Over the last few hundred years, humanity has developed an incredibly effective method for the study of the physical domain and put a massive collective energy into using it to satisfy our every true and imagined physical, emotional and intellectual need. But unfortunately, it appears that we have done this so successfully that we got trapped in our own success. We have come to believe, at least within the academic community, that objective knowledge of the physical world is the only type of knowledge that can be made reliable and that as such is worth pursuing, that there is a one-way causation from physical to psychological processes, and, though we may hesitate to say it out loud, that the physical reality may well be the only one that is fully real.

Research on psychological, inner states is almost entirely based on relatively superficial self-assessments by the general public, and as far as there is research on spirituality and religion, what is actually studied consists almost always of texts, artefacts and practices that are still part of the physical world. Depending on the discipline, they are then either looked at as cultural expressions or they are studied for their emotional, biological or medical effects by modern science's own objective methods. Neither involves an active, progressive enquiry into the underlying non-physical, or at least not primarily physical realities themselves, of which the existence is either denied or left undecided since it can not be studied with physical instruments.

How did we get here?

Historically, it is fairly clear how we got here. The way modern science developed in Europe is related to the peculiar mix of Abrahamic and Roman influences on medieval Christianity which led in Europe to the imposition of a too narrow, dogmatic view of religious truth, from which post-medieval scientists escaped by limiting themselves to the study of the measurable "res extensa" in "the Book of Nature". That Galileo made a distinction between the Book of God and the Book of Nature, and that Descartes distinguished res cogitans, thinking things, from res extensa, (physically) extended things, was by itself not that new or special. Reality as experienced by us appears to consist of an outer domain of physical things and forces, and a very different inner domain of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on. These two domains have been distinguished throughout history in a wide variety of ways and for different purposes. What is special about what happened in Europe in the 17th century is that the most creative thinkers of the time chose to study the physical half of reality. Earlier and elsewhere, whenever the choice came up, the wise seem to have admonished the public either to respect both or focus on the inner half. In case of Galileo the reason he chose for the outer one was clear: his life was at stake. Descartes lived and worked in the safer, northern part of Europe, but given the times in which he lived, it is hard to imagine politics did not play a similar role in his choices. But whatever the motivation of the main actors in the drama may have been, the net outcome was that for several centuries science limited its new way of doing research strictly to the study of the physical domain.2

A spiral of quickly cumulative knowledge

That the new methods were effective is hard to deny. Upto roughly 400 years ago, what we knew about the physical domain was limited to what we could perceive with our own biological senses, so it appeared small and relatively simple. Since then, an army of highly specialised researchers have used ever more specialised knowledge to make ever more sophisticated instruments to study it further. This led to more knowledge, and this led in turn to more sophisticated instruments, creating a self-reinforcing loop of ever faster progress. These physical instruments expanded the range of what we could perceive, and this made us realise that the physical universe is far larger than we used to think, as well as far more complex, especially in the fine detail of our own human bodies.

But all this gave us not only knowledge. It also gave us the power to make things we can use. And this created two more elements that reinforced the already self-reinforcing loop: demand, which produced money and other resources to do more research, as well as questions to stimulate and direct that research. In the process, two further things happened, and it is these two that made the speed by which our knowledge and power over the physical domain increased go completely out of hand. The first was that we found ever more powerful means to spread new knowledge to ever more people at an ever faster speed: after our organically developed speech, we invented writing, then printing, faster physical transport, telegraphy, telephone, radio, tv, internet, mobiles, and by now everybody can, at least technically, reach everybody else, instantly, and that at near zero cost. The second one, if possible even more revolutionary, and even faster in its development, was that in the early 1940s, we figured out how to process data electronically, and this capacity is growing so fast that our machines can by now do this in more and more areas faster and better than our own brains. And, as is strikingly obvious, the timespan in which each new technology is adopted gets shorter and shorter.

With the other half of reality, the world of thoughts, feelings and sensations, the opposite happened. This second domain appears to exist inside, since the most typical way to connect with it is not by using our outer senses, but by feeling, looking or even going inside. But over the last 500 years, what this "inside" means has changed dramatically for the worse. Before the scientific revolution, the vast majority of thinkers, even in the West, took it for granted that the inner domain was not only vaster than the outer one, but also primary: Plato saw the physical world as a shadow or projection from a world of ideas; theistic religions thought of it as created by a personal God; more abstract philosophical ones like the Vedic tradition saw it as manifested by Brahman, the divine consciousness, within its own vastness. We ourselves were thought of as eternal souls temporarily embodied on earthly soil, and not only us, but everything was supposed to have an "inside", a consciousness, perhaps even a being supporting it.

After 1500, the study of the inner domain did not make the same progress as the hard sciences made in theirs. Initially our inner life — the realm of Galileo's Book of God and Descartes' res cogitans — was left to religion which was too history and doctrine bound to allow much progress. As a result, the relative power of organised religion over the mental and politcal life of Europe gradually weakened till at the end of the 19th century, a small group of people with an interest in the inner life of man switched sides and psychology finally opened shop as an independent academic discipline. But as we saw in the beginning of this chapter, by that time the stress on objective knowledge was solidly entrenched within the scientific community, and psychology as a newcomer in the field, did not have the strength and self-confidence to establish its own methodology. And so, after a short period of attempts at professionalising introspection and hypnosis, it gave up on the inner domain and limited itself to the study of behaviour and what representative samples of the general public report about it. As a result, the self-reinforcing loop of specialists creating and using specialist tools to improve perception never took place in psychology.

Since the hard sciences did make progress, they became increasingly dominant in terms of funding, status and attracting talent, and within academics it became more and more normal to think of reality and even of ourselves as primarily physical. And to the extent we do that, the inner half of reality becomes the inside of the physical body, or even the inside of the brain. B. F. Skinner, who was — and perhaps even is — considered by many one of the greatest psychologists of the 20th century, wrote in 1953 that our entire inner life was "functionally irrelevant"3. And if you think that 1953 is long ago and science has moved on, an introduction to psychology recommended at Harvard in 2023 does not do much better: it describes prayer as one of nine "mind-body interventions" and mentions "spirituality" only once in a lurid description of the brainwashing techniques used by cults.4 In short, while the physical domain expanded, the inner domain shrunk. The ordinary surface mind is studied only indirectly in the form of its physical correlates and tokens, and in spite of the heroic efforts by a small minority, the higher ranges of reality have all but disappeared from the academic mainstream. We have become like the geologist who looks at Michelangelo's hauntingly beautiful Piéta, and only sees a nice piece of marble.

The longer story

The deeper, underlying story of why all this happened is of course more difficult to establish with any certainty, but it may add an interesting perspective to what is happening in the world at present. I mentioned in the Introduction that the best antidote against the one-sidedness of modern science can probably be found in the Indian knowledge systems since they made a similar kind of progress in the psychological and spiritual domains as Europe made in the physical domain. Interestingly this may not be by chance. The knowledge systems that developed in modern Europe and classical India may now look like mirror images of each other, but they have arisen from a common ancestor. Not only many of the foundational myths and stories are strikingly similar, but the very languages in which these stories were told are close cousins. The scientists that started the scientific revolution in Europe wrote in Latin, and Latin (as well as Greek) belong to the same linguistic family as the Sanskrit and Tamil of the Indian sages. These now distinct languages share much of their vocabulary, grammar, the basic structure of their alphabets and the way they developed over time. What is more, the ancient Indo-European civilisation that gave rise to this family of languages was itself more integral in its understanding of reality than its descendants. As we already saw, in Greece, Plato's idealism came much closer to idealist classical Indian thought than to the modern binary of Positivism and Constructionism. In India, the older Vedic texts were more life-affirming than the later schools of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.5 In short, the divergence may not be much more than three or four thousand years old.

Sri Aurobindo suggests that the Indian and European civilisations moved apart in the direction of the opposite poles of exclusive spirituality and physicalism because intellectually, for the mind, these extremes are easier to follow and more attractive than the emotional, relational and social realities in between. He wrote a little over hundred years ago:

In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, — it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p.11

The split is, obviously, not absolute. Europe has had its mystics, and India its physical luxury, but still, the genius and central focus have definitely been different and its shows in what they achieved. While Europe made fantastic progress in the physical domain, the Indian knowledge systems did the same in the inner domain, and one could well argue that the intensity of unconditional delight, the quality of its psychological insights and the sense of immortality that yoga can give are at least as far beyond our ordinary, ego-based happiness, knowledge and sense of self as our mobile phones are beyond our biological capacity to talk to our neighbours.

Unfortunately, as many people have found out before us, bringing these two complex knowledge systems together again is more complex than it may look at first sight. Over time, they have developed not only very different ideas about the basic nature of reality but even very different ways of thinking and expanding their knowledge. So to bring all this together, we have to develop a third way which goes beyond both. This requires from both sides to learn how to think in a new way, a way that is not restricted to the way one has learned to trust, but that accepts certain elements of the other, as well as elements of an older system that both sides seem to have forgotten, and all this not blindly, but critically, since all human knowledge is a mix of eternal truths and forms that are time and culture bound. As we will see, this is not easy.

Especially for someone with a well-trained mind, to think about new content is easy, but to change one's very method of thinking and the largely subconscious ideas that support one's thinking is a different issue.

And why it may happen faster than we think

Fortunately, there is something that might help to make the transition easier and bring the two systems together without too much of a clash. It is the realisation that if we look at them from a sufficient distance, it becomes clear that they have actually a few essential ingredients in common. There are common factors that have helped both knowledge systems to make the quick progress they made. These aids look different because the two domains are so different, but in their essence, in the way they function, they are actually the same. The similarity is most easily visible when we go back to the very early days of modern science, since things were at that time so charmingly simple. When we look from the right angle at what happened at that time in the hard sciences, and more specifically in astronomy, we'll see what it is that modern psychology should have learnt from them.

Interestingly, once we see it from this angle, psychology might move ahead much faster than physics did because it can learn from the Indian knowledge systems how they used these common elements for the study of the inner domain. We'll now have a quick look at what those common elements might be, so we can look for them in the next chapter which is about what the Indian tradition can contribute to psychology.