PSYCHOTHERAPIST, SPIRITUAL TEACHER, VERY DIFFERENT JOBS, VERY DIFFERENT METHODS, VERY DIFFERENT MORALITY

Freud defined the purpose of psychoanalysis was to transform suffering into ordinary human unhappiness. Later, object relations theorists spoke of developmental stages and internal mental objects that formed the nature of our relations with the world, and how therapists could act to clean up internal object messes and therefore help a person function better in the world. 

All other derivative therapies have followed suit: all aim to make the individual more functional in the world including family and love relationships, often by creating internal boundaries that separate our sense of self from that of the other. Instrumental to building boundaries, is the therapist maintaining “boundaries” of behaviors between himself and the patient to create good object boundaries in both, but especially the patient.

On the other hand a spiritual master of many of the Eastern traditions, and not merely a monk, nun, or garden variety swami, has a very different purpose and set of methods: if anything they are trying to deconstruct our conceptual, value, boundary, repression, separation mental and defense structures to allow for no boundary experiences and activities.  They want us to live in a world of now with no thoughts, no separation, no value judgments, decreased repression, increased relaxation, and intensely increased feeling and intuition.

The Bhaktic teacher is the epitome of no the no boundary approach, where he or she teaches love, devotion, and surrender of one’s self to another, or to God, or to the life force within so that boundaries, concepts, conventional or mundane life disappears, and one lives in “spirit,” or the literal realization that we are not our bodies, but the combination of sentience or awareness, with the manifesting energy of the life force, or “the power that knows the way.”

In such a view the process of individuation is left behind, concepts are left behind, moral judgments are left behind, and one loves one’s beloved single mindedly, totally, worshipping, and surrendered.  In that one-pointedness all the energies of the body and spirit are pointed to the beloved, whether God, a lover, or guru until there is an explosion, or numerous sequential explosions, where one reaches: unity consciousness, the experiences of the energies of the subtle body, recognizing one is really a witness to the unity consciousness and everything within, such as the world, people, and even the energies.

The Bhaktic guru has to break boundaries in the student which means he also has to break previous personhood boundaries that have kept the human devote locked into a mundane world of convention.

Yes, yes, I know what many moralists will say, and that this modality just unleashes the beasts in people.  Not so.  The devotee learns that only love and devotion are important, more important than one’s own self development, and that one pointed devotion reveals a completely different spiritual world as opposed to the mundane world of feudal and capitalistic conventions and societal order.

The divine lover is free of the desires and required activities of the mundane world. He or she rests in God, the divine energy within, in total love and peace feeling the world around him is fake, compared to the new world of love, of surrender, intense energies, bliss, and sexuality he or she feels now that their spiritual bodies are entirely awakened.

The mundane world of rent, possessions, obligations, depression, stress, moral outrage just disappears; the liberated one only lives with himself alone or with his beloved, whose heart, love, and energy states resonate and dance together.

This period of grace can last anywhere from three to ten years while Shakti develops within each, because the recognition grows that even the love, freedom, and energies he or she experience need to be transcended and realized as being not real, and they live then in the Void which has no attributes.  But, have come to the Void through the stage of devotion and surrender, when the Void state comes, it is filled with the deepest peace, the deepest rest possible, because all needs, all desires have either been fulfilled by their own love showing grace on each other, or they have been burned away by years of longing devotion.

Then one is in the stage of Ramana, Robert Adams, and Nisargadatta.