Category: Spirituality
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What Auroville Tells Us About the Term “Pseudo-Liberal”
I had a series of conversations a short while back with someone with a conservative bent of mind, and the term “pseudo-liberal” kept cropping up. This got me thinking about why this term is much more in use in everyday discussions and debates than any conservative counterpart. There are various…
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The Problem With Studying Auroville as a “Utopia”, and Other Issues of Materiality
There has been some interest from academics recently in studying Auroville through the analytic framework of “utopia”. I haven’t gone into the details of exactly how these scholars have been examining Auroville as a supposed or proposed utopian space, but I want to briefly address one fundamental aspect of this…
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India is Waking Up to Yoga
There are a lot of theories making the rounds in Auroville regarding the reasons behind the Indian government’s “take over” of the administration of Auroville. While the government is definitely exerting more influence over the functioning of Auroville, it is doing so because the situation in Auroville had become unacceptable,…
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Religion, Progressivism, Integral Yoga and Auroville
Over the past few posts we have been looking at the commonalities between the aims of progressive thinking and the spiritual philosophy of Integral Yoga, as well as the limits of progressive thinking in being able to find true solutions for humanity. Humans are on the path of perceiving a…
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Community in the Context of Integral Yoga, Part II
In the previous post we looked at how the conception of the term community in the context of Integral Yoga differs from the general understanding and connotations of community in our present everyday existence. In the current state of humanity it is individual and collective egos that are at the…
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Community in the Context of Integral Yoga, Part I
In Auroville the term “community” is used often. It is used to describe the community of Aurovilians as a whole. It is used as part of the “community decision-making process” by which Auroville has supposedly been making administrative and governance decisions over the past few decades. Housing in Auroville over…
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The Allure of Power, Authority and Control
In previous posts we have gone through the reasons why the idea of administrative autonomy is such a key topic of debate in Auroville. Administrative autonomy is indeed the central issue in the pitched battle that is ongoing in Auroville today. The small group of Aurovilians who have been running…
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Scale of Thought and Action in Integral Yoga, Part II
In the previous post we took a look at the vastness of scale and scope that Integral Yoga deals with. As we detach from the limitations of identifying with our material selves, we begin to identify with the entirety of humanity, the world and the universe, and begin to see…
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Scale of Thought and Action in Integral Yoga, Part I
In the last few posts we have contextualized progressive and conservative thinking in the framework of Integral Yoga. In this post we take this further, focusing this time on the scale at which Integral Yoga functions, and how that intersects with progressive and conservative thought. And then with this framing…
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Integral Yoga and the Limits of Progressive Thought and Action, Part II
In this post we continue to contextualize progressive thinking and its limitations within the framework of Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s writings. In the previous post we had gone through how humans as we exist today are a transitional being in the evolutionary journey on Earth. We are transitional because…
Finding Auroville 