A personal preamble

Some years ago, a seminar was held in South India for psychologists with an interest in spirituality. There were participants from all over the world and when a therapist from California realised how few well-trained psychotherapists there were in India, he got all enthusiastic about the enormous scope for his much-loved profession in this vast country. His enthusiasm didn't last long, however. A well-respected Indian psychologist looked at him somewhat pensively and said. "When I have an issue for which I need psychological help, I go to whomever has the highest consciousness, not to whomever has the highest degree in psychology." Most Indians present on the occasion seemed to agree that they would do the same.

What happened at the end of this seminar reflected almost exactly with what had gone through my mind some 25 years earlier. After finishing my medical training, a few years worth of academic psychology and a variety of counselling courses in the Netherlands and the USA, I had come to India to learn more about yoga and meditation. But when, after a few months, it was time to return, I realised that a few months had not been enough. If I really wanted to understand how the human mind works, I could learn more in India than at the university of Amsterdam. And so I stayed on in India, first for a few more months, and then for a few more years. By now, over 40 years have passed, I'm still in India and I'm still learning.

Recently, there was a third event, that for me finally nailed how serious the problem actually is. I spoke with an old-student who had just completed one of the best professional counseling courses in India. Before she took up this course, she had already gone through an extensive spiritual education and she explained how well all the different Western techniques she had learned during the counselling course fitted into the wider understanding she had obtained earlier. At the end of our chat, she said how wonderful it was for her personally when counselling actually worked and how grateful people were for the progress it helped them make. As she gave some more detail on what she did during counselling sessions, and how simple it actually was, she suddenly giggled and said, "all this doesn't sound very scientific of course." And I thought: "Heck, if a good counselling session doesn't sound scientific, which of the two should adjust?"

Long ago, when Gallileo dropped his cannonballs from the tower of Pisa and they did not behave according to the theories of Ptolemeus, who had to give way? Ptolemeus or the cannonballs? If Gallileo and the other pioneers of modern science had shrugged their shoulders and stuck to Ptolemeus, would we have had the science and the technology we enjoy today?

This is one corner of the scientific enterprise that is perfectly simple and straightforward: when there is a gap between reality and the accepted scientific theory, it is the theory that must be adjusted. But strangely, in psychology, this is not what has happened. People live their lives and practicing psychologists use whatever they have found to work, and everybody accepts that the official, mainstream, academic science of psychology, the science that was supposed to support us in our efforts to understand and improve ourselves, helps only upto a point. Its stress on measurement, facts and statistics, however admirable in its own way, is not commensurate with the depth, the pain, the love, the beauty, the freedom and the commitment of real people in their real, day to day lives. The knowledge mainstream psychology provides is not enough. To find meaning, live happier and more harmonious lives something more is needed.

Strangely enough, we accept that this is how it is, and we continue. Is it because most psychologists who deal with actual people in real life situations, tend to work in isolation, and positivist, physicalist science is too vast a colossus for an individual to tackle? Is it because positivist, reductionist science works so well for cars, planes, and cell-phones, that we don't dare to shout? Or is it because for each one of us as individuals there is actually such a simple way out?

Using incompatible knowledge systems, each in its own separate silo

When neither the religion in which we are born, nor the standard scientific understanding of life offers sufficient support, psychologists and "ordinary people" alike tend to take recourse to one of the many alternative schools and practices that our rich, global civilization has on offer. For many of us, this works quite well: after a bit of trial and error we settle on one of them, become happier and find the meaning and direction back for our individual lives. The problem is, that these therapeutic or spiritual groups tend to live in relatively narrow, self-satisfied silos. Typically, there is a charismatic life-coach, therapist or guru who has found inner happiness and satisfaction following a specific technique or spiritual path, and he begins to guide people along the same lines that have worked for himself. Since only those for whom it also works stay around, as time passes, the group tends to develop a stronger and stronger inner cohesion; there is a growing gratitude and admiration of the disciples for their guru (or of the clients for their coach or therapist) and both the leader and the followers become more and more confident about the path they have chosen. Though most of these groups are quite limited in their understanding, nobody really minds because for the personal lives of the group's members, they are good enough: they work.

And yet, the fact that some individuals can find a way out does not make the situation alright. There is still a problem, both for the individual and for the society as a whole. The problem for the individual is that he is likely to get stuck at a level of development where he is more or less comfortable, while he could have developed further. The nature of the collective problem becomes clear when we realise how far we might have reached if we had been as creative, clever and stunningly successful in psychology as we already are in engineering. How would it be if we had schools in which not just a few but all children would develop happily and freely into the very best human beings they could possibly become, into people who would do good things, and choose, for example, politicians who would do what is genuinely best for humanity? What if politics would give us governments that would look after everybody's interests justly and equally; if businesses would make and do what the world genuinely needs; if counselling would redress people's psychological problems with the same speed and reliability that we take for granted in the maintenance of aeroplanes; if we had not only Clinical Psychology, but also Advanced Psychology, a field in which students could learn how to develop whole new powers of knowledge, sharing and creation; and most of all, if more and more people would feel love and oneness, and live and act on that happy foundation in harmony with each other and the rest of nature? All this sounds at present completely unrealistic and utopian, but this — and much more — would be within our human reach if we were as good in psychology as we already are in physics and chemistry. And why not? With the help of the hard sciences, humanity can make things as utterly implausible as aeroplanes and cell-phones, chat-bots, solar panels and self-driving cars, so "why on earth" would a good, effective science of psychology be beyond us?

Part of the collective problem is that the making of isolated silos is not limited to small spiritual sects and schools of psychological practice. It also happens in the large world-religions and even in science. For the religions this is understandable enough. One of the roles religion plays in society is to pass insights and values from previous generations on to the present and future ones. As a result, they are focussed on their past, and since they provide their followers with a shared sense of purpose and belonging, they tend to be, almost inevitably, conservative and communal in outlook. But science has a very different role in society, and in science all this is not supposed to happen. Science is supposed to find new knowledge and new solutions. It is progressive by design. It accepts that its findings will always be open to revision, and it thrives on internal criticism. But unfortunately, as a whole, science is yet again a strongly siloed knowledge system. While it is open to the temporary nature of whatever truth it has established, it is extremely defensive about its basic assumptions and processes. In contrast with the religions, science does not attempt to hold on to its findings: what is sacrosanct in science is not content but the "scientific method". This again would not matter if that method worked equally well for all aspects of reality, or if science limited itself to the physical domain in which its method and its underlying assumptions work marvellously well. But in practice, that is not how it is.

The need for two fundamental scientific disciplines

The physical sciences are so undeniably effective and provide us with such astounding miracles on an almost routine basis, that the way science arrives at new knowledge is increasingly seen as the only one that is truly reliable and that cannot be reasonably doubted. As a result, science — and with it the entire academic system built around it — is entrusted, almost everywhere, with education, right from the most advanced centers of academic research down to the smallest neighbourhood level kindergarten. It has also become the only knowledge system that can be used almost unquestioned by governments, corporations and large NGOs all over the world. But if we are honest, we have to admit that mainstream academics as we have it at present is not up to that role, because the progress in the human and social sciences is nowhere near the progress we see in the physical domain. And the reason for this discrepancy is not hard to spot.

The methods that science uses to create and share new knowledge, work well for the outer, physical domain, but they don't work as well for the psychological domain, the world of love, meaning, feelings, thoughts, agency, attitudes, values and relationships, and it works even less for what people look for in the enormous variety of religious and spiritual knowledge systems humanity has created over the ages. This entire inner reality, all that can only be accessed by looking or going inwards, exists in consciousness but it is not, or at least not primarily, physical. And since it can neither be measured by physical instruments nor expressed in the language of mathematics, science does not really know how to deal with it, and so it doesn't study it directly but by proxy. What our present science knows how to study are its physical correlates in the nervous system, behaviour, verbal descriptions produced by individuals and representative groups, scriptures and other cultural expressions. In other words, the inner reality itself is only studied indirectly, and the result is not good enough to achieve the kind of quickly progressive understanding and mastery we see in the hard sciences.

What we suggest in this text is that if science wants to be worthy of the central role it plays in our global civilisation, it should not be based on one, but on two foundational disciplines:

• one focussing on the outer, material side of reality;
• one focussing on the inner, consciousness side of reality.

At present only the first one, physics, is doing well; the second one, psychology, is hampered by demands of objectivity and concrete, physical evidence, which are suitable for physics, but inappropriate for the aspect of reality psychology is supposed to study. While both foundational sciences should be bound by the same level of intellectual rectitude, rigour, and sincerity, each one should use the instrumentation and methods of enquiry that fit its territory. In other words, what psychology needs in order to become as precise, detailed and reliable as physics already is, are the research methods, the technology of consciousness and the inner, consciousness-based instruments of knowledge that together can produce rigorous, precise and reliable knowledge in the inner domain. At present the physicalist bias of mainstream science stands in the way of psychology even beginning to develop these. So psychology needs not only the technical know-how to study the subjective domain, but also a theoretical framework that is vast, flexible and integral enough to support this part of reality.

The good news is that humanity has already developed both to quite an extent. Collectively we have not only knowledge in the domain of the hard sciences, but there is also substantial knowledge in the subjective and inner domains. The main problem is that it is at present not part of mainstream academics. It is held, for example, by professionals, working in a wide variety of fields who have developed it more or less on their own simply because they need it for their work. It is also available in some highly sophisticated spiritual and religious traditions that science till now has not sufficiently respected as knowledge systems. The largest and in many ways most profound and well-organised treasure of inner knowledge can probably be found in India, but till now all that our global civilisation has adopted from the Indian civilisation are bits of culture, stories, music, dance, and decontextualised methods of yoga and meditation that help to achieve physical and emotional well-being. All this is valuable and relatively easy to adopt since it does not require a deep change in our modern way of thinking, but it is not enough and it is not the most valuable part of what India has to offer.

The Indian civilisation has not only created an exceptionally rich treasure of practical methods to achieve happiness, but also a highly sophisticated understanding of how to make inner, intuitive and "subjective" knowledge more reliable, precise and effective. Based on that, it has developed an exceptionally comprehensive and well-worked-out understanding of human nature and reality as a whole. It is these two things that together can become the philosophical and methodological basis for the more effective and quickly progressive science of psychology that humanity needs.

The most ancient, Vedic thought that supports the entire Indian civilisation, and that we intend to use as the philosophical foundation for this text is very different from that of mainstream materialism, and in some subtle but actually crucial ways, it is even quite different from the better-known Indian systems that came later. But as we will see, one of its core characteristics is its inclusiveness, and it is this integrality that bestows on it an amazing capacity to support and enrich other knowledge systems. While it is not in conflict with their findings, it expands and enriches their foundations as well as their methods of enquiry and action. What is more, and of special interest for our present objective, is that it is genuinely "psychology-friendly" and that it offers a fascinating perspective on our possibilities for further development.

Why it will be difficult

A full integration of science, the various later spiritual and religious traditions and this more ancient Vedic knowledge system is, however, not easy. One reason is that many of the later knowledge systems have over time become extremely complex and it requires an immense, focused, life-time commitment to understand them in their full depth and detail. For those who have given their lives to these systems and who have received virtually all they really value from them, it can be hard to accept that there might be something beyond. It is risky and uncomfortable to change one's moorings, and this is true for those in science as well as for those who feel more at home in any of humanity's many spiritual traditions.

Still, it is worth the effort, because all these later systems were created with specific, and ultimately limited objectives in mind. At the risk of oversimplifying things, one could say for example that the Buddha's central objective was to overcome psychological suffering and Christ's to spread love and faith in the personal Divine. Shankara wanted to free us from the illusions in which we live and modern science is to quite an extent in the service of material comfort, defence and commerce. Other systems developed in support of one specific community, one set of values or one way of thinking. As such, none of these systems is likely to provide the best starting point for the development of a broad philosophical and methodological framework for the whole of human knowledge, a framework that includes all of the physical and social sciences, psychology, religion, and spirituality. And yet, due to our increasing interconnectedness, humanity needs such a comprehensive understanding perhaps more than ever before.

Given our modern belief in linear progress, it may seem strange that one of the oldest human knowledge systems might offer the most comprehensive way of understanding reality. But it actually makes sense that in the earliest period of our present civilisation, the wisest amongst us had still a largely intuitive and implicit, but essentially true understanding of the whole of reality. It also stands to reason that in the next period of more abstract thought, individual thinkers, groups and ultimately whole civilisations focused on different aspects of that reality, gaining more and more detailed, but also more and more specialised and ultimately one-sided knowledge. Perhaps the time has come for at least some of us to go back to the underlying oneness, to what supports all our efforts at understanding, and to find there what it is that gives meaning and direction to our existence.

For whom this text is meant

This text is meant, then, for those who have realised that there is something missing in the way modernity explains reality, and that neither the physicalist, positivist hard sciences, nor the constructionist, post-modern social and human sciences, nor any of the major spiritual or religious traditions can give us a sufficiently comprehensive and progressive understanding of the world in all its complexity. In other words, this text is meant for those who feel that there should be something more, something that makes sense of the whole of reality, something that can tell us how it all hangs together and, most importantly, how we can study that extra, so that we can learn, also collectively, how we can attune ourselves better to the harmony of the whole.

This text is also a call for action. Humanity is at present clearly not wise enough for the powers it has and for the challenges it is facing. So this text is meant especially for those who have not only realised that our present way of thinking and doing things is not remotely as good as it should be, but who are willing to help change the way our proud global civilisation thinks, acts, and brings up its children.

What next

To start, we'll have a very quick look at what kind of a discipline psychology is at present, why it has not become as effective as the hard sciences already are, what it is that it can learn from physics, and what from the Indian knowledge systems. After this, Part One looks at a few different concepts of consciousness and discusses how a more integral and dynamic understanding of consciousness would improve our understanding of who we are and where the future might take us. Part Two contains what might be considered the central issue of this text: the different ways of acquiring knowledge that are needed to study the inner and subjective domains, how they can be made more precise and reliable, and how they can be integrated with the ways of acquiring knowledge used by the hard sciences. This completes the first half of the text. The second half of the text is intended as a "proof of concept". Part Three is about the individual. Its first chapter shows how such a topic could be introduced at college level if the ideas expressed in the first half would be found acceptable. The second offers a map, a fairly detailed model of the self and the personality, showing how the different parts or aspects of our nature function and how they interact with each other, other people, and the rest of the world. A major reason to include it, is to introduce Sri Aurobindo's relatively simple, yet surprisingly comprehensive, experience-based terminology, which may prove useful when different spiritual and philosophical traditions try to communicate. The third chapter looks at the various factors that together make us into the unique individuals we are. Part Four and Five are not yet written but intended to be about self-development and applied psychology. Ideally they should include contributions by other authors working with similar ideas in different fields.