[D-G] 1949 Diss. on Spinoza and Vedanta

[Paul adrian Bains]

Hi Ruth,
Sorry to hear about your horrifying episodes!

30 yrs ago I spent some time in S. India discovering yoga (principally 'hatha' yoga) and a little about the Upanishads. I found the best modern interpreter of advaita to be Krishnamurti (hated by many). The other good modern read was Aghenanda Bharati's The Light at the Centre: Context and Pretext in Modern Mysticism. 
Altho he was a little arrogant - mitigated by a keen wit.He particularly liked Chogyam trungpa rimpoche Cutting through spiritual materialism. But as in so many cases his followers in Boulder, CA, seem to be a bunch of idiots....Or as Gurdjieff would have said, 'candidates for a mental asylum'.

The main focus of Guattari's Chaosmosis was 'subjectivity' not being a 'given' - and the possibility of change. Look at the intro and the final paragraph of the book.......

For the record I would quote the philosopher and physicist/biologist Mariela Szirko who likes to say that 'in changing we do not become someone else'. Each person (whether human or not), or existential finitude, is unique.....and does not 'emerge' from the body it finds itself availing of.......but that's another story - one that anglo/american science is still somewhat ignorant of. But see:
 
Ontology of Consciousness: percipient agency, MIT Press, 2008. (An anthology of essays from many fields - tibetan buddhism to neuroscience...

You might find this essay by Stengers of interest (if you don't know it). 'Diderot's Egg: Divorcing materialism from eliminativism.'

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/pdf/highlight144.pdf

Happy New Year,
Paul


________________________________
From: Super Dragon <superdragon at addlebrain.com>
To: deleuze-guattari at lists.driftline.org
Sent: Thursday, 15 January, 2009 7:29:59 AM
Subject: Re: [D-G] 1949 Diss. on Spinoza and Vedanta

Greetings Paul-it is interesting to hear the directions you are taking. I remember the question of a core personal self being important to your position all those moons ago on spoons.

The reason I write is because I have been studying the lives of Hindu sunyassin dedicated to experiential union with advaita (literal meaning not two). The study was prompted by the similarity of this understanding of nondual reality and themes in Deleuze. The big difference is the manner of attaining what amounts to a transpersonal consciousness-for the sunyassin, the methods are chiefly yogic, contemplative and ascetic-while there is violence in the process,the desired state is blissful immersion and desubjectification v the violent process of desubjectification described by Deleuze.

As with yourself, I am more in favour of subjectivities for better or worse these days. It should not be forgotten that Deleuze also talks about resubjectification-a position that is not tenable for the sunyassin and which Nietzsche did not achieve. I am now out of the closet at having lived through several quite horrifying psychotic episodes in my own meditations on Eternal Return-it was a bit difficult to sat this while I was a doctoral student.

It is symbolic death (but not quite) for delusionary experience resymbolizes idiosyncratically at the 'edge'. I have been in these expereinces, a housefly, a spaceship and other transitory images of transcndence and immanence (images in which de and re subjectification play back and forth in precisely the zone of indetermination proposed). My point is desubjectification ain't funny and returning from the dead ( as recommeded in WIP) much easier said than done. However, having done it and reassembled as something like a proviosional speaking subject, I would say that there is both something core that is esistentially personal but which by no means can be called an I and encounter which pushes the personal self past its sustainable threshold. In other words- Being is indeed experienced as a clamour in these states but nobody could live there for long. But going there does change subjectivity for better or worse...

Warm Regards
Ruth.C aka Rudeearth
Sloughing one's skin.-The snake that cannot slough its skin perishes... Likewise spirits which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirits (Nietzsche: Daybreak:V:573)