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 Reviews

Kenneth Ring: "I wish you the very best of luck in bringing out your work...Its value is evident to me and you deserve a large and grateful audience for it."

Lawrence Jaffe: "A valuable resource for the practitioner, a one-of-a-kind, comprehensive survey of the burgeoning field of spirituality and psychology...You have accomplished this task in an exemplary manner, congratulations."

Edmund Bourne, Ph.D., author, psychologist: "I just finished reading But Where Is God? Psychotherapy and the Religious Search and feel it is a brilliant and far-reaching contribution to the overall integration of psychology/psychotherapy and spirituality. Certainly I've not seen anything else like your book.

BUT WHERE IS GOD?
Preface
Introduction
Table of Contents

Part 1: Argument for a Mature Integration of Psychotherapy and Spirituality chapter: 1. Why is the Integration of Psychotherapy and Spirituality Important? 2. History, Politics, and Contemporary Culture: How Psychotherapy Lost Its Soul and Where Things Are Heading 3. Integration of Psychotherapy and Spirituality: Benefits and Liabilities

Part 2: Building a Model for a Spiritual Psychotherapy chapter: 4. Survey of the Range and Frequency of Religious Issues and Experiences Commonly Encountered in Psychotherapeutic Practice 5. The Varieties of Religious Experience 6. Definitions and Distinctions: The Language of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality 7. A Psychospiritual Theory of Personality and Its Development 8. The Spiritual Meaning of Psychiatric Disorders: A Revised Taxonomy 9. A Psychospiritual Model of Psychotherapy

Part 3: The Soul of Spiritual Psychotherapy: Experiences in the Consulting Room chapter: 10. In the Hour: One Therapist's Reflections on Spirituality in the Psychotherapy 11. Case Studies in Psychotherapy and Spirituality 12. A Message to Clients Part 4: Practical and Applied Issues 13. The Role of the Mental Health Practitioner 14. Spiritual Assessment, Diagnosis, Management, and Referral 15. Special Problems in a Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy 16. Spiritual Practices as Adjuncts to Therapy 17. Education, Training, and Personal Preparation: A New Specialization? 18. Practical, Ethical, and Malpractice Issues Part 5: Integration, Summary and Implications 19. Sacred Psychology: The Basic Religious Nature and Function of the Psyche

   Excerpts:

From Chapter 5.

It is clear that, from this vast deadness of space, man is an infinitely unlikely product. From basic matter comes an organization of elements that is conscious, writes symphonies, and creates satellite TV and cellular communication. We think, feel, know, and love; and now we are participating in evolution itself. This achievement is beyond all reason and probability. We are a miracle. But what for?

   This chapter and its accompanying appendix review a variety of religious models and metaphors. The assumption behind this review is that our common and universal religious quest finds multifaceted expression, informing a broad and diverse continuum from first hand mystical communion to formal theological doctrine, from ancient religious traditions to new and emerging ones, and from aboriginal peoples to highly industrial civilizations. Each form has something unique to teach and across traditions are many common and recurring themes.

    The purposes of this review are fourfold: 1. to examine how religion grows and develops, 2. to discover the kinds of ultimate truths or values contained in each religious form, 3. to grasp the universal religious and spiritual problems people bring into psychotherapy, and 4. to provide a foundation for our psychospiritual model of psychotherapy. But there is one more fundamental purpose to this review: It is a way of returning to the divine ground of the religious psyche in order to awaken our own intrinsic mystical capacity to sense, experience, and trust the sacred dimension of existence.

   The religious search is ubiquitous. In every historical era and geographic location, the human psyche seems to intuit that there is a divine reality or principle within or behind the material one, and that we must try to know its purposes. We believe further that the pain and confusion of life, and indeed all that befalls us, are somehow related to this divine order. When we are in trouble, atheist and believer alike, instinctively cry out one of God's many names.

   At the core of the human personality, where psychology and spirituality meet in primordial oneness, lies the religious psyche. It is a wellspring forever yielding life sustaining and life transforming meaning to the multifarious experience of human existence. Spiritual seekers find a living sacred reality in this core - as a fire, a stillness, a voice, a presence, a revelation, a black and empty void, an immensity, a prayer or hymn, or a stream of symbols and images. Religion is born and repeatedly affirmed from this numinous center which is, itself, divine.

   In every religion, there remains a living spark of its founder's original fiery revelation and a view of the spiritual nature and purpose of the world. We study the "Varieties of Religious Experience," to borrow William James' famous title, hoping to know more about this revelatory process and its meaning for our existence, and to understand what it is that our clients are instinctually pursuing in the spiritual dimension of their psychotherapeutic journey, for that same pulsating spark of divine consciousness whispers to the heart and soul of each person seated before us in the consulting room. T.O.C

From Chapter 7. A Psychospiritual Theory of Personality

   In the traditional model, personality functioning is viewed as a homeostasis of conflicting forces that must be managed by the ego (e.g., conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious, emotions and conscience, needs and reality, unsocialized impulses and civilized standards of behavior), which of course is true, but it is much more than that. Putting soul back in the center of personality gives ego an even greater task and obligation. Now it must not only struggle to recover and nourish the true self, it must also understand the spiritual continuum of true self, soul, divine self, and Divine Being. It is this continuum that gives birth to a spiritual psychology and model of personality.

   As the previous discussion suggests, the true self, while clearly a psychological experience, is also an aspect or expression of the divine. It is God's gift to us in this world, an interior reality we are responsible to nourish, cultivate, and express. Residing in the realm of God and eternity, the soul is more than the true self; it carries the larger dimension of our divine being, experience, and history that can flow into our center. One discovers that feeling the true self stirs the mystical and other worldly energies of soul, exciting the self and bringing our awareness closer to the divine self, a form of God's nature in our own. As we experience the movements of the true self, so we come to know God and our own interior divinity.

    Placing the true self, soul, divine self, and God or Divine Being in the heart of personality gives new meaning to the nature and dynamics of emotion. The true self is our emotional self. It is most happy when valued as the feeling center of the personality, when given opportunities for expression, and when it opens to soul or Divine Being in some way. When the true self is ignored, betrayed, or violated, on the other hand, we feel sadness, anger, despair, or collapse. Like a child too long rejected, the true self grows melancholy, lonely and mute. In this way, emotional states are more than simply psychological processes, they are spiritual as well. We feel wounding and sorrow when the joy and the gifts carried by the true self and its divine counterpart, the soul, are devalued or rejected. It is a loss of unimaginable magnitude, metaphorically equivalent to the very loss of the soul.

   It should be pointed out that the soul itself is not wounded, the true self is, for it is the true self that feels the great despair of losing contact with soul and God. This is one reason why depression is so important: it indicates that a deep wound has occurred to the self, crippling access to both its psychological and spiritual life sources. In the theory of personality presented here, it can be seen that when access to the true self and soul are blocked, the whole personality falters.

    Motivation, too, arises from the energies of the true self and slowly dies when those energies are chronically betrayed or forbidden. When in touch with the soul, we can be inspired to tremendous heights of activity and creativity, working days and nights without rest. The great composers, writers, scientists, athletes, and performers know and feel this reality. It is through the soul that the divine acts, prompting the ego to give expression to the true self and its gifts, and inspiring the whole spiritual adventure of life. The ego must learn to ask in every situation, "But Where is God?" and "How is God moving me here?" When this kind of contact between ego, true self, and soul is lost, inspiration wilts like a flower abandoned in a dark closet, or the self severed from God, and along with this abandonment goes motivation and creativity.

   Those who have learned to experience the soul first hand realize that the greatest happiness and joy on earth come not from achievements or possessions but from contact with this living divine center of psychological being. Even a momentary connection with one's soul or indwelling spirit can evoke an ecstasy far greater than most can bear. Anxiety, depression, confusion, alienation, and the whole spectrum of hellish mental states, on the other hand, form when we are chronically or profoundly separated from the soul through the betrayal of the true self. In this conceptualization, our emotional experience can be an immediate barometer of our spiritual health.

   As mystics from all ages attest, and as we will understand later, when we open to the soul and its spiritual vision, energies, and values, a subtle chemistry of transformation takes place. Our lives are once again filled with wonder, beauty, and inherent validity, and a world of shimmering light and radiance is found to be the real and actual nature of reality. When we ignore or reject true self, soul, divine self, and God, or when we feel forbidden from entering that realm of holiness in the world, then we court existential futility, meaninglessness, and the despair of aging, loss, suffering, and death.

   Coming full circle, we can see that in this system of personality, the ego is very important. It is responsible for: 1. dismantling the false self; 2. locating and supporting the true self; 3. opening to soul and its transformational inspirations and energies; 4. incarnating the nature of God or Divine Being into personality as divine self; and 5. examining each step and stage along the way alert to the myriad forms of self-deception found on the spiritual path (in psychotherapy, this is called reality testing, in religious traditions, it is termed discernment). The ego, rather than being overcome on the spiritual path, actually has a very big job to do.

    In this model, spiritual progress is also intimately tied to psychological health. The progressive transformation of personality cannot transpire fruitfully unless the personality is relatively healthy and healed of serious psychological wounds or personality damage. Too much damage forces the ego to spend all its energies defending against pain and coping with impairment in place of expanding consciousness into the divine. A basic purpose of psychotherapy, therefore, is to heal personality wounds and limitations in order to cultivate the psychological and spiritual ground for the inflowing divine. The life problems that break us open also serve this great purpose, as much or more than all the spiritual practices we could undertake. Breaking down the inner barriers of the false self, they expose the abandoned self and its need for soul. Psychotherapy of the whole person recognizes that these psychospiritual interactions contribute centrally to the processes of healing and human growth.

   Finally, this model argues that a spiritually oriented psychotherapy needs to recognize one more thing: that the ultimate purpose of this whole experience, this whole adventure of consciousness and life, is to find and know God here, now, in the eternal present. The sacred journey moves from ego to God, joining individual consciousness through the portal of soul to the consciousness of the immanent Divine Being, not in some later time, but in every experience we are given. T.O.C

From Chapter 9. The Sacred Nature of Psychotherapy

   In its origins and core, psychotherapy has always been essentially a sacred process. A spiritually oriented model of psychotherapy simply seeks to return to this foundation.

   Even the etymology of our professional language reveals the hidden spiritual meanings behind the practice of psychotherapy. The word psyche comes from the Greek for soul and "ology" incorporates the Greek word logos, meaning thought (later assimilated into western theology as the divine creative Word). Blending these word roots, Hillman translates psychology as "reason or speech or intelligible account of soul" (Hillman, 1985). Therapy comes from the Greek therapeia, which means support and caring, but in the religious context of early Greece, it may also have meant "service to the gods," or "doing the work of the gods" (Houston, 1987). When we combine these roots of our modern term psychotherapy, we see that it means "to serve soul" (Hillman, 1975).

    Psychotherapy, then, goes beyond fixing, treating, or healing emotional problems; in its ancient etymology, it is about facilitating the divine principle, the "work of the gods," in an individual's soul. The Jungians often refer to psychotherapy as "soul-making," a reference borrowed from the poet John Keats who described the secret purpose of the world as "the vale of soul-making." (Hillman, 1985). This original connection between psychological healing and spirituality is thus secretly and wonderfully maintained in the professional words we use everyday.

    The sacred nature of psychotherapy is further evident in the religious assumptions thoroughly embedded in its original form. While the essence of psychotherapy derives from the simple act of one person sharing her sorrow, guilt, fear, or suffering with another, it was always more than that, for our ancestors were also very religious. The ancients viewed the entire cosmos, animate and inanimate, as full of spirits and spiritual laws. Personal suffering shared in this context is saturated with spiritual meaning. Suffering arises from violating the sacred order, and healing involves atonement for such wrongdoing and disrespect. From this original experience emerged the basic rituals of confession, atonement, and absolution. Imbued from the start with such fundamental spiritual meaning, this basic and beautiful act of sharing pain with another is naturally and inherently religious. In the archetypal ground, it is holy.

   Indeed, modern psychotherapy, though seemingly cleansed of such prescientific spirituality, actually continues to embody, albeit covertly, the original ritual-symbolic process of its religious ancestry, for it cannot truly be separated from its archetypally sacred nature without losing its meaning and effectiveness. The basic task of psychotherapy is still to create a sacred space for the client to reveal his suffering. The therapist, as witness to this confession, unknowingly serves as the representative of the holy to whom the client has come in search of healing. Like a member of an unseen clerical order, the therapist prescribes the necessary acts of atonement (e.g., confession, catharsis, forgiveness) that restore the sufferer's relationship with the underlying divine order (in modern parlance, the unconscious or emotions). Consistent with this congruence of religion and psychotherapy, the client must be sincere in his self-examination, wish for healing, and reparations to be released from his suffering. It is also understood that all suffering cannot be relieved, for some is necessary for our personal and spiritual growth.

   The psychotherapy client tells his story in order to understand its personal and universal significance. At the personal level, he hopes that telling his story will somehow reveal the nature, source and cure of his distress. As his pain is discharged through the therapeutic acts of confession, catharsis, and forgiveness, this individual story reveals a larger, universal and spiritual one, for every seemingly pedestrian biography is actually filled with mythic significance. This archetypal epic, various labeled the Hero's Journey (Campbell, 1949) or the "Story of Everyman" (Robinson, 1995), teaches that profound spiritual meaning lies behind the stages and struggles of the life journey. This deep, inborn sequence of experiential stages uses the client's life circumstances and his story as a theater for the unfolding of his soul. Omnipresent in this story is the Divine Being and the sacred order of life.

    The universal story secretly encodes a symbolic description of a healing journey home. We learn that our pain drove us from the original sacred oneness, and that we created a personal story of suffering or victimization to cope with it. Our desire to fix this pain further distracts us from the imminent divine present, and we travel years trying to fix ourselves instead of becoming conscious. We need to tell that story in psychotherapy in order to heal the pain it carries. With no more historical pain to build a personal story on, we re-discover sacred reality and the original mystic consciousness of our ancestors. Most psychotherapy clients miss this step into the spiritual-archetypal dimension, for their therapists have also missed it. It is for the therapist to lift the veil of ignorance, illuminate the sacred story, and, with eyes of faith, show the healing self the sacred nature of the world.

   The therapist's goal is to attend to the client's soul in its journey of transformation. The therapist is, in Campbell's words, the doctor of the soul (Campbell, 1949) who helps the client discover how he betrayed his divine origins. In this process, the client recovers his original self and its relationship to his own soul, opens to his own divine nature, and discovers a mystical connection to the ultimate that radically changes his perception of the world and his place it. In this larger context, psychotherapy is truly a profound and sacred undertaking. T.O.C

From Chapter 19. Conclusions: But Where Is God?

   A spiritually oriented psychotherapy seeks to restore the quest for sacred consciousness. The "average" problems of life are rarely recognized to be spiritual in nature. Yet, as we have seen, unhappiness, stress, marital or family problems, illness, and even diagnosable psychological disorders always have an additional spiritual dimension. Seeming to lack the drama of religious visions and visitations, we minimize the spiritual value of our everyday problems, forgetting that they are really the staple of religious growth through the life span. God is found in living here and now far more often then in otherworldly experiences. When reviewing their lives during NDE's, people invariably discover that their greatest achievements, failures, and learnings came from the simple human struggle to love. It is clear, then, that psychological and relationship problems are spiritual struggles; the religious psyche, with its openness to sacred consciousness, can provide their larger meaning.

   As we have seen, there is still a higher step. Spiritual growth is not just another self-improvement exercise and therapy is not merely about feeling better. If it goes far enough, this work is literally one of spiritual transfiguration, that is, the awakening of our inherent mystical capacity to experience the present, this place, oneself, and life as the radiant, joyous, infinitely loving Divine Being. Emotional problems and psychological symptoms identify knots where the process of spiritual unfolding is blocked, betrayed, or wounded; psychotherapy strives to untie these knots. As the Ego-Soul Matrix outlines, the religious psyche organizes the structure, images, and stages of this transfiguring process, for these phenomena are the ways we learn to know the sacred, until the time comes when there is no need for further mediation.

   So, how do we actually meet God? In the inner darkness of prayer and meditation? Through the language of life's problems and events? In a dream or vision from beyond? A near-death experience or mystical rapture? In the extraordinary nature of "ordinary" experience? In scripture, dogma, and faith? Through creativity and the arts? In learning to love unconditionally? In times of desolation and hardship? Through the interventions of angels and guardian spirits? In church or wilderness? In the immediacy of childbirth and death? Through icons, symbols, and ritual? In the questions we ask? To the enlightened, God is met in all these ways and countless others. A spiritual psychotherapy, bringing life into the sacred and the sacred into life, values such myriad forms of divine revelation and interpenetration while at the same time recognizing the inherent cycles of self-deception and betrayal that appear on the journey back to God.

   In the final analysis, meeting God is a personal experience. The stages of spiritual growth tell us that this encounter happens as we consciously and intentionally explore our personal, subjective, immediate, literal, and radical experience of the divine. No one can do this for you, no one can tell you exactly how to do it, and each person's experience will be unique to them. Asking sincerely for divine guidance, we must enter the sacred encounter alone, wide awake, and experience it as fully as possible. Just as we learned how to swim in water, discovering the magic of sensation, buoyancy, movement, and trust, we must also learn how to swim in the divine. It is here now.

   Can you sense the Presence in and around you, pervading everything, manifesting as the radiant consciousness of the very world? Can you sense its awareness, ask it questions, tell it what you feel, bring it into your heart, be moved by its joy, and even know your own ground of being as the imminent divine itself? When all the emotional blocks to spiritual growth are worked through, the encounter with God becomes the therapy and God the therapist. Once this level of practice is achieved, there is no therapy, there is only divine life and a grateful surrender to its never ending revelation, transformation, and loving communion. T.O.C

Publisher and ordering information:

But Where Is God? will be published by Troitsa Books, a division of Nova Science Publishers (6080 Jericho Turnpike, Suite 207, Commack, New York 11725-2808) and will be available by the end of 1998 in any bookstore or ordered directly by calling 1-516-499-3103, or 3106