The following selections come from the preface of Hindu Psychology by Swami Akhilananda. There are Hindu practitioners, and Westerners who perhaps learned the skill, who can teach kids to see through blindfolds, as an example of "the occult element in Hindu psychology." I want to look at the ideas that describe Hinduism, but this offers a preliminary commentary. Christianity has played an interesting trick on itself. As DesCartes´ began to articulate both modern philosophy of individual agency and mechanicism through mathematics, his rationalism led to the conceit that secularism and mechanicism are sufficient for modern living. Allport and Brown are two scholarly types who took steps to revive a view that I am relating to multidisciplinary studies, empirical philosophy, and spiritual modernization. Physicist Fritjof Capra embraced meditation and had some contact with Krishnamurti later in the 1970s, following trends including the Beatles and Ram Dass (Richard Alpert).
"....Swami Akhilananda makes available to us a nontechnical introduction to the thought of the East. He does so in a direct and lucid style. Understanding and appreciating the significance of much of Western psychology, he is able to point shrewdly to certain improvements that Eastern psychology can offer, and to chasms it may help to fill. At the same time he stresses in a manner agreeable to Americans the applications of Hindu psychology. In this respect he shows that he sympathizes with the pragmatic interest of Americans. He is an architect bent on building a bridge between hemispheres.... In respect to the more occult manifestations of mental powers to which he occasionally refers, I am not so certain. Whether the occult element in Hindu psychology stems from its relative lack of acquaintance with what we in the West call “scientific method,” or whether this Western “scientific method” is nothing but a narrow cult that blinds itself to uncongenial phenomena, I am not at this moment prepared to say. Perhaps concessions are needed on both sides." GW Allport, Dept of Psychology, Harvard U, 1948
"We offer the result of this humble effort to the All Loving Being." Akhilananda, Vedanta Society, Boston, Massachusetts, November 12, 1945.
"Dr. William Brown, one of the outstanding psychologists and psychiatrists of Europe, is much inclined to accept the theory of the post-existence of the mind. The evidence which he himself has gathered, and which was obtained for him from authoritative sources upon which he could depend, has convinced him that there is a strong possibility of the continued existence of the mind after the death of the physical body. He says: It would not be easy to define the scope of psychical research, but we may perhaps state as its most characteristic problem . . . how far the embodied mind can get into communication with disembodied minds, the minds of those who have already died, the minds that are to be presumed, either on the authority of religion or on the basis of fact, to be still existing elsewhere than in visible human form on this planet." (see William Brown, Science and Personality (Oxford University Press. 1929). p.183.)
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