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12 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
Yoga (an ancient and continuing system of empirically scientific spiritual thought and practice within the. Hindu tradition), on the other hand, has always been interested in achieving higher states of consciousness. Viewing the mind from this angle, it sees mind as a potential obstacle to higher consciousness. Yoga agrees that mind is an invaluable tool—essential not only for operating in the outer world, but for spiritual growth as well, up to a point—and agrees that desire is the very fabric of man’s mind, like the threads of a cloth. But it differs from psychiatry in declaring that the purpose of life, after a certain point in the evolution of consciousness, is the removal of desire rather than its gratification, so that the mind will disappear—thus leading to awareness of the real self, Universal Consciousness.
BROADENING PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS
In the Appendices, I’ll elaborate on the extensive work already accomplished toward establishing a workable synthesis of psychology and spirituality—work which broadens our concept of mind and sets the stage for a serious reappraisal of the nature of consciousness, but which hasn’t yet been seriously integrated into mainstream thinking. Ernest Becker, in his brilliant Pulitzer Prize- winning book The Denial of Death, argues that psychology and spirituality have been inextricably connected since the beginning of existentialism, with the famous Danish philosopher whom he calls “the psychoanalyst” Kierkegaard. Becker notes, “that at the very furthest reaches of scientific description, psychology has to give way to ‘theology’
The further one pushes his study of Rank the more his writings blur into those of Kierkegaard — all the more remarkably, as we now fully appreciate, because of the far greater sophistication of clinical psychoanalysis. By now it should be clear that this blurring of Rank and Kierkegaard is not a weak surrender to ideology but an actual scientific working-through of the problem of human character. Both men reached the same conclusion after the most exhaustive psychological quest: that at the very furthest reaches of scientific description, psychology has to give way to ‘theology’— that is, to a world-view that absorbs the individual’s conflicts and guilt and offers him the possibility for some kind of heroic apotheosis. Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. Here Rank and Kierkegaard meet in one of those astonishing historical mergers of thought: that sin and neurosis are two ways of talking