The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part Two: The Spiritual Empiricist, with Debashish Banerji

Debashish Banerji, PhD, is former Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles as well as an adjunct faculty member at Pasadena City College and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is also the former director of the East West Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He is author of Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century.

Here he describes how Aurobindo retreated to a spiritual life in the city of Pondicherry in south India that was under French control. During this period, he developed (or “received”) a detailed and extensive program of yoga. He also kept a very meticulous yoga diary that combined English and Sanskrit terms. He also began to experience a variety of paranormal abilities, documenting them in his diary and experimenting with them in various ways noting both his successes and failures. He also endeavored to integrate his spiritual and his political inclinations. Ultimately, he developed an approach to yoga that endeavored to achieve integration of all opposites. Integral yoga, therefore, entails a multi-dimensional experience of reality.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.

(Recorded on December 20, 2015)