One can distinguish four major contributions which the Indian civilisation can make to psychology and the science of the inner domain.
Its earliest formulations can be found in some of the oldest Indian texts like the Ṛg Veda, the early Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā. The "Vedic paradigm" given in these texts functions as a loving grandmother to the enormous variety of spiritual, philosophical, religious and cultural schools which India later brought forth. Outside India, it has been mainly these later traditions that have made an impact. One can think for example of the Buddhist meditation techniques that have spread since millennia throughout Asia and in more recent times in Europe and the Americas and the "eightfold path" described in Patanjali's Yogasutras which has become popular amongst American practitioners of hatha-yoga. There is an extensive body of research about them, and there can be no reasonable doubt about their value for self-development and therapy.
The older, more integral tradition is interesting for a different reason. It is its ability to support and nurture in an impartial (and often surprisingly modern) manner, the entire range of human efforts at understanding and improving the world and ourselves, whether religious, cultural, spiritual, or scientific. As science and technology are removing the distances that used to keep people and cultures apart, it is hard to exaggerate how much humanity needs such an integral framework for understanding all aspects of reality, and all the different ways in which people deal with them.
In modern times, Sri Aurobindo is the main exponent of the integral Indian tradition, and we will make use of Sri Aurobindo's work which is based on the Vedic understanding of reality throughout this text.
With this we have arrived at what may well be the most important contribution the Indian civilisation can make to modern science. While decontextualised forms of yoga and mindfulness are used on a large scale for well-being, the potential of the Indian knowledge systems for providing detailed and reliable knowledge and know-how in the inner domain has hardly been touched. This is remarkable — and tragical — since in the culture of origin, yoga was taken up not only for happiness, but also, and often primarily, for the sake of knowledge and wisdom.
It is a major theme of this text that these first two — the Indian understanding of the basic nature of reality and knowledge, together with its practical methods for the study of the inner domain — could revolutionise psychology and its applications in education, self-development, counselling, therapy, management, governance, etc.
One of the neat outcomes of the Indian approach is that it provides a logically coherent map of human nature in all its complexity, including things that are entirely beyond the scope of present day mainstream psychology.
As mentioned earlier, decontextualised versions of for example hathayoga and mindfulness, are already adopted by mainstream psychology on a large scale, and more comprehensive implementations are part of a variety of subcultures, but while all this is great for those who use them, it is not enough to take psychology further as a science. For that we need to understand the first two contributions, the ontology and epistemology that gave rise to them.
Studying the psychological aspects of the various Indian knowledge systems is, however, not that simple. The Indian civilisation is extremely complex and so, if one wants to go beyond the usual platitudes, one has to choose between a selection and a synthesis. For one's own individual growth, a selection may well be the most efficient way to proceed, since any one of these different paths can take the seeker to the experience and realisation of the divine Absolute. All that an individual needs is to find the path that works best given his or her unique background and nature. But if our aim is to develop a comprehensive framework for the whole of psychology, we need a synthesis, since each of these traditions has specialised in a different aspect of the Divine and of human nature.
Instead of attempting to make my own synthesis, for which I am ill-equipped, I've used the synthesis Sri Aurobindo made in the first half of the last century.1 This synthesis is special for several reasons. The first is simply the sheer quality of his work, which I hope will come across even from the short quotations from his writings I've included in this text. The second is that it is the outcome of a rigorous effort at going back in his own experience to the underlying reality that gave rise to the different terminologies and schemata developed by the major Indian and Western knowledge systems. As a result of this deeper, more inward effort, Sri Aurobindo's synthesis is clearly not based only on a scholarly study of texts; it appears rather like a remarkably comprehensive and coherent expression (in prose and poetry) of what he discovered in his own experience about the realities that gave rise to the sometimes radically opposite ideas one finds in the various Indian and Western schools of thought. The third is that he used that inner knowledge not only to look at the Indian systems for individual spiritual development, but also at the Greek ideals of beauty, at Darwin's idea of biological evolution and at the later European ideal of collective, social progress, which he all knew well from his early education in London and Cambridge. Together these Indian and European influences allowed him to create an exceptionally comprehensive perspective on life that is centred around the Vedic conception of an involution of consciousness creating the physical world which science knows so well, followed by a still ongoing re-evolution of consciousness within that physical world in which all of us play our parts and of which the many different knowledge systems that humanity has developed over time have studied different aspects.
As we discussed in the Introduction, the central purpose of this text is to explore ways to make science more balanced, so that humanity can develop the wisdom it needs to handle the powers which the hard sciences are providing. Unfortunately this is more complicated than it looks at first sight. The core of the problem is that the study of the inner domain requires not only different methods of enquiry, but also a different understanding of the basic stuff, structure and functioning of reality as a whole. Since the Indian knowledge systems that have focused on the inner half of reality are wider, more complex, and in certain respects more sophisticated than those of mainstream science, incorporating them as a small niche within the existing framework of science does not work. and without a basic grasp of their consciousness-centred understanding of reality, we cannot understand their methods for making knowledge of the inner, subjective domain more reliable, precise and cumulative. More importantly, we cannot develop these methods further, which as we will see, is crucial for humanity to take the next step in its still ongoing evolution.2
We'll start our philosophical explorations with the concept of integrality, which we will take in the sense of the Sanskrit word purna: the idea that the ultimate All is responsible for the existence and the functioning of the parts. This deserves to be a central theme in psychology, since our human lives go well to the extent that we live and act in harmony with the ultimate Whole of which we and everything else are parts. After that we'll have a look at different concepts of consciousness since a too limited understanding of consciousness has been one of the main stumbing blocks standing in the way of progress in psychology and a more comprehensive understanding of it will be crucial to take psychology further. The third thing we'll look at is Sri Aurobindo's idea of an involution and a —still ongoing — evolution of consciousness as the "secret ingredient" that made Darwin's biological evolution possible. One of the reasons to bring it in, is that it provides a relatively simple, logical and coherent answer to a wide variety of existential questions that have mystified humanity for as long as we know. It also provides a deeply inspiring vision of where humanity is going and what we can do to expedite this journey.
Once these ontological and axiological foundations have been laid, we'll come back to the epistemological question how to develop appropriate and efficient research methods for the subjective and inner domains.
In the next chapter, we'll start with a look at integrality, and we'll take it up in two very different ways. The first describes the allegorical image that has given rise to the title of this text. The second offers a more prosaic explanation of the concept of integrality. If the first version is too poetic for your taste, you can jump straight to the second one.
1 For those who are interested, there is a short biography of Sri Aurobindo in the appendix.
2It is true that certain techniques that have their origin in the Indian tradition, like mindfulness and hathayoga, have been found to be beneficial in fields like counselling and self-help even when used in a "decontextualised" manner, but without the deeper understanding of the knowledge systems on which they are based, it is a bit like using the techniques with which Michelangelo made his beautiful statues for making marble kitchen sinks and coffee tables: it is a good thing to do, we all need kitchen sinks and it is great to have a really beauteous coffee table, but it misses the point. The real treasures hidden within the Indian knowledge systems will become visible only when we study them in the context of the Indian understanding of reality and our place within it. Only then can we understand the Love and the Beauty they saw in the inner, psychological domain and how they managed to make their knowledge of it so effective and reliable. Doing so is not easy, as it requires a very different attitude towards life, work, knowledge and self, but as I mentioned earlier, the stakes are high. Humanity has become far too powerful for its own good and we are in urgent need of a better understanding of ourselves.
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