Psychology occupies a unique position amongst the different branches of science. While all other sciences are about things that exist in the physical and social outside world, psychology is — or rather should be — about ourselves and about what happens inside ourselves. In first instance, the natural territory of psychology seems to consists of our own thoughts and feelings, our desires and fears, our love, sorrow, joy and pain, our will, friendship and loneliness, freedom and agency, respect and commitment, and none of these are "things". They don't exist in the physical outside world, and they cannot be studied objectively. They appear to exist inside ourselves, in our consciousness, and our present science does not really know how to deal with consciousness and what happens "inside of us". For science, studying them in a rigorous and reliable fashion is not as straightforward as studying what exists out there, in the physical world, for everyone to see.

And so, while psychology at the end of the nineteenth century started off as the science of consciousness, in the beginning of last century, American psychologists gave up on consciousness and redefined psychology as the science of behaviour.1 Since behaviour can be observed and measured objectively, psychology suddenly turned into a real, objective science like all the others.

Over time, mainstream psychology realised this did not work as well as it had hoped, and psychology is now routinely defined as the science of behaviour and mind or even behaviour and experience, but, as we will see, the shift has not gone far enough: we still take the physical world as primary and we are still not as good in dealing with the inner side of reality as we are with the outer one.2

The problem with subjectivity is of course not a new one. There is a cute Sufi story that explains the predicament of mainstream psychology rather well. It is about Nasruddin who is feverishly looking for something on the street. A passer-by asks him,

A simple story, and perhaps over-used, but it contains a deep truth. As one of the Upanishads tells us, the house of our body is made with its windows (the senses) opening outside. So we tend to look outside of ourselves for the solution of our problems while that’s not where the key to their solution is to be found. Though meant as a warning for "the common man", the Sufi story describes quite accurately what academic psychology has been doing so far. It has been looking at external behaviour simply because that is what it knows how to research. The physical sciences have worked out their methods for centuries and they have achieved amazing successes with it, so it was tempting for psychology to follow their lead. But limiting oneself to what can be studied objectively in the outside world hasn’t worked for psychology so far and will not work in the future, for what psychology needs to study is not to be found outside in the physical world; it does not exist outside of ourselves, it exists purely in the eye of the beholder, or even behind it as the Chandogya Upanishad says,3 "in consciousness", while all that mainstream science can study objectively is at least one step removed from that inner reality. Even where psychology claims to study experience, what it actually studies are almost always the verbal reports people give about their inner states and processes, and such reports tend to be based on naive introspection which is good enough for ordinary life, but not good enough for science.4

It may be useful to stand still a little longer at Nasruddin's story and how it was used in this chapter. The story pokes fun at an obvious "village idiot", and it makes us as readers feel good about ourselves because we are in on the secret: in contrast to the idiot, we all know that happiness and wisdom are found inside rather than outside. But here is the hitch: in this chapter the joke is not on the village idiot, but on the most highly respected knowledge system humanity has at present. In traditional societies, education was entrusted to religious institutions which were supposed to pass the knowledge and values of previous generations on to the future ones. But in our present, increasingly global and future-oriented civilisation, this is no longer the case: even where educational institutions are nominally still part of religious organisations, the content is increasingly provided by science. And science prides itself, like the village idiot, on being objective, on looking for its keys in the clear daylight of the outside reality. So how did we get here? And how is it that even when we have gone to solidly secular schools, we still understand the story in the way it was meant?

This problem is more serious and urgent than those who could do something about it seem to realise. Though this may sound exaggerated, a better understanding of ourselves and our inner life may well be crucial for the survival of our global civilisation. It is not only that in spite all the wealth and technical know-how at humanity's disposal we still have people who die from hunger, violence, or perfectly preventable diseases, who live in abject poverty or have serious mental problems. We have created weapons of mass-destruction in the hands of corrupt politicians and ruthless dictatorships. The gap between rich and poor is increasing. There is an ever growing list of technology, economy, climate and bio-diversity related threats that can turn into acute catastrophes any time. Some of these issues can, perhaps, be resolved by some quick technical fix, but in the end, the underlying cause of almost all these problems is psychological in the simple sense that they are man-made: if we had been wiser they would not have existed. Theoretically, one could blame all this on incurable defects in human nature, but given the role education, which is a direct offshoot of science, plays in the way children grow up,5 we cannot leave science off the hook. Our global civilisation is too one-sided in what it understands and what it doesn't, and in spite of all the good-will and intelligence that goes into it, our physicalist science looks increasingly like the proverbial student magician who uses his new-found powers to invite calamities for everyone around. It is rather plausible that if science would not only get better and better at the study of physical nature but would also develop a better understanding of human nature, our lives would be happier and more in harmony with the rest of nature. So, how did we get here?