Understanding the Upanishads with Debashish Banerji

Debashish Banerji, PhD, is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. 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. His newest anthology is titled Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures.

Here he describes the historical context in which the Upanishads were produced, originally as elaborations on the Vedas and Brahmanas. The changing literature reflected changing social conditions among the urban dwellers, forest dwellers, priests, and rulers. New concepts are added as Vedantic thinking reflects back upon itself. The beginnings of Indian philosophy emerge, combined with an emphasis on various spiritual practices such as chanting.

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 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 May 22, 2019)

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