Sanskrit Psychology: The New-Old Way to Understand Yourself and Others

There is a new kind of psychology growing. It’s partly a response to the kind we’re used to, and partly a much older, much more tested, psychology that came from a place we don’t like to acknowledge by a people that we seem to prefer to keep invisible. It’s Sanskrit Psychology and it’s a combination of the kind of thinking you know about, and the kind that created yoga.

Psychology has been around for a long time and many people rely on it when they think about themselves. Some of our most treasured ideas about who we are stick around because of scientists’ claims, common belief, and tradition. Think about all the most famous experiments and concepts you might have heard of and how they can’t be (or at least haven’t been) ever repeated like in other sciences. Examples include the famous Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford experiment on the effect of power in prison settings. Think about people like Sigmund Freud who make bold statements without a shred of anything that a scientist would ever recognise as evidence, like the Freudian slip where you mean to say one thing but mean your mother (er, I mean, another). This is a gross over-generalisation and much psychology really starts to consider individual experience but this is very recent.

Psychology is a young science, some would say it’s barely a science at all, and many of its key thoughts have more in common with religion than modern discovery. Don’t believe me? Have you ever thought about where your mind is? There’s a story of a man who went to a famous Buddhist teacher, Bodhidharma. He said “Master I have so much trouble calming my mind, I’ve tried everything!”. The master said “No problem, bring out your mind and show me then I will calm it for you.” The man was confused and said “Well when I’ve looked for my mind I can’t find it anywhere!” Bodhidharma replied “There, then it must be calmed”. If your mind can’t be found, then how can it be the problem? If you thought your mind was somehow in your brain you’re engaging in belief-based ideas that have no conclusive statement of scientific fact that is anywhere near settled. There are some evidential leanings but it’s nowhere near as clear as some people would have you believe.

So how are we supposed to understand ourselves if the ideas of psychologists are called into question? I’m not saying psychologists are wrong - I am one after all - but their pronouncements must be questioned so that we can truly begin to understand who we are, where we are going and how we can identify with others.

Whilst Western psychology is based on a very specific set of cultural ideas that may or may not still be relevant, other parts of the world have had their own process of discovery about the self. Sanskrit psychology is a recognition of this fact and an attempt to make it all work together for all people. Take the idea of individuality for example. We know that we are minds trapped inside a bag of skin and we make decisions about what that package does in a world that wants to eat it. This may seem obvious - common sense - but it’s far from the only way of looking at people. If you think of yourself as a ghost trapped in a biological machine, it’s partly by long tradition and partly by the reinforcement of that by behaviourists, psychoanalysts and - shudder - influencers. I want to talk about an alternative.

When thinking about the self in other cultures, some surprises appear. Sanskrit psychology is the combination of modern science with the older ideas about the self from India. Sanskrit is the language of yoga, Buddhism and Jainism, all cultural and religious starting points that have completely different ideas about the self. It doesn’t mean you have to be part of those religions to understand it but a little background helps. Whilst there are differences in each of these, perhaps the most important thing they have in common is the starting point that you are NOT a bag of skin that appears in the universe and battles its way through a hostile life.

So what are you, if not a mind, trapped in a brain, trapped in a body? This long standing assumption is at the heart of psychology in many cases so it’s hard to think of an alternative as a possibility. I want you to take on the thought experiment of not being a THING. Like a fist for example. If you make a fist with your hand, you have a fist. If you then relax the fist disappears. It’s no longer a thing but an idea, a memory, a possibility. Right now you’re alive, but hopefully a long time from now you won’t be. You were not a fist for far longer than have been a fist and didn’t suffer one bit. You are an event in time, completely unique, never to be repeated, emerging out of the universe like an apple appearing from a tree. The apple isn’t alien to the tree in the same way that you’re not alien to the universe. If you’re not, in the big picture, a noun, then you must be a verb. You are not a human as such but the whole universe humaning. Just like a wave is on the sea - not a wave but the movement of the ocean. The greatest illusion, it is claimed, is that you feel so real, so solid, because you are. Sanskrit Psychology begins with the notion that this isn’t what’s real but a story conjured by your body and its experience.

So what does that mean you’re actually doing? There are 5 aspects that answer this question:

Body - the Physical Presence

This is the physical being that appears to others in the world. It commonly has specific features such as arms and a face but not always. There needs to be some key features for it to be a body and there are some obvious differences between a live and dead body. All categories beyond that are utterly unimportant: sex and gender, skin colour, weight, clothing, hair types, all meaningful to many people in their own way but not of interest beyond they are ways of the same body being present.

It’s important to note that in this new-old psychology, the brain is part of the body, not the container of the mind. That doesn’t mean however, that the brain isn’t essential for the mind to operate, but then again so are other things.

Mind - The Flow of Awareness

The mind, according to these traditions, is a physical part of the universe. It’s a subtle part - you can’t find it on the operating table - but we know that we can see it in action, like we know the wind by the movement of the clouds. We can see chemical movement and electricity and the effects of these things on hormonal composition, behaviour, and relationships. We often hear spiritual types talking about the joining of the mind to the body. This is the wrong way to look at it. The body and mind are the same thing already, it’s the recognition of this that counts.

Crucially it’s the mind - everything from the sense to the ego - that links your experience of its surroundings.

Universe - the Greater Whole

You can’t be a person in a void. Without a place to be, a first cause, a box to be in, you can’t be at all. Sometimes people talk about the universe as though it were a person. In religious terms the Judeo-Christian tradition sees God as separate to the universe - its creator even - but again, this isn’t obvious to most people. In other traditions God is the universe and we just grow out of God, making us part of that God. So if I’m part of God, and so are you (and so are the named gods like Zeus, Indra, Hades, the angels, the devils), then we are all one God, moving around experiencing itself. This is the meaning of the word namaste that you might here in a yoga class - “Hello fellow God, how am I today?”.

With some spiritual-not-religious people, the universe retains its image as human-like but remains impersonal. The universe showed me the way, the universe wants me to do it, the universe will work everything out. This is religious thinking without the desire to be religious sounding. You are the universe, the universe is you. There’s a very famous phrase in one of the holy books of Hinduism (the Brihadaranyak Upanisad) that is said to be the highest truth Tat tvam asi - “You are it”. You can interpret all of this metaphorically and not religiously of course. There’s no need to change your belief system just yet.

Environment - the Context of Experience

We can’t relate to the whole universe. When we try to think about things that large we either give up, go crazy, or make up something that sounds fine and stick to it. The levels that we can relate to are an awful lot closer and feel much more important.

The first of these is the environment, the place we immediately relate to. Yoga people will often talk about us all being the same but finding enlightenment in a Himalayan cave is very different to finding enlightenment in a tower block in Glasgow with 4 screaming children and the terror of being able to feed them or not from one day to the next. Sometimes environment has such an impact that we can’t even begin to think about the universe - why should we?

Environment is about our circumstances. During COVID restrictions many people were sad and depressed because they couldn’t live their normal lives. Whilst it’s certainly true that some were sad in a mansion with a private pool and others were sad in an enforced homeless shelter, and others were sad in a bedsit and others were sad at work in a hospital, the sadness remained true.

Just as important as the enviroment is how we relate to it. If you can align yourself with the environment, be comfortable with its uncertainty and threat, be ok with sometimes feeling smaller than you’d like, and not being able to control every little thing then you can thrive almost anywhere. Like Viktor E. Frankl said in Man’s Search for Meaning, echoing Friedrich Nietzsche, he who has a why can manage any how. Circumstances shape but don’t determine, your mental state or response.

Social - the Web of Relationships

Our social context is as important as our environment context and can be just as variable. The social aspect describes the relationships that we engage in including, paradoxically, the ones that we choose not to.

Some connections are chosen for us, such as family and proximals like work colleagues, and we have to negotiate those with the skills we hopefully learn along the way. Troubling relationship with your mother (hi, Mum)? There are ways of working it through. Don’t get on with work colleagues? Develop better boundaries. Others are forced upon us such those in power. These people become figureheads, focuses of resentment or admiration, but rarely considered to be relational in the human sense (because we do everything we can to paint them as non-people). Some we choose. Our friends and lovers; the salesperson we choose to spend an extra 2 minutes chatting with; the aggressive youth in the chip shop who you have to give a piece of your mind to; the actor that you tell everyone is your favourite (even though your real favourite is slightly embarrassing).

Our social relationships have the power to completely change our environments, our bodies and our minds. They’re every bit as part of the self as our legs. What would hurt more - having a hand chopped off or having your child’s hand chopped off. I know what I’d choose every single time.

Sanskrit psychology addresses relationships from a new standpoint. It can help you to think about other beings not as barriers or helpers to your own fears and desires, but containers of different sets of fears and desires living in a universe they don’t understand. This is one of the key powers of this kind of psychology.

So there we have it: 5 main parts, each consisting of infinite other parts all combining to produce a you. Far from the soul trapped in a meat bag, you’re a complex event that grows out of an infinite universe. How could we possibly hope to find some sort of understanding of all that?

Meaning and Mayhem

Sanskrit psychology helps us to organise ourselves. All of these interact constantly and most of the time in a way that we completely lose ourselves in. The interactions are so complex that we can’t possibly keep track of them all so we become selective. Pause reading for a moment and listen. How many sounds can you make out that weren’t there a moment ago? How many objects are close by that had no relevance until now? How is your big toe on your left foot feeling? We operate in a narrow band but by shifting that band around that’s how we create meaning. Having control over the bands movement is a skill, one of the most important outcomes of meditation. What if you can shift from the thing that’s making you angry and anxious to the thing that calms you and fills you with compassion and love. What if you stopped listening to shouting and focused on what it is that’s shouting. Is it the angry person in front of you or is it their pain and hurt appearing in a world they think is out to get them? Are they still shouting at you?

Finding meaning in the mayhem is the essence of the new-old psychology. Finding out that the self isn’t a permanently fixed thing is the first step. Consider all of the things required to make you who you are - family, friends, belief, language, body-type, sexuality, emotional tendencies, books you love, films you hate, people that make you angry, those that calm you. If you took one away would you still be you? Two? Half away? What’s needed to make you yourself is every single one of them but they will change. Just like all your cells will be replaced after 7 years the essence of you is a story, a combination of factors. You’re a collection of rocks in a river that combine to form a whirlpool as the water rushes by. Little shifts in the stones make new shapes and one day the rocks will be washed away and the whirlpool a memory.

So Now What?

This is a completely different starting point to western psychology but it doesn’t make it go away. Some things can remain true. Sometimes two or more seemingly opposing things can be true at once. Think about your whole life. Think about whether or not a chemical imbalance or a phantom brain disease that can’t be pin-pointed really make sense. Think about new ways of considering that if you feel sad, or desperate, or anxious, or angry that maybe it isn’t your fault, but you CAN make it your responsibility.

Sanskrit Psychology is a way to help you grow. Not to change yourself, to be better or to conform to some ideal, but to relate better to who you are in your environment with your people. You won’t be here forever, so accept the world as it is before you go about changing your place in it and you can be a whole person, not the little bits that the world sometimes wants you to become.

Sanskrit Psychology is the new-old way of thinking about you. Let me know your questions and follow for new insights on how you can make this relevant to your own life. You maybe disillusioned or just curious but there are new ways of thinking out there that can help make it all make much more sense.