The Promise of a Greater Psychology Integrating Knowledge of the Whole With Understanding of the Parts

0:00 The Greek philosopher Plato, after deep consideration, reached the conclusion that some higher principle was real, which he called Forms or Ideas, and that the physical reality we see and experience is the result, not the cause. This concept is in consonance with the Vedic understanding. Even the Christian Bible notes that quote in the beginning was the word End Quote. All of these approaches, and many more from around the world and across numerous traditional, religious, philosophical, and spiritual directions, make it clear that the physical world is a derivative phenomenon of the higher source. Western psychology, in its earliest approaches, tries to define the meaning, direction and motivation for our lives in the external reality based in trauma and various drives of the lower nature, without ever taking into account the implications of the higher wisdom that the sages and thinkers throughout the ages have eventually embraced. The life we lead, the promptings we follow, the thoughts we think.

1:20 The aspirations we experience do not originate in material substance, somehow trying to survive due to random combinations of chemicals making us what we are. Rather, they come from levels that are currently superconscient to our normal experience, which represent the idea, the Word, the light, or as some define it, God. In his book The Life Divine, Srioro Bindo identifies the basic human aspiration as a seeking after God, light, freedom, immortality. It is these basic drives that define the value and development of human life in general, as well as providing specific motivation to individuals as they awaken to a greater meaning for their existence.

2:19 Once we recognize the wider range of the human existence, encompassing drives, energies, motivations, aspirations that are conscient to us as well as those that are subconscient and those that are superconscient, we cannot avoid expanding the focus of psychology to not simply try to fit all human life into a small part of the subconscient elements of our existence. Rather, we need to develop what Triorobindo calls a greater psychology that takes all the different planes and parts of our being into account and explores also the impacts of forces subliminal to our conscious awareness. Trying to define humanity by our subconscious animal drives is both unduly limited and a falsification that distorts our search for meaning and our understanding of the significance of life, and of our own lives in particular, Sri Robinto notes quote.

3:28 I find it difficult to take these psychoanalysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinize spiritual experience by the flicker of their torchlights. Yet perhaps one ought to, for half knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting and putting their abcd of the subconscious and the mysterious underground superego together, and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings.

4:10 CAT, Cat, TREE, Tree is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down, up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities. But the foundation of these things is above and not below. Upari Butna Isham, the superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the Lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows. Here. Its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the Lotus that blooms forever in the light above.

4:57 The self chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited. You must know the whole before you can know the part, and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour, before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing. End Quote. Reference Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, chapter 5. Physical consciousness, subconscious sleep and dream illness. Pages 96 to 97.