Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
 
What Is Soul Psychology?
 
God equals man minus ego.
 
—SAI BABA
 
We are living in an extraordinary time in the history of the earth’s evolution. Extraordinary advances have been made within this last millennium. In the last hundred years alone, we have witnessed startling breakthroughs in technology, medicine, and communications. We have landed on other planets, put a space station in orbit, grown test-tube babies, and cloned sheep. In the midst of these incredible achievements, mankind has never been more at odds with itself and so lacking in inner peace. Why is this?
 
To say that there is one answer would merely oversimplify complex issues. While there are many aspects to consider, there are two main patterns woven through this tapestry of answers. The first is humanity’s obsession with material expansion and accelerated change at the expense of focusing on psychospiritual development. The second thread is failing to take into account the degree to which an individual’s relationship to the psychological self affects his or her spiritual life. Simply put, if we are not right with ourselves, then every relationship in our lives, including our relation to God, will be compromised.
 
I have spent my life studying psychology or sharing my days with those who work in the field, including my parents, my stepmother, and my sister, who are all professionals in this area. This early and frequent exposure hasn’t given me all the answers to life’s problems; however, I do feel that my personal and professional background, including my many years of experience in working as a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor, and as a licensed minister and spiritual teacher, has given me some valuable insights. Most particularly, it has helped me to understand, and to experience firsthand, the limited means traditional forms of psychology have used to deal with these two crucial issues.
 
I have a great deal of respect for traditional psychology and for those well-intentioned individuals who practice it. And I feel fortunate that I underwent traditional psychological training. It provided me with the solid foundation on which I’ve based my explorations of alternative methods and models, which eventually led me to establish my practice based on the principles of soul psychology. As you can probably gather from the very words themselves, soul psychology takes us out of the realm of traditional psychology by dealing with elements of human existence that traditional psychology often ignores completely or makes only passing mention of.
 
While traditional forms of psychology are primarily concerned with helping individuals deal with crises and helping them make adjustments to their personality, soul psychology expands upon the work with the individual’s personality to integrate the metaphysical aspects of human existence. Regardless of our spiritual or religious orientation, most of us would agree that soul is a convenient term to use for that part of human experience that is beyond body, mind, and emotion.
 
The purpose of this book is to build a bridge that spans the wonderful work being done in the field of personality-level psychology (traditional psychology) and the new tradition of soul-based psychology. What amazed me as I sat through lecture after lecture and read textbook after textbook in my traditional training was that few if any of the psychological theories I encountered even mentioned one of the most important aspects of human life—our relationship to God in whatever form we perceive him/her/it. I was doing my spiritual work at the time, and I simply couldn’t understand why none of the most highly regarded psychological theorists dealt directly with our spiritual side. Perhaps their need to guard psychology’s tenuous position as a rational science prevented them from doing so. The prevailing belief that being “correct” scientifically was more important than helping people become fully human troubled me as a student and well after.
 
When I went through my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs, professors taught psychology by throwing many different psychological theories at us, without guiding us to an understanding of which ones were valid and which ones were not. That was because no one teaching the classes could tell us this with any certainty. Every professor had a favorite theory. Our job as students was to try to develop some understanding of all of them and, on our own, select the one we preferred. This became the foundation for how we practiced and how we lived. My problem was that I couldn’t really accept any single theory by itself. They all contained what I would call “slivers of truth.” Maybe if you put them all together you would have a half-truth. But each theorist asserted that he or she had discovered the whole truth.
 
That’s not to say that these slivers of truth can’t help some of the people some of the time. Nevertheless, if you were to construct a horizontal graph with numbers at the endpoints of 0 and 100 (with 0 representing the lowest level of consciousness and 100 being the highest level—the realm of the Ascended Masters), then traditional psychology might be able to help some people attain level 30. It could never take you any higher. Even if you visited a traditional psychologist five times a week for the next fifty years, you wouldn’t be able to get past 30. Why? Because traditional psychology is 98 percent devoid of spirituality.
 
In my first book, The Ascension Handbook, I spoke of the three levels of self-actualization—the personality level, the soul level, and the monadic level. At traditional psychology’s absolute best (and even this is debatable), it can help you to achieve personality level self-actualization. That is the 30 percent level of consciousness I credit it with. Some people would say that 30 percent consciousness is acceptable. Many others aspire to something higher. If you are reading this book, you probably belong to that second group, and you intuitively understand that traditional psychology cannot help you to gain the soul self that you are working toward.
 
Of the many theories that I studied in school, I can recall only three that acknowledged spiritual reality—the theories of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Roberto Assagioli. Most people, including many students of traditional psychology, have probably never heard of Roberto Assagioli. He was an Italian psychologist who developed the theory of psychosynthesis and was an early practitioner of what we would today call transpersonal psychology. Because this is a comparatively new field in this country, his work has had little effect on traditional psychological theory. Assagioli believed that in the aftermath of turbulent wars, humankind could no longer safely identify with the groups we once sought to help establish our identity—family, tribe, clan, class, or nation. As a result, people had to turn back to themselves as individuals.
 
Unlike Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, which relied on analysis (literally, a breaking down into parts), psychosynthesis seeks to expand our awareness so that we can integrate all parts of our personality, including the spiritual components, into a more cohesive self. It is founded on the principle that life has purpose and meaning and we are a part of this ordered universe.
 
Abraham Maslow, who is probably most well known for elaborating on the concept of humans’ hierarchy of needs, mentions the value of a spiritual aspect of life, but he wrote very little directly about the subject. When one interviewer asked him if he believed in God, Maslow replied that he didn’t need to believe; he knew. What most interests me about his work was his belief that the body, and to an extent the psyche, operates under the principle of homeostasis, or balance. Finally, it was Maslow who coined the term self-actualization. He stated that this was mankind’s highest-order need, and that unless our other needs were fulfilled first, we could never attain self-actualization. His theory falls short, however, because it deals only with personality-level self-actualization.
 
Carl Jung was one of the few famous traditional psychologists to break away from the pack and integrate spirituality into his theories. He was truly a great catalyst in depth psychology and the field known as adult development theory. He recognized the ideal of the self, and broke away from Freud’s fixation on sexuality. He was a master interpreter of dreams and believed in reincarnation, although he was reluctant to let this belief be known. Among his many contributions are the concepts of introversion and extroversion, synchronicity, archetype, and collective unconscious. He taught us that by confronting honestly the everyday personal conflicts we all encounter, we also face the challenges presented by the most fundamental spiritual problems of universal concern. I have great respect for Jung’s work and recommend that you read it. Unfortunately, although Jung was a great catalyst to the field, even his work was quite limited when compared to the fuller understanding of Soul Psychology that is developing today.
 
Besides traditional psychology’s lack of a spiritual component, traditional psychology and soul psychology differ in several other important ways. One of the basic beliefs underlying soul psychology is that we can choose between two ways of thinking in the world. We can think from the negative ego mind—self-centered and dualistic, separated from the Divine, and based on fear—or we can think from the spiritual mind. Traditional psychology tries to heal us from within the negative ego’s web. In fact, we cannot truly heal ourselves until we fully transcend the negative ego.
 
It is essential to understand that the negative ego is the one real problem that all people on earth make themselves suffer from. The negative ego does not interpret experiences in our lives as lessons, challenges, or gifts. Rather, it curses or gets angry when its attachments/expectations are not met. The negative ego is the root of all negative emotions, all negative thoughts, all negative behaviors, all relationship problems, and poverty consciousness, (lack of money and real success). In essence, it is the negative ego that is blocking you from God-realization. As one of the great spiritual teachers of India, Sai Baba, says, “God is hidden by the mountain range of ego.”