Psychology and spirituality

In the modern materialistic and naturalistic - orientated societies it becomes increasingly difficult to have success on the path. But Stress, unnatural lifestyle and intolerance are just obstacles of many.

Modern man has thrown over the old religious principles and commandments and the ancient ethics and lives for the fulfillment of his small wishes, dreams and desires, but without observing and analyzing  either these nor himself (Eco-Humanism).

Culture and technology have so become two different things. Most of our modern culture is however  "old wine in new bottles", and most cultural values are rather ridiculous after closer inspection, and  often they have  a character of stupefaction.

In most cases a specific culture reflects in such values, but in the background are also guarantees of sales of certain economic branches.  The result is a visibly progressing decline in moral, and a naturalistic embossed intolerance spreads out. Nowadays, an industry lives from the awakening, control and enhancement of needs and desires, and politicians serve the investors. 

The prevailing cultural values continue to be power, success, wealth and sex in various subtle expressions and forms. Technology is to serve all of this and enable it further, and better technology arises due to competition. Therefore our earth became a plundered planet with growing biological problems and overpopulation with the consequence of upcoming local wars.

In disguising this, our culture has achieved a remarkable ability to let the ordinary blaze in a seductive glow.  Man is however only apparent the measure of all things. Sometimes one can hardly recognize him behind make-up and suit i.e. often already from the early youth years. Often the sterile inflated smile and arm-wagging of certain trained contemporaries remind more of a failed Tai Chi - exercise. 

Sri Aurobindo said : "This planet is mainly a big place of fulfilment of desires".

2. Psychology - a modern answer to life

Modern natural science is the rigurous attempt to establish  logical and causal connections between the processes of the environment and to formulate them by means of numbers and concepts and terms. A broad academic class now lives on this. The problem, however, is always the conditionality of the human psyche, not only with respect to perception, but also regarding to the logic and plausibility of knowledge and the truth of abstractions.

To investigate and to control this psyche is the goal of psychology, which once arose as a branch of philosophy. Besides arose the psychiatry for the detection of mental illnesses with overlaps to psychology and neurology. Many psychologists are therefore also psychiatrists and neurologists.

Psychology is therefore the attempt of a scientific response of materialism to human life. Therefore it strives to provide a purely logical biological-materialistic model of man, in which  religion and spirituality have an irrational function which psychology tries to 'explain' (eg. as a neurosis or psychosis or as a delusion).  In support of this a psychology of religion and a systematic theory of sociology and a structural functionalism were developed.

3. Psychology and personality

Psychology developed various personality theories and also investigated the personality characteristics and then created concepts like social scills.

Since psychology has no other 'independent' scale than itself, the branch of personality psychology hides behind concepts like personality disorder, as soon as the analyst believes to see exaggerated occurrences  of certain traits of character, a term behind which many things can be hidden. 

On the other hand, a spiritual-oriented psychology would have the practical problem that today's patient does not want to develop an integral spiritual personality, but mostly only wants to overcome his inner impediments and crises, and that he is generally quite indifferent to a morality of a completely selfish use of his energies,  mostly as a stubborn assertiveness as a mark of the small dominating human ego.

True integral psychic health includes among other things e.g. also the recovery from the three mental poisons, which can partially be removed within  the practice of the 'healing buddha'(within a sadhana), as well as by introspektion in the widest sense, which is also contained in the beginnings of the Ashtanga-Yoga, as well as by various Meditation-methods in combination with Swadhyaya and breath.

According to modern standards, such integrally developed psychologists would themselfes have a delusion(glamour), and besides this modern psychology has a problem with ethic rules, and it is actually a small 'black path' .

In this context, natural introversion does not necessarily mean a hidden soul relatedness  but rather a living out of the limitations of the small person.

Transpersonal psychology is here a little common approach. Western psychology has a tendency to ignore the spiritual dimension of the human psyche, which is of course  minimal in the average patient with his undeveloped esoteric bodies.

First people on the path have a spiritual inner culture, e.g. on the basis of Yama and Niyama, of Paramitas and introspection instead of a self-centered culture with emphasis on the small personality.  The false mental and the body-related ego's are gradually replaced on the path by the spiritual EGO (the Jivatma).

4. Substitute of religion

From the sight of modern psychology is spirituality  just a fancy and a delusion, not only because relative few people in the non-asian countries have spiritual experiences, but also because the model has a materialistic neuronal-genetic basis.

Many psychologists try to classify people on the path as schizophrenic, often because of their false understanding of the higher spiritual EGO, but also because of inner intolerance against those who deviate from your teaching. In some european countries psychology  lost a part of its bad influence, but very often first judicially. It returned through the  back dor with the growing influence of naturalism in medicine.

To be "social" means here to be like the others (in psychological terms) - and not to help or support each other. (In the USA the word social can have the undertone of communism).

An isolated lifestyle is here a sign of illness. If you think very different or live very different than the majority of people, then you are psychotic(deviant).

The psychological teaching model can become a rational substitute of religion for settled materialist psychologists. Here serves a pseudo-divine particle like the Hiks-Boson just right as a substitute for god.  Psychology can thus become a kind of modern inquisition. In many modern societies it has reached this position.

The scientific sequence is: opinion, conceptualization, model = scientific = 'true' (as plausible, that is to say for the psychologist), especially if the authorities stand behind it  and their own glasses are not seen (=plausibility delusion, delusion of competency, world-delusion), since an "I"-central body-attached self-consciousness and thus the self-assertion dominates. 

* Therefore psychology has tried to explain the religious: Jesus has here a father-complex, although here the esoteric 'father' is meant, the gnostic creator or the hinduist Ishvara. Oedipus has here the well-known Oedipus-complex, although behind the original history a mystery wisdom of the path to the 'entrance of the temple' (U.Path 12) hides, similar to the platonic love and the metaphor of the (Maya-) cave, in which modern science is caught(mind).  It is inconceivable for them that already in the past there were much more intelligent initiates than our greatest genes.

* A Bodhisattva is here "from the other shore", because he is completely schizophrenic ( Mind - cleavage, total loss of emotions and feelings for others; possibly delusion and acoustic hallucination-delusion or acoustic hallucinations - Tinnitus...) - man is measured here by his ephemeral emotions - and he is so impersonal and different, because he is just hyphy. He thinks he is somebody special,  which is ascribed (outraged).  The word nirvana is  here rather a "nir-delusion".   The sight, that the other shore is the divine(God-Man), creates here only a head-shaking: Escape into a delusion. A cosmic consciousness counts here as megalomania.

So a God-man is rejected here from the authorities . The inner  Shabda or Nada is here at most a kind of tinnitus. Inner light is interpreted (scientifically ...) as a nerve stimulus.

Such conclusions come from people, who see the world from a body-bound experience and understanding of the mind, and who can not reconcile all this with their personal experiences and acquired ideas, since spiritual experiences are rare in the west.

These are just a few examples of naturalistic interpretations by scientists, for which spirituality is a phantasm and religion is ranked as "psychosemantic immune system" or is located in the area of a neurosis.

Spiritual inclinations can  be psychologically interpreted as reality - flight into a healthy and ideal world, to which the fugitive neurotic approaches in his role with the aim of "enlightenment", of becoming a member in the ranks of the great ones (such gods are inconceivable here), possibly endowed with supernatural powers (Siddhis), and at least secretly superior to the human(non-recognition of their authority)  - which some dubious sects even advertise. 


The structured meditation, of which also some clinical variants have been developed, is here a kind of self-hypnosis with hallucinations (which, however, can occur during unsystematic training - and as CBS) for these scientifically enlightened ladies and gentlemen, and a loss of reality.  Clinical methods are e.g. the Benson method, the Clinical-Standardized Meditation (CSM) according to Carrington, and the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, according to John Kabat-Zinn. The Vipassana is recently being investigated in detail from a neurologic standpoint(Gamma-Waves).

After all, the autogenic training resembles  a mixture of Qi-Gong, Hatha-Yoga and magical imagination-training.

Lately  it has been attempted to get a grip on these techniques neurologically with measurements of brain waves (head-skin waves) and chemical changes in the brain in order to exploit their advantages, because there is a lack of effective treatment methods, but also to explain these exercises to neuronal stimuli (!) such as acupuncture. Gamma-Brain-Skin-waves are of course not necessarily equivalent with spirituality.


Of intrinsic good and bad people and human developmental steps of a higher kind does psychology not want to hear much,  because man functions here chemically and biologically with inherited and educated or appropriated patterns of behavior. Thus psychology is limited to the description of man's lower self and stays with its rationalizations in the dark Maya - grotto of materialism.

*** The WGH finally corrected the ICD-10 to ICD-11 in this regard in 2022, i.e. no more narcissism, no more drawers like paranoid or dissocial personality disorder.

5. Sri Aurobindo on psyche and transformation

Master Sri Aurobindo, as a well-known spiritual philosopher of modern times, commented:
"If moreover we put too much emphasis on the present or visible character of the development, as is natural science demonstrates, then the idea arises that nothing justifies the expectation that any higher principle than that of the human mind or something like superhuman beings may appear in a world of matter.

Consciousness itself is conditioned by matter, and is dependent on material organs for its birth and activity, and an infallible truth-consciousness, for which we hold the supramental (divine), would be at variance from these relations, and would have to be dropped as a mere hypocrisy.

The development of a further and more capable consciousness is seen as a subordinate result of the development of life and forms and not as an important criterion or essential thing, and it can not exceed certain boundaries drawn from matter by the origin of thought and life

The mental had proved that it was capable of many extraordinary achievements, but it would go beyond its natural limits, if it were independent of its material organs, or its physiological condition, or something like a truly powerful ability of immediate and absolute knowledge which was not acquired over the medium of matter.

Therefore the development of consciousness could not go beyond a certain point. Even if there is something so definite and independent as that what we call the soul, then it is subject to the natural conditions, which are here imposed with matter as a foundation and the physical life as a prerequisite and  and the thought system as the highest possible tool.

Consciousness could only work in the body and could not go beyond this physical, vital or mental nature. This determines the limits of our development here ... The past development of the body, especially its animal origin and nature, seem to stand in the way of this perfection. As we have seen, the body is a result and a creation of the unconscious, unconscious or semi-conscious. Its beginning is unconscious matter that took shape and developed viability .....(Life divine, e.a., Aurobindo)


These obstacles can be overcome, the denials and resistance of the body surmounted, its transformation is possible. Even the inconscient and animal part of us can be illumined and made capable of manifesting the god-nature, even as our mental humanity can be made to manifest the superhumanity of the supramental truth-consciousness and the divinity of what is now superconscious to us, and the total transformation made a reality here.
But for this the obligations and compulsions of its animality must cease to be obligatory and a purification of its materiality effected by which that very materiality can be turned into a material solidity of the manifestation of the divine nature. For nothing essential must be left
out in the totality of the earth-change; Matter itself can be turned into a means of revelation of the spiritual reality, the Divine....

...The difficulty is dual, psychological and corporeal: the first is the effect of the unregenerated animality upon the life, especially by the insistence of the body's gross instincts, impulses, desires; the second is the outcome of our corporeal structure and organic instrumentation imposing its restrictions on the dynamism of the higher divine nature.
The first of these two difficulties is easier to deal with and conquer; for here the will can intervene and impose on the body the power of the higher nature. Certain of these impulses and instincts of the body have been found especially harmful by the spiritual aspirant and weighed considerably in favour of an ascetic rejection of the body. Sex and sexuality and all that springs from sex and testifies to its existence had to be banned and discarded from the spiritual life, and this, though difficult, is not at all impossible and can be made a cardinal condition for the spiritual seeker. This is natural and unescapable in all ascetic practice and the satisfaction of this condition, though not easy at first to fulfil, becomes after a time quite feasible; the overcoming of the sex instinct and impulse is indeed binding on all who would attain to self-mastery and lead the spiritual life. A total mastery over it is essential for
all spiritual seekers, the eradication of it for the complete ascetic. This much has to be recognised and not diminished in its obligatory importance and its principle.(Sri Aurobindo : The Supramental manifestation, pg 30-31-de50; s.a. : Letters on Yoga, Band 4)


* An open psychology and a corresponding psychiatry would have some useful potential for the development of humanity if it would fully  understand and overcome the biological limitations caused by the own consciousness and recognize its real childhood stage.

But in the area of psychiatry and psychology today 's patient is confronted with an academic professional group, which often understands very little of practical life because of its origin from a particular class of society, but also because of rationalized unworldliness of the professors, with elevatedness  and  immovability and  appropriate arrogance and irresponsibility within a struggle for power around the own inner and also external position.

Moreover is in this area the scope  equally limited by the current human consciousness so that the scientific criterion of the comprehensiveness and universality of the results becomes the (repressed) main problem in so far as it is discussed at all.

This deficiency is replaced in many ways by so-called "scientific authorities", who are also not in total consensus, and who are a major problem in such a generalizing "science", which suppresses questions regarding the fundamental model approaches.


Sri Aurobindo commented further: "... Modern psychological experiment and observation have proceeded on two different lines which have not yet found their point of meeting. On the one hand psychology has taken for its starting-point the discoveries and the fundamental thesis of the physical sciences and has worked as a continuation of physiology.

The physical sciences are the study of inconscient force working in inconscient Matter and a psychology which accepts this formula as the basis of all existence must regard consciousness as a phenomenal result of the Inconscient working on the inconscient. Mind is only an outcome and as it were a record of nervous reactions.

The true self is the inconscient; mental action is one of its subordinate phenomena. The Inconscient is greater than the conscient; it is the god, the magician, the creator whose action is far more unerring than the ambitious but blundering action of the conscious mentality.

The tree is more perfectly guided than man in its more limited action, precisely because it lives unambitiously according to Nature and is passive in the hands of the Inconscient. Mind enters in to enlarge the field of activity, but also to multiply errors, perversities, revolts against Nature, departures from the instinctive guiding of the Inconscient Self which generate that vast element of ignorance, falsehood and suffering in human life, — that “much falsehood in us” of which the Vedic poet complains.
Where then lies the hope that mind will repair its errors and guide itself according to the truth of things? The hope lies in Science, in the intelligent observation, utilising, initiation of the forces and workings of the Inconscient. To take only one instance, — the Inconscient operates by the law of heredity and, left to itself, works faultlessly to ensure the survival of good and healthy types.

Man misuses heredity in the false conditions of his social life to transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We must study the law of heredity, develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely and remorselessly — with the remorseless wisdom of Nature — so as to ensure by intelligence the result that the Inconscient assures by instinctive adaptation. We can see where this idea and this spirit will lead us, — to the replacement of the emotional and spiritual idealism which the human mind has developed by a cold sane materialistic idealism and to an amelioration of mankind attempted by the rigorous mechanism of the scienti?c expert, no longer by the profound inspiration of genius and the supple aspiration of puissant character and personality. And yet what if this were only another error of the conscient mind?

What if the mistaking and the disease, the revolt and departure from Nature were itself a part, a necessary part of the wise and unerring plan of the profound Inconscient Self and all the much falsehood a means of arriving at a greater truth and a more exalted capacity?", (Sri Aurobindo : The supramental manifestation, Page 191).

6. Sri Aurobindo on human psyche 

The average current human nature is composed of physical, vital, emotional (also astral) and mental impulses. Transforming and developing these is part of the work of the path.

The first 10 steps of the Universal Path as described on this website also include an  overcoming of the so-called anal orientation. Therefore have already seekers on the trialpath  different attitudes to life and different patterns of behavior than the adapted average citizen, a fact that cannot please  many body-orientated contemporaries.

Regarding this  some quotations from Sri Aurobindo, who discussed the relations to spirituality in his big work.

" In human nature the vital is a despotic and exacting tyrant. As it is the owner of the energy, enthusiasm and creative power, many people have a fearful respect for him, and always try to please him. But it is a master whom nothing can satisfy, and whose claims have no limits.... The biggest problem is the education and transformation of the vital. Two very widespread ideas especially in the West contribute to make his rule unassailable, once the opinion that it is the main goal of life to be happy, and on the other hand, that one is born with a certain unchangable chacter ...

In the present world  the goal of life is not in a personal happiness but to awaken people to the consciousness of the truth ...

The second idea arises from the fact, that a radical change of the character requires the almost complete mastery of the unconscious, as well as a very strict discipline of all that comes from the unconscious, and which is usually the result of the condition of inheritance and of the influence of the environment into which one is born.
Only an unusual growth of consciousness and the constant help of the power of grace can master this Herculean work ....
''(Sri Aurobindo / The mother - for the future, 1974)


" As for the Superman, that is the conscious being whose emancipation is complete by his rising to a station beyond the limits of mind. He can determine his action in complete accord with an awareness which perceives all the forces acting in and on and around him and is able, instead of undergoing, to use them and even to determine. ."(Sri Aurobindo : Letters on Yoga)

7. Gnostic consiousness

Spiritual consciousness(chit) or gnostic consciousness is an intuitive consciousness without terms (in the Vajra-body or Paramatma-Purusha).

The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness, in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind's ideals and standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for humanity or for others or for the community or for the State; for he will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence,(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg. 1065)

"An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transformation of our world-consciousness and world-action: for it takes up into the new power of awareness not only the inner existence but our outer being and our world-being; there is a remaking of both, an integration of them in the sense and power of the spiritual existence."(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg 977)

"For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence.", (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg 985)

8. The mind

Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the
intangible, into the abysms of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subject for creation and enjoyment. For if Mind appears sometimes to conceive, to perceive, to sense or to enjoy with possession the infinite, it is only in seeming and always in a figure of the infinite. What it does thus vaguely possess is simply a formless Vast and not the real spaceless infinite.
The moment it tries to deal with that, to possess it, at once the inalienable tendency to delimitation comes in and the Mind finds itself again handling images, forms and words. Mind cannot possess the infinite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it; it can only lie blissfully helpless under the luminous shadow of the Real cast down on it from planes of existence beyond its reach. The possession of the infinite cannot come except by an ascent to those supramental planes, nor the knowledge of it except by an inert submission of Mind to the descending messages of the Truth-Conscious Reality.

This essential faculty and the essential limitation that accompanies it are the truth of Mind and fix its real nature and action, svabhava and svadharma; here is the mark of the divine fiat assigning it its office in the complete instrumentation of the supreme Maya,– the office determined by that which it is in its very birth from the eternal self-conception of the Self-existent. That office is to translate always infinity into the terms of the finite, to measure off, limit, depiece. Actually it does this in our consciousness to the exclusion of all true sense of the infinite; therefore Mind is the nodus of the great Ignorance, because it is that which originally divides and distributes, and it has even been mistaken for the cause of the universe and for the whole of the divine Maya. (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I. pg 163) (i.e. Maya is a product of divine Mahamaya)

Mind, being an action of the Infinite, depieces as well as aggregates ad infinitum. It cuts up being into wholes, into ever smaller wholes, into atoms and those atoms into primal atoms, until it would, if it could, dissolve the primal atom into nothingness.
But it cannot, because behind this dividing action is the saving knowledge of the supramental which knows every whole, every atom to be only a concentration of all-force, of all-consciousness, of all-being into phenomenal forms of itself. The dissolution of the aggregate into an infinite nothingness at which Mind seems to arrive, is to the Supermind only the return of the self-concentrating conscious-being out of its phenomenon into its infinite existence.
(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,28, pg 178)

"Thegnostic beeing starting from this new basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of knowledge and a realised power of being."

But in reality all that we call undivine can only be an action of the four divine principles themselves, such action of them as was necessary to create this universe of forms. Those forms have been created not outside but in the divine existence, conscious-force and bliss, not outside but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no reason to suppose that there cannot be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms or that forms and their immediate supports, mental consciousness, energy of vital force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg 160)

The sattwic mind and will change into that spiritual knowledge and dynamic power of identical existence in which the whole nature puts off its disguise and becomes a free selfexpression of the godhead within it. The sattwic doer becomes the Jiva in contact with his source, united with the Purushottama; he is no longer the personal doer of the act, but a spiritual channel of the works of the transcendent and universal Spirit.
His natural being transformed and illumined remains to be the instrument of a universal and impersonal action, the bow of the divine Archer.
"(Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita pg. 507)

9. Psychology and society

The modern medical faculties have integrated psychology and psychiatry into their materialistic and rationalized overall concept, using it increasingly systematically as an escape model for the own inability (often also because of the costs)  to find and to treat a disease whose background is then presumed to be psychosomatic(e.g. in pain therapy and infectology). The modern medical report contains in many countries a final paragraph with a psychological assessment of the patient into which the doctor can escape.

The other main problem is that psychology has won a big influence on the leading people, and in the United States many of these leading people visit their "soul doctor" regularly. So they stand under the influence of these "scientific" trainees, who are visited to guarantee their success in daily life.

A big theme of Psychology is the human interaction and coexistence, for which it has no universal rules likeas introspection developed, but instead concepts of social competence and social integration(to subjugate or normalize dissenters).

The modern TEAM-Model, which becomes in an intellectual steered system very quickly a skillful role play as a modern basis of the working groups, is also an achievement, which has little to do with charity but  more with egalitarianism, submission, conformity, intolerance and herd instinct - instead of socializing or universal group consciousness - which should to be confused with modern globalization.
It has its old foundations in the animal-kingdom, where the bull leads his herd and controls it completely, a group which follows the herd-impulse. Animals who are different or do not surrender have no chance in the animal kingdom or have to leave the herd.
The characteristics of a ordinary human society is instead the sociability, which is no longer sufficient nowadays.
The other problem is that instinct controlled  animals have neither a developed mental body nor a mental intellect (and terms) or a mental ego, and therefore they cannot generally be compared with human society.

Such a psychological development is a danger for freedom and democracy (as far as both really exist). It supresses the individual personal developement and so also supresses any spiritual developement. Nowadays, this naturalistic science spreads all over the world - especially in the management of firms. The american degrading society is a good example for a modern and unsocial society where success counts.

"As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the development of its own force and for mastery by force: its quest is for growth, power, conquest, possession, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant self-expression, development, diverse manifoldness of action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow possession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things or for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiment;." (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg 984)

The evolution of human mind and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing universality; but on a basis of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can only create a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, because it is not taken up by a creative harmonising light of the Spirit, must welter in a universalised confusion and discord out of which it is impossible to build a greater harmonic life. (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine I, pg 1054)

"In the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there will be a close and complete consciousness of the self of the others, a consciousness of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if they were one's own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface of love and sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual consciousness, this intimate oneness",( Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,28)


Psychology also has integrated the so called 'corporate feeling' into its doctrine, with which analysts exert constraints. A community, however, is a collection of individual interests and therefore of selfish interests, as is the case with a 'community of needs'. A community - feeling is therefore usually group-oriented.

In many schools of the industrialized countries, this tarted up herd-instinct or the so-called community feeling is assessed as 'social behavior' in the school certificats, even though a teacher can hardly assess the problems existing in the classes due to the mixing of the social strata[soft skills].

However, the social behavior of gray-roosters, ants, bees, and monkeys is an instinctive and functional one to survive as a group. The individual plays hardly a role here and mobbing is carried out as tackling. The strongest bull, apart from his leadership function, has a hidden genetic task.

Man esoterically distinguishes from the animals by his developed mental body, the mental I, the mind, and possibly by the intellect and the intuition, according to the individual human stage of development. However, the higher human development takes place individually in a social environment, which in our modern society takes an opposite development.


*** "It is false to demand that the individual should submit to the community or merge with it. A community can only develop through its most progressive individuals, and these can only really advance when they are free. It is true, however, that the individual finds his unity with the community and with the all in increasing measure, as well as he has progressed spiritually", (Sri Aurobindo, Life divine, II,28)

"The Individual does not owe highest loyalty to the state which is a machine, nor to the community which is only a part of life and not the whole life. His obligation is to the truth, the self, the spirit, the divine in himself and in all.
His real life goal should not consist in subordination to the mass or to lose in the mass, but to find and to express the truth of being in itself, and to help the community of humanity to find their own truth and fullness of being
", (Sri Aurobindo, Life divine, 28)


An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human individual as the true object of our existence, -- whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. An opposite idea gives the collective life the first or the sole importance; the existence, the growth of the race is all: the individual has to live for the society or for mankind, or, even, he is only a cell of the society, he has no other use or purpose of birth, no other meaning of his presence in Nature, no other function. Or it is held that the nation, the society, the community is a collective being, revealing its soul in its culture, power of life, ideals, institutions, all its ways of self-expression; the individual life has to cast itself in that mould of culture, serve that power of life, consent only to exist as an instrument for the maintenance and efficiency of the collective existence. In another idea the perfection of man lies in his ethical and social relations with other men; he is a social being and has to live for society, for others, for his utility to the race: the society also is there for the service of all, to give them their right relation, education, training, economic opportunity, right frame of life. (Sri Aurobindo, Life divine II, Ch 28, "The Divine Life" (Part 4 of 6)

"The spiritual man is one who has discovered his soul. He has found his self and lives in that, is conscious of it, has the joy of it - he needs nothing external for his completeness of existence." (Sri Aurobindo , Life Divine II,27)

"Again, the sign of the divine worker is that which is eternal to the divine consciousnees itself, a perfect inner joy and peace which depends upon nothing in the world for its source or its continuance; it is initiate, it is the very stuff of the soul's consciousness, it is the very nature of the divine being.
The ordinary man depens upon outward things for his happiness; therefore he has desire; therefore he has anger and passion, pleasure and pain, joy and grief; therefore he measures all things in the balance of good fortune and evil fortune; none of these things can effect thew divine soul.
" (Sri Aurobindo : Essays on the Gita, pg 175)

"In the Gnostic or Divine Being, in gnostic life, there will be a close and complete consciousness of the self of others, an awareness of their thinking, of life, of physical being, which is felt as their own. The gnostic being will not act out of a surface of love and sympathy, or a similar feeling, but from this near silent consciousness, this intimate unity."(Sri Aurobindo, Life divine II, 28 - He speaks here, however, of the master )


Psychology and psychiatry can thus become a kind of modern inquisition in the false and rationalized hands, not only in the dictatorships. It continues to sneak pseudo-scientific into many spheres of life.

Concepts such as sociality, sociability, and social integration also allow misuse as a means of pressure against individualists and dissenters to lead them back and insert them into the so-called community. Modern China is only one bad example. Here psychiatry serves management systems and social structures and preserves them. The modern so-called teams are a modern western example(loss of job...).

But what are social and community real? 'Social' means to turn to the community. But the community  cultivates egoisms and habits. It is dominated by power struggles and quarrels, because it is guided by wishes and desires and dreams. Psychology fled behind something that was un-elaborated, and it remains socially uncritical and sees itself as scientifically neutral.

In the industrialized countries psychology is ultimately used to provide a scientific model of man, at which ultimately everyone is measured. In reality that is essentially like a materialist reason-based substitute religion or world-view, in which certain final questions are swept under the table, for example, " Why does not  exist nothing at all " or "Who has created such a large universe", which are treated as symptoms of a disease.

A societal outbreak resulting from such a point of view is quickly classified as social phobia.  So there can be no question  that psychology is concerned about objectivity.

10. Scools of psychology

In the past, psychology developed several models of human nature and thus several schools emerged. These models correspond, naturally, to the imagination of the researchers and are based on their limited experience. Psychology derives further conclusions from it .In order to be impressive, psychology defines medical terms ('delusion' is a standard term such as 'schitzophrenia'). From the personal competency delusion and the own world-delusion one does not want to hear much).  

Even among the technical terms which have been agreed upon, the individual schools still understand different things according to their specific doctrine. Nowadys exists a confusing tangle of such technical expressions, because psychology has established itself in the universitys.

The school of C.G.Jung, who had studied Taoism  intensively as well as many several writings, does not quite fit into the psychological cliché, but he also rationalizes his subconscious with so-called "archetypes", and thus adapts himself scientifically.

Some schools even regularly examined their practicing psychologists as to whether they were also implementing the pure doctrine of the specific school, and in doing so they actually spread an ideology. In particular, these ideologues in the clutches of science are also concerned with maintaining their lobbyist interests.

This implementation violates the basic laws (plurality, free personality development and free religious exercise) and the human rights. Since the latter has become problematic in our society anyway, fewer conflicts arise here, especially as arguments are provided.

The Freudian school had to recognize in the meantime that the consciousness and the action of man are not so much derived from sexuality. However, a dark figure of well over 50% of sexual harassment in psychological treatments (of course purely scientific-medical and to the best of the patients) is rampant in the USA, which of course is strictly prohibited in countries like Germany.

How ignorant the early psychology was, showed for example the school of A. Adler with the answer to the question of God: Our actions are determined by the comparison with other things, according to Alfred Adler. By comparison, inferiority complexes develop and we become mentally ill. Basically, everyone here is a potential patient.

If, therefore, we look at the  stars of the clear sky and ask ourselves, whether ath the sight of such an infinity and our little humanity existence there must be a creator god, we have subconsciously compared ourselves with the universe and developed an inferiority complex! We are sick. The treatment begins with no longer to compare with infinity - so look away and stop this question! Then you will be "healthy" again! "(A. Adler: Individual Psychology). Here exist also dogmas, such as "obligation to so-called 'love'"and unelaborated notions of the social and community feelings.

This school forgets, for example, with regard to spirituality, that the psychologists also compare, that is, with others and with notions of god  or the higher consciousness of enlightened ones, who are then "sick" for them, what also calms them down personally (what is then with the astronomers?).


Furthermore are many fellow citizen generally under the suspicion of oral, anal and egoic traumatic childhood-damages - (of course not the honoured reader of these lines), the 'multiple delusion' of the author of this text less and less, but...

In the end, psychology can be reduced ono a doctrine of  the four well known ancient  types of human beings, of self-preservation drive and species conservation drive, of childhood memories, psychic repressions,  inferiority complexes and power struggles, and form the other side of NLP, suggestion and hypnosis, "encouragement and discouragement" and "praise and blame "(as with the Dachs-dog, who is looking for appreciation) and of course their combinations.

Someone who gets involved in the process for a long time, and the treatments last often many years, may even believe in it, as a kind of suggestion or a  intimidation by a scientific authority because he lacks self-confidence or of intellect.
The treating psychologist has always the problem of proving the correctness of his analysis in the individual case, since he must look for plausible reasons for the psychic disorder, which can have manifold and often not direct plausible reasons, and which can also be caused by certain infections (such as pertussis, herpesviruses, enteroviruses
or fungal CFS etc.), which are, of course, seldom carefully  examined by the doctors, nor in neurology.

In particular, a distinction should also be made between the psychology and the effect of modern drugs of neurology and psychiatry (with their side effects), since the drugs also function without a psychological ideology, even if some small progress has been made in the course of brain research (Ptopanolol, butyrolactone Etc ... and ... also devil-stuff like Risperdal etc.).
 

11. Psychology and introspection

Psychology and psychiatry try to explain the psychic problems from an intellectual standpoint, and therefore they  developed very complex systems(muddle) of explainations.

From the esoteric standpoint the revival of old incidents of the past of the individual patient (by remembrance)  in  a psychoanalys sould be avoided. Very often this leads to a long crisis of the patient und to revival of old karma.
Introspection, which was already practiced by S. Freud,  combined with inner exercises brings higher and better and deeper results, but the aspiration must be very different and continuous. The patient should be taught to live to live "here and today and always conscious".

Modern pyschology teaches people that they should love themselves, but the simple self-love is one of the roots of the black path. It is taught to establish the small untamed personal ego. It is better to see the transitoriness of feelings and to win distance.

"The gnostic beeing starting from this new basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous becoming of knowledge and a realised power of being."
"As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the developement of its own force and for mastery by force; its quest is for growth, power, conquest, posession, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant self-expression, developement, diverse manifoldness of action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow posession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiement." (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)


Therefore is psychology a science with models of the small human ego and the forces which are consciously and unconsciously controlled through the ego and control the ego because they are its substance which is the lower self. But psychology has only terms for the description of the unconscious forces and does not know them. It does not anticipate of the abysses of human consciousness . In contradiction is the aim of spirituality the complete spiritual transformation of body, soul and mind.


Finally a quotation of master Sri Aurobindo who said: "Psychology is only the exorbitant generalization of some small truthes."

To know these small truthes of psychology can of course somtimes be quite useful together with introspection if put into a proper order, just like any special knowledge can sometimes be useful. (Lit.: Ch. N. Norbu : Buddhism and Psychology, Shang Shung Edition; Hazrat Inayat Khan : Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology)

"An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transformation of our world-consciousness and world-action : for it takes up into the new power of awareness not only the inner existence but our outer being and our world-beeing."(Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)

"For the law of the body arises from the subconsient or inconscient; but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy respones, will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence", (Sri Aurobindo, Life Divine II,27)

At the latest on step 18 of the Universal Path the Adept has transformed the unconscious energies of his material body so far that he needs no more sleep, instead only two hours of rest of the body - as a forrunner of coming extensive changes.

12. Psychoanalysis

From the esoteric point of view, a psychoanalysis with a revival of old memories is usually a big mistake.

The patient should learn to live in the now.

Introspection in combination with internal exercises leads in the long term often to higher, better and more profound results and to natural self-awareness, but it should be based on a completely different and also permanent aspiration - which the patients mostly do not want.

Not least, psychology teaches "to love oneself", ie. the self-love, which is a pedestal of the black path, just as the assertiveness is a hallmark of the small human ego. The sin consists in the selfish desire to be one only with oneself. Something else is the natural self-esteem feeling, which is for many employers already in the hiring interview a thorn in the eye and is possibly classified as irreverence.

Such scientific thinking people are of course absolutely convinced of their plausible models (and they live from their Job!). If You argue with them then this maybe a hint that you are psychotic.

They can explain everything without a real proof in the individual cases, and their proof is the plausibility, and especially the Neurologists cant beleive that the "spirit" is seperated from body.

Since several years psychology shows interest in meditation and similar techniques. Chemical treatments(which belong to the neurologic section) have proved to have negative effects on the nervous system (Valium etc.) and the results of the therapies are very often disappointing.
The methods of autosuggestion, NLP, hypnosis and autogenic training have shown limited results. Therefore it has been tried to use the methods of meditation for treatment.

13. Real psychic illnesses

Undoubtedly, there are also genuine organic diseases of the psyche that are environmentally, organically, inherited, or even genetically conditioned, and which can only be influenced and not healed by introspection and further transformation methods.

However, many depressive disorders and also schizophrenic diseases can be cured or at least improved by means of genuine Qigong or pranayama and certain Japa meditations (mantra, pranava), once by retraction to the psyche and cleaning of the higher bodies, which is also practiced by many asian healers - naturally, on the basis of a change in diet and lifestyle and the conversion of priorities.

However, there are also overseen dangers, since negative connections of higher bodies can have many backgrounds and we live in one of the worlds of the Maya.  To use these techniques only for practical life is a variant of the black path. In addition, many of our fellow citizens are psychologically so injured that they need a kind of treatment.  Unfortunately, however, they are then mostly directed into incorrect values and overall contexts, and on the other hand even the "autogenic training" is too incommodious for most patients.

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14. Workgroups and teams

This modern working groups are also a modern achievement which has nothing in common with practiced charity or the like - which theoretically would be possible in another spiritualized type of man - but in practice more with equanimity, phasing, intolerance and herd-drive - instead of sociality or universal group-consciousness that is not to be confused with modern globalization.

Unfortunately, our undemocratic ruling classes prefer on a broader basis increasingly  the psychologically explored  outrageous mushroom management style (e.g., "steering at a distance").

Regarding the alternative hypocritical offered "cooperative management style" during training courses  it lacks willingness, because this would require mature, responsible and not skilled citizens, who are not only functionally creative.  The leadership style through a task force naturally also leads to the goal, because the purpose in the globalized business world sanctions the means, and money rules the world.Instead, target agreements as a means of pressure with the misuse of evaluation  give an outlook on future societal constraints.

Whoever has read the "Who is who" knows that meanwhile, not only in american companies a psychological entrance test is common, which tries to trace any undesirable individuality and is clearly contrary to human rights.
Such tests are now also the order of the day in many companies, where private life is illuminated and spirituality can be a killer criterion.

15. Brainwaves

In recent decades, various psychologists and neurologists have been systematically involved in studying the different meditation - methods scientifically by means of measurements of alpha waves and gamma waves of brain-skin currents, of changes in the blood composition with respect to different hormones and of effective substances in the brain (in Germany, among others, Professor Engel in Dortmund).
In this respect, psychology can mainly offer hypnosis (NLP), autosuggestion, hypnotherapy and autogenic training.

The electrical alpha-waves and Gamma-Waves during meditation and relaxation and the chemical changes in the human body caused by these methods were measured, which in fact exist and which have already been published before (St.Palos : Breath and meditation ; E.Taylor-M.Murphy-St.Donovan: The physical and psychological Effects of meditation).

But the chemical changes and waves cannot simply be used to reach higher states of consciousness through injection of those chemicals. They are just a side effect.
At the moment is the vipassana meditation in the focus of neurology.

At the step 18 of the path the initiate has overcome his unconscious. He needs no sleep and does not dream anymore, since he has nothing more to compensate for by dreams, and he still needs about two hours of rest daily, but all this only as an announcement of by far higher  states of consciousness.


Further all this does not mean that neurology accepts the religious systems around these methods. It is just the attempt use these methods as a means of treatment of patients , and to deleiver a modern description and to strip of the rest of the systems.
If it would be possible to bring down the spiritual energies as a means of treatment just to heal people who are completely against spirituality, then this would be a small modern branch of the black path.
The "Transcendental meditation"- with the relaxiation-alpha-waves is a known  example of such an attempt of abusing spiritual energies for daily success and for illusionary forces(siddhis), and this movement publishes chemical and electrical measurements (though probably many of them are just self produced and false).


All this is of course no steering towards spirituality, but an attempt to make these techniques usable in the way in which our culture tries to make everything utilizablel that it can get hold of, accompanied by an effort to appear scientifically based on the materialistic worldview.

All this would consistently implemented be a variant of the black path. On the other hand, a psychologist plays blue-eyed as a substitute guru with things in which he is not competent and which he does not control, and from which he should keep away at a certain stage.  Intensive Chinese breathing techniques ala Palos are performed in a certain environment and under experienced control.

These techniques simply to integrate into daily life, to be balanced and to have success and energy, can lead to the opposite in a corresponding impure environment, because here is played uncontrolled with partial polar energies which are simply ignored and which belong to other worlds, which have sideeffects and, in particular, interlacing.

The 'divine providence' shows little understanding for such misuse of spiritual energies, for it is a "to throw pearls before the swine" (Matthew, chapter 7: 6) in the sense of "meditating and working and being successful," and it is also in the advanced meditator an unconscious " sin against the Holy spirit ".

16. Final

Psychology is a science that dwells on the lower self and its small ego  and the conscious and subconscious powers subordinated to it, down to the "blind anake" of the unconscious, which, however, psychology has grasped only conceptually, and it does not suspect its abysses Spirituality, on the other hand, is the complete transformation and development of man and his esoteric bodies.

After i have blasted psychology in the preceding a citation of master Sri Aurobindo : "Psychology is only the exorbitant generalization of some small truthes."

Knowing this can, of course, be quite useful in introspection, if one understands it correctly, as every knowledge can sometimes be useful.

The behavioral rules of the body are dictated by the subconscious and unconscious: in the Gnostic being, however, the unconscious has become conscious, subordinated to gnostic supervision, and permeated by its light and its effect. The underlying unconscious with its darkness, its ambiguity, with its inhibited reactions, will be transformed by the appearance of the consciousness of the truth into a deeper or carrying superconsciousness.


"In our soul exists a thirst for perfection; but not for this human perfection, which is a perfection of the EGO and which blocks the path of the divine perfection, but it is that kind of perfection, which has the power to reveal eternal truthes on earth." (The Mother)

17. Literature

  • The antisocial personality disorder
  • Chögyam Trungpa : The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology (2005)(The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa 1-5)
  • Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry:  Diamond healing, Clifford, 2006, ISBN-10: 8120817842 ISBN-13: 978-8120817845
  • Transpersonal Psychology - a bibliography
  • Psychology of spirituality - Wiki - Journal
  • E.Taylor-M.Murphy-St.Donovan: The physical and psychological Effects of meditation
  • Ch. N. Norbu : Buddhism and Psychology, Shang Shung Edition
  • Hazrat Inayat Khan : Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology, ISBN 10: 0930872363 ISBN 13: 9780930872366

18. Links