“A Consciousness that knows not its own truth,
A vagrant hunter of misleading dawns,
Between the being’s dark and luminous ends
Moves here in a half-light that seems the whole:
An interregnum in Reality
Cuts off the integral Thought, the total Power;
It circles or stands in vague interspace… 1.”
In common parlance, ‘consciousness’ refers to some sort of awareness or experience of oneself and the world. Of course, one may attempt to understand ‘oneself’ and ‘the world’ in physiological, behavioural, psychodynamic, cognitive, socio-cultural, anthropological, ecological or spiritual terms. As these approaches emerge from very different knowledge bases, a justifiable model of consciousness should ideally be a pluri-dimensional construction.
However, mystics experience consciousness in a different way. It is realised as a vast ethereal matrix that is universal in extension, unitary in essence and transcends the individual. Sri Aurobindo explains how this unitary consciousness in its highest creative poise (which He calls the Supermind) actually becomes all the worlds and planes of existence, but without losing its unity. This integral perspective, in which the One and the Many exist simultaneously, justifies the study of consciousness along multiple dimensions as well as simultaneously from a unitary viewpoint. In practical terms, this means that human behaviour should not only be considered analytically but also from a synthetic standpoint.
The incompleteness of the analytical approach becomes apparent when we try to understand creative geniuses. For instance, the personality of Vincent Van Gogh has been studied from various angles. He has been considered to suffer from one disease or another, ranging from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and epilepsy to acute intermittent porphyria and even Meenière’s disease. Some enthusiastic researchers have also discovered alterations of his mental state in some of his paintings. A symposium of 30 international medical experts on September 14th and 15th, 2016 weighed all available evidence and analysed competing theories to conclude that nothing definitive could be pronounced about his medical status, except that the diagnosis in his last years was probably more prosaic 2. What is interesting is that no analytical approach could explain the magnificent creativity of Van Gogh. That might not be possible unless a synthetic perspective is used.
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The following case study further high-lights why both the analytical and synthetic perspectives are needed to do justice to under-standing the phenomenon of personality:
A youngster was exceptionally talented in multiple modalities. He painted exquisitely, played cricket with sophistication, was an amazing flute player, developed advanced percussion skills, wrote poetry with intellectual flair, and practised hatha yoga exercises alongside meditative sessions. Sometime in his late thirties, around 1970, he developed schizophrenic symptoms at a time when his family lost its affluent stature due to a mismanagement of funds. He had a delusional idea that Indian politicians deposited black money in Swiss banks, which legitimately should have been distributed among citizens of the country. This idea became so compelling that in the late 1970s, he stopped going to the office because he felt the wrongdoing should be corrected. (Interestingly, the Indian Parliamentary election in 2014 was fought mainly on the issue of illegal money stashed in Swiss banks that needed retrieval for distribution in the country).
Subsequently, after a gap of nearly a decade, he started going to the office again when he was put on a very light dose of anti-psychotic medication. His dosage was kept at a minimum so as not to interfere with his creativity, for he pursued his paintings with great enthusiasm up to his mid-70s. There were, of course, certain pictures that he modified in accordance with his mental state. For example, he drew a splendid portrait of Lenin but, after some years, took out that painting and put two doves on Lenin’s shoulders! His poetry camouflaged his delusional self-references in such a way that only those who knew him understood the hidden meaning. He was an avid viewer of Hollywood movies of the 1960s and 1970s, and much to the delight of the votaries of Bleuler’s loosening of associations, he would discover impossible similarities. For example, he declared a renowned Indian film director a cheat, as the movement of a ripple in a lake just before the blooming of a lotus was copied from a similar ripple in the sand of the Sahara Desert just before a skeletal hand jutted out in a Hollywood film!
All along, he practised his spirituality. He harboured some queer persecutory ideas about an occultist with whom he was once acquainted. Yet, his core spiritual insight remained intact and he meticulously performed his aasanas (yogic postures in Hathayoga) until his eighties. It is very difficult for anyone with even a good physique to practise intricate aasanas (including the posture of meditating while standing on one’s head), but his deep spiritual conviction carried him all through. In his mid-fifties, he suddenly decided to marry to have someone who would look after him when he would be old! He had a marriage that clicked, as his wife regarded his spiritual perspective with awe and respect while choosing to downplay his delusional ideas. His interpersonal relations also remained amicable. Due to his sterling qualities, people chose to ignore his mental aberrations. To the average person who knew him, his spiritual perspective was always more important than his crazy ideas.
In retrospect, this patient’s schizophrenic delusion about black money in Swiss banks had an intuitive element. Was it due to the mystical side of his character? Can delusion per se get modified in mystic states? The relationship between psychosis and mysticism is very complex, and it is known that spiritual aspirants can become psychotic if they are over-zealous in their spiritual pursuits without stabilising themselves In the present case, a standard psychiatric evaluation of the subject would assess his delusional state but would not have shown how his spiritual perspective had a synthetic value in his life.
The integral perspective therefore requires an approach to consciousness that accepts both analytical and synthetic viewpoints. At the analytical level, there are certain basic dimensions to be considered while studying the human psyche, none of which is superior or inferior to the other but exist together in the matrix of consciousness. These basic dimensions include the physical, psychological and social dimensions. At the synthetic level, an attempt should be made to study the spiritual dimensions of personality, while acknowledging that it is difficult for conventional psychology to assess this completely and accurately. Evidently, the conventional approach to clinical psychology and psychiatry tends to omit the synthetic element, so a new Consciousness-based Psychology is needed to provide a more comprehensive and compassionate approach.
The Physical Dimension
The human being is, to begin with, a physical being in the sense that the superstructure of living systems has been built upon a physical template. Hence, the physical dimension of a consciousness model should initially address the phenomenon of ‘awareness’ in neurological, physiological, psycho-physiological, genetic, developmental, cognitive, information processing, computational and other allied terms. This level should explore the physical basis of the ‘contents’ of consciousness (viz. sensations, emotions, images, memories, ideas) as well as the ‘states’ of consciousness (modulated through the ascending reticular activating system). The physical dimension can also be explored to find the neuro-physiological correlates of meditation, as well as of altered states of consciousness such as trance states, where endorphin-mediated neurovascular changes seem to be responsible for the absence of pain and bleeding (for instance, when lying on a bed of nails, walking on fire, or else developing weals and petechiae as ‘stigmata’ of Christ).
The altered states of consciousness triggered by psychedelic drugs require special attention, as the resultant quasi-mystical experiences motivated the hippy culture of the 1960s and paved the way for the emergence of transpersonal psychology. What is important to understand from the perspective of a Consciousness-based Psychology is that the physical dimension does not merely represent a mechanical substrate but holds in its matrix dormant non-physical processes that may be unleashed through yogic techniques of probing the deeper and higher realms of consciousness. Besides the non-physical processes acting upon the physical substrate, there are subtle physical processes that are not ordinarily perceptible in the usual way. Some significant subtle physical processes have been discovered and described by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother as part of their spiritual exploration of the body-consciousness and cellular consciousness.
Also, as previously noted, the scientific approach that attempts to understand physical reality by building blocks from below upwards is no longer entirely viable. This has now been acknowledged by physics, which has shown that subatomic particles like leptons and quarks can no longer be divided further as they lapse into formlessness. For consciousness studies, this means we should try to understand how consciousness qua consciousness gets organised, without assuming that it is caused by some ultimate material substrate. Rather than taking the ‘bottom-up’ approach to unravel the secrets of the body of cells, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother showed that a ‘top-down’ or spiritual approach is needed. It is not enough to probe the physical consciousness at the physical plane alone; it also needs to be probed from a higher non-physical perspective, as mystics and seers have done. The subtle body consciousness probed by a new transformative spirituality holds the key to the future body.
The Psychological Dimension
The psychological dimension of a conscious-ness perspective should be a search to understand ‘oneself’ in psychological terms, as distinct from the attempt to understand ‘awareness’ in physical terms. In psychological parlance, ‘oneself’ may refer to a variety of constructs: for some it is the ego perceived as an organiser of the ‘psyche’, for others it may be a ‘self’ that is conceived as an independent centre for initiative and action and experienced as continuous in time and space, or it may be a central principle which is again connected to a deeper spiritual Reality, or independent of it or a projection of it. Many psychological theories find it difficult to define the ‘self’, and the effort becomes more complicated if the personal self is conceived to be a projection either of a wider cosmic Self or an even higher transcendental Self. For if the self exceeds the limitations of the person, it becomes not only universal but somewhat omnipresent, which makes it difficult to be discerned in perceptual terms. In that case, this larger scope of self needs to be probed not through scientific experiments but by deeper introspective methods that traverse the inner ranges of consciousness.
Also, the ‘self’ is influenced by diverse forces that one may or may not be aware of in the waking state. Those forces that we are not ordinarily aware of have been termed as ‘unconscious’ in psychology, and studied both in the individual and in the collective sense. Some of the forces that one is unaware of in the waking state have also been studied throughout the ages by occultists and shamans, and in contemporary science by parapsychologists. A consciousness-based approach to psychology needs to include all of these domains and dimensions, and not exclude forces of which we are ordinarily only partially aware, or to a large extent unaware. It should also not exclude forces of which some people are aware and others not.
In fact, among the most important contributions of Aurobindonian thought to psychology is the detailed and methodical exploration of the inner ranges of the being that stand behind the surface personality and are normally inaccessible. It can be judiciously said that a psychological perspective based on the transformative and integralist poise of Sri Aurobindo’s vision is relevant only when the surface personality is exceeded in the inner ranges of the being, where the ego is replaced by a fourth-dimensional principle. The discordant parts of the being can then be integrated around this deeper ego-surpassing principle to make the human receptacle fit for a transformative journey that leads to the future supramental being.The transformational paradigm implies that consciousness is a spectrum and intelligence is not the sole prerogative of the human being. Obviously, such an endeavour needs an entirely new paradigm, which is a con-sciousness-based psychology.
The Social Dimension
The human being is not only an individual being but is also a social being. Indeed, the Latin term ‘conscious,’ from which the term consciousness was derived, had in its inception a social connotation as it meant mutually shared knowledge. Our socio-cultural transactions reveal another aspect of consciousness that is manifested in social norms, cultural traditions, economic motives, anthropological perspectives and in ethical, political and aesthetic values. The relationship between the individual and the collective remains complex, more so as they interpenetrate each other. Moreover, the collective is not merely a physical aggregate; it has non-physical aspects as well, which are necessary to understand phenomena like violence, ethnocentrism, fanaticism, drug abuse, globalisation, class conflicts, crowd behaviour, gender issues and changing familial values. The social dimension of a consciousness model should address this collective consciousness vis-à-vis the individual consciousness. Indeed, it can be argued that one of the inner reasons that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union was that while Marxism could brilliantly analyse the class conflict, it could not analyse with equal brilliance the conflict between the individual consciousness and collective consciousness.
Indian spirituality has been conventionally criticised for having laid more emphasis on individual salvation rather than on the flowering of the collective consciousness. Sri Aurobindo dealt with this imbalance at two important levels. First, at the psychological level, he envisioned how the inner freedom, liberty and equality could be harmonised with the outer freedom, liberty and equality to construct a consciousness paradigm of global human unity that would survive the vicissitudes of time. His insightful analysis of the collective psyche vis-à-vis the individual, detailed in his treatise on The Ideal of Human Unity, laid down a pragmatic blueprint for a future global social order. Second, he charted a progressive evolution of consciousness along a transformative trajectory to describe how transformed individuals would constitute gnostic collectives. Such conscious groupings would be marked not by standardisation or regimentation, not by ethical codes or doctrinal uniformity, but by a higher-order anarchy where true freedom and spontaneity of intuitive management of life would exist without disharmony. In the final analysis, these higher-order collectivities would be communities of transformed supramental, gnostic beings who would surpass present-day humanity.
The Spiritual Dimension
The world belongs as much to the scientist and the pragmatist as to the mystic, the saint, the seer. Psychology has not only to concern itself with the consciousness of the average person, but also with the consciousness of Christ and the Buddha. Ordinarily, the term ‘oneself’ refers to the experience of an individual who is anatomically limited by the skin, physiologically modulated by the senses, psychologically organised around the ego and cognitively guided by reason. However, mystical and spiritual experience has testified that one can cultivate a poise of universality in which the limits of the body, the senses, the ego and the mind disappear, and one becomes aware of a ‘cosmic consciousness’ where universal forces play, intermingle and interact with the individual consciousness. In the cosmic consciousness, one feels identified with the universe (in the metaphysical sense); in other words, the individual self is identified with the cosmic self. The sense of the individual ‘I’ changes to a poise of universality. Freudians would consider such ‘oceanic feelings’ as a regression to the unconscious states experienced as an infant. However, the meaning of an experience may be one thing to the individual experiencing it and another thing to the person classifying it 3. Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy demonstrates how conventional psychology confuses the pre- personal stage of an infant (where self-consciousness has not yet developed) with the more developed transpersonal state where consciousness has been exceeded, leaving the individual self-reflexive but not ego-bound 4. In fact, when spiritual seekers in India tried to understand the raison-d’etre of this experience of ‘universality’ vis-à-vis ‘individuality’, they discovered a poise of ‘transcendence’, which supported and surpassed both the individuality and the universality. They found that it was the same consciousness that expressed itself simultaneously in the three different poises of transcendence, universality and individuality and named it as the True Being or Brahman. Yogis have described that on gaining the highest mystic realization, one makes an immediate experiential contact with this Being or Brahman as ‘pure consciousness’. This Being (Brahman) experienced as the ground of the universe was also identified with the Self (AAtman), the ground of our psychological existence. Thus, a consciousness-based model of psychology has to take cognisance of this spiritual reality that is no less valid thea the material reality.
In conventional Indian spirituality, the term ‘consciousness’ is used in the experiential descriptions of the Infinite, the Brahman in its Transcendental poise, as well as for the Cosmic poise of the soul that supports the individual. Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual foray reveals newer ways of understanding consciousness that progresses through an evolutionary spiral to unravel hitherto unexplored zones of consciousness between the gross reality bordering to the Inconscience and the spiritual reality bordering to Infinity. An activation of supra-rational cognitive matrices promises the manifestation of the Infinite Consciousness in terms of earthly reality.
Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity
A study of Sri Aurobindo’s thought shows that an integral and synthetic perspective can actually harmonize the different dimensions of reality along a spectrum or gradation of consciousness without obliterating their unique attributes, a fact that is acknowledged by transpersonal psychologists. However, Sri Aurobindo went a step further than transpersonal psychology by positing that under conducive conditions, the higher orders of spiritual Reality can manifest within the lower matrices of material reality, signifying not merely a synthetic but a transformative paradigm with the power to manifest a new integer, a new creation. This consciousness-based approach to psychology should not be difficult for transpersonal psychology to grasp, for it is just the extension of transpersonal principles to their logical conclusion, but it is challenging for the current paradigm of science.
For the scientific mind, the main difficulty in understanding how an integration of the different dimensions of reality can be affected is a lack of clarity regarding issues related to subjectivity and objectivity. While one dimension of that reality represents a spiritual paradigm, the physical dimension is thought by scientists to represent a classical mechanistic paradigm. The mechanistic paradigm itself finds it difficult to satisfactorily resolve the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity within its own realm. This conflict gets more pronounced during attempts to quantify and objectify psychological and social forces. In fact, the psychological and social dimensions cannot be strictly scientific in objective terms, because they deal with phenomena that are ‘experienced’ by others and accepted either in a non-judgmental manner or in accordance to hypothetical norms. It has, of course, been argued that observation is also part of one’s experience, and not apart from it, and hence has a subjective component. On the other hand, subjective experiences can sometimes be shared with other observers to become ‘intersubjective’, a concept that carries an element of objectivity. This dilemma is the reason why researchers in psychological and social studies try to align themselves with the scientific paradigm. However, there are a few open-minded researchers in the psychological and social sciences who realise the limitations of a complete identification with the model of physical science, and seek ways and means to integrate scientific (rational) and metaphysical and mystical (super-rational) insights. Until now this endeavour has remained difficult to execute because of the absence of a comprehensive framework of reference.
In the spiritual reality, when one enters the cosmic consciousness, the whole debate between subjectivity and objectivity is changed because the perspective is changed. What was ‘public’ and ‘outside’ oneself becomes an extension of one’s individuality. The distinction between subjectivity and objectivity disappears. It is somewhat like the quantum world where there is no division between the object of the experiment and the observer, leading to an omni-jective reality where the subjective and objective are intertwined with each other 5. However, such spiritual experiences may be short-lived, and one may again come back to the position where the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity resumes significance. Thus, the spiritual world-view continues to remain technically different from the non-spiritual or mechanistic world-view. Yet if there is no scope for relating them, it would be conceptually difficult to conceive an integral paradigm of consciousness.
The different dimensions of consciousness actually merge into one another and are intertwined in such a way that any isolated distinction carries a risk of misinterpretation; hence, instead of aligning them along a hierarchical frame, Wilber has attempted to incorporate all of them within a multidimensional holarchy or latticework, which he calls the Great Nest 6. This concept of holarchy or the Great Nest is unmistakably derived from the Vedic concept of Brahman as the all-expansive ultimate reality that creates all, lives in all, becomes all and transcends all. The word Brahman itself comes from the Sanskrit root brih, which means to expand 7. There are aspects of the holarchy that can be studied from the scientific paradigm. There are also aspects which can be understood from the spiritual paradigm. It is also a fact that there are aspects or components in the holarchy (like the psychological and social components) whose study cannot be strictly scientific in the way we perceive physics to be ‘scientific’, but their proponents claim to follow scientific parameters. Hence, for the sake of brevity, it would be pragmatic to make a broad distinction between the scientific (or mechanistic) and spiritual (or mystical) paradigms of consciousness.
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A medical anthropologist from the UK, who had some exposure to shamanism, was interviewing spiritual and occult healers in India to find out how they viewed psychiatric problems and whether they collaborated with modern psychiatrists. She went to a remote village near the India-Bangladesh border and interviewed a venerated Muslim spiritual faith-healer. He was in his late seventies but still catered daily to a large clientele from all faiths. He explained to the anthropologist how he differentiated cases needing occult intervention and herbal remedies from those who had to be treated not by him but by a modern psychiatric practitioner, who would prescribe psychotropic medication. He also clarified that even in cases treated by him, some needed concurrent pharmacological treatment, too, for which he also made referrals. When asked if, as a mystic, he had any reservations about taking help from modern psychiatry, he gave a beautiful answer — ‘Let sadhana (spiritual pursuit) and gavesana (scientific research) go together — where is the conflict?’
Clearly, this remarkable mystic has an integrated approach to treatment. For the field of psychology, the question remains unanswered: how can the two perspectives, the spiritual and the scientific, be optimally combined? An initial exploration of these issues is documented by the anthropologist mentioned above, Natalie Tobert, who has written a fascinating book on her study of traditional healers, patients and modern psychiatrists in India, Spiritual Psychiatries 8.
The Relation Between the Spiritual and the Scientific Paradigms
The spiritual and mechanistic paradigms of consciousness are so far removed from each other that it would be relevant to ponder whether it is worthwhile to forcibly reduce one in terms of the other. Instead, perhaps it would be more meaningful to keep the two paradigms separate for conceptual, theoretical, practical and heuristic reasons. If a link could be established between the two paradigms, then our whole perspective of consciousness research would change.
A link can actually be made between the two paradigms if we consider the yogic insight that the macrocosm is represented in the microcosm and the microcosm is represented in the macrocosm. In other words, this is meant to imply that a higher level of Reality can be represented at a lower level of reality. In fact, we find two levels of reality when dealing with consciousness:
1. There is a spiritual Reality of consciousness far above the human consciousness, transpersonal and transcendent, ever perfect, ever manifest, beyond the constraints of space and time. It manifests Infinite Existence (Sat), absolute Consciousness and Force (Cit-SSakti) and Self-existent Bliss (AAnanda). This triune concept of Sat, Cit and AAnanda, also known as Sachchidananda, is not a summation of three separate principles but is an indivisible reality with three distinct poises.
2. There is an earthly reality of consciousness that is manifest at the mental, biological, social and material levels and which, in yogic parlance, has been conceived as a projection, deformation or an incomplete image of the higher spiritual Reality. Existence, Consciousness and Bliss are no more present in their indivisible Sachchidananda oneness but become separated, delinked, devalued, subject to constraints of space and time and get expressed in their opposite terms of death, limitation, entropy, pain, suffering and finally sink into an Inconscience which becomes a sort of denial of the spiritual reality. The indivisible spiritual oneness of Sachchidananda is translated into a multiplicity of phenomena (physical, biological, psychological, social, etc.) at the level of earthly reality. This is how consciousness can justifiably become the subject matter of different disciplines at the level of earthly reality. Thus, the diversity of approaches to consciousness at this level does not cancel out the spiritual reality.
The mystic and the spiritual seeker deal with the higher level of Reality, while the scientist and the materialist deal with the earthly reality, implying a duality implicit in reality itself. Sri Aurobindo explained in his magnum opus The life Divine, that this duality is not infallible and is not a “law of manifestation”; rather, it is “a circumstance” of evolution. Duality is just “the device of manifesting the Infinite in Ignorance through imperfect instruments 9.” In a reverse movement, the imperfect instruments can also be transformed into perfected archetypes not merely in the world of ideals but in the realm of manifestation. In The Life Divine, he has described how the earthly reality can be transfigured in transcendental terms through an elaborate and sophisticated process of what he terms as supramental transformation. In other words, the higher Reality can manifest at the earthly level, too. Actually, it is not a question of two different realities but the same Reality that is manifested at different levels, for ‘The Reality is one and not a sum or a concourse’ 10. Sri Aurobindo qualified that Reality or Brahman “expresses Itself in many successive forms of consciousness, successive in their relation even if co-existent in being or coeval in Time 11”; “Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time... 12”
This stance helps to consider an overview of consciousness where both the spiritual paradigm and the mechanistic paradigm are accommodated in their proper places in an integral poise so as to be ready for a transformational agenda. Therefore, the possibility of developing a paradigm of consciousness that is simultaneously pluri-dimensional and integral becomes a reality.
“A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,
The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul:
We must renew the secret bond in things,
Our hearts recall the lost divine Idea,
Reconstitute the perfect word, unite
The Alpha and the Omega in one sound…. 13”
