Spirituality and Personality: The Psycho-Spiritual Controversy

If you've got been worried in both remedy or counselling, or spirituality and meditation, in current years you've got possibly encountered  basic, polarized viewpoints concerning personality. Essentially it amounts to this: therapists are pro-character (and its development thru recovery neurosis and so forth.) whilst non secular instructors proclaim persona a huge waste of time, because neurotic or no longer, you are more than your persona.

This isn't particularly sudden, considering therapy and counseling have a tendency to be worried with the character, even as non secular practices are worried with higher topics. But it does lead the beginners and beginners right into a dilemma where they're confronted with the selection of what to do approximately persona. On the only hand, remedy may be an pricey, futile effort to higher the personality, whereas, however, non secular practice may additionally offer an excuse to leave personal issues at the back of, with the justification which you are transferring on to greater lofty concerns.

In the massive time I had been engaged in remedy and spirituality I can say that I actually have discovered the answer to this controversy! And I do not say it without reluctance and a certain caution, seeing that my solution is liable to offend both camps -- therapists and religious teachers. Perhaps my solution is less a rejection or abandonment of one standpoint for another and greater of a synthesis. This can be an answer of the first-rate type - the kind that doesn't marginalize or push aside all of us's enjoy or perspective. For my answer, while greatly new and progressive, does now not basically disagree with either point of view, however considers each appropriate to the complicated, total unfolding process of our human nature and capacity.

My solution to the predicament is to suggest a 3rd band of human experience. I call this "the authentic self" and due to the fact I am no longer the use of any unusual words I need to define this term, due to the fact I do imply some thing unique. The true self, in the way I use the term, is the bridge between the character and the religious self. It is arrived at generally, but no longer usually, after a lengthy period of intensive, deep, implemented and steady internal work. This internal work consists of a journey of self-discovery wherein one circumvents the self, becoming more and more aware of the conscious and unconscious cloth that accommodates one's sense of self, or ego. This entails person, which is basically protecting strategy or an smart, defensive response to early conditioning, which turns into increasingly more calcified and tailored at some point of adolescence and person lifestyles. Character consists of the way wherein we continue to exist and defend ourselves from inner and outer stimuli and in the long run avoid simply meeting lifestyles. It creates a self-imposed jail -- obstacles in which we feel falsely secure.

Self-discovery additionally entails cultivating our attention of persona, or the way wherein person (defenses and strategies) is experienced. Both inwardly and outwardly we erect a barrier to experience -- life events and other humans -- that's a masks, façade or character which eclipses the real character, or our genuine nature.

We additionally improve emotional and behavioural styles out of the murky stratum of the unconscious, out of unawareness, and see just how plenty our life is lived routinely, as an automaton without actual human reaction, emotional feeling, resonance, empathy or even recognition.

The manner of self-discovery involves witnessing, reliving and remembering, practicing awareness and releasing pent-up emotions, returning the bodymind, through self-regulating, self-recovery and self-referral, to a natural nation of balance, ease and rest, and beginning to insight and revel in. In the quick-time period the enjoy is enriching, enlivening and complete of dramatic modifications. In the long-time period through achieving private wholeness, soul nourishment and insights we attain a threshold, a bridge, a chasm - all variously transitional metaphors that symbolize a quantum leap, a fourth dimensional alternate that I actually have termed "the brink of transformation".

The significance of this threshold, and what distinguishes it from all of the modifications that have long gone before, is this is effects are irreversible -- it is a step from which there is no going back. Once taken, this step throughout the edge will lead you to the situation of authenticity and intimacy along with your own proper nature.

This perception renders the debate about character redundant. But it does depend upon our ability to sincerely distinguish the mental from the religious.