Dr. Muni Abhijit Kumar
Jain Vishva Bharati University
Opening New Dimensions in Parapsychology for Peaceful World Order
Throughout the history of mankind, intuition and intellect have proved to be prime driving forces for all the developments. All the organizations, societies, religion, cultures or even civilizations have efficiently used intuition and intellect in some or the other form.
Basically the cognitive faculty possessed by human beings and other living beings is believed to be the main source of the capacity to know, whether it is through intellect, intuition or even instinct. There are many epistemological explanations advanced by different philosophers both in the western as well as the Indian schools of philosophy.
Although the growing influence of modern science and hi-tech technology over all streams of knowledge have exclusively emphasized the need of intellect, yet, even the field of pure science and mathematics, there has arisen a strong voice in favour of intuition. For example Fritzof Capra observes—
"The rational part of research would, in fact, be useless if it were not complemented by the intuition that gives scientists new insights and makes them creative."
In the ancient times, intuitive insights dominated over human minds and sincere endeavours were made in every sphere of knowledge and action with firm basis of intuition. Intellect came later and was given a lesser value as compared to intuition. Intuition remained to be a foundational source of knowledge and intellect was just to manifest it so that it can be understood by others. Later on with time, logic and reasoning influenced the whole society and human mentality took intellect as a primary source and intuition was rather neglected.
All great discoveries and inventions, theories and findings, philosophies and religions, sciences and technologies besides using intellect, have been firmly based on intuition. Intuition and intellect when joined prove to be complementary to each other. Their mutual relationship is important.
Intuition provides an oasis of peace in the midst of chaos. To resolve the burning global problems of humanity we need to boost the power of intuition. This intuition will provide us the right directions to move and a deeper understanding to relate ourselves with a higher meaning of life in nature.
For awakening intuition mind needs to be silenced but still completely aware. It is the meditative state of mind which leads to pure form of consciousness. With practice one leads to thoughtless state of mind where rational mind stops interfering and the psychic or intuitive mode of consciousness perceives the truth. This leads to awakening of wisdom which had been dormant otherwise. This is known as insightful knowledge or direct cognition. This form of knowledge is also called extra- sensory perception (ESP) as it is arrived to truth without use of any external equipment or sense organs. As Fritjof Capra beautifully writes:
"When the rational mind is silenced, the intuitive mode produces an extraordinary awareness; the environment is experienced in a direct way without the filter of conceptual thinking."
This act or process of arriving to pure and complete knowledge, independent of any reasoning process is known as intuition. The term Intuition is derived from the Latin word "intueri" which means "to see within" or to "contemplate".
The importance of such knowledge in the field of philosophy is well established as has been stated:
"In philosophy, intuition is the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience. As such intuition is thought of as an original, independent source of knowledge."
In order to understand intuition in a deeper sense we need to understand parapsychology. The domain of parapsychology extends beyond psychology. It has two aspects:
- The cognitive aspect
- The behavioural aspect
Both of them are important for right development of an individual human being as well as the ideal development of the human society as a whole. The parapsychological researches have revealed that there are possibilities of real existence of cognition which is beyond explanation based on accepted laws of science including physics, chemistry and biology. Such type of cognition, if it really exists, would be of immense value in the modern world where merely the so called scientific knowledge is given importance for human development.
I want to draw attention of those who are not only interested in knowing about the nature and scope of such cognitive development but also have a deep conviction about its power in giving a new dimension to human behaviour in order to overcome certain natural weaknesses. As a matter of fact such weaknesses are responsible for the overall downfall of individual as well as society.
In the field of philosophy there is an agreement among the philosophers about the possibility of developing the extra sensory knowledge, which ultimately would be of the highest quality revealing the truth. The Jain philosophy calls such knowledge keval jnana, which has been described through different nomenclature in other schools of philosophy.
In the field of science, although there is no direct acceptance of the extra-sensory knowledge or intuitive knowledge, yet its possibility is not altogether denied. Hence the researchers in the field of parapsychology have to make such quest subject of their investigation and find out the means and ways to develop this capacity of cognitive faculty. Atleast a strong endeavour is required to find out the means of acquiring the intuitive knowledge and utilize it not only to develop the scientific knowledge and higher technologies, but also to utilize it for bringing about the ultimate transformation of consciousness by overcoming the instinctual negativities which makes human life wretched, restless, inhumane and devoid of altruism.
This is theoretically possible if explained on the basis of the findings of the most recent researches undertaken in the field of neuroscience. The modern equipments may also be used to verify the changes brought about in the biochemical phenomenon responsible for dominance of the mammalian brain and reptilian brain over the neo-cortex. As it is definitely known that the major problems of human life, whether in individual domain or social one, are mainly due to the dominance of the reptilian and mammalian brains and the only way to weaken this dominance is through the development of the power of neo-cortex. It consists in a happy blending of higher intellect with the extra-sensory knowledge including intuition. This would be probably the highest contribution of parapsychological research to the whole mankind.
Acharya Shri Tulsi and Acharya Shri Mahaprajna have suggested some empirical methodology such as Preksha Meditation, Science of Living, and Training in Non-violence etc. to remould the human individual and the human society to evolve a peaceful world order in which violence, possessiveness and unbridled desires would be minimized and on the other hand wisdom, self-discipline, and farsightedness would become the guiding forces.
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