The Psychology of the Mystic ...

“One of the elders used to say: In the beginning when we got together 

we used to talk about something that was good for our souls, 

and we went up and up, and ascended even to heaven. 

But now we get together and spend our time in criticizing everything, 

and we drag one another down into the abyss.”    

                                                           - Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, LXI, p.78

The Psychology of the Mystic …

I was clearing out the piles of papers in my office for a good part of the day today. My new book is published!! It is titled: The Inward Outlook, and my job now as an “author”, is to continue conversations with the website design team to get the website for the book up and running and satisfactory to my rather particular aesthetic senses. (The design team may have another way of expressing that last sentence…). So promoting and publicizing is the name of the game for a while! Not my forte - but on a learning curve to cultivate it as a strong suit … Heh! WRITING the book is just the beginning!

In any case, clearing out the office is a prerequisite for me to be able to sit and think and create freely, so … that was the task this morning. In doing so, I came across a paper I had written in 1994, while still in graduate school. Twenty years ago! Yikes!!  I had printed out that paper for another reason a couple of weeks ago, (lest you think it’s been 20 years since I cleaned my office), and it peaked my interest to re-read it.

What caught my attention, however, was the alignment of the paper with my newly printed book. I again was reminded of the hours and hours of work that goes into any of our endeavors, even though the creation of the form may have been very recent. Any richness comes from the years of tempering, any patina from the softening born of wisdom.

I thought I would share a paragraph of this paper titled: “The Psychology of the Mystic”. And I shamelessly say, if you like this following little snippet of the paper, you may really like the new book!

“’The person who has not courageously confronted the basic unreality of conventional structures... can never sincerely love the Real or long intensely for the Real, much less become Reality. ...Why? Because of divisive thinking - basically, the sense that there is [Source] plus some order of existence other than [Source]. This illusory category – “something or someone other than [Source]” - is what now receives the majority of your attention ... Give up this dualistic thinking, this hypocrisy!’      

                                                                                                            -Ramakrishna  (from Great Swan, by Lex Hixon, p. 171)

What is psychology, or, even more appropriate - integrative psychology? Who - or what - is the therapist? What role does spiritual cultivation and evolution play in the expression of psychology? What is the psychology of the mystic?

The word ‘integrate’ comes from the Latin integrarus: ‘to form into a whole; unite; to end the segregation of and bring into common and equal membership’. ‘Psyche’ comes from the Greek psyche; ‘breath; principle of life; soul’. ‘-Logia; -logy’ means ‘the study of’. Therefore we could say that Integrative Psychology is: The study, teaching and practice of understanding the unity of breath, soul, and principle.

Is this not the way of the mystic? ... “

And could this not describe any one of us listening for health, well-being, and peace of mind? A therapist, spiritual practitioner, business person, teen, parent – you and me - the true mystic is the most ordinary and practical person you will meet. S(he) simply longs for and listens from Source.

The Silence

THE SILENCE

“… All healing transmutation takes place in the Silence. Through the practice of quieting the thinking process, we can turn our attention away from the cacophony of incessant thinking that passes through and practice listening to the quietness, listening to and for the Silence; there is a sound to It.

Listen for the profundity of the Silence. It has a resonance; It has a frequency. Listen until you hear It, as It is equally-everywhere-present and always available. We look at each other through It. Cultivate an affinity with the Source, with the Silence. It is the only ballast that we can depend on, and It requires no guru outside of yourself.

The Silence is the Guru, and It lives eternally through each of us, waiting to receive our attention so that It can find expression uniquely as us, every individual. All hopes are possible manifestations through cultivating this affinity with the Silence.

 “Never tell anyone they can’t do something, for God may have been waiting centuries for someone who didn’t know that.”

~ The Reverend Kathryn Jarvis

There is an evolutionary benefit to cultivating a state of mind that is permeated with a deep and unflappable sense of knowing that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there is hopefulness and an inherent order which moves toward positive change. Such knowing augments a life, no matter what the conditions. As an individual cultivates this stance, this intimacy with the Silence, there is a resonance of hopeful certainty which permeates his/her presence and is felt by others, elevating the mood however subtly.

© 2014 From: THE INWARD OUTLOOK ™ by Laura Basha, PhD

THE INWARD OUTLOOK

“It is possible for people to see what has been obscured from their awareness.

It is possible to step from the invisible to the visible.

We are so afraid that we cannot be what we dream ourselves to be,

That we stay hidden inside of a persona that we ourselves created for our survival.

Bring the invisible to light so that you can begin to see your own beauty and claim your wholeness and your true voice.

When what has been obscured is illuminated, you remember who you truly are.

The result is an inherently synchronized person inspired to learn and grow,

Who is infused with the vitality of self-actualization.

Such self perception cannot be overestimated in terms of its capacity to produce positive extraordinary results.”

~ Laura Basha, Ph.D.

Please do check out my newly published first book: "The Inward Outlook"!

And many many thanks to all who have supported me, both literally and figuratively, through this last year of writing, editing, and publishing!

I hope you enjoy! xoxo

http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000760068/The-Inward-Outlook.aspx

Theo

THE SIXTH SENSE

"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. 

There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by the feeling for the 

order lying behind the appearance."

~ Albert Einstein

So I was going to put a gorgeous photo of the sunrise up on the blog for this month, as here in northern California we do have an abundance of them, and they are always an inspiration. But I wanted to make more accessible and pragmatic and obvious the seemingly intangible topic of this blog: Intuition.

Last weekend my husband and I took a class on “Communicating with Your Animals”. We have two Tibetan terriers that we adore, and often feel that they are trying to tell us something … sometimes we seem to catch on, sometimes they walk away from us, generously loving us yet crestfallen as they tolerate our dullard sensibilities. The class basically pointed to the fact that animals communicate through the faculty of intuition, which we could translate into words that make sense to us. We just need to practice listening to them through our intuitive faculty, and validating whatever we “hear” through the translation that occurs to us as our own thoughts.

Hence scratching the sunrise and posting the photo of Theo, a master of the sixth sense; our Sixth Sense Sensei.

We talk about our 5 senses, but there are really 7 - The 6^th one being Intuition. Like, no kidding, we all have access to Intuition as easily as we have access to touch or hearing or seeing with the physical eyes. We just don’t think about it that literally, so we don’t pay attention to it, so we don’t develop an affinity with it like we do, say, with touch. Scorch your hand once on that burner and you know that touching it again will produce a real and similar result.

Intuition is a realm of communication, a very real sense available to us, which requires that we stop listening to our familiar daily thinking, and quiet down what occurs to us as logical, enough to hear the sixth sense of insight.

What if we practiced our intuition with as much attention and pragmatism as we attend to the sense of touch?

I have a friend who made 40 cupcakes for her son’s school party, which was happening on the next day, and she left them out on the counter overnight to pack up in the morning. She woke up in the middle of the night and had a “sense” that she should go check on them. Now the real accomplishment here is that she actually LISTENED to this prompting and GOT UP to check on them!!

When she got to the kitchen to check on the cupcakes, she saw a line of ants heading straight for them! She moved the cupcakes just in time to rescue them for the morning!

Silly you say? Well, that’s the thing – notice how much we invalidate the sixth sense of intuition. We would not invalidate a burn from the stove. What if we took the “feeling” about something as being just as valid and tangible as being scorched by the flame?

Hmmm … I think will go ask Theo ….