 Thank you for coming here. I would begin by sharing my own personal journey, how I met the mother and Sri Arbindo not physically but energetically in this birth because I truly believe that all of us have met them before and only that's how we reunite right in this birth. My school teacher of Sanskrit and Gujarati in my school, Jai Sri Bandh Bhatt, who was a devotee of the mother who has lived with mother and who left her body here in Pondicherry. She was the one who reunited me again and even the journey is more interesting because it was psychology way back in my school days when I was five years young that connected us on that spiritual level. When I was five years young my sister was born and which was very normal for post delivery women to go through depression. My mother went through post delivery depression. Unfortunately for her she was put on tranquilizers and allopathic medicines which took away almost 30 to 40 years of her life, getting stuck into depression and I have seen in my growing up years the highs and lows of her own psyche. Naturally as a young child made me feel lonely, you need a mother at their age right and that's how I turned to the other mother through my teacher because beautifully when I speak with her about my loneliness, my problems, my confusion. She would give me mother's blessings to just hold it in my hand and meditate on it. She would give me small booklets to read and I wouldn't even understand much at a young age but I would hold on to that as if that's my only hope in life. And I think that's how I'm here today. It's her grace which has got me here and it was also her grace which made me choose psychology as my specialization in San Xavier's College Mumbai because all you have read in Sri Aurobindo and the mother's work is all life is yoga and all yoga is psychology. So obviously all you want to explore in your life is psychology and yoga and that's how I ended up doing graduation and psychology only to realize that the current mainstream curriculum of psychology is far away from yoga, it's far away from spirituality. It's only now that they are coming somewhere closer to consciousness, spirituality. However, the current psychology that we learn anywhere in the world and more so in India is more European, colonial and American. And therefore it has no roots in Indian ethos, Indian culture, Indian civilization. It's only recently that they have started, Indian universities have started integrating some Indic wisdom as a course on Indian psychology and elective in Indian psychology where sometimes they touch upon Sri Aurobindo and the mother, sometimes they touch upon Bhagavad Gita, sometimes something from Upanishad but it's not still a very integrated curriculum. And therefore what I realized is post graduation I left psychology. I followed the path of literature, human resources, diploma in yoga and Ayurveda. However, psychology never left me. So here I am coming a full circle and last three years in Rajasthan School of Public Leadership at Rishio University, I have designed curriculums based on Indic wisdom, integrating a lot of work of Sri Aurobindo and the mother, Swabha and Swadharma, which is psychology and you realize that there can be no understanding of psychology without Indian culture going back to our Rishis. So today I would talk about two things parallely. One, the current mainstream psychology. However, more emphasis on Sri Aurobindo's work in psychology. Very beautifully Sri Aurobindo says, psychological inquiry in Europe and without inquiry there can be no sound knowledge is only beginning and has not gone very far. And what has rained in men's minds up to now is a superficial statement of the superficial appearances of our consciousness as a look to us at first view and nothing more. But knowledge only begins when we get away from the surface phenomena and look behind them for their true operations and causes. This is from Letters on Yoga. And this is where we realize that what Sri Aurobindo calls the current psychology, the modern psychology, it's very sad that when we look at the word ancient and modern, we feel that modern is better and we think that ancient is outdated. Unfortunately, that's not true. And this is where Sri Aurobindo says that modern psychology is an infant science at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind to take a partial or local truth, generalize it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature. In its narrow terms, runs riots here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have tremendous implications which are very negative, which is what I experienced in the curriculum of psychology. And I realize that it's not only superficial, it's also partial truth, which is exaggerated. Only recently, two days ago, I met a young seeker working in strategy in a multinational company, but who was here for a month seeking deeper answers. And he says that I'm reading so many books in psychology, so many self-help books, but I'm not getting any answers. And I said, you are at the right space. All you need to do is learn to get into silence, get into meditation. Just soak in the energy of this space and the right books would appear, right people would appear, right inside, which is more critical. Because psychology in the West began, I would say, on the first floor. Even today, they do not know what is psyche or consciousness. Even today, the brain and mind are used interchangeably. And there is hardly any understanding of what is mind. Okay, I'm trying to help them, the youth understand using the software language, the IT language. And then I say, oh, your hardware is the body and the brain. Brain included is only a hardware and mind is the software. But then you should know that somebody is writing that software, right? Who's the programmer? Who's the writer? And that's where you have to go deeper. You have to go higher. So it's ultimately a hologram, right? The moment we go deeper, we also go higher. And that's where we come to consciousness. That's where supramental overmind, supermind, these terms start revealing their meaning to us. And then we realize that modern psychology is still stuck with sense mind. Even the definition of consciousness is all about awareness. I am aware of the environment. And that's what they call consciousness. They are far away still from what is supramental consciousness and how do you reach there? So I say they began on first floor and maybe they have reached second or third floor because they had the first force, then the second force, then the third force, which was humanistic psychology. Then they have the fourth force in psychology, which is transpersonal, where they are coming little closer to our Rishis. And when I say our Rishis, Sri Aravindu included. This is where now they are coming to some revelations that are there in Upanishad. And yet they are far away from that because transpersonal and transcendental has still to overcome, transcendent their own barriers to understanding psychology. So what our Rishis, where did they start? They did not begin on the first floor or the second floor. They began, I would say on the 1000th floor and they had that unified view. And that unified view helped them to slowly come down what Sri Aravindu calls evolution. So it's not only the evolution of the consciousness, but it also the evolution of insights to understand who we are, where we are in the current evolution and where is a possibility of our own evolution. So without understanding evolution, we will not be able to understand evolution. You cannot understand that from Darwin. You know, I feel sad when in psychology there were experiments to understand human beings or even more than being the human behavior based on rats, cats, dogs, pigs. Even today, lot of medical experiments are happening even in the field of Ayurveda, whether they would work the efficacy to understand the efficacy of the medication on human beings are being done on animals. So we are not integrating the understanding of who human beings are. What is the difference between animal and our existence? And that shift, that paradigm shift, psychology and medical sciences have still to overcome the obstacles. So you realize when Sri Aravindu says, but whatever the crudalities of the new science, it has at least taken the first capital step without which there can be no true psychological knowledge. It has made the discovery, which is the beginning of self-knowledge and which all must make who deeply study the facts of consciousness that our waking and surface existence is only a small part of our being and does not yield to us the root and secret of our character, our mentality, or our actions. I think this is where Poonaji was really guided to begin day one with secret knowledge. Right? Unless we go to the secret knowledge, all that is going to manifest and unfold in later days, including understanding psychology is impossible. The sources lie deeper to discover them, to know the nature and the processes of the inconscient or subconscient self and so far as it possible to buzzers and utilize them as physical sciences, buzzers and utilizes the secret of the forces of nature ought to be the aim of scientific psychology. I read a beautiful statement in one of the books on Indic psychology, the Indian Wisdom of Psychology by Rameshwar Rao and he says that the western psychology envies physics because physics is accepted as pure science while psychology is not accepted as pure science. While western psychology envies physics, Indian psychology envies western psychology and that's where I realized that oh my god because at one level to understand psychology, I went deeper into understanding from works of Sri Aravindu and the mother and another parallel my research area is Ayurveda and in Ayurveda, the first chapter itself is on cosmology. So to understand yourself, you have to understand cosmology, which is exactly what Sri Aravindu talks about, right? And that Sankhya because Ayurveda also borrows knowledge from Sankhya and once you understand cosmology, Panjmahabhuta, Tridosa, Triguna and I'll end my session today when I come to Triguna and how Sri Aravindu inspires us to become Triguna Teetha, how he explains to us the play of Satwar Rajasthamas as a Leela and how we have to transcend them. So this is the beginning of psychology from whether you look at it from the view of Ayurveda or whether we look at the word of Sri Aravindu and unless we understand this, we can't understand ourselves because Brahmanda and Pind, microcosm and microcosm is one, there's a continuum. Problem with psychology has been that it is stuck in a narrow field. It has not borrowed from other sciences that have moved away. Physics has moved away from the mechanical model. Physics is no more stuck into Darwin or Newton. It has expanded to include the understanding from quantum physics, right? Psycho-neuro immunology, health sciences have expanded, especially if you look at the works of Condense Bert and I realize that she's very close. She even explores heart chakra. Sri Aravindu's work talks about chakras. So we need to look at our physiology and psychology, metal energy continuum, the subtle body and the stool or the gross body, the Annamayakosha to physical, to vital, mental, to psychic, the continuum, the flow from mental to energy and which is where health sciences are now discovering. So if you look at PNI, psycho-neuro immunology, if you look at cardio-energetics, they talk of heart as an integral part of health and this is what Sri Aravindu talks a lot about the heart, the psychic being residing in the heart. So ultimately other sciences have moved on. They are integrating the understanding or the insights and broadening. Psychology still has to outgrow the matter paradigm and move on to integrate the energy paradigm, the consciousness paradigm and therefore Sri Aravindu writes in letters of yoga. But here the first difficulty confronts us. The problem, whether this other and greater self of which our waking experience is only a surface and a phenomenon is sub-conscient or inconscient. And there on hinges the whole destiny of the human being. And there on hinges the whole destiny of human being for it is inconscient in its very nature then we cannot hope to eliminate ourselves with the hidden light of these depths. For light there is none or to find and to possess ourselves of the secret of its power. On the other hand if it is sub-conscient that is to say a concealed consciousness deeper, greater, more powerful than our superficial self an endless vista of self enlargement opens out before us and the human race marches towards infinite possibilities. And if we want to explore those infinite possibilities within us around us there is no other way but to go deeper and inner. Because as Sri Aravindu explains we are not one, we are not harmonized, we are divided or fragmented into multiple layers of our being. Unfortunately psychology sees it as pathology and multiple personalities. It labels it as either schizophrenia or a disorder. Hardly realizing that maybe all the person needs is to integrate and harmonize those multiple levels, harmonize those multiple layers. And this is where I meet a lot of psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists who so confidently believe that their science is ultimate, their knowledge is the perfect one. Not realizing that they are looking at from a keyhole and they are not looking at the entire sky. You know if I look out from a keyhole my perception is very limited of who human being is or what the problems of the human being are. And trust me at times I feel that divide of spirituality, divide of any foundation of spiritual understanding of who we are, the divine life, who, what our life is, what is it supposed to be. They guide people, they guide people on relationship, they guide people on their own internal problems. Not realizing where these problems are rising out of. And it's almost to me like a blind leading another blind. So it's sad, I mean I don't mean to ridicule anyone. Maybe I would have been on the same path if I had continued my you know study in the modern or the mainstream psychology. I would have been so convinced of brain as the center, right? There are times when I feel that all of the Rishis, they spoke only of the heart. They never spoke of the brain. Even the modern psychology when it comes today to positive psychology, Martin Seligman is supposed to be the father of modern psychology, positive psychology. When they talk of peace psychology, when they talk of health psychology, parma model, flourishing, there's still talk of brain and cognitive skills. As if these are the habits that the brain can be trained, you know and therefore you have books of self-help that treat you like a rat, right? Who moved my cheese became so popular because you want to understand a rat behavior and apply that understanding to your behavior. And this is where I feel sad that we have at least in India we are lucky to have been born in the land of Rishis. We have this possibility even if we haven't read this when I saw this again at Umaji's home yesterday. I have my own personal copy at home many years ago and I realized this is psychology. This is true psychology and what was ancient? We are coming back. We just have to take a u-turn and this is the future of psychology. Why I call it future? Because at the moment we are still stuck at the level of matter, physical, vital and most of us are living in vital and all the problems that are created by the vital unless you go to mental you can't even see that these are the problems of the vital but one has to transcendent even mental and connect with the psychic being because the true light the two power is there true understanding is there and that's where you know the understanding of science was that earth is the center of the universe right and it's the sun which is going around the earth and the scientists were destined to death for you know saying that it's not the earth but it's the sun which is in at least in our galaxy which is at the center where all the planets are rotating and I think one day as the supramental dawns on us we would discover rediscover what Taitariya Upanishad has said what Shri Aurobindo has said what even Carl Jung has discovered and he has written in his work but which is suppressed a lot of work of Abraham Maslow Carl Jung which was coming closer to Upanishad wisdom has been kept away from the mainstream psychology that it's the heart and not the brain it's not the cognitive skill which will get us out of our current problems of humanity or individual and trans help us transcendent to the later level and Carl Jung beautifully I think he's I to me personally he's rephrasing lot of the work in Upanishad or Shri Aurobindo when he says that Anna Chakra is very critical heart chakra is very critical because this is where the lower nature has a possibility to self transcendent and then we are able to rise above and Shri Aurobindo gives this beautiful understanding of how we transcendent and in Savitri right I mean the the basic of Savitri I under for me to understand Savitri was difficult at that young age when my teacher Jai Sriman Bhatt used to take me for readings but maybe I just soaked in the energy the power of the mantras when I read the Gujarati book by Mansi Chowda called Savitri Sampark where he has written about you know how this is a personal journey of transformation while reading Savitri that you transform and that's where it dawned on me that's where the understanding came that it's the whole journey is your own journey you are the heroine you are the villain right and it's your own journey to go from the lower nature to the highest possibility there's nothing else to do to be honest there's nothing else to be done because all that we aspire and this is where the word aspiration becomes very critical in psychology because what the modern psychology teaches us as achievement motivation right and the achievement is nothing else but materialistic possessions while we realize that all these materialistic possessions would not help us evolve they may create little comforts give us a little luxurious life but they would not help us evolve in fact they would become our obstacle at the end please do you want to write it down okay thank you so when we look at when we try to correlate right the modern mainstream psychology and what we are bindo has been talking about psychology sigman Freud had described personality as an iceberg and he had given that iceberg model which has become very popular that you know only the tip of a behavior is visible but what is guiding our behavior is not was visible however what he named only as subconscious unconscious mind but what is the content there in the subconscious or the unconscious well he was not even aware of it right and therefore he could not guide us because he didn't have that light and only when we reread what we are bindo writes and he doesn't use the word iceberg but it's the similar image that he gives when he says we are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence somewhere else he writes our mind and ego are like the crown and dome of a temple jutting out from the waves while the great body of the building is submerged under the surface of the waters so beautiful i mean when i talk to young you know public leadership students at rastram or mba students executive mba students at spjain i always ask them because titanic as a film was very popular and i say i asked them what drowned that titanic you know it was supposed to be an invincible ship and look at the fate it met and they said the iceberg so which part of the iceberg the visible or the invisible and they all accept that it was the invisible part of iceberg which hits the titanic and i said if you look at your own life as the titanic right what is going to drown us if we are not aware it's that submerged part it's the lower part it's the the physical vital mental where we are constantly submerged right and and unless we outgrow that right unless we integrate that we don't have to suppress it because when you suppress the moment we try to suppress anything it's proud somewhere else suppression doesn't make it disappear it only creates a pathology so we don't need to suppress it we have to outgrow we have to transcend that and therefore shayar bindo's words come come as a great help to us man is not made up of one piece but many pieces and each part of him has a personality of its own that is a thing which people yet have not sufficiently realized the psychologists have begun to glimpse it but recognize only when there is a marked case of double or multiple personality and therefore they don't realize that all we need to do is let's say we take another image of ourselves as a lotus if you have to understand the lotus do you study the mud from which the lotus is blooming or do you understand the heavenly sky to which the lotus is opening up and this is what shayar bindo writes the significance of the lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here its secret has to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms over forever in the light above and this is where yesterday deshpandiji began with the secret right that secret knowledge of what is the archetype of lotus is future psychology not starting the mud i think all these years the the entire field of psychology has focused on mud and they are they're still struggling that how would a lotus bloom from the mud they are not even aware of it the self chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor dark and limited you must know the whole before you know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest that is the promise of the greatest psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor groplings will disappear and come to nothing it's apart from letters on yoga and this I feel is the true psychology understanding the lotus to understand the lotus understanding the light above and that's the secret knowledge I feel so yesterday when I was listening to deshpandiji I realized that how beautifully it's a flow these are not separate days with separate sessions and I'm sure we'll realize as we go on the last day that it's manifesting into a beautiful flow for us to get transformed also Sri Aurobindo gives the definition and scope of psychology from the standpoint of yoga this would become the foundation for future psychology psychology is the science of consciousness and its status and operations in nature and if that can be glimpsed or experienced its status and operations beyond what we know as nature it is not enough to observe and know the movements of our surface nature and the superficial nature of other living creatures just as it is not enough for science to observe and know as electricity only the movement of lightning in the clouds or for the astronomer to observe and know only those movements and properties of the stars that are visible to the unaided eye here as there a whole world of occult phenomena have to be laid bare and brought under the control before the psychologist can hope to be master of his province so occult becomes a part of the science of psychology occult or yoga become integral to psychology because without understanding occult you'll not be able to understand ourselves the word tantra itself which is synonym of occult tantra is it's just a technique to understand how anything works whether it's the cosmos or whether it's our own nature whether it's our life or it's the possibility of the life divine and I would say that this is future psychology today's psychology curriculum when I look at it I really struggle and I find it very hard to convince the deans and the vice chancellors you know that sorry but I don't want to teach mainstream psychology right I mean this is so limited I would feel guilty if I if I'm only looking out through a keyhole and I'm also showing only that much of the world to my learners you know it's a falsehood they will never get the glimpse of the light they will never get the glimpse of the power of our future possibilities and therefore I have to travel the path less traveled how many psychologists I mean apart from being in Pondicherry or Auroville how many psychologists in the world are integrating the integral psychology Indraseen gave us this term integral psychology way back and we are yet to integrate that in our own life our own journey forget about integrating that in the curriculums so that I think the first challenge for any psychologist would be go through your own sadhana because to be a true psychologist you have to do your own atma shruti purification your own transcendence from the lower nature to vital to mental to psychic get glimpses from there to guide your life your that light and then only you have the authority adikara to bring that light into the fields of our life of other people you know otherwise I'm in darkness and I'm only spreading darkness when I talk about glorification of darkness if that darkness is darkness of maha kali or maha kaal it is fine then it's that that darkness itself has enough light but if that darkness is coming from my own lower nature then that darkness will only spread darkness and that's what we are seeing today right in the pandemic world in the vuka world as they call it and therefore metaphysics occult and metaphysics or metaphysical sciences have to be integrated as a part of psychology she even though very clearly lays down this self knowledge has two inseparable aspects a psychological knowledge of the process of being a metaphysical knowledge of its principles and essentiality so unless I have experienced my being how can I even talk of being to somebody else and then thus another characteristic of yoga psychology in which it differs from modern psychology is that it is part of and inseparable from philosophy though both yoga psychology and yoga philosophy are based on experience and constitute a unified body of knowledge their provinces and nature of inquiry are distinctly different and therefore one side it is experiential the modern psychology is experimental they did experiments on animals to understand human while the future psychology is experiential where you have to do your own sadhana you have to experience it for yourself you have to be purified so that the knowledge flows through you to others that becomes the path and that's that's more difficult right it's very easy to read 10 books you know copy paste material and then teach that right it's so easy to do that and therefore Shri Arbindo says in letters on yoga a complete psychology cannot be a pure natural science but must be compound of science and metaphysical knowledge the definition of psychology as an examination of the nature and movements of consciousness at once takes us out of the field of ordinary psychology and extends the range of our observation to an immense mass of facts and experiments which exceed the common surface and limited range very much as the vastly extended range of observation of science exceeds that of the common man looking at natural external phenomena only with the help of unaided mind and senses the field of yoga is practically unlimited and its processes and instrumentation have a plasticity science talks of neuroplasticity today yoga is creating that neuroplasticity and adaptability and power of expansion to which it is difficult to set any limit and this is from essays divine and human which was the unpublished work of Shri Arbindo and which was published much later as essays it's available soft copy in complete works of Shri Arbindo and this is what I realized that my own path of research in the field of psychology right that no this is not psychology this is not psychology what we call neti neti for atma right if I want to reach brahmana generally the path is to go on the familiar and then you say no this is not atma this is not brahman this is not atma even in psychology I realize it's the same path you know I realize oh this is not psychology this is not psychology and you start rejecting so the the three path to our sadhana of course because I realize that integral yoga integral psychology whatever we call it is very practical it's just not theory which is up there in the books and in the library you know it can be applied in our everyday life and therefore when you start applying that you realize that there are three parts aspiration surrender rejection so this is what I said the moment I say neti neti this is not it I'm rejecting I'm rejecting falsehood I'm rejecting what is not truth I'm rejecting which is not science I'm rejecting which is not making me a better human being because I'm realizing that I am and this is what even Ayurveda says what Shri Arbindo says that mental has the capability mental mind to look at the vital right in Ayurveda they say the moment your mind your manas stops talking it talks too much right it continuously keeps on chattering the moment manas stops talking tata paraha buddhi the mental or the buddhi starts speaking only when the manas is quiet and therefore the need for silence because to reach that path ability to reject anything will only come when you realize that this is not useful this is not serving the purpose and then you realize what is the purpose purpose comes from my aspiration and there's a huge difference between achievement motivation and aspiration a few years ago I was I met one psychologist from the west Dr. Lyle Spencer he has done a lot of work on achievement motivation however he has been lucky enough to have come to India and done some Buddhist study so he understands dharma and laws of dharma so Lyle Spencer may beautifully said that all achievement motivation carry the seeds of its own destruction if not balanced by dharma but of course he explains dharma from the Buddhist perspective and I would look at Buddhism also as an extension from sanatan dharma right it's it's not something alien from sanatan dharma so when we listen to her when we reach Sri Aurobindo and the ma shri ma you realize that dharma is a unifying law dharayati iti dharma unfortunately dharma has been translated as religion but dharma is as sound as a universal law of physics we do not say gravity is christian right we do not call any of the physics laws as connected with any religion so sanatan dharma is not Hindu sanatan dharma is a universal law to guide humanity to a better living to unfold what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental and as a child I am sure what questions I had many people have who am I why am I here what is this whole drama of the world and then Sri Aurobindo very clearly says vital is nothing else but drama of life right and we are stuck there and therefore we are not understanding what is my ego what is that person's ego I'm able to see the other person's ego but I'm not able to see my own ego I'm able to see the faults and problems in the other person but I'm not able to see the same in myself and that's where you realize that rejection apart from rejection what aspiration do you have and what surrender do you get into because to be able to reject something you should know that this doesn't align with my purpose and the purpose comes from dharma the purpose comes from psychic being and the purpose comes from heart and and beautiful quotes on the heart I have so much written here but please make me aware of the time umma how much time we have and I would love to have question answers also wonderful so I'll be able to complete most of what I have got here with me vital is a thing of desires impulses force pushes emotions sensations seeking after life fulfillment possession and enjoyment these are its functions and its nature it is that part of us which seeks after life and its movements for their own sake and it does not want to leave hold of them if they bring it suffering as well or more than pleasure it is even capable of luxuriating in tears and suffering as part of the drama of life and this is what happened to me too that on one side you you have questions what is this life about what are we supposed to do why are we here and then you read so much of literature giving you very conflicting understanding right I mean I could never understand uh Brahma Satya Jagat Mitya I said if everything is Brahman that even Jagat needs to be Brahman how can it be Mitya so maybe the word Mitya is not understood or translated or interpreted well because if everything is Brahman what is Maya then why is it called Maya why is it there right why does it even exist and this is when Sri Arvindo and Shri Ma makes it so simple for you that it becomes Leela for you we have heard these two terms right Maya and Leela and specially in in Gujarat where I come from when somebody expires we say that that person concluded the Leela as long as you are alive you are in Maya but the moment you die it says that the soul concluded the Leela but while we are alive we are not even aware that it's a Leela you get caught up in the vital you become part of the drama right so what is the difference of participating in the drama and yet not being caught up in the drama and that's where Sri Arvindo makes it so simple for us that all we need to do is we are here to become the higher possibility of who we are we are on this planet not for our personal moksha or liberation but to bring that supramental light on this planet on this earth plane for everyone it would have been so easy for him to do his own sadhana and leave right it would have been so easy for Shreema why would she suffer so much and work on her own self as a laboratory right that the cellular transformation so much pain that she went through for our sake and therefore you realize that okay I'm here participating joyously and therefore you realize that the true nature of psychic being is only Ananda it's not suffering it's not personal happiness because happiness is a very limited term to translate Ananda bliss comes closer but I would still say you know Sanskrit non translatable it's very difficult to have one word maybe we need a full paragraph to explain some Sanskrit words so Ananda is Ananda you have to experience it if somebody has never had a keer or a palsam however much you describe it is white it's made up of milk you put rice you put jaggery or sugar they'll not understand you have to eat it yourself to experience the bliss your tongue which is called the Rasana it has to experience the Rasa of the Ananda the same way our own psychic being you know when the veil is removed and it's not difficult it's honestly the aspiration has to be that of removing of the veil the aspiration needs to be that of connecting with the psychic being so that the supramental comes down through us we all become a part of the process to bring it down and therefore rejection becomes easy therefore surrender becomes easy why do I need to surrender because I realize that I'm very limited my understanding my brain is very limited I realize that unless I surrender to someone who has better knowledge I will not be able to reach my aspiration today anyone who's driving a car would know that you surrender to GPS right you surrender to that some strange voice telling you when to take a left turn when to take a right turn and you blindly follow isn't it what is coming on your screen and some strange voice telling you you never question it because you trust that technology however the best for us would be to trust the Rishis because they know they know the path they know where to take a left turn right turn where there is traffic jam which route is better which is the shortest way to reach or which is the longer way but without traffic and therefore the moment you start your sadhana I would say many people find it difficult to meditate difficult to do sadhana they say we don't know I don't know what is sadhana how to do it but the moment you surrender the moment you even enter matramandir you understand what is sadhana it just comes to you you don't have to read 10 books to understand sadhana it just comes to you you become empty you you surrender and that then that knowledge the insights the light you know if there is darkness and this is exactly I don't I have that quotation here with me but Sreema had said that you don't have to fight darkness you just have to light a candle so what needs to be my aspiration if I'm clear that I don't have to teach a sunflower that face the sun that's the inner aspiration of sunflower to face the sun so the real aspiration of my own psychic being is to be one with the supramental consciousness to be the instrument of the supramental consciousness and that is psychology because psychology if we say is the science of psyche this is psychology this is consciousness this is what will save us from all our individual dramas of vital where we are caught up or the universal the global dramas of humanity of power war what saved me in pandemic and I would love to share this story because I would say that that that's practical yoga practical psychology when pandemic started two things saved me again one of course Sreema because for Suffolk I had to give a talk on pandemic and Sreema and when I started reading the works she has because she has been through a pandemic and she has experienced pandemic herself she saw pandemic as a possibility for us as humanity to either transcendent or go to Rasata and she very clearly says that be very careful of every breath don't allow fear to overpower you because the moment fear overpowers you and this is psychology fear brings down our immunity and therefore the microbes the asuri Shakti that microbes represent they can capture you or overpower you or your health only if you are weak only if you are anyway given up to the fear if there is no fear if you are you know Dhradaneshchaya Sankalpa is to be with mother that I'm protected and if you keep the fear away if you keep it away right this is what is written there that she used to do that with a gesture of her hand and you can actually experience this when you do it with yourself I I really want psychologists to integrate these insights into their psychotherapy you know don't look at people as clients or customers look at them as beings whom you are being an instrument to guide them to help them so when you allow yourself to be an instrument of these supramental and say no fear no pandemic I didn't even talk of pandemic in Ayurveda there is a whole chapter in Charak Samhita called Janapadodha house sir and it very clearly says why would pandemic happen because there was climate change and then you realize oh my god yes all of us have experienced climate change we have had conferences but we never realized that maybe the next stage of climate change is pandemic and why would climate change happen because of unsustainable practices at individual level which would bring down your immunity at collective level at business level where you have polluted the environment and at governance level at three levels and this is where you realize that oh if you had the inner heart guide you right there is an outer movement of the mind but there is also an inner movement of the mind which takes you to the heart and if you had your psychic being in the heart guide you then you would have come out of the unsustainable practices then the pandemic the microbes would not bother you they would stay far away from you and this psychology if we are able to integrate in all of our life in our work not only we will be happy and healthy but we will be able to create a healthier world so basically the the psychology from Shri Arbindo which is the future psychology is the meta science or the meta knowledge you know today everyone talks of meta view what is a meta view as I said is the view from 1000th floor when you see from up you are able to see everything unified everything harmonious right when you begin from the first floor then you have to slowly climb up and then paradigm shifts happen which happened in the field of psychology but when you look at the science of consciousness psychology as science of consciousness there are three things that we need to learn one it is beyond mind and behavior it's not superficial it's not a part but it's the whole consciousness that we need to understand experience and therefore understand it is beyond introspection measurement and analysis initially psychology started with introspection but when you introspect maybe it's the mental and the vital looking at each other you're far away still from the psychic being the real you know jaitya purush and measurement one of the biggest fallacy of psychology today is standardization and measurement because each seed is different I mean when we look out when we look at the trees do we standardize all the trees to one height same leaves same flowering season we don't there is so much biodiversity and that same biodiversity is with us as human beings so the fallacy of the normal curve right whether it is in psychology to understand human behavior or whether it is in health to understand your blood pressure which is put again in a bell curve so the bell curve has been a major you know obstacle I would say into the real understanding of consciousness because consciousness can never be measured and put into a bell curve called this is normal anything's before and beyond this abnormal or super normal and beyond ego and self actualization abram maslow though the normal figures show only five layers of needs and hierarchy of needs self actualization being the highest that was not the real figure given by abram maslow what he gave was beyond that and even before that need for knowledge need for aesthetics and beyond self actualization is need for self transcendence and this is where we come so closure to satyam shivam sundaram right without that there is no psychology of consciousness because self actualization is still I'm stuck in exploring what my mind can do it's not transiting who I am and therefore what we realize that the integration of the feminine principle the divine mother is a again a beautiful gift from shri arvindu psychology he integrates very well the purush and the prakruti concept but the divine feminine becomes again a central aspect because heart is connected with that planes of consciousness I will not go into the detail from satchit anand to the below part inconscient part right we all know that however the chakras through which it goes right so I've actually seen a lot of sadhakas going through hatha yoga sadhana kundalini sadhana and when you try to aspire to go from below to higher there is a possibility of you losing control there is a possibility of your kundalini going haywire and creating a lot of psychological problems health problems people losing their sense of orientation the safer part would be to trust the divine and allow the supramental to descend in you because then you are not doing anything it's not your ego it's a supramental which is coming down purifying you and guiding you and this is where psychology has to integrate the biology of the subtle body without understanding the subtle bodies which of course okanishad also calls it atma shankracharya called them kosha and and that's the pancha kosha the from annamaya to anandamaya and she arvindu calls them from physical to psychic being and therefore ultimately what we need to do is become gunatita because sattvarajasthamas again the way i understood lila and maya by shri arvindu's spiritual guidance i also understood sattvarajasthamas in the right way because there is so much information and there is more than information there is so much misinformation i have even met people who have done phd in triguna and they say oh yes there are three personalities sattvik personality rajasic personality tamasic personality people are born in that and they die in that and i said then what is the use if i'm born tamasik like a duryodhan then i will always say janami adharmam nachame nivruti i can't go beyond adharma because that's how i'm born and that's how i'm going to die and this is where shri arvindu beautifully says the dominant gunas are not the essential soul type of the embodied being but only the index of the formation he has made for this life and during his present existence and at a given moment of his evolution in time and therefore i realized that i'm not stuck in ayurveda also when you see you are born in a prakriti so tridoshavata pitta kafa i'm born in a prakriti i'll die in a prakriti i need to keep my prakriti balanced through right practices health promoting practices but that's not the same for triguna i'm not stuck in a one guna in fact the whole journey has to be go even beyond satva triguna titta and this is where beautifully shri arvindu says richness of life even a satvik harmony of mind and nature does not constitute spiritual perfection because if i have to ultimately reach my spiritual perfection i have to go beyond gunas there is a relative possible perfection but it is a perfection of incompleteness some partial height force beauty some measure of nobility and greatness some imposed and precariously sustained balance there is a relative mastery but it is a mastery of the whole body by life or of the life by mind not a free possession of the instruments by the liberated and self possessing spirit the gunas have to be transcendent and we would arrive at a spiritual perfection tamas evidently has to be overcome inertia and ignorance and incapacity cannot be elements of true perfection but it can only be overcome in nature by the force of rajas aided by an increasing force of satva rajas has to be also overcome egoism personal desire and self seeking passion are not elements of the pure perfection but it can only be overcome by the force of satva enlightening the being and force of tamas limiting the action satva itself does not give the highest or the integral perfection satva is always a quality of limited nature satvik knowledge is the light of a limited mentality satvik will is the government of a limited intelligent force moreover satva cannot act by itself in nature but has to rely for all the action on the aid of rajas so that even satvik action is always liable to the imperfections of rajas egoism perplexity inconsistency on one side it turned a limited and exaggerated will exaggerating itself in the intensity of its limitations there is a satvik as well as rajasic or tamasic egoism at the highest and egoism of knowledge or virtue and we see that right we see that we are aware in our own self that satvik ego is worse to overcome because it camouflages itself as non-ego and you think oh I don't have ego but even that becomes an ego and this understanding he also talks in greater psychology book compiled by a salal where he talks of tamas at two levels because satva rajas and tamas are never single they are in unison all the time they may change in their quality and quantity but they are always together and therefore they need to be transcendent and also tamas if you see most of the literature is described as inertia but in a negative way why shayarvindo says tamas is needed and he describes stool or gross tamas and sushma tamas so tamas subtle tamas and this is what ayurveda also says subtle tamas is needed for us to sit quietly for us to receive for us to be able to sleep because midra sleep in ayurveda is called tamas the devi nidra is also called a devi a goddess we need nidra for rejuvenation right but with that is subtle tamas is the sushma tamas which when turned into gross that it becomes ignorance avidya or falsehood ultimately even the gunas have the power to transform themselves and in letters on yoga shreyarvindo says satva becomes jyoti this is what happens because of our sadhana our sattva can become jyoti the prakash that illuminates the authentic spiritual light rajas becomes tapas the tranquility intense divine force and tamas becomes samma the divine quiet rest peace and without that i don't think any psychology is complete so this is where i would end and we can have questions and answers yeah umma will pass on the mic to you madam first of all the session was very beautiful from the basic from the known to far classic my question is a little bit basic voice is not very clear the question is yeah very basic this is related to the boundary of psychology the the boundary boundary okay of psychology we talked about you know human beings as far as i understand right um when you understand or try to understand the behavioral pattern habitual pattern why this has happened why these set of people behave like this why these animals do this way why these plants grow together this why is the root of psychology is that right absolutely okay and the how is part of science is that how it is and the psychology is common for all plants animals and everything so this when you talked about you know sattva rajas and all those things is it common for all the beings all the beings that's what you know i wanted to i'm shudan ja i just a little bit of your integral psychology this what i understand but why this things is not in our school curriculum as a physical education is there mental education is there but in that way psychological education is not seen and that is one because it is a part of our life and we always focus on the things on what is outside and not doing in that way what is inside for you so the small children they are it will be that things is there they are what are inside wow but it is our education system or whatever maybe suppressed and gone so that is one i think true true and therefore i truly believe that it's not difficult to integrate psychology from very young age in school education because in school we are teaching everything which is outside right we teach children how to speak but how to enjoy silence we never integrate how do we integrate that it's easy it's just that we need to give it a priority that's all thank you first of all ma'am thank you for your wonderful session i just want to ask that how do we can we make balance between the spiritual life and matristic life on a psychological level balance between both how can we make that there is always a balance because there is no dichotomy it's these are not two lives right every breath that you take right what is it it's a spirit right it's a respiration are you not breathing every second do you think of it separately the problem again i'll go back to what he explained about education right the problem is our current education has become so away from spirituality and what life really is that you mean it's unfortunate parents or teachers do not inculcate the joy of learning so what do you do you go to school because you want to go to college you go to college because you want a job so ultimately it's all about job and earning money right and and that was not the Indian way the gurukul way but not the reason that attracted me to rastram or rishi who does school university because we decided when we started that rastram will not promise jobs usually all colleges they attract students based on their placement and rastram's basic philosophy was that we'll we'll groom people for life and then whatever career they want to take will flow from their knowledge so don't get into this dichotomy which the world is giving us right materialistic life is also there and spiritual life is also there all integrated together as long as your materialistic life is not destroying life anywhere you're not killing or harming ecology harming other lives I don't see there is a dichotomy few times in my life I managed to stay very calm and in return and aspire for change and the change would occur and most of the time I fail but I do believe that the practical aspect of psychology to helping others would be in listening is that listening as well as as you listen right I mean this is what I personally do because I may not have all the answers right and therefore the more you listen as you listen surrender you know transfer these problems to the higher divine energy and let that energy guide you you become only an instrument to guide that person exactly exactly right at a very practical level what I've realized that if I breathe on rhythm if my breath is peaceful and in rhythm then most probably the other person sitting in front of me will also breathe in rhythm right this is what they teach in sales and negotiation sales technique and I wonder why don't we apply it teacher student or you know client and counselor or wherever even a personal relationship right if I'm having an argument or if I'm perceiving a dish harmony my breathing goes out of rhythm so the moment I want to be in peace and in harmony within the moment I create it within that vibration spreads to the other person absolutely children of course is the body self that you can rediscover later in life and they they realize that when you go to listen with this body self the change occurs absolutely absolutely in fact in India we have lot of stories where the baby in the womb was listening Abhimanyu is one such example in Mahabharata right where in the womb he was listening to the conversation between his mother and Krishna but mother fell asleep and somehow the words did not even reach the baby uh then there is this example of Prahalad who was born to a Rakshasa Hiranyakashapu but the mother used to listen to Bhagavata from Narada so listening to you know spiritual stories Prahalad developed as a very spiritual soul but that for that you would realize that a psychiatrist has to get into that practice right it's a tapasya in itself I would say right and and I would really want future psychology to integrate such tapasya as a part of curriculum you can't give an exam and become a psychologist or as a psychiatrist oh it would yeah like a lot of you know the questions that come how does one know sure uh Swabha and Swadharma as Sri Aravindra describes Sabha would be more about your Satvarajas, Tamas combination and how do you work on it and Swadharma will be more about the Varna right the four Varna's so I would not go into the detail because it it would really require to be very superficial for me to comment anything but Sri Aravindra has written a lot on it and it's the more you read about it you will discover but I would say it's like a process you know nobody can do an assessment a psychometric assessment and tell you this is your Swabha this is your Swadharma follow it it's a self-discovery it's a journey of self-discovery I run a course on sanskar abhyasa at rastram which is on self-leadership because I truly believe that the the leadership crisis I do see a leadership crisis in the world today right whether they are political leader religious leaders social leaders organizational leaders we are in a mess as humanity we are really in a mess and I see it as a crisis of leadership if a leader is someone who has to lead the leader needs a compass right the right direction and that would only come by self-purification and therefore sanskar abhyasa takes in insights from Ayurveda about who we are panjmahabhuta tridosa trigona insights from yoga about chitta vritti what are the five chitta vrittis and how do you balance them we all go through these states of kshipta vikshipta mudha right ekagra niruddha would be very difficult but at least if we reach ekagra which would create listening with body cells right so I integrate all that how does manas Ayurveda has beautiful ocean of wisdom on how does manas work how does heart work I mean it's sad that we wait for America to write on emotional intelligence and give it to us I integrate from at one side natya shastra rasa nishpati and sthaibhava because if my sthaibhava is of virras then courageous naturally my swabhava if my sthaibhava is that of karunras possibility of me getting into depression if I don't turn karun into karuna so personal sadness karunas into karuna or compassion and empathy for others and self and and this I integrate with modern research in pni psychoneuro immunology and other researchers absolutely absolutely and that momentary swabhava comes from lifetime of sanskara right absolutely exactly absolutely absolutely very prominent very prominent true true you need one more question this gap and organize a being but at the same time one's hardly aware of this gap the thing is my next question is that am I existing as an individual because I find myself you know a product of so much information and so my thought even whether am I and everything is coming to me from outside outside how to how to progress in this whole journey sure I'll answer the first one I was trying to remember the first one about masanas right location of manas in Ayurveda when I go to see Ayurveda there is a lot of conflicting views on location of manas if we look at manas as a gross one right in Ayurveda manas is called the 11th indria 5 karmendria 5 gyanindria 5 karmendria 10 and 11th one is manas but manas is at a subtle sukshma level so manas is everywhere in the body and this is exactly what psychoneuro immunology says that it's it's floating manas floats in the body it's everywhere in the body it's mini brains which are floating in the body which are called neuropeptides and they're frittin they carry emotions and they're frittin you know neuropeptides have receptor sites all over the body so when you look at puncture kosha right annamai kosha pranamai kosha manomai kosha so when you look at that which means man resides at manomai kosha so man is not in the body body is in man that is one way to look at it if you look at it as within your body also because it's a subtle energy level it's everywhere in the body even my hand has a man and my ears have a man and my feet also have a man therefore when you are not mindful we say in sanskrit i was annam manaskar which means man can go out of the body right you are listening you are here for a fraction of a minute also the mind goes out and comes back you say oh but i heard till here now they are talking something else what happened in between you were sitting here you were listening the words were reaching your brain but your brain was not able to process that because your man had gone out how can man go out but it does go out it's also intelligent enough to come back and it comes back to your own body your man never goes into your neighbor's body it comes back to your own body so in ayurveda they say that man and jivatma they travel together so when we leave the body the jivatma is leaving the body the body disintegrates with panjmahabhuta but manas goes along with jivatma into the next birth so all the stories about who i am who mala is i have made my own stories i carry it in my manas into my next manas is not the mind yeah manas is not something see it's it would take a long time right if we and the next question we can discuss later on because i don't want to hold up everyone right but he has knowing doing gap we need to bridge a lot of things we know but we are not integrating it in our doing right or in our being that i would say is a leadership challenge thank you so much if you want more answers from mala ji you can contact her i will pass her email id so it will be useful for you due to the time constraint we have to stop here so she as usual very sweet in her expressing the secrets of through ayurveda and the rasa we taste the nectar yes we take the nectar with us instead of muddling so much into the energy we received here so i want to take this as a gift okay we'll meet you tomorrow as tomorrow is going to be dr alok ji's talk it's going to start by 10 o'clock in the morning and it will end in 12 o'clock so please be here by 10 thanks for being here and mala ji super it's so wonderful that's wonderful okay and i request um danakshmi mark to present the gifts for our mala