by Gary Zukav
It is the health of the soul that is the true purpose of the human experience.
Everything serves that.
CHAPTER 13: PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology means soul knowledge. It means the study of the spirit, but it has never been that. Psychology is the study of cognitions, perceptions and affects. It is the study of the personality.
Because psychology is based upon the perceptions of the fivesensory personality, it is not able to recognize the soul. It is not able to understand the dynamics that underlie the values and behaviors of the personality. Just as medicine seeks to heal the body without recognizing the energy of the soul that lies behind the health or illness of the body, and, therefore, cannot heal the soul, psychology peeks to heal the personality without recognizing the force of the soul that lies behind the configuration and experiences of the personality, and, therefore, also cannot heal at :he level of the soul.
In order to develop and nurture your mind and your body, it is necessary to realize that you have a mind and a body. To heal directly at the level of the soul it is first necessary to acknowledge that you have a soul. If you have a soul, is it a hollowness that myth-logically fills your rib cage? No. If, then, your soul is real and alive with force end beingness, what is its purpose?
To develop a healthy and disciplined mind, an intellect hat can expand wholesomely and fully into any task, requires more than merely recognizing the existence of the rind. It requires understanding how the mind works, ,what it desires, what strengthens it and what weakens it, and then applying that knowledge. In the same way, it is not possible to consciously assist the soul in its evolution merely by recognizing the existence of the soul. It is necessary to understand the soul’s temperament, to learn what he soul can tolerate and what it cannot tolerate, what contributes to its health and what breaks its health down. these things must be looked at.
The means for doing this have not yet been developed. ale have not yet created a disciplined and systematic understanding of the soul. We do not understand how our Behaviors and activities affect the soul. When we see the personality in dysfunction, we do not think of what this reveals about the soul. Yet the personality is specific aspects of the soul reduced to a physical form. Therefore, dysfunctions of the personality cannot be understood without an understanding of the soul.
The fears, angers, and jealousies that deform the personality cannot be understood apart from the karmic circumstances that they serve. When you understand, and truly understand, that the experiences of your life are necessary to the balancing of the energy of your soul, you are free to not react to them personally, to not create more negative karma for your soul.
Pain by itself is merely pain, but the experience of pain coupled with an understanding that the pain serves a worthy purpose is suffering. Suffering is meaningful. Suffering can be endured because there is a reason for it that is worth the effort. What is more worthy of your pain than the evolution of your soul?
This does not mean that you become a martyr. When you understand that by consciously serving the evolution of your soul you contribute the most that you can to your world, you become one who contributes consciously to the well-being and spiritual development of those who share the human learning experience with you. If you are unkind to yourself you will be unkind to others, and if you are negligent of yourself you will be that to others. Only by feeling compassion for yourself can you feel compassion for others.
If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others and you cannot stand to see others loved. If you cannot treat your own self kindly you will resent that treatment when you see it in anyone else. If you cannot love yourself, loving others becomes a very painful endeavor with only occasional moments of comfort. In other words, loving others, or how you treat yourself, is your own dose of your own medicine that you really give to others at the same time.
Individuals who experience what might be thought of as a martyr attitude see themselves as giving all that they have to others. They see this as a form of loving, but in truth the love that they give is contaminated because it is so filled with sorrow for themselves. A sense of guilt and powerlessness clouds the energy from their hearts and so when their affection is felt by another it does not feel good, actually. It feels somehow thick with need, yet the need is never articulated, so their love feels like cement pulling you.
When you can do kindly things to yourself then you know what it is to be able to love yourself. Then you can look at others who desperately need kindness and love and feel good about their getting it, not patronizing, but truly good. This is the energy of the soul. This is the perception of the soul. When there is no compassion, when there is guilt, remorse, anger or sorrow, there is opportunity to heal the soul. What is the relationship of these experiences to a healthy soul and to a soul that is not healthy? What is a healthy soul?
A spiritual psychology is necessary to answer these questions, a new discipline of the spirit that is truly of the spirit, that has as its focus the soul of the human being. Human evolution, and the evolution of the spirit in matter, is a very specific evolution. It is not haphazard. It is not chaotic. It is very specific. When certain necessary processes of the maturation of the union of matter and spirit are not honored, the spirit breaks down. Psychologists have attempted to explain these breakdowns in the terms of psychology. We can continue to use that language, but let psychology then expand to include a language of the spirit. This will eventually become its first tongue, so to speak, and all psychoses and psychotic breakdown will finally, eventually, be put into its proper language, which is shattered spirit.
Reincarnation and the role of karma in the development of the soul will be central parts of spiritual psychology. The characteristics of a personality, the qualities that make one personality different from another, cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the karma that created those characteristics. They cannot always be understood in terms of the history of the personality because they may reflect experiences that predate the personality, in some cases by centuries. At issue, therefore, is not the effects of anger, jealousy, bitterness, sorrow and so forth upon the personality, but upon the soul.
An understanding of each of the personalities, each of the lifetimes, of a soul is not necessary. The numerous, numerous lifetimes of a soul are not equally central to the development of each of its personalities, but without awareness of the experiences of those lifetimes that bear directly upon the struggles of your personality, you cannot understand the extent of what is being healed through your experiences, or seeking to come to conclusion. If your soul was a Roman centurion, an Indian beggar, a Mexican mother, a nomad boy, and a medieval nun, among other incarnations, for example, and if the karmic patterns that were set into motion within those lifetimes are in motion within you, you will not be able to understand your proclivities, or interests, or ways of responding to different situations without an awareness of the experiences of those lifetimes.
It may be that the medieval nun of your soul developed an ability to see an Angel. What an extraordinary spiritual achievement! Your nonphysical Teacher will come to you upon those same frequencies of Light. She gives to you the fruits of a lifetime of contemplation and struggle and pain and courage. The Roman centurion of your soul is not dead millennia ago. That energy can literally step into your body and want to hold a modern weapon out of curiosity.
Do you dislike certain types of people? Were you drawn to medicine as a child? Are you frightened of small places? Reactions such as these are not always explainable in terms of the experiences of your life. The healing power at the core of psychology is the power of consciousness. Seeking out, facing with courage, and bringing into the Light of consciousness that which is unconsciousness, and, therefore, in a position of power over the personality, is what heals. When that which needs to be made conscious is not recognized to exist-such as the experiences of lifetimes that were lived in other places and at other times-it cannot be healed in this way.
Have you left a partner or a spouse? Has a spouse or a partner left you? It may be that your souls have graciously and with great compassion agreed to enact within this lifetime a situation that they have experienced together in another lifetime, or other lifetimes, a situation that still has healing potential for both. It may be that your souls have agreed to a mutual balancing of energy, so that one experiences the same painful loss that it inflicted previously upon the other. Experiences such as these are not meant to cause meaningless pain. There is not one act in the Universe that is not compassionate.
Your parents are the souls to whom you are closest in your lifetime, and whose influence upon you is the greatest. This is so even if it does not appear that way, even if, for example, you were separated from your parents, or a parent, at birth. Your soul and the souls of your parents agreed to your relationship in order to balance the energy that each needed to balance, or to activate dynamics within each other that are essential to lessons that each must learn. Without an awareness of your karmic interactions, of the experiences of other lifetimes of your soul, you are not able to understand the depth of the potential awakenings that can result from your interactions with a parent, or a sibling.
The exploration and understanding of intuition will be a central part of spiritual psychology. Intuition is the voice of the nonphysical world. It is the communication system that releases the fivesensory personality from the limitations of its fivesensory system, that permits the multisensory personality to be multisensory. It is the connection between the personality and its higher self and its guides and Teachers.
Psychology does not even recognize the intuition, except as a curiosity. Therefore, it does not recognize the knowledge that is obtained through the intuition, and, therefore, this knowledge is not processed by the intellect.
The fivesensory personality processes only the knowledge that it gathers and substantiates through its five senses. The multisensory personality acquires knowledge through its intuition, and, in processing that knowledge, aligns itself, step by step, with its soul. The conscious path to authentic power requires recognition of the nonphysical dimensions of the human being, of the soul, and a growing knowledge of what the soul is and what it wants.
Spirituality will be at the core of spiritual psychology. Spiritual psychology will be oriented toward spirituality and spiritual crises will be considered legitimate sufferings. Spiritual psychology will trace and understand the functional relationships between karma, reincarnation, intuition and spirituality.
Spirituality has to do with the immortal process itself. You have your intuition, for example, but your spirituality is not limited to your personality and its intuitional system. Your spirituality encompasses your whole soul’s journey, whereas your intuition is the way that your soul can contact your beingness to help it in survival situations, or in creative situations, or in inspirational situations. It is the way that, through your higher self, you can ask and receive assistance from other souls and from your Teachers and guides. Your spirituality pertains to that which is immortal within you, whereas, when you leave your body, the intuitional system that was developed for that body will be left behind because it will no longer be necessary.
Spiritual psychology is a disciplined and systematic study of what is necessary to the health of the soul. It will identify behaviors that operate in opposition to harmony and wholeness, in opposition to the energy of the soul. It will consider the broad-reaching elements of negativity, and how many forms of negativity there are, and the effects of these upon the soul.
Anything that increases separation within a person shatters the soul or in some form diminishes its strength, not to be confused with its immortality. The soul, as it reduces itself to fit into a physical incarnation, has the blueprint of holism in it. A genetic spiritual pattern, so to speak, of holism is there and present, and when the personality operates outside of the genetic pattern of holism, dysfunction results.
Spiritual psychology will bring to light those situations that would shatter the spirit if seen clearly. Brutality, for example, shatters the human spirit. The soul cannot tolerate brutality. It cannot tolerate abundances of pain and irrationality. It cannot tolerate being lied to. Consider that on our planet. It cannot tolerate non-forgiveness. It cannot tolerate jealousies and hatreds. These are contaminants, poisons, for it.
When the personality engages in these behaviors, it is as though it feeds its body arsenic again and again. It is just like that. These behaviors distort and contaminate and destroy the strength of the soul, in the same way. This is the distortedness of the soul that the physical reduced counterpart of the soul, called the personality, takes on in order to cleanse, in order to let other souls see so that it can be helped.
Understanding this dynamic is at the heart of spiritual psychology. It is the foundation upon which spiritual psychology is built so that when pain is seen it is not responded to with judgment or ugliness or avoidance, but recognized as the soul shattered. In this way, we shall say, in this circumstance, let us heal him. Let us heal her. Let us not run from the unattractiveness of a shattered soul.
The personality of a shattered soul is unaware. There is a continual interaction between your personality and your soul. The question is are you aware of it or are you not? If you are not aware of it, then it is not direct. It is indirect through having to move its currents through the density of doubt, through the density of unawareness. If you are aware of the guidance from your higher self, and are receptive to it, that receptivity allows guidance to flow instantly and immediately. If you are unaware and deny that there is any level of higher wisdom and guidance to your life, then the guidance must come through the density of physical events.
Awareness first enters into an unaware personality through crisis. When the personality is not attached to, or is apart from, clear soul energy, it becomes seduced into the physical matter-ness of life. That always results in a personality crisis because the necessary strength and guidance that are meant to flow into the personality have been cut off. The personality that is unaware of, or denies the existence of, its higher sources of wisdom cannot draw upon its guidance, its intuition, or any of the guiding mechanisms of our species. Therefore, crisis results.
Was it meant that crisis be central to our growth? No. This pattern evolved through the choices that were made by our species. The flow of our evolution did not have to include this pattern of crisis. It did not have to include the experiences of pain and trauma, of emotional or physical violence and brutality in order to grow. It was given in Divine order that our species would move into wholeness at some point in its evolution. How it moved and learned in the course of its evolution was left to be determined by the choices that our species made of how to maneuver energy within the Earth school. Doubt was created and chosen as the major teacher through human choice itself. Our species chose this way of learning, and, therefore, set karmic patterns into motion, generational karmic patterns.
As our species evolved, as it experienced its spectrum of fears, its spectrum of desires, its spectrum of attachments to the physical, collectively and individually certain choices began to characterize and form the path that would be most familiar to us. Awakening into the need to touch something more, to touch one’s own spiritual energy system, is now a well-worn path that includes the experience of becoming physically powerless in relation to the structure of the Earth school before the soul will reach for genuine power.
In other words, the awakening of the personality to the potential of the soul has come to require the loss of a mate, or the death of a child, or the collapse of a business, or some situation that renders the individual powerless. It requires the failure of external power. That, to the fivesensory personality, is crisis.
Spiritual psychology addresses this situation by addressing directly the issue of authentic power. It is timely because it comes at a time when our species is evolving beyond the fivesensory personality, beyond learning through fivesensory ex
ploration of the physical world, which is external power, and into the experiences of the multisensory personality, the experiences of the nonphysical world and the conscious journey toward authentic power through responsible choice with the assistance of nonphysical guides and Teachers.
The personality, including the fivesensory personality, is neither positive nor negative. It is a tool of the soul, a natural part of incarnation. The development of the five senses was a celebration in which the intellect was expanded and our species was allowed to learn through physical matter. The quest for external power came to be generated by insecurity not because of the limitations of the fivesensory personality, but because of the choices that were made by our species to learn through fear and doubt instead of through wisdom.
Our species is again being given the chance to choose how it will learn, how it will evolve. This is a time for us as a species and as individuals to choose again. It is an opportunity for us as a species and as individuals to choose differently, to choose otherwise, to choose this time to learn love through wisdom, to take the vertical path of clarity, of conscious growth and conscious life.
We are coming to the end of a phase of evolution that was written long before we existed. When the learning and evolution of our species was designed, it was designed to complement cycles, great cycles that work within the Universe, within our galaxy and within others. These cycles move within physical form at certain speeds, serving certain purposes and balances of energies.
The cycle that we are ending, and, therefore, beginning, is of a moment in which three cycles come to conclusion and begin again. These cycles act one inside of the other. Just as the moon orbits the earth which orbits the and there are orbits within orbits, so, too, there are cycles within cycles. We are coming to the close of a grand cycle astrologically, a two thousand year cycle, and an even grander cycle, where a twenty-five thousand year cycle is linking with a conclusion of a one hundred and twenty five thousand year cycle. That is why these things, within this moment in our evolution, are happening now. This is when they were meant to be.