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The Presence and Future of Spiritual Psychoterapy
I have been on the scene as a psychiatrist/psychotherapist for decades. Originally I was an inveterate psychoanalyst, as kosher as they come. I still believe in the science of psychoanalysis, for it allows one to see the resistances that hold us back from the natural ascension of our inner potential, goodness and soul. As the years have gone on, I have been much enriched by a study of Eastern literature, including Theosophy, Muktananda, Aurobindo and (from the West) Rudolph Steiner. I have been privileged to see a widening and expanding world that opens out from the top of the skull (the crown chakra) into a wonderful and ever-expanding realm of subtle energies — the world of the spirit. I have used a vision, a model, of how it works: In the beginning was/is God — God without ourselves and God within our center. When the All/Almighty decided to create, duality appeared. Then the unimaginably powerful vibrations descended through seven planes of decreasing intensity — much like mist descends into rain and then into ice as the vibrations become slower and lower in intensity. The All/Almighty is, I believe, Love/Consciousness, and inhabits all of Creation. Therefore God and Consciousness reside within everything, down to the mineral and the atom. In the midst of this descent there is (on the fourth plane) an intermediary — the Soul. Thus there is a difference between the Spirit and the Soul. The Spirit is God above and God within; the Soul is the delegate of the Spirit. The Soul is like a Janus-faced double radar dish receiving inspired messages from above and transmitting them below, to the physical mind. There is also transmission upward, from our lives and learning to the entities that live in the subtle realms — including angels and archangels. Since it is only through limitation that one can learn, it is understandable that we can transmit our learned teachings from this plane to the higher realms. Many things derive from this. One is the fact that we (our consciousness) are immortal. Another is that we are all connected, and we experience this on this earthly plane through ESP, transmission of healing energies, intuitions, predictions and pre-cognition. Following this model, we can also know that we (again, our consciousness, not our physical bodies) linger after death as we follow a continuing journey of ascension, incarnation after incarnation. This is the framework that I hold as I read further in the spiritual literature, and as I teach. It seems to serve well, and holds together consistently. There is an addition, however. To this descent we see that there is an evolution, a rising upward from the nadir of consciousness that exists within the material/mineral world, upward through plant, animal, human, high human and beyond and beyond. Keeping this in mind I would like to tell some stories, derived from my clinical practice. These are stories that illustrate the use and value of spiritual psychotherapy; call it super-psychotherapy, if you will. Whereas before, I was limited by the material-bound model of the mind — in which we can, at best, love well (another partner) and work well — here we have unlimited possibilities to help. Why? Because an unlimited potential resides within the patient, and an unlimited potential lives within us as therapists. All of this works toward Good, Union, Ascension. Here are two illustrations: I have a patient, a very successful businessman, whom I knew and treated when he was a child. He had come because of bed-wetting, but mostly because he had recently witnessed the immolation of his best friend, Kevin Sands. After some forty years, he looked me up again. We worked through several layers of defense. First, the protection of talking so rapidly that he couldn’t know what he was feeling. Second, the awareness that he was looking at me, with 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 his feelings abut his friend’s immolation. And so, after a long period of time, he learned to be quiet, reflective and inner. Today there 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” to validate that he is all right, that he is not responsible for that other child¹s death. But I couldn’t convey it to him right then. He continued to reflect and other things came out (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 with 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 the fire — but to my surprise and therefore in tribute to the higher wisdom of his higher self, he said, “It is/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 joining with his inner process on a higher level. I find myself in a Yogic state of silence at these times, in the High Self, and helping the patient to get there, too, joining with him — and this is, I believe, the essence of Spiritual Psychotherapy. The second is a lady of uncommon strength — one who carries the impossible burden of having lost two sons within two years of each other, both by tragic accidents: In a session, she had just come from a meeting which centered on a foundation to honor her children. It was very trying for her, and she felt drained at the end. I had been educating her, very gradually, about my beliefs in the immortality of our essential selves (not the body, but the inner “I”). I had also spoken about how we continue our journey after the death of the body, remaining in a temporary heaven until ready for the next journey — the next incarnation. At one point, and for whatever reason, I said, “I wish I and we could feel the reality of the stuff that I am learning and that I teach,” (referring to the wide spiritual realms that surround us and that are within us, including our immortality). She replied, “Did you say ‘I and we’?” I said, “Yes, that includes the me I make, little step by little step. But the more I learn about these wide regions of the mind and spirit, the more I teach about them, the more real they become to me. Your sons are alive, and you and I will live forever — not in our bodies but in our consciousness.” That does not deny the fact that while we are in the flesh we long for contact with the flesh. But the truth is that consciousness (not ordinary thought, but consciousness, which is a much wider energy-force) is creative. Consciousness is God. Consciousness is the part of us which is within God. And consciousness creates. One individual who agrees with me is Albert Einstein who said, “The more I go on, the more I come to believe that the universe is one great big thought.” I went on to say that even though we long to touch the flesh, we are, I believe, evolving, so that our bodies themselves will change into something more nearly semi-transparent, more like the dream body and the heart body. This new body will be able to move with much greater freedom, and function more and more as an energy-body and a heart-body. Therefore I do believe that your sons are alive. I do believe that you and I will live forever. She thought about this. She took it in. She could feel that it made sense to her. And thus both of us gained insight into this wide, wide spiritual world. Insight into the consciousness and love that we are — that grows slowly but progressively. Needless to say, when I was immersed in conventional psychoanalysis alone, I would not have been able to bring about this kind of understanding, this vision. I would not have been able to deliver this important kind of help. Both she and I are grateful for this enlarged understanding of how things are, and how they work “up there.” Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. 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. |
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