Psychology and Spirituality

What is psychological work? What is spiritual work? How are they related? Are they ever in conflict?

Psychology is about fixing issues of content

Spiritual work is about understanding issues of process

They’re highly interrelated things, but, at the fundamental level, spirituality is a deeper process than psychological work. And, in real honesty, a lot of spiritual work is done via psychology. And I hate the term “spiritual” work, but whatever, it’s about realising the fundamental processes that drive this whole thing called “life” and “experience” or “phenomena” (so many terms, pick your favourite).

Content means we’re looking at certain issues and why they’re important. This assumes the experience of these issues is fundamental, and the issues themselves as experience have keys to understanding them, which is another experience. But, fundamentally, psychology aims to look at a problem and, roughly put, understand and then fix it. That’s it.

Process means we’re looking at how things work. The deep bits n’ pieces that work to create our experience. We don’t assume anything is really fundamental to the thing. And so we work to understand the thing from as many angles as possible (the 3Cs, Jhanas, fruitions, paths, POI, etc…). Assuming there’s an end-point, lmao, there’s no more to the experience than the experience itself. A full appreciation of the process, as it is. The so-called collection of experiences (AKA: attainments) is really just the appreciation of the process, the directness of it, from various angles. Obviously, this reduces suffering, because appreciating the process means we don’t fall into the trap. Understanding experience as it is, rather than how we’d like it to be is very freeing.

The reason why when we do spiritual work we uncover psychological bullcrap is that because in looking at the process, the content itself first needs to be digested. Because process assumes that experiences are nothing more than things to be directly experienced, the content itself needs to be experienced. And that’s painful. Reliving the day your dog dies to fully appreciate the process of how that memory creates mind/body traces of sadness/depression/grief/guilt/etc., is tough. That’s why you have phenomena like the dark night, etc. And also the reason why Jhana is so groovy. Knowing the experience and how it works, its traps, etc., lets you navigate it to the good stuff.

Are they ever in conflict? Probably not, if you’re doing either one or both together right. One hand washes the other, both hands wash the face, y’know? If they are in conflict, it’s usually some form of defence mechanism being activated, an unconscious conflict going on (non-experienced content impacting consciousness), or some other cognitive bias going on (self-preservation is a big one). Defence mechanisms are tough because they’re conditioned responses to protect ourselves — we want to be safe. And that’s the fundamental ignorance of it all, you ignore all these maladapted but fundamentally compassionate things about yourself, but these very protection mechanisms fuel your discontent, and with more discontent arises the greater need for more protection from its unpleasantness. So, in learning how experience works, you unravel all these entangled webs trying to protect you. And that makes you sad too, because you realise all of these habits formed to protect you without knowing why or how they were actually doing it — a Faustian bargain, of sorts. Or, like that children’s poem about the lady who swallowed a fly. You’re meditating, and realising you swallowed an emotional crocodile to deal with what was initially a dust particle! Damn, you really were a mess! But it was with love that some part of you got you to swallow the crocodile, so you forgive it, and keep going on.

Also, who cares about the Pali Canon? I mean, it’s great. But when I talk about meditation, it’s about the best technology to understand an issue pertaining to your experiential reality and its contribution to your experience of suffering. It’s like Martial Arts purists, they’re great, but as recent times have shown, Mixed Martial Arts kinda blows any one single martial art out of the water. It’s not even close. Because having a larger arsenal of tools at your disposal to understand your fundamental construction of reality is better than only constraining yourself to one tool. Also, textual adherence is nice, but when someone says “I had X Y Z question about my experience in my meditation practice” and someone quotes the Pali Canon or any text to rebut their experience, downplay it, or otherwise fit it into a box, it’s gonna be met with some negative reinforcement from me. But, if the Pali Canon can be used to empower our experiences, has good tools to understand the thing, helps, etc., then I’m all for it. But about 60% of the time it’s used to disempower or pigeonhole people; unproductive!

Yeah, psychology is rapidly evolving. Thankfully, psychology, in trying to hang with the cool kids (biology) and tries to be scientific, so it doesn’t hold onto dogmatic bullcrap as much (although they have their dogma, such as Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy worship). Not that CBT is bad, but it’s not the only game in town. And it’s a massive coping strategy because any therapy is only effective as far as the therapist-client relationship is good; doesn’t matter which type of therapy you whip out. If they don’t trust you, they’re not gonna fix it. Which circles back to the direct experience thing and compassion thing. If you can’t love another human being despite their flaws via understanding those very same coping/defence mechanisms in yourself, then I don’t think your therapy is going to be as good as others who can. This goes for any type of psychological disorder. I won’t rant about psychiatry, because I think everyone already hates them — despite the fact that they’re well-intentioned dorks with very little social skills trying to excel in a field that requires intimate emotional contact with others. Medicines are their coping strategy. Again, nobody will take your medicine unless they trust you, and no, your fancy degree and institutional credo won’t make ‘em like you.

I think, eventually some dork (maybe me, I’m trying) will write something about process vs content in psychotherapeutic environments and meditation to try and bridge the gap, by getting psychologists on board with helping clients understand the fundamental construction of their reality. However, meditation also does offer up some deep and uncomfortable existential truths that 95% of humanity hate hearing about. Imagine how bad our economy would get if people realised that their happiness boils down to a fundamental ignorance of a choice to become attached/aversive to certain stimuli. Oh boy.

This is all my 2c as a psych in training and humble meditation teacher. My meditation practice has helped me more in my psychology practice than the other way around. Again, because process is deeper than content. But there have been times where psychology work has helped the spiritual, but it’s rarer.