Contemplative Studies is a recent field that endorses first person and third person views into academic discourse. It encourages "scholar-practitioners." Thus subjectivity is involved along with objectivity at the level of contemplative experience.. ...more

Response to Francesca Ferrando's "Philosophical Posthumanism" for the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, April 24, 2021 ...more

Talk given for the Sustainable Societies Conference II: Visions for a Viable Future in a Time of Covid and Climate Calamity organized by the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA on March 19, 2021. ...more

Talk given at a webinar of the Auro University, Surat, Gujarat on Integral Education in Higher Education, held on 6/8/2020, 8:30-10:30 am IST. The talk reflects on the topic from a contemporary standpoint of how we can address its goals today in higher education for relevance in participating in the creation of a future world. ...more

Talk given at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi on August 15, 2008 ...more

Address given at the conference "Spirituality Beyond Religions," Auroville. ...more

Text of a talk delivered at the AUM Conference, Los Angeles, May 2003. ...more

Sri Aurobindo envisaged the goal of human becoming as a transformed society and civilization based on the expressions of an integral consciousness. However, in keeping with the collective dimension of this goal, a transformed society was envisaged by him not merely as the end result of individual transformations, but as the dynamically transforming life-context or field which would allow and facilitate individual transformation. Seen from this standpoint, the social discipline of education, meant to “socialize,” “in-form” and inculcate the cultural, knowledge and epistemological skills of the social habitus for individual engagement takes on a changed meaning related to a new phenomenology, epistemology and teleology of human and social becoming. Integral Education then becomes a socially acknowledged and authorized praxis of the Integral Yoga or at least the pedagogical condition for its social possibility and collective transformation. ...more

A revised transcript of a talk given at the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco in 2008 and carried in the February 2010 issue of Sraddha, a journal of the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan, Kolkata. In this, I bring into dialog the epistemic boundaries of the western academic discipline of Psychology and Sri Aurobindo's formulation of Integral Yoga, so as to reflect on the disciplinary formation of a field of Integral Psychology. What would such a field hold out and how would it impact the existing assumptions of both Psychology and Yoga? The insertion of such a discipline into the academy is not a trivial task. It is a project fraught with danger and possibility, which needs to be carefully negotiated. ...more

In these last chapters of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo draws together the threads that he has introduced earlier in the work, leading to his conclusion. Though Jan Smuts was yet to coin the word "Holism" to encapsulate the idea that a directed tendency towards the formation of ever-larger aggregates is observable in Nature, each such distinct stage marked by the presence of an identity and properties exceeding those of the sum of their parts, Sri Aurobindo's model of History follows this course. Indeed, this teleology follows naturally from Sri Aurobindo's master-idea of the progressive manifestation of intrinsic spiritual Oneness in Time, expressing itself politically as the drive towards world-union. ...more