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A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
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A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
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As a psychiatrist, I feel it is important to mention at the outset two assumptions that underlie this book. One is that I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.
Page 10
The other assumption is that this process is a complex, arduous and lifelong task. Psychotherapy, if it is to provide substantial assistance to the process of mental and spiritual growth, is not a quick or simple procedure. I do not belong to any particular school of psychiatry or psychotherapy; I am not simply a Freudian or Jungian or Adlerian or behaviourist or gestaltist. I do not believe there are any single easy answers. I believe that brief forms of psycho¬ therapy may be helpful and are not to be decried, but the help they provide is inevitably superficial.
Page 10
The journey of spiritual growth is a long one. I would like to thank those of my patients who have given me the privilege of accompanying them for major portions of their journey. For their journey has also been mine, and much of what is presented here is what we have learned together. I would also like to thank many of my teachers and colleagues. Principal among them is my wife, Lily. She has been so giving that it is hardly possible to distinguish her wisdom as a spouse, parent, psychotherapist, and person from my own.
Page 15
Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved. I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. It will become clear that these tools are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. When we teach ourselves and our children disci¬ pline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.
Page 27
The issue is important, because many people simply do not take the time necessary to solve many of life’s intellec¬ tual, social or spiritual problems, just as I did not take the time to solve mechanical problems. Before my mechanical enlightenment I would have awkwardly stuck my head
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complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other. Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another’s needs is the assess¬ ment of that person’s capacity to utilise the truth for his or her own spiritual growth. Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilise the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.
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The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with courage to call themselves patients must go through in more major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy. The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a life-time. For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of ‘the old self’ must be given up. It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist. Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image ‘I’m OK’. This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom ‘I’m not OK and I need assistance to understand why I’m not OK and how to become OK’ is frequendy and sadly equated with ‘I’m weak, unmasculine and inadequate’. Actually, the giving-up process often begins even before the patient has arrived at the decision to seek psychiatric attention. I mentioned that during the process of giving up my desire to always win I was depressed. This is because the feeling associated with giving up something loved - or at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar - is depression. Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. It becomes abnormal or
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So if your goafis to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them with¬ out suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy. Perhaps you may find an answer in the remainder of this book; perhaps you will not.
Page 85
Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. This section will examine what lies in back of discipline - what provides the motive, the energy for discipline. This force I believe to be love. I am very conscious of the fact that in attempting to examine love we will be beginning to toy with mystery. In a very real sense we will be attempting to examine the unexaminable and to know the unknowable. Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the frame¬ work of words. I would not write this if I did not believe the attempt to have value, but no matter how valuable, I begin with the certain knowledge that the attempt will be in some ways inadequate.
Page 85
One result of the mysterious nature of love is that no one has ever, to my knowledge, arrived at a truly satisfactory definition of love. In an effort to explain it, therefore, love has been divided into various categories: eros, philia, agape; perfect love and imperfect love, and so on. I am presuming, however, to give a single definition of love, again with the awareness that is likely to be in some way or ways inadequate. I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
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At the outset I would like to comment briefly on this definition before proceeding to a more thorough elabora¬ tion. First, it may be noticed that it is a teleological definition; the behaviour is defined in terms of the goal or purpose it seems to serve - in this case, spiritual growth.
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Third, this unitary definition of love includes self-love with love for the other. Since I am human and you are human, to love humans means to love myself as well as you. To be dedicated to human spiritual development is to be dedicated to the race of which we are a part, and this therefore means dedication to our own development as well as ‘theirs’. Indeed, as has been pointed out, we are incapable
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of loving another unless we love ourselves, just as we are incapable of teaching our children self-discipline unless we ourselves are self-disciplined. It is actually impossible to forsake our own spiritual development in favour of someone else’s. We cannot forsake self-discipline and at the same time be disciplined in our care for another. We cannot be a source of strength unless we nurture our own strength. As we proceed in our exploration of the nature of love, I believe it will become clear that not only do self-love and love of others go hand in hand but that ultimately they are indistinguishable.
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Finally, by use of the word ‘will’ I have attempted to transcend the distinction between desire and action. Desire is not necessarily translated into action. Will is desire of sufficient intensity that it is translated into action. The difference between the two is equal to the difference between saying ‘I would like to go swimming tonight’ and ‘I will go swimming tonight’. Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are not in fact loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions. On the other hand, whenever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made.
Page 94
Falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one’s spiritual development. If we have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to terminate our own loneliness and perhaps ensure this result through marriage. Certainly we are not thinking of spiritual development. Indeed, after we have fallen in love and before we have fallen out oflove again we feel that we have arrived, that the heights have been attained, that there is both no need and no possibility of going higher. We do not feel ourselves to be in any need of development; we are totally content to be where we are. Our spirit is at peace. Nor do we perceive our beloved as being in need of spiritual development. To the contrary, we perceive
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*Those who have read the O’Neils’ book Open Marriage will recognise this to be a basic tenet of the open as opposed to the closed marriage. The O’Neils were actually remarkably gentle and restrained in their proselytis¬ ing for open marriage. My yvork with couples has led me to the stark conclusion that open marriage is the only kind of mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual health and growth of the individual partners.
Page 102
Most mystics understand the truth that was elaborated at the end of the discussion of discipline: namely, that we must possess or achieve something before we can give it up and still maintain our competence and viability. The infant without its ego boundaries may be in closer touch with reality than its parents, but it is incapable of surviving without the care of these parents and incapable of com¬ municating its wisdom. The path to sainthood goes through adulthood. There are no quick and easy shortcuts. Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be trans¬ cended. One must find one’s self before one can lose it. The temporary release from ego boundaries associated with falling in love, sexual intercourse or the use of certain psychoactive drugs may provide us with a glimpse of Nirvana, but not with Nirvana itself. It is a thesis of this book that Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the persistent exercise of real love.
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One of the aspects of dependency is that it is unconcerned with spiritual growth. Dependent people are interested in their own nourishment, but no more; they desire filling, they desire to be happy; they don’t desire to grow, nor are they willing to tolerate the unhappiness, the loneliness and suffering involved in growth. Neither do dependent people care about the spiritual growth of the other, the object of their dependency; they care only that the other is there to satisfy diem. Dependency is but one of the forms of behaviour to which we incorrecdy apply the word ‘love’ when concern for spiritual evolution is absent. We will now consider other such forms, and we hope to demonstrate again that love is never nurturance or cathexis without regard to spiritual growth.
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We frequently speak of people loving inanimate objects or activities. Thus we say, ‘He loves money’ or ‘He loves power’ or ‘He loves to garden’ or ‘He loves to play golf. Certainly an individual may extend himself or herself much beyond ordinary personal limits, working sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week to amass wealth or power. Yet despite the extent of one’s fortune or influence, all this work and accumulation may not be self-enlarging at all. Indeed, we may often say about a self-made tycoon, ‘He’s a small person, mean and petty’. While we may talk about how much this person loves money or power, we frequendy do not perceive him as a loving person. Why is this so? It is because wealth or power have become for such people ends in themselves rather than means to a spiritual
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goal. The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.
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Hobbies are self-nurturing activities. In loving ourselves - that is, nurturing ourselves for the purpose of spiritual growth - we need to provide ourselves with all kinds of things that are not directly spiritual. To nourish the spirit the body must also be nourished. We need food and shelter. No matter how dedicated we are to spiritual development, we also need rest and relaxation, exercise and distraction. Saints must sleep and even prophets must play. Thus hobbies may be a means through which we love ourselves. But if a hobby becomes an end in itself, then it becomes a substitute for rather than a means to self-development. Sometimes it is precisely because they are substitutes for self-development that hobbies are so popular. On golf courses, for instance, one may find some ageing men and women whose chief remaining goal in life is to knock a few more strokes off their game. This dedicated effort to improve their skill serves to give them a sense of progress in life and thereby assists them in ignoring the reality that they have actually stopped progressing, having given up the effort to improve themselves as human beings. If they loved themselves more they would not allow themselves to passionately settle for such a shallow goal and narrow future.
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On the other hand, power and money may be means to a loving goal. A person may, for instance, suffer a career in politics for the primary purpose of utilising political power for the betterment of the human race. Or some people may yearn for riches, not for money’s sake but in order to send their children to college or provide themselves with the freedom and time for study and reflection which are necessary for their own spiritual growth. It is not power or money that such people love; it is humanity.
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What this suggests is that the ‘love’ of infants and pets and even dependently obedient spouses is an instinctual pattern of behaviour to which it is quite appropriate to apply the term ‘maternal instinct’ or, more generally, ‘parental instinct’. We can liken this to the instinctual behaviour of ‘falling in love’: it is not a genuine form of love in that it is relatively effortless, and it is not totally an act of will or choice; it encourages the survival of the species but is not directed toward its improvement or spiritual growth; it is close to love in that it is a reaching out for others and serves to initiate interpersonal bonds from which real love might begin; but a good deal more is required to develop a healthy, creative marriage, raise a healthy, spiritually growing child or contribute to the evolution of humanity.
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much more than simple feeding, and that nurturing spiritual growth is an infinitely more complicated process than can be directed by any instinct. The mother mentioned at the beginning of this section w ho would not let her son take the bus to school is a case in point. By driving him to and from school she was nurturing him in a sense, but it was a nurturing he did not need and that clearly retarded rather than furthered his spiritual growth. Other examples abound: mothers who push food on their already overweight children; fathers who buy their sons whole roomfuls of toys and their daughters whole closetfuls of clothes; parents who set no limits and deny no desires. Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticising. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pull¬ ing in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word ‘judicious’ means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision-making.
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The motives behind injudicious giving and destructive nurturing are many, but such cases invariably have a basic feature in common: the ‘giver’, under the guise of love, is responding to and meeting his or her own needs without regard to the spiritual needs of the receiver. A minister reluctantly came to see me because his wife was suffering from a chronic depression and both his sons had dropped out of college and were living at home and receiving psychiatric attention. Despite the fact that his whole family was ‘ill’, he was initially completely unable to comprehend that he might be playing a role in their illnesses. ‘I do everything in my power to take care of them and their problems,’ he reported. ‘I don’t have a waking moment when I am not concerned about them.’ Analysis of the situation revealed that this man was indeed working himself to the bone to meet the demands of his wife and children. He had given both of his sons new cars and paid the insurance on them even though he felt the boys should be putting more effort into being self-supporting. Each week he took his wife to the opera or the theatre in the city even though he intensely disliked going to the city, and opera bored him to death. Busy though he was on his job, he spent most of his free time at home picking up after his wife and sons, who had a total disregard for housecleaning. ‘Don’t you get tired of laying yourself out for them all the time?’ I asked him. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘but what else am I to do? I love them and I have too much compassion not to take care of them. My concern for them is so great that I will never
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children because we want to have children, and if we are loving parents, it is because we want to be loving parents. It is true that love involves a change in the self, but this is an extension of the self rather than a sacrifice of the self. As will be discussed again later, genuine love is a self-replenishing activity. Indeed, it is even more; it enlarges rather than diminishes the self; it fills the self rather than depleting it. In a real sense love is as selfish as nonlove. Here again there is a paradox in that love is both selfish and unselfish at the same time. It is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from nonlove; it is the aim of the action. In the case of genuine love the aim is always spiritual growth. In the case of nonlove the aim is always something else.
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cathected another human being does not mean that we care a whit for that person’s spiritual development. The dependent person, in fact, usually fears the spiritual development of a cathected spouse. The mother who insisted upon driving her adolescent son to and from school clearly cathected the boy; he was important to her - but his spiritual growth was not. Third, the intensity of our cathexes frequently has nothing to do with wisdom or commitment. Two strangers may meet in a bar and cathect each other in such a way that nothing - not previously scheduled appointments, promises made, or family stability - is more important for the moment than their sexual consummation. Finally, our cathexes may be fleeting and momentary. Immediately following their sexual consummation the justmentioned couple may find each other unattractive and undesirable. We may decathect something almost as soon as we have cathected it.
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Genuine love, on the other hand, implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. When we are concerned for someone’s spiritual growth, we know that a lack of commit¬ ment is likely to be harmful and that commitment to that person is probably necessary for us to manifest our concern effectively. It is for this reason that commitment is the cornerstone of the psychotherapeutic relationship. It is almost impossible for a patient to experience significant personality growth without a ‘therapeutic alliance’ with the therapist. In other words, before the patient can risk major change he or she must feel the strength and security that come from believing that the therapist is the patient’s constant and stable ally. For this alliance to occur the therapist must demonstrate to the patient, usually over a considerable length of time, the consistent and steadfast caring that can arise only from a capacity for commitment. This °does not mean that the therapist always feels like listening to the patient. Commitment means that the therapist listens to the patient, like it or not. It is no different in a marriage. In a constructive marriage, just as in
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This is not to say that the partners in a stable, constructive relationship such as intensive psychotherapy or marriage do not cathect each other and the relationship itself in various ways; they do. What it does say is that genuine love transcends the matter of cathexes. When love exists it does so with or without cathexis and with or without a loving feeling. It is easier - indeed, it is fun - to love with cathexis and the feeling of love. But it is possible to love without cathexis and without loving feelings, and it is in the fulfilment of this possibility that genuine and transcendent love is distinguished from simple cathexis. The key word in this distinction is ‘will’. I have defined love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. If it is, so much the better; but if it isn’t, the commitment to love, the will to love, still stands and is still exercised. Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love. I may meet a woman who strongly attracts me, whom I feel like loving, but because it would be destructive to my marriage to have an affair at that time, I will say vocally or in the silence of my heart, ‘I feel like loving you, but I am not going to’. Similarly, I may refuse to take on a new patient who is most attractive and likely to succeed in therapy because my time is already committed to
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Having looked at some of the things that love is not, let us now examine some that love is. It was mentioned in the introduction to this section that the definition of love implied effort. When we extend ourselves, when we take an extra step or walk an extra mile, we do so in opposition to the inertia of laziness or the resistance of fear. Extension of ourselves or moving out against the inertia of laziness we call work. Moving out in the face of fear we call courage. Love, then, is a form of work or a form of courage. Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another’s spiritual growth. We may work or exert courage in directions other than toward spiritual growth, and for this reason all work and all courage is not love. But since it requires the extension of ourselves, love is always either work or courage. If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.
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In contradistinction to the others, I was able to hear much of what this great man said, precisely because I was willing to do the work of listening to him. I was willing to do this work for two reasons: one, because I recognised his greatness and that what he had to say would likely be of great value; second, because of my interest in the field I deeply wanted to absorb what he had to say so as to enhance my own understanding and spiritual growth. My listening to him was an act of love. I loved him because I perceived him to be a person of great value worth attending to, and I loved myself because I was willing to work on behalf of my growth. Since he was the teacher and I the pupil, he the giver and I the receiver, my love was primarily self-directed, motivated by what I could get out of our relationship and not what I could give him. Nontheless, it is entirely possible that he could sense within his audience the intensity of my concentration, my attention, my love, and he may have been thereby rewarded. Love, as we shall see again and again, is invariably a two-way street,
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The act of love -.extending oneself as I have said, requires a moving out against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage). Let us turn now from the works of love to the courage of love. When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory, so to speak. Our self becomes a new and different self. We do things we are not accustomed to do. We change. The experience of change, of unaccustomed activity, of being on unfamiliar ground, of doing things differently is frightening. It always was and always will be. People handle their fear of change in different ways, but the fear is inescapable if they are in fact to change. Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future. On some level spiritual growth, and therefore love, always requires courage and involves risk. It is the risking of love that we will now consider.
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to be you. We will love you no matter what you do, as long as you are you’. Without that security of my parents’ love reflected in my own self-love, I would have chosen the known instead of the unknown and continued to follow my parents’ preferred pattern at the extreme cost of myself s basic uniqueness. Finally, it is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions. As long as one marries, enters a career or has children to satisfy one’s parents or the expectations of anyone else, including society as a whole, the commitment by its very nature will be a shallow one. As long as one loves one’s children primarily because one is expected to behave in a loving manner toward them, then the parent will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of the children and unable to express love in the more subtle, yet often most important ways. The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.
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Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the founda¬ tion, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship. Deep commitment does not guarantee the success of the relation¬ ship but does help more than any other factor to assure it. Initially shallow commitments may grow deep with time; if not, the relationship will likely crumble or else be inevitably sickly or chronically frail. Frequendy we are not consciously aware of the immensity of the risk involved in making a deep commitment. I have already suggested that one of the functions served by the instinctual phenomenon of falling in love is to provide the participants wth a magic cloak of omnipotence which blissfully blinds them to the riskiness of what they are doing when they undertake marriage. For my own part, I was reasonably calm until the very moment that my wife joined me before the altar, when my whole body began to tremble. I then became so frightened that I can remember almost nothing of the ceremony or the reception following. In any case, it is our sense of commitment after the wedding which makes possible the transition from falling in love to genuine love. And it is our commitment after conception which transforms us from biological into psychological parents.* Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship. Anyone who is truly con¬ cerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, con¬ sciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly
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The risk of commitment to therapy is not only the risk of commitment itself but also the risk of self-confrontation and change. In the previous part, in the discussion of the discipline of dedication to the truth, I elaborated on the difficulties of changing one’s map of reality, world views and transferences. Yet changed they must be if one is to lead a life of love involving frequent extensions of oneself into new dimensions and territories of involvement. There come many points on one’s journey of spiritual growth, whether one is alone or has a psychotherapist as guide, when one must take new and unfamiliar actions in consonance with one’s new world view. The taking of such new action - behaving differendy from the way one has always behaved before - may represent an extraordinary personal risk. The passively homosexual young man for the first time summons the initiative to ask a girl for a date; the person who has never trusted anyone lies down for the first time on the analyst’s couch allowing the analyst to be hidden from his view; the previously dependent housewife announces to her controll¬ ing husband that she is obtaining a job whether he likes it or not, that she has her own life to live; the fifty-year-old mama’s boy tells his mother to stop addressing him by his infantile nickname; the emotionally distant, seemingly self-sufficient ‘strong’ man first allows himself to weep in public; or Rachel ‘lets go’ and cries for the first time in my office: these actions, and many more, involve a risk more personal and therefore frequendy more fearsome and frightening than that of any soldier entering battle. The soldier cannot run because the gun is pointed at his back as well as his front. But the individual trying to grow can always
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confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one’s beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the loved one, at least so far as the issue at hand is concerned. Yet genuine love recognises and respects the unique individuality and separate identity of the other person. (I will say more about this later.) The truly loving person, valuing the uniqueness and different¬ ness of his or her beloved, will be reluctant indeed to assume, ‘I am right, you are wrong; I know better than you what is good for you’. But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation out of loving concern for the spiritual growth of the other to confront the other with the problem. The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved’s own path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leader¬ ship.
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The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self¬ scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her ‘wisdom’ and the motives behind this need to assume leadership. ‘Do I really see things clearly or am I operating on murky assumptions? Do I really understand my beloved? Could it not be that the path my beloved is taking is wise and that my perception of it as unwise is the result of limited vision on my part? Am I being self-serving in believing that my beloved needs redirection?’ These are questions that those who truly love must continually ask themselves. This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. In the words of an anonymous fourteenth -century British monk and spiritual teacher, ‘Meekness in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of a man’s self as he is. Any man who
Page 164
protect her from her mother’s evil and nothing, in fact, to confront evil, leaving her no option but to incorporate her mother’s bitter manipulativeness along with his pseudo¬ humility as role models. To fail to confront when confronta¬ tion is required for the nurture of spiritual growth represents a failure to love equally as much as does thoughtless criticism or condemnation and other forms of active deprivation of caring. If they love their children parents must, sparingly and carefully perhaps but nonethe¬ less actively, confront and criticise them from time to time, just as they mustalso allow their children to confront and criticise themselves in return. Similarly, loving spouses must repeatedly confront each other if the marriage relationship is to serve the function of promoting the spiritual growth of the partners. No marriage can be judged truly successful unless husband and wife are each other’s best critics. The same holds true for friendship. There is a traditional concept that friendship should be a conflict-free relationship, a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ arrangement, relying solely on a mutual exchange of favours and compliments as prescribed by good manners. Such relationships are superficial and intimacy-avoiding and do not deserve the name of friendship which is so commonly applied to them. Fortunately, there are signs that our concept of friendship is beginning to deepen. Mutual loving confrontation is a significant part of all successful and meaningful human relationships. Without it the relation¬ ship is either unsuccessful or shallow.
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suggestion, parable, reward and punishment, questioning, prohibition or permission, creation of experiences, organis¬ ing with others, and so on. Volumes can be written about the art of exercising power. For our purposes, however, suffice it to say that loving individuals must concern themselves with this art, for if one desires to nurture another’s spiritual growth, then one must concern oneself with the most effective way to accomplish this in any given instance. Loving parents, for example, must first examine themselves and their values stringently before determining accurately that they know what is best for their child. Then, having made this determination, they also have to give great thought to the child’s character and capacities before deciding whether the child would be more likely to respond favourably to confrontation than to praise or increased attention or storytelling or some other form of influence. To confront someone with something he or she cannot handle will at best be a waste of time, and likely will have a deleterious effect. If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating. If we are to love we must extend ourselves to adjust our communication to the capacities of our beloved.
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I have indicated that the energy for the work of selfdiscipline derives from love, which is a form of will. It follows, then, not only that self-discipline is usually love, translated into action, but also that any genuine lover behaves with self-discipline and any genuinely loving relationship is a disciplined relationship. If I truly love another, I will obviously order my behaviour in such a way as to contribute the utmost to his or her spiritual growth. A young, intelligent, artistic and ‘bohemian’ couple with whom I once attempted to work had a four-year marriage marked by almost daily screaming, dish-throwing and face -clawing quarrels, along with weekly casual infidelity and monthly separations. Shortly after we began our work they each correctly perceived that therapy would lead them toward increasing self-discipline, and consequently to a less disorderly relationship. ‘But you want to take the passion out of our relationship,’ they said. ‘Your notions of love and marriage leave no room for passion.’ Almost immediately thereafter they quit therapy, and it has been reported to me that three years later, after several bouts with other therapists, their daily screaming matches and the chaotic pattern of their marriage continue unchanged, as well as the unproductivity of their individual lives. There is no doubt that their union is, in a certain sense, a highly colourful one. But it is like the primary colours in the paintings of children, splashed on the paper with abandon, occasionally not without charm, but generally demonstrating the sameness that characterises the art of young children. In the muted,
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be excruciatingly painful, as the assumption of godlike power so often is. But it must be made. Many factors need to be considered, primarily the capacity of a prospective recipient of our love to respond to that love with spiritual growth. People differ in this capacity, a fact to which more examination will later be given. It is, however, unquestion¬ able that there are many whose spirits are so locked in behind impenetrable armour that even the greatest efforts to nurture the growth of those spirits are doomed to almost certain failure. To attempt to love someone who cannot benefit from your love with spiritual growth is to waste your energy, to cast your seed upon arid ground. Genuine love is precious, and those who are capable of genuine love know that their loving must be focused as productively as possible through self-discipline.
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By this time some readers may feel saturated by the concept of discipline and conclude that I am advocating a style of life of Calvinistic dreariness. Constant selfdiscipline! Constant self-examination! Duty! Responsi¬ bility! Neopuritanism, they might call it. Call it what you will, genuine love, with all the discipline that it requires, is the only path in this life to substantial joy. Take another path and you may find rare moments of ecstatic joy, but they will be fleeting and progressively more elusive. When I genuinely love I am extending myself, and when I am extending myself I am growing. The more I love, the longer I love, the larger I become. Genuine love is self¬ replenishing. The more I nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more my own spiritual growth is nurtured. I am a totally selfish human being. I never do something for
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Although the act of nurturing another’s spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one’s own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved. The genuine lover always perceives the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.
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man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathise with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other ‘communist’ resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of ‘mid-life crisis’. The women’s liberation move¬ ment has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contribu¬ tions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth.
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As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: ‘If ever two were one, then we’.* As I have grown, however, I have come to realise that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone. Significant journeys cannot be accomplished without the nurture provided by a
Page 182
It is hard for me to recapture now the motivation and understanding with which I entered the field of psychiatry fifteen years ago. Certainly I wanted to ‘help’ people. The process of helping people in the other branches of medicine involved technology with which I was uncomfortable and which in other ways seemed too mechanical to suit my tastes. I also found talking to people more fun than poking and prodding them, and the quirks of the human mind seemed inherently more interesting to me than the quirks of the body or the germs infesting it. I had no idea how psychiatrists helped people, except for the fantasy that psychiatrists were the possessors of magical words and magical techniques of interacting with patients which would magically unscramble the knots of the psyche. Perhaps I wanted to be a magician. I had very little notion that the work involved would have something to do with the spiritual growth of patients, and certainly I had no notion whatsoever that it would involve my own spiritual growth.
Page 187
For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It is obvious, then, that in order to be healed through psychotherapy the patient must receive from the
Page 188
Since love and sex are so closely related and interconnec¬ ted, it is appropriate to mention here briefly the issue of sexual relationships between psychotherapists and their patients, an issue that is currently receiving a good deal of attention in the press. Because of the necessarily loving and intimate nature of the psychotherapeutic relationship, it is inevitable that both patients and therapists routinely develop strong or extremely strong sexual attractions to each other. The pressures to sexually consummate such attrac¬ tions may be enormous. I suspect that some of those in the profession of psychotherapy who cast stones at a therapist who has related sexually with a patient may not themselves be loving therapists and may not therefore have any real understanding of the enormity of the pressures involved. Moreover, were I ever to have a case in which I concluded after careful and judicious consideration that my patient’s spiritual growth would be substantially furthered by our having sexual relations, I would proceed to have them. In fifteen years of practice, however, I have not yet had such a case, and I find it difficult to imagine that such a case could really exist. First of all, as I have mentioned, the role of the good therapist is primarily that of the good parent, and good parents do not consummate sexual relationships with their children for several very compelling reasons. The job of a parent is to be of use to a child and not to use the child for personal satisfaction. The job of a therapist is to be of use to
Page 190
We have been examining the fact that psychotherapy should be (must be, if successful) a process of genuine love, a somewhat heretical notion in traditional psychiatric circles. The other side of the same coin is at least equally heretical: if psychotherapy is genuinely loving, should love always be psychotherapeutic? If we genuinely love our spouse, our parents, our children, our friends, if we extend ourselves to nurture their spiritual growth, should we be practising psychotherapy with them? My answer is: Certainly. From time to time at cocktail parties someone will say to me, ‘It must be difficult for you, Dr. Peck, to separate your social life from your professional life. After all, one can’t go around analysing one’s family and friends, can one?’ Usually the speaker is only making idle conversation and is neither interested in nor ready to assimilate a serious reply. Occasionally, however, the situation gives me the oppor¬ tunity to teach or practise psychotherapy there and then, on the spot, explaining just why I do not even attempt, or would want to attempt to separate my professional and my personal lives. If I perceive my wife or my children or my parents or my friends suffering from an illusion, a falsehood, an ignorance or an unnecessary impediment, I have every bit as much obligation to extend myself to them to correct the situation insofar as possible, as I do to my patients, who pay me for my services. Am I to withhold my services, my wisdom and my love from my family and my friends because they have not specifically contracted and paid me for my attention to their psychological needs? Hardly. How can I be a good friend, father, husband or son unless I take the opportunities that are available to attempt, with whatever artistry I can command, to teach my beloved what I know and give whatever assistance is in my power to give to his or
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her personal journeys of spiritual growth? Moreover, I expect the same services from my friends and family to the limits of their ability. Although their criticism of me may be unnecessarily blunt at times and their teaching may not be as thoughtful as an adult’s, I learn much to help me from my children. My wife guides me as much as I guide her. I would not call my friends friends were they to withhold from me the honesty of their disapproval and their loving concern as to the wisdom and safety of the directions of my own journey. Can I not grow more rapidly with their help than without it? Any genuinely loving relationship is one of mutual psychotherapy.
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exhortation to immediately begin practising psychotherapy with their mates and children. If one remains on a journey of spiritual growth, one’s capacity to love grows and grows. But it is always limited, and one clearly should hot attempt psychotherapy beyond one’s capacity to love, since psycho¬ therapy without love will be unsuccessful and even harmful. If you can love six hours a day, be content with that for the moment, for your capacity is already far greater than most; the journey is a long one and it requires time for your capacity to grow. To practise psychotherapy with one’s friends and family, to love one another full time, is an ideal, a goal to be striven toward but not instantly achieved.
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short of completely fulfilling their potential. They may have travelled a short or even a goodly distance along the journey of spiritual growth, but the whole journey is not for them. It is or seems to be too difficult. They are content to be ordinary men and women and do not strive to be God.
Page 207
Spiritual growth is a journey out of the microcosm into an ever greater macrocosm. In its earlier stages (which is all this book concerns itself with) it is a journey of knowledge and not of faith. In order to escape the microcosm of our previous experience and free ourselves from transferences, it is necessary that we learn. We must continually expand our realm of knowledge and our field of vision through the thorough digestion and incorporation of new information.
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The process of expansion of knowledge has been a major theme of this book. It will be recalled that in the previous section love was defined as an extension - that is, an expansion - of ourselves, and it was noted that among the risks of love was the risk of moving into the unknown of new experience. And at the end of the first part on discipline it was also noted that the learning of something new requires a giving up of the old self and a death of outworn knowledge. To develop a broader vision we must be willing to forsake, to kill, our narrower vision. In the short run it is more comfortable not to do this - to stay where we are, to keep using the same microcosmic map, to avoid suffering the death of cherished notions. The road of spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction. We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear. The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.
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So for mental health and spiritual growth we must develop our own personal religion and not rely on that of our parents. But what is this about a ‘religion of science’? Science is a religion because it is a world view of consider¬ able complexity with a number of major tenets. Most of these major tenets are as follows: the universe is real, and therefore a valid object for examination; it is of value for human beings to examine the universe; the universe makes sense - that is, it follows certain laws and is predictable; but human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition,
Page 209
Many patients who have already taken this beginning say to me: ‘I’m not religious. I don’t go to church. I no longer believe much of what the church and my parents told me. I don’t have my parents’ faith. I guess I’m not very spiritual’. It often comes as a shock to them when I question the reality of their assumption that they are not spiritual beings. ‘You have a religion,’ I may say, ‘a rather profound one. You worship the truth. You believe in the possibility of your growth and betterment: the possibility of spiritual progress. In the strength of your religion you are willing to suffer the pains of challenge and the agonies of unlearning. You take the risk of therapy, and all this you do for the sake of your religion. I am not at all certain it is realistic to say that you are
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less spiritual than your parents; to the contrary, I suspect the reality is that you have spiritually evolved beyond your parents, that your spirituality is greater by a quantum leap than theirs, which is insufficient to provide them with even the courage to question.’
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To some extent. While I believe that the sceptical world view of the scientific-minded is a distinct improvement over a world view based upon blind faith, local superstition and unquestioned assumptions, I also believe that most of the scientific-minded have only barely begun the journey of spiritual growth. Specifically, I believe that the outlook of most scientific-minded people toward the reality of God is almost as parochial as the outlook of simple peasants who blindly follow the faith of their fathers. Scientists have grave difficulty dealing with the reality of God.
Page 238
I have firmly stated that it is essential to our spiritual growth for us to become scientists who are sceptical of what we have been taught - that is, the common notions and assumptions of our culture. But the notions of science themselves often become cultural idols, and it is necessary that we become sceptical of these as well. It is indeed possible for us to mature out of a belief in God. What I would now like to suggest is that it is also possible to mature into a belief in God.' A sceptical atheism or agnosticism is not necessarily the highest state of understanding at which hpman beings can arrive. To the contrary, there is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is God. This is what Paul Tillich
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meant when he referred to the ‘god beyond God’ and why some sophisticated Christians used to proclaim joyfully, ‘God is dead. Long live God’. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth leads first out of superstition into agnosticism and then out of agnosticism toward an accurate knowledge of God? It was of this path that the Sufi Aba Said ibn Abi-l-Khair was speaking more than nine hundred years ago when he said:
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Whether or not the path of spiritual growth necessarily leads from a sceptical atheism or agnosticism toward an accurate belief in God, the fact of the matter is that some intellectually sophisticated and sceptical people, such as Marcia and Ted, do seem to grow in the direction of belief. And it should be noted that this belief into which they grew was not at all like that out of which Kathy evolved. The God that comes before scepticism may bear little resemblance to the God that comes after. As I mentioned at the beginning of this part, there is no single, monolithic religion. There are many religions, and perhaps many levels to belief. Some religions may be unhealthy for some people; others may be healthy.
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Mystics have spoken to us through the ages in terms of paradox. Is it possible that we are beginning to see a meeting ground between science and religion? When we are able to say that ‘a human is both mortal and eternal at the same time’ and ‘light is both a wave and a particle at the same time’, we have begun to speak the same language. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth that proceeds from religious superstition to scientific scepticism may indeed ultimately lead us to a genuine religious reality?
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together in time does not necessarily mean that they are causally related. Because this whole area is so murky and ambiguous, it is all the more important that we approach it with healthy scepticism lest we mislead ourselves and others. Among the ways that others may be misled, for instance, is by perceiving the lack of scepticism and rigorous reality-testing so often present in those individuals who are public proponents of the reality of psychic phenomena. Such individuals give the field a bad name. Because the field of psychic phenomena attracts so many people with poor reality-testing, it is tempting for more realistic observers to conclude that psychic phenomena themselves are unreal although such is not the case. There are many who attempt to find simple answers to hard questions, marrying popular scientific and religious concepts with high hopes but little thought. The fact that many such marriages fail should not be taken to mean that marriage is either impossible or inadvisable. But just as it is essential that our sight not be crippled by scientific tunnel vision, so also is it essential that our critical faculties and capacity for scepticism not be blinded by the brilliant beauty of the spiritual realm.
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However, on those occasions when we succeed in making the translation, the message always seems to be one designed to nurture our spiritual growth. In my experience, dreams that can be interpreted invariably provide helpful information to the dreamer. This assistance comes in a variety of forms: as warnings of personal pitfalls; as guides to the solution of problems we have been unable to solve; as proper indication that we are wrong when we think we are right, and as correct encouragement that we are right when we think we are probably wrong; as sources of necessary information about ourselves that we are lacking; as direction-finders when we feel lost; and as pointers to the way we need to go when we are floundering.
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animosity toward any member of his family. The last thought of herself in no other way than as a woman of the world. Through a complex of factors, our conscious selfconcept almost always diverges to a greater or lesser degree from the reality of the person we actually are. We are almost always either less or more competent than we believe ourselves to be. The unconscious, however, knows who we really are. A major and essential task in the process of one’s spiritual development is the continuous work of bringing one’s conscious self-concept into progressively greater congruence with reality. When a large part of this lifelong task is accomplished with relative rapidity, as it may be through intensive psychotherapy, the individual will often feel ‘reborn’. ‘I am not the person I was’, a patient will say with real joy about the dramatic change in his or her consciousness; ‘I am a totally new and different person’. Such a person has no difficulty in understanding the words of the song: ‘I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see’.
Page 275
Five months ago, having two hours to spend between appointments in a certain town, I asked a colleague who lived there if I could spend them in the library of his house working on the rewriting of the first section of this book. When I got there I was met by my colleague’s wife, a distant and reserved woman who had never seemed to care for me very much and had been actually hostile to me on several occasions in an almost arrogant way. We chatted awkwardly for perhaps five minutes. In the course of our superficial conversation she said she’d heard I was writing a book and asked about the subject. I told her it concerned spiritual growth and did not elaborate further. I then sat down in the library to work. Within a half hour I had run into a snag. A
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(a) They serve to nurture - support, protect and enhance - human life and spiritual growth.
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Although generally regarded as separate, I have come to believe that their commonality indicates that these phenomena are part of or manifestations of a single phenomenon: a powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings. For hundreds and even thousands of years before the scientific conceptualisation of such things as immune globulins, dream states, and the unconscious, this force has been consistently recognised by the religious, who have applied to it the name of grace. And have sung its praise. ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .’
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What are we to do - we who are properly sceptical and scientific-minded - with this ‘powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings’? We cannot touch this force. We have no decent way to measure it. Yet it exists. It is real. Are we to operate with tunnel vision and ignore it because it does not fit in easily with traditional scientific concepts of natural law? To do so seems perilous. I do not think we can hope to approach a full understanding of the cosmos, of the place of man within the cosmos, and hence the nature of mankind itself, without incorporating the phenomenon of grace into our conceptual framework.
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Although we have not until now focused upon it as a concept, in one\way or another we have been concerned with evolution throughout this book. Spiritual growth is the evolution of an individual. An individual’s body may undergo the changes of the life cycle, but it does not evolve. New physical patterns are not forged. Decline of physical competence in old age is an inevitability. Within an individual lifetime, however, the human spirit may evolve dramatically. New patterns may be forged. Spiritual compe¬ tence may increase (although it usually does not) until the moment of death in advanced old age. Our lifetime offers us unlimited opportunities for spiritual growth until the end. While the focus of this book is on spiritual evolution, the process of physical evolution is similar to that of the spirit and provides us with a model for the further understanding of the process of spiritual growth and the meaning of grace.
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The spiritual evolution of humanity can be similarly diagrammed: spiritual competence
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Again and again I have emphasised that the process of spiritual growth is an effortful and difficult one. This is because it is conducted against a natural resistance, against
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a natural inclination to keep things the way they were, to cling to the old maps and old ways of doing things, to take the easy path. About this natural resistance, this force of entropy as it operates in our spiritual lives, I will have still more to say shortly. But as in the case of physical evolution, the miracle is that this resistance is overcome. We do grow. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings. Not all of us. Not easily. But in significant numbers humans somehow manage to improve themselves and their cultures. There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born.
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This diagram of the process of spiritual evolution can apply to the existence of a single individual. Each of us has his or her own urge to grow, and each of us, in exercising that urge, must single-handedly fight against his or her own resistance. The diagram also applies to humanity as a whole. As we evolve as individuals, so do we cause our society to evolve. The culture that nurtures us in childhood is nurtured by our leadership in adulthood. Those who achieve growth not only enjoy the fruits of growth but give the same fruits to the world. Evolving as individuals, we carry humanity on our backs. And so humanity evolves.
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The notion that the plane of mankind’s spiritual develop¬ ment is in a process of ascension may hardly seem realistic to a generation disillusioned with the dream of progress. Everywhere is war, corruption and pollution. How could one reasonably suggest that the human race is spiritually progressing? Yet that is exactly what I suggest. Our veiy sense of disillusionment arises from the fact that we expect more of ourselves than our forebears did of themselves. Human behaviour that we find repugnant and outrageous today was accepted as a matter of course yesteryear. A major focus of this book, for instance, has been on the responsi¬ bilities of parenthood for the spiritual nurture of children. This is hardly a radical theme today, but several centuries ago it was generally not even a human concern. While I find
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But what is this force that pushes us as individuals and as a whole species to grow against the natural resistance of our own lethargy? We have already labelled it. It is love. Love was defined as ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’. When we grow, it is because we are working at it, and we are working at it because we love ourselves. It is through love that we elevate ourselves. And it is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self,' is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in mankind as human love. Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.
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We are still left, however, with the question asked at the end of the part on love: Where does love come from? Only now it can be enlarged to a perhaps even more basic question: Whence comes the whole force of evolution? And to this we can add our puzzlement about the origins of grace. For love is conscious, but grace is not. Whence comes this ‘powerful force originating outside of human consciousness which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings’?
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want this obligation. We don’t want to have to work that hard. We don’t want God’s responsibility. We don’t want the responsibility of having to think all the time. As long as we can believe that godhood is an impossible attainment for ourselves, we don’t have to worry about our spiritual growth, we don’t have to push ourselves to higher and higher levels of consciousness and loving activity; we can relax and just be human. If God’s in his heaven and we’re down here, and never the twain shall meet, we can let Him have all the responsibility for evolution and the directorship of the universe. We can do our bit toward assuring ourselves a comfortable old age, hopefully complete with healthy, happy and grateful children and grandchildren; but beyond that we need not bother ourselves. These goals are difficult enough to achieve, and hardly to be disparaged. Nonethe¬ less, as soon as we believe it is possible for man to become God, we can really never rest for long, never say, ‘OK, my job is finished, my work is done’. We must constantly push ourselves to greater and greater wisdom, greater and greater effectiveness. By this belief we will have trapped ourselves, at least until death, on an effortful treadmill of selfimprovement and spiritual growth. God’s responsibility must be our own. It is no wonder that the belief in the possibility of Godhead is repugnant.
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Being about spiritual growth, this book is inevitably about the other side of the same coin: the impediments to spiritual growth. Ultimately there is only the one impediment, and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome laziness, none of the others will be hurdled. So this is also a book about laziness. In examining discipline we were considering the laziness of attempting to avoid necessary suffering, or taking the easy way out. In examining love we were also examining the fact that nonlove is the unwilling¬ ness to extend one’s self. Laziness is love’s opposite. Spiritual growth is effortful, as we have been reminded again and again. We are now at a position from which we can examine the nature of laziness in perspective and realise that laziness is the force of entropy as it manifests itself in the lives of all of us.
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So original sin does exist; it is our laziness. It is very real. It exists in each and every one of us - infants, children, adolescents, mature adults, the elderly; the wise or the stupid; the lame or the whole. Some of us may be less lazy than others, but we are all lazy to some extent. No matter how energetic, ambitious or even wise we may be, if we truly look into ourselves we will find laziness lurking at some level. It is the force of entropy within us, pushing us down and holding us all back from our spiritual evolution.
Page 294
In the earlier stages of spiritual growth, individuals are mostly unaware of their own laziness, although they may give it lip service by saying such things as ‘Of course, like everybody else, I have my lazy moments’. This is because the lazy part of the self, like the devil that it may actually be, is unscrupulous and specialises in treacherous disguise. It cloaks its own laziness in all manner of rationalisations, which the more growing part of the self is still too weak to see through easily or to combat. Thus a person will say to the suggestion that he or she gain some new knowledge in a certain area, ‘That area’s been studied by a lot of people and they’ve not come up with any answers’ or ‘I know a man who was into that stuff and he was an alcoholic who committed suicide’ or ‘I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks’ or ‘You’re trying to manipulate me into becoming a carbon copy of yourself and that’s not what psychotherapists are supposed
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For these reasons, those who are in the relatively more advanced stages of spiritual growth are the very ones most aware of their own laziness. It is the least lazy who know themselves to be sluggish. In my personal struggle for maturity I am gradually becoming more aware of new insights, which tend, as if of themselves, to want to slip away from me. Or I glimpse new, constructive avenues of thought on which my steps, seemingly of their own accord, start to drag. I suspect that most of the time these valuable thoughts do slip away unnoticed and that I wander from these valuable avenues without knowing what I’m doing. But when I do become conscious of the fact that I am dragging my feet, I am compelled to exert the will to quicken my pace in the very direction I am avoiding. The fight against entropy never ends.
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We all have a sick self and a healthy self. No matter how neurotic or even psychotic we may be, even if we seem to be totally fearful and completely rigid, there is still a part of us, however small, that wants us to grow, that likes change and development, that is attracted to the new and the unknown, and that is willing to do the work and take the risks involved in spiritual evolution. And no matter how seemingly healthy and spiritually evolved we are, there is still a part of us, however small, that does not want us to exert ourselves, that clings to the old and familiar, fearful of any change or effort, desiring comfort at any cost and absence of pain at any price, even if the penalty be ineffectiveness, stagnation or regres¬ sion. In some of us our healthy self seems pathetically small, wholly dominated by the laziness and fearfulness of our monumental sick self. Others of us may be rapidly growing, our dominant healthy self reaching eagerly upward in the struggle to evolve toward godhood; the healthy self,
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badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness. My second conclu¬ sion, then, is that evil is laziness carried to its ultimate, extraordinary extreme. As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil. Truly evil people, on the other hand, actively rather than passively avoid extending themselves. They will take any action in their power to protect their own laziness, to preserve the integrity of their sick self. Rather than nurturing others, they will actually destroy others in this cause. If necessary, they will even lull to escape the pain of their own spiritual growth. As the integrity of their sick self is threatened by the spiritual health of those around them, they will seek by all manner of means to crush and demolish the spiritual health that may exist near them. I define evil, then, as the exercise of political power - that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion - in order to avoid extending one’s self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth. Ordinary laziness is nonlove; evil is antilove.
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The words ‘aware’ and ‘awareness’ have repeatedly cropped up throughout. Evil people resist the awareness of their own condition. A mark of the spiritually advanced is their awareness of their own laziness. People often are not aware of their own religion or world view, and in the course of their religious growth it is necessary for them to become aware of their own assumptions and tendencies toward bias. Through bracketing and the attention of love we grow more aware of our beloved and of the world. An essential part of discipline is the development of an awareness of our responsibility and power of choice. The capacity of aware¬ ness we assign to that portion of the mind we call conscious or consciousness. We are now at the point where we can define spiritual growth as the growth or evolution of consciousness.
Page 303
I have said that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is for the individual to become as one with God. It is to know with God. Since the unconscious is God all along, we may further define the goal of spiritual growth to be the attainment of godhood by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God. Does this mean that the goal is for the conscious to merge with the unconscious, so that all is unconsciousness? Hardly. We now come to the point of it all. The point is to become God while preserving consciousness. If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome of the unconscious God can become itself God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are bom that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.
Page 305
We have now come to the point where we can understand the nature of power. It is a much misunderstood subject. One reason for the misunderstanding is that there are two kinds of power - political and spiritual. Religious mythology takes pains to draw the distinction between the two. Prior to the birth of Buddha, for instance, the soothsayers informed his father that Buddha would grow up to become the most powerful king in the land or else a poor man who would be the greatest spiritual leader the world had ever known. Either or, but not both. And Christ was offered by Satan ‘all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them’. But he rejected this alternative in favour of dying, seemingly impotent, upon the cross.
Page 305
Political power is the capacity to coerce others, overtly or covertly, to do one’s will. This capacity resides in a position, such as a kingship or presidency, or else in money. It does not reside in the person who occupies the position or possesses the money. Consequently political power is unrelated to goodness or wisdom. Very stupid and very evil people have walked as kings upon the earth. Spiritual power, however, resides entirely within the individual and has nothing to do with the capacity to coerce others. People of great spiritual power may be wealthy and may upon occasion occupy political positions of leadership, but they are as likely to be poor and lacking in political authority. Then, what is the capacity of spiritual power if not the capacity' to coerce? It is the capacity to make decisions with maximum awareness. It is consciousness.
Page 306
What are we to do, adrift in a sea of ignorance? Some are nihilistic and say, ‘Nothing’. They propose only that we should continue to drift, as if no course could possibly be charted in such a vast sea which would bring us to any true clarity or meaningful destination. But others, sufficiently aware to know that they are lost, dare to hope that they can work themselves out of ignorance through developing even greater awareness. They are correct. It is possible. But such greater awareness does not come to them in a single blinding flash of enlightenment. It comes slowly, piece by piece, and each piece must be worked for by the patient effort of study and observation of everything, including themselves. They are humble students. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.
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The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one. There is a joy that comes with mastery. Indeed, there is no greater satisfaction than that of being an expert, of really knowing what we are doing. Those who have grown the most spiritually are those who are the experts in living. And there is yet another joy, even greater. It is the joy of communion with God. For when we truly know what we are doing, we are participating in the omniscience of God. With total awareness of the nature of a situation, of our motives for acting upon it, and of the results and ramifications of our action, we have attained that level of awareness that we normally expect only of God. Our conscious self has succeeded in coming into alignment with the mind of God. We know with God.
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Yet those who have attained this stage of spiritual growth, this state of great awareness, are invariably possessed by a joyful humility. For one of their very awarenesses is the awareness that their unusual wisdom has its origin in their unconscious. They are aware of their connection to the rhizome and aware that their knowledge flows to them from the rhizome through the connection. Their efforts at learning are only efforts to open the connection, and they are aware that the rhizome, their unconscious, is not theirs alone but all mankind’s, all life’s, God’s. Invariably when asked the source of their knowledge and power, the truly powerful will reply: ‘It is not my power. What little power I have is but a minute expression of a far greater power. I am merely a conduit. It is not my power at all’. I have said that this humility is joyful. That is because, with their awareness of their connectedness to God, the truly powerful experi¬ ence a diminution in their sense of self. ‘Let thy will, not mine, be done. Make me your instrument’, is their only desire. Such a loss of self brings with it always a kind of calm ecstasy, not unlike the experience of being in love. Aware of their intimate connectedness to God, they experience a surcease of loneliness. There is communion.
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Joyful though it is, the experience of spiritual power is also terrifying. For the greater one’s awareness, the more difficult it is to take action. I mentioned this fact at the conclusion of the first part when I gave the analogy of two generals, each having to make the decision of whether or not to commit a division to battle. The one who regards his division simply and solely as a unit of strategy may sleep easily after having made his decision. But for the other, with his awareness of each of the lives of the men under his command, the decision will be agonising. We are all generals. Whatever action we take may influence the course of civilisation. The decision whether to praise or punish "a single child may have vast consequences. It is easy to act with the awareness of limited data and let the chips fall as they may. The greater our awareness, however, the more and more data we must assimilate and integrate into our decision-making. The more we know, the more complex decisions become. Yet the more and more we know, the more it begins to become possible to predict just where the chips will fall. If we assume the responsibility of attempting to predict accurately just where each chip will fall, we are likely to feel so overwhelmed by the complexity of the task as to sink into inaction. But, then, inaction is itself a form of action, and while doing nothing might be the best course of action under certain circumstances, in others it may be disastrous and destructive. So spiritual power is not simply awareness; it is the capacity to maintain one’s ability to still make decisions with greater and greater awareness. And godlike power is the power to make decisions with total awareness. But unlike the popular notion of it, omniscience does not make decision-making easier; rather, it becomes ever more difficult. The closer one comes to godhood, the more one feels sympathy for God. To participate in God’s omniscience is also to share His agony.
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there is a similarity, in at least one dimension, between spiritual and political power. Someone who is approaching the peak of spiritual evolution is like someone at the peak of political power. There is no one above to whom to pass the buck; no one to blame; no one to tell you how to do it. There may not even be anyone on the same level to share the agony or the responsibility. Others may advise, but the decision is yours alone. You alone are responsible. In another dimen¬ sion, the aloneness of enormous spiritual power is even greater than that of political power. Since their level of awareness is seldom as high as their exalted positions, the politically powerful almost always have their spiritual equals with whom they can communicate. So presidents and kings will have their friends and cronies. But the person who has evolved to the highest level of awareness, of spiritual power, will likely have no one in his or her circle of acquaintances with whom to share such depth of understanding. One of the most poignant themes of the Gospels is Christ’s continual sense of frustration on finding that there was no one who could really understand him. No matter how hard he tried, how much he extended himself, he could not lift the minds of even his own disciples to his level. The wisest followed him but could not catch up with him, and all his love could not relieve him of the necessity to lead by walking ahead, utterly alone. This kind of aloneness is ‘shared’ by all who travel the farthest on the journey of spiritual growth. It is such a burden that it simply could not be borne were it not for the fact that as we outdistance our fellow humans our relationship to God inevitably becomes correspondingly closer. In the communion of growing consciousness, of knowing with God, there is enough joy to sustain us.
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are ‘out of touch with reality’, and will deem us mentally ill even though we ourselves are most likely convinced of our sanity.* But long before matters have proceeded to this extreme, and we have been served notice of our illness by our fellow citizens, we are served notice by our unconscious of our increasing maladjustment. Such notice is served by our unconscious through a variety of means: bad dreams, anxiety attacks, depressions, and other symptoms. Although our conscious mind has denied reality, our unconscious, which is omniscient, knows the true score and attempts to help us out by stimulating, through symptom formation, our conscious mind to the awareness that something is wrong. In other words, the painful and unwanted symptoms of mental illness are manifestations ot grace. They are the products of a ‘powerful force originating outside of con¬ sciousness which nurtures our spiritual growth’.
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Orestes did not go to a psychotherapist; he healed himself. And even had .there been expert psychiatrists in ancient Greece, he still would have had to heal himself. For, as has been mentioned, psychotherapy is only a tool - a discipline. It is up to the patient to choose or reject the tool, and once chosen, it is the patient who determines how much to use the tool and to what end. There are people who will overcome all manner of obstacles - for example, insufficient funds, previous disastrous experiences with psychiatrists or psychotherapists, disapproving relatives, cold and rejecting clinics - to obtain therapy and every last ounce of its possible benefit. Others, however, will reject therapy even if it is offered them on a silver platter, or else, even if they do become engaged in a therapeutic relationship, will sit in it like a bump on a log, extracting from it almost nothing no matter how great the therapist’s skill and effort and love. While at the conclusion of a successful case I am tempted to feel that I have cured the patient, I know the reality of the situation is that I have been no more than a catalyst - and fortunate to be that. Since ultimately people heal themselves with or without the tool of psychotherapy, why is it that so few do and so many do not? Since the path of spiritual growth, albeit difficult, is open to all, why do so few choose to travel it?
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Although I am recognising the extreme importance of this will to grow, I am not sure how much I will be able to contribute to its understanding, since the concept brings us once again to the edge of mystery. It will be immediately apparent that the will to grow is in essence the same phenomenon as love. Love is the will to extend oneself for spiritual growth. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people. I have spoken about how the capacity to love is nurtured in one by loving parenting, but I have also noted that parental nurturing alone fails to account for the existence of this capacity in all people. The reader will remember that the second part of this book concluded with four questions about love, two of which we are now considering: why some people fail to respond to treatment
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And so it is with spiritual growth as well as in professional life. For the call to grace is a promotion, a call to a position of higher responsibility and power. To be aware of grace, to personally experience its constant presence, to know one’s nearness to God, is to know and continually experience an inner tranquillity and peace that few possess. On the other hand, this knowledge and awareness brings with it an enormous responsibility. For to experience one’s closeness to God is also to experience the obligation to be God, to be the agent of His power arid love. The call to grace is a call to a life of effortful caring, to a life of service and whatever
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sacrifice seems required. It is a call out of spiritual childhood into adulthood, a call to be a parent unto mankind. T. S. Eliot described the matter well in the Christmas sermon he had Thomas Becket deliver in the play Murder in the Cathedral :
Page 326
We have spoken in various ways about how difficult it is to grow up. A very few march unambivalendy and un¬ hesitatingly intti adulthood, ever eager for new and greater responsibilities. Most drag their feet and in fact never become more than partial adults, always shrinking from the demands of total adulthood. So it is with spiritual growth, which is inseparable from the process of psychological maturation. For the call to grace in its ultimate form is a summons to be one with God, to assume peership with God. Hence it is a call to total adulthood. We are accustomed to imagining'the experience of conversion or sudden call to grace as an ‘Oh, joy!’ phenomenon. In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an ‘Oh, shit’ phenomenon. At the moment we finally listen to the call we may say, ‘Oh, thank you, Lord’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, I am not worthy’; or we may say, ‘O Lord, do I have to?’
Page 328
And we are left again facing paradox. Throughout this book I have been writing of spiritual growth as if it were an orderly, predictable process. It has been implied that spiritual growth may be learned as one might learn a field of knowledge through a Ph.D. programme; if you pay your tuition and work hard enough, of course you will succeed and get your degree. I have interpreted Christ’s saying ‘Many are called but few are chosen’ to mean that very few choose to heed the call of grace because of the difficulties involved. By this interpretation I have indicated that whether or not we become blessed by grace is a matter of our choice. Essentially, I have been saying that grace is earned. And I know this to be true.
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At the same time, however, I know that that’s not the way it is at all. We do not come to grace; grace comes to us. Try as we might to obtain grace, it may yet elude us. We may seek it not, yet it will find us. Consciously we may avidly desire the spiritual life but then discover all manner of stumbling blocks in our way. Or we may have seemingly little taste for the spiritual life and yet find ourselves vigorously called to it in spite of ourselves. While on one level we do choose whether or not to heed the call of grace, on another it seems clear that God is the one who does the choosing. The common experience of those who have achieved a state of grace, on whom ‘this new life from heaven’ has been bestowed, is one of amazement at their condition. They do not feel that they have earned it. While they may have a realistic awareness of the particular
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How do we resolve this paradox? We don’t. Perhaps the best that we can say is that while we cannot will ourselves to grace, we can by will open ourselves to its miraculous coming. We can prepare ourselves to be fertile ground, a welcoming place. If we can make ourselves into totally disciplined, wholly loving individuals, then, even though we may be ignorant of theology and give no thought to God, we will have prepared ourselves well for the coming of grace. Conversely, the study of theology is a relatively poor method of preparation and, by itself, completely useless. Nonethe¬ less, I have written this section because I do believe that the awareness of the existence of grace can be of considerable assistance to those who have chosen to travel the difficult path of spiritual growth. For this awareness will facilitate their journey in at least three ways: it will help them to take advantage of grace along the way; it will give them a surer sense of direction; and it will provide encouragement.
Page 331
A major purpose of this section on grace has been to assist those on the journey of spiritual growth to learn the capacity of serendipity. And let us redefine serendipity not as a gift itself but as a learned capacity to recognise and utilise the gifts of grace which are given to us from beyond the realm of our conscious will. With this capacity, we will find that our journey of spiritual growth is guided by the invisible hand and unimaginable wisdom of God with infinitely greater accuracy than that of which our unaided conscious will is capable. So guided, the journey becomes ever faster.
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every inch of the way and have it demonstrated to them that each step will be safe and worth their while. This cannot be done. For the journey of spiritual growth requires courage and initiative and independence of thought and action. While the words of the prophets and the assistance of grace are available, the journey must still be travelled alone. No teacher can carry you there. There are no preset formulas. Rituals are only learning aids, they are not the learning. Eating organic food, saying five Hail Marys before break¬ fast, praying facing east or west, or going to church on Sunday will not take you to your destination. No words can be said, no teaching can be taught that will relieve spiritual travellers from the necessity of picking their own ways, working out with effort and anxiety their own paths through the unique circumstances of their own lives toward the identification of their individual selves with God.
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Even when we truly understand these matters, the journey of spiritual growth is still so lonely and difficult that we often become discouraged. The fact that we live in a scientific age, while helpful in some respects, serves in others to foster discouragement. We believe in the mechanical principles of the universe; not in miracles. Through our science we have come to learn that our dwelling place is but a single planet of a single star lost amid one galaxy among many. And just as we seem lost amid the enormity of the external universe, so science has also led us to develop an image of ourselves as being helplessly determined and governed by internal forces not subject to our will - by chemical molecules in our brain and conflicts in our unconscious that compel us to feel and to behave in certain ways when we are not even aware of what we are doing. So the replacement of our human myths by scientific information has caused us to suffer a sense of personal meaninglessness. Of what possible significance could we be, as individuals or even as a race, buffeted about by internal chemical and psychological forces we do not understand, invisible in a universe whose
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Yet it is that same science that has in certain ways assisted me to perceive the reality of the phenomenon of grace. I have attempted to transmit that perception. For once we perceive the reality of grace, our understanding of ourselves as meaningless and insignificant is shattered. The fact that there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that nurtures our growth and evolution is enough to turn our notions of self-insignificance topsy¬ turvy. For the existence of this force (once we perceive it) indicates with incontrovertible certainty that our human spiritual growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God. The existence of grace is prima facie evidence not only of the reality of God but also of the reality that God’s will is devoted to the growth of the individual human spirit. What once seemed to be a fairy tale turns out to be the reality. We live our lives in the eye of God, and not at the periphery but at the centre of His vision, His concern. It is probable that the universe as we know it is but a single stepping-stone toward the entrance to the Kingdom of God. But we are hardly lost in the universe. To the contrary, the reality of grace indicates humanity to be at the centre of the universe. This time and space exists for us to travel through. When my patients lose sight of their significance and are disheartened by the effort of the work we are doing, I sometimes tell them that the human race is in the midst of making an evolution¬ ary leap. ‘Whether or not we succeed in that leap,’ I say to them, ‘is your personal responsibility.’ And mine. The universe, this stepping-stone, has been laid down to prepare a way for us. But we ourselves must step across it, one by one. Through grace we are helped not to stumble and through grace we know that we are being welcomed. What more can we ask?
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In the time since its initial publication, I have been fortunate enough to receive many letters from readers of The Road Less Travelled. They have been extraordinary letters. Intelligent and articulate without exception, they have also been extremely loving. As well as expressing appreciation, most of them have contained additional gifts: appropriate poetry, useful quotes from other authors, nuggets of wisdom and tales of personal experience. These letters have enriched my life. It has become clear to me that there is a whole network - far more vast than I had dared to believe - of people across the country who have quietly been proceeding for long distances along the less travelled road of spiritual growth. They have thanked me for diminishing their sense of aloneness on the journey. I thank them for the same service.
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But who is a competent psychotherapist? Several readers of The Road Less Travelled who moved in the direction of seeking psychotherapy have written to inquire how one should go about choosing the right therapist, distinguishing between the competent and the incompetent. My first piece of advice is to take the choice seriously. It is one of the most important decisions you can make in your lifetime. Psycho¬ therapy is a major investment, not only of your money but even more of your valuable time and energy. It is what stockbrokers would call a high-risk investment. If the choice is right, it will pay off handsomely in spiritual dividends you could not even have dreamed of. While it is not likely you will be actually harmed if you make the wrong choice, you will, however, waste most of the valuable money, time and energy you have put into it.
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This brilliant, disturbing book forces us to confront the darker side of our natures and to recognize that without a spiritual (and indeed religious) dimension modem psychiatry cannot claim to understand human nature or behaviour. It is a worthy successor to The Road Less Travelled.
