A Greater Psychology

Introduction by Arabinda Basu

I am glad of my association with this very important and remarkably scholarly book by Dr. A.S. Dalai, a valued friend and esteemed colleague. A Greater Psychology is a gathering together under one cover of all the salient aspects of Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought, thus providing an excellent introduction for psychology students and scholars as well as for the interested general reader.

The time for such a book has come and it is appearing at the right moment. For there is a growing interest in Indian yoga and spirituality in the Western world. Though much of this interest is not of the right kind it cannot be gainsaid that there are many people in Europe and North and South America whose interest is genuine, and the glamour of the exotic has little or no part in it. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the nature of yoga.

This book is timely particularly because during recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the study of consciousness as evidenced by numerous journal articles and books on the subject by writers from several different disciplines. But Western thought has been concerned with the aspects and functions of consciousness rather than with the essential nature of consciousness. That is simply this that Consciousness is the Reality of all that is; it is self-existent and self-luminous. William James (whose book Principles of Psychology was admired by Sri Aurobindo) in his celebrated essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" answered the question by saying that consciousness is real but as a function, not as an entity. Sri Aurobindo says exactly the opposite: Consciousness is not only an entity but the Entity; its various aspects and functions are its self-expressions by the exercise of its own inherent Conscious Force.

It may well be asked what the subject of yoga has to do with

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a book on Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought. The answer lies in the fact that Sri Aurobindo was first and foremost an integral yogi and spiritual mystic. While he was also a philosopher who formulated in rational terms — as far as that was possible — a comprehensive system of experiential concepts about the nature of the supreme Reality, the world, man, evolution of consciousness in the world with which is connected the subject of the role of consciousness in that evolution and the goal to which it is moving, still it must be clearly pointed out that Sri Aurobindo was first a yogi and then a philosopher. For on his own admission the materials of his philosophy were provided by yogic experiences obtained by the practice of certain psychological disciplines and not by speculative thinking. What then is yoga? Normally, practices such as physical postures, breath control, meditation, repeating a name of God or of a word or group of words, a mantra, etc. are understood as yoga. But these are particular disciplines and not the essence of yoga. According to Sri Aurobindo, yoga has the same relation with the inner nature and being of man as the natural sciences have with the forces of external nature like, say, steam or electricity. Yoga studies by repeated observation and experiment the forces and movements of the human psyche, its mental, vital and physical aspects, their mutual relation and influence. In the process of this inner exploration yoga discovers many capacities for knowledge, action and enjoyment which are not known to "empirical" psychology, for that deals with the surface nature of man. True, there is depth psychology but yoga avers that its depth is not deep enough, and that there is or should be a "height" psychology and a "breadth" psychology as well. For yoga includes not only methods of discovering depths of consciousness but also of heightening and widening it. These are not empty notions but actual facts discovered and effectuated by yoga.

Sri Aurobindo has said that real psychology is the science of consciousness. But consciousness in his experience is not only

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mental intelligence and feeling. For mind is only one level of the multi-level reality called Consciousness. This brings us to the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. The basic elements of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, briefly stated, are as follows. There is a supreme, sovereign Reality which depends on nothing for its being; this independent Reality is self-luminous, that is, it is not revealed by anything other than itself. It is dynamic and becomes everything in the world, arranging itself in a hierarchical system. As independent Being it is called Sat, Existence, or less abstractly, the Existent. It is the inmost Reality of everything and as such is termed Self. As a self-luminous reality, it is designated Consciousness which is self-conscious. As a dynamic reality, it is known as Consciousness-Force. As Consciousness-Force it manifests itself on many levels. It is life in plants, instinct in insects and animals, mental intelligence, will and feeling in human beings and powers higher than mind in yogis and mystics. It has the power of self-determination and self-limitation. By the exercise of this power it becomes determinate things. By self-limitation it seems to become progressively less conscious until it becomes what Sri Aurobindo designates the Inconscient, which conceals consciousness to such an extent that it seems non-existent there, though in truth it is existent but only unmanifest. As the Existent-Conscious, Reality has three self-determined aspects: Self, Soul and God the Lord. As Self it remains in the background of the process of self-manifestation of the Reality; as Soul it is the Conscious Being who sanctions the creative adventure of the Consciousness-Force, and as the Lord it controls the process of the self-manifestation of the Reality. The true being in man is a portion of the supreme Reality and is called the soul or psychic being by Sri Aurobindo. The psychic being is of the same essence as God and is other than body, life and mind.

Further, Consciousness, descended into and self-hidden in the Inconscient, progressively manifests itself. Another way of stating it is that it evolves its own higher levels which brings

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about the emergence of Matter, Life and Mind in the world. The evolution of Mind, or mental beings, is a stage in this process of the unfolding of consciousness of the supreme Reality. The process is continuing and is in travail of the manifestation of a level of consciousness higher than mind, for mind is a power which is a seeker of knowledge, and in so far as it has knowledge it is partial and even that too it does not properly possess. The higher level of consciousness which is in the process of manifestation is termed the Supermind by Sri Aurobindo. It is the Reality's integral self-knowledge and world-knowledge coupled with infallible will. The supermind is not only the Knowledge-Will of the Reality, it is the medium of its self-manifestation as and in the world. To all intents and purposes, Existence-Consciousness-Force as the supermind is at the core of everything through different levels of its own being and power. From the point of view of the world and man, which are respectively the venue and the medium of evolution of consciousness, the supermind is unfolding itself and its manifestation will bring about the emergence of a new race of beings here on this earth who will be equipped with true knowledge of the Reality and of the world and the will to effectuate the fulfilment of God here. Man is or can be a conscious and willing collaborator in this process of the evolution of the superman. Mind is the medium of the unfolding of the supermind and through that of the unveiled manifestation of the now-concealed and only partly revealed Divine Being.

This revelation requires the transformation of Nature so that on all its levels, physical, vital and mental it may become conscious and spiritualised. The life of the supramental race of beings will be the Life Divine. The means of attaining this goal of evolution is the Integral Yoga which Sri Aurobindo practised and expounded and taught, not merely by an intellectual exposition of it but practically also by opening up the being and consciousness of his disciples and followers. Many of them are discovering and developing new horizons of knowing, acting

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and enjoying and are evolving already existing but to them new levels of consciousness and thereby attaining them.

I have written on the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and not on his psychology because Dr. Dalal's book has done that admirably. And here I will say a word about the main difficulty in understanding the philosophy and the yoga on which it is based. Sri Aurobindo had to find many technical terms to describe his yogic experiences and to formulate them philosophically. But apart from the novel nomenclature devised by him to explain the different levels of consciousness in the universe and their corresponding levels in human beings, even the more well-known terms have different significances from those they ordinarily have. Consciousness, Spirit, Self, Soul, Mind, Life, etc. mean very different things from what they are taken to mean by the general reader and in other spiritual literature. Of these terms Spirit has some affinity with the Christian notion of God. But the meaning of the others and of many other words in Sri Aurobindo's writings must be understood as he uses them in order to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. Soul, for example, is not the animating principle of life, nor the seat of emotions, nor the total personality. Self, atman, both universal and individual, is an experiential concept of Vedanta and of Sri Aurobindo which has no parallel in Western thought or religious literature. All this will be clear to the readers of this most useful guide to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and psychology of yoga.

One word at the end. This work is primarily on the psychology of Sri Aurobindo which he himself described as metaphysical psychology. And to get even a preliminary idea of it, it is essential to have an initial understanding of Consciousness. What then is Consciousness? Let Sri Aurobindo answer this crucial question:

"But here in our world of Matter the original and fundamental phenomenon we meet everywhere is a universal Inconscience, Consciousness appears to come in as only an incident, a development, a strange consequence of some ill-understood operations of Energy

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in inconscient Matter. It arises out of an original Inconscience, it dissolves or sinks back into the Inconscience. Once it has appeared it persists indeed but as a general phenomenon precariously manifested in individual living beings. It has the seeming either of an uncertain freak of inconscient Nature, — a disease some would conjecture, a phosphorescence playing upon the stagnant waters of inconscient being, active at certain points of animation, or a guest in a world in which it is alien, a foreign resident with difficulty able to maintain itself in a hardly amicable environment and atmosphere.

According to the materialist hypothesis consciousness must be a result of energy in Matter; it is Matter's reaction or reflex to itself in itself, a response of organised inconscient chemical substance to touches upon it, a record of which that inconscient substance through some sensitiveness of cell and nerve becomes inexplicably aware. But such an explanation may account, — if we admit this impossible magic of the conscious response of an inconscient to the inconscient, — for sense and reflex action [yet it] becomes absurd if we try to explain by it thought and will, the imagination of the poet, the attention of the scientist, the reasoning of the philosopher. Call it mechanical cerebration, if you will, but no mere mechanism of grey stuff of brain can explain these things; a gland cannot write Hamlet or pulp of brain work out a system of metaphysics. There is no parity, kinship or visible equation between the alleged cause or agent on the one side and on the other the effect and its observable process. There is a gulf here that cannot be bridged by any stress of forcible affirmation or crossed by any stride of inference or violent leap of argumentative reason. Consciousness and an inconscient substance may be connected, may interpenetrate, may act on each other, but they are and remain things opposite, incommensurate with each other, fundamentally diverse. An observing and active consciousness emerging as a character of an eternal Inconscience is a self-contradictory affirmation, an unintelligible phenomenon, and the contradiction must be healed or explained before this affirmation can be accepted. But it cannot be healed unless either

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the Inconscient has a latent power for consciousness — and then its inconscience is phenomenal only, not fundamental, — or else is the veil of a Consciousness which emerges out of a state of involution which appears to us as an inconscience"¹.

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