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xii SPIRIT AND THE MIND
Serious students of the scriptures know that warnings have been voiced by tried and true spiritual masters about being spiritually deceived. They rightfully warn us to avoid being gullible and overly accepting where such an important dimension of life is concerned, without serious inquiry and study. But then why do we resist this inquiry and study when we learn of the extraordinary evidence already becoming common knowledge—much of which will be presented in this book?
Because, above all, I feel that most of our resistance arises from a profound, pervasive, irrational and fundamental fear that the mind has towards spirit. For the mind to seriously consider the possibility of man’s immortality, his existence beyond any boundaries including those of life and death, it must be open to seriously confronting our apparent mortality—death and the possibility of our non-existence. We must be able to stand face to face in front of death and peer unswervingly into its very depths. This in itself is frightening enough. And the mind’s intuition that to merge with the other entails the surrender of one’s own cherished ego, one’s sense of self-identity and self-worth, offers an even more trying and challenging threat.
What a task! For to become one with Universal Consciousness means to transcend duality—to transcend all limitations—to be unaffected by pleasure or pain, desires or threats to the ego, the pull of the senses to the tantalizing outer world of separate names and forms. Naturally, the thought of renouncing all that we hold as real makes us recoil in fear.
In the last analysis, even a man as perceptive and intuitive as Jung, a man who presented psychology with the idea of the collective unconscious, even he did not think mankind had the capacity to fully transcend the mind and move beyond the sense of a separate ego. No wonder that a mind which grasps the full extent of this challenge would reel, avoid and resist the path to self-transcendence.
This book, then, is my attempt to investigate spiritual reality and to put it into a language which is relevant to psychiatry. It is divided into four section. Part I investigates the growing need to integrate spiritual and mystical insights about the dynamics of consciousness into Western psychology. We will also explore the nature and depth of our resistance to spirituality.
We’ll move beyond the theoretical to investigate the relevance of