The Evolution of Consciousness: Introduction I’m going to be putting up a series of posts on the evolution of consciousness from a yogic perspective.   These are in part excerpts from our book on yoga psychology (inspired primarily by Sri Aurobindo, but taking into account a wide range of spiritual and scientific sources). There were two… Read More »

A friend just sent this article from the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/16/left-right-brain-distinction-myth I'm quite grateful for this, as the whole question of left-right hemisphere differences was supposed to have been thoroughly refuted in the 90s (most popularly by Jerre Levy).  On our website (www.remember-to-breathe.org) which uses Dan Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology as the basis for understanding the brain,… Read More »

moonlight sonata mp3 10-19-11 (it's probably best to listen through headphones. If you want to use this as part of an "experiment" - try listening starting at the line below, "and I started watching".  You'll probably find at first that your attention seems split, with the music almost as a kind of distraction.  At some point,… Read More »

            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 »

I began this exploration of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) and Indian psychology by exploring the connection between the functions of the mid prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and what in Indian psychology is known as the “buddhi” or, as Sri Aurobindo translates it, the “intelligent will.” I chose this because Dan Siegel, the originator of IPNB, puts so… Read More »