Roger Housden: What Iran Can Teach the Romantic Soul and Integral Heart
July 28, 2011 by Jeff Bellsey
Filed under Recent BAI Events
7:00 – 9:30 PM
Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, Berkeley
- Pre-Registration $20 / $13 students
- At the Door $25 / $15 students
Roger Housden went to Iran in 2008/9 to look for the contemporary pulse of its artistic and spiritual legacy; to meet with artists, filmmakers, writers and religious leaders who embody the long Iranian tradition of humanism and religious tolerance that began with the reign of Cyrus the Great over 2,500 years ago. He found what he was looking for and more. But he also encountered the dark side of contemporary Iran, and was lucky to ever get out of the country. His new book, Saved By Beauty, chronicles his journey.
Terry Patten went to Iran in 2007 carrying Integral texts translated into Farsi, joining a civilian diplomacy mission that had pre-arranged meetings with the most prominent reformists in the country. The day after he arrived in Tehran, all those meetings were cancelled by the “Ershad” or secret police, and he got a chance instead to meet the face-to-face with many of the most conservative leaders of the radical theocratic Islamic state. His blog Integral In Iran describes the often startling insights that came from this confrontation of Integral consciousness with the soul of Persia and the brutality.
Both of them wanted to link Western audiences with the human and creative face of an ancient culture that had been branded part of “the axis of evil,” and they both took Rumi and Hafiz along with them as their guides.
Terry will interview Roger Housden, who will read excerpts from Rumi and Hafiz during the discussion, and then, in classic BAI style, we’ll break into small group discussions, after which we’ll reconvene and take things further!
Roger Housden is the author of some twenty books on poetry, art, and travel. His best known works are the “Ten Poems” series, which began in 2001 with the best-selling Ten Poems to Change Your Life. All his books use the universal language of the arts and the metaphor of pilgrimage to explore the perennial question of what it means to be human. Saved By Beauty was published by Broadway Books in May 2011.
