THE QUEST: ‘There is more in heaven and earth…’

by Stanley

Some people have a strong spiritual sense – backed up, not by mere belief, but personal experience that confirms the existence of a psychic domain or imaginative sphere that can penetrate to the heart of things and give a deeper kind knowledge.

Maybe they have intuitions about people that later prove correct; or perhaps predictive premonitions that are too near the mark to be co-incidence; or visions and dreams; or perhaps merely inexplicable moments of uncanny insight. They may use physical aids like cards, pendulums, runes, crystals, sticks, gemstones, divining rods etc, perhaps insisting that these are just conduits that facilitate their psychic abilities. Others eschew such physical aids and rely solely on their own deeply felt intuitive sense.

There is no denying that there is something mysterious going on in all this that we do not understand and have as yet no adequate concepts even to discuss intelligently. But I would like to pause and consider some of the psychological effects of the spiritual quest, to look at the quest from the psychological angle rather than how spirituality views itself.

The spiritual world can provide hope and solace for people to whom life has been less than kind, much as the tortured souls of the Middle Ages, burdened with original sin and harassed by the omnipresence of devils, must have looked towards redemption and relief in a life to come. And who would deny unhappy souls a spot of comfort. But from the same psychological perspective there are others for whom spirituality acts as brake on their personal development, giving them, in the long run, more struggle than reward.

Spiritual doctrines can strongly reinforce personal hang-ups. An example is the injunction to ‘to pray and act for the welfare of others’. A most commendable idea, but we have to take into account the effect such guidance has on someone who already finds it difficult to assert themselves and who is compelled to fulfil the needs of everyone except themselves, who, in fact, actively neglects their own welfare. The number of people like this is surprisingly large. The effect is to reinforce an already serious displacement that makes life even more difficult for them.

Similarly, a person with an oversize conscious already feels they are to blame for everything. Any failure in a relationship and they will gnaw away at the idea that if they had done something differently everything might have been OK. The kind of spirituality that will appeal to them is one stressing that one is responsible for everything that happens, suggesting perhaps that their ‘thinking’ was at fault. These are pernicious one-sided ideas that screw them down, making it impossible for them to stop hammering themselves, a habit which is really their chief problem.

Then there is the tendency of spiritual practices to elevate one’s ideal of the sort of person one should be. The notion of the spiritual life suggests that you can be better than you actually are – which of course is true. But for someone who already has an overlarge and punishing internal critic such a suggestion enhances their own accusations of not being good enough. The failure to measure up and the struggle to do so is now justified as spiritual work. They are then condemned to a life of trying.

Then there is the opposite effect it can have on the narcissistic personality, who is already the centre of the universe and who has difficulty in getting the reality that other people actually exist. Spirituality will be attractive because secretly it will imply a certain superiority. Being spiritual will inflate the ego, whose grandiosity is blown up even further by its supposed intimate connection with the ‘transcendent’.

Spiritual advice can fail to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all. Lets say person has progressed to a point where they can, at last, get angry about something, whereas all their life they have too scared to be. After a lifetime of servility they are finally able to feel annoyed about something. If you now tell them that resentment is bad for them spiritually you have effectively done them in.

Another trap: if you are pursuing a path of spirituality and you feel depressed something must be wrong with the way you are thinking. Negative thoughts are not spiritual. That idea is psychologically disastrous.

On another level there is the problem of education. There are indeed fascinating phenomena associated with what one could roughly call ‘the transpersonal’. But educationally there is a difficulty with the beliefs that arise to explain it. Because it is such a nebulous sphere it is wide open to fantastic projections of meaning and interpretation, unchecked by any kind of evidence.

It is when we look into the beliefs and explanations about spirituality that we have to face up to the possibility of error. Merely to believe something sincerely is not enough. Mere sincerity can be highly dangerous. Muslim suicide bombers believe that 12 virgins will be theirs in the next life – it has never been established what women suicide bombers hope for.

There is perhaps one more doubtful psychological service that the spiritual quest performs. I mean as a defence against the overwhelming influence of science and technology and the materialism of the modern world. Spirituality seems to provide another dimension in which the true values of the soul can be preserved. But as a purely defensive manoeuvre it suffers inevitably from a sense of isolation and irrelevance in the stream of modern life.

I would suggest that the spiritual quest as a defensive manoeuvre is no solution either to the narrowness of the modern world or to the lostness of the soul. One way to re-ensoul ‘materialism’ is by seeing the modern world as the wonderful achievement that it is in so many respects. Seeing, as Stephen Pinker said, not what we have done wrong in civilisation, but what we have done right. Perhaps we could even regain the spirit of the Romantic poets for whom the burgeoning new sciences at that time were a source of wonder and inspiration.