The Psychology of Spirituality

An Introduction

Larry Culliford

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857004918
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Spirituality is increasingly accepted as integral to human psychology, vital for physical and mental health.

The Psychology of Spirituality is an accessible book that introduces the relationship between spirituality and psychology. The author sets out what spirituality is, the values it represents and how it can contribute to mental health and wellbeing. He then illustrates how knowledge of spirituality can provide a deeper understanding of people's problems and can help them develop resilience and aid recovery. With reference to a new holistic or 'psycho-spiritual' paradigm, the book then covers stages of spiritual development: from having natural spiritual awareness in early childhood to the waning of interest in later childhood; largely conforming to group mentality in adolescence before discovering individuality; and then the final journey towards full personal and emotional maturity. Finally, the author outlines practical advice on how to explore and make use of spirituality, covering a range of spiritual skills and practices, including meditation and contemplation. Each chapter includes case examples and exercises to explore the ideas covered.

This book will be compelling reading for psychologists, psychiatrists, chaplains, healthcare professionals, students, and anyone wanting to understand better the role of spirituality and psychology in the lives of all.

PART 1

THEMES AND VARIATIONS

‘What Goes Round Comes Around’

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

This introduction provides an overview, covering in brief much of what follows throughout the book. Each set of ideas will be developed in later chapters. It is not necessary for readers to grasp everything right away.

Wholeness

Spirituality is about wholeness. This point cannot be overemphasized. It is important to recognize the principle of an entirely seamless and interconnected reality that this entails.

To illustrate, from a spiritual perspective everything runs something like a Möbius strip that extends in every direction with no beginning and no end. It is easy to make such a strip and examine it. Take a 30 cm length of paper about 20 mm wide, blank on one side and dark or lined on the other. Half-twist the strip and connect the opposing ends, blank side to lined. This is your Möbius strip. Draw a pencil line along the centre, or simply run it between thumb and index finger. Where does it end?

We human beings, however, do not very often experience indivisible wholeness like this. Our lives much more commonly feel fragmented. We are used to disjunction, to beginnings and endings, birth and death, to ageing, the passing of seasons, of day and night, waking and sleeping, the discontinuity of turning our minds from this to this to this…to desires and aversions…to thoughts, feelings, perceptions of the senses and impulses to action…back and forth between experiences within the mind, within the body and ‘out there’, in the world…close by and at a distance…in the present, the past or the future…in plain consciousness, in twilight states, in dreams, in memory and imagination. We seldom experience our lives as seamless, or spiritual, at all. Nevertheless, when we do, ‘something happens’. It has meaning at a deeply personal level.

Spirituality links the deeply personal with the universal.

In everyday life, changes of focus occur either with gradual subtlety or suddenly, even with violence, as this or that intrudes abruptly into consciousness, demanding our attention. The seamlessness, the sense of linked order, is easily lost and forgotten. The psychology of spirituality in its purest essence involves recapturing an appreciation of wholeness, of indivisibility, and concerns reconciling this with the apparent disjunctions of material reality, of time and space. It is as much about attitude and about acquiring attentive skills as it is about gaining knowledge.

Discovery

The German chemist, August Kekulé, first described the six-member ring of carbon atoms, the benzene ring structure, in 1865. His immensely significant discovery was central to the understanding of organic chemistry, the chemistry of biological systems. He later said that the ring shape came to him after a daydream about a serpent that was curling into a circle to take its tail in its mouth.

After a period of meditation one day in 1980, it was similarly that the discovery concerning the circular interactions of human emotions came to me. Meditation, allowing the mind to settle down and focus upon itself, plays an important part in understanding the psychology of spirituality, and on this occasion seems to have produced a genuine moment of creativity.

As with the benzene ring structure, circularity emerged again as central to ideas concerning human reactions to threat and loss, but circularity with a difference, circularity plus. In this case circularity leads onwards to progression, to emotional healing and, at the same time, to personal growth. The circle develops into a kind of forward spiral. This was the essence of the discovery.

I had been working with a number of deeply distressed psychiatric patients. I felt certain that there would be some kind of logic to their painful feelings, if only I could fathom it out. That day I had been listening to a radio broadcast about the composer Schoenberg and his development of 12-tone musical composition. The principle, as I remember it, was that all 12 notes – including sharps and flats, the black as well as the white keys on the piano – must be used in each composition, but that introduction of the twelfth note should be delayed, bringing duration and perhaps tension to the piece, before its entry signalled completion of each section. The pattern (or a variation of it), concluding eventually with the same note from the musical palette of 12, could then be repeated to make up a kind of musical Möbius strip.

To appreciate 12-tone musical compositions therefore involves developing, more than usual, the ability to listen to a sequence as a whole, and to listen also for what is missing – until it finally appears. This can be difficult, and not everybody finds this type of music pleasing. Nevertheless, the idea sank into my mind and became constructively connected, during that brief meditation, with my thoughts about the emotions. I understood in a flash that emotional healing cannot take place unless the whole scale or spectrum is present or at least somehow represented in the experience of the sufferer. When the sequence is completed, (all the emotions in the scale having broken through a persons’s defences and been experienced in some way) it will be as if a dam has been breached. The painful energy is released and flows away, leaving peace. This is how circularity leads to progress. When a loss is fully accepted, and only then, something is completed and the process can move on.

One meaning of the word ‘perfection’ is linked to completion, to making something whole rather than flawless. This aspect of finding or reaching wholeness is what makes emotional healing a spiritual process. The resulting ‘psychological’ development equally implies growth of a ‘spiritual’ nature.

As the turning point is reached, the painful emotions do not disappear but are transformed by the ‘catharsis’, the release of energy, into their pain-free counterparts. That is why crying and laughter are important. They result directly from the release of energy that was previously invested in some form of emotional attachment.

As a result of the process, anxiety, for example, is transmuted into calm, and sadness into joy. The emotions can therefore be thought of as ‘bi-modal’, paired in such a way that when one aspect is present, the other is absent. (See Box 1.1, below.) The appropriate diagram is therefore not a single circle but a double one, as in the infinity symbol.¹ For example, you can feel guilty and blameless in sequence, but not both at the same time.

This process, and the basic set or spectrum of eight pairs of emotions, will be described in more detail later. For now, it is enough to say that, when the emotional healing process is complete, people are left with greater and lasting degrees of equanimity and emotional resilience, have more natural courage in the face of possible losses thereafter, are more engaged in the present moment, and are therefore able to live more spontaneously.

Less fearful for themselves, people in such a condition are also able to notice and share constructively in the suffering of others, bringing a measure of calm and hope to painful situations. Burdensome attachments are released as people grow increasingly mature. Progressively more content with the way things are, their horizons thus lifted and broadened, they start awakening to new truths about themselves and to new ‘spiritual’ values, discovering a new kinship with others, and intimacy with the natural world and the cosmos.

Box 1.1: Painful and pain-free emotions – the bi-modal set

Wanting – Contentment (both desire and aversion)

Bewilderment – Clarity

Anxiety – Calm

Doubt – Confidence

Anger – Acceptance

Shame – Worth (self-esteem)

Guilt – Innocence (purity)

Sadness – Happiness (joy)

Purpose in suffering

Purpose can therefore be discovered in suffering. For personal and spiritual growth to occur, adversity – and therefore at least some measure of emotional pain – is essential. In consequence, although it may seem sensible, time and energy spent trying to avoid distress and discomfort may only prolong or intensify painful experiences.

Many people need to revise their assumptions and re-educate themselves about this. The blessing though is that, as cuts, abrasions and bone fractures can mend, nature has also provided a mechanism for the healing of emotional wounds. Just as pain draws our attention to injury, and bleeding begins a healing process, so emotional pain signals something we need to attend to and sets off the process of repair.

We have learned to bring broken bones and cut flesh together with plaster casts and sutures, also to keep wounds clean and free of infection. Through knowledge of natural processes and the time required to heal, we have learned to plan ahead, to endure the necessary span of discomfort and disability with confidence and greater patience.

We have, in addition, discovered convalescent methods that help restore function and strength to wounded parts. Knowledge has thus allowed us to support nature in healing wounds. In the face of loss, by analogy, better knowledge about the process of emotional healing will permit improved wisdom to be brought to bear in helping people undergoing many forms of psychological trauma.

The discovery back in 1980, about a system of emotional interplay linked to healing and growth, significantly advanced my understanding in a way that has been of direct benefit in my work, and through that also, I hope, to my patients and colleagues. It seems natural to want to share what has been rewarding and helpful with others, but to do so has required much further investigation and thought, and has involved building on the ideas and research findings of many others.

Spiritual development

One of those pioneers was James Fowler who, in 1981, described six stages of faith development through the life cycle.² In order to build on Fowler’s ideas, it will be necessary to outline them and describe how he came to develop and validate them. To make them more accessible and easier to remember, they have been given simpler names.

Box 1.2: Renaming Fowler’s Stages of Faith

(Stage 0. Infancy and Undifferentiated Faith – Infancy)

Stage 1. Intuitive-Projective Faith – Egocentric Stage...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Themes and Variations ‘What Goes Round Comes Around’
• Part 2: Stages of Faith ‘Something Happens’
• Part 3: Remedies ‘Sowing Live Seeds and Doing Good Deeds’
• Appendix 1: Taking a Spiritual History
• Appendix 2: Further Reading
• Index