Physiological Psychology

Biopsychology is the name Ananda Marga gives to Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti's account of how mind and body act on each other. Its central claim, in the board's words, is that the endocrine glandular system is the literal physiological mechanism through which the mind exerts its effects over all mental and emotional expression.

The yogic tradition had long described cakras, centres along the spine at which the propensities of the mind are controlled. Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti mapped these onto the body: each cakra corresponds to a plexus of nerves and to glands whose secretions shape mood, drive and thought. A human being, in this picture, is a biological instrument, and the quality of one's physical, mental and spiritual experience depends on how that instrument is tuned. Anxiety, lethargy, aggression and calm all have a glandular side as well as a mental one.

This is why the practices are what they are. The postures of yoga are chosen for their pressure on particular glands; the breathing exercises for their effect on the nervous system; the diet for what it does to the body's secretions; and meditation is understood as acting on the glands from above, through the mind, while the other practices act on the mind from below, through the body. Together they are meant to bring the instrument into a state in which the subtler layers of mind can be reached at all.

The framework predates modern neuroendocrinology and does not use its vocabulary, but it makes the same wager — that mental states have bodily correlates that can be influenced deliberately — and the site's article on biopsychology follows it into the practices in detail.