Transcend Meaning In Urdu

[Tinisha]

CHARLES STANG: Good evening and welcome. My name is Charles Stang, and I have the privilege of serving as the Director of the Study for the-- I'm sorry-- Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this evening's event, the first of the year, called Transcendence and Transformation, Take Two. The Transcendence and Transformation initiative, or T&T for short, is entering its second year. And we're here this evening to celebrate that fact and to introduce its newest members.

But before I move on to this coming year, permit me to say just a few brief words about T&T, and to celebrate some of what we accomplished last year. But before I do even that, I want to bid farewell to a member of our team, who's been an indispensable part of the initiative and all programming at the Center for many years. Ariella Ruth Goldberg, our Events Coordinator, has moved on from the Center and is taking on a new and exciting position at Harvard's School of Design. So on behalf of the whole CSWR community and the audiences that have enjoyed our public programming, whether online or in person I want to thank Ariella Ruth for all her work with us at the Center and wish her well in her new position.

So back to T&T, this Initiative in its second year is devoted to the study of religious and spiritual traditions and practices, ancient and modern, global in reach, that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the transformation of individual community and society. T&T affirms the existence of the sacred, different levels of reality, seen and unseen, and different modes of access to them. It investigates what might be called metaphysics and mysticism, by which we mean the traditions across time, people, and places that have cultivated practices of transcendence and transformation and have articulated worldviews to make sense of those practices.

Now, as to T&T's accomplishments, last year, briefly, we launched two new speaker series and continued a the third. We launched Gnoseologies, led by my colleague Giovanna Parmigiani, a series which explored ways of knowing that are often labeled nonrational. I'm very happy to report that. Giovanna is continuing that series this year. Her next event will be on Wednesday, October 19 from 1:00 to 2:00 PM, a Conversation with [? Marcelit Faella. ?]

And with that event and with all our events, the best way to keep abreast is to sign up for our newsletter, which you can do on our website home page. We launched another series last year on the Divine Feminine and Its Discontents, led by two of our postdoctoral fellows, Mimi Winick and Hadi Fakhoury. That very successful series came to an end last April, and Hadi and Mimi have returned to Virginia and Beirut, respectively.

And I'm pleased to report that we're continuing our very popular series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, but due to staff shortages here at the Center and Ariella Ruth's departure, we're going to delay the start of that series until the Spring semester. But rest assured, I'm lining up an array of great guests who will cover an array of topics, such as the central Dahomey tradition, other Indigenous religious movements using plant medicine sacraments; debates over how to interpret and integrate, quote unquote, "bad trips;" and possibly a panel discussion on Psychedelics and Hinduism.

We ended last year with an in-person conference at the Center called Adventures in the Imaginal-- Henry Corbin in the 21st Century, which was hands down the best conference the center has ever hosted. And it included an exhibition of paintings, a poetry reading, a staged reading of a play, and a live musical performance, all of them inspired by the writings of Henry Corbin. That conference will eventually yield an edited volume, led by Hadi Fakhoury.

Now, to this year, T&T signature events this year will include not only the two speaker series I just mentioned, but also the launch of a podcast called Pop Apocalypse, led by another of our postdoctoral fellows, Matthew Dillon. Pop Apocalypse will offer an examination of myth and mysticism in popular culture, and will be aimed at audiences inside and outside the academy. So please be on the lookout for an announcement of the podcast release sometime later in the Fall semester.

We're also hosting two in-person reading groups, open to members of the Harvard community, one on Mircea Eliade, and another on Plant Consciousness. So these are some of the public faces of T&T, but the initiative also supports research associates and postdoctoral fellows who are pursuing private research projects, projects which will someday be public facing. That is to say, it will be published in whatever form is most appropriate, an article, a book, a website, or a public lecture.

So please let me introduce the new faces of T&T in alphabetical order. I'm going to be brief in my introductions because you can read more about each of them on our website, and because they are going to introduce themselves as they introduce their research projects. After I introduce them all, I will disappear from the screen, and they will take the virtual stage one by one and speak for about 10 minutes each. And then they will hand the mic to the next. And I will return at the end to conclude our evening.

So without further ado, let me introduce our five newest T&T affiliates. Barakatullo Ashurov is a linguist and historian from Tajikistan. His research and teaching focus on the history of religions, cultures, and languages of ancient Iran, encompassing the modern territories of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. One of his primary areas of interest is the history of Eastern Syriac Christianity among Iranian and Turkic-speaking communities of West and Central Asia.

Second, Sravana Borkataky-Varma is a historian who studies Indian religions, focusing on esoteric rituals and gender, particularly in Hindu Shakta Tantric traditions. She is the instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Houston, and she has taught here at Harvard Divinity School, but also at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, the University of Montana, and Rice University.

Our third affiliate is Michael Ennis. He's a historian of Patristic Christianity, focusing on the fourth and fifth centuries. His research sits at the intersection of Philology and Theology. His dissertation studied the fourth century poet, Ephrem the Syrian, whose symbolic theology in its interreligious contexts, spanning Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac traditions. In addition to revising his dissertation for publication as a monograph, Michael will spend his time at the Center working on a new book project examining the central texts of the fourth century Origenist controversy, about which he'll say more this evening.

Our fourth affiliate is Michael Ferguson, who is an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Neurospirituality Research Director for the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's a lecturer on neurospirituality here at Harvard Divinity School, he instructs a Cognitive Neuroscience of Meditation course at the College, and he leads graduate-directed readings in mysticism and neuroscience.

And finally, our fifth affiliate is Shiraz Hajiani, a scholar of Religion and History with over a decade of experience in teaching and advising undergraduates, graduates, and lifelong learners, including at the University of Chicago and here at Harvard. He specializes in Islamic history and thought, Shi'ism, Isma'ili Studies, and has regional experience in the study of the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia.

BARAKATULLO ASHUROV: Thank you so much, Charlie, and thank you, everybody in attendance tonight. My name is Barakatullo Ashurov, as mentioned, and I'm very pleased to be one of this year's research associates in the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Divinity School. I came to Harvard Divinity School last year as a part time lecturer in Eastern Christianity, and I'm immensely happy that I found this opportunity that I can continue this year in the new capacity with T&T.

I began my academic training as an Oriental Studies student in my home country in the Republic of Tajikistan. My studies will focus on South Asia, and I graduated with a specialist in Hindi and Urdu. After that, I attended another three more different graduate programs in India, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. And my studies all involved studying the languages and religions of the Near East and Eurasia, eventually leading me to my doctoral program at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where I earned my PhD in study of Religions.

My PhD dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of Syriac Christianity among the Iranian-speaking people of Central Asia, looking at the history of transfer and transmission of the Syriac-speaking Christianity from Iran plateau to Central Asia, specifically people called [INAUDIBLE]. However, my research goes beyond the study of Syriac Christianity, and it covers the study of other ancient and contemporary religiosities of both West and Central Asia.

This year, particularly at T&T, I am working on a project on contemporary healing practices in Central Asia, focusing on the Tajik people. The theme of my research is part of a globally attested and research phenomenon known today, "shamanism," quote unquote. Now the main theme of shamanism, or the academic interest in shamanism, is a global phenomenon, which [? Andres Naminsky ?] called it shamanism going global. And according to his publications, he marks that the notion or the study of shamanism becoming global is marked by the publication of the English edition of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism-- Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

However, the history of research in shamanism shows that the earliest records on shamanic practices in North Asia as well as parts of Central Asia were already known as early as 1773, 1778. Now, over 250 years of research have hardly exhausted the topic, especially when we try to localize or try to study a specific aspect of this phenomenon. And my research specifically tries to fill in this lacuna by bringing in and researching on the so-called shamanic practices that are current among the Tajik people.

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