This is a selection from the book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”   It was our attempt (Jan, my wife and co-author, and myself) to follow up on Sri Aurobindo’s chapter on “The Conditions for the Advent of a Spiritual Age” which I have written about in previous… Read More »

Here, I think, in a passage from Sri Aurobindo’s “The Human Cycle”, is one of the most beautiful descriptions I’ve ever seen of what Indian psychology has to offer – a vision of a society based on the awakening to the Spirit – the Divine within and without.  And it gives us so many clues… Read More »

From "Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity" THE VIEW FROM INFINITY Intimations of Infinity While India – the home of yoga psychology – has always placed great value on intellectual understanding, the yogic tradition takes direct spiritual experience to be the foundation for any valid intellectual view. In… Read More »

Nearly 100 years ago, Sri Aurobindo wrote, in “The Human Cycle,” of the emergence, world-wide, of a new, deeper and more subjective attitude in various areas of human endeavor, including the arts, education, sociology, politics, economics, even in criminology.  Since that time, a number of authors have written in great detail of the kinds of… Read More »

Several decades ago, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the experience of creative artists.  This was in the 1960s, and many of them described extraordinary states of creativity during which they felt “in the flow”.  Since then, the science of positive psychology has discovered many surprising things about the power of positive emotions to foster optimal functioning. … Read More »

I began this exploration of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) and Indian psychology by exploring the connection between the functions of the mid prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and what in Indian psychology is known as the “buddhi” or, as Sri Aurobindo translates it, the “intelligent will.” I chose this because Dan Siegel, the originator of IPNB, puts so… Read More »

I’d like to take some time to talk about “interpersonal neurobiology” (or more simply, IPNB).  It’s the “brainchild” (pun intended) of psychiatrist Dan Siegel (who was trained as a pediatric psychiatrist).  Why IPNB?  I think among all the attempts at understanding the mind and consciousness among modern scientists, IPNB may provide one of the best… Read More »

In previous postings (all of which, including this, are based on the appendix, “Science and Yoga”, from our book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”), I explored attempts to explore yogic topics using ordinary means of knowledge – and to some extent, what modern scientists consider “inner” means… Read More »

In the previous post, I discussed attempts to examine psychological phenomena using the outer mind. This mind generally employs what Sri Aurobindo refers to as “separative knowledge.”  It is a way of knowing in which the subject or knower is thought to be separate from the object, or the “known.” (note that the words “knower”… Read More »

  INTRODUCTION My first blog touched on the problem of physicalism (also known, strangely enough, as materialism – strange since nobody seems to know what “matter” is -  and most strangely, “naturalism”, - exceedingly odd since dead matter is perhaps one of the most unnatural, most abstract ideas anybody has ever come up with).  The… Read More »