A brief note to clarify again the relationship between philosophy and psychology. In a society like ours it is generally assumed that philosophers and psychologists are those who are accredited by a university with a major on these fields, that is, those people who have followed specific teaching programs and passed certain exams. Neither Pythagoras, nor Heraclitus, nor Buddha, nor Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Plotinus, nor Lao-Tzu, nor Sankara, nor... (the list would be immense...), well, none of the major philosophers and psychologist in history ever had a university accreditation. It is very important not to fall into the clerk’s mentality in relation to philosophy and psychology.
Psychology as academic knowledge developed under philosophy’s umbrella until the last quarter of the 19th century. We can still find remnants of this lineage connection acknowledged by the academic world. The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language recognizes this relationship, and tells us in one of the meanings of the term, that psychology is a part of philosophy. Let us remember that something similar happened to physics in relation to philosophy, or law, mathematics, etc. Isaac Newton's great work, written in Latin, not in English, is called: Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Physics was called “natural philosophy.”
University psychology is now fundamentally psychotherapy and neurophysiology, and is linked in the collective consciousness to health sciences. However, psychology is at its core self-knowledge, is an epistemological action that affects the homeostatic balance of our Soul and society at large. The epistemological treatment of our Soul as practiced by neuroscience from a purely physiological perspective is insufficient. The descriptions of neuronal structures in biochemical terms, as fascinating as they may be, lack a holistic perspective and belong to a way of doing science that does not correspond to the complexities of the human being: they leave out the emergence of the realms of meaning and lead only to the emphasis on the machine capabilities of the human. This way of doing physiological science does not have tools for understanding social and individual symbolic worlds. Furthermore, it does not have the capacity to address and complete its own projects: we do not have a mathematics that can deal with neurophysiological complexity, and even less to say something meaningful about that complexity in relation to the complexity of the identity of the Universe and the Human Being.
Human psychology began as the intuition of the Anima Mundi in us. And the discovery in the mirror of Nature of an identity that is not simply animal, an identity that springs from the Mystery of The Universe and gives it shape. The gods later accompanied us in different psychological configurations, and in them we discovered something different from what naked Nature offered us previously with infinite love. The third generation of gods revealed to us the Realms of Truth and Falsehood, Wisdom and Ignorance. When we apply Love to these Realms, the passion of conscious Existence emerges, Philosophy is born. Deep Philosophy arises from love. It is not Wisdom, it is love of wisdom. The Love of Wisdom leads us to understand that Wisdom and Ignorance merge into a single thing when we apply wisdom to ourselves, in a naked, authentic, spontaneous way. This Philosophy is Ñana (Gnana) Yoga, it is a perennial and transpersonal philosophy that is made from the five bodies (sheaths) that constitute us, not from a manas body that is mutilated by a dogmatic and illusory duality.
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