New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 27, 2026 Debashish Banerji, PhD, is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is author of Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternatate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century. Here he suggests that the current systems of chakras have antecedents going back to the Indus Valley civilization over 5,000 years ago. Much of our contemporary understanding can be traced by to a sixteenth century manuscript that was translated into English by Sir John Woodroffe as The Serpent Power. The discussion focuses on the deities, geometric shapes, mantras, and yantras associated with each of the chakras – as well as the koshas or sheaths that encompass the physical body. He notes that there are many different ways to count the number of chakras. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on October 31, 2020)