Psychospiritual psychotherapy, science and religion, cultism, the unique individual and the ego
The Buddha spoke of suffering. Is this a good way to explain “spiritual” in psychospiritual? Why, for example, should an atheist or a person who does not practice the faith see a psychospiritual therapist? Is it necessary to be on a spiritual quest of some kind or might the client feel driven to practice spiritually as a result of the therapy?
Everyone who lives and breathes has some experience, some sense, of something that is dear to them, that they value and honor, something that they revere or respect, someone they love, and perhaps a person or cause they would give their life for. Therefore, everyone has some idea of the spiritual, which is beyond common sense of oneself as a selfish entity committed to survival and personal pleasure. The psychologist Jung went one step further and claimed by examining a host of dreams from different eras, cultures, and moralities and value systems, that humanity shares a collective unconscious that is inherited and expressed in commonly recurring symbols and archetypes.
Everyone has a spiritual side, although they can call it by a variety of names; everyone values something or someone above themselves, even if it is science, philosophy, the state of the world or ecology. But today we may well ask ourselves: “Isn’t science the new religion?”
The usurpation of religion by science is the result of a hopeless, senseless conflict, in which human beings try to discover the “correct” answer without regard to the variety and multiple layers of reality and their composite experience. For example, science cannot say much about what is intuitive and instinctive, much less about the numinous and in a completely different realm than the type of phenomena that science seeks to observe and measure. The spiritual, the transcendent, and the divine are beyond words and experience. There is no point trying to convince someone who is scientifically minded of the truth of spiritual and numinous events, just as it is futile to try to convince a spiritually minded person of the absolute truth of science.
What happens when a scientist comes to you for therapy? Do you see another side of life? Searching for inner realms, experiencing inner processes, and understanding inner objects and their meaning can be interpreted in various ways that are personal to the experimenter, to the client. Many numinous experiences have been downplayed and reduced to an emotional or instinctive neurological event by the scientifically minded client. But we are all different, which is one of the wonders of being human; the differences, the variety, the uniqueness and the individual contribution that each one makes to the whole.
Spiritually, each of us has an individual and unique contribution to make to the whole. But alongside this statement is the idea that the end of spiritual achievement is to share a common essence, which is sometimes called unity consciousness. A characteristic of religious cults is that everyone begins to dress, behave and even think the same. So where are the individual’s unique human qualities in that?
Religious or spiritual cults have led to a sheep mentality. As in all walks of life and in all activities, there are very few people who remain questioning and nonconformist enough, free from schizoid tendencies to feel insecure about belonging and fitting in, to resist the collective power of the status quo, even when it is intensely strange, inhuman and corrupt. But everything that happens in the name of spirituality is not necessarily more spiritual than a political rally, a meeting of football fans, or even a night of drunkenness. All these searches invite and insist on a certain abandonment of one’s individuality and embracing the spirit of the collective.
But in psychospiritual therapy work, resolving the needs and desires of childhood is a primary concern. We work first with the unfinished business of personality, because only when the ego is fully formed and healthy do you have something to surrender to the spiritual fire. The fullness of the ego is found in the surrender or renunciation of the ego, because you are much more than the ego allows you to be. So this is a radical transformation that is achieved by placing yourself at your true center.
A person is more than his ego. This is evident in fairly ordinary acts of love and sacrifice, even pleasure. But transcending the ego is a difficult task for most people. In the pursuit of spirituality in the modern world it is important to remember that the early and deeply profound teachings of ancient spirituality did not have to deal with the central theme we have today and that is individualism. The modern world (and I don’t think we have to say western, as if it were different from eastern; western and eastern dichotomies have always been confusing because the division is more cultural and political than geographical) has progressively centralized the individual, so having an attack of the ego forces not the same. No time in the past have you had to face this problem and certainly not 3000 years ago in the Indus Valley, for example, when your caste and position in life were very established and unless you were aristocratic or priestly class, he was involved in subsistence, in survival.
Today we have leisure, recreation, options, even spirituality has become a tourist industry!
So we have to look at what the individual means in terms of spirituality. The spiritual path in the modern world is one of individual nature and focus. First, this is obvious because you notice that people mix their philosophy and spiritual methodology. This has its own difficulties; You follow Buddhism until you come across something you don’t like, then you jump into Sufism or Taoism, until you find something you don’t like there and you add a bit of mystical Christianity and a course in miracles. The obvious difficulty is that you cannot dictate your spiritual practice based on your personal preferences, for the simple reason that spiritual practice must challenge your personality at all times, so if your personality is in the driver’s seat, it really isn’t. will get nowhere.
Today we are saturated with wisdom and spiritual guidance, so comparing paths is inevitable. Even the great Thomas Merton [controversial monk and Catholic mystic] he was considering defecting to Zen in the last few years before he died. But as Joseph Campbell pointed out when asked if he had to put aside his religion to achieve spiritual goals; no, you have to go all the way to where religion in its origin represents the truth of the spiritual journey towards awakening and liberation.
Individuality cannot be evaded. We must have a spiritual practice and methodology that embraces the individual and works with that, not ignoring but seeing how it can help in the adventure of enlightenment. The ego is not just a fiction to be discarded, as if a few years of meditation gave it up. The ego must understand itself and first put itself at the service of the higher faculties of human existence.