12.15.11

Confusions of Aurobindo/OWS and a (naturalistic) spirituality for the left

Posted in General at 2:36 pm by nemo

From Andrew Cohens’ site: : A History of Evolutionary Spirituality

“History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute,” wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Indeed, evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept. And over two centuries ago, he and others were beginning to intuit that the nature of reality itself was, in some essential way, going somewhere. Nature—and humanity—had a direction.

The previous post touched on some shaky ground, but the thinking of Bennett stumbled on a better approach to the question of evolution and enlightenment. Cohen’s New Age junk theory doesn’t deserve the hype it has generated, and it certainly is not a summary and cap on the long tradition beginning with Hegel. This kind of of codification is unfair, as is Cohen’s false prestige that is based on the pseudo-guru status he received from an ambitious Indian figure (etc, etc). The point here is that the question of human evolution and consciousness is intractably difficult and still an unknown even to enlightened men (which doesn’t include Andrew Cohen in any case).

The real source here is the deep, yet deeply confused (I suspect) Aurobindo, who seems to originate the theme now regurgitated by Cohen and others, like Barbara Hubbard, perhaps Deepak Chopra. But Deepak Chopra, despite his confusions and similar bad theories, seems to have a connection with the Indian tradition, at least in the sense of its practice, beyond theories and philosophies, which distract people from practical efforts.

I say all this because Aurobindo would have made a good precursor to a possible spirituality for the left, having been an early Indian radical. But I think an ideology of evolutionary enlightenment would backfire, and turn out to be crap. A more intelligent variant closer to Schopenhauer than to Hegel might be workable. Indeed, the figure J. G. Bennett, before his work turned into New Age mush, had some telling suggestions.
In any case, the path of evolutionary enlightenment is an embrace of evolutionary illusion: the strong suggestion of Buddhism, and, indeed, the pessimistic Schopenhauer is that ‘liberation’ from the cosmic mechanics of the Will in Nature is the true path, not its embrace of the dark forces of evolutionary manifestation. And the world of the gurus needs to be liberated from reactionary bullshit. The entire framework of neo-Brahmanistic Hinduism is Crapola of the first order, and a total distortion of the real legacy of Indian religion. OCCUPY HINDUISM.
The Cohen/Wilber charade isn’t going to be a progressive force. Spiritual obedience to the Right will slip into the mix while you are tucked away in bed.
There is no reason why a New Age spiritual movement can’t be radically leftist, like the original Buddhism which was a revolutionary movement. All these gurus are a bunch of jerkoffs whose main achievement is to produce crippled disciples. Enlightenment doesn’t come from gurus promoting spiritual traditions.

It would backfire for me to negate Aurobindo’s basic strain of thinking. But perhaps it needs to be restated in a form that transcends the material/spiritual distinction. In any case, the presence of Schopenhauer next to Hegel in this set of figures speaking of ‘evolutionary enlightenment’ ought to show rapid movement on the bullshit meter. The Darwinian myth is far too savage and reductionist, but the reversal into ‘spiritual evolution’ is not the answer either.

Yet it was the work of the great Sri Aurobindo that, while following a similar thread to Bergson and Teilhard, brought an entirely new dimension to this burgeoning field— namely, translating the concept of spiritual evolution into a spiritual practice. After completing his studies in literature and philosophy at Cambridge in 1892, he became a leading figure in the Indian independence movement and was declared “the most dangerous man alive” by the British Empire, but eventually left the freedom fight to devote his life to exploring liberation of an altogether different kind. After experiencing a deep spiritual awakening, Aurobindo’s consciousness opened onto a vision of human possibilities that saw the attainment of nirvana—typically held to be the goal of all mystical pursuits—as merely the beginning of a personal engagement with the evolutionary force that has been driving the cosmos forward since the dawn of creation. Leading his spiritual community in the practice of “integral yoga,” Aurobindo was the first to synthesize the modern understanding of evolution with the timeless revelation of enlightenment, and pioneered the idea that human beings are capable of aligning their lives with the trajectory and purpose of the universe itself.

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