Page 30 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc
P. 30

Basic Assumptions 13
about the same thing—the complete isolation of the individual, his disharmony with the rest of nature, his hyper individualism, his attempt to create his own world from within himself.4
Thus Becker draws attention to the agreement between psychology and theology, that man’s suffering—his neurosis and sin, which are one and the same—result from his sense of separation and littleness—in other words, from duality. We must not be misled into thinking that Becker, Kierkegaard and Rank are talking only about the psychological dimension. For here there is recognition of a level of consciousness beyond the psychological—beyond duality.
The theological point of view and that of this book is that there is a unitive dimension of consciousness beyond the mind and duality, and that the “heroic apotheosis” of which Becker speaks—the theology to which psychology has to give way—refers to the possibility of transcending duality, of actually being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.
Becker also sheds light on the reasons for psychology’s resistance to spirituality, as we shall see in Chapter 4. William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, written in 1908, was an early recognition of the psychological significance of spiritual beliefs and phenomena. And of course Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious postulated the existence of a level of consciousness extending beyond time and space and shared by all of humanity.
Awareness of the importance of spiritual and mystical insight is a significant part of humanistic psychology. Humanists feel that behav- ioristic formulas and overattentiveness to Freudian unconscious determinants of personality are offensive to human dignity. A more complete picture of the total human being can be gained from the study not only of pathology, but of the normal and exceptional as well. Yes, there are lower animal drives, housed in man’s unconscious; yes, conflicts can be buried deep in the unconscious; yes, man’s behavior and thoughts can be determined and “conditioned” by past events—but man is more than this.
Abraham Maslow, considered the father of humanistic psychology, showed that man had higher human drives and needs—such as the need for meaningful work, for being fair and just and for morality—along with the more primitive drives defined by


































































































   28   29   30   31   32