Patanjali wrote his master treatise on meditation about 2,500 years ago. Buddha and Mahavir date around the same time. The Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions evolved their own tantrik practices. By following a particular method it was implied that specific and certain results could accrue. If this was to uniformly and universally happen, it would mean the practice of a scientific methodology. When it is not easy to replicate or repeat them, the events will have to be explained. Till such an explanation is forthcoming, such events will be called paranormal occurrences that are paranormal within the limitations of our knowledge.

Patanjali describes that in the process of Sadhana along the Raj Yoga route, eight Siddhis incidentally accrue. Most of these phenomena are unusual and fall in the category of paranormal occurrences. It is difficult to validate them. But there are authentic records of investigations by some mystics – occultists that point to the fact that they did succeed in exercising such powers. If paranormal phenomena do occur, the only explanation that can support them has to be an extrasensory extension of transpersonal, trans-spatial and trans-temporal faculties.

The incidents of spontaneous extrasensory perception (ESP) are infrequent, fleeting and ambiguous so they are impossible to reproduce dependably. This is genuine criticism as far as scientific study is concerned. ESP and paranormal occurrences cannot be generated at will. They just happen. But even a single event in nature requires explanation by its eventuality.

This paper examines how Sri Aurobindo extended the concept of evolution as enunciated by Charles Darwin to consciousness and being (personality).

The genius of Charles Darwin pervaded the scientific West in the 1890s. Europe was gripped by the theory of evolution during the formative years of Sri Aurobindo's personality. When he returned to India in 1892 to take up his assignment at Vadodara (then Baroda) under Maharaja Sayaji Rao, the idealist Arvind Ghosh was already on the path to becoming Sri Aurobindo. He was to delve in the modern scientific theories of his time and study Indian philosophical concepts in depth. This was not to search for a synthesis. That would have been an elementary exercise for average minds. The sages and seers evolve their own visions of Reality that transcend the knowledge of their age by a quantum jump. Through the intuitive insight that penetrated the Upanishadic enunciation of Ultimate Reality, he saw that evolution also evolves (Aurobindo, 1921a, pp.1–8). He elaborated on this vision on both individual and universal scales.

This paper limits its scope to the evolution of consciousness of an individual in the unfolding of his/her personality and how it correlates with the expression of health and disease. Sri Aurobindo's philosophical postulates are then juxtaposed with modern science in terms of New Biology and advances in medicine in order to evaluate and establish that he indeed foresaw.

Spirituality and science are regarded by many thinkers as two separate realms. Prominent among them is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who has said, ‘I must limit knowledge in order to leave room for faith’ (Kant, p.29). He created two realms – a realm of scientific knowledge and another realm of faith, morality and religion. What we normally call science is that which we can observe, experiment with, analyse, measure and prove. From that perspective, spirit or spirituality may be the last thing to be found under any microscope. The science of spirituality may not be so easily measured from the parameters used in normal science. I propose the role of logic between spirit and science. The insight into this proposal comes basically from the Upanishads in which the distinction has been made between para vidya and apara vidya at the level of knowledge and between Nihshreyas (attainment/fulfillment) and Abhyudaya (achievement) at the ethical level. The same dristi can be found in Avaita Vedanta traditions from medieval to modern India. However, in Western philosophy, post Renaissance, particularly during the Enlightenment, we come across a distinction between science and religion. This distinction, on the basis of principles, emerges as two separate realms in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) as quoted above.

In its further development, we find that Hegel's Science of Logic places logic as the middle term between spirit and science. This is the position of Absolute Monism.

The present book includes very little biographical information on Schumpeter. The primary exceptions are found in Chapters 2 and 10, where some information is given on the contexts in which he worked before and after World War I. The present appendix gives some pointers to the Schumpeter literature.

The literature on Schumpeter's life and work consists of specialised papers and monographic treatments. The contributions published before 1990 have been catalogued by Massimo Augello (1990), and Cunningham Wood (1991) and Horst Hanusch (1999) have collected large selections of the papers. The monographs are of two types. On the one hand, we have the personal biographies by Loring Allen (1991), Richard Swedberg (1991), Wolfgang Stolper (1994), Thomas McCraw (2007) as well as accounts that include much biographical material like the books by Erich Schneider (1975) and Eduard März (1991). On the other hand, the accounts for Schumpeter's works include books by Clemence and Doody (1950), Khan (1957), Perroux (1965), Oakley (1990), Bottomore (1992), Vecchi (1995), Shionoya (1997), Reisman (2004), and Heertje (2006). The extensive account for neo-Schumpeterian economics that is edited by Horst Hanusch and Andreas Pyka (2007) also includes much of interest for the interpretation of Schumpeter's work.

The first wave of biographical and interpretative work started immediately after Schumpeter's death in 1950. This was a period during which the main issue for ambitious economists was the development and application of the tools of equilibrium economics and the related econometrics.

It is often assumed that Schumpeter made the first formulation of his evolutionary research programme in The Theory of Economic Development (Development). This assumption is misleading for at least two reasons. First, the 1934 English edition of this book is the somewhat modified translation of the second German edition of 1926 (Entwicklung II). In turn, this is the radically revised version of the first German edition of 1912 (or 1911, if we emphasise the point of time at which it became available). Second, the first edition of Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (Entwicklung I) is clearly a sequel to Schumpeter's first book in which he—in 1908—announced the research programme that added evolutionary economics to equilibrium economics. This book is Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie (Wesen)—and it has never been translated into English. In very free translation, this book can be called ‘The Essence and Limits of Equilibrium Economics’ while the title of his second book could have been ‘The Essence of Evolutionary Economics’. Schumpeter implicitly pointed at the importance of these books by emphasising the importance of the “third decade” in the lives of great economists. This decade represents “that period of sacred fertility which, in the case of every thinker, creates what is subsequently worked out” (S1921, 87). In his own case, the results of the “period of sacred fertility” from 1903–13 were largely presented inWesen from 1908 and Entwicklung I from 1912.

In the beginning of the present book, Paul Samuelson (1981a, 1) was quoted suggesting that Schumpeter at the end of his life “would have traded his Popeship for a Keynesian revolution.” The preceding chapters have reconstructed the type of scientific revolution Schumpeter tried to promote. His main ambition was to complement the reformed branch of equilibrium economics with a new evolutionary branch of the science of economics. Since Schumpeter's evolutionary economics was largely a personal affair, he only became the “Pope” of the reformation of equilibrium economics. He became a ‘heterodox Pope’, however, since his dual research programme not only led to praise of Samuelson's (1947) Foundations of Economic Analysis, but also to the recognition of its inadequacy with respect to his wished-for establishment of evolutionary economics as a viable branch of the science of economics. Actually, Schumpeter's ambition seems to have been to write a book that could have had the title ‘Foundations of Evolutionary Economic Analysis’. Such a book would probably have emphasised not only evolutionary economic theory, but also the related statistics and history. As a co-founder of the Econometric Society, he seems to have hoped that the econometric alliance between theoretical and statistical studies would help to develop evolutionary economics. The underdevelopment of his evolutionary analysis, however, served to drive ambitious theoreticians and econometricians away from him. The major thing he could do was to point out that they thereby ignored crucial facts about capitalist economic evolution.

I have a deep interest in the close relationship between modern science and the study of the internal dimensions of the human mind, which I consider to be spirituality. The reason is quite simple. Because we have this body, we feel pleasures and pains that relate to sensory experience. It is very urgent, very important to understand these sensory experiences. In fact these experiences are something very immediate to us and determine our moods, our feelings of happiness or sorrow. So we have to pay close attention to them to understand how they are felt, perceived, and how in turn they influence our minds. And just as we pay importance to the mind we have to pay equal importance to the physical body upon which all the sensorial experience of pain and pleasures register and in which they arise. So we have the physical body and the mind; the two are closely interconnected. Now, as I said, we experience these sensory perceptions in our body. This is what makes us sentient beings. At the same time we also have this sophisticated mind. Physical pain and pleasure is one thing, but we also create mental pains and pleasures. Some of these are purely the creations of the mind, existing only at the mental level. These sensations, the source of pain or pleasure, satisfaction or unhappiness, I think, are solely created by the mind. Between these two, that is physical and mental sensations, I think the experiences of pain and pleasure on the mental level are superior, more powerful.

The present appendix deals with some of the analytical problems that Schumpeter faced in his treatment of the evolutionary processes that take place between and within ‘industries’. The suggested solutions are treated under the headings the ecological approach (Section D.1) and the statistical approach (Section D.2). Although these solutions do not include economic variables like profit and credit, they can nevertheless be classified as relating to, respectively, evolutionary mesoeconomics and evolutionary microeconomics (Dopfer and Potts, 2008). The theoretical, historical, and statistical analysis of the capitalist engine requires a lot of other analytical tools. For instance, there is an obvious need of developing the tools for evolutionary macroeconomics. Furthermore, the algorithmic reconstruction of evolutionary processes and their implementation in computer simulation models have proved crucial (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Andersen, 1994). Nevertheless, a short presentation of the ecological approach and the statistical approach serves to demonstrate that formalisation can clarify existing concepts of evolutionary analysis and suggest new concepts.

The ecological approach to evolutionary analysis

Schumpeter's treatment of the process of creative destruction in the historical parts of Business Cycles (see Section 8.2) included much attention to the structure of the “industrial organism”. When we take the structure of this “organism” into account, it becomes clear that he was considering a much more complex process of creative destruction than the one covered by the reconstructions of the Mark I and Mark II models of the capitalist engine (see Section 9.5). It also becomes clear that he seriously needed analytical tools for handling this complexity.