INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY – THEORIZING ITS DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES: A TALK AT THE CULTURAL INTEGRATION FELLOWSHIP, SAN FRANCISCO, 2008
Now, Sri Aurobindo envisages a perfect world, but at the same time, he, too, does not think it legitimate to travel outside of oneself to help others. The perfect world is to come about through the expansion of knowledge within, through the performance of yoga, but not through social service, not through humanitarianism or humanism, seen as the “helping of others.” And so this whole issue of humanity as the focus of sciences, of theoretic or applied science, is another area that needs to be addressed in arriving at the boundaries of Integral Psychology, that this is not what Integral Psychology is meant for.
Sri Aurobindo provides an alternate solution to this implicit seeking for integrality under the universalist drive of Enlightenment epistemology and teleology. This is the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s darshana, what has been called Purnaadvaita Vedanta or Integral Non-Dualism and expressed in his magnum opus, The Life Divine. According to this, the three streams of darshana and yoga, as possibilities of consciousness and experience are co-existent in the Vedanta as conterminous and convergent realties. This is a description which transcends Mind. Mental existence seeks for mutually contradictory realities to be distinct, with only one description which can be absolute and true while the rest must be relative or false. Pre-modern formulations of darshana have relativized these three distinct descriptions of Reality, nominally asserting each to be absolute for the purposes of experience through its corresponding yoga. Modern Neo-Vedanta asserts Advaita Vedanta to be absolute and true, the other darshanas and yogas to be relative phenomenological stages towards its achievement. It is only thus that a description of Reality can be valid to the mind. But one may conceive of an organ of Knowledge in which multiple descriptions of Reality can all be equally true and simultaneous experiences. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind.
Now, Sri Aurobindo envisages a perfect world, but at the same time, he, too, does not think it legitimate to travel outside of oneself to help others. The perfect world is to come about through the expansion of knowledge within, through the performance of yoga, but not through social service, not through humanitarianism or humanism, seen as the “helping of others.” And so this whole issue of humanity as the focus of sciences, of theoretic or applied science, is another area that needs to be addressed in arriving at the boundaries of Integral Psychology, that this is not what Integral Psychology is meant for.
Sri Aurobindo provides an alternate solution to this implicit seeking for integrality under the universalist drive of Enlightenment epistemology and teleology. This is the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s darshana, what has been called Purnaadvaita Vedanta or Integral Non-Dualism and expressed in his magnum opus, The Life Divine. According to this, the three streams of darshana and yoga, as possibilities of consciousness and experience are co-existent in the Vedanta as conterminous and convergent realties. This is a description which transcends Mind. Mental existence seeks for mutually contradictory realities to be distinct, with only one description which can be absolute and true while the rest must be relative or false. Pre-modern formulations of darshana have relativized these three distinct descriptions of Reality, nominally asserting each to be absolute for the purposes of experience through its corresponding yoga. Modern Neo-Vedanta asserts Advaita Vedanta to be absolute and true, the other darshanas and yogas to be relative phenomenological stages towards its achievement. It is only thus that a description of Reality can be valid to the mind. But one may conceive of an organ of Knowledge in which multiple descriptions of Reality can all be equally true and simultaneous experiences. This is what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind.
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