Debashish Banerji, PhD, is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is author of Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternatate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century. His newest anthology is titled Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures.
Here he proposes psychological science can be applied to the understanding of the many different approaches and methods of yoga. This will entail William James’ notion of “radical empiricism” as well as participant-observer methodologies. Researchers will be expected to analyze their own practice in a scholarly fashion. The hermeneutic form of inquiry acknowledges the creative role of the observer in developing new interpretations. The Yoga Diaries of Aurobindo serve as an example of what is possible.
(Recorded on May 22, 2019)
Published on June 9, 2019