Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903)
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1831 – 8 May 1891
Ramakrishna 1836 – 16 August 1886
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844 – 25 August 1900)
Nikola Tesla 1856 – 7 January 1943
Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and lived until 1925
Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 7 August 1941
Alfred North Whitehead, 1861 – 1947)
Swami Vivekananda 1863 – 4 July 1902)
Walter Bowman Russell (May 19, 1871 – May 19, 1963)
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 1872 – 2 February 1970)
Aleister Crowley  1875 – 1 December 1947
Carl Gustav Jung  26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961
Albert Einstein 1879 – 18 April 1955)
Erwin  Schrödinger 1887 – 4 January 1961
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951)
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958
Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976)

DEFENDING EXPERIENCE: A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE POST-MODERN WORLD

Chapter One. Have you ever been experienced?

Philosophy meets the real world

The Other-Worldly Philosophers

From its outset, the Western philosophical tradition has been hostile to everyday experience. This hostility has only intensified with the rise of modern philosophy. After the "new philosophy" associated with the scientific revolution came to dominate the intellectual world, an attack on ordinary experience became a defining feature of "serious" Western philosophies. Ever since, the widely acknowledged first step towards what passes as philosophical wisdom in the West has been to debunk much of what non-intellectuals cherish in everyday experience. The scientific and philosophical revolutionaries of the modern world believed that what exists is just matter and motion–not even color, much less meanings or values. The important experiences of our lives–feeling love and loving back, making a place into a home, coming to identify ourselves with certain activities–all these and more are dismissed by mainstream Western thought as unreal, as subjective additions to a world that is nothing more than whirling particles. Experience, if it can be said to exist at all, is said to exist in the mind only, and not at all as part of the realm of things. Those who have tried to make a place for something in our world besides matter in motion–for love and hate, for fear and pride, or even for color and harmony–have for centuries now been labeled "naive realists," which is the philosophers’ equivalent to tarring and feathering somebody and running them out of town. Serious philosophers simply do not listen to naive realists, they just get rid of them.

MICHEL FOUCAULT in The Archaeology of Knowledge rejects the traditional historian's tendency to read straightforward narratives of progress in the historical record: "For many years now," he writes, "historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events" (3). Foucault, by contrast, argues that one should seek to reconstitute not large "periods" or "centuries" but "phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity" (4). The problem, he argues, "is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits" (5). Instead of presenting a monolithic version of a given period, Foucault argues that we must reveal how any given period reveals "several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies, for one and the same science, as its present undergoes change: thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of

Teachings of Ramakrishna

1.
Chakri can be described as a type of low-paying servitude done by educated men—typically government or commerce-related clerical positions. On a basic level, Ramakrishna saw this system as a corrupt form of European social organisation that forced educated men to be servants not only to their bosses at the office but also to their wives at home. What Ramakrishna saw as the primary detriment of Chakri, however, was that it forced workers into a rigid, impersonal clock-based time structure. He saw the imposition of strict adherence to each second on the watch as a roadblock to spirituality. Despite this, however, Ramakrishna demonstrated that Bhakti could be practised as an inner retreat to experience solace in the face of Western-style discipline and often discrimination in the workplace.

2.
Ramakrishna emphasised God-realisation as the supreme goal of all living beings.


3.
Ramakrishna taught that kamini-kanchana is an obstacle to God-realization. Kamini-kanchan literally translates to "woman and gold."  "lust inside the mind."
4.

Ramakrishna looked upon the world as Maya and he explained that avidya maya represents dark forces of creation (e.g. sensual desire,selfish actions, evil passions, greed, lust and cruelty), which keep people on lower planes of consciousness. These forces are responsible for human entrapment in the cycle of birth and death, and they must be fought and vanquished. Vidya maya, on the other hand, represents higher forces of creation (e.g. spiritual virtues, selfless action, enlightening qualities, kindness, purity, love, and devotion), which elevate human beings to the higher planes of consciousness.
5.
Ramakrishna practised several religions, including Islam and Christianity, and taught that in spite of the differences, all religions are valid and true and they lead to the same ultimate goal—God. Ramakrishna's taught that jatra jiv tatra Shiv (wherever there is a living being, there is Shiva). His teaching, "Jive daya noy, Shiv gyane jiv seba" (not kindness to living beings, but serving the living being as Shiva Himself) is considered as the inspiration for the philanthropic work carried out by his chief disciple Vivekananda.

Ramakrishna used rustic colloquial Bengali in his conversations. According to contemporary reports, Ramakrishna's linguistic style was unique, even to those who spoke Bengali. It contained obscure local words and idioms from village Bengali, interspersed with philosophical Sanskrit terms and references to the Vedas, Puranas, Tantras. For that reason, according to philosopher Lex Hixon, his speeches cannot be literally translated into English or any other language and certain terms that Ramakrishna may have used only in a metaphysical sense are being improperly invested with new, contemporaneous meanings.