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The Making of a New-Age Therapist 197
service to the needy. The higher self is perceived ever more directly and strongly until it becomes the most moving and meaningful experience of life: the source of all intuition, empathy and creativity.
(3) Self-Sacrifice: The higher self is selfless, motivated by higher moral impulses, compassion and love. As one is centered more deeply in selfless love, life becomes a service to others without desires for personal reward. This selfless sacrifice without need for personal gain in turn serves to more deeply break the shackles of the pleasure/pain principle.
(4) Self-Realization: Out of the sacrifice of the small self, which has been bound by the pleasure/pain principle, one realizes the self less, universal state of union with the divine.
SELF-CONFIDENCE & SELF-SATISFACTION
Many of us who enter the field of behavior sciences are searching for our real higher self, and our interest in our field can be seen as a spiritual quest. And in the course of our training and practice many of us feel a lack of wholeness and fullness in a field, which identifies man with just his body, emotions and mind. I summarized what I consider the strengths and limitations of psychoanalytic, gestalt and bioenergetic therapies in my first book, Sai Baba: The Holy Man and the Psychiatrist. I had come to an impasse. Even though investigating thoughts, feelings and emotions by way of these approaches led to a greater range and depth of emotional expression with others, I also experienced my aloneness more fully. They led me to the edge of ”the great void—the dark abyss” as the existentialists call it—and left me having to accept my limited, at times absurd, mortality as the ultimate reality.
And so the confusion and fear that we must face on the path to a new vision of higher self. Was my desire for transcendence of this bleak destiny a defense against fear of death? Most psychotherapists would answer yes. In The Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud concluded that religion was an illusion and that positing an omnipresent God was a defense against feelings of anxiety and helplessness.
So as therapists, if we seek transcendence we not only doubt our motives, we must also face the even more terrifying possibility of having to give up the basic assumptions upon which our life and profession rest. Fearing that if they break with convention they will