© 1991 Ann Bendall
© 1991 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
by Ann Bendall, Nambour, Qld.
Members of a group tend to share common assumptions, both because they attract like-minded people and because they provide powerful selective reinforcement for their preferred assumptions. Any questioning of these assumptions is usually discouraged, or at best, not supported. Assumptions therefore function as beliefs that determine what will enter awareness and what will remain unconscious, hence determining cultural reality.
Seeing through one’s cultural belief systems is extraordinarily difficult but may be helped by exposure to other cultures and beliefs. Transpersonal psychology represents a paradigm shift in Western psychology, resulting in part from exposure to cross cultural beliefs about the nature of consciousness and reality.
Psychology as a science is continuing to break the ties with its “father” Freud, a man who opted to link his theories with science, rather than philosophy and/or religion. Freud realized that the great legitimizer of his era was science, not religion, and therefore opted to create an elaborate pseudo science, which, because he stood as a consistent and determined minority, enabled psychoanalysis to be successfully legitimized as a real science. Many theorists have come and gone, attempting to swing the image of the individual from Freud’s fundamentalistic image of being fallen children of Eve (although Freud gave a delightfully secular reason for us all being so — heaven forbid that he would mention the old testament, despite the fact that his theories are based on its tenets) and the current 'perspective of psychology, which, in seeking to understand the domain known as consciousness, builds on Rogers belief that folks are innately good ( substantiated by research on the morals of children, who in their pre-school years put their parents to shame).
West turned to East to the various religions, ignored the religious content and examined the practices, and discovered an attitude to life and reality that bore a marked resemblance to physic’s quantum theory and the theory of relativity. And thus it appeared legitimate to research such practices which achieved “altered states of consciousness.” Transpersonal psychology, the new perspective, has been able to distinguish three levels of consciousness which we all have, whether utilized or not.
Viewed as a continuum they are:
At this level the thought of harming others makes no sense whatsoever. The Eastern philosophies believe that such thoughts are impossible. They can only be expressed as love and compassion.
All levels of consciousness shade into one another, and only appear independently real to one who is too fascinated to see through the illusion, who fails to appreciate that the world always remains indistinct from itself despite the appearance of dualisms such as life/death.
Transpersonal psychology has definite views on “mental health”, the capacity of the individual, and that various problems can be solved at their appropriate level of consciousness. However within the third — the “Mind” level — there is wisdom, which, if given the opportunity, will always emerge as an integrating, healing force that we can trust.
All great stuff to me, as a URANTIA Book student. My heart warms as I see science not only accepting the reality of God, but also discovering Him within. The transpersonal perspective makes very clear that it does not see itself as a substitute for traditional spiritual paths, but is confident that it might serve as a bridge to them, at the same time as providing a neutral meeting ground where practitioners of different self-knowledge disciplines could come together and work out common understandings of human development as a conscious process.
Therapy at the psychological level is viewed as providing the integration necessary to achieve synthesis at the spiritual level. Theorists also postulate that one must experience the basic elements of love, faith, trust, and hope at the human level before one can experience them with God. They therefore believe that therapy can contribute to spiritual goals by providing fundamental emotional experiences that the person can subsequently use in her/his spiritual experiences, and it may also clarify distortions of one’s relationship to God.