Patterns of Spirituality

Clicking on a Section Heading will take you to the first article in that section.

Spirituality is not an easy option for anyone. The initial encounter with a source of spirituality may be joyful and exhilarating, but when the novelty wears off then the person finds that to continue with spirituality is hard work. The person finds that he cannot ignore, as he used to, the immature and inadequate aspects of his character. His problems become magnified. Issues and relationships that are manageable in ordinary life often become unmanageable when the person re-orientates himself to the spiritual practice of what he believes.

The main difficulty that he faces is that he has become more sensitive to the influences of his emotions and subconscious beliefs. These have a profound influence on the way that a person attempts to follow an ethical and spiritual direction in life.

Everyone experiences emotions, but few people can accurately identify them, except for some intense ones such as fear and anger. This inability to identify them results in a lack of self-awareness, and is a major source of self-deception and confusion in theories of human nature and spirituality.

Section 1  Awareness
is on the development of awareness concerning emotions and the beliefs associated with them. By learning to identify emotions the person takes the first step towards clearing his mind of confusion. Then I analyse the process of abreaction. This process is a group of four main sequences of emotions that invariably link together excitement with sorrow, and positive beliefs with negative ones. Abreaction mixes together morality with immorality, purity with degradation. It makes a mess of traditional ideas on ethics and responsibility.

Understanding the nature of emotion and the process of abreaction enables a person to begin to construct more skilful theories of consciousness and of ethics, and to handle better the problems of everyday life. This understanding has profound implications for all ideas on spirituality and the purpose of a human life.

The articles on emotion and abreaction can be accessed here as well as from the home page.

The three articles on emotion and the five articles on abreaction are all long articles. On my website World of Emotion, they are split up into much smaller page sizes in order to make them easier to read and digest. See Links page for the address.

Section 2  Stages
features the middle stages of spiritual evolution for a human being on planet Earth. The articles here focus on traditional problems. Many people believe that the acquisition of  Faith is the eventual goal of human endeavour, whereas it only signifies the beginning of the spiritual path. The article on Orientations features the goals of these stages. And the three articles on Conflict within Idealism are devoted to the difficulties and crises that each seeker has to confront and solve.

Section 3  Psychological Metaphysics
is a psychological view on metaphysics. Within the frameworks of Western and Eastern thought the natures of the ego and the mind are not adequately understood. Neither are the idealistic drives that propel the seeker on his search. I consider the question of whether or not the person has an essence (or a ‘human nature’) - the answer directly concerns the issue of reincarnation. Using my understanding of abreaction, I state what I call the first rule of spirituality, in Essence and Monad Theory.

Section 4  Reincarnation
begins with my view on the differences between ego, soul, and spirit. I explain why an ego is needed. Then I give a presentation of the aspects of reincarnation theory that are missing or out-moded in Indian thinking. I use psycho-dynamic theory to explain what is actually re-born on Earth. Reincarnation creates nihilism at the core of a person's being, and I analyse the effects that such distress causes.

Section 5  The Inward Life
contains ideas on spiritual progress using the psychological mechanisms of identification and self-absorption. The way of a spiritual teacher is examined in Dialectics and Human Evolution. In Utopian Idealism I analyse idealistic drives, and compare the two ideal types: the saint/mystic and the noble warrior/adventurer.

Section 6  Enlightenment
contains a completely new view of the highest stages of consciousness, being a comparison of states of enlightenment or ‘satori ’. The article on Satori relates my own experience of transient illumination (at the age of 22), and I use this event to assess the ideas of classical yoga, Buddha and Aurobindo.

Section 7  Causality or Karma
is a presentation of new ideas on karma, or human causation. It explains the difference between moral karma and psychological karma. It also explains why bad things happen to good people : this is usually due to the reversal of values that the subconscious mind produces.

Section 8  From the Old to the New
is an analysis of what distinguishes modern times from past spiritual traditions. The new feature of modern consciousness is the exploration of motivation, which came to the fore through the writings of some existentialist thinkers. Ideas on motivation mean that the age of Aquarius will be the age of identity.

In the article The Conversion Experience, I explain the other two forms of abreaction, those of narcissism and jealousy. These two abreactions can lead to a major change in a person’s system of beliefs: the old beliefs are swept away and new ones are upheld with conviction.

Existentialism and Human Evolution examines the reasons for the birth of existential philosophy and how it compares to the religious interpretation of life. Plus a look at why the Aquarian age is moving from faith to justice.

Section 9  More Articles
contains occasional new articles. The article Levels of Suffering describes how the levels of power, justice, and freedom each produces its own kind of sorrow. It introduces the concepts of validation, authenticity, and consolation.

The ideas presented here enable me to produce a better map
of the stages of spirituality than has been given by past thinkers.

Copyright © 2002 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.