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.
