(Easter Morning - Caspar David Friederich (Public) (All Photos are intended to honor the artist) |
|
Words can be difficult, and names even more so. For example, "Integral Spiritual Psychology" does not really name an enterprise, a field of study, or one more psychology to add to the list. Integral Spiritual Psychology is a way of doing, a way of presence, a way of Wholeness of Being.This way of being/doing cannot be taught. Integral Spiritual Psychology also does not say where to look, but rather how to look simultaneously inwardly and outwardly in the "fold between"-- without ending, without culmination, without expectation. Understanding comes in the doing. Integral Spiritual Psychology works through the capacity of intuition. If taken only mentally or intellectually, plus perhaps joining the mind with emotion, misses the happening. Integral Spiritual Psychology awakens an aspiration rather than providing a set system. It is a way of becoming an earthly-spiritual wanderer who, though, is not lost.
Another way of considering Integral Spiritual Psychology: A way of presence within Wholeness -- the unity of person, body, soul, spirit, word, earth, and the divine. It cannot be found anywhere within this website or any of the books or monographs or consultations, or persons involved. It orients fullness, an intuited, real possibility, spoken in multiple ways for some forty years. No permanent structure results from engaging the work -- that is, Integral Spiritual Psychology holds that the human being is a transitional being always, each moment, fundamentally changing, evolving, becoming. So-called problems are not solved because being integral, whole, does not exist within such a framework. Life is a mystery to be lived not a problem to be solved. Finding the way into the mystery constitutes the work.
Integral Spiritual Psychology relies as much on "undoing" as "doing". The two acts cannot be separated. The practice of Integral Spiritual Psychology cannot be added on to who we think we are -- yet another desire to satisfy, and it is not an ideology that attempts to "make us better", nor even, to "make us whole" or to be of "help" in the world. Undoing is necessary, crucial, unavoidable, because in this civilization and in this time we are not here and the one requirement of Integral Spiritual Psychology is being here. We now live within multiple constructed layerings that have removed us from body, from Earth, from each other, from community, from the Divine, and turned humans into commodity-seeking commodities. We live in the prison of social constructions, technological constructions, political constructions, electronic constructions, familial constructions, civilizational constructions --- we live within every possible medium except the medium of soul, the medium of the divine that we are, the unity of spirit-matter that we are, the medium of human body that we are. These realities constitute the givens which we have been distracted from for many centuries. The distractions have to be undone -- indirectly, for to try and undo them directly introduces exactly what needs to be dissolved -- another construction, another abstraction wearing a reality costume.
Integral Spiritual Psychology does not concern the means for resisting the plight of a lost civilization as this way does not concern power, nor "alternative" power. It concerns surrender, which does not mean giving up or giving in to becoming appallingly destructive. It concerns relinquishing all the multiple ways of living that give the false impression that we humans can "do business" on our own. Surrender here indicates surrendering to the Whole, recognizing that we are of the Whole, inseparable from the Whole, that any stance outside of the Whole is living in falsity. We do not stop doing what we do or think there are better things we could be doing, and instead work unendingly to be within Wholeness, which cannot be defined, but can easily be experienced when one arrives at being here.
Integral Spiritual Psychology relativizes the omni-present civilizational ego, but does not seek to do away with ego. It is not a form of mysticism nor a form of spirituality the way spirituality has come to mean leaving the body and leaving the world, leaving matter to indulge in the bliss of spirit. The Divine, the messengers, the dead, the elemental beings, everything we consider within the word 'spirit' does not exist 'somewhere else'; They intertwine with matter, making Beauty. The goal of Integral Spiritual Psychology consists of Beauty and Delight.
Some of the important influencers of Integral Spiritual Psychology
Rudolf Steiner C, G. Jung James Hillman Maurice Merleau-Ponty Sri Aurobindo The Mother Henry Corbin Phineas Quimby Satprem Joseph Rael Lao Russell Walter Russell Barry Long John Butler Russel Williams
