Psychiatry is a field limited to a study of morbid pathological conditions of the human mind. Its background is human psychology which is a study of the human mind as it functions today in its present evolutionary status. It is still in its infancy especially because of three reasons.
1. Modern psychology confuses the mind with the soul assuming that soul and spirituality is simply an operation of the mind. It believes that spirituality is the result of an abnormal functioning of the human mind.
2. It confuses the mind with the brain assuming that consciousness and what we call as thought, feelings, will etc are merely operations of the brain.
3. It assumes that material reality and the material world and its forces are all that exists. All the rest is abnormal experiences, hallucination, imagination etc.
None of these assumptions are true. Psychology as it is understood now is limited to the Science of human behavior.
Spirituality on the other hand is the Science of the soul which exists independent of the mind. The mind and its functioning can be better understood from the spiritual perspective since spirituality delves deeper into human nature and discovers its hidden secret roots.
Both meet in the one common matrix, that is Consciousness which is the fundamental reality that has woven the fabric of creation. Consciousness is the power of knowledge and the power of action (knowledge and will) embedded everywhere and in everything. Mind is a limited consciousness whereas the spiritual is a unlimited consciousness. At its highest Consciousness changes into Omniscience and Omnipotence (All-knowledge and All-power). At its lowest scale Consciousness changes into apparent Nescience (absence of knowledge as we feel in the material world) and inertia or powerlessness. The whole evolutionary journey is from this state of total lapse of consciousness (Asad, Tamas, Mrityu) to a complete recovery of the full consciousness (Sat, Jyotir, Amritam). Man with his human mind stands somewhere in between. In man consciousness has been half recovered. Spiritual life is the effort to recover the full consciousness.
For more details you can go to talks on the subject on Auromaa as well as a detailed discussion in the book ‘Veda of the body ‘.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
