CIIS East-West Psychology

Friday, 5:30pm in Namaste Hall at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)! A production of CIIS East-West Psychology and Asian Contemplative and Transcultural Studies! Tickets and more information below.

East-West Raga-Jazz concert featuring Padma Shri Tarun Bhattacharya on santoor, George Brooks on saxophone, and Jyotirmay Roychowdhury on tabla.

In celebration of Auroville's 58th birthday, the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Department of East-West Psychology will host an East-West Raga-Jazz concert featuring three distinguished musicians bridging Indian classical music and American jazz traditions.

Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, known as "the Mother," the spiritual companion of Sri Aurobindo—whose student, Haridas Chaudhuri, founded CIIS. This shared spiritual heritage in Integral Yoga philosophy connects the San Francisco-based university with the South Indian experimental township.

The concert honors Auroville's founding vision of human unity through a musical dialogue that transcends cultural boundaries, reflecting both institutions' commitment to East-West integration and world transformation.

The concert features Tarun Bhattacharya, a Padma Shri and Sangeet Natak Akademi Award-winning santoor maestro who studied under Pandit Ravi Shankar, alongside saxophonist George Brooks, acclaimed for successfully bridging the worlds of jazz and Indian classical music and founder of fusion groups Summit and Bombay Jazz. Tabla virtuoso Jyotirmay Roychowdhury, an A-Grade artist of Prasar Bharati and disciple of Ustad Zakir Hussain, will complete the trio.

Auroville's 58th Anniversary East-West Concert East-West Raga-Jazz concert featuring Tarun Bhattacharya on santoor, George Brooks on saxophone, and Jyotirmay Roychowdhury on tabla.

Join CIIS in celebrating Jung's 150th birthday and explore how his psychology continues to offer meaningful perspectives on personal growth, collective healing, and cultural transformation during these challenging times.
https://www.ciis.edu/events/forever-jung-cg-jungs-continued-relevance-during-challenging-times

Congratulations to Jonathan Kay for his successful EWP phd dissertation defense!

The Integrative Impulse as Dark Precursor of Sonocultural Transindividuation: An Autoethnographic Apprenticeship to Musical Signs

Abstract
This dissertation emerges from the cultural, ecological, and psychosocial crisis of our time—a convergence of planetary degradation, algorithmic capitalism, and the erosion of collective imagination. Within this context, the sonic and improvised arts—once crucial vehicles of counter-cultural resistance, spiritual experimentation, and revolutionary world-making—have been increasingly neutralized by the culture industries. Their subversive and transformative potentials have been subordinated to neoliberal logics of commodification and reframed as lifestyle accessories or aesthetic ornaments. At the same time, this foreclosure and capture hides a historical problematic that invites an apprenticeship to signs of the ‘outside’: and gestures toward affective, ethical, and ontological possibilities of a becoming that embodies such a problematic of world-making. The present dissertation explores the methodological and philosophical dimensions of such a Deleuzo-Guattarian apprenticeship through an autoethnographic inquiry.

The analysis reveals how, through this apprenticeship, I, as subject of the autoethnography, discovered an integral attractor that led me to consider solutions to the cultural problematic I inhabit as a representative of my place, time and culture. I identify this attractor as an integrative impulse—a speculative force situated at the perspectival vanishing point of becoming and actualization, where pluralism = monism. I interpret this impulse as a Deleuzo-Guattarian dark precursor immanent to modernity’s problematic—“a historical horizon for the release of the plural as radical expressions of univocity.” This research draws together different perspectives of psycho-cosmological individuation through Sri Aurobindo’s revolutionary spirituality, Debashish Banerji’s theory of Integral Posthuman Creativity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s metaphysics of becoming, and Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the transindividual.

The autoethnographic analysis reveals how engagement with jazz, free improvisation, and Hindustani raga music, invoked more-than-human potentials and conjured counter-cultural and revolutionary forces of the ‘outside’. The study redefines experimental improvisation as sono-ritual: a posthuman, cosmotechnic operation that precipitates transindividual sound-bodies through relational attunement. These become generative sites of ontoethical transindividuation, where ethics and ontology co-emerge. This dissertation thus reclaims the sonic arts as insurgent cosmotechnics: modes of becoming that carry the potential to recompose the fractured ontologies of our time into a new, posthuman ethics of transindividual life.

The inquiry culminates in aesthetic intuition—an integrative faculty that affectively reorganizes the sensorial and ethical field according to the perception of an integrative impulse. The dissertation culminates in an original composition entitled for a people to come, which is a sono-ritual that serves as an experimental site of improvisation and speculative worlding. This composition actualizes the dissertation’s theoretical concerns through embodied sonic practice, proposing a plane of composition where transindividual sound-bodies can emerge, resonate, and gesture toward collective futures not yet imagined. As such, it functions as a living instantiation of the integrative impulse—a call, a conjuring of ‘a people to come’.

Committee Chair: Dr. Debashish Banerji
Internal Committee Member: Dr. John Bagby
External Committee Member: : Dr. Stephen Zepke

Integrative Impulse as Dark Precursor of Sonocultural Transindividuation: An Apprenticeship to Signs An East-West Psychology doctoral dissertation defenseby Jonathan KayThe Integrative Impulse as Dark Precursor of Sonocultural Transindividuation: An Autoethn...

We are pleased to share all of the video recordings of the panels from the Numinous Earth conference help this past April!

Here is the full playlist- take a scroll through and I'm sure you will find something compelling :)

NUMINOUS EARTH: Ecopsychology at the Edge Conference organized by the East-West Psychology Department at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco April 17-18, 2025 The mounting polycri...