California Institute of Integral Studies

Description

Erik Haines:

"The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) carries the Aurobindonian-integral lineage that began with the American Academy of Asian Studies in 1951 and the Cultural Integration Fellowship in the 1960s; CIIS’s Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, founded by Richard Tarnas in 1994, has been the academic home of process-relational metaphysics in North America for three decades. Matthew David Segall, whose process-relational panexperientialism I engaged at length in On God, Absolute Freedom, and the Post-Metaphysical Turn, teaches in that program. CIIS’s institutional history runs through Esalen, Michael Murphy, Dick Price, Alan Watts, Frederic Spiegelberg, and Haridas Chaudhuri—a Pacific Coast lineage of speculative-cosmological thinking that has stayed alive in American intellectual life through decades when the broader academy made such ambitions professionally dangerous. Wilber’s Integral Life platform, the institutional center of the American integral movement, operates in the same orbit and shares much of the same readership. Together, these American institutions amplify a vision of consciousness evolution and cosmological re-enchantment that is genealogically related to but institutionally distinct from the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster. The two cross over through shared figures such as McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, Brendan Graham Dempsey, and the broader meaning-crisis discourse."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)