Haridas Chaudhuri(May, 1913-1975), Bengal

Bengal

Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...

i integral

Integral thought

Integral is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and many other areas regarding a comprehensive synthesizing transdisciplinary framework or multidimensional perspective to a given field...

 philosopher, was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo , born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose , was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress...

 and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies is a private institution of higher education founded in 1968 and based in San Francisco, California. It currently operates in three locations just south of the Civic Center district...

 (CIIS). He was born in Kolkata

Kolkata

Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...

. He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta

University of Calcutta

The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...

 from where he earned his doctorate in Indian philosophy. He became a professor and later the chair of philosophy at the Krishnagar College, a constituent college of the University of Calcutta.

California Institute of Integral Studies

In 1951, Dr. Chaudhuri was invited by Frederic Spiegelberg

Frederic Spiegelberg

Frederic Spiegelberg was a Stanford University professor of religion. A friend of Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Jung, he participated in Jung's Eranos symposia and lectured in Jung's institute in Zurich. Paul Tillich helped Spiegelberg escape Germany in 1937 after Spiegelberg was fired...

 of Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 to join the staff of the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, having been recommended for that post by Sri Aurobindo during the final year of Aurobindo's earthly life. He accepted the invitation, eager to implement in a Western educational institution the integral approach to education that he had developed as a student of Sri Aurobindo. Soon after his arrival in San Francisco, Dr. Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which emerged an educational branch later to become California Institute of Integral Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies is a private institution of higher education founded in 1968 and based in San Francisco, California. It currently operates in three locations just south of the Civic Center district...

. Over the past 30 years, the Institute's original emphasis on Asian religions and cultures evolved to include comparative and cross-cultural studies in philosophy, religion, psychology, counseling, cultural anthropology, organizational studies, health studies, and the arts. The influence of both Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri (and their early proteges in San Francisco) upon the emergence of Asian philosophies and ways of knowing within the American cultural mainstream would be difficult to overestimate. They both worked tirelessly until the ends of their lives in this world to bring a truly integral perspective to the philosophical, scientific, and religious mainstream of the incipient world culture, and in so doing did great service to the memories of their own teachers, and all who were privileged to learn from them or to know them.

Integral Psychology

Chaudhuri was the first to publish in the West on Integral Psychology, during the 1970s. His version of Integral Psychology has almost nothing in common with that of Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American author who has written about mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and developmental psychology. His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory. In 1998, he founded the Integral Institute, for teaching and applications of Integral theory.-Biography:Ken Wilber was...

, who has written a book of the same name.

Bahman Shirazi

Bahman Shirazi

Bahman A.K. Shirazi is former director of graduate studies at California Institute of Integral Studies. He has been actively affiliated with that organisation since 1983. His doctoral dissertation, "Self in Integral Psychology" was the first of its kind in the field of integral psychology...

 of the California Institute of Integral Studies has defined Integral Psychology as "a psychological system concerned with exploring and understanding the totality of the human phenomenon....(which) at its breadth, covers the entire body-mind-psyche-spirit spectrum, while at its depth...encompasses the previously explored unconscious and the conscious dimensions of the psyche, as well as the supra-conscious dimension traditionally excluded from psychological inquiry". (Shirazi 2001) In a paper on the subject he reviews Indra Sen

Indra Sen

Indra Sen MA, LL.B., PH.D. was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, psychologist, author, and educator, and the founder of Integral Psychology as an academic discipline....

's, Chaudhuri's, and Wilber's definitions, as well as developing the ideas of Chaudhuri.

Integral Psychology

• Chaudhuri, Haridas. (1975). "Psychology: Humanistic and transpersonal". Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15 (1), 7-15.
• ----- (1977). The Evolution of Integral Consciousness. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books. 1989 paperback reprint: ISBN 0-8356-0494-2
• Shirazi, Bahman (2001) "Integral psychology, metaphors and processes of personal integration", Cornelissen, Matthijs (Ed.) Consciousness and Its Transformation, Pondicherry: http://ipi.org.in/texts/ip2/ip2-1.2-.htm