how science, and society, became more and more physicalist

Over the last few hundred years, humanity has developed an incredibly effective method for the study of the physical domain and put a massive collective energy into using it to satisfy our every real and imagined physical, emotional and intellectual need. But unfortunately, it appears that we have done this so successfully that we got fooled by our own success. Within the scientific community it is now widely held that mathematics and the objective knowledge of the physical world are the only two types of knowledge that can be made fully reliable, and that what people think about the inner reality is inescapably "subjective". Though some may find it hard to admit, it looks more and more as if only the physical reality is fully real, and as if the inner domain exists only within our individual, brain-based minds. Since science can do nothing with it, it is left to the social networking and entertainment industry, the worlds of art and literature, and for those who still have faith in it, to religion.

Historically, it is fairly clear how our global civilization became as unbalanced as it presently is. The way modern science developed in Europe is related to the peculiar mix of Abrahamic and Roman influences on Christianity in Western Europe. After Rome became Christian in the fourth century CE, Christianity became increasingly Roman. The result was that from that time onwards there was a growing tendency to impose the strict monotheism of the Abrahamic tradition in which Christ grew up on whole populations with all the bureaucratic and military genius of the Roman Empire. This led in Europe to the imposition of a too narrow, dogmatic view of religious truth, from which post-medieval scientists escaped by limiting themselves to the study of the physical nature in which the Roman Catholic Church had a more limited interest. That Galileo made a distinction between the Book of God and the Book of Nature, and that Descartes distinguished res cogitans, thinking things, from res extensa, physically extended things, was by itself not that new or special. Reality as experienced by us appears to consist of an inner domain of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and other aspects of reality that do not appear to be physical, and a very different outer domain of things and forces that do appear to be physical. These two domains have been distinguished throughout history in a wide variety of ways and for different purposes. What is special about what happened in Europe in the 16th and 17th century is that the most creative thinkers of the time chose to study the physical half of reality. Earlier and elsewhere, whenever the choice came up, the wise seem to have admonished the public either to respect both or focus on the inner half. In case of Galileo the reason to limit his studies to the outer one was clear: his life was at stake. Descartes lived and worked in the safer, northern part of Europe, but given the times in which he lived, it is hard to imagine politics did not play a similar role in his choices. But whatever the motivation of the main actors in the drama may have been, the net outcome was that for several centuries, science limited its new way of doing research strictly to the study of the physical domain.

A spiral of quickly cumulative knowledge

That the new methods science developed during this period were effective is hard to deny. Until about 400 years ago, what we knew about the physical domain was limited to what we could perceive with our own biological senses, so it appeared small and relatively simple. Since then, an ever-growing army of highly specialised researchers have used ever more specialised knowledge to make ever more sophisticated instruments to study it further. This led to more knowledge, and this led in turn to more sophisticated instruments, creating a self-reinforcing loop of ever faster progress. These physical instruments expanded the range of what we could perceive, and this made us realise that the physical universe is far larger than we used to think, as well as far more complex, especially in the fine detail of our own human bodies.

All this gave us not only knowledge. It also gave us the power to make things we can use. And this created two more elements that reinforced the already self-reinforcing loop: demand, which produced money and other resources to do more research, as well as questions to stimulate and direct that research. In the process, several other things happened in society, which made the speed by which our knowledge and power over the physical domain increased grow exponentially. The first is that we found ever more powerful means to spread new knowledge to ever more people at an ever faster speed: the letter press was invented, then faster physical transport, telegraphy, telephone, radio, tv, internet, cell phones, and by now everybody can, at least technically, reach everybody else, instantly, at near zero cost. The second is that since purely physical labour was increasingly taken over by machines, jobs became more mentally demanding. This led to more people getting into education and education becoming more and more science and technology oriented. As a result, an ever larger percentage of the population got involved in learning and developing the powerful, but narrow type of knowledge the hard sciences require. The third and perhaps most dramatic development is that in the early 1940s humanity figured out how to process data electronically, and this capacity is growing so fast that our machines can by now do this in more and more areas faster and better than our own brains. In all these directions, the timespan in which new technologies are adopted gets shorter and shorter.

All this is probably to the good, except for one thing, which is that the type of knowledge that is progressing so marvellously, is one-sided to the extreme. It is a kind of knowledge that only works for the physical aspect of reality, while reality is way more than just physical. The world in which we live is full of meaning and beauty; it is the outcome of love rooted in a deep underlying oneness, and none of this can be studied by the kind of science we presently have. And as a result, our collective understanding of reality has become more and more fractionalised and unbalanced.
 

How psychology followed the hard sciences, and lost itself

While our knowledge and mastery over the physical world increased, with the other half of reality, our inner life, the opposite happened. This second domain appears, at least in some sense, to exist inside, since the most typical way to connect with it is not by using our outer senses, but by feeling, looking or going inside. But over the last 500 years, what this "inside" means has changed dramatically for the worse. Before the scientific revolution, the vast majority of thinkers, even in the West, took it for granted that the inner domain was not only vaster than the outer one, but also primary: Plato saw the physical world as a shadow or projection from a world of ideas; theistic religions thought of it as created by a personal God; more abstract philosophical ones like the Vedic tradition saw it as manifested by Brahman, the divine consciousness, within its own vastness. We ourselves were thought of as eternal souls temporarily embodied on earthly soil, and not only us, but everything was supposed to have an "inside", a consciousness, perhaps even a being supporting it. In many civilizations, the highest inner reality was seen as a Kingdom of God, true, happy, all-beautiful, saccidananda, way beyond the "valley of tears" we inhabit physically and socially. So how did this entire inner reality disappear?

After 1500, the study of the inner domain did not make the same progress in Europe as the hard sciences made in theirs. Initially our inner life — the realm of Galileo's Book of God and Descartes' res cogitans — was left to religion which was too history and doctrine bound to allow much progress. As a result, the power of organised religion over the mental and politcal life of Europe gradually weakened till at the end of the 19th century, a small group of people with an interest in the inner life of man switched sides and psychology finally opened shop as an independent academic discipline. But as we saw in the beginning of this chapter, by that time the stress on objective knowledge was solidly entrenched within the scientific community, and psychology, as a newcomer in the field, did not have the strength and self-confidence to establish its own methodology. And so, after a short period of attempts at professionalising introspection and hypnosis, it gave up on the inner domain and limited itself to the study of behaviour and what representative samples of the general public report about it. As a result, the self-reinforcing loop of specialists creating and using specialist tools to improve perception never took place in the inner domain.

Since the hard sciences did make progress, they became increasingly dominant in terms of funding, status and attracting talent. As a result, it became more and more normal within academics to think of reality and even of ourselves as primarily physical. And to the extent we do that, the inner half of reality becomes the inside of the physical body, or even the inside of the brain. B. F. Skinner, who was — and perhaps even is — considered by many one of the greatest psychologists of the 20th century, wrote in 1953 that our entire inner life was "functionally irrelevant". And if you think that 1953 is long ago and science has moved on, an introduction to psychology used at Harvard in 2010 does not do much better: it describes prayer as one of nine "mind-body interventions" and mentions "spirituality" only once in a lurid description of the brainwashing techniques used by cults.1 In short, while the physical domain expanded, the inner domain shrank.
 

Studying by proxy

One of the reasons psychology has not been as successful as the hard sciences seems to be that psychology doesn't study the non-material aspects of reality directly but by proxy. What psychology knows how to study is not the inner domain itself, but on the one hand its physical correlates in the nervous system and on the other hand cognitive behaviour which in practice consists mainly of verbal descriptions produced by individuals and representative groups. As a result, research on psychological processes and inner states is almost entirely based on relatively superficial self-assessments by the general public, and even in research on spirituality and religion, what is actually studied consists almost always of scriptures and other cultural artefacts and practices that are still part of the physical world. The furthest mainstream psychology has reached in recent times is respect for individual, personal experience, but there is still no active study of the non-physical reality that is being experienced. Even when people with outstanding spiritual achievements are studied, they tend to be studied as physical people who, whether through genetic predisposition or cultural influences, have subjective experiences of which the objective emotional, biological or medical effects can be studied by modern science's own objective methods. Since physicalist science cannot see the inner reality these people know, and since it has no generally accepted way to study it, there is no active, progressive inquiry into the underlying non-physical, or at least not primarily physical reality for which such people engage in their spiritual practices, and there is a tendency in psychology to accept what they say about it either as cultural expressions or as subjective beliefs. From a simple agnosticism in which it is left undecided whether there actually exists a non-physical reality independent of humans thinking about it, mainstream science has quietly and gradually shifted into thinking that belief in the existence of non-physical forces and individualities is either due to a naïve acceptance of some religious or spiritual tradition, or plain pathological.2

Most psychological research is statistical in nature and designed to confirm or reject already existing ideas in areas where the underlying processes are insufficiently known. By itself this kind of research only rarely produces new insights. In medicine, the new ideas come mostly from subsidiary fields like biochemistry, pharmacology, physiology, material science, experimental surgery and so on. Once the case for an effective and safe new treatment is strong, large population surveys are undertaken. In psychology there is no such supply-line of new findings, and as a result, there is not much progress and hardly any "advanced psychology" to speak of. Most of the progress there has been in psychology is due to the goodness and insightfulness of individual psychologists. In short, almost all we have in terms of mainstream psychological knowledge is research-tolerated, not research-generated.

Getting entangled further and further

There are several factors that have made the conundrum in which psychology has entangled itself even more intractable. One of the most pernicious ones is that the physicalist bias can be difficult to spot for the people most concerned. In physics there is an immediately obvious distinction between the reality that is being studied and the social activity that studies that reality: the reality that physics studies is physical and belongs to the physical domain. "Physics as an academic discipline" and the "History of physics" are human activities and clearly not part of the purely physical world that physics studies. For physicists there is no reason to get confused between the territory and the map that describes it.

In psychology as presently practised this difference is much less obvious. The raw data of cognitive behavioural psychology consists largely of sentences, and even qualitative research tends to end with sentences that are subsequently analysed. And so are the theories that other psychologists formulate, the theories that together make the history of psychology, and the scriptures ancient cultures left behind. Given that academics typically "live in their mind," even if they look inside their own minds, what they see may well consist mainly of thoughts formulated as sentences. For some this may become a matter of conviction: they may get into the habit of considering feelings, visuals and whatever else can happen "inside" as noise that needs to be suppressed in order to remain sane and do serious work.

In physics it is taken for granted that the kind of advanced, cutting-edge observations of reality that can change the field can only be made by a relatively small number of especially gifted people, who, after extensive training, use highly specialised instruments. Subsequently, the observations of these specialists are accepted as valid descriptions of the shared, objective reality and taken further. In the Indian knowledge systems there is a similar faith that some people — rishis, gurus — have managed to turn their own nature into a reliable and precise "inner instrument of knowledge", or antaḥkaraṇa, so that their observations can be accepted as a reliable description of the inner reality.3 In mainstream psychology this faith is missing. Almost all psychological research is based on large data-sets of unskilled observations which are prone to all kind of gross errors, and psychologists are used to discard data that is too far removed from the "standard" range. As a result, when qualitative studies report the observations of highly qualified subjects, say exceptionally experienced meditators, these observations are still booked as private, subjective "experiences" that say something about the people having the experience, but not about the shared inner reality. And since they form a statistically irrelevant minority, the authorities in the field tend to feel justified in simply ignoring what they have to say.

A third factor compounding the other two is that almost all psychological research that gets taken seriously (the bit that is published in the main journals and that gets quoted by others) is about the tiny portion of humanity that shares the belief system of the researchers: American college students.4 People in other cultures (and social strata) tend to be studied as "others", and largely out of curiosity about the effect their culture has on them. Their culture is studied objectively and what they think about reality is taken as information about their culture and not as information about the shared inner reality that all of us try to understand. While there is at least some respect for the way other cultures deal with life's problems — as one can see for example in the widespread adoption of hathayoga and mindfulness — there appears to be remarkably little interest in how other civilizations study the inner domain, and whether they might not have found more precise and trustworthy methods to do so than those which mainstream science presently uses. And this is tragical, since, as we will see, the Indian civilization has managed exactly that: it has found what mainstream science has missed. It has managed to create a highly sophisticated theoretical framework as well as an effective technology of consciousness to study the inner domain.

Together, these entanglements have created rather serious blocks on the way to inner knowledge, and they have helped make humanity's most progressive and only truly global knowledge system bizarrely one-sided. While it gives humanity ever-increasing powers in the physical domain, the very methods it uses stand in the way of a perhaps even more needed understanding of the non-physical side of reality.
 

The deeper, underlying story of why all this happened is of course more difficult to establish with any certainty, but giving it a try may add an interesting perspective to what is happening in the world at present. I hinted already that the best antidote against the one-sidedness of modern science can probably be found in the Indian knowledge systems since they made a similar kind of progress in the psychological and spiritual domains as Europe made in the physical domain. Interestingly this may not be by chance. The knowledge systems that developed in modern Europe and classical India may now look like mirror images of each other, but they have arisen from a common ancestor. Not only many of the foundational myths and stories are strikingly similar, but the very languages in which these stories were told are close cousins. The scientists that started the scientific revolution in Europe wrote in Latin, and Latin (as well as Greek) belong to the same linguistic family as the Sanskrit and Tamil of the Indian sages. These now distinct languages share much of their vocabulary, grammar, the basic structure of their alphabets and the way they developed over time. What is more, the ancient Indo-European civilization that gave rise to this family of languages was itself more integral in its understanding of reality than its descendants. As we already saw, in Greece, Plato's idealism came much closer to idealist classical Indian thought than to the modern binary of Positivism and Constructionism. In India, the older Vedic texts were more life-affirming than the later schools of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.5 In short, while there were already fascinating differences between Europe and India three thousand years ago, they were not remotely as extreme as those between present-day mainstream science on the one hand and classical Buddhism and Vedanta on the other.6

Sri Aurobindo suggests that the Indian and European civilizations moved apart as a consequence of an increasing intellectualization, because intellectually, for the mind, the opposite poles of exclusive spirituality and physicalism are more attractive than the somewhat messy emotional, relational and social realities in between. He wrote a little over hundred years ago:

In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, — it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p.11

The split is, obviously, not absolute. Europe has had its mystics, and India its physical luxury. But still, the genius and central focus was definitely different and it shows in what they achieved. While after 1800, Europe began to make impressive progress in the physical domain, the Indian knowledge systems made no less impressive progress in the inner domain, and that several centuries, if not millennia, earlier. Just as modern science looks at our individual bodies as tiny parts of an infinitely vaster and independently existing physical world, the Indian knowledge systems look at our individual feelings, thoughts, and intents as tiny parts of an infinitely vaster and independently existing, non-physical world. And the way the Indian knowledge systems have expanded the range and detail of our knowledge and know-how in this inner domain is no less astounding than the way modern science has expanded them in the physical one. In terms of the practical application of this knowledge too, one could well argue that the intensity of unconditional delight and the sense of immortality that the Indian technology of consciousness can give are at least as far beyond our ordinary, ego-based happiness and sense of self as our mobile phones are beyond our biological capacity to talk to our neighbours.
 

Can we bring these two knowledge systems together?

The question that then arises is whether we can bring these two complex knowledge systems together, and as many people have found out before us, this is more difficult than it may look at first sight. Over time, they have developed not only very different ideas about the basic nature of reality but even very different ways of thinking and expanding their knowledge. So, to bring all this harmoniously together, we have to look afresh at what the world is made of and how we can actually know about it. And as we will see, to do this well, we have to develop a whole new way of arriving at knowledge that goes in certain respects as much beyond traditional spirituality as it goes beyond mainstream science. This will require from both sides to learn how to think in a new way, a way that is not restricted to the way one has learnt to trust, but that accepts elements of other knowledge systems and especially of an older, more integral system that the later ones seem to have forgotten. To compicate matters, we cannot do any of this blindly. We must do it critically since all existing human knowledge is a mix of eternal truths and forms that are time and culture bound.

Especially for someone with a well-trained mind, to think about new content is easy, but to change one's very method of thinking and the largely subconscious ideas that support one's thinking is a different issue. And yet, this is needed and it may happen faster than we think because there is something that might help to make the transition easier and bring the two systems together without too much of a clash. It is the realization that if we look at all of them impartially, it becomes clear that they have actually quite a few essential ingredients in common. There are common factors that have helped these different knowledge systems to make the progress they have made. They look different because their domains and cultural settings are so different, but in their essence, in the way they function psychologically, they are actually very similar.

The similarities are most easily visible when we go back to the very early days of modern science, since things were at that time so charmingly simple. When we look from the right angle at what happened at that time in the hard sciences, and more specifically in astronomy, we'll see what it actually is that made the progress in our collective understanding of the physical reality possible. Once we have this clear, we'll find that the Indian knowledge systems used these very same elements for the study of the inner domain with relatively minor changes in order to adapt them to the very different nature of the non-physical side of reality.

So we'll now have first a look at the early days of modern astronomy and after that, we'll see what the Indian knowledge systems can contribute to modern academics and especially to psychology.