What is obviously needed is a complete philosophical reflection that carries the criticism of education to the roots of the soul. We must analyze those acts we perform to become educated and not stop short by imposing certain habits of mind we have inherited, and thus act against the education of the young. We need to define our society, our culture, our nation, as what it is rather than as what it is not. We are not Romans, Germans, or English primarily, but we are those and also Greeks, Orientals, and all of them at once. As a culture we are neither scientific nor humanistic, but we have adopted a hybrid called technology. Technology, for Americans, is the instrumentalization of both science and humanities, and as such is our universal culture and our philosophy, against which we view both past and future. The fact that it is insufficient should increase our urgency to fill the gaps, direct our training to figure the alternatives, or focus on training that would reestablish the actual practice of doing science and doing humanities. It is because we have accepted the culture of technology, that what the critics see as an aberration of reason is from the viewpoint of technological culture, seen as the outcome of a fully legitimate culture. From an ontological point of view this is not only legitimate but true. Absolute claims are possible only in logical or human isolation.

Ibid p.12

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Well it would follow that Western culture is NOT really a scientific culture but rather a technological culture, which DENIES certain possibilities of the Mind and where even humanities are mechanized, made the field of positive sciences where whatever that does not conform to the norms of such sciences are rejected and so forth. Of utmost importance to me is the claim that the breaking down the academic world into humanities and sciences is not only WRONG but also false and which must be wiped out to create an education that does not sustain this dichotomy. This TRUE education must bring out that we are UNIVERSAL, not just American etc but also all.

This is quite surprising to me but at the same time very valid and something that applies not only to the Americans but also to all.

Why surprising?

Looking at the enormous production of NEW knowledge of the WEST and the SUPPORT they give for such a production, it comes as a surprise to learn that there DEFECTS even in this. For I have been marveling at the way the Europeans explore the outer space, deep seas, unexplored corners of world, technological adventures in which they invent machines after machines and with which they perform medical miracles, scientific discoveries and so forth. The world is a village now not because of religions and philosophies but because of technological adventures, perhaps as unintended consequences of the scientific advances. Even in thinking the West has produced so many brilliant thinkers - Descartes, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Marx, Russell, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and so forth who have shaken the world and shown new political cultures. Against this the Indians have been spinning out thought systems not at all influential not only at the global level but also at Indian level. The Indian thinking is sickeningly caste-bound, stereotyped where the same age old stuff is regurgitated ad nauseam and with astrological fantasia added to mystify everything. Sickened at this I have recommending Westernization by way of liberating Indian Thinking from caste prisons and camouflaged racialism. But perhaps words are ineffective and political actions are the way - a mental revolution through political action is the way out.

But such is NOT the situation in the West where what is proposed is a change in the philosophy of education so that a culture that sees the division of Science and Humanities is seen also as false. In other words there is a demand here to broaden and extent the notion of RATIONALITY so that it is NOT exclusively identified with Science alone but also extended to the humanities. In poems arts dance music and so forth there is also an expression of RATIONALITY and which because they deal with the soul, if neglected will lead to spiritual decadence of man and hence make all the technological advances quite useless really.

Here I concur but I just want to raise some questions.

Is it being recommended here that the notion of science, not that it should be discarded but instead be broadened as Hermeneutic Science that sees both the sciences and humanities just as the different expressions of the SAME human rationality? Here by Hermeneutic Science I mean the interpretive science where everything investigated is a TEXT with DUALITY of structure, the Surface Structure (SS) and Deep Structure(DS) and where rationality is shown by locating that element of DS that is agentively linked with that feature of SS that becomes problematic and hence a matter for investigations. The object taken can be a physical object like stones, a living creature like fish 2000 meters below the sea-level, the masks the Kathakkali dancers wear, the gestures of the hands of a Barata Natyam Dancer, the Icons that fill the temples, the metaphors that add elegance to poetry and so forth. They all have MEANINGS and there is a RATIONAL WAY of getting at the meanings and with that enjoy TRUTH-EXPERIENCES. Since this is the ONLY way both the technology oriented sciences and poetry oriented arts can be brought together as different fields of Hermeneutic Sciences (as it has been among the Tantrics or at least the Tamils since the days of Tolkaappiyam), it appears to me that what Prof Antonio is recommending is this Hermeneutic Science.

From: "Dr. K.Loganathan" <subas@pc.jaring.my>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <meykandar@yahoogroups.com>; "Abhinavagupta" <Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com>; <ontological.Ethics@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-2

Date: Monday, January 12, 2004 8:37 AM

Dear Prof

Thank-you very much. I am beginning to understand you and believe that what you are proposing is essentially Hermeneutic Science and NOT simply Philosophical Hermeneutics of Heidegger Gadamer and so forth. I am fully sympathetic with that and feel that this is the only way not only to diffuse the artificial barrier between the sciences and humanities but also the cultural and religious differences across the world.

The human mind (also animal?) is wired to respond to TRUTH and as long we move in the direction of TRUTH, the MeyneRittu of Tolkaappiyar, our differences will naturally dissove or fizzle out. Just simply who can deny truths?

Let me add that the SumeroTamil studies may also play an important role in this. As I pour through the SumeroTamil literature, I can seen the beginnings of these notions as would any one if they approach them with a background knowledge of Tamil. The words of Suruppak where he implores one must study the events around so that one learns the truths ( me-kal-kal) must be carved in gold for it is this spirit that has sustained Agamic Hinduism and continues to sustain it ( when activated) Perhaps it is also the secret of the survival of SumeroiTamil culture to this day.

This whole story remains to be told to the world and I will be obliged if you also as a scholar of Sumerian literature do something in this direction as well.

I have just finished reading the Third Chapter of Habits and I will adumbrate more on such things and which will be just simply providing more arguments for your proposals.

Loga

----- Original Message -----

From: diotima245@aol.com

To: agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 7:14 AM

Subject: Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-2

Dear Dr. Loga and friends,

If every reader would have the depth of training and insight of Dr. Loga the world would be a better place for all of us. Extraodinary beginning, not only critical but positive in understanding and suggestions. Way to go!

Thanks

Antonio de Nicolas

Dear Raja

I have written quite extensively on Hermeneutics and you can read them at the following website:

https://ulagank.tripod.com/hermscience.htm

From the account of my students, the best and really effective is the paper I wrote on literary Hermeneutics of Tolkaappiyar where the sutra begins interestingly enough with “ottak kaadci utti” i.e. the Utties, the movement of the mind that bring the same vision (kaadci) as the author (otta kaadci) so that there can be agreement, (ottal- to agree). This is available at the following address:

http://arutkural.tripod.com/tolcampus/utti-32.html

At global level there are many traditions that go by the name of Hermeneutics and even in the West, beginning with the protestant Exegetical Hermeneutics of Martin Luther it has moved into a variety of Hermeneutics including now that of Philosophical Hermeneutics such as that Heidegger Gadamer Ricouver and so forth. All of them have a family resemblance in having INTERPRETATION of TEXTS as the common point. In Tamil, as I have already said, in Marabiyal it begins as Literary Hermeneutics (also shared by Kaudilya of Artha Sastra) but moves to a general methodological principle in the main body of Tolkaappiyam itself. I am studying now Meyppaaddiyal, the study of Meyppaadu, feelings and emotions and posting them even to Abhinavagupta. You can see the elements of Hermeneutic Science there that Tol. calls Nuul NeRi (The way of becoming CLEAR ) where he also says it has as its goal the contemplation of Nannyap PoruL, the essences of objects, including the MEANINGS that determine the behavior of people. The whole of PoruLatikaaram, the massive third book is about PoruL, the MEANINGS that constitutes the EXISTENCE of man and how they come to be as such.

In the world outside Tamizakam, and even outside the Saiva Tradition, Hermeneutics existed essentially as Exegetical Hermeneutics such as Biblical Hermeneutics of the Christians, the Islamic hermeneutics such as that of Imam Gazali in his Uhya Illumudin, the non-vedantic Sri VaishaNava philosophy of the exegetics of Tiruvaymozi of Namazvar maintained by Idu tradition the summaries of which are available in such books as Acarya Hridayam ( MaaRanin Manam) and so forth. In a way even the Vedantic tradition can be considered as belonging to this tradition but confined to Badarayana’s Vedanta Sutras. After all it is as commentaries to these sutras that Sankara Ramanuja Madhava and so forth worked out their Vedantic philosophies.

It is against this tradition that we have to see the revolution in Philosophy that Meykandar effects: he generalizes the notion of TEXT to the WORLD as a WHOLE and this being the most inclusive TEXT where the production of scriptures and so forth is part of it, founds Philosophy as the most Fundamental Hermeneutic Science. Now as you explore the metaphysical visions unfolded in Botham (see Lessons on Botham for an ongoing attempt at this) you will realize that our mind or specially the self is already equipped for its metaphysical journey and towards Moksa. Tirumular elaborates on this magnificently. BEING is not only in the world but also in the mind or self and that we can RECOGNISE His presence there by going deeper and deeper into the workings of our mind or self itself.

The phrase “alaiyaatu njanattai munnuNarntu naadil” that Meykandar uses to establish the anma as a fundamental substance, clarifies this issue. This phrase really means: there is a pre-understanding of Njanam and there is something seeking that despite a sequence of deaths and rebirths and without being lost (alaiyaatu) in all these. Thus the self is there as both sat-self and asat-self and its metaphysical journey, the asat-self drops off and the sat-self survives to enjoy Moksa.

Also you can see Tirumular Appar Punitavati Poykaiyar, those whom I am studying now, are essentially practicing Hermeneutic Sciences for they are boldly exploring the Metaphysical World and articulating in moving poetry their encounters of the depths in the form of icons, mythical themes and so forth and where they also seek out the MEANINGS of all. For example in several places Punitavati seeks out the MEANING of the presence of the snake, the presence of Moon but always as a Crescent Moon and so forth and hints at the meanings she sees and which I bring out in my commentaries. This science I have called Hermeneutic Semiotics as it is seeking out meanings of mythical and related themes.

I may not have answered all your questions but I will keep them in mind and in my dialogues on Habits I hope to bring appropriate responses and at the appropriate places.

Now finally one thing: yes you are right in saying that your Tamil upbringing in Malaysia did not alert you with respect to the essences of Tamil traditions I am articulating. The study of Saiva Siddhanta is lost, the Saiva Tradition is DEAD and even in India and Sri Lanka it survives only among a small minority of scholars and that too is dwindling. This is part of the DECLINE of Tamil and Tamil scholarship- gone are the days of Somasundara Nayakkar, MaRaimalai AdikaL, Kalyana Sundrar and so forth.

I am trying to revive it all in my humble way or at least keep it alive because of its enormous depth and usefulness.

Loga

From: "Raja Mylvaganam" <mylvahana@yahoo.com>

To: <Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Abhinavagupta] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-2

Date: Monday, January 12, 2004 8:50 PM

Dr. Loganthan has written:

The human mind (also animal?) is wired to respond to TRUTH and as long we move in the direction of TRUTH, the MeyneRittu of Tolkaappiyar, our differences will naturally dissolve or fizzle out. Just simply who can deny truths?

This is a very tightly packed statement and requires help in understanding. First, the assertions contained therein seem to rely entirely on the authority of the Tolkaapiyar. It is reminiscent of claims of inerrancy for their scriptural texts by some sects among Christians. The belief in the inerrancy of scriptural texts and the challenges to the beliefs are matter of history. Nevertheless, Hermeneutics [The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates the word at 1737 and describes it as, "The art or science of interpretation, especially of Scripture. Commonly distinguished from exegesis or practical exposition."] is hardly a done deal. On the contrary the subject is taught to beginning students as a means of thawing the grip of 'ancient truths which have become uncouth'. Any claims by Hermeneuts to know the TRUTH as an objective reality or even assert there is a universally applicable TRUTH (out-there or in-here) has to be reconsidered in the light of

Hermeneutics itself. I confess that my background in Hermeneutics is rudimentary and I am sure that Dr. Loganathan among others can better inform us on the range and differences in the contributions by Dilthey, Gadamer, Heidegger, Ricouer etc, on the subject.

Second, Dr. Loganathan's assertion that "the human mind is wired to respond to TRUTH," requires more explanation. I am not sure if the intention was to mean 'brain' instead of 'mind'. Neither case, however, has been sufficiently accepted by the wider scientific, philosophical or psychological community to warrant such an assertion. Sufficiently accepted at least to recommend to the governments of the world that the education systems in place should be discarded. Philosophically it is my understanding that it is still not acceptable to deduce 'value' from a 'fact'(Hume). The anatomical structure of the brain is a fact. Truth is a value. Are there underlying reasons for the search to find a biological basis for the manifestations of Psyche? I first noticed this this quest in the debate over whether "addiction is a moral problem or a disease?" Whatever the outcome of the debate it has generally been accepted that both religious and scientific (medical) support is necessary for

recovery. This view has been accepted even by insurance companies who are rapidly becoming the final decision makers on health care delivery in the USA. It was never clear, however, whether it was the non-scientifically trained professionals who were seeking greater power to heal in the predominantly scientifically propelled medical industry, or the psychiatrists who wanted to use more and more pharmaceuticals to treat mental illness that made the better case. The choices were determined as much by financial resources as anything else. Since my Tamil upbringing in Malaysia did not make quite the same distinction between MIND and BODY I thought the whole debate was quite unnecessary in the context of treatment for addicts except in deciding who got the bigger slice of the budget. None of this is to suggest that Science has provided us with the all-encompassing method by which Facts are to be established. The same can be said for Philosophy and Truth. Philosophy after all is a Friend

of Truth and not Truth itself. And certainly seminal studies such as Habits of Mind should be pursued. I read the posts and derive much from them and hope they will continue but I do hope that you will include the effects of Capitalism on the degradation of values in your deliberations.

I would like to offer two suggestions. As a merely curious lay reader it would be useful to be kept aware and reminded of the limitations of the arguments presented. Second it would be beneficial, again to the non-expert, if some direct correlation to Abhinavagupta's work could be made, again only so that the non-professional reader like myself may benefit.I do not for one moment imply that these questions and difficulties are not in your thoughts.Let me reiterate my deepest respect for Dr. Loga's and Professor Antonio's contributions to these pages.

M. Thurairaja

Nordre Frihavnsgade 15A

2100 København

Denmark

---------------------------------

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From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: <meykandar@yahoogroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: Fw: [Abhinavagupta] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-2

Date: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 1:15 AM

Raja Mylvaganam and friends,

Your concerns and questions are not only legitimate but also most insightful.

And you are right. You might however be aware by now that Dr, Loga is most

eager to find a legitimate path for Tamil literature to find its place in world

literature. At this time, however, in relation with Habits of Mind I am not

surprised you find his conclusions premature. I am more interested at this time

to establish facts, rather than hermeneutics, but we will need them when we

come to the descriptions of the different habits, or rather the differents acts

the different brains perform and how they all come together and all are

needed. From a philosophical perpective it is most urgent for us to establish the

facts that create a clear and legitimate epistemology so we may proceed in our

quest. The beginnings we are speaking about are only the realization that a new

culture has emerged, that was not present before, with such global

consequences in the American Academy, and this is the culture of technology. Technology

is not humanities, and it is not science. It is a hybrid new habit of mind

based on the interpreter module of the left brain of the neo-cortex. Though it

seems to proceed by the way of science it does not. It borrows from science

methods, words, dogmatism and establishes itself as a legitimate and overriding

culture. Unfortunately it imposes itself on human habits and by becoming

embodied, it creates a culture, a human culture with enormous consequences to those

using this culture uncritically. All the so called social sciences are the

culprits and perpetrators and it is this culture that it's overriding the

humanities, establishing itself as the only culture humans should embody. This is

evident in the classroom and this is the "laboratory" of our inquiry in Habits of

Mind. Though this habitt of mind is examined in the American classroom, Dr,

Loga is right in generalizing it to humanity at large. Abhinavagupta and Indic

texts together with Plato and the recovery of the human ground through memory

and imagination is what we expect to come to at the end and for which we will

need not only the Indic texts we know, Rg Veda, Upanishads, Gita, but also

those we do not know, like Tamil literature.

My interest is to add them as a return to our complete human origins, at the

end of the book. The reason why this needs to be done is simple, the program

of education of Plato never entered the Academy and the reason is that the

Medievals, on the shoulders of Aristotle and their interpretation of him, made it

so that to this date we have no resources in Western philosophy to take care

of the "self", individual or otherwise. You see, our model of doing philosophy

in the West started by acknowledging that God created the world, but we cannot

know Him. He created the world, known as Nature, and therefore knowing Nature

we can know God indirectly. Regardless of the methods we used to study

Nature, the deductive, (the supremacy of universal) the inductive ( the

accumulation of single facts) or the transcendental ( the knowledge of our own (single)

mind) in the end all we could do was to superimpose those models and

discoveries on humans, our individual body, our self, a sinner, a machine, a robot etc...

And there we are stuck in that model and not able to communicate with those

other cultures that acted through the memories and imaginings of the right

neocortex, where the self, or the witness are central. What we call Western

culture is just that, an overriding of the discoveries of one brain over all the

others. It is time to give legitimacy to the other brains and see how in the

harmony of all of them we may become more fully human, on the model of the

Avatara.

We have a long way to go but the journey should be interesting.

Om and Shanti

Antonio de Nicolas, or Nitin Bhai as they called me in Gujarat.

Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Dialogues on Habits of Mind-3

Dear Prof and Friends

I believe there is something very important that our Nitin Bhai( Antonio) is proposing and which may be something that he learned by comparing the Indian with the Western philosophical traditions. Whatever the genesis of this form of thinking, it is something very valid and timely. Let us hold firmly in our mind that what he wants is the dissolution of the false dichotomy of the arts and sciences and which form of thinking also extends to alienating people as American, Oriental, African and so forth. We can add here also the Indian Brahmanical Thinking that pigeonholes human beings into Brahmin Ksattriyas Vaisyas and Sudras and in which while the social alienation is validated (by the gimmick of sastra sanctions) but NOT the social equality. In VarNasrama Dharma there is NO RECOGNITION of the SAMENESS of all human beings but only hierarchical differences and tied to BIRTH and hence something made IMPOSSIBLE to annul. The fact that all human beings can rise to be SAME despite differences in birth is something BEYOND Brahmanism.

Thus the proposal of our Nitin Bhai bears similarities with the Ati-VarNasrama Dharma of the Saivites, the sociology of going BEYOND the VarNa differences and see the SAMNESS in all human beings and which became the central sociological impulse of the Bakti movement where people from all walks of life felt the SAME and as the adiyars, the humble servers of BEING and despite all kinds of differences. I believe there is this striking similarity because the Tamil culture has been Hermeneutic Scientific in essence and thanks to the magnificent accomplishments of Tolkaappiyar and the body of scholars who cultivated it and fed him. I also believe that our Nitin Bhai is also struggling to say something similar but perhaps not relating it to the notion of Hermeneutic Science that I am reading in his words , very justifiably, I think.

With this let us come to the following passage from the second chapter of Habits of Mind.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

The social sciences have emptied the classroom of any spiritual images, substituting in their place masses of numbers and facts, mountains of information that make image making difficult, if not impossible. Facts, figures, and platitudes are no substitute for philosophy. Experts now take the place of the earlier priests, and they advise the educated and the super-

stitious about all facets of their lives, from belief in God to sexual behavior. The expert appears routinely around every corner where opinions or knowledge are needed, in foreign policy, in the press, in how to take care of a toothache. Indecision and confusion seem to appear all around us, and we have taught it.

Nor are only the students and the superstitious affected by the new trend. Whole departments of philosophy await the results of experiments by the social scientists to pronounce on matters of philosophy. Positivism and language analysis do not take a new step without the aid of the social sciences. And even then they express themselves in the subjunctive mood and no longer in straight, declarative sentences: “If it were the case that such an x existed . . .“

The old metaphysics, the assertion of how things are, is dead for most philosophers and the few adhering to such an antiquated philosophical style are affected by the new fashions from the social sciences. Where once the categories of thought were abstracted from the internal structure of thought itself, now any external structures, provided they are general enough, will serve as the architectonics of all thought. In such systems of metaphysics everything, even the foundation, becomes a category, and thus nobody flinches when “experience” is proposed as such an abstract category. But how would anyone flinch when almost everyone accepts the definition of epistemology as a theory of knowledge, regardless of the fact that cultures including our own are testimony to the contrary: epistemologies are historically many and none is a theory, but ~ rather a concrete set of rules and presuppositions that make knowledge possible.

Prof Antonio De. T. Nicholas, Habits of Mind, pp 24-25

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Here the key phrase is an understanding ‘how things are? is dead” and such pursuits have become backgrounded, antiquated and all because the social sciences have invaded the field with their statistical analysis, number games etc. Clearly what Nitin Bhai is proposing is a reinstatement of Ontology - the understanding what things are there and how they stand etc. This is how I understand ontology, the Tattuvanjanam as they say in India. The ‘tattuvam’ is what is there and the njaanam is a clear understanding of what is there and which in its course leads to the investigations of Fundamental Ontology, the Anati PoruLaayvu, as they say in Tamil.

In this Nitin Bhai also provides an analysis of the malady: the INVASION of THEORETIC thinking and where only hypothesis are possible but not firm convictions or decisions. There are only epistemologies but not personal UNDERSTANDING and culture produces only artful theoreticians but NOT the wise with an UNDERSTANDING and who can stand FIRM in a certain decision only because they UNDERSTAND faultlessly the events and so forth. Lost in this theoretical thinking is also the PERSON- it is the mass of statistical data that speaks but NOT the experience of truth of a person, the illuminating INSIGHTS he has gained and has made him not only wiser but also FIRM in his decisions and judgments.

Thus the Theoretic Thinking that spins out epistemologies, hypothesis to be only refuted, while may be successful in the physical sciences, but inapplicable to the Human Sciences. Men do not operate only with hypothesis - they have CONVICTIONS based in their UNDERSTANDING and such convictions should become the matter of the Human Sciences.

Now this call for freeing of humanities from the encroachment of Theoretic Thinking also points out to me that Nitin Bhai is in fact calling for the Hermeneutic Sciences again. For as I have already said, there is NO Theoretic Thinking in the Hermeneutic Sciences but only Ontological explorations and EXPERIENCING deeper and deeper metaphysical realities ALREADY THERE ensuring that such ontological or metaphysical experiences are TRUTH-EXPERINCES and not otherwise, the fancies and imaginative. The truth-experiences are visions of what are already there and hence not at all theoretic postulates, conceptual inventions and what not. In truth-experiences one experiences what is there already and which is NOT refuting or confirming a hypothesis.

The fact is in Hermeneutic Sciences there is NO Theoretic Thinking at all but only ontological explorations, the deepening of experience by accessing deeper and deeper ONTOLOGICAL or metaphysical realms. It is an odyssey, a journey but guided by Logical Thinking of the Hermeneutic Logic type and hence immensely rational. The Hermeneutic Logic operative DISALLOWS the false and imaginative enter the understanding and distort it. When a dancer dances with total absorption, he GAINS access into metaphysical realms already there but which has remained beyond his access so far. Through dancing he is accessing realms blocked off from his understanding by an inner darkness. His dancing is a way of VIOLATING his intrinsic BLINDNESS and therefore as valid as space explorations and so forth. Where such experiencing through dancing turns out to be experiencing what is already there and NOT fictions and fancies, they become truth-experiences, the MeyyuNarvu.

Thus it would appear that the Theoretic Thinking enshrined now in the Western Academia as the only valid intellectual life is in fact SUFFOCATING the deepening of experience through fostering rational explorations into metaphysical realms that come along with Ontological thinking, thinking in terms of what is there that I have NOT seen experienced and so forth. Thus it perpetuates unwittingly IGNORANCE and not UNDERSTANDING.

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <akandabaratam@egroups.com>

Cc: <abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com>; <meykandar@yahoogroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>

Subject: Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-3

Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 6:02 AM

Dear Loga and friends:

First of all thanks for letting Nitin Bhai come back to life. Second, Dr.

Loga has made an admirable summary of the hopes hiding in this research. Yes we

are all human and differences of varna as cast are as antiquated in Hinduism as

tracial profiles are in the West. Our differences of conditioning and biases

rest on the "pilot brains" we use , on the relationship of nature/nurture

mutual fecundation within the windows of malleability periods, not on birth

conditions based on cast. This new focusing of the neorosciences make Hermeneutical

Sciences a perfect match for the future of human development. Except that in

between a new brain/culture has established itself as dominant. And this is the

"interpreter module", that brain attached to the left hemysphere and with

access only to the left neocortex. This brain is territorial, searches for

instant results, lives of names upon names without relations, structures not aware

of consequences. This is the brain that has made technology (writing, reading,

the writtent word, fear\, territoriality) a culture. This is the offspring of

the social sciences, the manipulation of education through universals, and

statistical probabilities. The subjects are lost, invisible, not able to decide.

At most they can only comply.Living for others ( a technology) for there is

no individual will left.

I am leaving for later the differences between fantasy and imagination, the

first centered on a subject the other not, when the time comes.

Meanwhile, thanks to you all for the great company we share.

OM and Shanti

Nitin Bhai

Antonio de Nicolas

From: "Dr. K.Loganathan" <subas@pc.jaring.my>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <meykandar@yahoogroups.com>; <kalaivani@yahoogroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-3

Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 9:26 AM

Dear Prof

Thank-you. I am glad you see that the new neurosciences make perfect matches with the Hermeneutic Sciences. I am reading now carefully the Third Chapter where you are discussing the real meanings of Habits of Mind. I shall write the next in this series focusing on that. Let me mention that there is something very important in all these and interestingly enough something I have felt the world needs for quite some time. I as one who been an academic man for 25 saw the slow decline of universities into training centers for business skills and with no professor standing up for REAL Education. I also encountered great opposition to my Agamic Psychology, a filed of Hermeneutic Science, despite the fact that they were very popular with the students as the course really led to UNDERSTAND themselves. The opposition arose mainly because it was quite original - not following the standard psychologies from the West and made officially acceptable. This reluctance and refusal to face something different had led me think deeply about it all and I am beginning to understand the origins such attitudes through reading Habits of Mind. The West exists in the EAST in the form of University Education that is modeled on the West and which has mechanized thinking as well.

Let me say that this great project must be pursued and pushed to the fore for I think this is what the world needs. Even if I do not fully understood you ( my Habits of Mind are very Tamilian!) feel free to counter my suggestions so that very exciting developments in thinking follows.

Loga

Dialogues on Habits of Mind-4

Dear Prof and Friends

Now I propose to raise some questions in relation to the main theme of this book - a change in Habits of Mind in order to recapture the ontological explorations and which is the essence of the Humanities and again which would diffuse the false dichotomies and alienations the Theoretic Thinking fosters. What OUGHT to be the essence of genuine education is the destruction of such alienations and dichotomies and which is something BEYOND Theoretic Thinking- thinking in terms of certain invented concepts and categories and fixating the understanding of things and people to such a way of relating self to them. There is a UNITY in the arts and sciences, among people of different nationalities and cultures, of different castes and cults. The Theoretic Thinking that Western science fosters perpetuates a blindness with the respect to the SAMENESS across all these just as the VarNasrama Dharma Thinking perpetuates or seeks to perpetuate a BLINDNESS towards the sameness of all people. The social sciences that follow the Habits of Mind of the positive sciences have driven away or seeks to drive away the ONTOLOGICAL turn the classics enjoyed and it is this tendency of the social sciences that has to be combated.

But how? Our Nitin Bhai proposes a CHANGE in the Habits of Mind and which is the main theme of this book. But this suggestion needs further clarifications and so with this in mind let us look at what he says below:

Students are creatures of habit, with education primarily an exercise to bring out (educere, educate) these habits. From an educational point of view, the history of education is the history of the formation and implementation of these habits of mind. But habits of mind are not only the forming of ideas; they include a whole range of operations that act through the human body to the point of total transparency to the subjects using them. The philosophy of education is, or ought to be, primarily concerned with the formation of these habits in the students before it proceeds to any other projects. A habit of mind is the technological lifeline of the human body. Through these technologies the human body stretches to reach the past and the future while sensitizing itself individually. What we call the objective world is shaped by these subjective structures of human knowing, and knowledge is impossible without them. They are also the sensual life of the body, and since the body abhors a vacuum they must be kept in exercise at all times. Habits can only be changed by other habits, and the history of education is the best reminder of such a struggle for certain habits to dominate over others. The more radical and transparent the habit, the more radical and difficult the change, and the deeper the concentration and dedication needed for the implementation and development of the new habit. Habits of thought are the most difficult to change. Other thoughts, true or false, sublime or stupid, only reinforce the already existing habit of thought. Nor will psychologizing or sermonizing about thought help. Education alone will do if it understands its mission as the concerted effort and ability to bring out all those habits of mind that make up the whole human ground of the culture and of the individual mind and soul.

Prof Antonio De T. Nicholas , Habits of Mind pp 32-33

Education installs certain habits of mind and which are technologies of the Human Body and which are also the sensual lives of the body. Such habits are not simply thoughts but something deeper and hence quite recalcitrant to change but which have to be changed nevertheless and through the proper education.

But the key point here with which I shall be concerned is the claim that habits can be changed only by other habits and the proposed new kind of education should have as its mission “the concerted effort and ability to bring out all those habits of mind that make up the whole human ground of the culture and of the individual mind and soul”

I hope in recapitulating thus I am not committing any errors in understanding.

A change in Habits of Mind is called for knowing very well that it is rather difficult. And though the DIRECTION is towards reinstating ONTOLOGICAL excursions and hence bringing back that kind of Habits of Mind that would foster it. But what kind of Education and can studies of Plato Pre-Plato do the trick?

I believe that what is ABSENT in the present Habits of Mind fostered by scientism with it’s Theoretic Thinking are the Habits of Mind that can be called self-deconstructive and which can emerge only within a philosophic culture where philosophies are understood as to what they are and then deconstructed so that falsities are destroyed and truths are made to hold the stage. This kind deconstruction is NOT that of Derrida which is simply DISPERSAL of thoughts so that no thoughts are made to sustain themselves but made to flow and flow. The Derridian-type of deconstruction lets there be only FLOW (if I have understood correctly) and which if allowed to develop further may end up with a metaphysics of momentary particulars such as that of Dignata Dharmakiirtti and so forth, the Buddhist Logicians who flourished in Kancipuram and whose metaphysics was challenged by Appar Sambantar and so forth. Everything is a flow of momentary particulars, a flux of photon-like phantoms with NOTHING sustaining itself as a substance (such as the anma, BEING and so forth)

Certainly our Nitin Bhai is NOT proposing this kind disruptive deconstruction but rather a change in the Habits that would encourage ontological excursions of the mind and in that also SEE the Depths and in seeing thus also SEE the UNITY that is there.

So I believe again IMLICIT in the program proposed by Antonio is another dimension of Hermeneutic Science : the truth-deconstructions as opposed to the disruptive deconstruction of Derrida (and modern Hermeneutics of the West). The Saiva deconstruction as enshrined in Civanjana Botam of Meykandar and more clearly in the massive Sivanjana Siddhyar, we do not have the clever and skillful mental exercises of dispersing and dissolving anything that is substantial so that there is only FLOW and nothing else. Every deconstruction CLARIFIES thinking, CHANGES the Habits of Mind so that it moves in a terrain or ecology where there is LESS FALSITY and more truth. Then such a desconstruction is reapplied on this NEW and with removing the falsities and prejudices there, move ahead into another HIGHER terrain where there is Less Falsity than earlier and so forth. In this movement of Habits of Mind, which is also an ascendance, there is a LIMIT, the terrain where NOTHING false exists and whatever enjoyed are only truth-experiences and something absolutely there, as something solid that cannot dispersed with disruptive deconstruction.

The Tamil Saivites call this the Supakkam- the terrain of only clear light in comparison with which all else is Parapakkam, the alien grounds.

The understanding can be erroneous because of the PREJUDICES, (the Vinai of Tolkaappiyar) and philosophic desconstruction is the METHOD of freeing the mind form such prejudices so that the understanding shines forth as that which illuminates all as to what they are in themselves, i.e. the Vinaiyin niiGki viLaGkum aRivu of Tol (c.300 BC)

We should also note here that such a habit of Philosophical deconstruction when becomes the habits of self-deconstruction also leads to ACCESSING deeper and deeper layers of the brain and the nervous system so that Ways of Being and Habits of Mind that were not there come to be enjoyed. We can see such developments amply in the History of Dravidian Philosophy, which became more and more body-centered. Tirumular that I am studying now still remains the most outstanding in all such developments.

Dear Prof

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <abhinavagupta@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-4

Date: Friday, January 16, 2004 6:08 AM

Dear Dr, Loga and friends:

I just came from class and it is curious that my American students asked me

the same question Dr. Loga has just asked: Can we change our habits of mind?

Can we change so much so that we can speak of conversion? Is conversion

neurobiologically possible?

It is difficult to change our habits, more so if we have only one habit of

mind, let's say thinking. No amount of education will change that mind...It will

ad, perhaps, more facts, more arguments, but if it is thinking all we know

how to do then thinking will be reinforced, but not changed by more thinking.

Changing one's mind means simply changing from one intelligence center to

another, either because of education, or crisis or just going to sleep, which means

that we move at will ( Oh who has a will these days?) from one brain to

another, from the reptilian, to the limbic, or the right neo-cortex, or the

left-neocortex, interpreter module, executive brains (the frontal lobes), the heart

etc. and keep doing it when needed, as the dharma facing us dictates. We must

we aware of this change in possibilities, that is this is the only recourse we

have as humans to overcome crisis, or repetation or simply lack of sensation.

This ability of changing them is essential when a habit in one brain cancels

the others and we need to move the center of focusing from one brain and its

technologies to another and its technologies. It is primarily important to use

education --humanities-- to exercise imagination and memory. Only then the

habits of the left neocortex will be infused with more experience and knowledge

that this brain will try to interpret and translate the others for others. You

can see the growth in students when the right neocortex is activated , the way

they speak, stand, participate in the conversation. The left brain will let us

know how well the students are educated and if they are educated. But this

will be in proportion to how much the right brains are exercised,

simultenously with the sophistication educated into the left brain to interpret experience

correctly.

I am enclosing a chart with the description of the "pilot brains" in case it

helps.

OM and SHANTI

Nitin Bhai

Antonio de Nicolas

The Biocultural Paradigm

(APPENDIX ONE)

The Biocultural Paradigm
(APPENDIX ONE)

Bioculture	Nature Imperative	Nuture Imperative	Cultural Imperative	Primary Sense	Form of Knowledge
MAIA	reptilian, amygdala/septal regions of limbic	prenatal conditioning, mother/ child bonding, (autonomic nervous system threshold)	athletics dance ritual asceticism	kinesthesia	memory of "body states" control of autonomic function
MYTHOS	limbic system (hippocampus), prefrontal cortex	name-thing exploration in "nest" environment (pleasure conditioning circuitry)	live story telling, dance, unstructured play , music appreciation	auditory, visual (geometric)	working memory, discrimination of rhythm, pitch,volume, and melody perception, visuo/spacial acuity
R. BRAIN MIMETIC	right hemisphere, visual cortex	name-thing exploration outside nest environment (fear conditioning circuitry)	visual artsdramapuppetry, role playing games,organized athletic games	visual ( imagistic)	self development and discrimination, scanning, screening,depth and distance acuity, color discrimination, and 3D spacial perception
L. BRAIN* MIMETIC	left hemisphere of neocortex	conformity to societal proscriptions ( ie. laws, organized religions)	reading arithmetic grammar logic	visual (conceptual)	comprehension of "objectivity" "universals", values based ideals, ethics, conceptual differentiation, theory making
LOGOS*	left hemisphere "interpreter module", amygdala	reliance on expert authority, knowledge through external data collection, rules, infallible dogma	technological proficiency (ie. use of instrumentation) rhetoric,astronomy	digital (kinesthesia+ visual/ conceptual)	BELIEFS opinion formation, ideology, fundamentalism, agnosticism
MYTHOS*	prefrontal cortex, heart	communal living, conflict resolution, stress management, homeostasis	dialectics, spiritual exercises, communal rites of passage , music, geometry	empathy (working memory+ group homeostasis)	heart intelligence, intuition

* secondary biocultures (adult only)

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Prof and Friends

Thank-you and thank you also for the chart from Dr. Maria Colavito and which all sound quite close to the ideas in Tantrism where I believe they have also gone considerably further in some areas. The neurosciences of Siddhas can very well incorporate the modern mappings of the brain centers without damaging their essential insights. For example Tirumular speaks of Tenpotu as that region of the brain where Siva executes His DANCE with Uma and which Tirumular understands in terms of dance of mantras and all different differentiation of the LOGOS that Maria is also mentioning but is identified by Tirumular as the AUM, shared by all Tantrics.

Certainly the main problem is making sense of what can be called ‘self-conversion” and which can be seen as something that correlates with the different brain centers and ‘pilot-brains” . While it is true that new Habits of Mind will come to prevail as the different parts of the brain are activated, the question remains :How to do this? And on what scientific basis? The Indian Tantrics have recommended several sadhanas of which the closest to the neurobiological view will be the Vaciyoga, the Yoga of Breath Control where the breathing through the left and right nostrils and so forth are practiced by way of ACTIVATING the right and left hemispheres so that mental functions hitherto unavailable become available.

However even this is NOT without problems. If this were true then man can attain great heights in understanding just with Breath Yoga or some kind of Yoga and without any reference to ETHICS. This contradicts the fact that attaining and enjoying higher reaches in personality is also a kind of ethical development. The higher person is also a morally higher person , someone who can serve as a model for the less developed in matters that are moral.

There is also another issue - the more developed a person is more LOVING he is also and which is instrumental in diffusing the tendency to ALIENATE and pigeonhole them into classes -nationalities, ethnic groups, varNas, jatis, social classes such as bourgeois, proletariat and so forth. This is one of the main concerns of Antonio that should not be left sight. The LOVE that comes to prevail diffuses such ways of Theoretic Thinking and installs another where this alienating tendency would be eliminated.

Yes in a way it can be attributed to ‘pilot brains” . But isn’t this just another way of putting the notions such as ‘deities’ ‘sakties’ ‘mantra-complexes’ and so forth?

May be and I propose to take up such issues later.

Loga

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <abhinavagupta@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-4

Date: Saturday, January 17, 2004 3:26 AM

Dear Dr. Loga and friend,

As usual Dr. Loga is on target and it proves to me that once you have it

inside it is easy to remember it through reading and then use the readings for

footnotes and clarification. Knowledge is either inside or almost impossible to

find. And so to the "pilot brains". Yes, this is the tantric neural map and you

will see as we proceed how close the two maps are, the neurobiological and

the tantric.

I know there are different techniques to stimulate the different Intelligence

centers, but it is essential that the one guiding the apprentice makes sure

first that those intelligence centers are operable or in place. It could do

harm to the initiate otherwise. So the primary exercise of Habits of Mind is to

make sure that the brains in place in each student are exercise through

decision making in the actual classroom, and not reduce his/her participation to the

enlargement of the left brain by absorbing only left brain conceptual

exercises.

There is a whole chapter on this in Habits of Mind and we will get to the

rest of this point at the end. I love to see the way Dr. Loga already anticipates

what is coming. A sure sign that it is there.

OM and SHANTI

Antonio de Nicolas

Nitin Bhai

In a message dated 1/15/2004 10:19:49 PM Eastern Standard Time,

ulagankmy@yahoo.com writes:

Dialogues on Habits of Mind-5

Dear Prof and Friends

As the dialogue proceeds and I see more and more what our Nitin Bhai is trying to get at, I see more and more similarities between the Tamil Tantric Thinking and what the Habits of Mind proposes. I am not qualified to extend this observation to the whole of Hinduism or even Indian Tantrism, as I am not familiar with the literature. However noting that Temple Worship is central to Hinduism as such, and since I believe that such a culture presupposes an UNDERSTANDING such as the one being proposed, in a way we can see that what Nitin Bhai is proposing is akin to what the Hinduism of common man lives with certainly with a naïve understanding. Anyone who soaks in the spirit and implicit philosophy of Temple Culture would naturally tend to agree with Nitin Bhai and which is the case with me.

Now in the course of thinking further the notion of Habits of Mind and the need to change them, I noted, from my knowledge of Tamil Saivism that what he proposes resembles the notion of deconstruction such as MeykaNdar and that the philosophic deconstruction of the Saivites which ensures the destruction of falsities and the installation of only truths also bounces back towards the inner world and because of which we have also self-deconstruction. This expression appears to me now very useful to understand further the proposals of Antonio and also the MEANING of the Indian mythological theme related to Muruka and GaNesha, both the ‘sons’ of Siva-Parvati.

This is related to the notion of INTENTIONALITIES - a change in the Habits of Mind requires a change in the founding intentionalities. So with this in mind, let us look at what Nitin Bhai says below, again from the Third Chapter.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Language, as much through its internal as its external tokens, is a technology. It not only creates the visible and the intelligible aspects of human life but also sensitizes individuals to those aspects of the visible and intelligible that it can reach. In this creation of the visible and intelligible, language and technology become coextensive. The visible and intelligible adapt to the language used, so that language determines the shape of the visible and intelligible. The mere act of teaching, the act of speaking to students, determines the shape of their education, regardless of what the teacher says. A language attached to the purely deductive habit of thought assumes a human power attributable only to a divine intellect. Those defending the inductive habit of thought assume a human impotence attributable only to our complete dependence on the givenness of objective events, and those using the transcendental or critical habit of thought assume that their categorizing mind and its data are the only measures of the real.

But neither the conceptual system, nor the habit of mind accompanying the use of such a system, assert anything about reality. A conceptual system and the accompanying habit of thought are only the preconditions for meaning or asserting anything about reality. Conceptual systems take on existential import when the system as a whole is used to refer to what is not in the mind or the senses, though having a system to refer to presupposes having a meaningful notion of knowledge or reality. Neither the contents of a conceptual system nor their counterparts—the organic states of the sensory system—are in their own right significant or intentional. They only signify or represent a state of affairs (itself experienced) because we take them to do so. The natural intentionality and disposition of the mind can be committed to a knowledge and a reality which are constructed so by us in response to an already-committed way of viewing the world. Thus, reinforcing the students to perform only certain mental acts to favor certain ontologies is not only fallacious but noneducational. In education, more than anywhere else, there is perplexity about how to decide what ontology to adopt, and the answer ‘is: e~tuca~non ‘r~th~ti ~ indoctrination.

Judgments, opinions, or values cannot be taught to the students if those judgments, opinions, or values are not shown as being part of the system of concepts to which the student or teacher belong. For they are not factors in our conscious experience but rather a presupposition of our conscious experience.

It is this lack of correspondence between our teaching and the background through which our teaching is done that is mainly responsible for the present crisis in education. The answer is that we must focus on the background from which our teaching is done so that education, rather than indoctrination, is made possible.

Prof Antonio De T. Nicholas ; “habitd of Mind” pp 34-35

This view of Antonio about language is quite similar to that of Gadamer of ‘Truth and Method” though he would speak of “prejudices’ in the positive sense - languages impose upon the mind of the speakers by withdrawing itself into background but leaving behind the concepts images and so forth. Understanding is LINGUISTICAL and man cannot escape from being so. There can be only effective history constituted by fusion of horizons. But Antonio seems to differ with Gadamer and as he says above, this language mediated knowledge cannot be right on their own and truly related to the ‘natural intentionality”. So perpetuating a certain linguistic habit is not only fallacious but also non-educational and which carries the implication that such Linguistic Habits of Mind must be destroyed and replaced with others in the interest of healthy education. This view would go against that of Gadamer who seems to assert the HISTORICITY of understanding and that it is condemned to be so inescapably.

A Tantrics would certainly welcome Antonio and perhaps quote the often repeated words of the Siddhas ‘vaartaiyaal onRumillai” - there is nothing really useful with words. The words must be TRANCENDED; one must go beyond the realms of discursive language in order to ACCESS deeper metaphysical realms that are more authentic.

Let me here mention that this view of the Siddhas comes with what can be called a Hierarchal view of Language, that languages have an organization in terms of Surface Structure (SS) and Deep Structure (DS) and that the mind must FREE itself from the SS and access the DS and so forth.

All languages have the Hierarchical Organization of the sort: Vaikari Paisyanti Mattimai, Cuukkumai and Ati Cuukkumai and in which the later form is the DS of the former e.g. the conceptual and auditory Vaikari has as its DS the pre-speech Paisyanti and so forth and with the Ongkaram, the Ati Cuukkumai, the Tantric’s Logos constituting the Absolute Deep Structure (ADS)

Thus the mind can MOVE from the Vaikari to Paisyanti and in that also ACCESS deeper metaphysical realms, relating and reorganizing understanding by bringing together BOTH the conceptual understanding of Vaikari and pre conceptual understanding of Paisyanti and so forth. In this movement the LIMIT comes when everything is integratively understood in terms of AUM and which breaks into understanding everything in terms of the mantras Si-Vaa-Ya-Na-Ma and which resolves into the tri-syllable A-U-M.

Accompanying such shifts in languages is not only UNDERSTANDING but also INTENTIONALITY, what the person SEEKS out. Just to give an example - a person who has accessed the Cuukkumai form of language would seek to understand EVERYTHING in terms of the working of the AKSARAS, fifty-one or so and would contemplate everything- words, concepts images etc - as manifestations of akkara-cakras, complexes formed out of these aksaras. With this we have the science of MANTRAYANA presenting itself as MORE AUTHENTIC than the language of concepts and so forth, the Vaikari form of language.

In this translation of INTENTIONALITIES we finally come to what can be called the Fundamental Intentionality, that of seeking Moksa. Antonio knows quite well this notion and so I suspect that the ’natural intentionality’ he talks about is this Fundamental Intentionality and which is a UNIVERSAL, something already there in the soul of all.

Let me also point out this may be the essence of Dr Maria Colavito in suggesting the biocultural centers of Maia, Mythos Right Brain Memetics Left Brain Memetics Logos and so forth. The Saivites would also see all these in terms of fundamental Siva Tatvas Natam and Bindu and which has a resemblance with Yin and Yang of Taoism, the Anima and Animus of Jung and so forth.

Let me also point out that such developments of man where he is finally taken to be mumuksu, the one who desires Moksa are the functions of Muruka and GaNesha, the two sons of Siva-Parvati. Muruka as the embodiment of the Fire that emerges from the forehead of Siva is the deity of philosophical desconstruction, the deity that illuminates the WORLD as a whole and helps to appropriate it as a beautiful PEACOCK, an aesthetic wonder that pleases the soul immensely. In contrast to this GaNesha is the deity of self-deconstruction and which leads a person to become a Mumuksu, the Moksa Smith. Both have to work together for unless the INTENTIONALIIES are deepened NEW visions of the world are impossible and unless the vision is held as dear to oneself, the intentionality underlying it cannot be exposed and thus deconstructed.

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-5

Date: Sunday, January 18, 2004 11:39 PM

Dear Dr. Loga and friends:

The email below by Dr. Loga confirms once more that the recognition of

certain embodied structures in human cognition is possible only when those in

dialogue already have them embodied and not just trying to discover them through

reading, history or study. Dr. Loga agrees not with my statements but with the

recognition of a deeper reality that we share through inner geometries common to

humans and that these structured geometries were silenced or bypassed when

writing and the technology of the left neo cortex took over overriding those

structures and intentionalities. It is to me overwhelming to suddenly share in

the recognition that my effort has not been a lonely one and that others who

were already there out of Plato's cave and admiring the sun have returned to the

cave and can join those in front of the fire and be recognized by those who

have those structures of knowing already embodied in themselves. Talk is cheap,

embodiment is the difficult task of education.

History started when writing was imposed on all, and because of the

technologies accompanying it it also overrode those other bio-cultures previous to it:

the oral world, memory, imagining, decision making, educating the will, the

plurality of bodies according to the plurality of bio-cultural embodiments. A

society had to be built on creation and sacrifice for there was always an

eternal geometry sustaining all forms: Asat, Sat, Yajna and Rta were the structures

of those languages, as in the original Rg Veda. When history cancelled those

worlds it also cancelled human movement, for the self had to be fixed in order

to study the variations of history.The West has no legitimate studies for

studying or liberating the self. The bio-cultural paradigm is the revelation made

possible because of the new discoveries in neurobiology, and these made

possible because of the realities in the neurobiology already present in humans. We

humans do not divide by external tokens of race, cast, geography or

universals, but by the individual realities of bio-cultural invariances.

And this distinction is what distinguishes the Avatara from the Savior. The

totality of human development against the human impotence that needs an outside

divine intervention to gain immortality. Except that at the base of the

historical arrival of the Savior for the sake of one dominant brain, they

proclaimed a historical incarnation of God as human that is neorubiological heresy. If

Eve, a mere woman infected the whole human species with original sin (that is

affected the whole neurobiology of humans) how is it possible that God would

become human and not affect the whole species in the same way, i.e., making it

divine, in fact destroying it?.

It is time to start regathering the human fragments lost in the imperialism

and stupidity of the left neocortex and renew a dialogue that so far has never

taken place between East and West where all the bio-cultures are included and

mediated by an open heart and open frontal lobes.

Infinite gratitude to all.

OM and SHATI

Antonio de Nicolas

Nitin Bhai

This is related to the notion of INTENTIONALITIES - a change in the Habits of

Mind requires a change in the founding intentionalities. So with this mind,

let us look at what Nitin Bhai says below, again from the Third Chapter.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

Language, as much through its internal as its external tokens, is a

technology. It not only creates the visible and the intelligible aspects of human life

but also sensitizes individuals to those aspects of the visible and

intelligible that it can reach. In this creation of the visible and intelligible,

language and technology become coextensive. The visible and intelligible adapt to

the language used, so that language determines the shape of the visible and

intelligible. The mere act of teaching, the act of speaking to students,

determines the shape of their education, regardless of what the teacher says. A

language attached to the purely deductive habit of thought assumes a human power

attributable only to a divine intellect. Those defending the inductive habit of

thought assume a human impotence attributable only to our complete dependence on

the givenness of objective events, and those using the transcenÂdental or

critical habit of thought assume that their categorizÂing mind and its data are

the only measures of the real.

But neither the conceptual system, nor the habit of mind accompanying the use

of such a system, assert anything about reality. A conceptual system and the

accompanying habit of thought are only the preconditions for meaning or

asserting anything about reality. Conceptual systems take on existential import when

the system as a whole is used to refer to what is not in the mind or the

senses, though having a system to refer to presupposes having a meaningful notion

of knowledge or reality. Neither the contents of a conceptual system nor their

counterpartsâ€”the organic states of the sensory systemâ€”are in their own right

significant or intentional. They only signify or represent a state of affairs

(itself experienced) because we take them to do so. The natural

intentionality and disposition of the mind can be committed to a knowledge and a reality

which are constructed so by us in response to an already-committed way of

viewing the world. Thus, reinforcing the students to perÂform only certain mental

acts to favor certain ontologies is not only fallacious but noneducational. In

education, more than anywhere else, there is perplexity about how to decide

what ontology to adopt, and the answer â€˜is: e~ducation rather than indoctrination.

Judgments, opinions, or values cannot be taught to the students if those

judgments, opinions, or values are not shown as being part of the system of

concepts to which the student or teacher belong. For they are not factors in our

conscious expeÂrience but rather a presupposition of our conscious experience.

It is this lack of correspondence between our teaching and the background

through which our teaching is done that is mainly responsible for the present

crisis in education. The answer is that we must focus on the background from

which our teaching is done so that education, rather than indoctrinaÂtion, is made

possible.

Prof Antonio De T. Nicholas ; â€œhabitd of Mindâ€ pp 34-35

From: "K. Loganathan" <ulagankmy@yahoo.com>

To: <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <agamicpsychology@egroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>; <abhinavagupta@egroups.com>

Subject: Re: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-5

Date: Monday, January 19, 2004 8:54 AM

Dear Prof

Yes you are right. It has been possible to AGREE with you only because you are saying what is already within me and which is also within all. This is the substance of the essence of the Dravidian Culture which is characterized by an OPENNESS, an OPENNESS quite different but not entirely unrelated to the OPENNESS of the Protestant Christians who founded the American culture. What you are proposing is to OPEN UP further this already existent OPENNESS of the America culture so that the UNIVERSAL comes to prevail and the new education incorporates this as part of the Academic Culture.

How can I , or for that matter anyone, disagree with this?

The language of neurobiology that you are fond of using provides the first access towards an objective metaphysics that is ALREADY within all of us. I noted this in my decades long study of SivaNjana Botham and was immensely perplexed but pleased to note MeykaNdar saying that the Njanam is "anRe iruppatu", the Absolute Understanding that lights up all is already there in the bosom of all. So when we see similarities in metaphysical thinking we should NOT always jump to the conclusion that it is all because of acculturation, cultural diffusion and so forth. It is here I find Jung's notion of Collective Unconscious quite useful. We have similarities only because we have a COMMON metaphysical ground and living in it cannot help speaking and feeling the way we do and which shows a sameness.

I am glad to note that you see this dialog as a dialog between the East and West. You are an Easternized Westerner and I a Westernized Easterner. Though I more disagree than agree I find the Western thinkers from Descartes to Derrida quite fascinating as thinkers with whom I partly agree and disagree in essence. In my next posting that will be on Plato you can see more of this.

I notice that this dialog also helps me to understand why I cannot agree wholly with such great thinkers.

I believe that this dialog will bring out that what is common to all is a JOURNEY, that we are all already MOVING in the direction of Moksa and it is the Ego of man that tries to block off and FREEZE this movement and that once we free man to MOVE and DANCE then he will discover the COMMONALITY that he shares with all.

Loga

Dialogues on Habits of Mind-6

Dear Prof and Friends

I begin now the sixth dialogue and which is concerned with the Philosophy of Plato, and which is advocated by Nitin Bhai as a way of recovering authentic University Education. What struck me again is the similarity with Tamil Tantrism, at least as it has developed since the days of Tolkaappiyam. The commonality appears to be Ecological Thinking which started in pre Tol days as geographical ecology but which became INNER ECOLOGIES on the discovery of SEXUALITY as the COMMON element in all human beings but varying in many ways and all because different inner ecologies become dominant at different times contributing to the differences in behavior.

There is Ecological Thinking in Plato as well and which can easily be seen in neurobiological terms as it has been seen by Antonio and a host of Tamil Siddhas including Tirumular, the greatest and the most scientific of them all. Well let us look at the following view of Nitin Bhai on Plato to contemplate further on such issues.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

As the narrative of the Republic unfolds we find that Socrates agrees to the initial “robbery” of his own person by the young men and that he uses this opportunity to form a “community” in search of those technologies (training) that would make justice visible to all. While a lot of talk goes on for five long chapters in a search for what appears to be a definition of justice, we are made aware of a number of spaces-—the house of Polemarchus, the Cave, the region of Er, the desolate region of the dead. Within each of these spaces, different intellectual acts, using different communications media, intelligible and visible, are performed. All acts performed during the whole narrative of the Republic concide with those acts which Plato! Socrates divides with his famous “divided line.” And each space demands a different language, a different inner technology for its use and participation in the community. Each use demands a different embodiment from the practitioner. The totality of these embodiments is the criteria for an educated young person to be able to recognize in society what he or she inwardly recognizes: the need for justice inside to bring justice outside. Thus the Republic includes the quality of a number of acts to be performed, and also the partial narratives of each space of discourse. No universal narrative from one space takes over the narratives from any other—there is no universal philosophy.

In appearance the prose of the Republic leads the listener along a smooth path. There are changes of direction and delays in the journey, but all in all there appears to be a progressive development, an intimation that the listener is nearing home. But suddenly Socrates takes over and introduces sudden shocks and abrupt discontinuities, setting the familiar expectations on their head. At the end of Book Six of the Republic he introduces the divided line, followed by the Cave, and the narrative of Er.

The divided line ought to be a simple exercise in reading (509b—5 lie). How difficult could it be to divide a line into two unequal segments? One, according to Socrates, must be larger than the other; one must be labeled intelligible, the other visible. Which one is which? (Depending on which habit of mind educators use, they will name the two parts differently, but this is not in the Republic.) Are images abstracted from empirical objects, opinions, objects of art and science, visible or intelligible? Is the larger portion (which Plato in the Sophist 236b and 264c divides into icons, or good images, and simulacra, semblances without likeness, or bad images) visible or intelligible? Educators feel that they must make a decision as to which part is which. If they decide a priori which is which, the result will be disastrous to their teaching, closer to indoctrination than actual teaching. If they do not decide on which part is which, then they will have to settle for a program of exercises in the hope that the students will be able to discern by themselves the visible and the intelligible. Plato’s answer to this problem is to give no answer at all, for in no place in the Republic does he settle the question of which part is which. All Plato does is to describe the acts that through performance prepare the stu~ dent always to choose the best from among the possible. Besides, a commitment to either side of the divided line or to any one of the narratives from either side would ruin the educational project.

Plato’s whole educational enterprise is concerned with developing quality in the performance of our inner acts. It is in relation to this quality of performance that he is able to sort out different worlds and the claims of the members of his community. These inner acts performed through education and training rely on their similarity to an original, invisible form. Yes, Plato demands that we accept models. It is in view of these models of acts internally performed (if they are good acts) that will make the invisible visible. The only criterion for judging their validity is how good are the effects produced, for the better the effect the closer the acts performed internally were to the invisible model. The life of the Cave is the image of a life where the intelligibles predominate as simulacra (bad images) because they negate the need and existence of original, invisible models. Er appears in the Republic as the journey of memory to keep alive those dead by recreating the acts that made them immortal. Er is the reminder that education is an exercise in bringing to life what has already happened, the activating of memory and imagining in such a way that we, the living, keep the whole story of the culture or the species alive. Memory, in this exercise, turns to images which turn the past into new life.

Antonio T. De Nicholas Habits of Mind pp. 40-41

>>>>>>>>>>>

The dialogue proceeds on different Ecological regions- spaces: the House Polemarchus, the CAVE, the region of Er and so forth with each demanding its own styles of communication inner praxis and so forth. There is no universal philosophy but only MOVEMENT or performance or inner praxis marking this journey across these realms. The basic question that sustains this journey is seeking out the meaning of Virtue and enjoying the GOOD. As one moves along there are qualitative developments of the praxis itself especially the inner and which OUGHT to be the goal of Authentic Education. Now into this journey is introduced the question of the DIVIDED LINE where the larger is the INTELIGIBLE and the other VISIBLE. The students are required to contemplate and decide for themselves and any attempt to compel the students to choose one over and above the other would ruin the real goal of authentic education

Any one familiar with the philosophic tradition of the Tamils would recognize a fundamental similarity as well as difference here.

First of all, the ecologies here resemble the TiNai of Tolkaappiyar where he notes that all human behavior - both verbal and nonverbal -can be understood as arising from SEVEN Inner Ecologies of KuRinjci Mullai Marutam, Neytal, Paalai, KaikkiLai and PeruntiNai. Here too we find a LINE being drawn - the first FIVE are acceptable, normal and so forth and the last two are Unacceptable and which parallels the Er (< Su. eri, Ta. eri, eer? light) and the Cave. However we notice a DIFFERENCE, perhaps historically a crucial one: while Tol uses the sexual impulses for not only identifying these inner ecologies but also for DIVIDING them into the normal and abnormal, it is NOT so with Plato or Socrates., The first five are different intensities of SEXUAL love, strongest in KuRinjci, the realms of hills with luxuriant vegetation and almost dried up in Paalai, the desolate realms of the desert and which make one DEPART from the familial surroundings and seek out victory in all kinds of combats including the philosophical. These are ACCEPTABLE for sex that dominates here is on MUTUAL agreement and LOVE based. In contrast to this we have KaikkiLai, the unreciprocated one-sided love and PeruntiNai, the abnormal love like seeking to seduce a child etc. Now another interesting thing about this kind of Ecological Thinking is that the Er realms, the first FIVE realms are ecologies pervaded by DEITIES - Murukan Tirumaal Indra VaruNa and KoRRavai and which are also understood as local transformations of the ONE, the Paal, the Brilliant. As noted in Cilappatikaaram, just as the different ecologies are transmutations of the initial and primordial DESERT, the Fire-Land, so are the different deities - all are different transmutations of the same Paal, the Brilliant One, the Fire, the BEING.

I have already pointed out that it is this Ecological Thinking that became transformed into the Six Padai Viidu, the battlefronts of Muruka and with led to the ICON of Kanta VeeL, the integrated polycephalic Deity with SIX faces and which was also seen later as the phenomenal manifestation of the Noumenal Cataaciva with His six faces. In all these developments, the Ecological Thinking slowly but definitely becomes metaphysical expressing itself on the way in various kinds ICONS mythical tales and so forth.

However the most important in all these and which relates to neurobiology is the notion of Atara Cakras and which finds the most ancient expression on Tirumular (6th-7^th cent AD) and subsequent to which it became the bed rock of Siddha Science. Though these cakras are located in the body from the groin or the Muulam onwards, we can see that indirectly they refer to the different BRAIN CENTRES, the region where the spinal cord meets the brain proper as the Muulam and so forth. Into this is woven also the TRANSMUTATION of sexuality - as one ascends from the Muulam to the Aknja, there is a qualitative difference introduced in the nature of SEXUALITY and as Tirumular explains the matter, the normal progeny producing sexuality is transmuted into TRANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITY of enjoying the Golden Body and without seeking immortality though species regeneration, the animal instinct. (Please see the series : The Metaphysical Gynecology of Tirumular for details)

I can go on but sufficient has been said to raise an important point in relation to the Philosophy of Plato: While Tamil Tantrism is also MOVEMENT based and promoted a culture of movement( and DANCE) of the mind into different inner ecologies and UNDERSTANDING all to become ILLUMINATED, but they did not choose VIRTUE or the notion of the GOOD but rather the transmutation of the instinctual sexuality thereby giving the whole culture a psychoanalytic orientation. Plato ( and Greeks as a whole) seems to have overlooked this and by focusing on virtue, the good and so forth gave perhaps an AESTHETIC turn and that too PHYSICAL AESTHETIC through Gymansiusm and NOT Spiritual Aesthetics as the Indian. A scientific understanding of sexuality, the existence founding impulse of man was probably given only a peripheral attention leading to it’s NEGLECT in the whole of Western Culture. When this problem surfaced to the fore with Freudian Psychoanalysis, it was unfortunately only as something that causes mental abnormalities and hence a devilish force etc. The view that SEXUALITY is DIVINE as already hinted at by Tolkaappiyar himself has never taken root in Western Culture.

Could it be that it is so for the reasons I have outlined here? And if I am right, what implications it has for the program of Authentic Education that our Nitin Bhai is proposing?

And could it be that the West became predominantly instrumental and technological as Antonio observes correctly, mainly because it failed to cultivate the science of sexuality even during the times of Plato (who seems to have favored homosexuality).

And again can this be because, as Antonio observes, the NEGLECT of the right hemispherical functioning of the brain where, according to the Siddhas is located the Bindu, the Tatva of sex and love?

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <akandabaratam@yahoogroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>; <abhinavagupta@egroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>

Subject: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-6

Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 9:07 PM

Dear Loga and friends:

It is in the program of education ( Plato, Indic texts) to proceed one step

at a time and not jump to the conclusion and superimpose it on the journey. The

names of the GOOD and VIRTUE are just that names at this stage. Nowhere are

they defined or imposed instead of other names, like sexuality etc. The search

at this time is for a perfection in every internal act performed...This act

will in turn produce its effect as the good, not so good, virtuous or not so

virtuous, i.e., the perfect act produces the perfect effect. Theories about

sexuality, goodness and the rest are not part of this dialogue. If one wants to

know more about love and sex one would have to be in a different context like the

Symposium and listen to Diotima speak, meanwhile let us concentrate on the

perfection of inner acts...

OM and SHANTI

Antonio de Nicolas

Nitin Bhai

Dear Prof and Friends

Thank-you. It Looks as though we have reached a point where there may be a DIFFERENCE but with considerable sameness and about which I am happy. What is a dialogue such as ours if some differences do not emerge and we seek to find out the sources of difference, if it is true and resolve it? You say that: The search at this time is for a perfection in every internal act performed...This act will in turn produce its effect as the good, not so good, virtuous or not so virtuous, i.e., the perfect act produces the perfect effect.

Now when I pondered about this I am not sure whether I can make sense of the claim that the perfect act produces a perfect effect. How do we make sense of the notion of ‘perfect act’ and ‘perfect effect”? Are there such things?

Let us recall that we AGREE that the new education should bring about a change so that the artificial dichotomies between the arts and sciences as well the human beings are diffused so that the underlying UNITY is recognized and our actions accommodate this unity. Both of us are united on this and have no disagreement at all. We do not also have disagreements to the essentials of the Model of Plato that I see, from the descriptions you have given, presupposes Ecological Thinking and in which MOVEMENT, the JOURNEY is emphasized. The mind should be made to move instead of being fixated and only then will there be a healthy mind and authentic education should do this.

But does this philosophy of Plato involve the notions of prefect act and perfect effect? I doubt very much and if it does then, I believe, something impossible.

The difference between Tol. and Plato emerges NOT in the general orientation towards Ecological Thinking but rather at the level of the notions they choose to demarcate them. Tol. takes sexuality while Plato/Socrates does not as far as I can see. If he does elsewhere, I will be happy to know and change my views.

Let me elaborate a bit further to explain as to why it is important. Tol not only divides ALL kinds of behaviors as having as the originating grounds the tiNai or inner ecological regions but also all these seven into Akam, the domestic and PuRam, the public or political. And on top of that every PuRam type of behavior, like a king invading another country, is a SOCIAL expression of the sexual Akam, here the KuRinjci. Thus both the social and political praxis are seen ultimately as expressions of the sexual and hence the importance of sexuality also in Ecological Thinking. Whether domestic (akam) or public (puRam) all are equally sexuality related. Here we also see the presence of Hermeneutic Science for sexuality is identified as the DEEP Structure that agentively determines the shapes of Surface Structure- the observable and experiential domestic and public behavior. These are psychological realties and are NOT mental constructions, which are disallowed in Hermeneutic Sciences.

Within this how can we understand the notion of Perfect Act and which sounds so mathematical just as in the thinking of Descartes Husserl and so forth where they took the numbers and geometries as the models of the perfect?

There is a way however (and which you have hinted at in your other writings) and this non mathematical notion of Perfect Act is that of acts based on non-alienating Universal Love. One can see this as the Nishkama Karma of Gita or Arutceyal of the Saivites. But here too there is a problem: such acts as Nishkama Karma DO NOT have any expectations, the Perfect Effect for simply TRUE LOVE prompts spontaneous acts and also comes along with NO expectations whatsoever - it just expresses itself and finds fulfillment in that expression.

It is here that sexuality becomes relevant - the non-alienating LOVE, that which gives the eyes to see all as the SAME over and above the differences results by TRANSMUTING the animal sexuality into Divine Sexuality and then transcending even that towards absolutely Pure Love.

I believe that a program for new education, and with which I am in total agreement should involve activities that transmute the inherent animal sexuality into DIVINE and which is part of the function of dance music and so forth i.e. the humanities as a whole. While the positive sciences may unearth the physics and physiology of sex but it remains IMPOTENT in transmuting it into the higher shapes and which the human sciences, if taught properly would do.

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: <"To:akand"@egroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>; <abhinavagupta@egroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>

Subject: Re: [akandabaratam] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-6

Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 9:44 PM

Dear Dr. Loga and friends:

I find your DIFFERENCE most instructive since this kind of difference is the

ones that either guarantees a dialogue or starts a war.

If you remember correctly Plato starts the Republic with these enigmatic

words: "Yesterday I went down to Peiraeus..." I have been to both Athens and

Peiraeus, and Athens is physically up and Peiraeus is down... Also remember that

Trasymachus, the analytic philosopher, is excluded from the dialogue in the

Republic. And so here comes the explanation and you will see how much closer we

are than it looks. It is true that the reptilian brain is the first brain humans

develop and that this brain is the seat of sexuality, safety, fear,

territoriality, absence/presence, violence...The main reason is that at this beginning

stage this pilot brain is linked to the amydala and the memories of the mother

to which the child has no access. Immediately afterwards ( after the first

year) the child starts developing the limbic brain, affectivity, community,

company etc...and later on the visual neocortex as the three dimensional presence

of the vibrations of the previous two... Now, we have also discussed that

depending on the influence of the mother on the child, that is the nurture part

of child development, the child may become limbic dominant as "pilot brain",

his guide and his filter. And furthermore imagine that this is the commuinity

that Plato gathers together in the house of Polemarchus to start his Republic,

the inner and outer organization of the soul... Before they set on their

journey, this group of primarily

limbic brain dominant community, and before they can proceed they must "go

down" to Peiraeus, that is descend to the regions of the reptilian brain to

start their journey in search of wisdom. And so you are right, the reptilian,

sexual origins of humans are the first to be investigated and it is for this

reason the Greeks had their initiation mysteries...As you see the diologue takes

place after the festival of Bendix, a celebration of the Mysteries. And so for a

community, like the one Plato had or was about to form, the descend to

Peiraeus is equivalent to the descent to the ground base of sexuality and the

reptilian brain.

The second point is about the perfect act. Mathematics is not the rule in

Plato. He places the act performed within a community of choices (frontal lobes).

If one is equipped with the right act, the right effect will follow, but

within the contexts of those choices available and of those possible choices only,

choosing by habit the one that is best; that is, if one is equipped to do so.

Just as dharma would prescribe.

Thanks for the oportunity to clarify.

OM and SHANTI

Antonio de Nicolas

Nitin Bhai

Dear Prof

Thank-you. Yes there are more agreements than disagreements between us and this may be because Tantrism is part of what the neural networks feed into our understanding. So not just you and me but anyone who seeks understanding along these lines will have a striking similarity in the philosophies they advocate. And I am sure this is the essence of Clinical Philosophy you are proposing.

There are many areas where even traditional Tantrism can benefit from new studies on brain physiology coming from the West and as results of the use of sophisticated technologies. There is considerable amount of inexactitude among the Siddhas and such inexactitudes can be corrected by incorporating the new findings in brain physiology of modern science and without doing any damage to their essential philosophical insights.

For example in Lessons on Botham 4-13 which summarizes a huge amount of date on consciousness, MeykaNdar mentions the groin (Muulam) Navel (unti) heart, throat and the forehead as the centers of the different states of consciousness. I believe there is double talk here. In talking about body parts such as the above he is in fact talking about the different brain centers that regulate these body parts. The Muulam may be amydala that you mention and regressing into the groin area may in fact be the self traveling in the realm of neural network and coming to this amydala and becoming consciousness of how behavior is shaped by the inputs from this area of the brain.

Having said this I must also mention that they have analyzed the function of these brain centers in terms of the working of mantras and the Siva Tatvas Natam and Bindu and which parallels the Taoist Yin and Yang and the Jungian Anima and Animus. So to understand fully the way the brain works we have to also bring the Mantrayana and the Siva Tatvas.

I hope as we continue this dialogue there will be opportunities for us to discuss these matters and if relevant then incorporate them into the notion of New Education that you are proposing.

Thank-you again for kind words and understanding which encourages me considerably to continue this dialogue and bring it a happy conclusion.

Loga

From: "Raja Mylvaganam" <mylvahana@yahoo.com>

To: <Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [Abhinavagupta] [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-6

Date: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 6:24 PM

Dr. Loga:

You are at your best in this last post. It appears to this reader at least that you really excel when you apply the Tol. and make comparisons with Plato and other Western philosophers. Perhaps you are a better pragmatist (C.S. Peirce) than I allowed. In any case it is a style with which I am most comfortable. Thank you. I do have a question though regarding the understanding of sexuality in Tamil culture as derived from Tol.You write:

And on top of that every PuRam type of behavior, like a king invading another country, is a SOCIAL expression of the sexual Akam, here the KuRinjci. Thus both the social and political praxis are seen ultimately as expressions of the sexual and hence the importance of sexuality also in Ecological Thinking. Whether domestic (akam) or public (puRam) all are equally sexuality related. Here we also see the presence of Hermeneutic Science for sexuality is identified as the DEEP Structure that agentively determines the shapes of Surface Structure- the observable and experiential domestic and public behavior. These are psychological realties and are NOT mental constructions, which are disallowed in Hermeneutic Sciences.

Are you suggesting that sexuality is the underlying motivation for war-mongering in all instances? I say all because in indvidual cases this may well be true and difficult to prove one way or another. And it is possible to have a general rule of thumb about sexuality from which to make exceptions but once the exceptions outnumber the instances of the rule then we have to re-consider.

Raja

M. Thurairaja

Nordre Frihavnsgade 15A

2100 København

Denmark

Dear Raja

Thank-you very much for the kind words (that I don’t get that often!) Let me mention that I am NOT a pragmatist in the sense of the American Pragmatism for I just don’t go along with their Theory of Truth where they hold that anything that works (roughly) is truth. But I can understand why you call me a pragmatist - I practice Natural Metaphysics and as a Hermeneutic Scientist always go back to the WORLD and EXISTENCE to explore the DEEPER realms buried underneath them. In this I follow the best of the Dravidian tradition and a very ancient one. Even Suruppak (c. 3000) has said that if you study what happens around( nig-e kal-kal-in) then you will learn the great truths (me-kal-kal). I suspect that it is this Natural Metaphysics that is the secret of the survival of Dravidian with unbroken continuity from those ancient times.

With this remark let me come to point you have raised and which I really appreciate. In Tantrism sexuality is fundamental and that it is by transmuting this basic sexuality into higher forms that greatness in personality is achieved and who are called the Munivar, Siddha the Civanjani and so forth. Such a view of personal excellence frees people from VarNasrama Dharma Thinking which ties such higher reaches of personality to birth and which is pure nonsense, notions which only highly bigoted individuals can maintain and that too only in a community of unthinking fools.

Sexual desires, as Tirumular has observed, is part of the Uyir Muuccu, the very impulse to LIVE as such is founded by sexuality as the URpatti KaaNdam of Kanta PuraNam would disclose. Only when Siva looks lovingly at Parvati, there is sexuality in the world among the creatures and hence meaningful living for them.

Let us see how this theme is present in Tolkaappiyam and how it is also the basis for the aggressive behavior of man.

I shall take only two of the TiNais to bring out the point.

First of all we have the kuRinjci, the Interior landscape of strong sexual urges and ordained by Muruka and which along with Mullai Marutam and Neytal give rise to speech acts and behavior that are expressive of sexual desires like lamenting separation, expressing anger and frustration on meeting obstacles for meeting and enjoying sexual unions and so forth.

Now this Akam has its PuRam reflex the Vedci and which is war behavior in which the cattle of the enemies are stolen and brought home and which has 14 different phases to it.

Now contrast this with Paalai and which is the inner realm that promotes SEPARATION and DEPARTURE for various reasons -higher studies, trade warfare and so forth. This Akam has as its puRam, the Vaakait TiNai and which is understood as the general behavior where man tries EXCELL others and seeks to RISE above all. And this applies to ALL kinds of men - the kings, warriors, scholar’s yogis’ philosophers and so forth and hence a UNIVERSAL.

While KuRinjci is vegetative luxuriance, the Paalai is desert landscape of desiccation and burning where no vegetation thrives at all. And while the former establishes acquisition through invasion the wealth of the neighboring lands, this is NOT so with Paalai. This Paalai dissociates all ties of Love that makes possible DEAPARTURE from the FAMILY, the nexus of love relationships, the ties of Paacam. And in the sociopolitical reflex, it leads to pressure for SOCIAL ASCENDANCE though ACTS that establishes one as ABOVE all others.

The question is why this DIFFERENCE between KuRinjci-Vedci and Paalai-Vaakai?

You can see in the latter there is DESICCATION of sexuality and the nexus of familial relationships it establishes while in the former it is present very intensely, metaphorically implicated by the luxuriance of vegetation which will NOT be true unless species reproductive processes are strongly present and hence sexuality. While a man with this inner ecology also undertakes a warfare in which he STEALS in fact the cattle (at that time the real wealth) of the neighboring tribes, a man with Vaakai will seek ways and means to RISE above others by showing his excellence.

Tol. also notes these differences are to be attributed to the workings of the deities Muruka for the first and KoRRavai (or Sun God) for the second. However in between we can see the presence of a Depth Psychological structure - one of strong sexuality (STS) and that of its absence through desiccation but with a strong Ascendance Desire (ASD). Perhaps we can incorporate Antonio’s interesting notion of ‘pilot-brains’ here.

So to answer your question: There is greedy acquisitive warfare prompted by STS which also prompts possessive kind of sexuality where the woman (or man) one marries is also treated as a property, ones own POSSESION and hence made to serve only one self. The excessive love for the properties of others and willingness to wage wars for acquiring them are also functions of this STS.

Now warfare can also issue forth as part of Vaakai, the realms of ASD and which will vary according to the professional interest of the people. The philosophers, the aRivars, will enter into intellectual combats to emerge victorious over others. However it is also mentioned that real battle is with one’s own sexuality (kaamam niitta paaL) and along with it disengaging one self with all the paacas, the bondages that bind a person to the worldly.

So we can see TWO kinds of warfare: the first is prompted by strong sexual desires and which prompts also a warfare of wealth stealing and second, battling with this sexuality itself and trying to emerge victorious (and become the Mahavira?) and be a FREE and LIBERATED individual. Whether positively or negatively SEXUALITY is there in the depths as the foundation of both kinds of warfare.

You can see now how these ideas have developed further and further and became the substance of the metaphysical studies of Tirumular and a host of others.

I know I have NOT touched on all aspects of this interesting matter but I hope in the course of this Dialogue on Habits of Mind, I can bring them out later.

Loga

Dialogues on Habits of Mind-7

Dear Prof and Friends

With apologies I begin the seventh dialogue again with the Plato of our Nitin Bhai. Here I am really amazed how close Plato is to Dravidian Culture as founded by Tolkaappiyam and in which the Bakti streams of Saivism and VaishNavism are simply products of deeper journeys in the same direction. It appears to me it is Tol. that established firmly the basis of Hermeneutic Science that enabled the Tamil philosophers to combat the idealistic Buddhism and Vedanta and established the tradition of Siddhanta, that of hermeneutic science part of which is Ati VarNasra Dharma, going beyond sociology of discriminations based on birth.

Using these insights I have developed Agamic Psychology and in which I have worked a notion of LEARNING, which is neither behavioral nor cognitive, but Depth Psychological. It appears to me that this concept of LEARNING is also an integral part of the philosophy of Plato as seen by Antonio as much as Tamil Saivism

With this in mind let us look at the following words of Antonio, again from the Third Chapter, which appears to be the most crucial chapter in the whole book.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Plato’s journey of education acknowledges the body as the primary vehicle (inter-text) of those acts humans performed in the past which serve us as models to perform on our own, to preserve ourselves in innovation and continuity. As human

complete wisdom and complete ignorance as the eternal mediator between heaven and hell (Symp. 202e) and must remain in midair: a move too close to either side would be the demise of love. Since love has no home it is only in loving (repeating the act) that love makes a home. Of itself it has no nature but finds itself only in the acts of love performed. It gives birth to goodness (Symp. 206b) and through these acts prolongs itself into immortality (Symp. 207a). It is in the creation of goodness and beauty that we become rid of the indeterminateness of the mid-region, the homeless ground, and become one with the immortal (Symp. 207a).

How does a mortal perform this fantastic transformation? In Symposium 21 Oa—2 12a, Plato discards as proper to this goal but not to be absent from education the technologies of logic, rhetoric, acts of logic, and acts of thinking. He proposes instead technologies closer to initiation exercises into mystery religions than to Aristotle, Hegel, or Marx. in Symposium 109a— 2 lOa he identifies these technologies with acts of imagining of the kind we might call creative imagining. For this imagining is not an abstraction from objects empirically given to the senses, but rather an imagining that begins to act only when the senses, all information coming from the outside, and all images are canceled. As in the Republic, one enters this world by drinking of the “milk of forgetfulness.” Here Plato is specific: “[This imagining] will not take the form of a face, or of a hand, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will neither be words, nor knowledge, nor something that exists in something else, such as a creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is.

(Symposium 210a—21 la).” In the Phaedo he gives us the positive clues:

the real earth. . . is multicolored and marked out by different colors, of which the colors we know here are only limited imitations. . . there, the whole earth is made up of such colors and many others far brighter and purer still.

For in this world of imagining, colors are sharper, mountains and stones smoother and even transparent, better than the precious stones our senses know empirically (Phaedo 11 Oc—e).

But it is in the Republic that Plato summarizes for us the technologies of imagining (Republic, 508e—5 lie; 532a—534e):

1) the soul must be turned into an opposite direction;

2) a different faculty must be used than the ones we use to create opinion, images, thinking, theorizing;

3) different objects and different reading signs must be created;

4) a different kind of knowledge is created in the whole composite of body and soul, thus

5) enabling us to choose from among the possible the best.

Plato repeats these criteria for imagining in the Phaedo 67c—d and in 79e—8 1 a, as the exercise for creating “experience after death,” or of achieving experience “through practicing death,” by accustoming the soul to “withdraw from all contact with the body and concentrate itself on itself. . . alone by itself.”

In short, Plato understands education as a unique concern and a unique motivation for the quality of all the acts it performs to educate. Quality of performance concerns itself with directing the will to select and sort out those acts that are historically capable of being remembered and thus repeated. Distinctions and divisions leading to those acts are to be found in the quality itself of the acts performed, not in the external property of objects and their external relations. For it is in these internal acts, without intimation from the outside, that human freedom resides. Divisions, in Plato’s scheme of education, are made for the sake of establishing an inner genealogy that separates the pure from the impure, the authentic from the inauthentic, but in no way is it concerned with any classification through genus and species. Plato establishes things and images, originals and copies, models and simulacra. And this can equally hold when sorting out gold, as in the Republic, or when sorting out claims, as in the Statesman, the Phaedrus, or the Symposium, “I am the shepherd of men,” “I am the possessed,” “I am the lover.”

Antonio T. de Nicholas Habits of Mind pp. 44-45

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Thus the underlined words make it clear that Plato is recommending what I call Icon Thinking for such a form thinking is NOT thinking of fantasies or images formed by abstracting from our empirical objects and so forth. The ICON ( or Muurtti) in the special sense we use the word here, are graphic structures that emerge on their own from the Depths, the CAVE and seizing hold of the soul forces various kinds of metaphysical interrogations that on the whole have the function of ILLUMINATIONG the mind by informing some deeper truths. Thus this phenomenon of possession by icons from the depths with an inescapable metaphysical thinking is Educational or Pedagogic and is designed to bring about what I have called Njaanam, being in the world of Light and which appears to be the same as the Er of Plato. The Icon Thinking that issues forth in such moments of icon possession leads NOT to categorical thinking such as Aristotle but rather within the framework of LOVE (or Bakti) to interpretive acts in which the MEANING of the icon is sought after and the individual effects METAPHYSICAL LEARNING. So these are the inner acts that bring about a qualitative change in personality and not just new connections in the synapses of the neural network. The person is led to die and reassume birth but as a DIFFERENT person so that she is NO MORE what she was before - she is wiser, better illuminated and hence truly educated. Such learning has to be effected by the person herself perhaps with a help of a guru but which is not a must. This kind of metaphysical learning can be and should be done by the person herself and the whole of education must individual centered with the individual always encouraged to allow himself to be possessed by such ICONS and led to be thinking metaphysically as dictated by the ICONS themselves.

A guru or teacher who interferes and disrupts with this process of NATURAL LEARNING with his own egoistic inventions of ideologies, sastras to which he addicted and rituals as the religionists do, will be doing disservice to the essence AUTHENTIC EDUCATION.

Let us see a concrete example of this Icon Thinking from Punitavati who seems to have lived the philosophy of Plato even though it is very unlikely she knew Plato.

27.

aravamonRu aakattu nii nayantu puuNeel

paravit tozutu irantoom pannaaL - muraNaziya

onnaar tam muuveyilum eytaanee

poonnaaram maRRonRu puuN

Meaning:

For many days we worshipped and requested you just one thing : don’t wear on your chest the Snake that arouses the sexual desires in the heart of the creatures and make them suffer immensely because of it. Instead we implore you that you wear the golden chain that arouses Pure Love (that’s above sexuality). For you who singed to ashes with a single arrow the THREE castles of your enemies, this should not be impossible at all.

Here Siva emerging in the form of an ICON where He wears the SNAKE on His Neck becomes the object of Hermeneutic Semiotics, the interpretive understanding of the MEANING of such an ICON and in particular the snake where there is also the interpretive understanding that the natural snake has as its meaning the sexual libido. She requests that Siva wears a golden chain rather than a natural one and which is a request to transmute the ordinary sexuality into Pure Love and something He certainly can do as He is also the one who burnt to ashes the citadels of the ignorance.

In such a self-education, Punitavati is venturing on HER OWN, is NOT listening to the Guru Makasannidhanams, does not quote profusely from the scriptures, pay abeyance to the Mullahs Brahmanahs and Padres and so forth. There is genuine LEARNING only because Punitavati has thrown out aside all these textual understanding , sastric mental loads as useless (nuulaRivu peeci nuzaivillaar tirika), has asserted her autonomy and independence and LEARNS with Icon Thinking and under the loving guidance of BEING Himself.

Isn’t this what Plato is advocating? I think so. And it leads to the region of Er, the realm of Njanam, the Light, the Supreme Radiance, the Cooti where there is no shadow of IGNORANCE at all. So sings Punitavati too:

17.

kaaNpaarkkuG kaaNalaan tanmaiyanee kaitozutu
kaaBpaarrkuG kaaNalaam kaatalaaR - kaaNpaarkkuc
cootiyaayc cintaiyuLee toonRumee tollulakuk(ku)
aatiyaay ninRa aran

Meaning:

BEING, the Primordial Cause for this ancient world, can be witnessed directly for those Yogis who have managed to see the concealed world by opening their Third Eye of transductive perceptions. BEING is also seeable for those who have become the humble servants who tirelessly involve themselves in selfless service for humanity always praising BEING with true Bakti. But among these for those who, out of Deep Love for BEING and with a heart that melts in sincere LOVE, He discloses Himself as the Pure Light that purifies the soul and relieves them of all pains.

There must be LOVE and worship as part of Icon thinking where the icons are magical - are made available for vision or withdrawn from it. But for those who are engraced with such visions and learning from within that, BEING finally discloses Himself as a Cooti, the Pure Light disclosing that this is also His Primordial Form for this ancient world.

Thus the inner acts that lead the student away from the CAVE into the realm of LIGHT, the Er is in fact the kinds of Hermeneutic Semiotics Punitavati practices and which lead her to enjoy presence of BEING as Pure Radiance.

From: <diotima245@aol.com>

To: <agamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>

Cc: <akandabaratam@egroups.com.aagamicpsychology@yahoogroups.com>; <ene@egroups.com>; <meykandar@egroups.com>; <kalaivani@egroups.com>; <Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com>; <ontologicalethics@egroups.com>; <NavyaShastra@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [Abhinavagupta] Re: [agamicpsychology] Dialogues on Habits of Mind-8

Date: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 12:42 AM

Dear Loga and friends,

I was totally touched by the similarities in the stories of the passages of

the soul both in Plato and Tamil literature. Icon thinking is another way of

putting together what thinking by itself cannot accomplish. These are two

different brains and their technologies differ. From the Rg Veda down the

imagination is activated through acts of "dismemberment." That is, applying one sense at

a time to the image to be made. Sight, sound, touch, smell, movement are

attached separatedly to the image being made out of nothing. In this way sensation

is lent to that image in the making and the image returns sensation to the

initiate. These are the signs of the soul. And reading them needs someone else

with experience besides the meditator to decipher them. It is a long journey

made easier because others traveled the same path before us.

I am enclosing a short description of this acts using a Western mystic,

Ignatius de Loyola, to better follow this thread. It is this tradition and not the

tradition of theology that links East and West. It is based on neurobiology

not primarily on history. History is secondary.

OM and SHANTI

Antonio de Nicolas

Nitin Bhai

==============

Meditation: The Making of Images

By Antonio T. de Nicolas, PhD

Introduction

From the Rig Veda to Plato the act of imagining is the secret technology of

the mystics. While most people use fantasy to achieve the results they

fantasize for the sake of the subject, and theologians use concepts to claim knowledge

and revelation, imagining has been always the technology of a few souls, from

East and West, in their effort to repeat the divine act of creation

uncontaminated by human faculties. For this reason and to describe what this technology

is based on I have chosen to write this paper following the clear

descriptions of this act as found in the writings of Ignatius de Loyola and as he used

them in the making of his Spiritual Exercises. The reason for this choice is the

radical need of presenting how images are made, rather than borrowed in

meditation. It is my contention that this tradition of making images in meditation

is present wherever meditation is practiced. It is common in Hinduism, from

the Rig Veda down, in Buddhism, and in Christianity, as well as in other

religions. The aim of such presentation is to show that in religious practice no

image may be borrowed.

Meditation

Ignatius is convinced that meditation is the road to that inner space that

may be revealed, opened, touched, uncovered by that unique act of creation,

unique to meditation, and by no other creature, object or sensation. Only God, he

believes, owns the human center (Exer. 316, 322, 329, 330).But this center is

covered by a communications system, a natural attitude, a self indulgence,

that impedes human access to it. Ignatius' initiation into this mystery is a

definite effort at breaking down this communication system and building a new one

through which the soul and God may communicate. Since the external

communications system has also, through language and its repetition, through the use of

the faculties and the repetition of this use, sensitized the subject into a

series of body sensations and their habitual comfort, the new system of

communications will aim precisely at destroying, suspending, this habituation. The

exercises start in the human body and end in the transformation of this same human

body. The body is the primary text and primary technology, while the

discourse about the experience is the "secondary text" and "secondary technology."

Through the exercises a new language is given the retreatant, a new memory and a

new imagination. Through this retraining a new will might emerge in harmony

with the Will of God.

Language and the Will

The first week of the exercises is one of trial and training. It is a time of

testing the will of the retreatant and the body of that will. Not everyone's

body is ready for meditation at the particular time chosen for the exercises.

Ignatius wants to single out those who might continue and those who should

proceed no further. Though the exercises carry so much promise they could also be

dangerous to one's health if not done under the best physical conditions.

Ignatius says of "those with poco suiecto (little temperament, lack of stamina

and preparation) that "they should not proceed any further" (Exer. 18).

This first week is one of violence to the body habits of the retreatant. He

is asked to search for a "place" (Exer. 20) away from the ordinary place to

which he/she is normally accustomed: the cave of Manresa, a lonely room, a

different room from the one usually inhabited, a different house, a monastery in the

country, an unaccustomed place, a place where the retreatant has to invent

new body habits and where outside communications systems do not reach. The

retreatant is also instructed about lights: less in the first and third weeks, more

in the second and fourth (Exer. 79). The retreatant's body is subjected to

new and calculated positions: kneeling, prostrating oneself face down, standing

with the head bent down, pacing, walking, sitting rigidly (Exer. 74, 75, 76,

77) lowering the eyes, raising the eyes, closing out sounds, listening to

special rhythms as the meditation dictates (Exer. 81, 258). The whole body of the

retreatant must be reeducated until it becomes like a repellent to the external

communications system and habits he/she was familiar with. All gestures,

facial expressions, bodily movements, bodily expression must be painstakingly gone

over as if in slow motion so that the body becomes impervious to the outside

and begins to learn the technologies of facing and gathering within.

The will of the retreatant is now used as a surgical knife to cut some

openings into the interior world. The whole attention of the retreatant is now away

from the outer world even if in order to achieve this he/she must cut to

pieces, one by one, the different lived moments of his/her life, the different

moments of a day, of a prayer, of a meditation, of an examination of conscience,

of an act, a look, a thought (Exer. 24, 25, 26, 27, 33, 34, 38, 42, 43). But on

the trail of these acts of the will a language is being formed: "intense pain

and tears," ugliness and evil...of sin" (Exer. 57), compare God's attributes

to yours, wisdom and ignorance, omnipotence and weakness, justice and

inequity, goodness and selfishness (Exer. 59), "esclamacion admirative con crescido

afecto" (shout with amazement and filled with a growing emotion) (Exer. 60);

self-pity, gratitude, amazement, disgust, consolation, desolation (Exer. 62) are

the signs of this language the will has started to create by turning the

entire life and every minute of it into an interior timetable where only the chimes

of eternity are heard. By the time the will becomes habituated to those

exercises there will no longer be room for external and familiar languages. The

clock of the "solitary region" is now running. The interior timetable now

determines one's waking (Exer. 74), the kind of prayer, examinations of conscience

(Exer. 43) and meditations one makes and what conversations one will bring to

the guide of the exercise. The prayer may take various forms; it may be light

and relax the emotions (Exer. 238), or it may focus on the seven deadly sins

(Exer. 244), or on the three powers of the soul (Exer. 246). It may become a

meditation which considers every word pronounced (Exer. 249), or which

concentrates only on those points of meditation "where I felt the most intense spiritual

feeling" (Exer. 62). And, of course, we must not forget, a new diet has to be

included (Exer. 84), and one should sleep with less comfort than one is used

to and cause sensible pain to the body (Exer. 85). Even while going to sleep

there is no stopping this clock; one should prepare oneself for the coming day

by going over the memory-points of the meditation one is going to make in the

morning (Exer. 73). Upon awakening, one should bring to mind what one is about

to meditate on. The clock of the "solitary region" does not allow any external

language to come in; there are no cracks between exercises: "no dando lugar a

unos pensamientos ni a otros" (not to make room for this kind of thoughts or

any other) (Exer. 74).

Spiritual exercises, however, do not compare to any army "boot camp."

Ignatius is very sensitive to that: "If the one giving the exercises sees that he who

makes them is in desolation or temptation, he should not be harsh or severe

with him, but rather gentle and soft..." (Exer.17). And if at times Ignatius

recommends acting against natural inclinations (agere contra, do the opposite

Exer. 13, 16), as when one feels like not going the length of a whole hour in

meditation, one should therefore at once decide to go for one hour and a half.

He also makes the exercitant aware that all those things he/she is trained to

do are only means to an end. One should use, therefore, those things only

"tanto... cuanto" (as much as) (Exer. 23) one needs to in order to achieve those

ends. For in the end the exercises are for the soul to get ready to receive the

Will of God, not suggestions from the guide of the exercises, or confessors,

or friends, or enemies: ...it is much better, in searching for the divine Will,

to let Our Creator and Lord communicate Himself to the devoted soul..."

(Exer.15).

The exercises of the will and the hint of the language that emerges builds

around the inner space of the retreatant a scaffolding of inner habits ready to

sustain the new emerging body of meditation. But then the drama unfolds. While

the retreatant experiences the excitement of the new, he/she also experiences

the bereavement of the familiar. The retreatant is not guaranteed that the

divinity may enter the solitary space, while the familiar will no longer feel

the same. The retreatant can never anticipate what is about to happen or even if

it will happen. One needs to give up everything and, yet, one cannot

anticipate that the empty spaces are going to be filled. This journey needs raw human

faith, the exercises themselves that keep opening horizons of language, and

memory along with its predictability. The exercise now is memory.

Memory and Predictability

The origin of Christianity in particular and Religion in general, is an

experience that has already happened. It originates outside of time with the

Trinity and enters time in the Second Person of the Trinity through the mysteries

of the Incarnation and Redemption. It is precisely because of the fact that

this experience has already happened that for every. Christian to know is to

remember. Memory makes of Christians communities and religion; it is the common

ground of memories, on which all stand, that joins them as community. Without

memory Christianity could not be articulated. Christ had already set down the

internal law of the community: "Do this in remembrance of me." (Luke 22, 19) And

even when the Father will send, in Christ's name, the Comforter, the Spirit,

He will do it to "bring all things to your remembrance" (John 14, 25). To be a

Christian is primarily to live on memory, to turn memory around, to store

memories, to turn every sign, whatever its origin, into a memory-point, to

articulate those memories so that memory remains active. Those memories are the

remembrance of the Will of God in operation. They are the memory of a past

actively present and therefore, being God's Will, with a future. It is a memory that

predictably organizes the future. But not without human effort and

participation. Strictly speaking, the Spiritual Exercises are a string of memories, of

memory-points. Even the exercises as written are not to be read for information

or edification or content. Each and every word is slowly and carefully

chiseled out so that it becomes a memory-point for action, or for making memory.

The journey of the retreatant's will dividing his/her life into the search

for sins, the day divided into exercises of the will to discover flaws, to

remove flaws, these exercises are primarily exercises in memory: memories that

travel back and forth, up and down, within the perimeters of a human life.

Meditation begins by "bringing to memory" the first sin of the angels (Exer. 50); "by

bringing to memory" the sin of Adam and Eve (Exer. 51); "by bringing to

memory" our sins (Exer. 52), all the sins of my lifetime (Exer. 56), year by year,

place by place, looking at the places I have lived, conversations I have had,

work done (Exer. ibid.); bring to memory to instruct the intellect in it: "so

that the intellect, without meandering, may reason with concentration going

over the reminiscences (memories) of the things contemplated in past

exercises..." (Exer. 64). Ignatius literally means, through the Exercises, "to bring all

things into remembrance." In order to bring all things into remembrance,

however, demands from us certain shifts in technologies. In every case human effort

is needed.

Ignatius de Loyola shared with the other mystics of his time habits of

reading different from ours. Early in his Autobiography (Autobiography 6 and 7) he

lets us know how he used reading in order to fix memory points and visualize

the things the Saints did and that he could also do. With these memories he

would then dream of doing greater things for the service of God. In this manner

Ignatius kept his mind well occupied. Ignatius' knowledge came through the

experience of meditation, not through reasoning out the mysteries of Christianity.

It is true that the Exercises use the three potencies or faculties of the

soul, but it is through memory that they are held together, or by turning all

things into remembrance. The flight of the soul will eventually take place through

imagining.

Turning all things into remembrance is not an easy task, however. The

memories of Christianity are not factual history, are not deeds humans caused on

humans or nature. In order to turn all things into remembrance one must perform a

radical hermeneutical act. How does one remember "the souls in hell" or the

Trinity before Creation, or angels sinning, or how Christ used his five senses,

or even one's own sins without a radical reinterpretation of those cognitive

ciphers in view of the experience that already happened? Those are living

memories to a Christian and therefore recoverable. To recall them is to call them,

and therefore, they may be articulated in language. They are the language in

which imagining takes place. On these memory units imagining will act. This

memory bank is the only security the retreatant has that the system works; it is

the language of Christianity, its communications system. It is in this sense,

of memory in use, that memory acts with an element of predictability in the

system. Memory, by turning back, vivifies the retreatant and guarantees the

future. Memory mediates all human action: it is language and it is divine human

life.

Imagining as Individual Dismemberment

Language, in order not to be a dead language, must be used, spoken, written

down. Memories would become dead if not activated through acts of imagining.

Contrary to contemporary practices in psychology, where imagining is guided

so that individuals and groups share the same image and are guided in imagining

it, or where archetypal images are the object, goal, and the identity of

imagining, Ignatius, astonishingly enough, leaves the retreatant entirely to

his/her "own abilities" (Exer.18) when guiding him/her in the act of imagining.

Ignatius provides memory points, describes how to imagine, but the images of

imagining are absent from the Exercises . Actual imagining is the retreatant's

exercise. This may be understood because Ignatius cannot draw on any existing

reservoir of images in order to correct mistaken identities. He cannot draw from

any subjective field of images with which the subject may be more or less

familiar, because through some of those images individuals have already

experienced transformations, even creations. Ignatius displaces the retreatant from any

subjective or objective pools of images and vigorously transplants him/her to

an imageless field where the absence of images will force the exercise of

creating them. This kind of imagining is the more powerful because it does not

rest on images anyone ever before created. Neither the exercitant nor the world

has the images of the exercises of imagining. The images to be born are of a

sheer power of imagining which includes not only the act of imagining, but the

act of creating the images.

This strategy of Ignatius is so demanding that it rests more on the actual

technologies of imagining than on any images. Thus his insistence on the

technology of concentration in order to bring out the pure image, the uncontaminated

image, the image in perfect solitude, the original image, the divine image.

The image created in meditation is the only image that will gain currency in

meditation. One cannot borrow it, one must create it. In this creation all other

images are automatically excluded. The whole technology developed in the

Exercises has one aim: the perfect image, for it is in it and through it that God's

signs will appear. The image will turn to language and return to the public

domain.

The pure image, the original image, will penetrate the public domain if first

it penetrates the material body of the retreatant. This material body is

always set facing the scene, the image, to be imagined. But this material body is

a fluid body through imagining: a slave in the Nativity, a knight in the Two

Kingdoms, a sinner facing the Cross; or it may change sizes if compared to

other men, the angels, God (Exer. 58); it may become a vermin worth "many hells"

(Exer. 60); or the temple, image of God, animated by God, sensitized by Him

(Exer. 235).

Technically, however, this material fluid body of the retreatant, becomes

dismembered through the act of imagining. Ignatius conceives imagining as an act

of dismembering the senses by running them in isolation, one by one, through

the image being made.

The retreatant is placed in front of a scene and asked to make his/her own

"contemplacion viendo el lugar" (contemplation seeing the place). With

exhausting detail, he/she is asked to make up the scene; the road: how long, wide, flat

running through valleys or hills; the cave: how big, small, how high, how

low, how furnished (Exer.112). Imagine hell, the width and depth and length

(Exer. 65), or imagine the synagogue, villages and castles (Exer. 91), or the Three

Divine Persons (Exer.102), or Mary riding a donkey or Joseph pulling an ox

(Exer.110). But for Ignatius the image alone is not the source of signs. The

image on recall is to call it to memory. The actual birth of the signs or the

system of signs does not take place until the retreatant proceeds, through

imagining, to "read" the image through his own dismembered sensorium. The perfect

image, the solitary image, the divine image is set into motion through the

sensuous motion of the retreatant's senses as he or she runs them, one at a time,

through the image. It takes the "reading" of the image by each sense so that it

becomes a mediation of signs. The efficacy of the image is made possible on

condition that the subject be kept elusively absent, as a fixed unity, in the

act of imagining. What he or she is asked to do instead is to lend sight,

sound, smell, touch, movement to the image. The image must be filled through the

reading of each sense on the image. He or she vitalizes the image through his or

her dismembered sensorium. Each sense must read the image separately; each

sense must sensitize the image separately; each sense must read/write its

separate movement on the image separately. What is done through visualization must

be repeated through hearing, smelling, touching, moving. This applies to the

exercises on hell, the Nativity, the Cross, Resurrection, in short, to any

exercises where images are to be imagined.

It is the exercise of imagining that makes the appearance of signs and the

articulation of both as a language possible. Images of themselves, do nothing.

The retreatant must exercise them by reading/writing sensation on them. In its

preparatory stage imagining is a technology that if performed in all its

purity will return signs and articulate itself into a language. It will also force

the sensible signs to appear in the act of sensitizing the image of

meditation. As a consequence and because it is an embodied technology, it will also

desensitize the subjects to their original unities and attachments while

sensitizing them to the new and fresh sensations. Imagining, therefore, with its

preliminary organization of daily acts, memories and sensitizing of images, is the

primary technology through which a language/text appears and may be

articulated. Without this primary text written in the human body, this technology of

habituation, signs will not appear nor the language of their articulation. The

primary technology thus is the causal origin of the signs, the diacritical

systems of signs, that are to be read. The reading of those signs will have several

readers: the retreatant, his director or confessor, his spiritual guide,

whoever is trained to read such a text. The reader must know the primary technology

and the primary text and be an expert in reading the signs. He/she must be

able to read them even if he/she is not the author of the primary text or the

reader/writer of the primary technology. It is on this condition that the

primary text and primary technology produce not only a language but also the

possibility of its articulation, either as a private articulation to a spiritual

guide, or as a public articulation for the public domain.

Conclusion

Though this hermeneutical task is unfinished, it should be suggestive enough

to encourage all those interested in deeper unities than theological

civilities to search for a way of making possible inter-religious communities where

serious, dedicated forms of meditation are made available to all.

Human technologies divide into two groups: one follows the image of the

sinner-Savior model where the individual has hardly any room to do anything on

his/her own, for he/she is always at the mercy of "compliance" with an ethical

code dictated by this model.

On the other hand, there is the Avatara-mystical model, the individual uses

technologies that infuse all his/her brains with knowledge and allows him or

her to embody the human paradigm as it moves along. Heart Ethics is the guide

here, and the training is geared to be able to chose from among the possible

(dharma) facing you, the best, by habit, as Plato and Indic texts proposed before

him and is found in the mystical literature of the Spiritual Exercises of

Ignatius and other mystics.

Before Ignatius wrote his Exercises Indic Tradition had already imprinted the

paradigm in the human species with the practices of the yogas of the Bhagavad

Gita. Krisna moves by the neural pathways of the left brain to gain distance

from Arjuna's trauma, and on to the communities of the right brain practices,

embodying them as he moves to the point when in chapter eleven he shows the

bewildered Arjuna his geometries without the forms Arjuna so loved or feared, or

with the forms already destroyed. Kalo'smi: I am Time, Krisna proclaims, I am

all a man can be, nowâ€¦And so can you if you learn to make decisions. Of

course, Indic Tradition does not have to deal with the sinner-Savior model for in

this Tradition, from the Rig Veda down, all the gods are "this side of

Creation," as the Rig Veda proclaims, and manas (the mind) is not a faculty but one

more of the senses.

And so, in the end, make sure your exercises correspond to your available

neural connections and brain centers, restrain your fantasy, cancel out your left

brain until you leave meditation and translate whatever happened there into

ordinary prose or poetry or simple power of decision making. There are two

roads, make sure you find the one leading to the technologies of the heart.

Bibliography

de Nicolas, A.T. (1986) Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loyola, State

University of

New York Press, Albany N.Y

(1976,8,2003) Meditations Through the Rig Veda, Shambhala, Boulder- London,

Nicolas-Hays, iUniverse.com.

(1990) The Bhagavad Gita, Nicolas-Hays, York Beach, Maine

(1989,1996) St. John of the Cross; Alchemist of the soul. Nicolas-Hays, York

Beach, Maine

(1976) Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy. Nicolas-Hays, Maine and New

York .

Note: Meditations and Avatara are ready at iuniverse.com andcan be read on

line by going to the bookstore and writing down my name or the name of the books.

Dear Prof and Friends

A very fascinating article where I felt, on reading it, that I was reading a report on the spiritual experiences of the Nayanmars and Azwars, the only mystics I can understand quite intimately because of the language ( and which is my personal limitation). Also Nitin Bhai’s observations forces to me think more and more the body, the neural networks and so forth and how important they are in accounting for such spiritual experiences as Icon Thinking, which appears to me quite central. I was particularly attracted to the following passage (among many):