To be or Not To Be Our Essential Selves, That Is The Question

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Testimony to the inherent buoyancy of the soul

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The following is an article written, but not published, before September 11, 2001. That cataclysmic event has made a change in the psychology of all of us. Hopefully it has begun an awakening. It is right and proper that we take another look at ourselves as we evaluate our present, our past and our future.

I have written on, and I practice, "Spiritual Psychotherapy." Such "psychotherapy," such growth and self-improvement, such self-inspection, can be practiced privately, every day of our lives, as we strive to improve both ourselves and the community of humankind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the nineteenth century Transcendentalists spoke a deep truth in releasing the essential self. There was Goethe who discovered the "beingness" of the plant, and extended that concept to understanding, seeing and fully appreciating the "beingness" of all things. This beingness is also something that the great humanists (A. H. Maslow) described, and all this beingness is the essential of one of God's creations. It is the latency, the potential, the "all-that-it-can-be" inside, that is recognized by the Self and by others. It is the loving inspection of a mother of a newborn infant, and the visioning of all that it can be.

This has tremendous implications, for if we will see the beingness, the potential, the latency, the God-given godliness that we are, then we will strive to release it. But the beingness can only be seen through authenticity, through a fierce and courageous willingness to self-inspect and other-inspect, and to dispense with superficialities with which we have been so well indoctrinated in our society. It is, as William Shakespeare wrote, "This above all else--to thine own self be true, for then it must follow as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." It is all of this truth, authenticity and integrity.

This is the beingness that we seek to find, recognize, authenticate when we engage in psychotherapy, for seeing it is to appreciate it, and to appreciate it is to strive to release it from the constrictions of superficiality.

On the other hand, we are seeing more and more otherness and superficiality in our society. Going to a movie, or watching television, we witness violence upon violence, explosion after explosion, hard sex after hard sex, a compulsion toward excitement. On the highway, the rush to get ahead of the other. In business, a merging to the disappearance of the human being within the industry. All of this rushing forward toward the surface in order to have more and more external excitement, more and more on the outer level, more and more in the way of superficiality, and relating to others through the skin rather than through the depth.

This is the age-old fight between the Prince of Darkness and the Prince of Light.

But we will achieve, and we will assist the Forces of Light, as we self-inspect, as we honor the integrity of the inner being, in ourselves and in others. As we strive to look deeper through silent contemplation and appreciation of others and ourselves. In this way we will find and live in the Supermind that we are within, that God has given us and that defines the divinity of our inner being.

To Be or Not To Be Our Essential Selves: That is the Question

Spiritual psychotherapy is dynamic psychotherapy. It is a collaborative effort between two people (or more) in which they join to explore the innermost depths of personality. Hovering over the scene is a faith and knowledge that a fearlessly courageous inner search will lead to expansion, lifting and elevation of the personality. This is testimony to the inherent buoyancy of the soul. The soul is different from the spirit. It is the delegate of the spirit, for the spirit is the direct portion of the God-Self. It is encased and encumbered by the learned acquisitions of our material society. Spiritual psychotherapy recognizes the vast energetic territory that surrounds the physical body, and its representative, the personality. Accordingly, this new psychotherapy goes far beyond the conventional, and wants to free the personality to soar and to live in the expanded planes of mind, all the way up to Supermind.

Notwithstanding the fact that we can do better if we have an "alter" to reflect back to us, a mirror and benevolent guide, I still believe that we are our own best psychotherapists. But we must adhere to the fierce honesty of introspection, and apply some of the well-known, well-taught principles of how our personalities function--often in obedience to hidden factors. Our best guide is always the inner "guru"--the intuitive center we hold, which "clicks" when truth is on the scene, and sounds a false alarm when it is not.

As an illustration of the process at work, here is an excerpt from my practice. A Course in Miracles says, "I [the therapist] will be healed, as I let Him teach me to heal."

I have a patient, 45 years old, whom I knew and treated when he was a six-year-old child, for two years. He had come, back then, because of bed-wetting, but mostly because he had recently witnessed the immolation of his best friend. After some forty years, he looked me up again.

We worked through several layers of the onion, as Freud would say. First the defense of talking so rapidly that he couldn't know what he was feeling. Secondly, the awareness that he was looking at me with his eyes glued on my every movement; through this he grew aware of how much he was worried about what I was thinking of him. This led to feelings of guilt, as if he were a fugitive. All this traced back, again, to the terrible death of his friend. And so, after a long period of time, he learned to be quiet, reflective and inner.

In one session we participated, together, in what was a signal event. With difficulty, he told me that he discovered that he does feel ambivalent toward me, angry. It hurts him to tell me that. He is the kind of person who is ruled by an excessive fear of hurting others. This holds back logical and helpful criticism. And then he said something which really caught my ear and that is that "I need you to validate me." Something about that brought me to attention. I stood at attention within myself, quiet, alert, waiting, receptive, surrendered, yet very expectant. What I suddenly realized was that I am uniquely important to him, "the last of the Mohicans," so to speak, to validate that he is all right, that he is not responsible for Kevin's death. But I couldn't convey it to him right then. He continued to reflect and other things came out, mostly (and I could say this because we were, as I told him, now soul to soul, two individuals, one soul, seeking, waiting, ready to receive, working on a higher plane.

He went into silence, felt he was floating on waves. I told him that this was real, that he was in a high place, a Witness place, a meditative place, contacting the high mind -- but we were both there, together, two souls waiting and working together. I helped him to understand that his pride, his fear of being wrong, his excessive shame, or propensity to shame, kept him from surrendering to this high place. He was surprised to find, through my questioning, that there was nothing wrong being wrong. And then, I asked him to trace back his feeling of shame that dominated him so, fully expecting that he would go back to his friend. To my surprise and therefore in tribute to the higher wisdom of his higher self, he said, "It was my mother, constantly criticizing me, making me feel wrong."

He left that session feeling enlightened and almost a little dazed by the power of the whole thing. But I was very enlightened by my inner process having joined with his inner process on a higher level. At these times I find myself in a Yogic state of silence, in my High Self, and helping him to get there, too—joining him--and this is, I believe, the essence of Spiritual Psychotherapy.

References:
The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann;
The Life of Emerson by Robert Richardson, PhD;
Toward a Psychology of Being by A. Maslow;
Goethean Science by R. Steiner.

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Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. is the author of Enter the Supermind, Visions From the Soul and co-author (with Patricia Joudry) of Twin Souls: A Guide to Finding Your True Spiritual Partner. Dr. Pressman is Emeritus Chairman of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University Health Sciences Center. He is Medical Director at the Center for Psychiatric Wellness, clinics that operate in Philadelphia and Haddonfield, N.J. These clinics bridge traditional and spiritual psychotherapy. Dr. Pressman can be reached at 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106; telephone: 215/922-0204; fax: 215/922-3008; email: mauriedavid@earthlink.net; website: www.mauriepressman.com.