“All the troubles of the world, especially spiritual troubles such as impatience, hopelessness, and despair, derive from the failure to see the Grandeur of God clearly.”

The Essential Kabbalah,
Daniel C. Matt

Gstalt-L, An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-l). Gstalt-J, An email discussion group devoted to research on Gestalt therapy, theory and practice (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-j). Supported by the Gestalt Research Consortium (GRC) (www.g-gej.org/grc). Gestalt Bookmarks, a place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web (www.g-gej.org/gestaltbookmarks).

This issue of Gestalt! constitutes a special invitation to explore the Gestalt Forum at Behavior Online, where discussion of issues related to the field of Gestalt therapy take place, but where the topic of spirituality in Gestalt Therapy is, for this time, especially explored.

If you work (as I do) in fields of drug and alcohol abuse, mental health, or areas such as child abuse, domestic violence and suicide, then you would be well aware that there are many troubles in the world today.

Troubles which are not going away. Troubles which bring untold misery and suffering. Troubles which call us out to see ourselves and our world in a new light. Troubles which can ultimately transform us and those we walk with and live with and care about.

If this simple statement from the Kabbalah is to be believed, then our lack of overall success with such social ills stems from looking in the wrong place for solutions. We need to in some way include the spiritual ground of our being in how we approach these issues - whatever that may mean for each individual.

Troubles which can be understood psychologically and socially – and which stem from a “the failure to see the Grandeur of God clearly.”

The Split Between Spiritual and Psychological Realms

Whether we believe in God or not, whatever our spiritual background, we are able to use our faculty of “splitting” and put spirituality and religion on one side, and the practical everyday reality on the other.

In fact many spiritual and religious people who work in the helping professions see a clear ethical need to keep such domains separate. This is so as not to impose their attitudes on the client and put their own system of belief unto the other. Hence this can translate to a dual existence of phsychological reality at work and spiritual or religious practice at other times.

For example in the mental health field, no matter how many practitioners believe they have a soul, this rarely translates to the literature and practice of mental healing. In working with people experiencing psychotic illness it is clear that for most people their experience, particularly of the “voices,” involves some type of spiritual reality. Yet this clearly is not to be talked about by mental health workers for fear of making things worst.

The same often holds true in fields of physical healing such as medicine, nursing or physiotherapy. People and their families can undergo extreme physical and psychiatric disorders without in any way having attention paid to the underlying spiritual and religious experience - what this means to the person and their family.

It would be too easy to simply portray this as two opposing camps – those who work with psychosocial (or mental) health and those who address spiritual health. There are many people who are interested in both psychological and spiritual realities, and the link between the two. However there is still a schism between the spiritual and physical which is manifest in our society.

Repression of the Spiritual

Richard Hycner in his book “Between Person and Person- Towards a Dialogical Psychotherapy” calls this tendency to separate psychological and spiritual realities, the “Repression of the Spiritual.” He argues that we have historically developed a view of ourselves as rational beings, separate and distinct from the ontological or spiritual ground of our existence.

This self concept has come at a cost, for while Western society has valued this unique, individual and rational self identity, there has developed an over-emphasis on separateness to the extreme. This experience of being separate individuals without a connection to our spiritual ground has lead to a sense of anxiety and emptiness, which is then filled with personal and financial success. In this ultimate of existential emptiness, “things” easily take the place of what is missing spiritually.

As Hycner states, “Acquisition becomes religion.”

This spiritual and psychological isolation creates a void which must be filled, and from Hycner’s perspective it is filled by things which don’t really fill it and create further longing – money, drugs, sex, even television. . We are, as a society, cut off from the spiritual well spring of our existence.

If you accept Hycner’s perspective, then the current plagues of drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, mental illness, suicide and crime which our societies are struggling with are signs of not only psychosocial disorder but a spiritual disorder.

If we are to find meaningful solutions to these troubles of the world, we must seek answers which include this deeper spiritual ground of our being.

What is interesting is that this dilemma of current society, as described by Hycner, is also clearly apparent in the story of the life of the Buddha.

The Story of the Life of Buddha

If we view the story of the life of the Buddha as a blueprint for both our individual and society’s spiritual development, then we see patterns in the story itself which can offer great wisdom in our search for answers to our personal and social troubles.

Buddha was the son of a king, Shuddhodana Gautama whose queen was called Maya. For twenty years they had no children until one night in a dream the Queen envisioned her pregnancy.

The Queen followed custom and returned to her parents home, and as she rested in the Lumbini Garden, and as she reached up to pick an Ashoka blossom, the prince was born.

They named the child Siddhartha, which means “Every wish fufilled.” Shortly after, Queen Maya died and the baby prince was raised by her younger sister.

A hermit named Asita then foretold that if the Prince remained in the castle he would become a great king and subjugate the whole world. However should he forsake this and embrace a spiritual life, he will become a Buddha and Savior of the world.

The king preferred to keep his son and maintain the life of the palace (as many of us tend to want to perpetuate our physical and psychological self). He educated his son in matters of state and tried in ever way to distract him from things spiritual.

However one day while out in the fields, the young Prince saw a bird carry of a small worm. He was deeply affected by such a simple but barbarous little death. He sat down in the shade of a tree and thought, “Alas! Do all living creatures kill each other?”

So this little death effected him and this became a spiritual wound, particularly in light of the death of his mother. More and more he thought about human suffering and death.

For ten years the King tried to cheer him up and distract him. He became immersed in the pleasures of the palace, but he could not block out his awareness of death. Finally he said:

The luxuries of the palace, this healthy body, this rejoicing youth! What do they mean to me? Some day we may be sick, we shall become aged; from death there is no escape. Pride of youth, pride of health, pride of existence – all thoughtful people should cast them aside.

A man struggling for existence will naturally look for something of value. There are two ways of looking – a right way and a wrong way. If he looks in the wrong way he recognises that sickness, old age and death are unavoidable, but he seeks the opposite.

If he looks in the right way he recognises the true nature of sickness, old age and death, and he searches for meaning in that which transcends all human suffering. In my life of pleasures I seem to be looking in the wrong way.

The Teaching of Buddha
Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai

Looking in the Right Way

If we see the story of Buddha as a parable then there are some striking parallels with the modern day writing of Hycner’s Dialogical psychotherapy.

Like Buddha our spiritual nature is born into a situation where the outer physical reality dominates. The ruling part of our nature (the King or ego) is delighted with the advent of the spiritual (Buddha). But this creative power comes with a dilemma – this state of being can be used to subjugate the world as a great ruler (ego) or go beyond the physical world to become a spiritual being.

Our ego state (the King) prefers to maintain the status quo and stay immersed in the world of physical reality. Yet the spiritual within us keeps being called out to something more… something bigger and beyond the ego state of being. This calling comes at first as a bitter pill – and awareness of death. Yet try as we may to distract ourselves from the true state of physical reality, from the bigger truths of spiritual life, there is that which keeps calling us…. Tapping us on the shoulder and saying “what about…”

Eventually the Siddhartha stops from the years of continual distraction and empty living and sees there are two ways of viewing this situation – this struggle for existence.

The first way, which he calls the wrong way, is to ignore these awarenesses of sickness, old age and death, ignore the bigger picture, and seek the opposite.

This parallels Hycner’s notion of the spiritual isolation of modern life which creates a void which must be filled, and is filled by things which don’t really fill it and create further longing – money, drugs, sex, even television.

We ignore the bigger spiritual picture and immerse ourselves, like Buddha, in the opposite – “In my life of pleasures I seem to be looking in the wrong way”. Or as the Kabbalah has said: “All the troubles of the world… derive from the failure to see the Grandeur of God clearly.”

The second way, which he calls the right way, is to recognise the transitory nature of this ego state and physical reality, and search for meaning that transcends it.

So drawing upon the Kabbalah, Buddhism, and Dialogical psychotherapy we can see striking parallels in how to look at and understand our struggle for existence. Such a perspective lends a revealing light to the current plagues of drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, mental illness, suicide and crime which our societies are struggling with.

It seems clear that these are signs of not only psychosocial disorder but of a spiritual disorder –like the Buddha when he was Prince Siddhartha – we are a society without deeper meaning, a society which is looking in the wrong direction.

If we are to find meaningful solutions to these troubles of the world, we must seek answers, seek meaning, which include this deeper spiritual ground of our being.

Our theorising and practice of counselling and psychotherapy has created a psychosocial ethos of the nature of the self which is mostly devoid of the spiritual. I say mostly, as there are clearly those writers and theorists who have worked to re-connect counselling and psychotherapy with the spiritual, in one form or another.

Yet even in such work, there is the potential of diminishing or misrepresenting the Holy. For example, some practitioners of therapies which are grounded in the spiritual, such as Dialogical psychotherapy (which draws on the mystical work of Martin Buber), at the same time profess their lack of belief in God. I find this contradictory yet it may simply be a question of language and the meaning given to the term God by each individual.

Buber himself has both space and grace for this contradiction. He talks of the many names we have given to God as the eternal Thou - how all God’s names are hallowed. Yet some also reject the word “God” because it is so misused and so heavily laden. However it is because it is so heavily laden is exactly why, Buber states, it is the most imperishable and indispensable of names.

Yet people need not use or believe the name to reach the Holy.

As he states:

But when he too, who abhors the name, and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.

I and Thou
Martin Buber page 75-76

So whether Dialogical therapists believe in God or not, I guess the difference is that God believes in them.

Psychosynthesis and Roberto Assagioli

Assagioli was a colleague of Freud and Jung who initially trained in psychoanalysis. Like Jung, he found psychoanalysis to be limited in certain areas, which for Assagioli was the higher reaches of human nature, what he came to call the superconscious.

Assagioli is quite clear and explicit that his therapy is purely and simply a science and in no way crossing into subject matter which is religious. How this is accomplished is in the definition of his terms and the goal of his therapy.

He believes psychotherapy includes areas of higher consciousness – of spiritual and religious experience - as real and important facts and direct experiences which cannot be ignored by scientists and psychologists. These higher urges of intuition imagination aspiration and genius are seen to be as real as conditioned reflexes and therefore subject to research and treatment. The neglect of this area by psychologists is noted as quite curious by Assagioli and would make an interesting piece of psychoanalysis and shed light on the psychology of psychologists.

In defining the terms to separate religion from psychotherapy, Assagioli firstly notes two different stages of religion. The first is “existential religion” which is direct spiritual experience, often realised by founders of religions, mystics and in varying degrees by many people.

Second is the religion of theological or metaphysical formulation of such experiences and the institutions methods and forms developed to communicate to the masses.

Psychosynthesis affirms the reality of the first religion and works in this area but is neutral to the second, noting that this second form is necessary, but the purpose of psychosynthesis is to attain direct experience of the first (pages 194-195). It is offered as a support and help make better use of the methods and teaching of the second religion without interfering with doctrine or theology. He goes so far as to suggest a “psychosynthesis of religions” by which he means the development of a common ground and greater understanding between religions, as well as some fields of cooperation developed.

In many ways Assagioli makes the distinction between psychology and religion on practical grounds, offering definitons of terms such as “self” and “spiritual” and “religion” as being practical realities which can be experienced and altered by psychological techniques.

For example, in defining the term spiritual he does not attempt to define or discuss what it is in essence but offers the fact of spiritual experience, an experience of what he terms the superconscious. He then uses the metaphor of electricity wherein we do not need to know the underlying theory or ultimate nature of electricity to use electrical appliances. Likewise psychosynthesis accepts that spiritual experiences exist and therefore includes and studies them with the purpose of therapeutic and educational utilisation.

The same pragmatic approach applies in defining the “self” to his patients. Initially the notion of a personal self and a higher Self is presented as an hypothesis which can be verified or disproved as the therapy proceeds. How this is explained also depends on the background of the person, so that a religious person is told the higher Self is a neutral psychological term used for the soul. For agnostics it is whatever term or metaphor or symbol fits for that person.

Clearly the drive behind this is to put aside the normal barriers and difficulties people experience with theoretical or cognitive discriminations of the spiritual experiences and move to an experiential base.

Similarly he sees his approach as Dialogical in the same sense as Martin Buber, and pays tribute to Buber’s eloquence in writing about dialogue both in the vertical sense with God and the dialogue between human beings. He disagrees with Buber on the primacy of the interpersonal dialogue and believes he overstates the case in saying this is the true and only reality and one cannot dissociate oneself or God from the relationship. He further views dialogue as also internal between the personal self and the higher Self, a process which may not be mystical in any way but mental, impersonal and objective (page 207).

Writing in the early 1960’s, Assagioli defines psychosynthesis, by comparing it to what he terms the “new trends” in psychiatry and psychology of Existential psychotherapy. Existentialism as a philosophical movement has been accredited to Kierkegaard (1813-55) who was a very religious man and emphasised man’s relation to God in terms of subjective, personal truth and choice. He also writes about angst or dread, which is the result of a life given over to the world and pleasures of the senses (Hamlyn, 1987).

Later existentialists are equally classified as belonging to the phenomenology movement (including Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Marleau-Ponty and Satre) and most left behind the original religious emphasis of Kierkegaard.

Assagioli focuses on existential psychotherapy, which he admits is a loose grouping of divergent thinkers. To attempt to summarise the characteristics of this approach he builds on the work of Maslow (Remarks on Existentialism and Psychology) and offers nine aspects of existential psychotherapy:

• They share a similar methodology of starting with the self of the individual, his presence.
• Each individual is in constant development and growth
• There is a central importance to meaning each person gives to life.
• That values are important, particularly ethical, aesthetic, noetic and religious values.
• Each individual is constantly confronted by choice and the responsibility of their life
• There is a need to understand the motivation for these choices
• The depth and seriousness of human life and the anxiety and suffering which arises.
• The emphasis on the future and the present
• The recognition of the uniqueness of each individual.

Viktor Frankel, Logotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy

It is to this school of psychology which Viktor Frankl is seen as a major contributor, and Assagioli is highly appreciative of his work and contribution to spiritual psychotherapy, classifying him and Rollo May as spiritual existentialists (page 113).

Like Assagioli, Frankl was a student of Freud and developed an alternative psychotherapy which he came to call Logotherapy. A key theoretical construct of this approach was what Frankl termed a “will-to-meaning”. In a similar fashion to the notion of Kierkegaard’s angst, Frankl described what people complained of as an inner void, which he termed an existential vacuum. Having satisfied other more basic needs the human being then turns to higher spiritual needs, which for Frankl manifest as a need to find meaning in one’s life.

Such meaning involves discovering what is valued in life, and when this meaning and values are not apparent the person’s existence becomes empty and meaningless. The role of the therapist is to help the person find meaning in their life, accept responsibility for their existence and find values to live by.

This profoundly simple approach is based on the experiences of Frankl in a concentration camp in World War II. He was interned with his whole family, including his parents and wife and children, who all died. In the first half of his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl tells of the experience of shock, dehumanisation and later adaptation to this horrendously brutal world. He tells this in a way that is very simple and factual with in-depth self disclosure, yet without any hint of over emotionalism or exaggeration.

In many ways his simple style of writing adds to the bare horror which he reports. At one instance he reports how dehumanised he had become. A friend had died and was dragged out of the hut. As he looked to the window he saw the person’s head thump on the steps as he was taken out – dead, lifeless eyes – and the only thing Frankl could think of was that he had the man’s bread. This is stark reality.

I have often used the story of Frankl in teaching counselling and psychotherapy. Having described his situation, I go on to tell how people would kill themselves in the camp by walking into the electric fence, which was not stopped. These people were called the walkers. Once it was known Frankl was a psychiatrist, he would be called upon to come and talk to these people and dissuade them from suicide. I was ask student “What would you do if you were Frankl, how do you reach someone in this despair and what can you offer them that will help?”

The secret Frankl discovered was that when he could help the person find a reason to live and some meaning to this horror, then they lived. If they didn’t they died. Each reason to live was unique as was the eventual meaning that the person found in this situation. Frankl himself had some extraordinary spiritual experiences of heightened awareness within this paradoxically hellish situation. While working almost naked and as a skeleton on road gang, Frankl saw his wife in a vision and knew she must be dead, and he was greatly moved by this loving visit.

This approach of logotherapy has a profoundly touching aspect of humanism, personal meaning and spiritual application in a wider sense of the word.

The Spiritual Ground of Being

To reconnect with the spiritual ground of our being is no easy task and one which we may be less prepared for than we realise. Robert Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, saw this as a tremendous undertaking, long and arduous, and one that not everyone was ready for. He describes the process as a journey from the low lands of ego to the highlands of self-realisation :

But between the starting point in the low lands of ordinary consciousness and the shining peak of Self-realisation there are many intermediate phases, plateaus at various altitudes on which a man may rest or even make his abode, if his lack of strength precludes or his will does not choose a further ascent.

Psychosynthesis
Robert Assagioli, page 24

If we are to make this journey from ordinary consciousness to the peak of self-realisation, it is apparent that a map would be useful, as would stories from people who have already travelled these roads. Such maps and myths are largely missing in Western society and this is apparent when one goes beyond the facade of materialism to find meaning. Bede Griffith points to how religion and spirituality in the West has become quite limited.

In India everything has a sacred character - it meets one on every side – they are living in a sacred world. Every meal is sacred, and the kitchen is a sacred place in the Hindu household which no outsider is allowed to enter. Food must be purified and offered in sacrifice. Work is sacred and even the account books are sacred where ever book has a little sandal wood mark to make it sacred.

The Cosmic Revelation
Bede Griffith (p39)

Griffith views that the Western world has become a profane world, where for the last three centuries we have tried to remove everything from the sphere of the sacred. Science has tried to eliminate the sacred, and while this approach has its value, we have developed a very uni-dimensional view of reality that is material. There is little to give maps and stories about the meaning to life – no sense of a measure of or a mathematics for that which is not within the realms of physical or psychological science.

Arthur Deikman considers there is a need for psychotherapy to learn from mysticism. He argues that while psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are geared towards clinical disorders and how to treat them, they are hard put to meet human beings’ need for meaning. (Deikman 1982)

He gives an example of where a group of psychotherapists met, originally for peer supervision, but soon the group began to deal with they termed their mid-life crisis.

The mid-life crisis with which the psychotherapists grappled probably reflects the fact that at midlife one’s own death becomes less theoretical and more probable. Goals of money, security, fame, sex, or power might formerly have given purpose to life. With experience, the limited nature of such satisfaction becomes increasingly evident…. As life progresses the search for meaning becomes increasingly urgent.

The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy
Arthur Deikman, page 7.

It is rather striking that these psychotherapists share the same challenges and crisis as the Indian Prince Siddhartha Gautama over two and a half millennia before. Yet unlike Prince Siddhartha, they seem to lack the ground to be aware of the Noble Quest. Deikman argues that this is because most Western psychotherapists lack the theoretical framework to provide meaning for patients and therapists alike.

Western clinicians on the whole tend to look to disturbances in intra-psychic or interpersonal phenomena, behavioural mal-adaptations, and neurotic and psychotic distortions of reality. However when the entire reality of everyday consciousness is viewed as a distortion or illusion, a mal-adaptation, then a wider universe becomes available from which to seek meaning and to understand suffering.

In essence, our notions of psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry need to be better understood, challenged, and developed if they are to play roles in the person’s search for meaning. Better maps and myths are required to guide on this journey from the lowlands of ego consciousness to the mountains and peaks of greater meaning and self-realization. Many of these current forms of healing have lost their soul.