About Purnam Centre for Integrality
Vision
Transformative Learning for an Integral Living
By transformative learning we mean a learning process that:
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Awakens your thirst for progress and lifelong self-directed learning.
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Empowers you to transform and harmonise various psychological parts of your being.
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Liberates your creative potential and gives it a practical expression in your social context.
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Set you on a path to discover and fulfill your life’s purpose.
By integral living mean a way of living in which:
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Your psychological nature is developing increasing harmony and integration.
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Your creative actions are complementing your social context and its needs.
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You are growing towards increasing harmony with self, society and Nature.
Mission
To accomplish our vision we are focusing on three missions:
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Campus: Facilitate the emergence of Auroville as an international univers-city campus for transformative learning.
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Courses: Design and offer transformative higher education courses for an integral living.
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Community: Grow into a thriving community of transformative learning practitioners.
Campus
Auroville, a vanguard International Univers-city
In a rapidly changing world, education must continue throughout life with all activities and institutions of life consciously recognised and reorganised as contexts for learning. This demands us to reimagine the very notion of a university if it is to embrace all contexts of human life from birth to death. Auroville is a unique and foremost prototype as a learning society pioneering individual and collective transformation. Conceived as a city for 50,000 people Auroville is a live-in-laboratory for learning and research where all contexts of life from birthday to death are recognised as learning spaces for an integral living. Here education is a lifelong process for individuals to live joyfully, develop integrally, and contribute meaningfully in the wake of giving birth to a new society, new humanity.
Every year, already, thousands of students and volunteers from across the world go through their self-designed learning journey in Auroville. This is only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. Auroville’s rich and diverse ecosystem of practitioners and learning labs spread over 3500 acres is a dream Univers-city being built by generations of learners since 1968 as part of their learning journey. Purnam is only acknowledging, honoring and building on what has been already in the making for more than five decades.
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Courses
Transformative learning journey for Youth that Never Ages
When the whole life and all contexts of life are seen as a part of an integral learning journey, what kind of pedagogy and learning objectives are required for an integral living? This is where the bedrock of Auroville, the integral psychology and science of living pioneered by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the founding visionaries of Auroville, come in as foundational principles.
We are designing and offering courses and programmes based on the principles of integral yoga psychology, the ethos that are at the heart of Auroville’s evolutionary vision. Our courses are to awaken the life-long learner in you and to set you on a path of self-discovery and transformation regardless of the domain of expertise you may acquire on the way. These are radical alternatives to kindle your thirst for transformative learning.
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Community
Growing Together in Harmony and Collaboration
Transformative learning journey is a life-long process and that makes everyone a learner throughout life. Peer learning and collaboration are key tenets of new higher education pedagogy. Thus, a collaborative community is central to any attempt at transformative higher education; it is a collective endeavour nurturing collective evolution. All courses and programmes can only act as starting points or opportunities to reorient and reboot one's learning journey, the real test is in real life regardless of the domain one specialises. It is necessary to have your tribe, your peer learners and researchers who understand you. To facilitate this we are building an Integral Education Portal where the foundational knowledge of transformative learning is gathered and explored continuously and shared for everyone’s benefit.
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Volunteering Culture
Our passion is transformational learning and having been nourished by this gift ourselves we are inspired to share it with others. Service is an important value of Purnam and it reflects in our work culture, where the joy of contributing to the community is paramount. Work is not meant to reward in exchange but the reward itself and offered as a gift.
Subsidised costs
Even though there are many expenditures to cover, we strive towards making our courses as affordable as possible to the learner. A simple cost comparison with other social transformation/skill development/liberal art programmes at some of the prestigious organisations in India like Jagriti Yatra and Ashoka University reveals that our programmes cost only a fraction to the learner but not on the compromise of impact or learning experience. A large part of the cost is absorbed by people voluntarily offering their time and energy to engage with the aspiring learner.