Download or read book Art and Beauty Opposition and Growth in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram written by Patrick Michael Beldio and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sri Aurobindo (nèe Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950), a native of India, spent his youth studying poetry and the classics in England. Upon his return to colonial India, he became influential in Indian revolutionary politics. Inspired by his own spiritual experience, Śaktism, Vedānta, Tantra, and the Bhagavad Gītā, he later developed his own "integral yoga" in the French colonial city of Pondicherry. Instead of transcending the Earth, his yoga seeks to transform matter into what he calls "the new supramental creation." He wrote over 30 books in the areas of yoga theory and practice, social, political, and cultural reflection, art and poetry. He wrote his most important work, his epic poem Savitri, over a 35-year period as a way to develop his spiritual practice. Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973) shared Sri Aurobindo's goals and joined him in 1920. She was a gifted painter and musician and a spiritual seeker from Paris whom he named "the Mother" when they established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. He considered her the feminine Śakti to his masculine Īśvara role, and their followers believe them to be their Avatāras (God/dess in human form). After he died, the Mother continued to guide the Ashram until her death. For 52 years she used painting to grow in her spiritual practice. Both gurus encouraged many of their disciples to use the arts for spiritual growth. Sri Aurobindo's work has inspired various prominent thinkers, and is considered a significant contribution to Hindu studies, as well as 20th-century colonial Indian history. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of the modern yoga renaissance; however, since the 1980s there has been a lack of scholarship on his thought, and particularly as this applies to art and religion. Also, the Mother's participation has never been critically examined in this tradition. This dissertation investigates the following question: What are the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's aesthetic theory and to what extent does their artwork and their collaboration with their disciples demonstrate their aesthetics? This study uses a historical-critical methodology to examine the development of thought in their written texts on culture and aesthetics, and a visual culture approach to interpret their use of art, architecture, and visual culture. It relies upon disciples's diaries, reproductions of drawings and paintings by the Mother and her disciples, and the author's ethnographic data collected during his stay in the Ashram in India in 2012-13. The results of this dissertation: 1) their yoga is "descendant," demanding a principle of growth that welcomes oppositions found in life to stimulate the universalization of the basic consciousness and to divinize the Earth; the arts aid this process by helping the disciple to face oppositions with sincerity and resilience, and to unveil spiritual potentials that were not known until the creative process uncovered them; 2) they prize the intuition and higher spiritual faculties of consciousness in their creative process and spiritual experience, which diminishes and potentially annihilates the importance of the intellect; 3) for them, the arts are essentially tied to beauty, which aids their goal of the "new creation;" their ideal of beauty occurs when the physical art media harmonizes with the meaning of the artwork, uniting qualities of beauty with the value of beauty. This study concludes that if Sri Aurobindo is a guru who is primarily an artist, his teaching is principally found in an examination of his creative process, his poetry, and his work with his and the Mother's disciples. Likewise, as an artist-guru, the Mother's teaching is chiefly encountered in an investigation of her guidance of the Ashram, her painting, music, architecture, and visual culture, and most importantly her claims to the transformation of her own body. Their combined teaching is intended to be a transformative experience of growth through beauty, which for them is a way to create a non-sectarian sacred gaze in their followers. Their aesthetic goals might be characterized as expanding the basic consciousness in order to critique past uses of beauty that have become an abuse of others; to reinterpret past achievements in beauty with an intent to include all; and still further, to create new, more inclusive expressions of beauty in one's own historical context.
Download or read book Shmuel Hugo Bergmann written by Olaf Glöckner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the interest on life and work of the Jewish writer, philosopher, mystic and politician Shmuel Hugo Bergmann (1883–1975) has perceptibly increased. Well-known as a protagonist of the famous "Prague Circle", Bergmann headed for Palestine in 1920, became the driving force for building the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem and finally advanced as first Rector of the Hebrew University. All his life, close ties to the Czech Republic remained. In the State of Israel, Bergmann became a leading philosopher and highly admired cultural figure. He himself showed great interest in world religions, mysticism, and Western esotericism. Bergmann also emerged as an important point of reference for left-wing Israeli discourse. Up from the late 1920ies has was one of the protagonists of the “Brit Shalom”, an initiative which called for an advocated peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs and a bi-national State in Israel/Palestine. In this volume, distinguished historians, scholars of religion, and cultural scientists conflate a fascinating life story of a man who always worked on social and educational improvements and searched for fairness and deeper truths in a world full of conflict and antagonisms.
Download or read book Modern Hinduism in Text and Context written by Lavanya Vemsani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Hinduism in Text and Context brings together textual and contextual approaches to provide a holistic understanding of modern Hinduism. It examines new sources - including regional Saiva texts, Odissi dance and biographies of Nationalists - and discusses topics such as yoga, dance, visual art and festivals in tandem with questions of spirituality and ritual. The book addresses themes and issues yet to receive in-depth attention in the study of Hinduism. It shows that Hinduism endures not only in texts, but also in the context of festivals and devotion, and that contemporary practice, devotional literature, creative traditions and ethics inform the intricacies of a religion in context. Lavanya Vemsani draws on social scientific methodologies as well as history, ethnography and textual analysis, demonstrating that they are all part of the toolkit for understanding the larger framework of religion in the context of emerging nationhood, transnational and transcultural interactions.
Download or read book The Search for Beauty written by Hariram Jasta and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Significance of Indian Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The National Value of Art written by Aurobindo Ghose and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The National Value of Art written by Aurobindo and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sri Aurobindo s Philosophy of Social Development written by and published by Atlantic Publishers & Distri. This book was released on with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Significance of Indian Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1953 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The National Value of Art written by Aurobindo Ghose and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Significance of Indian Art written by sri Aurobindo and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Significance of Indian Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters on Poetry and Art written by Sri Aurobindo and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art and Aesthetics in the Works of Sri Aurobindo written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life Divine written by Sri Aurobindo and published by editionNEXT.com. This book was released on 2016-05-29 with total page 1256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘‘The Life Divine’’ by Sri Aurobindo. It's a major philosophical work of Sri Aurobindo.Sri Aurobindo presents a theory of evolution,which will culminate in the transformation of the human being and the advent of a divine life upon earth.
Download or read book Letters on Yoga written by Sri Aurobindo and published by Lotus Press (WI). This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters on Yoga encompass all life and deal with such topics as the object of Integral Yoga, Synthetic methods, basic Requisites of the path, The Foundation of Sadhana, Human relationships in Yoga,Visions and symbols, Experiences of the Inner and the Cosmic Consciousness, to name a few.
Download or read book The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo written by Kaikhushru Dhunjibhoy Sethna and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sri Aurobindo stands for no narrow cult: he kindles a vision and initiates a work that bear on the whole human situation, meeting its most central and recurrent as well as its most external and diverse issues. Man in every mode and field – the thinker and the scientist no less than the artist and the mystic – man individual and man collective – the modern breaker of new ground side by side with the heir of the ages – is Sri Aurobindo's material for probing and guidance. Especially he is concerned with man the conscious evolving agent and with the powers within, around and beyond him that help or hinder steps towards true Supermanhood, a transformative evolution of the entire nature rather than a glorified extension of this or that group of qualities. The selections of the author's writings on the vision and work of Sri Aurobindo which have been put between the covers of this book were written with an eye to the wide world of inquiring minds and questioning hearts much in harmony with Sri Aurobindo's own global vision. Five new pieces have been added to this revised and enlarged edition; one of them is a short poem to whose opening lines the Mother paid highest possible compliment from a spiritual point of view. Many of the essays have been seen and approved for publication by Sri Aurobindo himself.
