Title
The Traditional Roots of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga Practice and his Seven Quartets of TransformationSri
Document Type
Audio File
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Debashish Banerji PhD, did his undergraduate degree in English Literature from Elphinstone College,Bombay, and served as a cultural correspondent for some of the leading English language newspapers of India. Later, he completed his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Louisville, Kentucky, and his Ph.D. in Indian Art History from the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1991-2005, Banerji served as the president of the East-West Cultural Center in Los Angeles., one of the earliest institutions responsible for introducing a scholarly and cultural perspective on India and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo in Southern California. At present, he teaches courses on topics in Indian Philosophy and Psychology and serves in the role of Dean of Academic Affairs at the distance-learning graduate levelUniversityofPhilosophical ResearchinLos Angeles. He is also an adjunct faculty in Art History, teaching courses on South Asian, East Asian and Islamic Art History at the Pasadena City College; and a Research Fellow in the Asian and Comparative Studies department of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS),San Francisco. In these capacities, he has been instrumental in teaching, giving talks, and organizing activities relating to the dissemination of Indian philosophy and culture in the U.S. Banerji has curated a number of exhibitions of Indian and Japanese art and is the author of two books: The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Sage, 2010) and Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformational Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo (DK Printworld and Nalanda International, 2012).
Comments
The Traditional Roots of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga Practice and his Seven Quartets of TransformationSri Aurobindo (1872-1950) practiced and taught a form of yoga which he called Integral Yoga. He described the philosophical and psychological bases of this yoga in his written works. Though these works contain some references to Indian yoga traditions, they steer clear from sectarianism and attempt to develop a universal transpersonal psychology of human becoming, leading to what he called a “supramental” or “divine” life. Yet, at the same time that he was formulating his teachings in these works, he was also maintaining a diary of his own yoga sadhana that was couched in terms of esoteric Sanskrit terminology derived from traditional lineages of yoga. At the outset of his self-reflections, he outlined a seven-pronged system of transformative practice (sapta chatusthaya) which he used to organize his experiments with consciousness in his diaries. By considering the traditional roots of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga practice and their integration in the seven quartets of transformation, I will attempt to arrive at the non-sectarian psychology of the Integral Yoga which Sri Aurobindo taught. The presentation will be based on Sri Aurobindo’s published diaries, The Record of Yoga, his principal work of yoga psychology, The Synthesis of Yoga and my recently published book Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo.