The spiritual life must obviously take psychology into account; if
we want to do good and know truth, we will have to understand what
in us supports this intent, and what stands in the way of it. But
after Jungian Psychology, Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal
Psychology, and Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, the reader may
wonder what remains to be said vis-a-vis psychology and the
Spiritual Path. In the author's opinion, what remains is to present
a psychology rooted in traditional metaphysics, one that he has
termed "Principial Psychology." This psychology is not essentially
new; elements of it are to be found in every traditional path; but
it has rarely been so explicitly defined. Principial Psychology
does have certain affinities with Transpersonal Psychology, and
with Integral Psychology as well; all three emphasize the
attainment of self-transcendence. The difference is that
Transpersonal and Integral Psychology draw various elements from
the faith traditions, while Principial Psychology requires that we
actually follow one of them. Principial Psychology is based on the
premise that the different "faculties" of the psyche that the
Scholastic psychologists studied-thought, feeling, will, memory,
imagination-as well as the various "archetypes" that Jung
discovered but didn't entirely understand, identifiable in some
ways with the levels of the human psychospiritual makeup in Sufi
doctrine-are psychic reflections of timeless spiritual or
metaphysical principles that exist in a world beyond the psychic
dimension entirely. In terms of the human microcosm, these
principles are the loom upon which the psyche is woven, and the
body as well; in terms of the macrocosm, they are the eternal
designs that underlie, and guide, the greater universe of which we
are a part. From the point-of-view of this science, the whole
spectrum of mental illnesses and psychological "complexes" can be
seen as based on various wrong or inverted relationships between
the faculties of the psyche-imbalances that are produced by, and
further reinforce, the misperception and veiling of the archetypal
Principles by the tyrannical and deluded ego. Principial Psychology
recognizes the goal of human development not simply as the healing
of mental illness or a balanced adjustment to social norms, but as
the attainment of a state of "ideal normalcy" based on a complete
conformation of the psyche to the principles from which it
springs-in other words, on the "salvation of the soul." Just as
mental health is inseparable from moral development, so
self-knowledge is impossible without self-transcendence.
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