Psychology, Mental Health and Yoga

Preface

The essays brought together in this book appeared at first in the annual numbers of Sri Aurobindo Circle between 1983 and 1990. Since the essays were written as independent articles published at long intervals rather than as a connected and closely-knit series, several ideas and references to literature, including quotations, were repeated. In the present collection of the essays undue repetitions have been removed wherever this could be done wihout major revisions.

Since the birth of modern psychology a little over a hundred years ago, views regarding the nature of the human being have followed a certain progressive trend which may be conceived as a dimensional development. Psychology began with a lateral view of the human being as an essentially animal organism capable of certain superior psychological functions which have generally been labelled as "mind". To this surface view was added a new dimension by the "depth" psychologies which discovered "the unconscious", ascribing to it a greater role than the conscious mind in determining behaviour. During the past few decades, yet another dimension — that of "height" — has been discovered through experiences of "higher" states of consciousness which have been termed "transpersonal". With this dimensional progression of views about the human constitution, psychology has been drawing increasingly closer to the pluridimensional concept of the human being found in yoga. Since notions of mental health stem from theories

regarding personality structure, the emerging convergence of psychology and yoga is reflected also in the field of mental health. The purpose of this book is to present some salient features of Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought and its implications for mental health in order to bring out some points of convergence, as also of divergence, between psychology and mental health on the one hand, and yoga on the other.

Three main categories of readers have been kept in view in writing these essays: students and practitioners of Sri Aurobindo's yoga who have an interest in modern psychology and in what today goes by the name of mental health; secondly, students and teachers of psychology who wish to have an introduction to Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought and its bearing on mental health; finally, persons interested in the interface between modern psychology and mental health on one hand and yoga on the other - yoga construed broadly as a consciousness discipline, that is, as a psycho-transformative system for the attainment of a more evolved state of consciousness.

The essays utilise copious quotations from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in giving an exposition of the psychological thought of their yoga. These actual words of the Masters have an intuitive quality and are therefore capable of imparting something more than an intellectual understanding of yoga psychology. If read with a quiet concentration, they may enable the reader to sense something of their intuitive content which would be all but completely lost by paraphrasing the words. In this respect, the reader may find that the words of the Mother,

though translated from French, are particularly helpful in inducing a certain receptive state which is conducive to a deeper understanding of what the words express, for, consisting mostly of her spoken utterances, they are less intellectually couched and let through their intuitive quality more readily.

A. S. Dalal