Date: 07/22/2018
Come one and all and bring your friends, partner and neighbors to a gathering in which favorite poems will be shared. Or you can come and simply listen and enjoy. The number of poems one can read will depend on the number of people attending who want to share their poetry. You may read one or several. The host Sally Love Saunders has a passion for poetry and gathering people around to write and read. Today we will simply read and listen. Hope to have you there.
Sally Love Saunders is a widely published Poet, Poetry Therapist, Lecturer, Free-Lance Writer and Workshop Leader. Sally’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Times International, The London Times, The Denver Post, and among over three hundred other anthologies, magazines and newspapers. She has received many prizes for her poetry. “A Johnny Appleseed Poet,” Sally travels all over the country running workshops. It is her absolute conviction that “Everyone is a Poet!” Sally has developed fun techniques to help individuals get in touch with their own unique creativity.
refreshments to follow
5 Fulton bus line; 14 steps
2650 Fulton Street at corner of 3rd Avenue, San Francisco
Date: 07/29/2018
During the Bhakti Movement era, the bold and compelling poetry of the great Indian poet-saints made religion accessible to all irrespective of language, social status, age, or gender. Aks & Lakshmi present the love, peace, and pluralistic vision of bhakti poets such as Adi Shankara, Kabir, Mirabai, and Thyagaraja, in Sanskrit as well as vernacular languages such as Hindi and Telugu. Bhajans and stotras (devotional song and hymn) interconnect with storytelling and visual media in a celebration of ecstatic devotion. With live singing, keyboard, electronic instruments and English narration, Aks & Lakshmi maintain the poetic authenticity of these works, while reinventing them with contemporary musical arrangements in World, Pop and Folk styles.
Aks & Lakshmi are a composer and vocalist duo who specialize in Electronic Bhakti Music. They are pioneers in blending Raga influences with electronic and pop genres to create powerful spiritual experiences. Aks is a composer, producer and vocalist who composes for albums, film & TV, and video games. Trained by Oscar winner AR Rahman, Aks is best known for creating multi-layered electronic orchestrations and lyrical melodies. Lakshmi is a vocalist-scholar who brings singing, scholarship, and storytelling onto one platform. With an M.A. in Religious Studies from Stanford University, she performs and writes on the great Indian poet-saints. As guest artists at Princeton, Stanford, and the Global Conference on World’s Religions (Montreal), the content of their sacred music holds strong educational value. Based in San Jose, CA, Aks & Lakshmi tour in North America and beyond. Audiences describe their music as “healing,” “meditative” and “transforming.”
You can hear their music on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/EclipseNirvana
Date: 08/05/2018
Lives of great men are not lived on the surface for all to see. But those who look beyond the veil can sense a strong undercurrent that controls the surface. In this presentation we will watch a documentary Lopa made on the life of Sri Aurobindo, keeping these two streams in mind. The events of his time, the circumstances of his family, his work-life, and spiritual experiences are the background upon which we will see unfold his inner life. This inner life will be expressed in his speeches, his books and discussions with disciples. When the Teacher is reticent we infer about him from his pupils. The documentary has many voices, and we get to see Sri Aurobindo through many eyes. We will situate him in the turbulent history of his time. We will see how it shaped him, and how he shaped it. We will see his contributions in the field of culture, Indian nationalism, and yoga. We will greet the Mother as his collaborator and see the ashram grow around them. Thus will we together celebrate his birth anniversary, although such men are never born and never die. The presentation will start with an introduction that will put us in contact with Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness. It will be followed by the half-hour documentary and discussion afterwards.
Lopa Mukherjee is a writer and documentary maker. She did her schooling at the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in Pondicherry. She has published three books and has made several documentaries on topics such as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s lives and on cultural, social and spiritual subjects. Lopa’s books include “The Soma People,” story of a man’s spiritual journey in mystic India; “Three Rivers of Tears,” the formation of nations from the Indian subcontinent and “East West Crossroads,” short stories of the cultural exchange between India and America. Lopa has presented on a variety of themes in several organizations, including the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco, and at SASP, Lodi. She also teaches Sanskrit and spiritual literature written in Sanskrit.
Date: 08/12/2018
Sri Aurobindo, his teaching and his ashram have been characterized in a variety of ways in the common imagination, many of them erroneous. For his contribution to humanity and our times to have the impact that he hoped for, it is important to situate him and his teaching correctly within its larger social, cultural, political and spiritual contexts. This talk will consider several such common misconceptions, their causes and their realities, in an attempt to sketch his enduring legacy for humanity in our times.
Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophy and Culture and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. He holds a PhD in Indian Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since the 1970s, Banerji has been a student of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s teaching.
Date: 08/19/2018
Occult, profound comes all experience,
Marvel is ever new, miracle divine. Savitri II:VI
In this talk, we will look at the Mother as the inheritor of Western occult lineages, which passed to her from her teacher in France, Max Theon. Theon was the co-founder of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Cosmic Movement, two Western esoteric orders which traced their descent back through Rosicrucian, Freemasonic, Jewish, Hermetic and Egyptian mystery traditions. All these were intimately involved in the evolution of magic as a spiritual discipline in the West. To see the Mother in this light is to realize that she carried within her the accumulated wisdom of Western magic, which resonates wonderfully well with the tantric wisdom Sri Aurobindo incorporated into his own synthesis of yogas.
Stephen L. Julich is a graduate of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), receiving a PhD in East-West Psychology in 2013. He is currently the EWP Program Manager at CIIS and adjunct professor at the University of Philosophical Research (UPR) in Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on topics in Jungian Psychology.
