Sri Aurobindo's Psychological Thought - Implications Of Yoga For Mental Health
In the West, where modern psychology was born and cradled, psychological thought had for centuries been part of philosophical enquiry into the nature of the human being. As such, psychology was a handmaiden of philosophy. The emergence of psychology as an independent field of study in its own right and as an empirical science is generally traced to the founding of the first laboratory of experimental psychology by the German physiologist, Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig in 1879. During its earliest stage, psychology, overshadowed by the natural sciences, developed strictly as a laboratory science, becoming what has been described as a "brass-instrument psychology". It studied relatively superficial aspects of behaviour, such as reaction time, conditioned reflexes, perceptual functions, attention span, localization of functions in the brain, and other similar areas of psychology which border on physiology. Alluding to this early psychology, Sri Aurobindo observed in 1916:
"Modern Science, obsessed with the greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system."1
Regarding the superficial nature of the early psychology
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and the need for a deeper view, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
"...Psychological enquiry in Europe (and without enquiry there can be no sound knowledge) is only beginning and has not gone very far, and what has reigned in men's minds up to now is a superficial statement of the superficial appearances of our consciousness as they look to us at first view and nothing more. But knowledge only begins when we get away from the surface phenomena and look behind them for their true operations and causes. ... All Science is like that, a contradiction of the sense-view or superficial appearances of things and an assertion of truths which are unguessed by the common and the uninstructed reason. The same process has to be followed in psychology if we are really to know what our consciousness is, how it is built and made and what is the secret of its functionings or the way out of its disorder."2
The first major development which ushered in a deeper view of psychology came through the work of the Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The study of psychopathological behaviour led Freud to the discovery of what he called the unconscious - that part of the mind which is the storehouse of instincts, impulses and other psychological contents that are not only outside conscious awareness but also ordinarily inaccessible to it. The discovery of the unconscious gave rise to Psychoanalysis, which connotes the psychological theory formulated by Freud as well as the method devised by him for the study of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis, which some have called the First Force among the various movements in the
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history of psychology, had a twofold impact on the development of psychology as a science. In the first place, it gave birth to Depth Psychology - the study of the human being in the light of unconscious motives and attitudes - which had a profound impact and a revolutionary influence, particularly in the fields of psychiatry and psychology. Secondly, because of the trenchant one-sidedness of its theories, psychoanalysis led to the founding of several divergent offshoots and reactionary schools of thought. What evoked the strongest reaction in the psychoanalytical theory was its pansexualism, which attempts to explain the entire gamut of normal as well as abnormal human behaviour - an infant's sucking reflex no less than literary and religious pursuits as well as the aberrations of hysteria and psychosis - in terms of the libidinal impulse. Regarding the one-sided, exaggerated views and over-generalisations of psychoanalysis, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter:
"It [psychoanalysis of Freud] takes up a certain part, ... the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here."3
Freud's dogmatism which assigned an exclusive role to the sexual drive and its associated dynamics in the
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motivation of all human behaviour led to the first two major rival offshoots of psychoanalysis - Individual Psychology founded by Alfred Adler (1870-1937) and Analytical Psychology promulgated by Carl Jung (1875-1961). Adler regarded the urge for power, rather than the sexual urge, as the chief motivating factor underlying human behaviour. As for Jung, he differed from Freud chiefly in two respects. In the first place, Jung maintained that the libido is not a purely sexual drive, but a general "psychic energy" or "life-instinct" (somewhat similar to Bergson's élan vital) which expresses itself in diverse forms, including the sexual urge. Secondly, Jung believed that besides the unconscious in the individual spoken of by Freud, there is a collective unconscious which is common to the human race as a whole. The collective unconscious, according to Jung, plays a far greater role in determining an individual's behaviour than the personal unconscious. Jung's broader concept of the libido as a general instinctual energy is somewhat akin to what Sri Aurobindo has termed the vital which he speaks of as follows:
"Vitality means life-force - wherever there is life, in plant or animal or man, there is life-force - without the vital there can be no life in matter and no living action."4
"The vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, ... and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature."5
It should be evident that Sri Aurobindo's concept of the
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vital is more inclusive than even Jung's broad concept of the libido. The former connotes life-force in all its gradations, from the relatively grosser life-energy (called Prana in Indian philosophy) which animates plants, animals as well as human beings, to the higher forms of the vital such as feelings and emotions. Though compared to Freud's or Adler's views, Jung's view of the libido is closer to that of Sri Aurobindo, the relative truth of what Freud and Adler maintained is corroborated by Sri Aurobindo according to whom the three strongest motivating forces for the ordinary individual are power, wealth and sex.6 (It is striking that whereas modern psychology has recognized the primary role played by the sexual urge and the urge for power in the motivation of human behaviour, it has overlooked the role of wealth with its associated instinct of greed. By contrast, in Indian thought greed for wealth has always been viewed as one of the most powerful motivating forces in human life.) In Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, too, we find some degree of concurrence between modern psychology and Sri Aurobindo. Freud regarded the unconscious as partly the outcome of repression; the contents of the unconscious, therefore, according to Freud, differ from person to person, depending upon the vicissitudes of an individual's psychosexual development. However, Jung, in working with dreams and fantasies, came across images which could not be explained in terms of the personal unconscious, and which Jung ascribed to the collective unconscious of the human race, common to all individuals. Jung thus added a new dimension to the concept of the unconscious, distinguishing the personal from the collective unconscious. Jung's distinction between the personal and the collective is somewhat akin to, though narrower than the distinction
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between the individual and universal which Sri Aurobindo applies to all parts of an individual's nature as in the following statements:
"There are two aspects of physical Nature as of all Nature - the individual and the universal."7
"The subconscient is universal as well as individual like all the other main parts of the Nature."8
A further distinction, however, made by Sri Aurobindo is between what he terms the subconscient - that which lies below the level of consciousness - and the subliminal -that which lies behind the surface consciousness. Regarding such a distinction, Sri Aurobindo states:
"The real subconscious is a nether diminished consciousness close to the Inconscient*; the subliminal is a consciousness larger than our surface existence. But both belong to the inner realm of our being of which our surface is unaware, so both are jumbled together in our common conception and parlance."9
"The subliminal self stands behind and supports the whole superficial man; it has in it a larger and more efficient mind behind the surface mind, a larger and more powerful vital behind the surface vital, a subtler and freer physical consciousness behind the surface
* It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between the subconscient and the Inconscient. The latter, for which there is no equivalent in modern psychology, is the most involved state of consciousness, below even the subconscient.
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bodily existence. And above them it opens to higher superconscient as well as below them to lower subconscient ranges."10
The last of the above-quoted extracts contains still another important distinction which has not yet been made in modern psychology - the distinction between the physical, the vital and the mental aspects which characterise not only the ordinary waking consciousness but also the subconscient and the subliminal. Regarding the prevailing lack of such a distinction, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"Each plane of our being - mental, vital, physical - has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected and interacting; but to the outer mind and sense, in our waking experience, they are all confused together."11
From the viewpoint of Sri Aurobindo's yoga psychology, Freud and Jung, who could not make the distinctions pointed out above, were led to confound the various aspects of the human psychological make-up, and to assert the truth of their partial discoveries to the exclusion and denial of whatever militated against their own findings. Sri Aurobindo's integral view, on the other hand, affirms the element of truth contained in both Freud's and Jung's discoveries, including the Freudian theory of repression and "repetition compulsion" - exaggerated by Freud and underplayed by Jung - as may be seen from what Sri Aurobindo states about the nature of the subconscient:
"... there are different parts or planes of the subconscient. All upon earth is based on the Inconscient as
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it is called, though it is not really inconscient at all, but rather a complete 'sub'-conscience, a suppressed or involved consciousness, in which there is everything but nothing is formulated or expressed. The subconscient lies between this Inconscient and the conscious mind, life and body. It contains the potentiality of all the primitive reactions to life which struggle out to the surface from the dull and inert strands of Matter and form by a constant development a slowly evolving and self-formulating consciousness; it contains them not as ideas, perceptions or conscious reactions but as the fluid substance of these things. But also all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as 'complexes' exploding into action and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed, the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of for ever. ... All too that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment."12
The primary emphasis on unconscious motivation -which is the chief characteristic of depth psychology in general and psychoanalysis in particular - led to a reactionary movement and gave rise to Behaviourism - the Second Force in psychology. The viewpoint of behaviou-
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rism was first systematically stated by J.B. Watson in a paper entitled "Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It" published in 1913. Watson stated that the proper subject-matter of psychology is objectively observable behaviour which must be explained as a response to internal and external stimuli. Psychology, said Watson, must become "a purely objective experimental branch of natural science". Deprecating the "mind-gazing" methodology of introspection, and eschewing all hypothetical concepts which cannot be tested experimentally, the new school adopted a purely objective approach based on observation and experiment for the study of behaviour. Using largely rats and other laboratory animals, it sought to explain human behaviour strictly in terms of stimulus and response. Psychology once again became primarily a laboratory science, the old "brass-instrument psychology" being replaced by what has disparagingly been called a "rat psychology". Behaviourism became the dominant school of psychology in the 1920s, and though its influence has to some extent declined, and though clinical practice has continued to be dominated by psychoanalytical and other non-behaviouristic approaches, behaviourism has to this day occupied a commanding position in the mainstream of academic psychology.
Though diametrically opposed to each other in their views regarding the proper subject-matter of psychology and the appropriate method for studying it, psychoanalysis and behaviourism share one fundamental view in common: they both regard the human being as essentially an animal organism. According to psychoanalysis, the human being, like the animal organism, is driven exclusively by the psychobiological energies of the id; the ego
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and the superego which, from the psychoanalytic viewpoint, constitute the sui generis characteristics of the human being, do not alter the fundamental dynamics attributed to the animal organism, namely, the constant tendency to seek a state of homeostasis or internal equilibrium. According to behaviourism, human behaviour is determined by the same laws of stimulus and response which were discovered by Pavlov in his experiments with dogs and by the same principles of reward and punishment which have been found by Skinner and other neobehaviourists to operate in laboratory animals. Thus both psychoanalysis and behaviourism are characterised by reductionism, which consists in an attempt to explain the complex behaviour of the more highly evolved human organism in terms of the same physiological and biological principles applicable to the simpler behaviour of the less evolved animal organism. Sri Aurobindo made some pertinent observations applicable to reductionism when he wrote:
"Still less can we find the clue [to the psychological complexity of human nature and the way to its transformation] in a scientific psychology with a materialistic basis which assumes that the body and the biological and physiological factors of our nature are not only the starting-point but the whole real foundation and regards human mind as only a subtle development from the life and the body. That may be the actual truth of the animal side of human nature and of the human mind in so far as it is limited and conditioned by the physical part of our being. But the whole difference between man and the animal is that the animal mind, as
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we know it, cannot get for one moment away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul, and become something greater than its present self, a more free, magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions of the vital and physical formula of being. But even this is not all that man is or can be: he has in him the power to evolve and release a still greater ideal energy which in its turn escapes out of the restrictions of the mental formula of his nature and discloses the supramental form, the ideal power of a spiritual being."13
Psychoanalysis carried the reductionism to an extreme and earned notoriety by reducing even mystical experiences to the unconscious strivings of the id. In this regard, Sri Aurobindo made the following remarks:
"I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights. ... They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below. ... The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. ... You must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest.
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That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing."14
As a reaction to the reductionism of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, there arose what has been regarded as the Third Force in psychology - the school of Humanistic Psychology. According to humanistic psychologists, there are unique aspects of the human being which cannot be adequately explained in terms of the prehuman or animal functioning. One of these unique aspects which is particularly stressed by humanistic psychology is the human individual's inner urge to grow through the development of one's latent potentials. Psychoanalysis regards the human organism as seeking essentially the maintenance of a state of homeostasis. Behaviourism holds that an individual's behaviour is merely a reaction to stimuli. According to humanistic psychology, however, an individual does not seek merely to maintain the existent state of homeostasis, nor can human behaviour be explained solely as response to stimuli: the human being is impelled from within to exceed the actual or existent state in order to actualize the latent potentials. Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of the humanistic movement in psychology, has attempted to develop a comprehensive view of human potentials which encompass, in the words of one of the titles of his books, "the farther reaches of human nature", including the attainment of "peak experiences" -states which are generally associated with mystical or semi-mystical experiences. Maslow thus comes close to voicing what has been stated by Sri Aurobindo regarding "the whole difference between man and the animal" in
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the last but one passage quoted above.
In turning more and more to the consideration of man's highest potential, Maslow and other humanistic psychologists moved beyond humanism to a consideration of what transcends the ordinary state of human consciousness. During the later phase of his work, Maslow wrote:
"I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology, to be transitional, a preparation for a still 'higher' Fourth Psychology, transpersonal, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity, self-actualization, and the like."15
Anthony Sutich, another founder of humanistic psychology, also eventually came to a similar conclusion as Maslow's regarding the humanistic approach. He stated:
"I felt that something was lacking in the [humanistic] orientation... and that it did not ... give sufficient attention to the place of man in the universe or cosmos. A special problem was my growing realization that the concept of self-actualization was no longer comprehensive enough."16
The "still 'higher' psychology" envisaged by Maslow strikingly echoes Sri Aurobindo's prevision of "the greater psychology awaiting its hour". In the late 1960s, Maslow, Sutich and other prominent humanistic psychologists founded an association for the study of what they called Transpersonal Psychology, thereby launching the latest major movement in psychology, regarded by a
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growing number of psychologists as the Fourth Force.
One of the most significant features of transpersonal psychology is its revolutionary view and definition of psychology. The view has been well expressed by Robert Orustein, research psychologist at Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, and President of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge. Ornstein writes:
"Psychology is, primarily, the science of consciousness. Its researchers deal with consciousness directly when possible and indirectly, through the study of physiology and behavior, when necessary."17
Here again we have a partial echo of what Sri Aurobindo had written several decades earlier regarding the nature and scope of psychology. In an unrevised, and perhaps incomplete piece of writing on "Psychology", published posthumously, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
"Psychology is the science of consciousness and its states and operations in Nature and, if that can be glimpsed or experienced, its states and operations beyond what we know as Nature....
"Our observable consciousness, that which we call ourselves, is only the little visible part of our being. It is a small field below which are depths and farther depths and widths and ever wider widths which support and supply it but to which it has no visible access. All that is our self, our being; what we see at the top is only our ego and its visible nature.
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"Even the movements of this little surface nature cannot be understood nor its true law discovered until we know all that is below or behind and supplies it -and know too all that is around it and above."18
It is, of course, not the first time that psychology is being defined as the science of consciousness. It was so defined by E.B. Titchener (1867-1927) and other psychologists of the old introspectionist school for whom psychology was the study of the "elements of consciousness". However, what the early introspectionist psychologists studied was the superficial aspect of consciousness which is observable through introspection. The study of consciousness did not include what lies outside conscious awareness and what is therefore not accessible to introspection. Regarding this early view of consciousness, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
"Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound - for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious,- supramental or overmental and submental ranges."19
In the re-definition of psychology as the science of consciousness, the term no longer implies merely that
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which constitutes conscious or mental awareness, but rather something which, as Sri Aurobindo states above, has various ranges, similar to the gradations of colour or of sound. Perhaps the clearest expression of this new concept of consciousness in modern psychology is to be found in Ken Wilber, a leading writer on the psychology of consciousness. Wilber, using a metaphor similar to those used by Sri Aurobindo in the first of the two extracts just quoted, has formulated the concept of "the spectrum of consciousness" which he explains as follows:
"... human personality is a multi-leveled manifestation or expression of a single consciousness, just as in physics the electromagnetic spectrum is viewed as a multi-banded expression of a single, characteristic electro-magnetic wave. ... Each level of the spectrum is marked by a different and easily recognized sense of individual identity, which ranges from the supreme identity of cosmic consciousness through several gradations or bands to the drastically narrowed sense of identity associated with egoic consciousness."20
Wilber's view of ego-consciousness as representing a "drastically narrowed sense of identity" is in some respects a total reversal of what modern psychology has hitherto held regarding the ego. For, from the viewpoint of modern psychology in general and of psychoanalysis in particular, the ego represents the most advanced stage in the psychological development of an individual. A normal and psychologically healthy person is deemed to be one who has an adequately developed ego. When the ego is ill-developed in an individual and, as a result, the individual
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suffers from certain ego-deficits, or, when after having developed an adequately strong ego there is a breakdown in some of the ego functions due to outer stress or inner conflict, the individual suffers from neurosis or psychosis. Therefore, modern psychology, which has hitherto been preoccupied with what is regarded as the "normal" personality, has extolled the ego, equating a well-developed ego with the state of normality and psychological health. Even Jung, who was strongly influenced by Eastern thought, and who, in his concept of the collective unconscious, was one of the earliest thinkers in modern psychology to speak of something that is transpersonal, did not admit of a state of consciousness in which the ego is transcended or abolished. He categorically asserted that "consciousness is inconceivable without an ego.... If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything."21 According to Jung, to lose the ego is to fall into a state of unconsciousness.
Jung's difficulty in conceiving of consciousness without an ego is rooted in the very nature of the normal human consciousness which is ego-bound. But Sri Aurobindo's experience testifies - as does that of others who, transcending the ego-consciousness, have discovered the self -that the ego, with its sense of a separate individuality, is only a shadow of the true individuality which is characterised by a sense of oneness with the all. As Sri Aurobindo states: "Our ego is only a face of the universal being and has no separate existence; our apparent separative individuality is only a surface movement and behind it our real individuality stretches out to unity with all things.. . ,"22
The model of the spectrum of consciousness, which
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admits of states of consciousness other than that of the ego, is, according to Wilber, a core concept of the "perennial psychology" - a universal doctrine regarding the nature of man common to all major metapsychological traditions of the world - and "yet at the same time gives ample consideration to the insights of such typical Western disciplines as ego-psychology, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, Jungian analysis, interpersonal psychology, and the like."23
If psychology is the study of consciousness, the view that consciousness consists of gradations above and below the normal state of ego consciousness would suggest that the study of psychology and knowledge of the self are intimately related and must go hand in hand. This thought has been well expressed by John Welwood, an editor for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and Pre Vision. Suggesting the directions that a new psychology might take, Welwood writes:
"This new approach needs to be a self-knowledge psychology, based on an inner empiricism, an investigation of experience and its deeper nature....
"It needs to be based on self-knowledge disciplines (such as the practice of meditation). Every body of knowledge is based on a certain discipline, an orderly and precise approach of observing, practicing, and learning. A self-knowledge discipline is one in which attention is trained to actively examine the nature of one's experience... ."24
Such a view of psychology as a self-knowledge discipline
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was adumbrated by Sri Aurobindo who spoke of "psychological methods of discipline by which man purifies and perfects himself,- the work of psychology, not as it is understood in Europe, but the deeper practical psychology called in India yoga".25
In presaging the emergence of psychology as a science of consciousness and as a self-knowledge discipline lies perhaps Sri Aurobindo's greatest relevance to modern psychology. However, besides foreshadowing the "greater psychology awaiting its hour", Sri Aurobindo has through personal exploration and experience, mapped out and intimately described the entire terrain of consciousness in all its gradations. Embodied in his yoga, such a science of consciousness, which is also a discipline for self-knowledge and self-transformation, awaits discovery by those who are turning towards the new horizons in psychology.
REFERENCES
1. The Human Cycle, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1970-73), Vol. 15, p. 1.
2. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), pp. 321-22.
3. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), p. 1606.
4. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), p. 346.
5. Ibid., p. 321.
6. The Mother (SABCL, Vol. 25), p. 11.
7. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), p. 1435.
8. Letters on Yoga (SABCL. Vol. 22), p. 354.
9. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18). p. 223fn.
10. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), p. 1606.
11. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 22), p. 347.
12. Ibid., pp. 354-55.
13. The Synthesis of Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 21), pp. 597-98.
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14. Letters on Yoga (SABCL, Vol. 24), pp. 1608-1)9.
15. Maslow, A. H. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968.
16. Cited in John Welwood (Ed.) The Meeting of the Ways (New York: Schocken Books, 1979), p. 224.
17. Ornstein, R. The Psychology of Consciousness. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972.
18. "Psychology" in The Hour of God and Other Writings (SABCL. Vol. 17), pp. 21-22.
19. Letters on Yoga (SABCL. Vol. 22), p. 234.
20. Ken Wilber, "Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness". Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1975, Vol. 7, p. 105.
21. Cited in Swami Ajaya, Psychotherapy East and West (Honesdale, Pennsylvania: The Himalayan International Institute, 1983), p. 137.
22. The Life Divine (SABCL, Vol. 18), p. 401.
23. Ken Wilber, "Psychologia Perennis: The Spectrum of Consciousness". Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1975. Vol. 7, p. 105.
24. John Welwood (Ed.). The Meeting of the Ways, pp. 224-25.
25. "Our Ideal" in The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings (SABCL, Vol. 16). p. 314.
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