Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#4368 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The following is an
excerpt from the article at...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mariana-caplan-phd/spirituality-and-psychology_b_941242.html
Psychology and
Spirituality: One Path or Two?
by Mariana Caplan
It is very important to
understand that our psychological blocks can actually impede our
capacity to open to spiritual understanding and experience.
Trauma and a sense of betrayal in childhood, which many have
experienced to some degree, can result in a failure to trust the
divine and life itself and in great difficulty in surrendering to
the unknown. We learned from a very young age that the world was
not a safe place, and that whatever "God" existed was
not a god who would protect us from child abuse.
Feelings of abandonment
and isolation in childhood can make it much more challenging to
encounter and open to the experience of spaciousness that
meditation offers, as it can be difficult to distinguish between
non-dual emptiness and the experience of profound lack and
psychological emptiness. Disappointment in childhood authorities,
teachers and religious leaders can make it very difficult to
trust spiritual teachers, teachings and even the divine itself.
Undigested emotions from our past profoundly color our
relationship to spiritual concepts, practices and experiences.
On the other hand, we can
get so wrapped up in psychological processing that it becomes a
kind of narcissistic self-involvement, leaving us trapped in a
cul-de-sac that neither brings about the powerful capacity for
compassion and wisdom that can be discovered through spiritual
practice, nor produces the sense of social responsibility that
Hillman claims the field of psychology has failed to pay
attention to.
Many schools of
mainstream psychology have routinely failed to take into account
a broader spiritual perspective, frequently reducing profound
spiritual insights to neurotic fantasies, infantile regressions
and idealized projections. For example, I once consulted with a
psychologist in her late 30s who was experiencing tremendous
confusion about her spiritual life because her therapist had
convinced her that her relationship with her spiritual teacher
was purely a romanticized projection based on unmet childhood
needs and a failure to individuate from her father.
A chain is only as strong
as its weakest link, and I am convinced that most spiritual
scandals, as well as disillusionment among spiritual seekers and
practitioners, are the result of spiritual teachers who have
significant areas of psychological blindness. They assume their
great spiritual insight has taken care of their psychological
wounds when it has not. We are not weak, but courageous, when we
dare to again face the things that we would rather not see and
confront but in the end continue to blind us to the wholeness of
all that we are.
Adapted from "Eyes
Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path"
(Sounds True, 2010)
Read the entire article
here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mariana-caplan-phd/spirituality-and-psychology_b_941242.html