Here’s an interesting (intuitive/speculative!) chart – playfully done; don’t take rigid categories too seriously!) – looking at psychologist Clare Grave’s developmental theory which has been popularized (unfortunately, to some extent) by Don Beck as “Spiral Dynamics.”  There’s some interesting parallels with Sri Aurobindo’s symbolic (the lowest levels), typal (mythic,… Read More »

This is a selection from the book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”   It was our attempt (Jan, my wife and co-author, and myself) to follow up on Sri Aurobindo’s chapter on “The Conditions for the Advent of a Spiritual Age” which I have written about in previous… Read More »

Here, I think, in a passage from Sri Aurobindo’s “The Human Cycle”, is one of the most beautiful descriptions I’ve ever seen of what Indian psychology has to offer – a vision of a society based on the awakening to the Spirit – the Divine within and without.  And it gives us so many clues… Read More »

From "Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity" THE VIEW FROM INFINITY Intimations of Infinity While India – the home of yoga psychology – has always placed great value on intellectual understanding, the yogic tradition takes direct spiritual experience to be the foundation for any valid intellectual view. In… Read More »

Nearly 100 years ago, Sri Aurobindo wrote, in “The Human Cycle,” of the emergence, world-wide, of a new, deeper and more subjective attitude in various areas of human endeavor, including the arts, education, sociology, politics, economics, even in criminology.  Since that time, a number of authors have written in great detail of the kinds of… Read More »

Several decades ago, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the experience of creative artists.  This was in the 1960s, and many of them described extraordinary states of creativity during which they felt “in the flow”.  Since then, the science of positive psychology has discovered many surprising things about the power of positive emotions to foster optimal functioning. … Read More »