"Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence, and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit." Djwhal Khul, As Channeled By Alice A. Bailey
This chapter is a very interesting chapter and a very important one. It is a chapter that I am particularly qualified to write, given my experience in this lifetime. As you know, I have a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology and am a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor.
I have gone through traditional psychological training while being steeped in my spiritual studies. Adding to this, both my parents, step-mother and sister are also all in the field of psychology. I have grown up with it, lived, breathed, made my living at it, and have been surrounded by it my entire life. Because of this I have a lot of very strong thoughts and feelings about the entire field in general.
The first thing I want to say is that even though I practice soul psychology, which also might be called spiritual or transpersonal psychology, I have a lot of respect for the field of traditional psychology. I learned a lot in my traditional training and am glad I have the foundation or base.
The problem is that the field of traditional psychology is very limiting. The way I look at it, it is kind of like a horizontal graph that goes from one to one hundred. Zero might be considered the level of conscious-ness of a retarded person, and 100 being that of an enlightenment being or an Ascended Master.
Traditional psychology will take you maybe up to level 30, however, never any farther even if you go five times a week for the next fifty years. The reason for this is that traditional psychology, and I speak in the broadest sense of the term, is 98% devoid of soul and spirituality.
When I went through my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs the way psychology was taught was to throw hundreds of different psychology theories at you, and there was absolutely no understanding of which ones were correct or which ones false. The reason for this was because no one teaching the classes knew.
Every professor had his pet favorite. Your job as a student was to try to develop some understanding of all of them and, on your own, pick the one you happen to like and that is how you ended up doing therapy and living.
The problem comes in the fact that none of them are true, really. They are all what I would call slivers of truth. Maybe if you put them all together you would have a half truth. The problem is compounded because each theorist thinks they have the whole truth.
In my first book, I spoke of the three levels of self actualization. There is the personality level, the soul level and the Monadic level. Psychology, at absolute best (and even this is debatable), will help you to achieve personality level self actualization. There is the 30% I spoke of. Traditional psychology cannot help you to gain soul self actualization or Monadic (spiritual) self actualization because they don’t even recognize the existence of soul or spirit.
Of the hundreds of different theories I studied in school, I can only think of three that were of a spiritual orientation. Those three were Jungian psychology, Abraham Maslow, and Robert Assagiolli. I will start with the last one first.
Robert Assagiolli was an Italian psychologist who developed psycho synthesis. This is one of the few forms of traditional psychology I think is really worth studying. Even though I very much respect the work, he was never once mentioned in all the books I studied going through all my formal education. He is basically completely unheard of in the field of psychology in terms of college and post graduate education.
Maslow, although mentioning the value of spiritual aspect of life, wrote very little on the subject. He was well known for studying healthy people instead of sick people which was a major breakthrough in the field.
Carl Jung was the only famous traditional psychologist who broke away from the pack and integrated a spiritual aspect. He was truly a great catalyst in the field. He recognized the ideal of the "self", and broke away from Freud’s fixation on sexuality. He was a master of dreams and believed in reincarnation although didn’t really advertise the fact.
I greatly respect his work and recommend reading it. The problem is that although Jung was a great catalyst to the field, even his work was quite limited when you compare it to the fuller understanding of soul and spiritual psychology that we know of today. I will speak more on Jung later in this chapter.
One of the basics of soul psychology is that there are two ways of thinking in the world. You can think from your negative ego mind, or you can think from your soul or spiritual mind. Traditional psychology is basically a form of psychology that is trying to heal oneself within the negative ego’s web. One cannot truly heal themselves unless they fully transcend the negative ego. Was it not Sai Baba who said, "God equals man minus ego."
Traditional psychology has absolutely no idea that it is our thoughts which create our reality. It does not see that there are two diametrically opposed ways of interpreting reality. By definition this is impossible for them to see because there is no integration of the soul aspect. It is because of this that they see life through a paradigm or set of glasses that the negative ego is wearing.
Traditional psychology may be able to help you to see better through those glasses, however, you will never truly be able to see unless you take off those glasses and put on your Christ consciousness or soul consciousness glasses. The negative ego has infiltrated every aspect of our society, religion, traditional medicine, our prison systems, and all institutions on the planet… including psychology.
Now here comes the major problem. You have tens of millions of people who are graduating from college and post graduate work, getting degrees and licenses, who are completely ill qualified to be doing therapy or teaching psychology in our schools. They have, for the most part, not even stepped onto the path of initiation.
You can’t truly understand psychology unless you have integrated the soul. Traditional psychology does not have the slightest clue that our thoughts create our reality including our emotions. Traditional psychology believes that negative emotions are unavoidable, and a normal part of living.
Traditional psychology teaches victim consciousness. They have no understanding of the chakras, the soul, the spirit, the negative ego, intuition, higher mind, abstract mind, or the real purpose of life. They don’t even, for the most part, understand how the subconscious mind really works or how to reprogram it.
Again, I want to emphasize that I am not saying that traditional psychology has no value. It does have some initial value. If it can lead a person to personality level self actualization that is a great thing and nothing to shirk at. The problem is that very few forms of traditional psychology do lead to this point, and I will explain why later in this chapter.
The real problem comes, in that many people seek help which is good, but stay stuck in traditional psychology for endless years upon years, and don’t really move that far beyond their initial impetus or beyond, maybe, the first year’s work. They can’t because it is not within the theory they are working with or within the consciousness of the therapist to take them any farther. How can the therapist lead you to enlightenment and self realization when he or she hasn’t even taken the first initiation?
The problem for the average person is that there are not that many spiritual counselors around. The average person who has a religious orientation might consider going to their church or temple to receive counseling. I am here to tell you that that would probably be even worse than traditional counseling. Traditional religion is as filled with the contamination of negative ego as the field of psychology. What kind of guidance would a fundamentalist minister give the average couple seeking counseling?
The truth of the matter is that we need more new age spiritual counselors. There are a lot of them but they are unlicensed. In other words they haven’t’ gone through traditional schooling. The average person can’t accept this, in fact, is often warned against it.
In my opinion for the most part, I think they are much more qualified to do counseling than your traditional professional psychologists who have no relationship to soul. This goes completely counter to the views of the average materialistically minded person. They could not imagine how that could be possible. The spiritual people who take the traditional route, in my opinion, are extremely contaminated intellectually by the time they get out.
There are very few people who do not get overwhelmed and confused by all the psychological theories that are thrown at them. In this chapter I will briefly go through some of the main ones and try and compare it to the view of soul psychology.
In summary, there is nothing wrong with going to a traditional therapist for a time. It can be of great value in getting your personality under your control if it is the right person. At some point you need to get out, however, and find a spiritual teacher to take you the rest of the way, or you will never get beyond that 30%.
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