Page 36 - NAMAH-Oct-2023

Namah Vol. 31, Issue 3, 15th October 2023

dimensions — not just the transpersonal. forms and permeating all forms. The ‘bottoms
Transpersonal psychology itself has outgrown up’ approach to build a model of reality with
its initial poise that was context specific to ultimate building-blocks appears to be no
other Western schools of psychology and longer tenable. Ulrich Mohrhoff writes, “The
is moving towards the whole person by right question to ask is, how does Brahman
surpassing the transpersonal/trans-egoic manifest the world — or manifest itself as the
aspect of the self. world (22)?”

Psychology — a complex of science and The dilemma of modern scientific psychology
metaphysics is that while it has to be scientific in temper,
it cannot justifiably exclude the investigation
of phenomenological experience. If it has to
keep its scientific character, there is no reason
why it should not take cues from the fact
that what quantum physics tells us about the
physical world can only be appreciated on
the basis of metaphysical presuppositions.
Moreover, if psychology has to accommodate
phenomenological experience, there is also
a scope to acknowledge insights originating
from deep spiritual experience. Sri Aurobindo
explains that the mind cannot go on dividing
existence ad infinitum, “… because behind this
Metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense dividing action is the saving knowledge of the
concerned itself with the fundamental supramental which knows every whole, every
nature of existence. Today that terrain atom to be only a concentration of all-force, of
is being claimed by fundamental physics, all-consciousness, of all-being into phenomenal
cognitive sciences and even evolutionary forms of itself (23).”
biology. The problem is that if science starts
from the premise that physical matter is the The Supramental is the creative consciousness
only reality, its conclusions cannot be justified that not only explains atoms and molecules
empirically if the scientific temper is to be but also life and mind. A greater psychological
impartial. Moreover, the scientific position paradigm has to acknowledge both the material
affirms itself by denying whatever it cannot reality and the spiritual reality. It is in the
explain. Such an ‘a priori denial’ would be context of the complex interplay between the
antithetical to the very spirit of knowledge. supramental reality and the material reality,
Modern physics shows that sub-atomic between supermind and the mind, between
particles like leptons and quarks cannot be the soul and Nature that Sri Aurobindo had
subdivided any further because they lapse described as early as in 1917–18:
into formlessness. It is as if forms lapse into
s
something like the Brahman of the Upanisads, “A complete psychology cannot be a pure
which is without form though containing all natural science, but must be a compound of

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