Date: 07/21/2019
Internationally acclaimed dance artist, choreographer, and scholar Farima Berenji is passionate when she speaks of the role dance has played in her life. At her core, she believes dance rituals invoke healing and harmony. This was the legacy of these dances but over time, people have lost connection to them. She feels strongly that bringing these ancient rituals back to life will help bring positive change to our lives.
Farima Berenji is an award winning, internationally acclaimed performing artist, instructor, dance ethnologist, choreographer, and archeologist. Recognized as one of few world experts and scholars of Persian dance history, Farima infuses spirituality into her dance and teachings to impassion, empower, and inspire. Farima travels worldwide to research, perform, teach, and inspire dynamic creativity and rejuvenation through dance. Farima is founder and artistic director of the Simorgh Dance Collective, a member of the International Dance Council (CID-UNESCO), and a 2018 TEDx lecturer.
Date: 07/28/2019
By letting go of collective consciousness we enter the realm of pure awareness. We focus our awareness on the natural function of breathing. As we surrender in the Present Moment constantly attentive to our breathing, we sense the Divine Manifestation of That which we naturally are, we sense the Source of all Creation manifesting through us. The talk will point out typical ways in which we avoid Being. In our avoidance of Being we identify with thought processes which we have assumed are vital to our existence. This meditation goes to the essence of each individual’s experience of Being. There are no “techniques” to follow or theories to understand. This meditation affords each individual the ability to come home to the Self. This Self-realization opens the consciousness to That Divine Source which created and runs this universe.
Ted Nordquist worked with Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri from 1971 – 1973 at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), then the California Institute of Asian Studies (CIAS). Ted’s parents, Gladys and Leo Nordquist, were members of Cultural Integration Fellowship since the mid-1960s and Leo Nordquist was Chairman of the Board of CIAS until his death in 1976. In addition to Asian Studies, Dr. Chaudhuri was Ted’s spiritual guide beginning in 1969. Other influences in Ted’s life were Mahatma Gandhi, Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Aurobindo.
Ted taught at the University of Uppsala, Institute of Religious History, from 1976 to 1985. He founded Sweden’s first tofu manufacturing plant in 1980 and Northern Europe’s first non-dairy soy-based frozen dessert in 1988. Ted moved his Swedish family, his wife Anne-Marie and their three children, to Sonoma, CA in 1994. He continues to work developing non-dairy yogurts.
Date: 08/04/2019
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri is a revelatory mantric epic poem of spiritual challenge. Its writing became Sri Aurobindo’s major literary work which he continued to expand and perfect until his last days. The first known telling of the story of Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of love conquering death. Sri Aurobindo viewed the characters not as allegory but as incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch. They take human bodies in order to help man and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.
The Mother has referred to Savitri as “the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo’s vision” and as “a mantra for the transformation of the world.”
Rita Pease is president of Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF), which was founded in 1951 by her parents, Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri, to promote the interchange of ideas between East and West. Seeking a dynamic synthesis of the cultural and spiritual values of all people, CIF teaches the complementarity of the world’s great religions and philosophies and celebrates our unity in diversity.
Date: 08/11/2019
Sri Aurobindo was an exemplar of Spiritual Knowledge, Action, and Love, all three within the evolution of consciousness. In his life and thought each yoga included the other two. He exemplified all three in response to his, and our, time in history—a time for syntheses of human and divine, spiritual and material, ancient and future, and India and the West.
Robert McDermott, Ph.D. president emeritus of California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), has published extensively on Sri Aurobindo, including his editions Sri Aurobindo (with Haridas Chaudhuri, International Philosophical Quarterly, 1972) of The Essential Aurobindo and Six Pillars: Introductions to the Major Works of Sri Aurobindo. He was secretary of the American Academy of Religion, Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the Open University, and director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Project for the Study of Hinduism and Buddhism. With Debashish Banerji he is writing Sri Aurobindo and Modern Thought.
