150 Years of Sri Aurobindo: The Pioneer of Integral Consciousness

September 23-30, 2023

In honor of the 150th Anniversary of Sri Aurobindo's birth, the East-West Psychology and Transformative Inquiry departments have planned a joint week-long period of celebration through conferences, music, theater, film and food.

Bookended by two multi-day conferences, events will take place both in-person at Namaste Hall and online. Find the schedule of events, conference overviews and registration links below. Access the full Digital Conference Brochure.

Conference #1: Sustainability and Contemplative Civilization: The Integral Vision of Sri Aurobindo

• Cost: FREE
• Locations: LIVE at Namaste Hall & Streamed Online via Zoom

Register for the Online Events

Register for the In-Person Events

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Conference #1 Overview

This two-day hybrid conference will engage with the possibilities, problems and potential of a sustainable civilization based on contemplative praxis of deep relationality and extended identity as implicit in the vision and teaching of Sri Aurobindo and as explicit in the experimental community of Auroville.

The contemporary imperative of sustainability has produced a wide array of proposed solutions. Most are a pragmatic patchwork that envision resource reduction or replacement while continuing modern human aims of global production, distribution, and consumption supporting a competitive ontology of ownership. A few instead identify the problem of sustainability as inextricably linked with human aims and lifestyles, and recommend scaling down the human footprint as well as peaceable coexistence with the non-human and non-living entities of the earth. Such visions often veer towards a technophobic return to nature, a rural or primitive nomadic romanticism opposing the narrative of modern progress. In most of these cases, the boundaries of the human are taken for granted, even when there is a refusal of human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism.

This conference will examine the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother as a way to reconcile, expand, or replace these approaches. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was a modern Indian teacher of a form of yoga philosophy and praxis, which he named integral yoga, whose aim was a realized redefinition of the human based an expanded identification of the self with cosmos and beyond. His spiritual partner and collaborator (in yogic parlance, Shakti) Mirra Alfassa, also called The Mother, gave practical form to some of these ideas about ecology, technology, culture, religion, polity and economy in Auroville, the international site for individual and collective transformation she founded in 1968. Auroville continues as an experimental utopian community in-the-making with many problems both internal and external, but The Mother conceived of it as a model town for a sustainable civilization of the future based on human redefinition and transformation. It may hold an ideal for praxis that is worth considering in relation to the problematics of our times.

Conference #2: The Emergence of Integral Consciousness: Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, C. G. Jung, Teilhard de Chardin

• Co-Sponsored by: The Jean Gebser Society and the Transformative Inquiry Department at CIIS
• Cost: Non-Students: $95 | Students: $25
• Locations: LIVE at Namaste Hall & Streamed Online via Zoom

Register for the Online & In-Person Conference (Non-Student Price for Entire Conference 9/27-9/30 - $95)

Register for the Online & In-Person Conference (Student Price for Entire Conference 9/27-9/30 - $25)

Register for the Online Conference (9/27 & 9/28 Only - $25)

Conference #2 Overview

We are at a crossroads of consciousness in which our current way of thinking is no longer serving the world; in fact, it has brought us to the brink of ecological and spiritual destruction. But there is hope. Visionary thinkers such as Gebser, Aurobindo, Jung, and Teillard de Chardin all foresee the emergence of a new structure of consciousness beyond the limits of rational thought–an integral or supramental consciousness that brings about a concretion of the spiritual–the manifestation of heaven on earth. Join us as we usher in the dawn of integral consciousness.