For many people in the modern materialistic world psychology has replaced religion, but how can you heal the mind if you don't acknowledge the soul? And most forms of psychology, despite the name, do not acknowledge the soul except sometimes when it is envisaged as an aspect or extension of the mind.
Human beings consist of a body, a mind and a soul, all three of which must be aligned and interacting harmoniously for an individual to be in a healthy state. All three are important to the whole but there is a hierarchical relationship between them which is to say the soul has a mind and a body rather than the other way around. So, I do not have a soul. I am the soul.
If the spiritual is not taken into account a person will be not be in a healthy psychological condition, and while not everyone will feel the impact of this there will still be damage. To attempt to heal the mind without acknowledging spiritual factors is superficial at best.
Some forms of psychology do attempt to integrate a spiritual element into their thinking but they do this by making the spiritual a subset of the psychological so giving a false idea of the spiritual by reducing it to the psychological.
But the spiritual exists at a level of being beyond the psychological and the psychological cannot touch it. All it can do is create a conceptual framework for it but if that is mistaken for the real thing any true connection to the soul is lost.
The soul is sometimes described as beyond form but this is not strictly true. It does not have material form but it has a spiritual form which is its quality. It takes on form in order to express itself in the material world but then it mistakenly identifies itself with the form assumed. It forgets its true nature. Psychology addresses itself to the mind but the mind is part of the form the soul takes in order to interact with the world. If there is not a clear understanding of the difference between mind and soul psychology cannot address deeper problems when they arise and they will even if one is not aware of it with the outer self.
We can go further than this and apply the same line of reasoning to religion. Does religion bring us into relationship with the soul or does it supplant that relationship with itself? It depends on how an individual views his religion. Does he see it as a path to God and the soul or a replacement for God and the soul? Often it is a bit of both but we must, especially now when all religions are spiritual shadows of their former selves, recognise that religion belongs to the world of form and that true spiritual understanding must lie beyond that.
In the End Times religions lose their power for two reasons, one bad, one good. The bad reason is the prevailing atheism and egotism of a large section of humanity. The good reason is that an increasing number of people see that the form of religion is an inevitable limitation on the higher understanding. That is not to reject religion because if that limitation is recognised one can go beyond it while still using the good in religion as a guide and support. But a religion is rather like one of those rockets that enable a spaceship to escape the earth's gravity but must then be jettisoned if the ship is to advance deeper into space. This may not always have been so but has become so in our day when End Times energy affects everything in the world.
4 comments:
Spot-on! Psychology was my thing as an atheist. Soul-less psychology degrades the mind because it deprives it of purpose. The only purpose offered to the mind in a soul-less frame is to serve the body i.e. hedonism, which is where this approach always leads even among those who start out with some higher goals of worldly achievement.
As for the booster rockets, this is how Aquinas conceptualized the theological virtues of faith and hope. Only love would go with us to heaven: the other two are crucial to get us there but also don’t come with us. It parallels soul/body/mind (although I assume we have all three in heaven) in that if you spend all your effort making those booster rockets as powerful as possible you’ll find in the end you’re launching an empty capsule into the heavens.
Aquinas mentioned booster rockets? He was a man ahead of his time! More seriously, I like the way you have developed that idea into the notion of launching an empty capsule which is precisely what many people do who focus on the wrong thing.
As for having soul, body and mind in the higher world I am sure that's the case though mind and body will be transformed and transfigured by grace, and now fully expressive of the soul.
"(The soul) takes on form in order to express itself in the material world but then it mistakenly identifies itself with the form assumed. It forgets its true nature."
Yes, but why? Why do we choose to leave the world of eternity to enter into this world of time with all its strife & suffering? In order to remember our true divine nature *while we are physically incarnate*. We must fall asleep before we can awaken. That is the harvest we can bring with us back into eternity, the harvest of the memory of completing that circle.
Memory is the one thing that can be added to eternity, which is whole and complete within itself.
The soul incarnates in order to grow through experiencing duality which it doesn't know on its own plane. It's like the old saying that separation leads to completion. It's to make an unfallen Adam into a Christ.
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