Papers by Debashish Banerji
Routledge eBooks, Nov 13, 2023
Sustainable development goals series, 2022
Sustainable development goals series, 2022
This volume brings sustainability studies into creative and constructive conversation with action... more This volume brings sustainability studies into creative and constructive conversation with actions, practices, and worldviews from religion and theology supportive of the vision and work of the UN SDGs. It features more than 30 chapters from scholars across diverse disciplines, including economics, ethics, theology, sociology, ritual studies, and visual culture. This interdisciplinary content presents new insights for inhibiting ecospheric devastation, which is inextricably linked to unsustainable financial, societal, racial, geopolitical, and cultural relationships. The chapters show how humanistic elements can enable the establishment of sustainable ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. This includes the aesthetic and emotive dimensions of life. The contributors cover such topics as empowering women and girls to systemically reverse climate change; nurturing interreligious peace; decolonizing landscapes; and promoting horticulture, ecovillages, equity, and animal ethics. Coverage integrates a variety of religious and theological perspectives. These include Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and other traditions. To enable the restoration and flourishing of the ecosystems of the biosphere, human societies need to be reimagined and reordered in terms of economic, cultural, religious, racial, and social equitability. This volume illustrates transformative paradigms to help foster such change. It introduces new principles, practices, ethics, and insights to the discourse. This work will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals researching the ethical, moral, social, cultural, psychological, developmental, and other social scientific impacts of religion on the key markers of sustainability.
Hinduism and Tribal Religions, 2022
The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore
Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) developed, practiced and taught a form of yoga, which he named in... more Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) developed, practiced and taught a form of yoga, which he named integral yoga. If one peruses the texts he has written pertaining to his teaching, one finds a variety of models, goals, and practices which may be termed formulations or versions of the integral yoga. This article compares three such formulations, aiming to determine whether these are the same, but in different words, as meant for different audiences, or whether they represent different understandings of the yoga based on changing perceptions. The article also tries to compare the versions in terms of differences in emphases and/or responses to the problem of integrality, which Sri Aurobindo tried to answer through practices and resultant experiences
The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore
Hinduism and Tribal Religions, 2022
Journal of Posthumanism, 2021
This is a discussion of Francesca Ferrando’s book Philosophical Posthumanism, focusing in particu... more This is a discussion of Francesca Ferrando’s book Philosophical Posthumanism, focusing in particular on three chapters, “Antihumanism and the Ubermensch,” “Technologies of the Self as Posthumanist (Re)Sources” and “Posthumanist Perspectivism.” It traces the origins and implications of the concepts at the center of these chapters from a posthumanist perspective. It then evaluates these implications from the viewpoint of a non-Western praxis, specifically the spiritual praxis of Indian yoga. For this, it elaborates briefly on some genealogies of yoga and discusses what an intersection of posthumanism and yoga may look like. It holds that such a consideration would enhance the concepts of the chapters in question in Ferrando’s text.
Acta Psychopathologica, 2017
Post-Enlightenment philosophy, which is largely creative of and dominates the modern consciousnes... more 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.
The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore
Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, 2017
The original version of the book was inadvertently published without the biography of "Francesca ... more The original version of the book was inadvertently published without the biography of "Francesca Ferrando" in FM "List of Contributors". The book has been updated with the change.
“Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of ... more “Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of integral consciousness. But few people actually know the roots of these concepts in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser and especially Sri Aurobindo, and Haridas Chaudhuri, co-founder and the first president of CIIS. Weaving through these personalities and the disciplines of evolutionary philosophy, transpersonal psychology and cultural anthropology, this will be a talk and open dialogue about evolution in consciousness and culture
This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern ... more This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore\u27s literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore\u27s literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore\u27s music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1052/thumbnail.jp
Integral Review, 2013
Sri Aurobindo’s teachings on Integral Yoga are couched in a universal and impersonal language, an... more Sri Aurobindo’s teachings on Integral Yoga are couched in a universal and impersonal language, and could be considered an early input to contemporary transpersonal psychology. Yet, while he was writing his principal works in English, he was also keeping a diary of his experiences and understandings in a personal patois that hybridized English and Sanskrit. A hermeneutic perusal of this text, The Record of Yoga, published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, uncovers the semiotics of Indian yoga traditions, showing how Sri Aurobindo utilizes and furthers their discourse, and where he introduces new elements which may be considered “modern.” This essay takes a psychobiographical approach to the life of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), tracing his encounters with texts and situated traditions of Indian yoga from the period of his return to India from England (1893) till his settlement in Pondicherry (1910), to excavate the traditional roots and modern ruptures of his own yoga practice, which goes to...
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Papers by Debashish Banerji