Haridas Chaudhuri

Early life and career

He was born in May 1913 in Shyamagram in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). He studied at the Scottish Church College and later at the University of Calcutta from where he earned his doctorate in Indian philosophy. He became a professor and later the chair of philosophy at the Krishnagar College, then a constituent college of the University of Calcutta.

California Institute of Integral Studies

In 1951, Chaudhuri was invited by Frederic Spiegelberg of Stanford University to join the staff of the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, having been recommended for that post by Sri Aurobindo during the final year of Aurobindo's life. Other accounts have indicated that Chaudhuri was recommended for the job by K.D. Sethna, an eminent intellectual living at Aurobindo's ashram, based in part on the fact that Chaudhuri was an active devotee of Sri Aurobindo. He accepted the invitation, eager to implement in a Western educational institution the integral approach to education that he had developed as a student of Sri Aurobindo.

Soon after his arrival in San Francisco, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF), from which emerged an educational branch later to become California Institute of Integral Studies. Over the past 30 years, the Institute's original emphasis on Asian religions and cultures evolved to include comparative and cross-cultural studies in philosophy, religion, psychology, counseling, cultural anthropology, organizational studies, health studies, and the arts.

Integral Psychology

Chaudhuri was the first to publish in the West on Integral Psychology, during the 1970s. His version of Integral Psychology has almost nothing in common with that of Ken Wilber, who has written a book of the same name.

Bahman Shirazi of the California Institute of Integral Studies has defined Integral Psychology as "a psychological system concerned with exploring and understanding the totality of the human phenomenon....(which) at its breadth, covers the entire body-mind-psyche-spirit spectrum, while at its depth...encompasses the previously explored unconscious and the conscious dimensions of the psyche, as well as the supra-conscious dimension traditionally excluded from psychological inquiry". (Shirazi 2001) In a paper on the subject he reviews Indra Sen's, Chaudhuri's, and Wilber's definitions, as well as developing the ideas of Chaudhuri.