Consciousness as the foundation of psychology
author: Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: December 1969

section 2
Three major concepts of consciousness

If you haven't read Section 1, you may like to read that first:

A first look

To arrive at a better understanding of what consciousness actually is, we will compare three concepts of consciousness that belong to three very different worldviews: those of physicalism, exclusive spirituality and integral spirituality.

Physicalism is widely held to be an essential constituent of the scientific worldview. It holds that everything that exists, or at least everything that can be known reliably, is ultimately physical. Its understanding of consciousness tends to be limited to the types of consciousness we humans have in the ordinary waking state, and it takes it for granted that our consciousness is produced by the brain.

Exclusive spirituality has been part of some of India's most influential spiritual traditions for over two millennia. It holds that there is ultimately only one type of consciousness that is worth having: a consciousness that is entirely empty of content and intent, and as such completely pure, kaivalya. It has played a major role in the creation of some of the most powerful techniques of yoga and meditation.

The third, integral spirituality, accepts and values what the other two have contributed, and adds the power aspect of consciousness. As Infinity in a Drop hopes to show, it may create the conceptual space needed for the kind of quick cumulative progress in the subjective domain that humanity already has made in the objective domain. The integral approach has its origin again in India, where it predated the more exclusive spiritual traditions by several centuries if not millennia.

Though there are exponents of all possible views in the West as well as in the East, in India pure materialism has been extremely rare. The various schools of the Indian tradition tend to locate themselves between the poles of exclusive and integral spirituality.¹

We will now look at these three approaches in some more detail. In this section of the chapter we will take them up serially, one at a time. In the next section we will take them up in parallel and see what each of them has to say about a variety of consciousness-related issues.

Physicalism

The idea that matter is the ultimate reality has been the mainstay of modern science. The great strength of this view is that it cuts radically through all forms of religious hypocrisy, dogmatism and superstition, and as a collective enterprise, it appears to have contributed to our incredibly detailed and fast-increasing knowledge of the physical domain. There is an ontological and an epistemological side to it.

Ontological Physicalism

At its extreme, ontological physicalism holds that the physical reality is all that exists. As mentioned earlier, the great difficulty for ontological physicalism is how to account for experience, love, truth, beauty, ideas and all those other things that do not appear to be physical in any ordinary sense of the word. Much of this non-physical stuff is in some way or another related to the subjectivity of consciousness, and physicalists tend to have a serious problem with subjectivity as well as with consciousness. Watson, the father of behaviourism, bundles everything not directly physical away as "the trouble". Skinner, who according to many is one of the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, claims it is "functionally irrelevant"². And David Chalmers, one of the founding fathers the Consciousness Studies movement, calls the way consciousness arises out of matter "the hard problem"(1995) . Only few amongst the adherents to this theory bother to write about consciousness, and when they do, they have different ways of explaining its (apparent) presence. There are two main groups. The first claims that mind and consciousness are nothing more than chemical reactions in the working brain. Daniel Dennet, for example, says that we are our neurons and Patricia Churchland compares consciousness to heat, which, at least in her eyes, is nothing beyond the kinetic energy of moving molecules. The second group claims that consciousness is a different, higher order phenomenon that "emerges" out of material reality at a certain level of physical complexity.emergence600 John R. Searle compares it to fluidity, which does not exist in a single water molecule but comes into being when you put enough of them together. On booth sides, the majority takes it for granted that the brain "causes" consciousness, in the strong, exclusive sense that you cannot have consciousness unless you have a working brain (or at least a physically existing functional equivalent of a brain). There are many different positions within this camp, but there is none that has not come under attack by the others. Churchland and Dennet have been accused of explaining consciousness away, and Searle stands accused by Dennett of confusing subjective illusion with objective reality.

Though ontological physicalism is philosophically hard to defend since it denies or trivialises everything that really matters to people,³ the physicalist concept of consciousness is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The reason is that it is so eminently useful in medical practice, and especially in emergency care: if a person is "unconscious" there is an increased likelihood that the brain is physically damaged or the brain-chemistry is seriously off balance, and immediate specialist attention may be required. Moreover, a number of tasks that are otherwise taken care of by the patient, like providing information and making decisions about treatment, will have to be taken over by others. Even in less life-threatening situations, medical professionals are confronted on a daily basis with the fact that even small changes in blood chemistry or minor damage to the physical brain tend to have a dramatic effect on a person's consciousness. The opposite, situations where the consciousness seems to operate normally in spite of a seriously impaired brain-function are far more rare; they are moreover often somewhat subtle and easy to miss. Though there is an increasing interest in them, there is still a widespread tendency to dismiss them as freak phenomena for which science will find a "proper" physical explanation in due time.

Epistemological Physicalism

Epistemological physicalism does not bother about deep metaphysical questions regarding the essential nature of reality, but argues that, whatever the world may be made of, the physical reality is all that we can know scientifically. Within psychology, classical behaviourism comes closest to this view: It looks at the human mind as a black box, about which nothing can be known, or needs to be known, as long as one knows the rules that connect purely physical input (the stimulus) to purely physical output (the response). As we have seen in the chapter "What is Psychology", the serious difficulties with this view have become more and more apparent. It does not work in the simple, pragmatic sense that knowing the stimuli a person receives does not reliably predict his response except in the most trivial of laboratory situations. It is third-person and thus intrinsically manipulative. And it is not really impartial because of the degree to which the researcher's questions and observations are determined by social, cultural and political influences. In spite of all this, classical behaviourism reigned in psychology for over 40 years. Since then psychology has widened its horizon considerably, but physicalist influences are still far more pervasive than those within the system seem to realize.⁴

In mainstream psychology, consciousness and the inner states and processes that take place within it are hardly ever studied directly. In order to allow the researcher to remain objective, almost all psychological research consists at present of sophisticated statistical analysis of unsophisticated self-observations by representative members of the general public. This arrangement allows the scientist to deal in an objective manner with subjective issues, but he can do so because he has outsourced the crucial job of exploring the subjective inner realities to the public. Research about more rare spiritual experiences tends to be booked under cross-cultural, religious or spiritual studies which focus on the cultures that support them or the scriptures in which they have been described, but not on the inner reality that these experiences refer to. Here too the researcher stays objective by inserting a layer that can be studied objectively between himself and the subjective reality he is supposed to be studying. Whether he creates a "quantitative" statistical surveys or a "qualitative" description of what others say about themselves, he can not progress much beyond what his subjects already know, and it is hard to see how such research could ever lead to the kind of cumulative progress we see in the hard sciences.

For the issuewise comparison in the next Section, I will focus on the physicalist position as it is used in medicine. It is anthropocentric in the sense that it limits consciousness to the type of consciousness we humans have in our ordinary waking state, and it takes it for granted that consciousness is produced by the brain, but beyond this it does not deny or trivialise consciousness. In science, this position deserves to be called mainstream not only because it plays such a crucial role in the day-to-day practice of medicine, but also because it informs almost all neurological and psychological research. Even those authors who have a different position still tend to take it as the "given view" from which they subsequently differentiate their own standpoint. And finally, it is a view that is based on common experiences and lines of thought that everybody can understand. In contemporary Consciousness Studies, the most prominent protagonist of this view is probably John R. Searle.

 

Exclusive spirituality

The defining characteristics of the "exclusive spirituality" concept are two: (1) the ultimate reality is consciousness rather than matter, and (2) the only state of consciousness really worth having is a state of "pure consciousness". In many ways the "matter" and "exclusive spirituality" views are each other's mirror image. Just as the physicalist position holds that consciousness is basically a causally inactive epiphenomenon of physical processes, so the most extreme position on the exclusive spirituality axis holds that the material world is nothing more than an illusionary imposition, adhyāropa, on the absolute silence, emptiness and purity of the spirit. While the austere simplicity of the physicalist worldview appears to have helped physics to develop by isolating it from the complexities of religious and social sentiments, exclusive spirituality may well have helped India to understand the highest ranges of consciousness undistracted by the messiness of consciousness at the level of our ordinary human lives. The great strength of the "exclusive spirituality" view is the absolute beauty of the experience of pure consciousness, and the detailed and penetrating psychological insights it has developed about the highest ranges of consciousness available to humanity.

In the scientific mainstream, exclusive spirituality as ontology plays hardly a role. The very possibility of an entirely pure consciousness has been denied, for example, by Steven Katz (1978) who claims that all mental phenomena are socially determined, and, strangely enough, by Carl G. Jung (1958), who holds that a state without a clearly distinguished subject and object is inherently unconscious.⁵ The possibility of this state has been defended vigorously, and I think rather effectively, by Robert Forman (1990) who bases himself largely on Indian sources. The possibility of using pure consciousness as a means to achieve accurate perception plays a central role in Husserl's phenomenology. In Indian philosophy it has many protagonists and can well be called mainstream.⁶

The idea of pure consciousness can be found throughout Indian thought, but perhaps most prominently in certain schools of Vedānta, Sāṁkhya and Buddhism. There are considerable differences between these three knowledge-systems in terms of their philosophy, but the origin of the concept of pure consciousness is almost certainly experiential rather than speculative, and, as we will see, in terms of experience these differences appear less insurmountable. There are many methods to arrive at a pure consciousness, but the cultivation of detachment is one of the most commonly practised techniques. It works through a systematic withdrawal of one's consciousness from its involvement in one's thoughts, feelings, sensations, and — perhaps most importantly — one's ego-sense. In the ordinary waking state, there is a clear distinction between oneself as subject inside, and the world as object outside, but the the borderline between self and world is continuously shifting. Sometimes people identify with entities outside their own body — e.g. their work, their possessions, their family, their country — and sometimes they look with a certain objectivity even at their own thoughts and feelings.Through yoga, it is possible to learn how to shift the border between self and world at will, and on the path of detachment one moves the border gradually further inwards till absolutely everything, including all one's thoughts, feelings, and actions, are seen as part of outside nature, and only an absolutely pure, silent self, or not even that, remains on the inside.

Theoretically, one might expect that the result of shifting the borderline between world and self inwards would be an increasing sense of powerlessness, of shrinking, of dullness even, but in practice the opposite is true. As one dis-identifies more and more from one's small set of habitual thoughts, feelings, sensations, motives and actions, one experiences an increasing sense of an infinite, inalienable peace, which can grow into a positive sense of exhilaration, liberation, and, strange enough, of vastness. It is as if the wall between the world and oneself becomes thinner and one finds oneself extending beyond the borders of one's old egoic self into the rest of the world or even beyond it.

Ultimately, when one is completely free from all sense of possession and private, egoïc limitations, there is a definite turning point and one can enter into a totally different type of consciousness that transcends, encompasses, and inhabits absolutely everything in complete freedom, joy, and perfection. This technique, which starts from the naïve subject–object dualism typical of the ordinary waking consciousness, is used not only by dualist traditions like the Sāṁkhya which espouse a division between puruṣa (self) and prakṛti (nature), but also by various monist schools like Advaita Vedānta. In the latter, the dualism is not accepted as an ultimate truth, but only as a pragmatic means to shift the apparent border between self and world either fully inside or outside till one arrives experientially at a monism of the spirit in which one knows one's ātman (individual Self) to be one with Brahman (the Self of the universe). Even in the yoga of Patanjali, which starts with a dualist philosophy, one ends with a monist experience.

To what extent and in what manner the material manifestation is part of this oneness has been a major issue throughout the Indian tradition, and over time many different answers have been proposed. Together they make a kind of gradient from māyāvādin traditions, which stress the illusionary nature of the manifestation, to pūrṇa Vedānta, which stresses that in the end both spirit and matter are manifestations of the inalienable oneness of saccidānanda.

Psychologically the experience of the Absolute can have different "flavours". In its most classical form, one can experience absolute emptiness, entire freedom of form and content, a total transcendence. One can also feel oneself become one with the undivided All, extending illimitably through space and time. One can even — and this is perhaps the most mysterious and beautiful — experience the infinite Presence right here in the smallest of things.

It has been argued that the form which the experience of the Absolute takes depends on one's expectations, on the theory in which one's practice is grounded and on the tradition from which one starts. As the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.6) said (several thousands of years before Katz), "Whoever envisages it as the existence, becomes that existence, and whoever envisages it as the non-existence, becomes that non-existence." But this is not always the case. In actual life, spiritual experience often contains at least some element of surprise. When one reads the autobiographical notes mystics have left behind, some degree of conflict between their experience and the tradition from which they came appears to have been the rule rather than the exception. In fact, the unexpected character of the experience tends to add a sense of authenticity to their descriptions as it gives the feeling that they experienced something that existed objectively, something that was not the product of their prior thought and imagination. In Christianity, where the official doctrine was rather narrowly defined — and where deviation was not without risk — this led in those who stayed within the fold, like De Kempis and Rhuysbroeck, to rather touching attempts at reconciliation between the conflicting narratives of their experience and their religious faith.

This said, at least in some people, the form the experience takes, appears to depend on the location in one's subtle body from where one begins one's exploration. If one goes inside, for example, on the level of the hara, as in some forms of Zen, the experience may give a predominant sense of power and solidity. If one goes inside at the level of the heart, the experience may include an element of personhood, of love, of compassion. If one concentrates in a centre of consciousness just above the head, the sense of impersonality, vastness, formlessness is more likely to dominate. Accordingly, the Indian tradition holds that there is a self, a true being, puruṣa, on each level of consciousness. The common characteristic of all these states is that the sharp division between the ego and the world is not felt, while the clarity and depth of awareness and bliss tend to increase as far as one's nature can handle.

A fascinating aspect of all such experiences is that they leave one with a permanent sense of having seen — or rather of having been one with — something that is much more true, beautiful, eternal than the ordinary reality. This is its strength, but it is also where the conceptual confusion starts. When one comes down from the Transcendent into a more ordinary type of consciousness, the ego can jump back into action and declare that the specific way in which one's mind formulates the little shadow of the Transcendent which is within the ego's reach offers the single best description of the ultimate reality. When that happens, the Divine turns into my Divine, and when I'm brave — and blind — I'm ready to fight with anyone who dares to claim that his vision is more true than mine.

Philosophically, the differences in the flavour of the experience have led to diametrically opposed philosophies. The most infamous of these contradictions is perhaps that while the Sāṁkhya holds that there are many selves, Advaita Vedānta holds that there is only one self, and Buddhism that there is no self at all. Historically, differences like these have led within the Indian tradition to a welter of competing philosophies, schools and sects. Seeing these differences, some modern scholars, like Katz (1978) and, in a more sophisticated fashion, Ferrer (2002, pp. 71-111), have come to the conclusion that the whole idea of a single perennial philosophy supporting the conceptual jungle is problematic. Though there is a point in this criticism, the denial of a perennial philosophy, or at least of a perennial reality, is not the full truth either. For the traditionalist within the Indian tradition, the sceptical position is not valid because the most respected scriptures in the tradition, right from the Ṛg Veda and the older Upaniṣads to the Bhagavad Gitā, insist on an ultimate oneness supporting from behind all differences in appearance. For those who trust their own judgment and experience, the perplexity can be resolved by going beyond one's initial experience till one finds an inner place, described in the Gitā and several older texts, which goes beyond the dualities of form and formless, personal and impersonal, etc. From the level where the differences between the different flavours of "pure consciousness" are still extremely real to one's experience, it is possible, for example, to rise to a place where one can flip effortlessly from the infinite peace and harmony of the cosmic self to the utter freedom and delight of the non-self. The experiences are still different, but while the philosophies of ātman and anatta are each other's opposites, the underlying experiences are such close neighbours that one begins to get a sense of something indefinable beyond both. Sri Aurobindo indicates that there is indeed a state of consciousness, entirely beyond the mind, in which all these different aspects of the divine are experienced simultaneously as both one and many.[FN to "unitary consciousness"]

In Buddhist as well as in post-Shankara Vedāntic thought, there has been a tendency to consider the most extreme form of an entirely passive and pure consciousness — an absolute and permanent emptiness, silence, formlessness — as the highest type of consciousness and source of the most absolute pure bliss. Philosophy tends to strive after the impersonal and the abstract, and in a certain sense, this is the legitimate extreme of both. But to take psychology (and our human understanding in general) further, we need something more. And this brings us to the third pole of our conceptual discussion of consciousness, integral spirituality.

 

Integral Spirituality

In the debate about consciousness, the poles of materialism and exclusive spirituality both have their strengths and greatness, but both deny part of reality. As quoted earlier, Sri Aurobindo wrote almost a century 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

So how do we combine the deep love for the material world that has given the West its strength, with the lofty aspiration for the spirit that has given the Indian tradition its wisdom? The answer is certainly not in some half-baked compromise, with materialism guiding public life during working hours and religion private life after five and on the weekend. It isn't either in leaving the science of psychology to do evidence-based, statistical studies on the (side)effects of mediation practice, while private "post-academic" practitioners follow whatever guru or practice they happen to feel comfortable with. The real solution has to come from a deep integration, for which we need an ontology that is based on a complete acceptance of both matter and spirit and research methods that combine the rigour and open-mindedness of the hard sciences with the deep understanding of the spiritual realms and the effective use of intuitive knowledge that developed in the Indian traditions. This is possible only in a consciousness on the side of the researcher that goes beyond the dualities one finds in the West as well as the East. This may strike the materialist as way too far up in the sky, and many traditional spiritualists as preposterous, but as long as one's striving for the ultimate reality involves the slightest denial either of the silent spiritual or of the dynamic, material pole of reality, it is still part of the world of dualities, and therefore misses the absolute truth which the integral Indian tradition proposes.

The absolute, impersonal emptiness of pure consciousness described in the previous section plays a major role in almost all spiritual traditions, especially in India, and there are elements of it even in streams that are normally considered dualistic and theistic. But still, it is not the only form, aspect or type of perfect consciousness, and the oldest and most authoritative Indian texts point to something else that at least in some respects can be seen as going beyond even the purest forms of "pure consciousness".

There are different ways in which the "extra" has been formulated. In the Gitā, for example, one finds the concept of the puruṣottama, the absolute "Person", the parāpuruṣa, the "Being" who exists beyond the dualities of saguṇa and nirguṇa, kṣara and akṣara (manifest and non-manifest, moving and unmoving). With a different stress, there is the idea of sarvam Brahma, the ultimate who is all. More abstractly, there is the concept of saccidānanda, the absolute oneness of true being, consciousness and delight that is seen as the source of all there is in the universe. This all-inclusive integrality which has been expressed with such exquisite beauty throughout the oldest scriptures of the Indian tradition, is so central to Indian thought that even the māyāvādin schools, who deny the reality of the physical world, still, somewhere in the background, have to accept that ultimately everything has its origin in Brahman. As we will see in more detail in the chapters on the application of Integral Indian psychology, it may well be this ability to link absolutely everything in existence up to the Transcendent, that gave India that unique "secret ingredient" which was responsible not only for its spiritual depth, but also for the legendary wealth that brought in the previous millennium so many plunderers to its shores.

As I alluded to in the description of the method of detachment, if one begins by excluding things in one's quest for purity, one may find the Absolute, but one risks remaining stuck in a limited understanding of it. The good news is that one doesn't need to. It is also possible to persist in one's search till one reaches — at the other end of absolute emptiness — another space and time, a "world", or way of being, which includes absolutely everything, yet avoids the usual egoic limitations and distortions. There are two interesting conceptual consequences that follow from the integral realisation one can arrive at in this manner: the first is that consciousness must be everywhere, even in seemingly unconscious matter; the second is that consciousness cannot be limited to awareness, but that it must also have power. We will now have a look at both.

Consciousness in Matter

For most of the twentieth century, physicalist monism was so much taken for granted in science, that it created quite a stir when during the fifth "Towards a Science of Consciousness” Conference at Tucson in April 2002, some young scholars in a poster presentation⁷ showed that most famous Western philosophers in the past had held that consciousness existed throughout creation, even in physical things. Though "panpsychism", as this position is called, is rare amongst contemporary philosophers of science, it used to be common enough. The consciousness and knowledge embedded in physical nature cannot, of course, be of the same type we find in the human mind, but the fabulous beauty, order and lawfulness of matter does suggest that there must be some kind of built-in intelligence, some kind of subconscious know-how supporting the world.⁸ To recognize the inner structure of matter as a form of consciousness, one might look at the knowledge-constituent of matter as a subconscious habit of form and function, a tendency to act in harmony with the basic dharma⁹, or inner law, of the physical entity in question: an electron needs to “know” how to behave like an electron, a hydrogen molecule how to behave like a hydrogen molecule, a rock like a rock, and a river like a river.

There are two interesting consequences of this line of thought. The first is that just for the sake of symmetry and logical coherence it seems plausible that if matter turns out to have a basic modicum of consciousness embedded in it, consciousness might also turn out to be some kind of extremely subtle "stuff" explaining its power over physical processes. The most promising venue to determine whether there is some truth in this, might well be research on the neuroscience of anomalous, parapsychological phenomena: for example if we could determine where and how telepathically conveyed information enters and influences the brain. Though extremely interesting, in this text we will limit ourselves to the other, psychological pole of the enquiry.

The second one is that the information content in inanimate matter is not as small as it may appear at first sight. Since matter makes no mistakes, every part of it needs to have the “know-how” required to act perfectly according to the laws that guide its movement. As the laws of physics are supposed to be interrelated and derivable from each other, this may well mean that in some extremely involved way, matter has to be aware of the entire law that human physics tries to discover. What is more, as matter’s movements are influenced, to whatever small degree, by everything else that occurs in the universe, each part has to be perfectly aware, in however minute a measure and implicit a manner, of everything that has any bearing on it. Together this amounts to a special kind of “subconscient omniscience” which in a fully automatic fashion self-limits itself to the very simple set of dumb but perfect actions that are proper to this little portion of reality. In the chapters on knowledge we'll discuss how this is related to Sri Aurobindo's claim that all human knowledge is ultimately based on a similar deep, intuitive inner knowledge in our own being which can be trained to come more routinely to the surface. As we will see, he argues that the information that comes to us through our sense organs is far too limited to lead to the detailed and well-organised knowledge that we humans have about reality, and that once one is sufficiently clear inside, one can observe that sense-input and logical thinking do little more than trigger, evoke and give form to an already existing inner knowledge, which — if the right methods are used — can be cultivated to such an extent that it can take over from all ordinary mental functions and become one’s normal way of knowing reality.

Consciousness as power

Another crucial element of the integral view of consciousness is that it holds that for the consciousness in things to determine their qualities, that consciousness must have power. To use an argument by example, there is no effective difference between the quality of "being yellow" and the power to reflect (or radiate) yellow light. In other words, if it is the consciousness in things that gives them their different qualities, then that consciousness must also give them the power to express these qualities.

In the context of Indian philosophy this has far-reaching consequences because of the notion that consciousness is the core of our individuality. If we combine the idea that everything in this wondrous universe is a manifestation of consciousness and delight with the idea that Consciousness is also Conscious-force (Cit = Cit-Śakti or Cit = Cit-Tapas), then we open the road not only to a more integral understanding of the cosmic reality, but also to an infinitely larger scope for further individual development. Realizing in one's direct personal experience the absolute purity of spirit in its aspect of passivity and receptivity is presently well within human reach. It is not easy but it is doable because it does not necessitate a complete transformation of one's nature: one's nature has only to get out of the way so that one can receive the splendours of the Infinite in the silence that one is in one's innermost essence.

If this world is not an illusion or an imposition on the Divine, but a progressive manifestation of the Divine itself, if the kṣara is as true as the akṣara, if dynamic becoming is as much divine as static being, if the absolute Delight manifests itself dynamically as divine Love, then it should be possible for the individual to identify, at least to some extent, with the dynamic as well as with the passive consciousness of the Divine. It may be clear that this is much more difficult than the purely passive identification, as it needs for its manifestation not only a liberated Self but also a, far more difficult to attain, perfect, ego-free, "divinized" nature. If we accept this as our ultimate aim and destiny, then the spiritual evolution of humanity has only just begun. Traditional mokṣa is then not the end of our search, but rather an essential pre-condition, a first step towards the greater dynamic realizations of the future that will transform the whole of life into a powerful, dynamic expression of the truth of the spirit.

Just as one may accept the dualism of Sāṁkhya not as a statement of the ultimate reality, but as a necessary step on the way to a higher realization, so also the absolute oneness of the Advaitin and the śūnya of the Buddhist may then be accepted not as the ultimate reality but as an essential step towards the still greater realizations that are hinted at in India's most ancient texts, but that for their full consummation are still awaiting the future.

The oldest and perhaps most powerful expression of this possibility, is given in the Vedic concept of integrality, pūrṇa, which stems from the more ancient and heroic period in Indian history when the highest ideal had not degenerated into the wish "not to be reborn" but had still the simple strength of "True Being, Light, and Immortality". One could look at the coming together of the materialist intellect of Europe and the spiritual intellect of India — after so many long centuries in which they developed separately — as a sign that the manifestation of the Vedic concept of integrality, pūrṇa, has finally become a realistic possibility. In the field of psychological knowledge, this might lead to developments compared to which the immense achievements of the physical sciences we are now witnessing may just be the first beginnings. As Sri Aurobindo says:

The first necessity is to know the One, to be in possession of the divine Existence; afterwards we can have all the knowledge, joy & power for action that is intended for our souls, — for He being known all is known, tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam, not at once by any miraculous revelation, but by a progressive illumination or rather an application of the single necessary illumination to God's multiplicity in manifestation, by the movement of the mahat & the bhuma, not working from petty details to the whole, but from the knowledge of the one to the knowledge of relation & circumstance, by a process of knowledge that is sovereign & free, not painful, struggling & bound. This is the central truth of Veda & Upanishad & the process by which they have been revealed to men.

— KU, p. 429

Pure consciousness as tool for research

One aspect of consciousness that stands central in the exclusive as well as in the integral systems of Indian thought is the idea that pure consciousness not only produces immutable peace and delight but also true knowledge. From an epistemological standpoint, the status of pure consciousness is interesting because it opens a way to unbiased self-observation. If the central realisation of the Absolute removes the limited ego-sense from one's basic identity, there is at least at that level no longer any support for an egocentric response to the things that enter into one's consciousness, and this should in principle allow one to function as a free observing intelligence without any bias or axe to grind. In practice it is not as simple as this, however. Human nature is extremely complex and even when the central realisation is there, distortions may continue to intrude into one's thoughts and actions, and perhaps even into one's primary perception due to remnants of the ego and residual impurities in the outer parts of one's nature. Fortunately, once the type and direction of these intrusions becomes known, one can compensate for them through a process that is similar to the manner in which physical defects in telescopes and other instruments can be corrected electronically after the observation is over. We'll come back to this in the chapters on Knowledge.

The older Vedāntic and Buddhist schools talk about this process of purification in terms of karma and samskaras that still need to be exhausted even after realisation. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the need to transform the entire inner and outer nature under the influence of ever higher levels of consciousness. There is a subtle but important difference between the two positions. For a passive realisation in which one aims "not to be reborn", exhaustion of karma is sufficient as it leads to a state where nothing activates any response or initiative. As Sri Aurobindo (Letters on Yoga–II, p. 398) points out, if one aims at an active participation in a further evolution of the manifestation, this is not enough and a full transformation of one's nature is needed. Interestingly, this higher degree of purification and change is also needed if all one wants is to use a free consciousness to take psychology further. After all, not only complex dynamic interventions, but even the simplest description of one's awareness and its contents is an active, creative process that requires a transformed instrument of expression to reach anything that could possibly be considered unbiased and appropriate to the context. To this also we'll come back in the chapters on Knowledge.

Endnotes