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The Spring 2024 issue of Collaboration will explore music as an aid to spiritual practice.
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Collaboration Journal Call for Submissions

Music and Consciousness

Spring 2024 | VOL. 49 NO. 1

Due by November 1, 2023

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e invite your reflections, essays, conversations, art, and poetry about “Music and Consciousness” for the Spring 2024 issue of Collaboration.

Music is a cultural universal that has been used for centuries to foster community, enhance celebration and ritual, and put us in touch with the Divine. The Mother has a great deal to say about music and sadhana, and Sri Aurobindo has written much on the value of the arts for elevating consciousness. Accordingly, this issue will explore music as an aid to spiritual practice.

Music, it has been said, brings us near to the infinite and to the essence of things. It can express what is verbally inexpressible. It can plumb unfathomable depths and reach beyond the stars. And if we listen closely and attentively, music can be a method of inner opening: a barrier in the mind breaks down and there comes a flooding, a revelation, an experience of divine reality. For as cellist Yo Yo Ma says, when one performs Beethoven, one believes that God exists.

Engaging with music, whether by listening, singing, dancing, composing, playing, or performing, can integrate body and soul, reason and intuition. Music can uplift the emotions and be used in healing. Music can teach us discipline. It can cultivate physical-vital-mental suppleness and deepen our experience of human unity. And it can introduce us to new territories in consciousness.

We invite your insights on how music—be it acoustic, Carnatic, operatic, electronic, or symphonic, from classical and folk to raga and jazz, from blues and bluegrass to Coltrane and Cage—has been part of your yogic path.


Whole-Person Psychology

Summer 2024 | VOL. 49 NO. 2 

Due by March 1, 2024

“Whole-Person Psychology” will be the theme for the Summer 2024 issue of Collaboration. Evolution’s quest for wholeness calls for a consciousness-centered psychology in our times that heals person, community, and nature; reveals hidden parts of being and planes of consciousness; and ultimately transforms mind, life, and body into instruments of a vast new dynamism for earthly unity.


50 Years of Collaboration

Fall 2024 | VOL. 49 NO. 3 

Due by July 1, 2024

Collaboration’s first issue was published in September 1974. To mark its 50th anniversary, the Fall 2024 issue will highlight notable articles published over the past five decades. Join us for a look back at Collaboration and its expressions of Integral Yoga through the years.


Mission

Collaboration is the journal of Integral Yoga published in the United States. Our mission is to share articles, conversations, poetry, and art that deeply engage our transitional times with the beauty, joy, and hope of the vast wisdom and practice of this evolutionary tradition and its founders, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We explore and celebrate particularly the individual practice of yoga in this country as well as currents and expressions of the collective yoga of the American soul in our times.

Audience

Collaboration is a means of reflection, encouragement, and inspiration for the Integral Yoga community here at home. We also want to highlight friends and allies in related areas of personal and social transformation. Including these fellow travelers requires sensitivity from our contributors, whom we ask to refrain from using references and terms of Integral Yoga and the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother without explaining or clarifying them.

Content

We welcome many kinds of contributions, especially those that share, in ways both personal and universal, the surprises of grace, intuition, and delight in the widening—or stuck—moments of our lives. We also love to publish submissions that challenge the increasing polarization of our personal and social lives or embrace that fragmentation and find its deeper meaning and healing in the integrative and inclusive currents emerging in our time.

Guidelines

Please contact our editorial team at editor@collaboration.org for the word count suitable for your contribution before submitting. This allows us to provide you with writer’s guidelines that reflect our editorial criteria.