Building an Intuitive Mentality: The NeoVedantic Knowledge Project of Sri Aurobindo
Journal Title: Acta Psychopathologica - Year 2017, Vol 3, Issue 5
Abstract
Post-Enlightenment philosophy, which is largely creative of and dominates the modern consciousness, has defined humanism in terms of rationality and its control over the irrational. This has led to our technological age but has also spawned counter philosophies critiquing the limits of reason and the epistemic possibilities of experience and intuition. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950) was an Indian thinker who was schooled in England and arrived at a cosmopolitan grasp of modernity, including the ideals of the Enlightenment and its limitations. Looking to the discursive and experiential traditions of India, particularly those of the Upanishads (Vedanta) he sought for hermeneutic keys to address the human possibilities of knowledge. In his reading of the Upanishads, he saw a fundamental division between Knowledge (Vidya) and Ignorance (Avidya) and a practical tradition (yoga) which negotiated this division by rejecting worldly or relative knowledge (Avidya) for a Knowledge-by-identity (Vidya). Whereas such a transcendentalism had been idealized even within the counter-movements of the Enlightenment as "the Eastern Enlightenment," Sri Aurobindo sought traces of an intuitive mediating consciousness which would enable a new kind of worldly knowledge based in Truth-Seeing (darshan) and Hearing (sruti). He has referred to this knowledge project as "building an intuitive mentality," a transformative process based on Vedantic knowledge and leading more to an integral consciousness than what we would call a mentality. Looking for the operations of absolute Knowledge in the Vidya that translate to operations of relative knowledge in the Avidya, he located four forms of intuition that could be cultivated and normalized towards the end of preparing such an intuitive consciousness and leading ultimately to an integral consciousness foundational to a divine collective life on earth. In this paper, I will outline these operations of knowledge and discuss the processes by which Sri Aurobindo sought to bridge our human "rational ignorance" (Avidya) to the integral knowledge (Vidya) spoken of in the Upanishads.
Authors and Affiliations
Debashish Banerji
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP308970
- DOI 10.4172/2469-6676.100136
- Views 80
- Downloads 0
The African Belief System and the PatientâÂÂs Choice of Treatment from Existing Health Models-the Case of Ghana
This paper presents a narrative review including a case study of the African Belief System. A strong belief in supernatural powers is deeply rooted in the African culture. In Ghana, there is a spiritual involvement in th...
Academic Interventions for Children in Foster Care in the Professional Literature
The purpose of this systematic literature review is to determine the number of articles and provide a summary of the academic needs of youth in foster care, to explore the barriers those children and caregivers face with...
Herpes Zoster Opthalmicus with Hemiplegia due to Vasculopathy
This is a case of herpes zoster opthalmicus with involvement of the right trigeminal nerve presented with stroke and hemiplegia secondary to HZV vasculopathy. The author discusses clinical manifestation, the subtle diagn...
A Body-Based Group Intervention for Teacher Stress and Burnout in High-Risk Schools
Teachers in high-risk South African schools suffer from stress and burnout as a result of on-going violence and lack of student discipline. An evolutionary psychological approach to self-care was researched in a mixed-me...
Contemplation: When Enough is Enough
We all aware of the rising health care costs and the astronomical premiums that insurance companies charge every day, even though, we as a society may be partly to blame for most of the mischief behind the chaos. A few w...