The Way of an Idealist 2

When we are confused about spirituality we will fail to appreciate the value of materialism. When I began my spiritual journey in this life, I was attracted to asceticism. Now, after having studied the subconscious mind for over 30 years, I have abandoned most of my asceticism and replaced it with a psychological approach to life. I have let go my hatred of the world, and so there is little to empower asceticism in me. Materialism has a place in a person’s life, so long as materialistic desires do not govern him or her. When materialism is handled harmoniously, then it does not warp the person’s unfolding spirituality.

From my mid-40s onwards I gradually became immersed in psycho-analytical psychology. I travelled alone on a journey, which was a journey into my mind. This has led me to a different understanding of spiritual conflict than that taught within the various spiritual traditions. The seeker in his aloneness is forced to develop a higher level of idealism than that normally required, in order to surmount the conflicts that he experiences. The seeker who separates himself from tradition has to make his own attempt to understand spiritual reality. He has to find his own mental sign-posts and landmarks as he travels on his interior journey – the journey that is within his confused mind. Sometimes he is influenced by his higher self, and then he has to interpret this influence. My higher self never used words in its contacts with me – it used either symbolic dreams or else emotional indicators, usually by juxtaposing negative emotions to some of my major beliefs that it disapproved of. My higher self was the source of much distress to me, as I came to terms with my limitations. In my interior journey, I had to learn compassion, empathy and detachment.

I accept that there are three global or overall levels to the spiritual life. I represent part of my present understanding in the concept of the three stages or three goals.

Three Goals

Within a perspective of a spiritual ethics there are three main levels or stages of confusion, which refer to ideas on humanity, higher self, and God. These levels give rise to three radically different conceptions of spiritual reality. In order of progression these conceptions orientate the person to three desirable goals.

a). The Attainment of Faith
For the believer, God is personalised and needs to be perfect. Only a personalised and perfect God will reward the seeker. Transference and determinism are the main distorting factors here – God is the ideal father figure or ideal mother figure.

b). The Attainment of pure Love
Now God needs to be good. Only a good God will love the seeker. Pure love is divine love. Now asceticism is the main distorting factor.

c). The Attainment of Equanimity
A more realistic idea of God is accepted. God is beyond perfection, goodness and personality. The seeker attempts either to control his will by means of his intellectual understanding, or else uses a deep sense of compassion as the primary means of controlling emotion.

The average seeker focuses on God or a deified teacher as the object of his ideals, and attributes his results to one or the other. But this is not always accurate. There is an intermediary between person and God, and this is the higher self. It is the person’s higher self that is responsible for many of the inspiring (and also distressing) effects of the spiritual life. Therefore it is necessary to re-classify these three attainments in order to clarify what is actually happening with them. Once confusion is removed, then they appear in a different light. In the evolution of each person, over many lifetimes, there are three levels of relationships, each of which produces a distinctive orientation towards reality (or the person’s conception of reality).

d). The First Level is that of his relationship to other people and to his own idealised ego
Relationships dominate this level and this is the reason that God is conceived to be the ideal parent figure. From this level emerges his understanding of faith.
The spiritual influences acting on him, which he attributes to God, actually come from spirit guides, guardian angels, and sometimes his higher self.

e). The Second Level is the relationship to his own higher self
From this level emerges his understanding of divine love.

f ). Finally The Third Level is the relationship to God
From this level emerges his understanding of equanimity and balance.

The understanding that the person attains may be an intellectual one, in that he can explain the truth of his experiences. Or the understanding may be an intuitive one, in which case the person feels the truth of his experiences without being able to explain them. The intuitive understanding means either that the person does not have the intellectual ability to understand them, or that the intellectual vocabulary of ideas is not adequate to explain them. As time goes by and the intellectual vocabulary of ideas expands, then mankind will slowly increase its ability to intellectually understand high spirituality.

Everything in the material world is evolving, and I consider that this applies to each person equally so. This issue has implications for the focus of one’s spiritual effort. If a seeker denies any value to evolution, then the only way to ascribe meaning to his life is to desire to return to the original, primeval state of Being. Then the focus of spiritual effort is on a return journey back to the higher self (the higher self is considered to remain perpetually in its original state and not to be changing or undergoing evolution). The religious person is always looking backwards, metaphorically speaking. As usual with most metaphysical theories, there is some truth in it, mixed with a lot of confusion. I fail to see why a person should have an ego at all, if this perspective is fundamentally correct; what is there for the higher self to learn from the ego’s experiences of Earth life?

I believe that there is no state of originality that the person can return to. So my focus is on the forward journey, to where mankind is going.

Three Journeys

In traditional views of spirituality, the seeker begins his spiritual journey in a state of confusion and uncertainty. He is not sure of the truth of whatever knowledge he has already acquired, and does not know what the goal of his journey is. He travels from one teacher to another, hears different versions of the meaning of life, and realises that reality is interpreted differently by different traditions. He may find that different teachers have achieved different measures of spiritual “success”, but who is there to tell him how to evaluate and compare these achievements?

In the majority of cases the seeker eventually bonds to a teacher and a tradition that offers help for his own particular psychological problems. This usually happens when the seeker forms an emotional attachment to the teacher (or, if the teacher is no longer living, to a traditional portrayal of him). The emotional attachment generates psychological support for the seeker, which is what he needs.

As I understand it, this spiritual journey has three separate stages, or levels, to it. These stages are represented by the dominance of faith, love, and equanimity respectively.

The first stage represents the journey to faith.
This journey is the usual realm of religion, and it is as far as religions can go, since faith is the achievement of the ego (aided by the higher self ), and is often a product of communal and social striving.

The second stage represents the journey to mystical love.
This is often called the soul-search, because the seeker has to make contact with his own higher self. This contact is solely the work of the higher self, since nothing that the ego can do can speed up the process. The seeker, although he does not know it, is searching for love, and the love that is sought is given from his higher self. The attainment of this level is sometimes called an “awakening”.

The third stage is the journey to equanimity, which is the journey to God.
The attainment of this level is the state of enlightenment. This journey seems to begin when the higher self switches off the love to the seeker. If the higher self maintained its love to the seeker, then that person’s evolution would cease, since he/she would be under no pressure to continue it. Hence the magic state of divine love evaporates sooner or later, in order to force the seeker onward towards God.

Each of these three stages is likely to follow the same pattern of effect. The initial awe of attainment generates excitement and enthusiasm. The excitement leads to intense abreaction, so that after the excitement exhausts itself the seeker may seem to fall into the depths of despair. Eventually a more mature and steady state of mind is developed. Enthusiasm and seriousness are always the beginnings of any spiritual stage, and sobriety and calmness are the end results of it.

The Spiritual Inquiry

The spiritual journey, whether focused on ego, higher self, or God, is sometimes accompanied by another journey – the inquiry into some aspect of reality. These are quite separate journeys or quests.

The Spiritual Journey
This focuses on the experience of emotion and desire. During this journey, the seeker may have to plough his way through sorrows, rejections, punishments, degradations and disappointments of all kinds. If he is successful, he finds happiness and contentment, bliss and love.

The Spiritual Inquiry
This focuses on the mind and explores aspects of truth. The seeker tries to remove confusion and self-deception from his mind, and to surmount the glamour of power. The objective of this inquiry is to know oneself.

This is an ideal separation of the two journeys. In actuality, the inquiry is hindered and limited by subconscious prejudices, emotional needs, and lack of interest in intellectual development of the mind. These limitations are often the result of the distress that the seeker experiences: it is nearly always more important to resolve emotional distress than to seek intellectual understanding. Ideally, to follow an inquiry, the seeker has to step aside from pain, sorrow, and happiness, and this is not always possible.

g). You only find that which you search for
For example, if you only search for faith, then you only find faith, and not love or equanimity.

h). You only understand that which you study
Or, you only get answers to questions that you ask. Obviously this applies to the material life, in that each person has to study in order to understand anything that interests him or to attain professional qualifications for his job. However, it also applies to the spiritual life. Very few seekers ever study spirituality in depth, and so they are rarely able to understand, let alone explain, their personal experiences. They have to resort to traditional explanations, which are not always accurate and may in fact be very misleading.

The usual explanation for not being able to understand aspects of the spiritual world is to say that spirituality is “ineffable”. The main reason why traditional explanations may be misleading is that past theorists had little or no understanding of the subconscious mind, and so could not make sense of its influences.

A person may find that his tradition downplays the importance of study and intellectual effort, as in Buddhism and Christianity. As the bible says: “seek first the kingdom of God and all else will be added to you”. This view is only partly true. What will really happen is that the person will see the big intuitive picture of reality, but he will not understand how it works unless he has previously studied it.

Purpose

In the spiritual journey there are three levels to traverse, those of ego, higher self, and God. What is the primary purpose of each level? In my view, it is that of causing a re-orientation of the seeker.

The person of little interest in spiritual affairs is orientated towards a materialistic life. The production of faith re-orientates the person towards the spiritual life, but he is still ego-centred. The process of “awakening” re-orientates the person to the higher self; and the process of enlightenment re-orientates the person to God. What the person believes has happened to him is not very important – it is the effect on his character that is important. This is why the beliefs propagated by any religion are neither better nor worse than the beliefs of any other religion. In general, his new beliefs should lead to some better standards of morality than he had before the re-orientation.

In my view, the first two levels involve only the higher self, so God is rarely involved. The person attributes to God what the higher self facilitates. Usually God is only involved when enlightenment is on offer to the seeker.

The first level focuses on faith. The person re-orientates his beliefs about reality.
In effect, he creates a new model of reality. This level is the ego level. This re-orientation of belief is all that faith achieves. Everything else that the person feels, such as joy, happiness, enthusiasm, etc, is not derived from faith, but from projecting his psychological needs and desires upon a new model of reality. The new model allows him to express all his emotions and attitudes that he thinks are part of the good life, but which he was not able to express in his old model of reality. Faith gives him the psychological strength to live his beliefs in a hostile world.

The second level focuses on love. The person re-orientates his attitudes about reality.
Once more, a new model of reality is created, by upgrading the model generated by faith. This is the level of the higher self , and the higher self bathes the person in contentment and love. This level is that of an “awakening” and represents the goal of the soul-search. The happiness and enthusiasm that are felt are not derived from love but from the new model of reality, as happened previously with faith. Love, considered in itself, has no connotation of happiness – the happiness is contributed by the person’s own consciousness.

The third level focuses on detachment and equanimity. The person re-orientates his motivation.
The difficulty here is that it is the subconscious motivation that has to change. This level is that of God and enlightenment. If the subconscious motivation changes rapidly, in the space of a few seconds or less, then enlightenment is rapid. If it takes weeks or months to change the subconscious motivation, then enlightenment will be slow in taking effect and only be fully attained when the change is completed. Enlightenment is either fast or slow. Either way, the eventual outcome should be equanimity.

At each level there are grades of achievement, depending on how permanent and stable each achievement is. Some attainments seem to be permanent, whilst others are transitory, lasting perhaps only a few weeks. I use a simple classification of seekers into beginners, mature seekers and advanced seekers. The basis of classification is how easy or hard life is felt to be. Beginners often find the new life of faith to be joyous and enthusiastic, especially if they are part of a religious congregation. Mature seekers often find that it can be quite difficult to practise their spiritual ethics in the outside world. For advanced seekers, life can be extremely hard and difficult ( hence the almost universal desire to stay in solitude, or only relate to other spiritual seekers). Part of the reason for the increasing level of difficulty is that the person’s degree of sensitivity also increases with each attainment: hence he or she is affected more than before by the problems and sorrows of social life.

In religious and New Age literature there is often a great deal of confusion between the levels of higher-self attainment and God attainment. I have read biographical accounts where the seeker has thought that he/she had attained an enlightenment experience, but which, in my view, was only an experience of the higher self. It can be very difficult to know whether a high spiritual experience is the result of higher-self activity or God activity on the seeker.

[¹]. For a description of transference, see my article Transference on my book Living in Times of Change.
To understand determinism,see my article Determinism in the same book. [1]

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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