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 changes Sri Aurobindo both described and predicted.  Swiss-German poet Jean Gebser, about 65 years ago, in his “Ever Present Origin”, speaks of the emergence of a new “integral” consciousness, and provides abundant details of examples of this emerging consciousness in art, music, literature, physics, biology, economics, and many other areas.  More recently, Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley Dennis have been surveying recent cultural changes around the world that, I think, are in line with what both Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser described. 

While Sri Aurobindo used Indian psychology (psycho-spirituality, really) as the backdrop for his exploration of this unfolding consciousness, to my mind, many of the subsequent writers have not availed themselves of anything as profound as that understanding of consciousness and the world which can be found in the Indian tradition.  I’m posting here – and plan to post other selections in the future – some of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on the emergence of this subtler, inner and innermost consciousness.

The inherent aim and effort and justification, the psychological seed-cause, the whole tendency of development of an individualistic age of mankind, all go back to the one dominant need of rediscovering the substantial truths of life, thought and action which have been overlaid by the falsehood of conventional standards no longer alive to the truth of the ideas from which their conventions started. It would seem at first that the shortest way would be to return to the original ideas themselves for light, to rescue the kernel of their truth from the shell of convention in which it has become incrusted. But to this course there is a great practical obstacle; and there is another which reaches beyond the surface of things, nearer to the deeper principles of the development of the soul in human society. The recovery of the old original ideas now travestied by convention is open to the practical disadvantage that it tends after a time to restore force to the conventions which the Time-Spirit is seeking to outgrow and, if or when the deeper truth-seeking tendency slackens in its impulse, the conventions reestablish their sway. They revive, modified, no doubt, but still powerful; a new incrustation sets in, the truth of things is overlaid by a more complex falsity. And even if it were otherwise, the need of a developing humanity is not to return always to its old ideas. Its need is to progress to a larger fulfilment in which, if the old is taken up, it must be transformed and exceeded. For the underlying truth of things is constant and eternal, but its mental figures, its life forms, its physical embodiments call constantly for growth and change.

It is this principle and necessity that justify an age of individualism and rationalism and make it, however short it may be, an inevitable period in the cycle. A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress. In India, since the great Buddhistic upheaval of the national thought and life, there has been a series of recurrent attempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life and get behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have been conducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soul-intuition and deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant and destructive. Although productive of great internal and considerable external changes, they have never succeeded in getting rid of the predominant conventional order. The work of a dissolvent and destructive intellectual criticism, though not entirely absent from some of these movements, has never gone far enough; the constructive force, insufficiently aided by the destructive, has not been able to make a wide and free space for its new formation. It is only with the period of European influence and impact that circumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce the beginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation of ideas and things have come into existence. The characteristic power of these influences has been throughout – or at any rate till quite recently – rationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic. It has compelled the national mind to view everything from a new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the present or restore the past are obliged unconsciously or half-consciously to justify their endeavour from the novel point of view and by its appropriate standards of reasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of life and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of a quite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers.

The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid, defaced or distorted; but from that first step it must proceed to others and in the end to a general questioning of the foundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life and action. A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of himself, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.

In Europe and in modern times this has taken the form of a clear and potent physical Science: it has proceeded by the discovery of the laws of the physical universe and the economic and sociological conditions of human life as determined by the physical being of man, his environment, his evolutionary history, his physical and vital, his individual and collective need. But after a time it must become apparent that the knowledge of the physical world is not the whole of knowledge; it must appear that man is a mental as well as a physical and vital being and even much more essentially mental than physical or vital. Even though his psychology is strongly affected and limited by his physical being and environment, it is not at its roots determined by them, but constantly reacts, subtly determines their action, effects even their new-shaping by the force of his psychological demand on life. His economic state and social institutions are themselves governed by his psychological demand on the possibilities, circumstances, tendencies created by the relation between the mind and soul of humanity and its life and body. Therefore to find the truth of things and the law of his being in relation to that truth he must go deeper and fathom the subjective secret of himself and things as well as their objective forms and surroundings.

This he may attempt to do for a time by the power of the critical and analytic reason which has already carried him so far; but not for very long. For in his study of himself and the world he cannot but come face to face with the soul in himself and the soul in the world and find it to be an entity so profound, so complex, so full of hidden secrets and powers that his intellectual reason betrays itself as an insufficient light and a fumbling seeker: it is successfully analytical only of superficialities and of what lies just behind the superficies. The need of a deeper knowledge must then turn him to the discovery of new powers and means within himself. He finds that he can only know himself entirely by becoming actively self-conscious and not merely self-critical, by more and more living in his soul and acting out of it rather than floundering on surfaces, by putting himself into conscious harmony with that which lies behind his superficial mentality and psychology and by enlightening his reason and making dynamic his action through this deeper light and power to which he thus opens. In this process the rationalistic ideal begins to subject itself to the ideal of intuitional knowledge and a deeper self-awareness; the utilitarian standard gives way to the aspiration towards self-consciousness and self-realisation; the rule of living according to the manifest laws of physical Nature is replaced by the effort towards living according to the veiled Law and Will and Power active in the life of the world and in the inner and outer life of humanity.

All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and ill-developed form, are manifest now in the world and are growing from day to day with a significant rapidity. And their emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the rationalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society. The change began by a rapid turning of the current of thought into large and profound movements contradictory of the old intellectual standards, a swift breaking of the old tables. The materialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy which is pluralistic because it has its eye fixed on life rather than on the soul and pragmatic because it seeks to interpret being in the terms of force and action rather than of light and knowledge. These tendencies of thought, which had until yesterday a profound influence on the life and thought of Europe prior to the outbreak of the great War, especially in France and Germany, were not a mere superficial recoil from intellectualism to life and action, – although in their application by lesser minds they often assumed that aspect; they were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the Life-Soul of the universe and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created by the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there had begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware of its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even lays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit.

The art, music and literature of the world, always a sure index of the vital tendencies of the age, have also undergone a profound revolution in the direction of an ever-deepening subjectivism. The great objective art and literature of the past no longer commands the mind of the new age. The first tendency was, as in thought so in literature, an increasing psychological vitalism which sought to represent penetratingly the most subtle psychological impulses and tendencies of man as they started to the surface in his emotional, aesthetic and vitalistic cravings and activities. Composed with great skill and subtlety but without any real insight into the law of man’s being, these creations seldom got behind the reverse side of our surface emotions, sensations and actions which they minutely analysed in their details but without any wide or profound light of knowledge; they were perhaps more immediately interesting but ordinarily inferior as art to the old literature which at least seized firmly and with a large and powerful mastery on its province. Often they described the malady of Life rather than its health and power, or the riot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotent and unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression and self-possession. But to this movement which reached its highest creative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a more truly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional, psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficial vitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the objective mind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philosophic Intuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the touch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much of it was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued, rudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure of the human mind from its old moorings and pointed the direction in which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery, the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring about the creation of a new world without in life and society. Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towards a subjective search into what may be called the hidden inside of things and away from the rational and objective canon or motive.

Already in the practical dealing with life there are advanced progressive tendencies which take their inspiration from this profounder subjectivism. Nothing indeed has yet been firmly accomplished, all is as yet tentative initiation and the first feeling out towards a material shape for this new spirit. The dominant activities of the world, the great recent events such as the enormous clash of nations in Europe and the stirrings and changes within the nations which preceded and followed it, were rather the result of a confused half struggle half effort at accommodation between the old intellectual and materialistic and the new still superficial subjective and vitalistic impulses in the West. The latter unenlightened by a true inner growth of the soul were necessarily impelled to seize upon the former and utilise them for their unbridled demand upon life; the world was moving towards a monstrously perfect organisation of the Will-to-live and the Will-to-power and it was this that threw itself out in the clash of War and has now found or is finding new forms of life for itself which show better its governing idea and motive. The Asuric or even Rakshasic character of the recent world-collision was due to this formidable combination of a falsely enlightened vitalistic motive-power with a great force of servile intelligence and reasoning contrivance subjected to it as instrument and the genius of an accomplished materialistic Science as its Djinn, its giant worker of huge, gross and soulless miracles. The War was the bursting of the explosive force so created and, even though it strewed the world with ruins, its after results may well have prepared the collapse, as they have certainly produced a disintegrating chaos or at least poignant disorder, of the monstrous combination which produced it, and by that salutary ruin are emptying the field of human life of the principal obstacles to a truer development towards a higher goal.

Behind it all the hope of the race lies in those infant and as yet subordinate tendencies which carry in them the seed of a new subjective and psychic dealing of man with his own being, with his fellowmen and with the ordering of his individual and social life. The characteristic note of these tendencies may be seen in the new ideas about the education and upbringing of the child that became strongly current in the pre-war era. Formerly, education was merely a mechanical forcing of the child’s nature into arbitrary grooves of training and knowledge in which his individual subjectivity was the last thing considered, and his family upbringing was a constant repression and compulsory shaping of his habits, his thoughts, his character into the mould fixed for them by the conventional ideas or individual interests and ideals of the teachers and parents. The discovery that education must be a bringing out of the child’s own intellectual and moral capacities to their highest possible value and must be based on the psychology of the child-nature was a step forward towards a more healthy because a more subjective system; but it still fell short because it still regarded him as an object to be handled and moulded by the teacher, to be educated. But at least there was a glimmering of the realisation that each human being is a self-developing soul and that the business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material. It is not yet realised what this soul is or that the true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within. That, if we ever give it a chance to come forward, and still more if we call it into the foreground as “the leader of the march set in our front”, will itself take up most of the business of education out of our hands and develop the capacity of the psychological being towards a realisation of its potentialities of which our present mechanical view of life and man and external routine methods of dealing with them prevent us from having any experience or forming any conception. These new educational methods are on the straight way to this truer dealing. The closer touch attempted with the psychical entity behind the vital and physical mentality and an increasing reliance on its possibilities must lead to the ultimate discovery that man is inwardly a soul and a conscious power of the Divine and that the evocation of this real man within is the right object of education and indeed of all human life if it would find and live according to the hidden Truth and deepest law of its own being. That was the knowledge which the ancients sought to express through religious and social symbolism, and subjectivism is a road of return to the lost knowledge. First deepening man’s inner experience, restoring perhaps on an unprecedented scale insight and self-knowledge to the race, it must end by revolutionising his social and collective self-expression.

Meanwhile, the nascent subjectivism preparative of the new age has shown itself not so much in the relations of individuals or in the dominant ideas and tendencies of social development, which are still largely rationalistic and materialistic and only vaguely touched by the deeper subjective tendency, but in the new collective self-consciousness of man in that organic mass of his life which he has most firmly developed in the past, the nation. It is here that it has already begun to produce powerful results whether as a vitalistic or as a psychical subjectivism, and it is here that we shall see most clearly what is its actual drift, its deficiencies, its dangers as well as the true purpose and conditions of a subjective age of humanity and the goal towards which the social cycle, entering this phase, is intended to arrive in its wide revolution.

 

6 thoughts on “The contribution of Indian psychology to the emergence of a subjective and spiritual age

  1. Great points Sandeep. We mentioned Swami Rama in our yoga psychology book. I think it was in the early 1970s, perhaps 1973? at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. He demonstrated full awareness in delta wave sleep, thus taking us beyond lucid dreaming into lucid sleep. he also demonstrated psychokinesis, though of course the professional skeptics like James Randi refuse to accept it (though as far as I know, none have been able to offer a credible alternative explanation for his feat).

    Yes, it would be great, as you recommend, to describe those milestones. I unfortunately don’t have time at the moment, though I hope with our next website (hopefully starting around 2015 or 2016) I’ll be able to go into much more depth about that and related issues.

    By the way, perhaps you can help with some suggestions – I’m thinking about putting up a post showing parallels between current neuroscience (particularly interpersonal neurobiology) and Sri Aurobindo’s integral psychology. I’d like to start simply with what he calls “the surface nature.’

    My goal here is to see to what extent there might be consensus in the integral yoga community about the parallels between neuroscience and IP. I’ve noticed that there are almost always controversies when topics related to integral psychology come up on various integral yoga forums. I understand that everyone sees from their own perspective and there are many ways to understand Sri Aurobindo as well (an infinite number of ways, no doubt!:>)

    But I would think there are a few everyday things that might lead to a general consensus. Speaking personally, i know of at least half dozen folks in the IY community whose writing I find I generally am “In sync” with – Larry Seidlitz, Matthijs Cornelissen, (most 0f!) your writing, Michael Miovic, etc. I wonder if it might not be worthwhile to have some very basic, simple reference point to build from.

    I have no doubt once we leave the simple, easily accessible territory of the surface, ordinary waking consciousness, there will continue to be endless disputes. But I don’t see why everyday things have necessarily to be so complicated.

    To give one simple example, I was thinking of posting to Auroconference something about the relationship between Sri Aurobindo’s terms “vital mind” and “physical mind” and note how remarkably similar they are to the descriptions of the functioning of the reptilian brain (brain stem) and mammalian brain (limbic region or system). But I really didn’t want to stir up a lot of controversy,

    So I’m not quite sure how to go about putting together a post on neuroscience and integral yoga psychology, but am very much open to feedback.

    By the way, for some reason WordPress didn’t send me a note regarding approval of your comment, and in the past it usually did. For you, and anybody else who writes, if you don’t see your comment approved within one day, please feel free to write me at donsalmon7@gmail.com and let me know. Thank you.

    • Don : relationship between Sri Aurobindo’s terms “vital mind” and “physical mind” and note how remarkably similar they are to the descriptions of the functioning of the reptilian brain (brain stem) and mammalian brain (limbic region or system).

      yes, I had noticed that too ! Certainly a link worth pursuing.

      I will reply to the other points you made later (or perhaps offline)

      • I’m working on a somewhat lengthy post about interpersonal neurobiology and parallels in integral yoga psychology. While it’s true there are interesting parallels to many areas of Indian psych (I have a post on IPNB and the yoga sutras I may put up soon). I have found (over a few decades of exploring these links) that the most precise parallels are in IY. I imagine people outside of integral yoga could just look at me as a cultist, but I could say I’ve also spent a good deal of time not only studying a wide range of indian spirituality, but tibetan buddhist, zen, christian, sufi and others as well. I’ve never found anything with such close correspondence – especially to neuroscience – as Sri Aurobindo’s psycho-spiritual vision.

        To name a few:

        physical mind – brain stem
        vital mind – limbic region (or “system”)
        mind “proper” – cerebral cortex
        “intelligent will” – mid prefrontal cortex
        the distinction of the critical and “comprehensive” reason – left and right hemispheres
        the aesthetic and ethical mind – the right hemisphere informed by left hemisphere critical reasoning.
        higher vital – heart brain
        psychic vital – the heart brain at its most refined
        central vital – enteric nervous system
        psychic prana – the autonomic nervous system (it’s infinitely more complex than this, and this is a terrible oversimplification; i have to go into this in more detail; in fact, all of these are oversimplified and missing many layers of complexity and layers of consciousness that are in all of indian psychology and wholly missing in contemporary science – or at least, mostly missing)
        subliminal – conscious dreaming, characterized by the increased activity of the cerebral cortex durign REM (and at times, non-REM) sleep.

        And that’s only a start. Iain McGilchrist, in his masterpiece, “The Master and His Emissary”, gives an analysis of western civilization starting from Greece, showing how the various cultures in Europe and America show an increasing imbalance toward left hemispheric critical, quantitative, non-holistic thinking.

        This is supported by numerous studies of Asian vs European thinking, where Asian individuals tend to see the particular in the context of the whole (a right hemisphere characteristic) whereas the European and American tends to see the particular out of the context of the whole (a gross generalization, of course, but interesting if applied with right hemisphere comprehension rather than left hemisphere “particularized” thinking:>))

        Well, this is just a quick, rough, simplistic overview. I’ll try to refine it considerably when i do a posting on it.

    • – Larry Seidlitz, Matthijs Cornelissen, (most 0f!) your writing, Michael Miovic, etc.

      I can add Kundan Singh.

      • yes, Kundun, and Soumitra Basu is doing wonderful work as well.

        Oh, and I forgot to mention, when i referred to Iain McGilchrist – his analysis of Eastern and Western thought is almost exactly the same as Sri Aurobindo’s, in a letter from “Letters on Yoga” in which he analyzes the history of Western civilization in comparison to India. It’s the beginning of the sectino, “Reason, Science and Yoga.” pg. 157. on pg 159, it’s almost like he’s setting up the background for McGilchrist’s argument. in The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo adds more that supports McGilchrist as well. But that’s the subject of another blog post – or maybe, a whole website!

  2. The rapid development of neuroscience over the last 2 decades has enabled third-party experimental confirmation of the benefits of mindfulness claims made in the Indian psychology. It may worthwhile to enumerate the milestones in this interaction between neuroscientific research and meditation. I believe it started with experiments conducted Swami Rama at the Meninger Institute in the 1960s and it was under the first Bush administration that neuroscience funding received a boost in the USA.

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