CIIS Faculty Publications
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Integral dreaming : a holistic approach to dreams
Daniel Deslauriers and Fariba Bogzaran
A holistic approach to the fascinating, multifaceted world of dreams. This innovative book offers a holistic approach to one of the most fascinating and puzzling aspects of human experience: dreaming. Advocating the broad-ranging vision termed “integral” by thinkers from Aurobindo to Wilber, Fariba Bogzaran and Daniel Deslauriers consider dreams as multifaceted phenomena in an exploration that includes scientific, phenomenological, sociocultural, and subjective knowledge. Drawing from historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary practices, both interpretive and noninterpretive, the authors present Integral Dream Practice, an approach that emphasizes the dreamer’s creative participation, reflective capacities, and mindful awareness in working with dreams. Bogzaran and Deslauriers have developed this comprehensive way of approaching dreams over many years and highlight their methods in a chapter that unfolds a single dream, showing how sustained creative exploration over time leads to transformative change.
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American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner
Robert McDermott
Few thinkers from outside the United States have touched American culture in as many ways as Rudolf Steiner has. Agriculture, education, spirituality, and medicine—or more precisely, alternative practices in these fields—all bear clear marks of his influence, for those with eyes to see. Yet the very breadth of Steiner's impact has perhaps made him harder, not easier, for observers of American culture to notice. American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner aspires to raise Steiner's profile by digging into just one field of inquiry: philosophy. Before he became known to the world as a transmitter of clairvoyant wisdom, Steiner was an academic philosopher, editor of the scientific writings of Goethe and author of a foundational work in philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom: The Basis for a Modern Worldview, published in 1894. American philosophy may have taken a wrong turn in the mid-twentieth century, when pragmatism gave way to a tradition of analytical philosophy that eschewed metaphysics as inherently meaningless and focused on the coherence or incoherence of linguistic structures. Nonetheless, many new sites of potential dialogue exist between Steiner and American philosophy.
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Six Pillars: Introductions to the Works of Sri Aurobindo
Robert McDermott
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was one of the great twentieth-century figures of India. Over the course of his lifetime, he helped India's struggle for freedom and became a leading yogi, philosopher, and poet of his time and culture. In his teaching, Sri Aurobindo went well beyond Eastern philosophy and religion, synthesizing it with Western traditions, even spending two years of his youth at Loreto Convent in Darjeeling, West Bengal. In 1879, Aurobindo and his two elder brothers were taken to Manchester, England for a European education and placed in the care of Rev. Drewett, an Anglican clergy, and his wife. In 1884, Aurobindo joined St. Paul's School, where he learned Greek and Latin and spent three years studying literature, especially English poetry. By 1910, Sri Aurobindo's focus was directed entirely toward spirituality, and he settled in Pondicherry, India, where he taught, wrote, and published his greatest works. His spiritual vision extended beyond the perfection and transformation of the individual to include the evolution and transformation of human society. According to his teaching, a true solution to humanity's problems arises from a radical transformation of human life into a form of divine existence. “The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature.” ―Sri Aurobindo For everyone interested in the philosophical and spiritual vision of the great Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary turned yogi, this outstanding collection of masterly introductions, first published in 1974, offers original reflections and interpretations of Sri Aurobindo’s six major works, all written by distinguished scholars of religion and philosophy rather than devotees. Long out of print and difficult to find, Six Pillars is again available for contemporary readers.
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Free Your Voice: Awaken to Life Through Singing
Silvia Nakkach and Valerie Carpenter
Science is beginning to prove what ancient cultures fully embraced: that human voice can become one of the most powerful agents of transformation in every facet of life. Free Your Voice offers the liberating insights and personal instruction of music healing legend Silvia Nakkach, whose four-decade immersion in the voice as a creative force makes her a uniquely qualified educator. With co-author Valerie Carpenter, Silvia shows how to reclaim the healing potential of our voice (regardless of training or experience) through more than 100 enjoyable exercises that are steeped in spiritual tradition and classical vocal technique and backed by the latest science. Free Your Voice invites us to “savor a banquet of our own divine sounds” as we practice breathwork, chant, and other yogic techniques for emotional release, opening to insight, and much more.
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Ventral Depths: Alchemical Themes and Mythic Motifs of the Great Central Valley of California
Craig Chalquist
Ventral Depths, the second volume of the Animate California Series, examines recurring mythic and alchemical images brewing in the Golden State’s Great Central Valley. From the standpoint of terrapsychology, the transdisciplinary study of the lively and interactive presence of the outer world in the depths of the human psyche, landscapes harbor rich recurrences of story and folklore, image and dream that connect us to the places we call home. At over four hundred miles in length and seventy five at its maximum width, the Central Valley provides the world with fruit, vegetables, beef, clothing, petroleum, machinery, and hydroelectric energy. Its cultural and religious diversity is unmatched. When witnessed with a terrapsychological eye, it also reveals itself as a vast, sealed-in repository of tales and events, histories and psychologies, geographies and mythologies that weave together inner and outer soulscapes in patterns discernible to a sensitized ecological imagination.
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Thomas Berry, Dreamer of the Earth : The Spiritual Ecology of the Father of Environmentalism
Ervin Laszlo and Allan Combs
A tribute to the visionary contributions and prophetic writings of Thomas Berry, spiritual ecologist and father of environmentalism. This anthology presents 10 essays from leading philosophers, scientists, and spiritual visionaries--including Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, Duane Elgin, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Ervin Laszlo, and Allan Combs--on the genius of Berry’s work and his quest to resolve our global ecological and spiritual challenges, as well as a little-known but essential essay by Berry himself. Revealing Berry’s insights as far ahead of their time, these essays reiterate the radical nature of his ideas and the urgency of his most important conclusion: that money and technology cannot solve our problems, rather, we must reestablish the indigenous connection with universal consciousness and return to our fundamental spontaneous nature--still evident in our dreams--in order to navigate our ecological challenges successfully.
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The Postconventional Personality: Assessing, Researching, and Theorizing Higher Development
Angela H. Pfaffenberger, Paul W. Marko, and Allan Combs
Postconventional stages of personality development involve growth well beyond the average, and have become a rapidly growing subject of research not only in developmental psychology circles but also in areas such as executive leadership development. This book is the first to bring together many of the major researchers in the field, showcasing diverse perspectives ranging from the spiritual to the corporate. The contributors present research on essential questions about the existence and prevalence of high levels of personal growth, whether such achievement is correlated with other types of psychological growth, whether high levels of growth actually indicate happiness, what kinds of people exhibit these higher levels of development, how they may have developed this expanded perspective, and the characteristics of their viewpoints, abilities, and preoccupations.
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The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore
Debashish Banerji
This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the national school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. The book argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th/20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It establishes that his form of art-embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism, and storytelling through oral allegories-sought a social identity within the inter-subjective context of locality, regionality, nationality, and trans-nationality. The author presents Abanindranath as a creative agent who, through his art, conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and regional subalternity
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A Brief Mythology of Petroleum
Craig Chalquist
This work looks at the history of the petroleum industry and its impact on politics, culture, ecology, and other dimensions of earthly life through the lens of myth. Many of the images clinging to the darkness of oil closely resemble those of the mythic Underworld, including burning rivers and desolate landscapes overseen by Pluto, whose name means "wealth."
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Rebearths: Conversations with a World Ensouled
Craig Chalquist
This anthology contains contributions by authors who study nature, place, land, and Earth up close with tools from a variety of disciplines, including qualitative research, naturalist exploration, philosophy, mythology, and even poetry. By closing the gap between self and world, these essays show the reader how to feel the presence of landscapes, creatures, and things inwardly, an experience that transforms how we regard the world around us.
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The Brain as Archetypal Tree (and Other Neurological Nature Metaphors)
Craig Chalquist
This short paper looks at the brain and nervous system from the standpoint of natural patterns that recur in the natural world and serve us as images and metaphors.
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The Folly of Repetition and the Wisdom of Remembrance: 30 Crucial Neglected Lessons of History
Craig Chalquist
How many times must we repeat the mistakes of the past? This new book describes 30 crucial historical lessons from around the world in clear, lively, readable language.
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Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era
Sean Kelly
With the threat of global climate change, a looming mass extinction of species, and increasingly complex and volatile geopolitical relations, the entire Earth Community has entered a most critical phase of what the author describes as the “Planetary Era.” This era began some five hundred years ago with the conquest of the Americas and the Copernican revolution in cosmology, but it is just now becoming a defining feature of human consciousness on a global scale.
How did the Planetary Era come about, and why was it initiated in the European West? What elements in the evolution of the Western worldview might contribute to the actualization of a sustainable planetary culture? Drawing from a wide range of panoptic, or “big-picture,” thinkers―from Hegel, Teilhard, Jaspers, and Campbell, to Ken Wilber, Richard Tarnas, and Edgar Morin, among others―the author answers such questions and presents his own synthetic theory of the evolution of consciousness, leading to the birth and transformation of the Planetary Era.
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Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era
Sean Kelly
With the threat of global climate change, a looming mass extinction of species, and increasingly complex and volatile geopolitical relations, the entire Earth Community has entered a most critical phase of what the author describes as the “Planetary Era.” This era began some five hundred years ago with the conquest of the Americas and the Copernican revolution in cosmology, but it is just now becoming a defining feature of human consciousness on a global scale.
How did the Planetary Era come about, and why was it initiated in the European West? What elements in the evolution of the Western worldview might contribute to the actualization of a sustainable planetary culture? Drawing from a wide range of panoptic, or “big-picture,” thinkers―from Hegel, Teilhard, Jaspers, and Campbell, to Ken Wilber, Richard Tarnas, and Edgar Morin, among others―the author answers such questions and presents his own synthetic theory of the evolution of consciousness, leading to the birth and transformation of the Planetary Era.
Beginning with a consideration of the fundamental pattern of world history, Sean Kelly reveals the role of a “Great Code” and the turning of a tightening spiral in the evolution of the past two millennia of Western―and increasingly, planetary―consciousness. Along with a vision of the path that has lead to our vexed and complex present, the author offers reason to hope that we are on the threshold of a new countercultural resurgence―a new planetary wisdom culture―that could signal the homecoming for which our troubled world so desperately longs.
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The Spirit of Modern India: Writings in Philosophy, Religion, and Culture
Robert McDermott
This introduction to modern Indian thought establishes the historical context in which Indian thinkers of the past century developed their ideas, showing how those ideas comprise a coherent vision that is both Indian and contemporary. The Spirit of Modern Indiaoffers a full treatment of these ideas in an intelligible and concise approach and format.
The Spirit of Modern India provides a valuable service to those who wish to better understand India and it modern roots.
