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The Complete Yoga The Lineage of Integral Education Jim Ryan The word “integral” has entered the vocabulary of higher education. It has no single definition, admitting of a myriad of meanings and understandings in practice. But many in the West respond to the word nearly instinctively, as if it provides a resonance of possibility that is lacking in contemporary experience, not only in the educational realm. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the meaning of the word Integral as it is inflected in the Integral Philosophy and Integral Yoga of Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri, who drew his central insights from the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo and from the ideas of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa (referred to as The Mother. Also referenced as M. Richards.) (I term these three and their followers as “Integralists.”) Taking Chaudhuri’s notion of Integral for this discussion on education is by no means arbitrary. Chaudhuri founded the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 1968, a graduate school, which was dedicated to the ideal of providing an integral education in the West.1 The word, Integral, in the tradition of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother is a term that comes from the Sanskrit word purna, which means complete. When Sri Aurobindo examined many of the ancient yogas of India, he found that each focused on a particular aspect of the human being. One yoga might focus on the physical body (hatha yoga), one might focus on the emotional (bhakti yoga), one might focus on a factor of knowledge (jnana yoga), or one might focus on action (karma yoga.) Sri Aurobindo, acknowledging and affirming the positive elements of these many yogas, endeavored to develop and practice an “Integral Yoga,” a “Complete Yoga,” that would serve the complete human being. I will not dwell here on certain of the basic and unique philosophical assumptions that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother made. I will touch on them only later, in order to put them in proper context. For now let me summarize the notion 47 48 Jim Ryan of education that began its development with Sri Aurobindo, continued forcefully with The Mother, was adopted and formed in practice in higher education by Chaudhuri, and which has lived, sometimes hidden and sometimes overtly, at the California Institute of Integral Studies since Chaudhuri’s death in 1975. There may be numerous facets to the ideal integral education, but three stand out. Firstly, the Integralists believed that education should be of the whole human being; it must involve the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual. Secondly, it must be global and have reference to the, “total human situation” (Chaudhuri, 1977. p. 78). Thirdly, it must attempt to surmount the contradictions and antagonisms inherent in ordinary human cultural and philosophical positioning. In regard to the education of the “whole human being,” the elements of the physical, emotional, and mental education as outlined by the “Integral tradition,” as defined here, are fairly easily translatable to innovative Western educators. I will outline these briefly later. But the usual stumbling block among educators in the West would be with the word spiritual in the litany. For the secular minded this word may sound too religious or too New Age. Naturally, words like, “the Divine,” or, “God,” (also, of course, “Goddess”) which Dr. Chaudhuri, The Mother and Sri Aurobindo freely used would alienate the secular academic even further. Both The Mother and Chaudhuri, however, made efforts to be clear about this word spiritual, which stands for something that is, in the end, indefinable. They took pains to make the concept more accessible to the more secularly inclined, as neither of them saw a definite demarcation between what should be considered spiritual, and what should be considered secular. In regard to the spiritual ideal, The Mother talked about a person’s, “frame of consciousness beyond the frame of his ordinary life” (Aurobindo and Richards, 1966. p. 72). She states in regard to the spiritual that: This discovery very generally is associated with a mystic feeling, a religious life, because it is religions particularly that have been occupied with this aspect of life. But it need not be necessarily so: the mystic notion of God may be replaced by the more philosophical notion of truth and still the discovery will remain essentially the same, only the road leading to it may be taken even by the most intransigent positivist .” (Aurobindo & Richards, 1966...

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