CIIS Faculty Publications
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Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind
Craig Chalquist
Ecotherapy, or applied ecopsychology, encompasses a broad range of nature-based methods of psychological healing, grounded in the crucial fact that people are inseparable from the rest of nature and nurtured by healthy interaction with the Earth. Leaders in the field, including Robert Greenway, and Mary Watkins, contribute essays that take into account the latest scientific understandings and the deepest indigenous wisdom. Other key thinkers, from Bill McKibben to Richard Louv to Joanna Macy, explore the links among ecotherapy, spiritual development, and restoring community. As mental-health professionals find themselves challenged to provide hard evidence that their practices actually work, and as costs for traditional modes of psychotherapy rise rapidly out of sight, this book offers practitioners and interested lay readers alike a spectrum of safe, effective alternative approaches backed by a growing body of research.
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Storied Lives: Discovering and Deepening Your Personal Myth
Craig Chalquist
It has been claimed that we live in a time without myth. But if C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Momaday, and a host of other preeminent minds are correct, then myth is always with us and all around us as the basic psychic weave that holds our relations with ourselves, each other, and the living world. The real question is whether we resonate to the weave of myth consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or involuntarily, even tragically. This book shows how specific myths play out from cradle to grave. Personal accounts of discovering and working with these myths enliven the book's emphasis on refashioning these plot lines from the inside out.
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The Tears of Llorona: A Californian Odyssey of Place, Myth, and Homecoming
Craig Chalquist
California has shimmered alluringly as paradise and Promised Land since long before the projections of Hollywood and the slick brochures of real estate developers. Those who answered the call to adventure have been many: conquistadors and missionaries, lovers and dreamers, swindlers and salesmen, builders and destroyers. Yet in all the bruising centuries of exploration and exploitation, few witnesses, if any, have attended to the inside story of this haunted seaside place.
When California native Craig Chalquist awakened from a life-changing dream to hear the troubled spirit of his homeland, he set forth on El Camino Real, the fabled King's Highway linking San Diego with Sonoma, on a journey of research, reflection, and anguishing recollection to listen in on stories and persistent images still abroad at continent's edge. As he followed in the footsteps of Junípero Serra, first missionary of California, he found himself followed in turn by the centuries-old mystery of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of Mexican folklore, in her search for her lost children along the conquered coast. Who was she? How had she come to be here? And what did she have to do with the land? Come along on an odyssey through the heart of enshadowed California, keeper of nightmares and inspirer of dreams, and into a deep exploration of the resonances and echoes and "ecological complexes" that bind us all to the places we call home
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Consciousness Explained Better: Towards an Integral Understanding of the Multifaceted Nature of Consciousness
Allan Combs
Consciousness is explored as a living stream of lucid experience composed of the essence of the moments of our lives. Grounded in Ken Wilber's model, consciousness is explained from many points of view: its historical evolution, its growth in the individual, its mystical dimensions, and the meaning of enlightenment.
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The Bhagavad Gita and the West
Robert McDermott
The main body of The Bhagavad Gita and the West consists of two lecture courses by Rudolf Steiner: “The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul” and “The Esoteric Significance of the Bhagavad Gita.” In the first course, his main purpose, as McDermott shows, is to integrate the flower of Hindu spirituality into his view of the evolution of consciousness and the pivotal role played in it by the Mystery of Golgotha—the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Steiner views Krishna as a great spiritual teacher and the Bhagavad Gita as a preparation, though still abstract, for the coming of Christ and the Christ impulse as the living embodiment of the World, Law, and Devotion, represented by the three Hindu streams of Veda, Sankhya, and Yoga. For him, the epic poem of the Bhagavad Gita represents the “fully ripened fruit” of Hinduism, whereas Paul is related but represents “the seed of something entirely new.” In the last lecture, Steiner reveals Krishna as the sister soul of Adam, incarnated as Jesus, and claims Krisha’s Yoga teachings streamed from Christ into Paul. In the second lecture course, given five months later, Steiner engages the text of the Bhagavad Gita on its own terms, as signaling the beginning of a new soul consciousness. To aid in the understanding of both these important cycles, this volume includes the complete text of the Bhagavad Gita in Eknath
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Deep California: Images and Ironies of Cross and Sword on El Camino Real
Craig Chalquist
California has been invaded by three imperial powers: Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Deep California examines in depth the lingering psychological traumas and motifs emanating from that long history of conquest. These unhealed events have not been left in the past: they recur symbolically again and again, growing in intensity as the overbuilt land and its distracted occupiers unconsciously but definitively demonstrate that environmental justice and social justice can no longer be thought of as separate.Pacing crusaders and colonizers from county to county along El Camino Real, Deep California studies the lingering impact of continuous oppression of people and places as images and themes of displacement and exile filter down into architecture, agriculture, politics, art, culture, psychology, and even folklore and dream. Yet within the shadows cast over California also dwell resistance, humor, irony, tragedy, and hope for more heartfelt and soulful connections to this story-rich "land of the sundown sea.
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The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies
Jorge Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman
Can we take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism, without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact? The contributors to this volume argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the participatory turn, which proposes that individuals and communities have an integral and irreducible role in bringing forth ontologically rich religious worlds. They explore the ways this approach weaves together and gives voice to a number of robust trends in contemporary religious scholarship, including the renewed study of lived spirituality, the postmodern emphasis on embodied and gendered subjectivity, the admission of alternate epistemic perspectives, the irreducibility of religious pluralism, and the pragmatist emphasis on transformation all trends that raise serious challenges to the currently prevalent linguistic paradigm. The first part of the book situates the participatory turn in the context of contemporary Religious Studies; the second part shows how this approach can be applied to various global traditions, ancient and contemporary, from Western esotericism to Jewish mysticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism, and socially engaged Buddhism.
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Mani & Service: Classics from the "Journal for Anthroposophy"
Robert McDermott
Means of serving in the world through spiritual science arose from the generous gifts of Rudolf Steiner. Such service requires ongoing inner development and presence to one’s soul life as the medium of service, creatively and spiritually. Steiner was deeply aware and inwardly present to the reality of the spiritual tradition that inspires active service. The individual known as Mani, a third-century Persian mystic, and the spiritual streams that flowed from his teachings―the Cathars, Templars, and others―had the special purpose of "spiritualizing service," in that the spiritual worlds become the conscious wholeness through which we help others. Without the capacity to comprehend the nature of this wholeness and how to develop it, all of our attempts to serve can fall into mere functionality. The articles in this volume (previously published in the Journal of Anthroposophy) present a picture of Manicheism, which Steiner held in high esteem. The authors discuss the long-forgotten cosmology and practices of Mani, which hold important seeds for the future; the inner capacities inspired by Manicheism that relate to serving others; caring for the wounded soul; being able to help others in the most selfless ways; and working through the heart. Mani & Service presents these articles together for the first time.
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Terrapsychology: Reengaging the Soul of Place
Craig Chalquist
Why do some places restore us while others deplete us? Why do certain figures out of folklore and myth haunt specific locales? Do borders around a nation parallel borders around the heart? Do wastelands and depleted landscapes delineate gaps in the collective imagination? Why have so many indigenous cultures insisted on the world's aliveness? And if the world is alive, how does it let us know? To explore such questions, Craig Chalquist calls for a new perspective of deep encounter, "terrapsychology," which shows us how to listen into recurring symbolic resonances between the "inner" person and the presence, voice, or "soul" of places and things which embody the animation of the world. In this perspective the health of the places where we live corresponds closely to the pockets of health inside and between us. Terrapsychology strives to counter the ancient war on nature one heartfelt dialog at a time.
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Integral Psychology: Yoga, Growth, and Opening the Heart
Brant Cortright
Integral Psychology connects Eastern and Western approaches to psychology and healing. Psychology in the East has focused on our inner being and spiritual foundation of the psyche. Psychology in the West has focused on our outer being and the wounding of the body-heart-mind and self. Each requires the other to complete it, and in bringing them together an integral view of psychology comes into view. The classical Indian yogas are used as a way to see psychotherapy: psychotherapy as behavior change or karma yoga; psychotherapy as mindfulness practice or jnana yoga; psychotherapy as opening the heart or bhakti yoga. Finally, an integral approach is suggested that synthesizes traditional Western and Eastern practices for healing, growth, and transformation.
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Revisioning Society & Culture (Classic Articles from The Journal for Anthroposophy)
Robert McDermott
Throughout his life, Rudolf Steiner stressed repeatedly that the most crucial task facing the modern human being is that of transforming our dominant ways of knowing the world. This emphasis is the red thread that runs through and connects all of Steiner’s writings, lectures, artistic work, and practical endeavors. Steiner spoke of this transformation of knowing as developing the capacity to obtain genuine knowledge of the spirit. He spelled out in great detail what this entailed and its concrete implications for all of life. The articles in this issue of the journal point, each in its own way and with respect to a particular social/cultural concern, to the necessity of this fundamental transformation of our knowing capacities. Everything depends, however, on the development of qualitative, spiritual capacities of knowing. In the words of Rudolf Steiner, which Virginia Sease quotes:
To find living ideas, living concepts, living viewpoints, living feelings, not dead theories―that is the task of this age.
And that also may be one way of describing the crucial task of the cultural sphere in Steiner’s conception of the threefold social order. It is the primary function of the cultural sphere to provide the living knowledge of meaning, value, purpose, and qualities that can guide and set a context for the humane functioning of the political and economic spheres. The threefold social order in this sense is especially relevant to America’s influence, for both good and ill, in today’s world, and has special relevance to this article on America. Steiner warned after World War I:
The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the threefold social order it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth.
For those today who are convinced, and have weighty reasons for so thinking, that the Doubles have come overwhelmingly to the fore in present day America, Virginia Sease also reminds us of the particular spiritual realities with which we may still work in the hope that, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the better angels of our nature” may yet prevail.
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Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams: Reflections on American Ideals
Don Johnson
Finding his idealism challenged by the reactionary forces that have proliferated in the post-9/11 world, Don Hanlon Johnson felt a need to recover more sober visions of hope amid the many reasons for despair and cynicism. Everyday Hopes, Utopian Dreams is a bracing backward turn toward the diverse and often conflicting visions passed down to Johnson by his immigrant ancestors who settled in the Sacramento Valley in the nineteenth century. Through stories about neighborhood, local churches, hunting and fishing, driving, cooking, heavy construction, and schools, he examines what in our forebears' ideals continue to nurture us and what aspects of those ideals carry germs of personal and social harm. Johnson's descriptions offer a lens for recovering the deep soul of America—one that deserves attention as a model for progressives and anyone concerned the directions our country has taken in response to 9/11.
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Anthroposophy & Imagination: Classics from The Journal For Anthroposophy, Issue # 76, summer 2006
Robert McDermott
In what way is imagination true? And what can it do for us? Like the first volume in this series (Meeting Rudolf Steiner) this volume, Anthroposophy and Imagination, is comprised of outstanding articles selected from many years of the Journal of Anthroposophy. The selections in this volume are articles on Anthroposophy and Owen Barfield, J.R.R. Tolkien, W.B. Yeats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saul Bellow, Sigmund Freud, Novalis, Georg Kühlewind, and others. This series provides an invaluable look into the history and development of Anthroposophy and spiritual scientific thinking.
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Contours of Modernity: An Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art
Debashish Banerji
Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder's Hall of SOKA University in Aliso Viejo, CA. from Feb.1- April 1 2005. The catalog features fine prints of the 39 paintings exhibited.
These paintings are representative of works from the 1970's to the present by twenty leading artists from India and of Indian origin. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Southern California, displayed works by major contemporary Indian artists including celebrated founders of modern Indian art such as M.F. Husian, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay and G.R. Santosh, younger leading contemporaries such as Rameshwar Broota, T. Vaikuntham, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vasundhara Tewari, Surender Kaur, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Sohan Qadri, Anjan Chakrabarty,Biswarup Datta and Paresh Maity and diasporic artists such as Allan DeSouza, Sudha Achar and Amrita Banerji. The catalog carries an excellent histrorical oveview and contextualization of contemporary Indian art by the curator and biographical sketches of the artists.
The text brings out the intent of the curator to promote an international dialog with modernity, with its critical dimensions of displacement of culture, technological alientation, commercialism, mass conditioning, globalization and future possibilities; and the prints stimulate an intellectual and visual experience with a sense of socio-cultural affirmation, syncretic spontaneity for life, hope and regeneration and provide approaches towards understanding new ways of being modern in a global world.
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Mind in Time: The Dynamics of Thought, Reality, and Consciousness (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences)
Allan Combs, Mark Germine, and Ben Goertzel Ben Goertzel
This volume presents a collection of essays that all share a common concern with time, process and consciousness. The chapters represent a variety of different perspectives and the authors span the disciplines of psychology, mathematics, physics and psychiatry.
