Date: 02/16/2020
Date: 02/23/2020
Along with Sri Aurobindo, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram has been a major inspiration behind the founders of the Cultural Integration Fellowship: Mrs. Bina Chaudhuri and Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri. The Mother was not only the spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo but also his collaborator in the formulation of Integral Yoga. In fact, it is cardinal for the practitioners of Integral Yoga to collaborate with the force of the Divine Mother, which the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram was stated to have represented. But who was the Mother in her physical manifestation? Where did she come from? Where was she born? How did she spend her childhood and teenage years? What were her spiritual accomplishments before she joined Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry? What made her to come to Pondicherry? How did her role evolve in the ashram? How did she conduct the affairs of the ashram? We addressed some of these questions in the last few years when we gathered to celebrate her birthdays. We will continue expanding on her biography this year as well as we celebrate her one-hundred-and-forty-third birthday.
A scholar-practitioner of Integral Yoga and author of The Evolution of Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramakrishna, and Swami Vivekananda, Kundan Singh, PhD, is Core Doctoral Faculty at the Hindu University of America. He was earlier the Executive Core Faculty at Sofia University and Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Theological Union. He has presented extensively at national and international conferences, and has authored many journal articles and chapters in edited-books.
Date: 03/01/2020
The Yemenites are considered to be one of the most ancient of Jewish communities. Local folklore ascribes their arrival to Yemen because Moses forbade some malcontents from entering the Promised Land. Despite only sporadic contact with the outside world for at least one thousand years and periodic cruel and heavy-handed treatment at the hands of the fanatical Shiite clergy, these long-suffering but proud, dignified, and God-fearing Jews remained unswerving in their religious beliefs. The Jews of Yemen managed to preserve ancient and unique traditions in a relatively unadulterated form up to the present day.
In this Power Point/DVD presentation, we will trace the history and culture of the Yemenite Jews from hoary antiquity to “Operation On Wings of Eagles” (1950), the airlift of some 40,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel. Some time will be devoted to a study of a fascinating group of Bedouin Jews from the former East Aden Protectorate known today in Israel as the Habbanim of Moshav Bareket.
Educator, writer, and Yiddish translator, Ken Blady was born in Paris, France, and grew up in Chassidic Brooklyn where he attended yeshivas and rabbinical seminary. A San Francisco Bay Area resident since 1972, Ken has a BA in History from the UC Berkeley and an MA in Clinical Counseling from California State University East Bay. He is the author of “The Jewish Boxers’ Hall of Fame,” “Jewish Communities in Exotic Places,” and translator of several works from Yiddish. A popular lecturer on a variety of Jewish themes, Ken has been featured on a number of radio and TV talk shows and educational programs, including The Voice of Israel and The History Channel.
Date: 03/08/2020
Date: 03/15/2020
No diver has ever reached the bottom of the ocean of love, but he has been rewarded with many pearls on the way. This topic is as inexhaustible as love itself. Love is a powerful emotion that transforms the person who gives it to others. It also transforms the person who is capable of receiving love. Love comes in all forms, and it is one of the most natural instincts in all sentient beings. It is not confined to one person, or a handful; it is for all peoples, and all denizens of the earth. When we are born, we start loving before we are conscious of anything. We are better defined as: I love – therefore I am. Every culture has at least one god and goddess of love with many adventures woven around them. These myths are playing out from time immemorial in us, in animals, in mountains, rivers, trees, and every sentient creature. We embody archetypes of love who are forcing us to walk through a fire trail, or a path covered with rose petals, and emerge on the other side purified and reborn. In this presentation, we will see the many faces of Love, hear some stories and see some videos on the power of love, and meditate on the opening of the heart chakra.
Lopa Mukherjee is a writer, documentary maker and also a student of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, CIIS. She did her schooling at the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in Pondicherry. She has published four 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 newest book is a collection of imagined myths that revolve around the God of Love, Krishna. Lopa has presented on a variety of themes in several organizations, including the Cultural Integration Fellowship, San Francisco, at SASP, Lodi and at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry.
