Spiritual Psychology

What is Spiritual Psychology?

Spiritual Psychology is the understanding of The Structure of the Psyche combined with a depth understanding of Spiritual Traditions.

Spiritual Psychology is the process of reuniting the Individual Spirit, called the Soul, with its infinite Source.

Why Reunite?

The Soul may identify with many partials, see itself only through that with which it identifies, less than its wholeness.

Spiritual Psychology is the method of releasing identification with partial awareness, allowing the Soul to return to whole relation with its Infinite Source.

What is the Soul’s Infinite Source?

‘Infinite Source’ is defined by scientific minds as ‘the Universe’ or ‘universal substance, by philosophers as ‘The Non-dual Absolute’, by religionists & yogis as ‘God’, by artists as ‘Divine inspiration’, by what we mean here as ‘Spirit’. Whatever the concept of the Infinite Source, Spiritual Psychology is re-union of the individual Spirit, or Soul, with the Infinite Source, the Absolute Infinite Spirit.

What is Spirit?

Spirit is the first cause of all we see, and feel, and do. Spirit consists of Will & Consciousness. A great spiritual teacher says the Spirit blows where it lists.. so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

What is Psychology?

The term “psyche” is the Greek for ‘Soul’ and means ‘life, breath’ and ‘to blow, breathe’.
The term Psychology means logos, or rationalization, about the Soul.

A Brief History of Psychology’s Evolution

In its origin, Psychology meant the study of the Soul, but the way men have interpreted this has somewhat changed over time. Around the time of the Renaissance in Europe, about 14th Century in Italy spreading into Germany and England in about the 16th Century, scientific men said “let us not believe anything unless we can get at it with our physical senses”.

If we return to the original meaning of Psychology, it is obvious that it isn’t possible to get ‘physical hands’ on the Soul, because the Psyche is ‘sentiency’ itself. Sentiency is ‘feeling’. Sentience is field consciousness. The Psyche is Spirit, pure consciousness circumscribing, and in the act of circumscribing, en-sphering itself, making a unific being, the Soul, and the Soul ‘feels’ itself.

The Psyche is ‘a zone of feeling’, and Psychology is ‘a rationalisation of why we feel what we feel’. In the beginning “God .. breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The text does not say man was ‘given’ a Soul, rather he ‘became’ a Soul. The Soul is not an accessory, the Soul is the very man himself, divinely created.

In the Renaissance, and in so-called Behaviourism, Soul becomes ‘how do things cause action’. This then becomes a discipline in terms of how the Mind is applied & measured in physical experiments. So the definition is changed and the ‘Psyche’ equals the ‘Mind’. The Mind during this period is defined to be ‘the coordinator of five sense organ information’, that is, how to coordinate sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile touch.

So in the Renaissance, if Psyche equals Mind, it is clear that the five senses cannot explain, measure, and be applied to the ‘field’ which surrounds the physical body.

This leads to the definition of Psychology, from the 14th Century, becoming ‘the Science of the Mind’, that is, ‘Psychology is rationalisation about coordination of the five senses’. Psychology has changed in definition from ‘why we feel what we feel’ to ‘a measuring process of the counting mechanism, the Mind’.

Then the scientists of the day discovered that using the Mind required an individual to introvert their attention. Introversion of attention requires a high degree of concentration and self-discipline, a talent not widely prevalent in many scientists, who instead are looking ‘out’ at the world and at their experiments.

Science is about projection onto the external world, and experimentation in a laboratory, and analysis by numerical formulas & statistics. Psychology begins experimenting on physical bodies, and even on bodies ‘non-human’.

The modern scientific approach to Psychology and the Psyche has become a ‘non-entity’ because scientists have declared that they are going to ‘study bodies in their relations’, and this we call ‘Mechanistic Behaviourism’. The result of this reduces the whole human being to a ‘system of mechanical reflexes’, starting with the most simple reflex of all, the reflex of a so-called ‘inanimate’ object like a hammer causing the bounce of a table.

What has Psychology become?

We now have historically three kinds of psychology:-

1. The ancient view, Psychology is ‘why the feeler, the sentiency, feels what it feels’
2. The Renaissance view ‘the science of the mind’, as the coordinator of the five senses; therefore Psyche equals Mind.
3. The 19th century view of ‘mechanical reflex experiments on animals, stimulating their salivation mechanisms and meat and bell-ringing, etc’, Mechanistic Behaviourism.

In effect this is a steady degeneration from Spirit, through Soul, through Mind, into Body, creating a natural hierarchy

1. Spirit, primary cause,
2. becoming Soul, sentiency itself,
3. a counting process going on in the so-called Mind,
4. the supplying of data to the mind through five different tools, Body sense organs, and statistical analysis of this,
5. down to a substratum underneath of passivity itself, which is five categories of Object which can be observed by the 5 sense organs.

This final level (5) is the interest of Psychology by businessmen & marketing people; how to trick the mechanical reflex of Souls identified with their Physical Body and the body’s desire to be stimulated by Physical Objects in a gross material situation.

What is Real Psychology & what is it about?

Psychology is the rationale of ‘feeling’. Feeling is field consciousness. Modalities of feeling include: sentience, awareness & consciousness. Everything we know is known in, by and through feeling and its modalities. Feeling is at the basis of all that we know, and that we know. Feeling is that out of which all action arises, all thinking (mind), all physical body function. This fact has led us as real psychologists to ‘study our own physical, mental and psychical processes.

• We can find out how our whole being is related to its parts, and how these parts interact with each other within the whole.
• We can teach ourselves to watch our own processes, Physical, Mental, Psychical and Spiritual.
• We can start by watching how we actually do certain physical actions and then watch our reasons for them, and how we feel about them, and about our own self in the doing and thinking of them.
• And then we can seek the Spirit within ourself, the centre of our freedom and initiative.’

The Psyche referred to in Psychology is the Soul, that essence of our being which feels and which relates to the Spirit within us.

Difficulties arising within a being as to its feeling are the aim of Psychological assessment and remedy.

Anxiety

For example, Anxiety is a modification of feeling.
‘Anxiety of some degree is always present in living beings, for some kind of damage is always a possibility.
But we are to distinguish between different kinds of harm, physical, mental. psychological and spiritual.

• If only physical harm is possible, then it is relatively easy to adjust to it.’
• If mental harm is possible, then we look to clarify & organise formal elements within the mind space, and to differentiate these from desires, motives and emotional states, so that the mind in its formal pattern is enabled to organise & integrate, and thus respond clearly & adequately to inner & outer stimuli.
• ‘But if psychological harm is done, the soul itself is involved and may complicate its position by wrong interpretation of its condition.
• Spiritual harm is that which reduces our freedom of decision and so alienates us from our true source in God.’ EH

From an understanding of the Structure of the Psyche, Spiritual Psychology aims to relate the Psyche to the Spirit, and then observing how the Psyche governs the Mind & the Body.

At the very centre of a being is the Spirit, and where the Spirit meets the Soul is a relation. This is the highest relation of all relations, without which the Soul is lost to the Mind, & the Body, & the World, and the World’s devices and problems.

For some people, for some time in life, the above loss to consciousness seems of little or no account. But the relation is significant and either the Soul finds and builds this relation in life, or delays to the very end where death resolves the loss.

Here we are offering assistance for individuals who are seeking psychological assistance at the level of Spiritual Psychology.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Jesus Christ, (Matthew 16:25-6)