog of the yoga and culture, in that due to the turn that evolution of consciousness has made the uncritical assertion of a progressive spiritual evolution is problematic when applied to any collectivity.
Therefore, what is more fascinating -at least for myself- is the tension between these Utopian tendencies characteristic of the Modernist period (late 19th early 20th century) and the often dystopian, machinic, computational view of reality that defines much of the writing and art of late Modernism and the post-human period we find ourselves confronted with today. Although I dont see any widespread interest in such a dialog I am a bit heartened by the latest works of those trying to re-construct unifying narratives of hope out of the ashes of the ideological ruins of Modernity. (I especially liked how the Kroker's concluded Virilio in Obama's America) Re: Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: Xul Solar by Rich on Sun 02 Nov 2008 Permanent Link]

[It seems to me that generally - identity is morphing (or if one would rather call it evolving) in some instances it is becoming more protean, pliable, elastic, - but in other instances it may becoming even more entrenched in its identification with the body and all that signifies, (ethnicity, nationality class,) One could ask I suppose if the forms of spirituality that are culturally co-evolving as part of this whole process of change sufficient or in fact ask: just how relevant words like spirituality are -when assigning them a value as a placeholder for a certain type of experience - when the very articulation of the word inevitably divides the world into that which is spiritual and that which is not? aka. Is there a way to overcome the binary process of languaging a world? Re: LACMA 111909 - Debashish Banerji Tony Clifton]

Richard Carlson (Tony Clifton), very sensitively, disputes the homogenizing propensity of notions like evolution and spirituality. As there can be no perfect answer to his objections within the human condition a la Gödel's theorem, Pascal's Wager seems to be the best bargain in the circumstances. [TNM]

No comments:

Post a Comment