A dalliance of the Divine and a teleological drama

Global Spirit: Exploring Consciousness, East and West (VIDEO) Huffington Post Stephen Olsson Posted: 08/06/2012 11:00 am Sraddhalu Ranade is a scientist, educator and scholar living at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, South India. Sraddhalu is a practitioner of the ancient Hindu Vedanta tradition and is deeply involved with meditation and consciousness-related research.

I had the good fortune to meet Sraddhalu Renade in Asilomar, Calif., at a seminar of "contemplatives" from different faiths, which was organized by a group called the Contemplative Alliance. While Sraddhulu felt like a very good choice for Global Spirit, he was clearly in great demand at the seminar. I remember it was a challenge to get him away from the other participants and off on our own.

Once we finally found a quiet place for an interview, it was clear that Sraddhalu's comments on awareness, consciousness and meditation were perfect for the program. Then we needed to film what I call "inner space" -- visual imagery that coveys not only an inner state of mind but also an integrated philosophical orientation to life. With Sraddhalu, that space turned out to be under the coastal pines and along the Pacific coastline.

Integral Review Special Issue - CIIS: Spirituality, Religion, Contemplative Practices, and Socially Transformative Service in the 21st Century Posted by William Harryman at 9:37 AM There is a new issue of the Integral Review up online, and it's a s Special Issue on CIIS: Spirituality, Religion, Contemplative Practices, and Socially Transformative Service in the 21st Century. For those who do not know, CIIS is the California Institute for Integral Studies, a private, alternative model to higher education originally founded by adherents to Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. Aurobindo sought to bring together or integrate the three paths of yoga - karma yoga (action in the world), jnana yoga (spiritual wisdom), and bhakti yoga (devotion) - to facilitate integration of body, mind, and spirit. CIIS was founded in that tradition.

Table of Contents July 2012 Special Issue Volume 8, No. 1 SPECIAL ISSUE - CIIS: Spirituality, Religion, Contemplative Practices, and Socially Transformative Service in the 21st Century Special Issue Introduction Special Issue Editor Bahman A. K. Shirazi, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Peer Reviewed Articles:

The Need for Interreligious Dialogue in Higher Education - Joseph L. Subbiondo

New Religious Movements, Western Esotericism, and Integral Consciousness - Constance A. Jones

Rethinking the Future of World Religion: An Interview With Jorge N. Ferrer - Bahman A. K. Shirazi

Transformative Body Practices and Social Change: The Intersection between Spirituality and Activism - Don H. Johnson

The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth - Ahmed M. Kabil

The Future History of Consciousness - David Hutchinson

Sri Aurobindo’s Lila: The Nature of Divine Play According to Integral Advaita - Matthew W. Morey

Structure and Process: Integral Philosophy and the Triple Transformation - Debashish Banerji

United Religions Initiative:- Building a Global Community - Sally Mahé

Here is the introduction to this special issue: Spirituality, Religion, Contemplative Practices, and Socially Transformative Service in the 21st Century Special Issue Introduction Issue Editor: Bahman A. K. Shirazi 

In the next essay, The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth, Ahmed M. Kabil provides, through the life and teachings of Frederic Spiegelberg, a novel account of some of the unique historical and intellectual developments that converged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid twentieth century and subsequently informed and enabled many of the defining chapters of recent global history. Spiegelberg was instrumental in creating the American Academy of Asian Studies (a predecessor to CIIS) in San Francisco by inviting pioneering east-west scholars such as Haridas Chaudhuri (founder of CIIS) and Allan Watts who are responsible for the early dissemination of Asian spiritual traditions in the west. The conversations and writings by Spiegelberg, Watts, and Chaudhuri lead the way toward cultural movements such as the San Francisco Renaissance, the rise of the counterculture, the environmental awareness, and the information age revolution. This well-researched essay connects some key developments in world consciousness in the last 60 years. Of special importance is the connection between science (and recent technological developments) and spiritual consciousness which may be apparently diametrical, but are actually complementary in an all-embracing integral consciousness.

In The Future History of Consciousness, David Hutchinson picks up on the theme of science, spirituality and integral consciousness in an intriguing reflection on the future of integral consciousness. He asserts that ‘consciousness’ is the key fact of life and that the study of it is in its infancy. He maintains that spirituality and science are bound to meet and argues that science is moving rapidly into the hitherto unexplored subjective areas such as dreams, thought processes, and awareness and asserts that we are on the verge of a momentous shift in knowledge and ability with consciousness driven by exponential change in theory and technology.

In the article titled Sri Aurobindo’s Lila: The Nature of Divine Play According to Integral Advaita, Matthew W. Morey highlights a key aspect of integral consciousness focusing on the concept of Lila, or Divine Play, in the context of Integral non-dualism as described by Sri Aurobindo and Haridas Chaudhuri. To provide a context for this topic, he first recounts Haridas Chaudhuri’s brilliant exposition of the various schools of Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta and how Integral consciousness is a culmination of several key spiritual philosophical schools of Indian thought known as Advaita Vedanta. The second part of the essay directly addresses Sri Aurobindo’s description of Lila, a play that is at once a dalliance of the Divine and a teleological drama. In the context of Lila, the essay examines evolution, the individual poise of Brahman and the participatory nature of Integral Yoga.

Debashish Banerji’s Structure and Process: Integral Philosophy and Triple Transformation takes the reader deeper into the core of integral consciousness, philosophy and yoga. He starts by examining the debate concerning perennialism and pluralism in religious studies and considers the category of the ‘integral’, as described by Sri Aurobindo in the context of this debate. After exploring the case for perennialism vis-à-vis pluralism, he compares the contemporary taxonomy of a perennial core to mystical experience developed by Robert K. C. Forman with the idea of the “triple transformation” developed by Sri Aurobindo.