CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

For over 50 years CIIS has been a leader in transformative integral education. Integral studies, in the founding of CIIS, encapsulated a contemporary academic approach to a spiritual mission. In this episode, CIIS Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures, Debashish Banerji, and CIIS President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, Robert McDermott have an illuminating discussion on the multitude of meanings of integral, as seen and applied to the spiritual mission in the history and future of CIIS.   

This episode was recorded during an in-person and live streamed event at California Institute of Integral Studies on September 28th, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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Robert McDermott: Hello everyone and welcome. I'm speaking first but Debashish will speak in a few minutes, and we'll go back and forth, two or three times which is sort of true of our friendship. We're always going back and forth about something, and this is the latest of our outings together. We have spoken on this topic or dialogued on this topic at the 50th anniversary and other times as well. So to begin our topic is integral education and in the history of the founding, especially in the founding but also in the history of CIIS and the word integral, that's what we'll be talking about. Debashish, you want to say anything about the theme? 

Debashish Banerji: Yes, Robert. I mean I think as you said, I think the title was given as spirituality and integral education and I think both of them are really interesting terms. They're not terms that are fully understood today because they develop so many different meanings. You know, the philosophical understanding of the term problematic is not so much that it's bad, it's that there are many problems that it raises you know, I think both those terms are in that sense problematic. They're interesting terms because they raise so many issues.  

Spirituality, on the one hand it's about spirit, on the other hand, it has a history where it becomes the opposite of materialism, right. So, you think of matter and spirit. And the integral is a term which has also developed many nuances over time and today people are not really aware what exactly integral means. So, I think it's more like whole person to most people, I think it's an interesting set of terms to discuss.  

Robert: Thank you, that was helpful. And so, I'm going to speak about the integral in the founding and the early history. And I often say, I think more and more I'm convinced of the case, that CIIS was wonderfully founded and really great got off to a great start in its founder Haridas Chaudhuri, who was a professor in Calcutta at Krishnagar College, who was the chair of the philosophy department. And he was the professor who was recommended to represent Sri Aurobindo’s thought and through a series of conversations, he was selected for the school to start in 1951. We're not going to dwell on that school, that was not CIIS. I was in the academy, the American Academy of Asian studies and I think I could summarize the history of that school, by simply saying it was before the time was ready. The faculty didn't really know how to do what they needed to do. It was, I would say, fraught, in a way that it was, nobody's fault, it was just too hard at that time, and then they all scattered in the big 50s.  

And Haridas went on to the Cultural Integration Fellowship to teach on Fulton and 4th Avenue. And he lectured and gave meditation classes to a wonderful group of spiritually, aspiring people, which significantly included, Michael Murphy and Dick Price, the founders of Esalen and they became close friends of Haridas and Bina close friends of the school that Haridas and Bina founded in 1968 just six months after the summer of love, in pulsing San Francisco with aspirations and protests, psychedelics, music and it was an exciting time and difficult time in some ways.  

So, what was Dr. Chaudhuri trying to do this with this new graduate school? I know for a fact that both he and Bina told me that they did not continue the license or the approval that they had for the previous school. But they founded it very deliberately, I don't know if they used the word deed, but that's what they meant. It was a new start with a new spiritual impulse and identity, so since we have already established that Haridas Chaudhuri, he was devoted to the teaching and practice of the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, we know that he was trying, because that's what you do with that yoga, he was trying to hold together the transformation of thinking and action and of course being president of and founding and being president of a graduate school is surely an action and quite exhausting action. Then the third one is affect- or love and I do think that Haridas and Bina tried to create something that they loved and that others would love and that it would be a source of inspiration in a fast-moving time in the late 60s, with lots of opportunities, lots to object to.  

Okay, so Debashish will talk about the Upanishads as an integral teaching and I just want to continue a little bit more, though already anticipating that when we tried to understand what Haridas was talking about. He was the president, but he was also the teacher, he was also the spiritual guide of the community. So, he like Sri Aurobindo was devoted to these three paths: knowledge, action, and love but within an important addition which transformed the knowledge, action, and love. The addition was the evolution of consciousness, that is to say the thinking now had to be understood in terms of what it is to be in the 20th century and the vast explosion of knowledge and the division in the western paradigm between spiritual and material, for that matter rather spiritual and intellectual. So that was a challenge facing him and the school.  

Similarly, the action had to be lifted or transformed or redeemed so that it was a selfless deed influenced, not now by Sri Aurobindo as much as by Gandhi who is the expert exponent of this teaching, this karma yoga, which is true of Sri Aurobindo, but with Gandhi it was the sole discipline and he tried to show how everything that we would do would be free of selfish motive, that we would do it because of the deed itself would be a spiritual or moral deed. And then love needed to be lifted because we are in a culture where love is obviously materialized and to some extent debased and with all kinds of sort of appropriations and distortions. So that's a very hard job to re-establish. The deeper true meaning of love.  

Now if you notice what I have, I've already begun Debashish thought of this, and I'm continuing to talk about terms because terms are not what ordinary casual thoughts of our lives. You know, there are lots of books showing that if you control certain terms, you can have a very significant and perhaps very negative influence. So, since the 14th century, when there was a split between the nominalists, the people who said there's only words, and the realists who said, no, no there's something real between the words and the reality and the objects or the event, there's been that split in our culture and more and more. It is the case that people use words without any regard to their referent. So, my favorite example is seeing people with shirts and hats with teams or clothing stores to which they have no relationship, but they just happen to be on their shirt. I'm thinking, this is a good example of the separation of words. In terms of tonight we're talking about integral and spiritual and so there's not a separation in the culture between what words really mean and how they are appropriated and debased.  

So, what I'd like us to try to have in mind as we proceed is that we are trying to talk about spiritual in a way that we think has a clear focus and maybe even some kind of essence different from oh it just could mean anything, somebody who's nice or somebody who is not, not a money-grubbing person. But actually, we have to be more exact if we're going to build a whole graduate school with that word as an adjective.  

Now the same is true of integral for quite a long time, many people had given up the idea that integral is the transformation of my of thinking, feeling and willing, they decided that the relationship between the physical and the mental or it has to do with different academic disciplines and so the original meaning for Sri Aurobindo and Haridas was lost track of. So that's what we're here to talk about and we hope you'll stay with us. Debashish? 

Debashish: Yes, Robert. Yes, indeed. I think what you said about words is so important and I think sometimes words become nuanced, changed, and even turned into something opposite from what they were. I think one of the things we can do about that Robert, is to have a slew of synonyms that we use, so people understand words not merely for a certain kind of a meaning that a word has, but in a more kind of community way. Words form an ethos rather than forming just as certain single meaning.  

So, from that point of view, I think what Haridas Chaudhuri was trying to do when he came is something quite, I mean, you talked about the San Francisco Renaissance, it's very different from what he was doing at Krishna Nagar College in Calcutta, he was a follower of Sri Aurobindo. He was a Yogi, he was a practicing Yogi, but he wouldn't be teaching spiritual philosophy in Krishna Nagar College. He was teaching the kind of philosophy, you know, other schools over here teach. So, it was something new for him as well, I'm sure. It's exciting to think about that Robert. Don't you think? I mean he started a new kind of philosophical education over here or what today we call spiritual education. [Robert: Yeah.] I think one of the terms and that's the term I'm using in the new concentration, which we started Contemplatively Studies. So, when we use spirituality, think of a more contemporary term that can be associated with it is contemplative studies and studies of scholarly practice, which is what he was really aiming for we just don't read it as armchair intellectuals, who read books and split hairs about their meanings, but we actually internalize it for our own purposes. Did you get that feeling Robert? You met Haridas at least quite early times of CIIS, what was your feeling at that time?  

Robert: Well, I could speak at length. I don't know if we'd be on the topic, Haridas, he really was an integral person because he was very scholarly, he was an excellent writer in English. He was articulate in a way that was elegant and eloquent, he had a great charm that was not at all superficial. He was very practical, and he and Bina were a great combination. And so, the wonderful thing thinking about him is that really nothing was missing except a long life because he died still in his early 60s. Just a heart attack at his desk in 1975, when the Institute was only seven years old and then it really struggled without him. So, he was an integral person and for example in his book integral yoga when he wrote about the different yogas. He's writing out of his own experience and that makes it very convincing. 

Debashish: Yes, yes, Robert and that’s what I meant, and we still encourage that, and I think we still encourage that at CIIS, I think these two terms because that's what we started with our seven commitments begin with integral education and then the second one is spirituality. So, I think it lives on in that sense. I'd say another term that is related to this kind of education that they started is scholar practitioner, that's what you just said, right that his words carried conviction because he practiced what he wrote about, and I think that's something that everybody should know. We all have all the archives of Haridas Chaudhuri’s lectures. Many people have heard Alan Watts, who was one of the cofounders of the early American Academy of Asian studies. But Haridas Chaudhuri’s lectures and that conviction that you talked about, that eloquence is so marked, and people should listen to his lectures.  

Robert: I couldn't agree more. I was once in charge of a project that reviewed all of the audiovisual materials for Hinduism and Buddhism and so I watched about 12 Alan Watts videos and positively, he was wonderfully, eloquent with great facility of metaphors, and it just came out like that and not so positively certainly in comparison to Haridas Chaudhuri is that there was a facile quality, which I never detected in Haridas, he was really grounded and careful, so I'm sorry to say something not so nice about Alan Watts, but I'm not going to bring him down, he's very popular, but I mentioned it partly because I think we all have the task to discern what is authentic and what is rooted in a person's actual life experience and what is just taken from one book to a page and Haridas, he was this integral person. So, you want to say something about the Upanishads as an example?  

Debashish: Yes, yes, Robert because Haridas. So, the name that he gave both the incarnations, that he sort of founded was Asian studies but I think it changed to integral studies. I think you know, as you told me, it was in keeping with his understanding of integral. So, it was a happy transition that was more integral [laughs] than just Asian studies.  

Robert: Yes, yes. Asian studies by 1980, the school had a very large psychology program, not all of which was Asian, and the board decided interestingly just before, the WASC accrediting agency arrived, they decided that it would be more accurate and also an explicit honoring of the name of the philosophy and the yoga of Sri Aurobindo to call it integral. So, it's not some unrooted mathematical term or something about, oh, well it has to do with putting things together. It's a very, very strong and clear word having to do with the three yogas and the evolution of consciousness. Also, the tantra [Debashish: Yeah.] maybe I should say something about that.  

Debashish: Yes Robert. So, I think when he used the term integral in the- but the term integral as Haridas got it comes from Sri Aurobindo and when he used the word integral, he was translating the Sanskrit purna, which he calls his yoga, purna yoga. He uses the term purna and then Haridas begins his book Integral Yoga, by talking about purna and its roots in the Upanishads, that’s what we were discussing.  

Robert: Do you wanna spell that, for those not familiar? 

Debashish: Yeah, it's p-u-r-n-a and you know this, this is the one of the earliest Upanishads actually the earliest, on which I have just written, just completed a book. So in the fifth chapter they have this verse and it goes like this many people have heard this [speaks in Sanskrit] and Haridas doesn't give the Sanskrit, but he gives the loose translation of this in the book and essentially what it's saying is that the exact translation is purnam, we could again many synonyms Sri Aurobindo would use the word integral for problem. We could also use the word whole so you know the word integral as the whole, more like not the whole being a complex unity one thing of many things. So, the whole is that, the whole is this, out of the whole, the whole emerges. If you take the whole away from the whole, it is the whole that remains. So, this is like a puzzle or a kind of a you know, some meditative exercise you have to you have to meditate on this and it sounds paradoxical. So, what remains if you take it away from itself, right and from its entirety emerges. So, this is the notion of the integral as something which is undividable. 

Robert: Yeah, and inexhaustible. 

Debashish: Yeah, so for example, the universe arises from something a substratum underneath it and it instantiates itself into all the many beings creatures of the universe. The universe itself is the whole and every creature and it is the whole and nothing exhausts the whole from which it came. This is, you know, the meditation behind it.  

Robert: It’s a little like Hegel, who speaks about the unity of unity and difference. [Debashish: Right.] Which is another meditation. Unity of unity and difference. It’s the unity of the one, and the many, which in certain sense, all Western philosophy and I think Indian philosophy is as well devoted to dealing with that mystery. 

Debashish: Right. So where does it fit in, you know, in Haridas’s use and in the use of because as you said, CIIS was very strongly, a psychological, you know, based educational institute. But by the time Haridas died the notion of the integral has to do with something which is whole inside us and something that nothing can really wound. Now when we talk about psychological healing, it's more than trying to mend things that are broken. It's trying to find something that's already whole inside us. 

Robert: Yeah, that's good. Yeah. 

Debashish: And then the true spirituality, you find it, you can't find it by rationalizing about it. So that was one of the reasons. 

Robert: Is that what you quoted in the book Integral Yoga? 

Debashish: Yeah, it begins by talking about this particular passage, yeah. And then the other aspect of it that you mentioned Robert, which has to do with the three yogas, Sri Aurobindo writes his book called Synthesis of Yoga and he breaks it up into these four books of parts. The first three parts are these three parts that you talked about, which he is getting from the Gita that. But another interesting and important thing to remember there is that, you know, the understanding of the differentiation, of our psychology, of our goals, you know, like you said The Yoga of Knowledge, The Yoga of Works, The Yoga of Love, we have to give individual attention to each one of them. So each one of them has uniqueness, you know, something which is singular, at the same time they have a common root and so that's the integral, I think that that part is many people miss because they think about, you know, many ways of knowing etc, but how do we honor the diversity of these ways of knowing but also find that which is behind them?  

Robert: The book is called Synthesis of Yoga, not the plurality of yoga, [Debashish: Yeah. Right, right.] not the variety of yoga. It's the synthesis together. Maybe we should move not so far away, but to the question of the relationship of integral education and spiritual education and ethics. [Debashish: Yes.] So you know, that one of the yogas is action but if you study the action yoga, common yoga, you pretty quickly discover that you can't really do common yoga if you don't know, quite a lot about what to do, you have to know something about the world and you have to know about the situation and you have to know about your own life in your own destiny and what you hear on the Earth to do. So, you need to have a relationship between the action and the knowledge. You also have to have a relationship between the action and what you are able to love. So that when you are choosing what to do, you are choosing to love what it is that you're involved with, whether it be a person or a deed or a country or a teaching.  

So that then leads me to suggest that when you're thinking about ethics or morality or justice, right? You know, for example, CIIS is now increasingly devoted to the cause of what we call DEI, right diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a matter of justice among other things. What is the morality of that commitment? So, I would like to suggest that if you follow the integral yoga, then you become aware that morality is not following rules or even principles.  

Each deed is a new deed coming out of the unity of knowledge and action and love which is appropriate for the time where you are, when you are in the evolution of consciousness. This is confusing but also slightly liberating. You can't tell what is moral by looking at a deed. You could only tell if it was possible by looking at the consciousness, the motivation, the whole integral situation of the person who was performing the deed or reacting or initiating some chain of events. So just as religion ideally, is not a matter of prescribed practices or a matter of dogmas and requirements, it is rather a turning, it's affirming, a numinal dimension. Numinal actually means tipping of the head, the way you do when you're being reverend, you go tip your head.  

So ethics, it seems to me in terms of which words we would associate, we would associate the words again, spiritual, which means that it's not divided from the community from other persons, it's not fragmented, it's integral to the whole situation to one's community in the Indian teaching of Dharma, there's a self at the center but then there's also the family, there's the community, the cast it's all related to the divine, the relationship to the cosmos. So, you really can't commit a deed that you hope is moral unless you have been integrated in all those concentric circles, if you can think of it that way.  

So, when we think about what words we use, I think in terms of what is spiritual, some people think it has to do with God and other people say, no, just not God, that's too specific or too Western. We just mean divine then other people say yeah but divine, is it just being the interior? Does it just mean material? Well all those levels of meaning have to be sorted out when you use the term and especially when you use the term in order to define and characterize a graduate school or a school with also undergraduate, you need to have an understanding of the truth of the word that you can build on together.  

Debashish: Yes, Robert. I think that's very important. A very, very, very important point, particularly for an institution, which is a spiritual education, institution of spiritual education and, you know, I'd like you to address that at some point in the very notion of spiritual education in our age. With the division between the church and the state, the very notion of spiritual education is under question, you know, that we are able to survive with a kind of freedom of exploring what it means to be spiritual. I think that's really important.  

But related to that is the notion of ethics because ethics often, when you're talking about social justice social ethics it often becomes just a matter of do's and don'ts, you know, prescriptions, but as you were pointing out, it's really not about prescriptions. It's really about finding the root of this spirituality and the root of oneness. I mean, if we can actually experience people as oneself or as the self as the opener should say, purna, integral, then ethics is the natural outcome of that. But if one doesn't, then one needs a police-keeping force and one needs laws and one needs to be, you know, chastised for doing because you don't have the inner connection of oneness from which ethics naturally arises. So, I think spiritual ethics when we are talking about social justice has to fall back on that root of the experience of the spiritual experience of ethics. 

Robert: Yeah, I think the New Testament is really good at this because every time they tried to trick Jesus, he chose love and integrity over rules and laws. Which made them more angry but he got it straight in and in that sense. Okay, well, should we continue with the ethics or do we want to talk about where we are at institutionally and in terms of education?  

Debashish: Yes Robert. I think that's really also something we have to think about, the future. I mean, where are we now with regard to spirituality and the integral? Particularly the integral and thinking about history and our work in the world towards the future and I think Haridas Chaudhuri and you know, his predecessor in that sense, Sri Aurobindo they really were fore-seers. They were seers. They were prophets in that sense, they saw a time to come. A time which has come now and which we are facing right now.  

So, I think what's really timely about our time, in the teaching of the integral, is that all the way from the beginnings of modernity, which we can take back to say, 15th, or 16th century. There has been a trend towards specialization and it's all mental. You know, it's divide and conquer. It's making a construction, right? We look at the world in a million perspectives, which grows smaller and smaller, and people do research and create this huge institutional network across the world with the idea that someday all this will integrate into a single whole, but it doesn't. 

Today, we are face to face with the consequences of that. It's so fragmented. People don't see eye-to-eye and we are actually divorced from the Earth. We are completely blind to the fact that we are no longer in contact with anything. So, I think the integral from that point of view is a change of perspective from this notion of fragmentation, from an age of ultra-specialization to an age of integration.  

Robert: And our beloved university, we do have some amount of synthesis in terms of a common root and some common ideals etc. But we also suffer the modern Western separation of disciplines and goals which is understandable and so I’m not criticizing so much as I'm saying, this is our situation in our society and in educational which is part of the society specialization is prized at the expense of integration, which is not to say we shouldn't have specialization because we want to go deeper and deeper in whatever we're trying to learn and do and to teach and that requires specialization. But it has to have soft edges, has to be related to other concerns and other values, even other routes. 

Debashish: Right, so that's exactly what I mean when we have the other kinds of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary studies. I think CIIS apart from its specialization, which I agree with, I think the integral again, is both the multiple and the one at the same time. So, the entire range of disciplinary specialization and their relations ultimately forming the viewpoint of the integral, the perspective that unites I think, is something that CIIS is equipped to promote in our times.  

Robert: It’s equipped, and I think it also shows how difficult it is because this is an institution devoted to ideals, but many institutions of higher education are committed to ideals. They are committed to producing people who can get careers and ideally contribute back to the institution and that kind of a cycle, that's really okay if positive and at the same time they aren't shared ideals except for smartness and the production that comes from smartness which is positive and necessary. At the same time, it seems to me that the advantage of the smartness in CIIS has a vertical dimension. That is to say it has depth, it aims at depth and other institutions can't agree on that and they don't try to do that. They're doing something else but producing knowledge coming out of depth and also aspiring to a higher level, a higher reality.  

So that instead of it being horizontal, which is perfectly adequate for most people and for most parts of the society, the integral is trying to say we are trying to be related positively to all the other parts and also related integrally to the deep sources and to the higher dimensions and some people don't like higher. But you know, I think it's a word that is to some extent fallen like transcendent, but I think it needs to be rescued because the spiritual life doesn't just go horizontal, it goes deep, and it goes high, and I think all the great spiritual teachers evidence that double direction of horizontal and vertical. So, one test I think of integral and spiritual is whether it is only on one level or whether it aspires to a deeper and a higher dimension. I know Debashish sometimes talks about transhumanism, do you want to say something about that in this context? 

Debashish: Absolutely Robert. I think, actually what I'm more interested in is what's called posthuman, so they make the distinction between transhuman and posthuman. Transhuman or transhumanism is more about how technology is enhancing us and making us go beyond the human, but posthumanism is actually a critique of transhumanism because in a sense, it's the entire history of modernity of science and technology that has brought us to the brink of some kind of an extinction. We are really in a sense faced with a climate crisis, an unprecedented climate crisis across the world. We have pandemics that we're in the middle of right now and then we have cultural wars going on all over the world. We're possibly in a third world war right now. So, what we see is this kind of you know brink of a certain disaster that we brought on us, a dystopia rather than a utopia that we've brought on ourselves.  

So posthumanism from that point of view, related to the integral, is when we think of ourselves as a whole person, not as a human being that is limited in our scope, not as somebody who has a name and a certain family background and a certain kind of distinct identity. But somebody who's in deep relation with larger universal forces. So that the human is a whole, the idea of the whole person, which is another synonym for integral and I think you were talking about the San Francisco Renaissance, that's when ideas like the whole person- now we talk about whole person psychology, the whole person psychology is not only the psychology of the individual whole, but it's the knowledge of the individual as the whole.  

In other words, individual psychology, the human is not the cogito of the Western rational ego. But the human is in a sense, one with the Earth, we talk about the geosphere, the world of climate. For example, we talk about the biosphere, the world of the ecology of animals. We talk about the psychosphere, which is the cultural relations we have with other humans. I think in a way, each one of us contains all of that in ourselves and to experience our oneness at those levels is in that sense a posthuman, integralism. That's what interests me about this. 

Robert: Yeah, and so Debashish let me put you on the spot, if everyone currently in CIIS, as students, faculty, board members, donors, staff people, administrators, were posthuman 

in the sense in which you're speaking that is to say after and in some sense transcending and more than the human as it's created in the modern West, what kind of change would that bring about? 

Debashish: Well Robert, I mean, you mentioned it yourself, that's the root of spiritual ethics. I mean they would be able to experience much more closely, the feelings of the Earth, the feelings of other creatures or other human beings. How can we make it our preoccupation to focus our understanding? So as to feel deep unity or it comes first from deep relationality, how can we have intimate relations with the things that we've completely separated from ourselves, and we find then that there is a deeper unity among all these things? I think that's the basis of spiritual ethics and I think when you're talking about CIIS is making that possible, as you said to the extent that we do that we don't need to worry so much about policing people.  

Robert: This gives me a chance to introduce the beautiful term of Tich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, interbeing. So, he wants us to experience between everything in such a way that nothing is cut out or isolated. Then we can see ourselves as Buddhist, Christian, Muslims, Vietnamese, American, German, Brazilians, which is the way he actually lived and  thought that there was no away and no apart and no opposed it was all a great symphony in his thinking.  

Debashish: Yes, Robert. I think that's such a great example. I think Tich Nhat Hanh is a tremendous example for the kind of scholar practitioner, that CIIS should aim to produce, you know, I think because for a number of reasons, for one as a Buddhist, he reinterpreted the Buddhist, all the Buddhist teachings in extremely contemporary ways and ways that matter for us today. Exactly like you said the word interbeing was his translation, just like the word integral was Sri Aurobindo’s translation of the ancient purna, which is so timely for us today. 

Tich Nhat Hanh’s word interbeing is a translation suññatā, which people normally translate as the void and immediately, you think, well, it's outside of the world. We have to get out of the world. He says, suññatā is interbeing, in other words it's not you, it's not me, it's what's between us and what's between us is the whole world, you know, it's the distances of the vast. So, I think from that point of view, it's exactly what you said about what Tich Nhat Hanh said. 

Robert: By the way, it reminds me when you were speaking, Debashish, that a uh- Episcopal Bishop of California Mark Andrews, who just finished a degree in PCC, wrote a dissertation, now a book, on the relationship between Tich Nhat Hanh and Martin Luther King. So here we have a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist and a Black Baptist preacher activist both devoted to peace in these completely different cultures. In fact, one of the cultures dropped millions of tons of bombs on the other one and they just came together as friends because they didn't allow the- their national context to prevent them from interbeing with each other. [Debashish: Right.] It's very beautiful.  

Debashish: Yes, it is Robert.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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