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Sri Aurobindo’s Prevision of a Greater Psychology

Dr. Soumitra Basu

Abstract
Psychology is the study of consciousness and its operations in Nature. Consciousness is the
creative force of existence that is the inmost reality of everything (the poise of the Self or soul) and
the Conscious-Force that builds the worlds. The soul-status shifts when one goes from the lower
Nature to the Higher Nature, free from the ego. Psychology may begin as a natural science but
deals with the supraphysical and ends with a metaphysical enquiry.

William James’seminal work, The Principles had its own unique and innovative techniques
of Psychology, appeared in 1890. He defined and fields, which could be tested and verified
psychology as the description and explanation by an aspirant who had the faith and courage
of states of consciousness in human beings. to undertake a disciplined voyage of self-
He had, of course, visualised psychology discovery. Hence this approach was to be a
as a “natural science”. When, years later, ‘self-knowledge psychology’ characterised by
the transpersonal movement reinstated an experiential “inner empiricism (2)”.
consciousness in psychology in the 1960s, it
treated psychology as a “human science (1)”. A It is against this background that Robert
human science, in contrast to a natural science, Ornstein in 1973 had defined psychology as

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