The synergy of psychology and spirituality

Most people think of everyday problems as distractions from everyday life. The truth is that everyday problems are actually the best means for our spiritual development. By attracting the help and guidance of spiritual forces and using it to solve those everyday problems, you will improve your material and spiritual life at the same time.

To establish the best possible approach, we can draw on the discoveries of modern psychology. Since major discoveries in psychology have permeated the thinking of our society, we are all sufficiently trained to become our own spiritual psychologists. Psychology emerges and refines solid common sense. His more careful approach helps us to identify the additional beneficial effects that spiritual forces add to our well-planned actions with greater precision than intuition alone.

However, we will have to begin by setting the proper framework, as we are currently in the same state in our understanding of spirituality as psychology more than 100 years ago. Before the late nineteenth century, no one had been successful in the scientific study of the mind, despite the remarkable success of scientific study in other fields. Our thoughts, emotions, and behavior seemed too subjective to be studied by the rigorous new standards of the scientific method and its experimental approach.

Sigmund Freud, for example, was convinced that if people could not understand their mental world, it would be because the mind worked in a way that followed the rules. If you were not currently aware of these rules, you were convinced that they could be discovered by taking a rational approach. He brought together the elements of human thought that seemed incomprehensible and called them the unconscious, which science continues to study today in ever more refined ways. Each step forward resulted in better ways of understanding the human mind and solving everyday problems. Today, a trusted body of objective knowledge helps us understand our emotions, improve our relationships, solve otherwise perplexing problems, and develop our own unique potentials. Popular books and magazines take the latest research and narrow it down to simple, practical steps we can take to build higher self-esteem, earn more money, or have better sex.

To begin, we must affirm that we can understand spiritually in a rational way. If we don’t do it today, others will do it in the future. The proof will be that each step we take, however, will bring with it some tangible benefit that will make our efforts worthwhile. We can then set up our own experiments to test whether or not this is true, starting in situations where we would benefit the most from even a little spiritual help. You can choose a purely material or psychological problem that has resisted your efforts to change it. Try your best one more time to figure it out, but this time add whatever you think can connect you to the spiritual dimension and get your help, for example by praying for divine assistance. Any different results will likely be attributed to the spiritual effects your connection caused. And to the extent that your problem has been resistant to change before, you will see that it is highly likely, even if no one else does, that any positive change you find is likely to be caused by spiritual forces. By applying this experimental approach to a number of different situations in your own life over a period of time, you will gather evidence that I believe will give you more and more confidence in your results.

So choose an area of ​​your life, whether it is an interpersonal problem, a work problem, or a fear or anger problem. Approaching it the way psychology found works best but has failed in the past. Then add whatever element you think does something spiritual to it and see whether or not there are different effects. Don’t expect miracles and try to refine the spiritual element you add to a situation based on the feedback you receive so that the results you get are more and more consistent.

It’s such a simple and straightforward approach, why haven’t we done it already? I think it’s because people haven’t approached spirituality in a systematic enough way. We have been bound by the belief that spiritual forces cannot be understood and therefore we have not made the effort to understand them. We were content with an intuitive and emotional engagement of spiritual forces. We think of understanding spirituality by quickly joining one theory or another without sufficiently understanding our own experiences first. We had not understood that each of our experiences is data that can only be understood by appreciating the limits of what it shows and combining our own data with those of others. However, if the tools of psychology and those of the Internet are used to pool our little knowledge, it is possible to make progress.

Once we learn to work psychology and spirituality together, our approach to spirituality will undergo a radical change. We may still enjoy the rituals of our tradition, but we will no longer be tied to them because we will see how much more can be gained both materially and spiritually by practicing spirituality in everyday life, the original system created for our natural spiritual development. We can feel whole and complete at the deepest levels of our being as we are excited by the prospect of learning more and more.