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KIT 25 - Interface Spirituality Psychology

Psychologists accuse those who work as spiritual guides of
teaching the 'spiritual by-pass, ' which is, failing to deal with
psychological problems and lulling adepts into a metaphorical
Shangrila while neglecting important day to day issues. This
action reinforces people's temptation to escape rather than to
face and unravel real life situations and often results in
producing 'otherworldly dropouts' of society.

Conversely, some psychologists get burned out by recurrently
administering the same therapy with exasperatingly little change
in the patient. Why? Some patients, although they ask to be cured,
unconsciously do not really wish to be cured, because they
experience the therapist as one who is robbing them of their
justification for not having become "what they would have been if
they could have been what they might have been."

We, as spiritual guides. are fostering creativity rather than
therapy. One might ask. "Should not therapy come first before
rebirthing?'' This seems logical but it is important to give a
person something to live for to offset his/her reticence at being
cured. The pull of the future is more motivating than the clutches
of the past, and there is nothing more stimulating and motivating
than creativity. If the human being is a holistic phenomenon, then
the metaphorically creative levels of his/her psyche are essential
to the organic wholeness sought after.

Most of the party line psychologists would lose their credibility
if they were to prescribe the kind of practices fostered by
spiritual groups: breathing practices, the mantram, visualizing
the aura, grasping one's eternal being beyond the idiosyncrasies
inherited from one's ancestry. and modulating consciousness in the
cosmic and transcendental dimensions. But these are techniques
which foster a correction in the psyche by working on the energy
flow of the life field. These techniques help the adepts to
overstep their self image and encourage a creative blossoming of
latent qualities.

Actually, some spiritual guides and psychologists are exploring
areas of mutual complementarity and enrichment. Fundamentally,
spiritual guides and psychologists are dealing with a human need
embodied in the struggle for self esteem, culminating in the
unfoldment of one's personality, which is simply an expression of
the evolutionary drive. Basically, the crux of the issue is that
people's self image is simply a notion, a purely imaginary
projection, constrained by the very fact that consciousness in the
human being is focalized as in a lens and Judges things from a
localized vantage point. Therefore, the problem facing
psychologists revolves around the fact that people get stuck in
their fictitious self image, which blocks the evolutionary process
from fostering a blossoming in their personality.

If we apply Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan's paradigm of the seed,
striving to manifest more and more of its bounty in the plant, the
clue lies in grasping more dimensions of our being beyond the
scope of consciousness in its middle range setting. This is where
spirituality does make a contribution to psychology. Briefly, our
being extends through several levels of reality in which
transcendental and ancestral idiosyncrasies intermesh and overlap,
particularly at the physical and psychic level.

We are encouraging people to earmark their eternal core being.
irrespective of what they inherited from their ancestors, in
keeping with the words of Jesus, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly
Father is perfect. " Notably, these more transcendental factors of
our being aver themselves to be more impersonal or cosmic or to
dovetail with those of other beings. so that one may consider
oneself as an inverted cone whose base is coextensive with the
totality of the universe and whose apex (which we usually imagine
ourselves to be) is the convergence or funneling of all this
bounty. To sift this quick of one's being, unravel it out of the
humanly inherited factors and refertilize one's psyche through its
creative power, is the work of spiritual guides.

One can trigger this off by self transcendence; observing one's
body and mind objectively without identification. This seems
paradoxical because. as already seen, our core being. irrespective
of ancestral inheritance, does intermesh with our inherited
characteristics in both the psyche and the body. However, thanks
to the dimming of one's identification with the physical and
psychological factors of one's being. During the self transcendent
experience, a sense of dejavu emerges in the conscious from some
impersonal level of the psyche's memory. One feels, "this is
really me." The emergence of this genuine core of one's being has
an overwhelming effect upon the self image and presents a new
challenge; namely, reconciling and integrating the oceanic feeling
of one's cosmic identity with the constraining self image.

Thus the need branded by psychologists as self acceptance is met
by spiritual guides by placing one's shadow self (attributed to
one's inheritance) at the service of one's core being as a "bridge
over troubled waters", and by interfacing and intermeshing with
it, thereby transmuting the shadow self. Rather than considering
the shadow and core being as two factors of one's being, one may
consider them as two poles of the same reality.

It becomes obvious that spiritual guides and psychologists would
gain much by working together since the factors they are dealing
with interact and intermesh inextricably.
    
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