Dayal Gauranga spoke at
Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga conference in 2025 on how spirituality can complement
psychology in the healing of past traumas. He explicitly related religion/spirituality
and psychology; my question is whether he succeeded, and if so, what put him past
the finishing line. I contend that even though at times his use of spirituality
lapsed into psychology (i.e., conflating the two domains by psychologizing spirituality),
at the end of his talk he related spirituality to truth, which is not within
the purview of psychology. By truth, I mean religious truth, rather than, for example, 2+2=4. I contend,
moreover, that disentangling religion from other domains by plucking out weeds
from other gardens so to be able to uncover and thereby recognize the native
fauna in the religious garden, as well as pulling the religious weeds that have
been allowed to spread other gardens is much needed, especially in a secular
context. It is with this in mind that I turn to analyzing Gauranga’s
spiritual-psychological theory of healing oneself of traumatic wounds.
The full essay is at "Integrating Our Humanity and Divinity."
