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Since Jung wrote his psychological commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower in 1929, there has been a steady stream of literature which has explored the interface between Western psychology and Eastern philosophy. This exploration has been mirrored by a general widening of interest in the orient and has been paralleled by scientific developments in holography and quantum physics, and by extensions in our knowledge of the callosal bridge which joins the two hemispheres of the brain.
All these advances seem to be leading us towards a more unitary mode of consciousness, and it is on the premise that unitary consciousness is all that exists that this latest work by Swami (i.e., Master) Ajaya rests.
The book itself is divided into two parts. Part 1 attempts to uncover and examine the philosophical assumptions underlying various branches of Western psychology—reductionism, humanism, dualism—and compares and contrasts these with the Eastern monism from which Yoga therapy springs. Part 2 is devoted to applications of Yoga therapy, contrasting it with contemporary approaches to psychotherapy, consistently emphasising the shortcomings and limitations of the latter, while at the same time trying to show how the former provides a synthesis within which to place modern psychology's ‘partial’ yet insightful perspective for understanding and modifying human experience. This, it is claimed, leads to a more comprehensive approach to self-transformation.
As someone particularly interested in fruitful exchange between East and West, I must confess that I was disappointed by this book and at times frankly irritated by its evangelical tone and repetitiousness. My reason for feeling like this lies, I think, in the author's failure to tackle the fundamental issue of how to explain to us in the West the Eastern notion of ‘anatta’ (no-ego) in such a way that orthodox Western psychologists do not feel that their Cartesian stronghold is in danger of demolition. The author states openly in P