How to do research in Indian Psychology?

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Matthijs

One of the hallmarks of Indian Psychology is the central role it gives to consciousness. But how do you study consciousness? Consciousness is quintessentially subjective, and mainstream science does its level best to be as objective as possible. Can subjective and objective research be brought together in one single framework?

During the last few hundred years, the hard sciences have produced a stupendous increase in our knowledge of the workings of the mind and the physical correlates of our consciousness, but even their most fascinating findings have failed to shed much light on consciousness itself. One could even argue that all this effort has actually diminished our understanding of consciousness, as the physicalist bias of the hard sciences has strengthened the idea that consciousness is no more then “a causally ineffective epiphenomenon of the physical processes that take place in our nervous system”. And this, to borrow Dennet’s phrase, is an exceedingly dangerous idea, because it trivializes virtually everything that is of real value in human life: meaning, truth, agency, feelings, love, beauty, ….

Social constructionism has added a radically new perspective to the world of science, as it has “problematized” the very idea of objective knowledge. Though this has led to the amusing “science wars”, constructionism and the hard sciences need not look at each other as implacable enemies: it is not hard to figure out that their views are not so much contradictory as complementary. While constructionism has focused on the first and the last stage of the scientific process — the formulation of the research question at the beginning, and the formulation of the results at the end — the hard sciences have focused on what comes in between — conducting experiments, collecting data, and using mathematics to analyze the results. It is in this middle stage that the hard sciences have made their greatest contribution to society, and it is this stage that researchers in the hard sciences value and enjoy.

There is much to be grateful for in the massive, collective labour of the hard sciences — its findings are valuable, effective and valid within their boundaries. Yet, it is also good to acknowledge its limitations and for scientists to pay attention to the wider social context in which they work. Only by working harmoniously together, the positivist and constructionist approaches to knowledge-generation can produce a harmonious picture that takes the social as well as the physical aspects of reality into account.

But what about psychology? It appears, unfortunately, that psychology has not yet found its swar, it own “song”, and its place in the collective harmony. What happens if we apply the dual perspective of social constructionism and objective science to psychology and consciousness studies? It is easy to see that social constructionism and its sister cognitive constructivism have something to contribute. Social influences do play a role in how people are aware of themselves and their surrounding, and how they ”construct” (or perhaps rather give a form to) their knowledge. The hard sciences tell us about the workings of our nervous system and the physical correlates of consciousness. The quantitative methods of traditional mainstream psychology tell us reliably how large populations of citizens “behave” and what they know about themselves. The newer qualitative methods provide some insight in how individuals experience themselves. And yet, psychology has hardly scratched the surface. It has hardly gone beyond what people already know about themselves. Psychoanalysis and Transpersonal Psychology have made brave attempts to go deeper and go beyond, but their methods are not rigorous and self-critical enough, and as a result, the knowledge they provide is often lopsided and limited. Collectively we have not reached a clear understanding of what goes on within the deeper and higher layers of consciousness, the stuff most people are not aware of and that, yet, determines what happens on the surface of our being.

It is here that the Indian tradition can make its crucial contribution. Its yoga-based methods of enquiry that have been honed for millennia can do for the deep, subjective study of consciousness what the hard sciences have done for the in-depth, objective study of matter. If taken together, the three approaches may then produce complementary, and mutually enriching knowledge in all three fields, in the physical, social and psychological domains.

So, what would research in Indian Psychology look like? Its core would be the use of yoga (in its widest, deepest sense) to affect inner changes, to activate and undergo processes within the realm of consciousness, to move through and study the complex, subtle, inner worlds that our ordinary waking consciousness doesn’t allow us to see, and then to use this new knowledge to transform one’s outer and inner nature. The other half of the effort would be to share the new knowledge and know-how in a manner that helps others to do the same.  Interestingly the sharing of yoga-based research can take three very different but equally effective forms: The first is an “objective”, technical, prosaic, description of a method, of something concrete and explicit which others can “do”. Good examples of this method might be the Yogasutras of Patanjali or Kamalashila’s Bhavanakrama: both give detailed, step-wise descriptions of how to reach higher states of consciousness. The second way is to describe the inner states and processes in such an evocative manner that the reader (or listener) can be carried by the language to a similar experience, or at least to a shadow of it. Typical examples of this second method are the verses of the Rig Veda and the Upanishads, the writings of Shankara, the poetry of Rumi, and Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri. All these authors did massive inner work, which then enabled them to write in such a manner that their texts carry the reader to far beyond his or her normal level of being and understanding. The third method is simply by sharing one’s “presence”, one’s style of being and responding to the world, so that the student can grow in his consciousness through some form of osmosis or “contagion”. All great yogis do this, but as typical examples of the third way, one could name Sri Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. Both masters wrote little, hardly ever gave systematic instructions, and yet by their very being influenced millions and increased our knowledge of the “further reaches” of our human potential.

All this may seem very unscientific, and yet it may have more in common with the way science operates, than may be clear at first sight. After all the progress of science as a collective enterprise is not only made through the publication of scientific papers. New insights are also shared through their application in technology, and through the complex process of learning that takes place in universities and other research establishments. For students who want to become the next generation of scientists, it is not enough to study textbooks and research papers. They also have to absorb the methods and practices of their discipline, and, just as in yoga, the best amongst them have to manage spending time under the direct influence of the great exemplars of the preceding generation.

Perhaps one should consider then not only systematizers like Patanjali, but also poets like Rumi as researchers in the field of consciousness: both mastered complex inner processes, developed new knowledge, and an effective way to share their findings. While acknowledging fully that it may be more difficult to reach consensus on the value of a poem than on the validity of a mathematical formula or the effectiveness of a yogic “method”, one could perhaps argue that poetry plays a somewhat similar role in the field of inner consciousness studies, as mathematical algorithms in the hard sciences: for those who can read them, they light up large and complex issues in a precise and quick fashion that ordinary, linear prose cannot match.

Finally, it may be relevant to note that in the hard sciences, one can distinguish a continuum that has, on the one side, a small number of really great scientists who help the field to make large steps forward, and on the other side a huge mass of minor researchers who corroborate the findings of the really great. The former get famous, and rightly so, and yet, the latter are also important, as they add solidity, mass and sometimes detail to the body of science, even if they add little of entirely new knowledge. Similarly, in the field of consciousness-based psychological research, one can make a difference between the really great — yogis like the Rishis of the Rig Veda, Rumi, and Aurobindo — and a large mass of “small-timers”, people who can take up the texts of the really great, try to apply them in themselves, and then, for example through the qualitative methods of collaborative research, corroborate, refine, or problematize the findings of the great.

Putting the various elements of the argument together, we could then say first that the positivist methods of the hard sciences, the constructionist approaches of the social sciences, and the yoga-based methods of (Indian) psychology may give humanity a fairly comprehensive science of ourselves and the social and physical worlds we inhabit.

The second point is that within this triple framework, psychology should employ the whole range of methodologies: objective, positivist research for the study of the nervous system and  its workings; quantitative, standardized surveys for large populations (and for the relative placement of individuals within those populations); qualitative research methods for in-depth studies of individuals and small groups; and first-person, yoga-based research for those who can discern and describe their inner processes with sufficient precision for others to profit from their findings.

If you’re interested in some further reading on the subject, you could have a look here.

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Asia

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Divya

Okakura Kakuzō, (1862-1913), a Japanese scholar wrote these beautiful lines on Asia :

“ASIA is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.”

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Why do we need Indian Psychology?

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Matthijs

When modern psychology discovered in the beginning of the 20th century that introspection was not a very reliable method of enquiry, it did not discover anything new. The Indian civilization had discovered this thousands of years ago. What was different however, was how modernity reacted to this discovery. It is good to stand still at what happened for the consequences have been far-reaching and by and large negative.
Modern psychology escaped from the problem of introspection by redefining psychology as the science of behaviour. Initially this must have seemed a splendid idea and, especially in the USA, the whole field fell for it with a stunning degree of unanimity: psychology suddenly became a real science, purely objective, third-person, dealing in undisputable facts.

It took remarkably long before it began to dawn at what cost all this had come for the cost was high: By focusing exclusively on outer behaviour, almost everything that really matters to people had disappeared from view. Things like truth, love, joy, beauty, even meaning itself had become difficult to research, and so all those things that are central in a truly human life got an air of being intangible and unsubstantial. Moreover, as behaviour was easier to study in small (and cheap) animals than in people, the study of cognitive behaviour shifted to rats and pigeons. These “laboratory animals” were first starved and then taught random behaviour with the help of rewards in the form of food-pellets. And it is here that it all became really serious: the results of these animal studies were applied to human education, and so we have now children who are taught what to them appears as random facts, with the help of rewards in the form of marks and degrees. And once children are systematically trained to do anything whatsoever as long as it produces high marks, is it surprising that we end up with ‘grown-ups’ who are willing to do anything as long as it produces money?

It is hard to prove, but it appears at least that a relatively innocent looking choice regarding scientific methodology at the beginning of last century has led to one of the most serious problems our global civilization is presently facing: a true, world-wide epidemic of corruption and money-mindedness. It is obviously difficult to prove the link, and one may well argue that modern psychology is not anymore about “rats and stats”. We have now the well-established quantitative methodology of statistically processed surveys, more recently the promise of qualitative, narrative analysis, and a growing awareness of how knowledge gets socially constructed. But none of this goes deep enough. Good science goes below the surface, but these approaches don’t allow that to happen. The statistical surveys are limited to what representative populations of large numbers of lay people can report about themselves; the narrative analysis can not go beyond what concerned lay people already happen to know. Both have their use, no doubt, but the first cannot deliver more than a kind of sophisticated psycho-social geography, the second will find it difficult to rise beyond high quality journalism.
In case it is not clear whether this rather harsh criticism of mainstream psychology makes sense or not, it may help to consider what would have happened to astronomy if it would have followed the path taken by psychology. What would have happened if astronomy had limited itself to quantitative analysis of what large, representative populations of lay people see in the evening sky? It is clear that what people see is informed by their culture, it is also clear that one single “qualitative” interview with a farmer living high in mountains could have given better information on the sky than a large study of people living in the plains. But still, the real road ahead for astronomy was to forget about all this, and to ensure that a few highly trained professionals could make use of the most powerful and reliable pieces of equipment available.
Interestingly this is exactly what the Indian tradition has done in the field of psychology.

The ancient rishis and yogis realized, like their modern counterparts, that what ordinary people know about themselves is not worth much, but they did not shy away from the problem. Instead they analysed the causes for this human incapacity and then they set to work on methods to overcome these defects. They found that the two main problems were egoism, and a too naive reliance on what the senses make us believe. Regarding the former, they found that the egoism expressed itself through desires, preferences and the natural “vested interests” we all have in the outcome of our self-observations. All such factors lead in their own way to distortions. What is more interesting is that they found that it is actually possible to remove these obstacles, and that this not only leads to greater clarity of thought, but also to a remarkable type of unconditional inner joy and effectiveness in action. The latter may be a surprise to those who have been brought up on the virtues of “ego-strength”, but there is convincing scientific evidence that the detachment furthered by yoga and meditation actually does lead to greater social effectiveness and life-satisfaction. An anecdotal but almost certainly historical support for this comes, besides, in the form of the life of the Buddha, a living example of selflessness, and yet, one of the most influential individuals who ever lived.

Regarding the need to overcome the first impressions our senses give us, this is of course a hallmark of modern science. In the beginning of the modern, scientific era, the sense-impression of a “rising sun” was discarded in favour of a model in which the earth turns around its axis. More recent discoveries in quantum mechanics do not fit in our ordinary sense-based view of reality at all any more, and yet we use them as they can still be processed mathematically and used technologically. In a similar way, yoga and meditation have led to insights that are hard to grasp for the ordinary sense-based mind — for example “pure consciousness”, or the presence of “the Divine” as our deepest identity — but they can be made real experientially, and then they have a perfectly concrete, beneficial effect on our psychological existence.

Though the beneficial effects of yoga and mediation on our subjective sense of well-being have been shown to exists in numerous researches, they may still not be the most important contribution of the Indian tradition to psychology as a science. The most interesting might well turn out to be what the Indian tradition can contribute in terms of detailed, incisive and reliable psychological knowledge. For we should not forget that the ancient rishis were not only seeking for “ananda”; they were also seeking to overcome ignorance; they wanted true, undistorted knowledge. And real knowledge meant for them knowledge of the self, and this stress on looking inward first makes sense, for every thing we know or do, we achieve through our own nature. If our own nature is weak or distorted, everything we know or do will be tarnished by our weaknesses and distortions. So the first necessity it is to clean up, to purify and to get to know our own nature as thoroughly as we can. And this is exactly what jnana and purna yoga are about: to purify the inner instrument of knowledge so that it can provide undistorted truth about reality. If this purification and transformation are extended to the inner instruments of action, this will automatically lead to action which is no longer ego-based but in harmony with the whole.

Given the obvious treasures of psychological knowledge one can find alike in ancient scriptures like the Rg Veda, the Upanishads, and the works of modern yogis like Sri Aurobindo, it would be a great loss for humanity if modern Psychology chose to ignore this contribution. For the rishis developed something which mainstream psychology did not: a rigorous and effective method to develop detailed and reliable knowledge of the subjective domain. And this might well be the one thing humanity is presently most in need of.

Posted in Cognition & Methodology, Society | 1 Comment

the golden youth cooperative

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Matthijs

Just came out of a dream in which I visited the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to.

When I just woke, I thought the place was very well-known, that I and many others had been there so many times; now more fully awake, I realise — though it feels upside-down to use the word realise for acknowledging the reality of a much greater falsehood — that, at least in my waking consciousness, I’ve never been there, and I doubt whether in the shared physical reality, anybody has: all humanity has seen over the last few thousand years are the most horrible deformations and distortions of it.

Just imagine the equivalent on the side of real Truth, Nobility, Light, Love, Beauty, of what on the side of falsehood, cruelty, darkness, hatred and ugliness was the Hitler Jugend.

It is really hard — now since I am fully back in my waking consciousness actually impossible — to imagine or even recollect what such beauty could be, because all we have seen — all that authors have been able to imagine in books and movies — are terrible, horrid deformations of it.

Imagine a spontaneous, completely “true” grouping of youth, with all the dynamism of youth, a spontaneous, collaborative union that is how to say, composed only of those who are completely luminous, without the least internal shadow or the tiniest impurity of darkness (in the sense that Mother describes of the people on the supramental boat). That joyous unity of youth is out together to do the works of true nobility.

This is really tragical and bizarre: for us words like “goodness”, “nobility”, “perfection” when used for a group only evoke images of their opposite: of terrible organisations of falsehood. But there in my dream, there was the genuine reality of nobility, light, goodness at a level of true perfection. It is really weird, for true goodness in our waking reality we need the graciousness and charm of imperfections, for “perfection” is always false in our world. How utterly false is our world…

Anyhow in that world, it was not like that. Just before coming out of it I saw it as a space in which there were a few rectangular blocks that differed in proportions, colour and radiance. The colours varied from a dark terra-cotta, a muted stone brown/red, through gerua, to yellow gold. The colours were not painted on the surface but through and through, and everything was self-luminous, radiant like molten steel. The shapes were all composed out of perfect rectangles — these “visuals” must have been a contribution from my mind’s sense of perfection, I guess!

The “golden youth cooperative” — this is the name I now give it, there were no words in that space; the first words that came up after I came out of the dream-space but when I still could see it, were true, gold and noble — that “golden youth cooperative” was full of energy, enthusiastically doing what is noble, true, light and good in society. The block representing it was the most bright, the most intensely shining, the lightest in colour, like yellow-gold. The other blocks were a little darker, a little more towards brown-red, though still self-luminous. All so incredibly beautiful, so completely “filled up” with such genuine harmonious perfection; there was absolutely nothing remotely wrong or evil. I can now say that that whole universe was built on perfectly pure, divine love,  but when I just came out of the dream the word love did not come up, I guess because it has itself become so polluted… Though Love is no doubt the essence of that place, the word “love” needs thorough “over-hauling”, cleaning, re-conditioning before it can be used again!

I’ve never seen anything remotely as beautiful.

Posted in Miscellaneous musings | 2 Comments

Some further musings on knowledge and the brain, on science and yoga

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Matthijs

Even the tiniest particle of matter, however small, must have within itself all the knowledge of the universe. The reason that it must be like this, is that the particle must know the laws that govern it, and as all the laws of physics are supposed to hang together, this means it must know the laws that govern all the processes that are taking place in the universe. It must also know the characteristic properties of everything that exists in the universe as everything influences everything, however minutely. Without this all-sided omniscience the particle would not be able to act in the perfect harmony with the rest of the universe that is so typical of simple, material “things”. In other words, a perfect and complete knowledge must be an inalienable part of the very being of every little thing. (In case of interest: you can find a more elaborate argument for this idea and how it relates to other forms of knowledge here.)

Humans are more complicated than tiny material particles, and we do not only have this perfect and complete knowledge embedded in our deepest essence; we also have thoughts, feelings and sense-impressions. The reason we humans get so often into a terrible mess is that we allow our actions to be guided by these far less perfect surface thoughts, feelings and sense-impressions.

Thoughts etc. seem to come to us in three ways: we can construct them out of prior thoughts (retrieved from memory); we can re-construct them from complex symbolic sense-impressions that come to us from others (as in reading and listening); and finally, thoughts etc can come to us “telepathically” from others or universal nature. According to Sri Aurobindo more than half our thoughts come to us in this last fashion, from the outside.

Once we “have” a thought, we can assess its truth-worthiness in two ways: “horizontally” by comparing it with other thoughts, and “vertically” by checking it out against the implicit knowledge inherent in our being. This vertical process, though most of us are not terribly good at it, must in the end be the more important of the two, as the inner knowledge is primary and inherently true, while the outer, constructed knowledge, is indirect and at best an approximation.

According to Sri Aurobindo all knowledge comes ultimately from within and is at most triggered by the external mental processes of perception, thinking and learning. For many years he spent a large part of his genius, effort and time on fine-tuning and perfecting his own access to the inner knowledge, and he came to the conclusion that with sufficient effort, inner, subjective knowledge can be made more reliable than outer, objective knowledge.

Now, how does all this relate to what happens in our nervous system? Over the last 50 years science has discovered loads about the fysio-chemical functioning of our brains. It has also become quite good at imitating the functional aspects of our own thinking in “software” running on electronic “hardware”. Yet, as far as I know, it still has no cue on how our subjective awareness comes into being or how consciousness relates to the working of the brain. We know how to change the content of our awareness, and how to chemically disturb it, but we have no idea how it arises or how it could possibly influence material processes.

The Isha Upanishad says that avidya (the type of knowledge science collects) is needed to conquer death, and that vidya (the yogic knowledge of the Self) is needed to find immortality. Did the Isha predict thousands of years ahead of time that one day humanity’s secular and spiritual efforts would come together, or did it mean something entirely different?

It is not immediately obvious why yoga would need science. It is easier to see why science needs yoga, but still, a meeting point is conceivable. If scientists move ahead into the study of subtler and subtler processes at work in the cells of our body, and if yogis develop greater and greater powers of consciousness, a time might come when these two efforts will meet and we will learn to move all kind of subtle material processes directly with our consciousness.

But is that synthesis really the intended direction?

Science without yoga is sure to destroy us. A viable future with yoga but without science is easier to conceive. Humanity might leave material science and technology simply behind as a toy it has outgrown, once it has recovered the full power of consciousness. But what if they are meant to fulfill and complete each other? What form would that take?

In what direction should we prepare ourselves?

There are many reasons why the development of yoga seems to me to be the most urgent, by far.

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Early morning musings on mind, brain, time and coffee

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Matthijs

Early morning thoughts stream slowly and meander leisurely through the mind without much of discipline. Yesterday I fixed a new mirror in the bathroom. The old mirror is still laying next to it. Seeing them both, I remember the adventures with “mirror-books” that Fynn describes with so much love in Mr. God, this is Anna. With some apprehension I hold the old mirror in front of the new one. Such tricks rarely work for me, but the effect is immediate. An infinite series of mirrors inside mirrors pops up. And it is true: the mirrors appear so quickly that it is hard to resist the impression that they have actually always been there, that I just peep into a pre-existing reality. Anna is right, there is something magical about this.

Several old thoughts get triggered. “How quick must something happen to give the impression of simultaneity?” And from there, “What does it mean that there is a difference in the length of ‘now’ in vision and hearing?” I have never heard anybody else bother about this, but I find it intriguing. Children learn in school that the length of time the eye needs to discern a difference is  somewhere between a thirtieth and a sixtieth of a second. Movies and TVs are based on this, but I don’t remember ever having learnt anything about the length of “now” in terms of sound. Musicians and sound-engineers must have studied it, but I haven’t stumbled on any writing about it. I’ve noticed that my own auditory “now” seems to last about a second and a half. Beyond that stretch of time, my sound perception tapers off gradually into the past as well as into the future. It is as if I watch a river: water flows into my field of vision from one side and flows out from the other. I see sharp only what is in the middle. Is the length of the auditory “now” a biological constant or is it something that can be trained to expand? Do musicians hear a whole concerto “in one go”, as one piece? Or do they move, like me, through the music as if they were looking at a parade through a vaguely bordered slit or window? However precisely I may know how the parade looks as a whole, I still can see only a few marchers at a time. Does everyone hear in the same manner? Or can the borders between knowing and perceiving shift? Or blur?

The thoughts withdraw, there is silence again. I make some coffee and watch a bit of milk fall into the cup. While I see it falling, there is another fleeting thought: “Should I add a bit of sugar?” I see my mind’s eye move to the sugar pot and back within the tiny bit of time it takes the milk to fall a centimeter or two. Now another train of thoughts follows.

“How long does a ‘fleeting thought’ actually take? The image came and went while the milk fell at most 2 cm, judging from the size of the cup. From physics class I remember that free-falling objects speed up during their fall, so I should take into account that the milk must have been falling already for another 20 cm or so. With some embarrassment I realise I’ve hopelessly forgotten how to calculate how long falling those 2 cm should take, but it must have been a small fraction of a second. (A bit later the formula comes back, it and I guestimate it should have taken something of the order of 10ms). The time it takes for a signal to pass from one brain cell to another through a chemical synapse is similar, about 2 ms. I wonder whether this observation is sufficient to conclude that thoughts and consciousness must take place within single cells. Probably not. I should try to find out whether it is possible for loads of slow working cells to produce together complex results in a short timespan.

“The image of adding sugar and the words in which that suggestion was clad were vague. Could it be that such thoughts arise simultaneously in a number of individual cells and that a thought becomes more precise, detailed and solid as and when more cells get involved? Could this offer a hint on the process through which intuitions and ideas from more subtle vital and mental planes enter the physical brain? Could it explain why some scholars think consciousness goes together with certain frequencies of coordinated brain activity? In the field of “Consciousness Studies” people tend to look at consciousness as the ability of the organism as a whole to react to stimuli, and that type of consciousness might indeed need the whole brain to work in unison.

“And all this, while consciousness in the Indian understanding can exist without any brain at all….”

The whole train of thought lasts hardly a few sips of coffee. It takes almost two hours to write it all out. Was it worth it?

Posted in Cognition & Methodology, Miscellaneous musings | 1 Comment

TIP-2011: Observations from the sidelines

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Jyoti

TIP-2011 — IPI’s collaborative workshop on Teaching Indian Psychology —  began with much hope, enthusiasm and eagerness, as something, the need for which had been felt since quite some time. In spite of the resistance against the teaching of Indian Psychology in universities and other age-old institutions, where western classical positivist psychology had been the norm — as if it were the only psychology! — and especially since the Pondicherry conferences (in 2001, 2002 and 2004) on IP, a slow but steadily growing murmur of discontent with the existing system of psychology was being heard. But how to include IP in the teaching curriculum? What to teach under IP which would not come across as teaching philosophy? How to teach so that it would bring home the realisation that IP is actually what psychology essentially is and should be? Even those who believed that IP ought to be an integral part of psychology curriculum felt uncertain as to how to do justice to the richness of this tradition and the knowledge and insights contained in it. Since most of the psychology teachers keen on teaching Indian psychology had been trained in the western tradition, a change of orientation and approach was necessary to teach IP as an independent knowledge system.

The group of 15 participants and five resource people finally came together in the exquisitely beautiful and serene precincts of Savitri Bhawan in Auroville, Pondicherry. The participants comprised largely a group of (teaching/counselling) professionals, some with well-established careers, others just starting out. All of them had come with expectations to learn about the teaching pedagogy of IP, which they would be able to use in their respective work areas. I was a peripheral part of the group, yet very much wanting to learn and silently observing….

The first four and a half days were packed with various activities: sample classes by resource persons, discussions, sharing of experiences, exercises such as snowballing, concentration, etc., choosing individual projects by the participants and working on the same to be able to make a presentation on the last day.

This five-day workshop was an intense experience for most of the participants. The manner in which the whole atmosphere of the workshop, and the consciousness that permeated during the sessions seemed to have touched the participants alike in some subtle manner was evident in the presentations made by the participants and during the last round of expressing gratitude, which succinctly highlighted what each of them had received from the workshop. It had a sweet personal touch to it, was an expression of their inner selves and revealed how the same atmosphere, same people, had impacted each one so differently. One of the significant discussions during these days had been as to who is equipped, or who can/should teach IP? The interesting insights each one came up with were actually the manifestation of that basic ingredient needed by those interested in teaching IP: the ability to look inside, confront oneself honestly, try to know and understand oneself, and be one’s own subject and workshop (as beautifully expressed by one of the resource people). All this of course together with the willingness to help others through one’s own learnings.

To briefly touch upon some of the areas explored by the participants as part of their individual projects: where one participant shared his personal life experiences vis a vis his experiments with love relationships, another shared her ardent faith and love for her personal God. She expressed that she had never thought such people as she met here ever existed, people who would understand and respect her faith. As was obvious, this part of her life was a complete disconnect from the psychology she had studied and was teaching. Another confessed having gently tapered down her lofty ambitious ideals from dealing with her egoism to finding the calm and silence within and trying to help her clients experience the same, because it had made a difference in her life. Again someone else was brave enough to voice her fears about life and how she needed to confront and deal with them; yet another, who in the beginning of the workshop had been convinced that there was no need for two different ways of teaching IP and Western psychology, with much humility admitted that yes IP could be taught in other ways, through love, silence, faith, etc.

I realized that all these were people who had attained a particular station and stature in their lives and that what they had believed for so many years, taught, thought to be the right way of doing things, was a part of their identity and I expected that they might have consciously or unconsciously defended it as such. When they walked into that room where the workshop was to be held, for many of them this would have meant simply another academic exercise, similar to several others they might have undertaken during the course of their careers. But something which was pleasantly added here was the no-threat, no-judgment ambience, where they were not expected to prove or defend themselves. Perhaps all that was required (even in this respect they had the freedom to be as they liked) was just to be, which most of us have forgotten in the outside world, where we are our careers, our roles, our education, our achievements, etc., with a total disregard and a consequent loss of the real person we are without all of these. This workshop helped the participants, through several direct and indirect ways, get a tiny peep into what and how each one could be, unfettered by the whole baggage of external things that we carry with and on us all the time, actually as crutches to help us stand up in society, amidst people, needed only because we do not know our real self! The non-threatening, non-judgmental ambience of the workshop, the genuine respect, positive  regard and acknowledgement accorded to each individual as an individual, for his/her views, opinions, experiences, seems to have been the catalyst which facilitated the open and honest sharing by each one of their personal experiences.

The rich variety of the participants, their individual journeys, life experiences and all that they brought with them to this workshop, simply drove home a gentle but a poignant realisation that underneath the diversity, there was a oneness which was subtle and harmonious, and which perhaps is the essence of IP.

Posted in IPI, Teaching IP | 3 Comments

The objective and the subjective!

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Divya

I came across this interesting passage from the book “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by Wiliam James. Here it is:

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of what so ever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous, — the cosmic times and spaces, for example,— whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs — such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the ‘object’ is when taken all alone.”

He further continues:

“That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egoistic elements of experience should be suppressed. … To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description— they being as describable as anything else— would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion may be egoistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.

A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound.”

Having read this, I realized that to treat psychology as a science that solely takes into account the objective reality of people, the measurable facts and figures, seems to me like the “bill of fare” instead of the “solid meal”. As James expresses that reality consists of both the objective and the subjective, it is rather unfair of science to study only one of these aspects. If it does that then it can never grasp the whole of reality.

But then the question remains how does one study the inner realities or the deeply personal experiences of man?

I am inclined to believe that the Indian tradition has this answer!

Posted in Cognition & Methodology | 1 Comment

Time

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Matthijs

Psychologically time is quite a strange phenomenon. St. Augustine famously said about it that he perfectly understood what time was … till someone asked him to explain.

In a talk with the children of the Ashram school, the Mother described how it operates in the different inner worlds.

Sri Aurobindo gave a marvelous short summary of the role of time in different stages of one’s sadhana at the end of a chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, called “The Four Aids”. He writes there:

Time presents itself to human effort as an enemy or a friend, as a resistance, a medium or an instrument. But always it is really the instrument of the soul.

Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal, Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument.

The ideal attitude of the sadhaka towards Time is to have an endless patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an ever-increasing mastery and pressure of rapidity till it reaches the miraculous instantaneousness of the supreme divine Transformation.

Our only problem is how to make enough time to grow into that attitude.

Posted in Miscellaneous musings | 1 Comment

The Two Birds

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Divya

Here is a small imagery from the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad that depicts beautifully the relation we have with the world and The Self.
The image, that of two birds, presented here in 3 shlokas gives first the description of ourselves in this world, then presents us with the Problem we face and lastly gives us the Solution to overcome it.

dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṁ vṛkṣam pariṣasvajāte
tayor anyaḥ pippalaṁ svādv atty anaśnann anyo’bhicākaśīti.
Two birds, beautiful of wing, close companions, cling to one common tree: of the two one eats the sweet fruit of the tree, the other eats not but watches his fellow.
***
samāne vṛkṣe puruṣo nimagno’nīśayā śocati muhyamānaḥ
juṣṭamyadā paśyati anyam īśam asya mahimānam iti vīta-śokaḥ
The soul is the bird that sits immersed on the one common tree; but because he is not lord he is bewildered and has sorrow. But when he sees that other who is the Lord and beloved, he knows that all is His greatness and his sorrow passes away from him.
***
yadā paśyaḥ paśyate rukma-varṇaṁ kartāram īśam puruṣam brahma-yonim
tadā vidvān puṇya-pāpe vidhūya niranjanaḥ paramaṃ sāmyam upaiti
When, a seer, he sees the Golden-hued, the maker, the Lord, the Spirit who is the source of Brahman, then he becomes the knower and shakes from his wings sin and virtue; pure of all stain he reaches the supreme identity.

(Translation taken from Sri Aurobindo; Kena and the other Upanishads; p. 142)

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