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Commentary 13 - Page 3 |
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Esoteric psychology is both 'normal' and developmental. When we speak about human inner development we speak about a psycho-spiritual process: at first it is psychological, but it can lead to a spiritual awakening. To approach it first from the psychological viewpoint, we need to overcome certain difficulties. The first of these is the difficulty people today have in understanding that, since spiritual life is prevented by the unfinished nature of our psyche, to develop spiritually we first need to understand our own psychology. Both modern religion and modern psychology have tended to ignore the fact that many individuals are drawn to attempt such a process. In the West, what is known as developmental psychology is concerned largely with childhood, in part because there appears to be an assumption that development of the individual stops at adulthood. Because of this misconception, both developmental psychology and medical psychology in the West have shown little concern with the forms of psychology needed for adult development, and so they have drawn conflicting conclusions about the need for and the possibilities of such a discipline. The fact is not that development stops before adulthood, but that it ceases to occur automatically. Development can be continued into adulthood, but to do so requires certain individual efforts which we describe as conscious efforts. Their nature is such that these conscious efforts cannot be forced on the individual. In the past century, effective forms of adult developmental psychology, in this sense, have begun to be introduced to the West from other civilizations, and they are now known by names such as Yoga and Sufism. It is almost unknown today that an equally effective form of developmental psychology existed in the earlier stages of our own civilization, and that this meets the needs of Western individuals more completely than does any Eastern teaching. The different forms can best be understood as different branches adapting a single tradition to different cultures.
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