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I regard myself as a highly "spiritual" person. However my personal and professional experience reluctantly forces me to view spirituality from a naturalistic perspective. This means that I entertain no primary assumption that there is a conscious prime mover either in the background and/or the foreground of our earthly sojourns.
It would be considerably easier for me if I could simply give in and let go luxuriating in the comfort of a compassionate certainty. This certainty would make it unnecessary for me to keep pondering such 'big' questions such as where did we come from, what are we doing here, where are we really going after we die? If there is consciousness after we give up the physical body then we really aren't really dead, are we? And if we persist in consciousness then we just continue on in some other form so there is really no need to be concerned about what happens after we "die" which means we better pay exclusive attention to what we are doing in between having been born and our so called dying. No?
But either because of some combination of genes, education, etc. it is not in my nature not to question all primary first ontological and epistemological assumptions concerning the nature of reality and the aquisition of knowledge.
Yet, although, not a 'true believer' (absolutely rejecting 'blind' faith in conventional definitions of faith - as more often than not - a thinly veiled rational for failure to accept final responsibility for one's choices {projected authority}; I, nevertheless, am a true believer in what I refer to as a 'grounded' faith or a grounded spirituality. This is a long winded way of saying that for me spirituality need not be in any way associated with a deity.
This view of a naturalistic spirituality necessitates a reformulation of such core spiritual terms as faith, transformation, and transcendence. In this connection, the following is an abstract of a paper I recently wrote called Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Spirituality.
ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic psychotherapists report a notable increase of patients seeking help with “spiritual” material, particularly among those patients who identify themselves as non believers. The spiritual dimension challenges therapists to clarify their thinking about issues associated with spirituality. Among these issues is a need to identify, operationally define, and reexamine core “spiritual” concepts in the context of theoretical and practical psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Spirituality is associated with ultimate purposes, absolutes, meaningful connectedness, significant psychological change (transformation) and transcendence. Once identified the next question is how best to intervene.
Research indicates that intervention concerning spiritual material is governed by conscious and unconscious factors. The most important of these is the therapist’s awareness {or lack of awareness} of his/her attitudes to spirituality which determine the meaning(s) the spiritual dimension has for a given therapist. These meanings are derived from the therapist’s implicit and/or explicit ontological and epistemological first assumptions. One such agnostic patient’s seemingly transparent spiritual dream, wherein he is “saved” by Jesus, is the impetus for this paper.
My aim is to integrate “spirituality” into mainstream psychoanalytic psychotherapy by locating the origin of spiritual concerns – faith, trust, hope, love, and persistence [all primary motivators] in pre oedipal consciousness relating them to the origins and vicissitudes of the development of the self structure.
Alternative views of spirituality are discussed highlighting transference and countertransference implications. Suggestions are made for redefining the core concepts of transformation, and transcendence from the perspective of a naturalistic ‘grounded’ spirituality. Thus transformation focuses on the whole self reconciling psychological splits in the state of being; whereas transcendence focuses on the self’s struggling with struggle towards actualizing that which one desires to become.
Spirituality is concluded to be the activation and consciousness of one’s unique creative process directing it to the attainment of cherished pursuits.
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