A Matter of Heart and Soul: The Value of Positing a Personal Ontological Center for Developmental Psychology

Abstract

A whole person understanding of postconventional development needs to offer a facilitative agent, what is here called a psychocentric dimension, with a unique and necessary role in the transformation of individual consciousness, that complements and completes the egocentric and cosmocentric domains. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings and praxis concerning what they called the psychic being may elucidate an alternative frame to current theoretical speculations, in a way that may offer a new synthesis and a more theoretically satisfying interpretation. More specifically, it is hoped that an integral yoga psychology framework for postconventional development can meaningfully account for the transformation of individual consciousness by rendering the psychic being as the definitive reference point, facilitative agent, basis, source, originating point of the self and-or cause for the process of self-individuation of postconventional consciousness.

Does Spiritual Awakening Exist? Critical Considerations in the Study of Transformative Postconventional Development

“…Spiritual development can be understood through a variety of models: Eastern, Western, indigenous, philosophical, psychological, and neurobiological (e.g., Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson, 2010). Changes related to spiritual development may be gradual (Brown & Engler, 1980;Teklinski, 2018) or rapid (Cheng, 2000;Hastings, 2010;Taylor, 2012aTaylor, , 2012bTaylor, , 2013aTaylor, , 2013b, or some interweaving of the two (Cook, 1983). Sudden psychological change itself is not exclusively spiritual, having been described in a wide variety of contexts (Taylor, 2013a), and frequently associated with mundane or secular activities (Taylor, 2012b).…”