Starting in 2025, India must engage the West to co-build a ‘New Science of the Mind’
My New Year wish is that, in coming decades, Western scholars would spend more time exploring India’s deep and vast philosophical and spiritual traditions, which would enrich these scholars’ respective disciplines — and even enrich Western cultures.
In 1927, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, published The Future of an Illusion.
In this book, Freud argued that “the function of religious belief is psychological consolation. The belief in a supernatural protector serves as a buffer against man’s ‘fear of nature’, just as the belief in an afterlife serves as a buffer against man’s fear of death.”
Freud sent a copy of his book to Romain Rolland, a French novelist who had won the 1915 Nobel Prize for literature and was well-versed in Indian philosophy and mystical traditions.
After reading Freud’s book, Rolland wrote to Freud:
“Your analysis of religions is a just one. But I would have liked to see you doing an analysis of spontaneous religious sentiment [sentiment religieux spontané] or, more exactly, of religious feeling [sensation religieuse], which is wholly different from religions in the strict sense of the word, and much more durable.”
Rolland named “Oceanic Feeling” this mystical sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something ‘limitless, unbounded’
A mystic himself, Rolland acknowledged he constantly experienced this Oceanic Feeling.
Freud mentioned “Oceanic Feeling” in his 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents, but suggested “it is a regression into the state of consciousness that precedes the ego’s differentiation of itself from the world of objects and others.”
Further, Freud argued that “the true source of religion is not this oceanic feeling but an infantile feeling of helplessness, which can be traced to the child’s need for the father’s protection.”
Unfazed, Rolland sent to Freud his monumental three-volume work: Life of Ramakrishna (1929), Life of Vivekananda (1930), and Universal Gospel (1930).
A great admirer of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, Rolland believed these two reputed Indian spiritual personalities “not only experienced this oceanic feeling but also ‘revealed an aptitude for thought and action which proved strongly regenerating for their country and for the world’”.
Freud read Rolland’s three-volume work and something shifted in his consciousness.
A year later, Freud wrote to Rolland:
“I shall now try with your guidance to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending of Hellenic love of proportion (σωφρºσυνη) Jewish sobriety, and philistine timidity have kept me away.
I really ought to have tackled it earlier, for the plants of this soil shouldn’t be alien to me; I have dug to certain depths for their roots. But it isn’t easy to pass beyond the limits of one’s nature.”
I wish Freud had sought Rolland’s wise guidance to penetrate the “Indian (spiritual) jungle” and uncover the sophisticated understanding of the human mind and psyche contained in the millennia-old Vedantic, Tantric, and Yogic traditions.
But it’s never too late !
Starting in 2025, Indian scientists, philosophers, and religious experts should proactively engage their Western counterparts to co-create the “New Science of the Mind” that Rolland ardently called for
Sources:
Maite Del Moral Sagarminaga. “LA LUZ DE LA OSCURIDAD: Una aproximación al pensamiento de María Zambrano desde la psicología profunda”
Wikipedia, Sigmund Freud.
