Spiritual Psychology

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Essay on Spiritual Psychology

Essays

ESSAYS ON SPIRITUAL HUMANISM

 

Moller de la Rouviere

 

Author of: Spirituality Without God

 

The following short description of `Spiritual Psychology' comes from

a practical, self-help course on the subject Möller is currently

working on:

 

WHAT IS SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY?

 

Spiritual Psychology is a way of facilitating the natural unfolding

of your own human potential whereby your current distressful

emotional disturbances will lose their hold over your life and allow

you to breathe freely - deep into the well of your true, happy and

natural human state.

 

The way the word `Spirit' is used in this Course points to that deep

feeling -sense we all have of our own inherent sanity, well-being,

equanimity and health. Spiritual Psychology is a methodical and

practical approach both to work with, and to resolve, disturbing and

debilitating emotional and psychological shadow material from this

prior disposition of health and wholeness. The approach to integral

living that this Course explores does not assume any inner

disturbance, whether physical, mental or emotional, as fundamental to

your living reality.

 

Rather, Spiritual Psychology assumes that you are always, already

perfectly healthy, sane and whole, and that this inherent well-being

has merely been obscured by unnecessary and uninspected impositions

on your inner order and general well-being.

 

The word `Spirit' could also be equated with those natural and

uniquely human qualities such as compassion, love, joy,

companionship, charity, empathy, sympathy, unconditioned emotional

response-ability, self-worth, intelligence and insight. These are

qualities inherent to our human condition which cannot be created or

destroyed. Through the way we live, though, these may either be

allowed to reveal themselves as the functional manifestations of our

own inherent well-being, or they may remain obscured through

uninspected living.

 

Except in the case of extreme emotional/psychological debilitation,

even deeply wounded individuals retain the capacity to give and

receive love and human warmth. And as there is no clearer

manifestation of sanity and a well-adjusted emotional disposition

than the capacity to give and receive love freely and un-self-

consciously, this deep urge for the expression of love from within

our being points to our inalienable prior state of health and order.

 

This profoundly humane quality is therefore built into the fabric of

our humanness, and although not much of it is generally evident in

our daily interactions with one another, it is always there for us to

draw on should we open ourselves to its delicate promptings from

within. This deep humaneness can only be obscured. It can never be

touched or destroyed. It is our birthright and is always ready to

shine through the fog of our uninspected responses to life to become

our living truth, if only we could find ways of allowing it to

manifest.

 

We are born sane and whole. About this we never need to concern

ourselves. Our nature inheres in an unfathomable well of creative

Intelligence and emotional purity. And this inherent emotional

warmth, charity, mental order and Intelligence are those uniquely

human qualities we may refer to as the human `spirit'.

 

Spiritual Psychology primarily endeavors to re-establish an open

channel of communication between your everyday, functional awareness

and this deeper feeling-sense of complete well-being and inherent

wholeness. In fact, before you are encouraged to start any work on

your psychological and emotional disturbances, you will first be

shown how to establish yourself in a disposition of deep quiet and

inner Intelligence which exists prior to your emotional shadow

material and psychological reactivities. This will safeguard you

against the mistake, so prevalent in many psychotherapeutic methods,

to approach your inner complexities from the point of view of the

dilemma itself. Unless a stable inner environment has been well

established, the positive, freeing results of emotional work will not

be able to integrate themselves into your life because of the

relative superficiality of how they had been approached and resolved.

The deeper the inner quiet from which you observe and work with these

disturbances, the more thorough, penetrating and sustainable will be

the results of your endeavor....

 

In this Course you will be shown many forms of deep mental relaxation

and bodily awareness to serve as preparation for the important

emotional work that lies ahead. Only when the right inner environment

has been established will you be able to truly look at yourself,

learn about yourself and come to new and liberating insights about

your present condition. Using this approach, you will always be

working from a perfectly safe, yet extremely effective, inner

disposition to re-establish yourself in your natural well of sanity

and inner order. You will always be encouraged to start any inner

work from this disposition of inner quiet.

 

To follow this kind of enquiry, you will not be asked to believe in

anything other than your own clarity, observational ability and

natural Intelligence. You will be taken by the hand and shown simple,

direct and practical ways of how to feel into your own prior sanity

and natural order. This feeling-sense will become your own experience

and, once yours, it could serve as a powerful base from where you

could investigate all your emotional disturbances. In this way you

will allow yourself direct access to disturbing shadow material

without becoming disturbed or absorbed in its reactive and often

volatile content. Rather, you will be led by the subtlety of your own

Intelligence to work through your disturbing material quite naturally

and without defense or resistance.

 

Spiritual Psychology assumes that health is always prior to sickness

and that any psychological or emotional disturbance is like being

affected with some kind of ailment. Behind the disruption in your

normal functioning, your inner health has neither been touched nor

disturbed. What you feel as specific physical, emotional or mental

symptoms do not detract from the fact that prior to these

disturbances your being still inheres in a natural state of health

and order which is always ready to heal, and bring to perfect

functioning, any aspect of disturbance within itself. If health was

not your fundamental condition, no healing could ever take place.

 

Healing is the function of a healthy, whole organism, despite

temporary debilitation or malfunction in any of its parts – including

your emotional/psychological being.

 

The health you regain after your sickness is the same health that

served the process of healing. At no point did you believe that you

were sick in any ultimate sense, and although the sickness might have

been uncomfortable or even painful, deep inside you knew that you

would get better. At no stage did you become totally identified with

the disturbance as though it reflected your entire being.

 

Exactly the same is true of your painful and disturbing emotional and

psychological experiences. These are forms of inner disturbance, and,

painful as these may be, there is nothing written that you need to

become identified with them as though they truly reflect the totality

of your being.

 

You are already as emotionally healthy and whole as your body is

fundamentally healthy and whole – even in the midst of any disturbed

aspect of it, whether physical, mental or emotional. And your human

spirit is as eager and capable of healing aspects of your

psychological being, as the life-energy of the body is ready to do

its healing work when its holistic functioning has temporarily been

interfered with through sickness or trauma.

 

Sickness, discomfort and disease are secondary to, and generally of a

lower and less subtle order of organization, than health. When the

healthy, life-positive functioning of the organism has been

sufficiently eroded through inappropriate living, thinking and

feeling, debilitation and disorder may well become dominant and may

finally lead to total disorganization of the psychophysical

instrument. This naturally leads to death or a state of living

inertia. But should there remain even the slightest possibility of

recuperation, the organism will always, as far as possible, move

toward the rebalancing of life energy. This again implies that even

under dire circumstances, the being as a whole inheres in a state of

well-being which could be seen as the fundamental ordering principle

and initiator of any movement back into a wider condition of health.

And this relationship between health and sickness, where health is

always seen to be prior and inherently of a higher order than

sickness or dysfunction, forms the basis of all realistic and

Intelligent investigations into any disturbance. It is also one of

the most pivotal insights that informs every aspect of this Course

in `Spiritual Psychology'.

 

Another, very important aspect, integral to `Spiritual Psychology',

is the specific use of the term `Spiritual' in relation to the

psychological work on which this Course centers.

 

In my book: Spirituality Without God, I continually stress the close

working relationship between psychological work and any sustainable

freedom which spiritual enquiry might afford us. In this book I

describe `spirituality' as the gradual unfolding of all the more

subtle and humane qualities which are already present within our

being but that need to be allowed to reveal themselves in our daily

living. We are all human by birth, but to become truly humane, we

need to allow for the gradual development and unfolding of our true

humanity which is our deep potential and, when allowed to manifest,

is directly experienced as love, compassion, self-respect,

positivity, intelligence, empathy, equanimity and relational

integrity. These are aspects of our being which have been obscured

from very early in life but, as we have seen in the case of health,

are always immediately available to us should we allow for their

revelation.

 

When we consider psychological work, we find ourselves in very much

the same position relative to these deeper qualities of being. True

sanity and integral living are not possible as long as we firmly

believe in the projections which obscure our natural emotional

equanimity. In fact, to be a sane and emotionally healthy human

being, is to stand no less in the fullness of these spiritual

qualities, than we would expect to manifest only after deep spiritual

enquiry. Spiritual life is human life fulfilled. And psychological

and emotional order form an integral part of such a living reality.

 

This brings us back to the question about the use of the

term `Spiritual Psychology'.

 

Spiritual Psychology makes use of all the methods we would apply to

free ourselves from our psychological complexities during the self-

transcendent work which characterizes the spiritual path. When we

thus employ the term `Spiritual Psychology', this is because we not

only approach our psychological work with the same methods as we do

in more formal self-transcendent (spiritual) work, we also arrive at

the same freedom from emotional disturbances as we would expect from

the spiritualizing process.

 

This Course addresses only the deep psychological and emotional

disturbances we carry with us from day to day, and makes no claims to

facilitate the complete process of the free, enlightened condition of

Non-dual awakening. (For such a complete investigation into the

spiritualizing process as a whole, you could explore the work

presented in Spirituality Without God). Spiritual Psychology takes

its stand as a method of psychological and emotional enquiry with its

sole purpose to free you from binding emotional/psychological shadow

material.

 

2005 Möller de la Rouvière