Friday, November 11, 2016

Empathy, fantasy, and emancipation

Swarajya-03-Sep-2016
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual collaborator was Mother— Mira Alfasa— a ... science are themselves evolving to make us a more empathetic species?

Forbes-10-May-2016
~Sri Aurobindo ... A Shakti leader becomes whole by balancing empathy, cooperation, and openness (feminine power), clarity, competition, ...

Times of India (blog)-20-Apr-2016
... his destination being Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in search of his inner quest. ... Despite being from a feudal family, he was always empathetic ...

Huffington Post-07-Nov-2014
More than 60 years ago, Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo declared that, ... our capacity to feel, connect, collaborate and empathize, all of which are ...

Huffington Post (blog)-05-Apr-2010
The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of the emergence of superconsciousness ... It inspires empathywith people and with nature; it brings an ...

The Quint-16-May-2016
... Gangadhar (Lokmanya) Tilak and Sri Aurobindo in the development of ... two legendary adversaries treated with equal empathy by this comic ...

Draft of ending of e-course on meditation and the brain I thought I’d post this for fun – it’s a draft of an e-course Jan (my wife) and I are working on. If you’re familiar with Sri Aurobindo’s “Yoga of Self Per...
Training Your Brain is Good For Everyone, Not Just For You
People often say that practicing things like mindfulness and cultivating positive emotions is somehow selfish. It’s just ‘navel gazing’ that’s about being preoccupied with your own well-being.
But this is not true at all. For one thing, to the extent you succeed in becoming more mindful, experiencing more positive emotions and shifting more and more to open, heartful awareness, it will show in your behavior, and you can provide a positive example for others.

Empathy by the Book: How Fiction Affects Behavior

Wall Street Journal -
Only literary fiction, which requires readers to work at guessing characters’ motivations from subtle cues, fostered empathy.
In these studies, the reading of nonfiction not only failed to spur empathy but also predicted loneliness and social isolation, specially among men. Of course, nonfiction reading has its virtues. Other research suggests that various kinds of nonfiction can prompt empathetic feelings—as long as the narrative is moving and transformative.
https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn...

Sri Aurobindo associated yoga practices with practical occurrences to give a comprehensive answer to the complex problems faced by disciples. These letters depict the empathy and solicitousness in Sri Aurobindo's personality. That he had a tremendous understanding and acuity was evident. A CID agent, Biren, entered ...

https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn...

Earlier, I introduced Sri Aurobindo and his concept of spirituality, which he describes as the aim of human life . In The Human ... in her character. Feminists like the relational cultural theorist Judith Jordan who foreground “mutual empathy” in Women's Growth in Diversity further contribute to a theory of the “political sublime.

https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn...
Leela Gandhi - 2014 - ‎Preview - ‎More editions

Writing with all too insufficiently acknowledged elitism and xenophobia of the descent from ontological self- care into the relational “solicitude,” and “empathy,” Heidegger describes this motion, vitriolically, as “ subjection,” “leveling down,” and “averageness” (Being and Time, 164, 165). Sri Aurobindo, LifeDivine, part 1 , 99.


of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism (Koenigsberg, 1977), we interpreted the revolutionary behavior patterns of Hitler, Lenin and Sri Aurobindo as constituting a struggle against passivity. I would now view their patterns of revolutionary behavior as a counterphobic defense against the regressive fantasy of merger. Hitler is ...

In a society where human connection seems to either be too difficult, or too scary, or too effortful, ... Fantasy, after all, is a play at the edge of comfortable reality and the unknown. But this territory can be emancipating, can actually feel like freedom, she writes. November 3, 2016 - Radhika Chandiramani

Fantasy is make-believe. We make something up and then we believe it in order to make it exist. However, in some contexts, the make-believe is relegated to the realm of mere ‘play’ (as opposed to the ‘real’), but there’s no denying that make-believing is a crux of human civilisation – children naturally play make-believe games that steer them in their growth, adults use the hypothetical in their thought to make everyday decisions, and both children and adults rely on fantastical stories and myths to construct a common meaning that contributes to creating the world as we know it. November 3, 2016 - TARSHI

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Cultivate the most authentic connection to one another

Integral Education: Sonya Shah - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0aNgdr-JWo

Oct 26, 2011 - Uploaded by CIIS_SF
CIIS faculty and administrators answer the question, "What is Integral Education?Sonya Shah, professor ...

"4 Things We Can Do To Help Heal And End Sexual Violence" by CIIS Associate Professor Sonya Shah @HuffPostWomen https://t.co/h2Cnd9fP0y
We need to hold with great care and tenderness the socialization of men, women, and transpeople that allows freedom and range of gender and emotional expression of all that we can be, and without pitting ourselves in an US and THEM, because if we don’t we’ll all continue to suffer. I have experienced and witnessed so many men and women in my cohort of peers work daily against the levels of socialization, and work through expectations put upon them so we can cultivate the most authentic connection to one another. Let’s continue to work towards this personal and interdependent liberation.

Posted on  by 

“Didn’t that happen at that train station? If they walk around the city undressed, what else is going to happen but getting their necks slashed?”
“Stop the auto.”
He did. I disembarked silently and took a few steps away. He drove off. I didn’t note his license plate. I didn’t take a photo. What would the point of Internet-shaming him be? Would it stop women from being attacked? Would it change people’s attitudes? Or would it just be one more app-friendly act of resistance, the kind that saturates our feeds yet does not spill over into our lived practices of equal partnering, better parenting or structural overhaul? Petty wins don’t give me power trips. They give me fatigue. The battle is so much bigger, and so continuous.

That evening, I read about Qandeel Baloch’s murder at the hands of her brother. The auto driver had thought a teenage girl deserved a brutal death for wearing something she must have liked.
https://sharanyamanivannan.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/the-venus-flytrap-quiet-outrage-and-battle-fatigue/

@ranyamanivannan - Even on the day that India gained independence, Sri Aurobindo was already looking toward post-nationalism. Visionary. http://t.co/hdi7qatH

Critical Estimate of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh’s Contribution to Indian English Poetry https://t.co/Y4yw0aM3zt

Sri Aurobindo puts forth in precise detail the synthesis of the integral yoga. https://t.co/nKlbXyIrgQ

Madhuban - Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Talla Ramgarh – https://t.co/PZ1PUwrZ1n

Video of the second Jindal lecture by @pbmehta on Nietzsche and Aurobindo @SouthAsiaBrown @WatsonInstitute  https://t.co/sUlaGLx49Y

Integral Education: Sonya Shah on Vimeo

https://vimeo.com › CIIS › Videos
Oct 26, 2011
Sonya Shah, professor in the School of Undergraduate Studies at CIIS, discusses Integral Education: "I don't ...

Savitri - 033: The Yoga of the Cells by the Mother

savitri.in › resources › aug-15-2011
Jun 27, 2014 - With some (for instance, those Sri Aurobindo refers to here: the prudish or the puritans), that virtue becomes dry, barren, gray, aggressive, and almost always finds fault in all that is joyful, free ...

[Sachin in a Ferrari; how will they react if he rides a motorcycle? Take away the idols and you ruin the temple.] https://t.co/0Lzg3ptoMs