UHU Brochure Draft
THE UNIVERSITY OF HUMAN UNITY IN AUROVILLE - draft brochure
Grace
The International township of Auroville was founded in 1968 in southern India, near Pondicherry, in the words of the Charter of Auroville:
"to be the site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity."
As stated in the 4th UNESCO in 1983, the aims of Auroville are:
“ to ensure international understanding, peace, innovative education, a learning society and an all round material and spiritual development of harmonious individual and collective growth and ...such aims contribute to the advancement of the objectives of UNESCO”
As early as 1969, The Mother, Auroville's founder and guide, addressed her intention to UNESCO to create a "University of Human Unity", as a means to realise the spiritual and material goals of Auroville.
"The permanent university will be the key to the reason for Auroville's existence (la clef de la raison d'etre d'Auroville)" she said. "It has to be a leap forward to hasten the advent of the future - a world of harmony and beauty and union."
In the course of Auroville's first four decades, its research and development especially in the fields of environmental restoration, reforestation, alternative energy design and technology, alternative healing practices, and integral education have been widely recognized; it has already become a community for men, women, and children of many different nationalities, and it has hosted numerous international conferences, workshops, seminars, and research projects in a wide variety of fields.
Today, Auroville aspires to become the learning community of tomorrow: a global adventure to discover the knowledge, understanding, creativity and consciousness that humanity searches for and needs everywhere, as it leaps into the 21st Century.
Since the beginning, researchers, scholars, seekers, graduate and post graduate students, professionals at all stages of their growth and development have been coming to Auroville for specific research and study in various Auroville-related topics - in the fields of integral yoga, architecture, town planning, ecology, sustainable development and society, philosophy and psychology.
Auroville has hosted conferences, workshops and seminars featuring presentations by leaders from Auroville and around the world in the fields of integral transformative practice, consciousness studies, innovative business management, sustainable technology and design. Now, with the growing aspiration and intention of our affiliates from within Auroville and around the globe, a coordinated effort is at last underway to develop a more coordinated structure that will enable the evolution of a next level of organisation in Auroville's education: the manifestation of a true university of integral learning.
As part of its aspiration for Human Unity, Auroville welcomes Research Partnerships with Universities and Research Institutes all over the world to advance new knowledge in any given field that contributes to further the ideal of human unity.
A New Integral Learning Paradigm
The University of Human Unity is being conceived of as an innovative alternative genre of university, expressive of the explorations of a new consciousness in the universe-city that is Auroville, free from many of the conventional restraints that characterize higher educational institutions in the world today.
The specific mission of the University of Human Unity will be to provide an environment for higher learning where the discovery of an integral self-knowledge and world-knowledge will be the aim, where integral self-development and the realization of the full human potential will be the primary object of research and discovery in all fields of study.
The University of Human Unity will be a platform for exploration and discovery in all areas of knowledge and activity where students may design, develop and implement programs of study in a a supportive and contemplative atmosphere, with the participation and cooperation of other students and facilitators in their respective fields of interest. To do this, new approaches to knowledge and new learning modalities are to be discovered, and a new perception, a deeper understanding, a truer force of consciousness manifested, in Auroville and in the world.
The University of Human Unity encourages an atmosphere of experiential knowledge, where learning becomes a personalized living process, natural, a chance to seek one's true identity. The collaboration and sharing among researchers from different fields will become a common practice and a new mode of learnng.
Well structured and organized processes of inter-disciplinary studies will be based on a self-educational approach, which, in itself is a field of research.
In the words of Sri Aurobindo, the spiritual visionary, poet and philosopher whose ideal of Human Unity provides the philosophical framework for Auroville:
“A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life. (…) A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully replace the imperfect mental constructions of the past”. (p577)
The University of Human Unity in Auroville offers:
- Opportunities for long or short term residential accomodations
- Programs of discovery in many fields of the humanities an natural sciences
- Individual or small group explorations
- Informal experiential learning
- Internships
- Research seminars
- Applied research
- Distance learning in association with our many affiliates world-wide
Auroville:
- Sri Aurobindo International Institute of Education and Research (SAIIER)
- Savitri Bhavan
- Verite Integral Learning Centre
- The Unity Pavilion/International Zone Group
World-wide:
- Indian Psychology Institute, Pondicherry (IPI)
- Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, Pondicherry (SACAR)
- The California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco (CIIS)
- The Sri Aurobindo Learning Centre, Crestone Colorado
- The WorldShift University and The Club of Budapest
Fall Program 2007
by UHU Core Group Seminars:
(schedule to be announced)
- Exploring Integral Psychology and Education
- Vedic Epistemology and Integral Learning
- Authentic Program Development and Assessment
- Sustainable Development in the Auroville Contest - psychology, ecology, technology
For information please contact Elizabeth
Unity Pavilion, Auroville
uhu@auroville.org.in
Telephone +91-413-262-2623
*Please note that the University of Human Unity is a non-accredited institution and does not award degrees or diplomas. Various forms or authentic program documentation, such as portfolios and letters of commendation may be issued, and affiliated institutions such as SACAR and CIIS may recognize individual programs for credit.