“Science in its essence should stand only for a method and not for any special beliefs, yet as habitually taken by its votaries, science has come to be identified with a certain fixed general belief, the belief that the deeper order of nature is mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such a thing as human life.”
William James,
“It is a fundamental mistake to identify a model with reality… Force, field… mass, energy… space, time… particle, wave [are simply elements in the scientific model]… We know now for sure that we do not know at all what matter is.”
Chemist A. G. Cairns-Smith
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I’ve posted a few comments on this blog, but since this is my first formal blogpost, I thought I’d say a bit about my background. I’ve been a clinical psychologist for the past 20 years, and worked as a composer/pianist before that. Jan (my wife) and I have been students of Sri Aurobindo since the mid-1970s. We wrote a book together which focused primarily on his integral yoga psychology, though titled it “Yoga Psychology” to show the connection between his work and others in the Indo-Tibetan yogic tradition. I also have several articles on Indian Psychology at the Infinity Foundation website. Jan and I are currently developing a website – www.remember-to-breathe.org – on neuroscience and meditation (which, with its focus on integration, may actually be quite a bit closer to Sri Aurobindo’s yogic psychology than it appears at first glance).
I thought for this first post I would focus on what I personally think is the single greatest impediment to the widespread acceptance of “Indian” or “yogic” psychology. 10 years ago, I would have simply said, “materialism.” However, this term seems to have gone out of fashion. For awhile, it looked like “physicalism” would replace it, but gradually, people seem to have come to the conclusion that nobody quite knows what the word “physical” means (I think there’s actually a Wikipedia article saying “physical” refers to whatever physicists study).
More recently, I’ve seen the term “naturalism” used instead of “materialism.” This seems particularly odd, as it somehow implies that mind, feelings, consciousness, awareness, etc are somehow – “supernatural”… or perhaps “unnatural”? I’m going to stick with materialism for now, as I think it conveys the problem better than the other terms.
What exactly is the problem?
I think it could be safely said that, with the exception of the Charvakas, almost all Indian philosophy (and the psychology associated with it) is non-materialistic (at least, in the modern sense of the word “materalism”). To the extent that modern “scientific” psychology has a materialist (or physicalist, if you prefer) orientation, psychologists are going to see Indian psychology as unscientific.
So what is the solution?
The solution, I think, is to see clearly, to think logically, to understand that materialism and physicalism are illogical, and in fact, incoherent ways of looking at the world. Most importantly, they are philosophic views that people associate with science that were not themselves arrived at in a scientific manner. Unfortunately, they are views which have so long been associated with science that to criticize them is taken as a criticism of science.
Where to start?
I like to start with experience. As given. And to whatever extent possible, shorn of excess preconceptions.
So let’s start with a white coffee cup (mathemetician and philosopher Thomas McFarlane has an excellent video on Vimeo in which he presents this experiment at one of the Franklin Merrell-Wolff gatherings; this is a modified version).
Say you’re sitting in a chair, looking at a coffee cup on a table. How might we describe your experience? There are an assortment of percepts – “chair”, “cup”, “table”, etc.
Where do these percepts “exist” (or perhaps a better way of stating it, “by what means to you come to ‘know’ these percepts”?) For you, they exist in your awareness, no?
Do you experience an essentially different awareness in regard each percept? Is there a chair-awareness, and entirely distinct from that, a table-awareness, a floor-awareness, etc?
Try it. Do you find any divisions or boundaries in awareness? In fact, do you actually find a clear division or boundary between “awareness” and “percepts”?
Does it make any sense, then, to describe your experience as a unified yet differentiated field of awareness?
Now, where does “matter” (or “physical”) fit in all this. If you do not make it into an abstraction, it certainly seems appropriate to refer to the “texture” or “form” of the table, chair, floor, cup, etc as matter. But this is not the “matter” of the materialist.
So where, or when, is the matter of materialism? And how might we come to know of it? What experiment could we perform to find some kind of “matter” which exists entirely independent of awareness, consciousness or knowing? That is, which exists outside of the field of differentiated yet unified awareness.
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So now that we have dispensed with materialism – well, ok, it’s not really that easy… now that we have perhaps questioned the materialistic view enough to grant a greater legitimacy to the non-materialistic perspective of Indian psychology, we might have an easier time exploring what changes might be necessary in research methodology to allow Indic psychology to transform the way we understand ourselves, consciousness, matter, life – and in fact, our whole approach to science.
(Note – I am not proposing this as an alternative metaphysical position. In fact, I’m not suggesting any metaphysic here at all. I’m simply offering a way of thinking that might facilitate questioning of the materialistic orthodoxy).