1 Why Trust this Guide?
Robert had to have a good laugh at himself as he looked again at his bookshelf. There, Robert could see on the book spines the rather-amusing titles of all the self-improvement journeys on which his natural curiosity had led him. Robert had taken those journeys out of intellectual interest. He had a natural appetite for new thoughts. But now, Robert’s amusement at the book titles reminded him that he had, somewhere along the road, taken a turn. Robert had realized that intellectual interest was not a sufficient way to live a life. The world held too many interests, of which Robert had tired. Robert wanted something more than amusement. He wanted life itself, not an imitation of life.
Self
How much or how little do you think about yourself? Of course, we are continuously aware of ourselves, including not just our physical and mental health and emotional condition but also our needs, desires, responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities. And that’s all well and good. Pay attention to those things closely, and live well. But beyond managing your moment-to-moment affairs, do you ever step back to see how well or poorly you are doing, not just in life with the outward things but instead with you, with yourself? The question isn’t exactly your mental health, which is a reasonable concern but one that lies only at the surface. Your mental health primarily involves your symptomatology, like whether you are thinking clearly and have a reasonably positive outlook and mood. You are surely aware enough of your mental health. The question here is instead with the development and maturation of your psychological and spiritual self. In the biggest possible picture, what is the state of your soul?
Psyche
Our psyche is the strangest apparition. The word psyche comes from the similar Greek word for the mind, spirit, or soul. We have within our physical bodies an animating entity, this psyche or consciousness. We acknowledge that our conscious self or soul is somehow associated with our anatomical brain. Yet we know that our psyche is much more than our physiology and even quite apart from our anatomy in the way that we experience consciousness. Our psyche gives organization and purpose to our bodies, not the other way around. Without our psyche, we would be brutes, livestock, for use by someone or something else. Our soul or psyche not only animates us but guides us this way and that, responding to whatever internal urgings and external demands its attention perceives. Indeed, the psyche deals only with those urgings, opportunities, and demands. The rest of the physiological work of living goes on without the mind’s involvement. The self deals only with the temptations, challenges, distractions, and delights. And that self, the psyche or soul, is the subject of this guide.
Spirit
You’ve already seen that we have several words for this animating entity, words like mind, soul, spirit, and psyche that we can use more or less interchangeably. The word mind we rightly associate more with our most-conscious, deliberate, surface-level thinking, as in I’m of a mind to take a nice walk today or I’ve made up my mind on the red corsage over the white one. The word soul has a somewhat different connotation, referring to something broader and deeper, as in he’s a kind old soul. The word spirit, though, has a special connotation. While spirit could just mean the sum of attitudes, character, and emotions, much like the way in which we think of the soul, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew all associate spirit with wind or, more precisely, breath. And of course, the breath to which spirit refers in the highest sense is the breath of the transcendent ideal, traditionally referred to and revealed as the Spirit of God. To be spiritual is to connect with, submit to, and integrate with the divine embodiment of the highest ideal. If that’s where you are, living as the human image of the transcendent ideal, then you don’t need a guide. But that’s the journey, isn’t it? And most of us have a very long way to go.
Guide
The journey into a Spirit-transformed new self must of necessity be a personal journey, indeed so intensely interior and personal that you may find it frankly hard to follow a guide. If your goal is to climb a mountain or to raft white waters, then by all means, retain and follow a skilled and experienced guide. But the path of transcendence isn’t a physical path, nor an outward journey. It is instead an inward and upward path, and only from there outward and down below. No guide can literally walk alongside. Instead, a spiritual or psychological guide can at most lay out the landscape, one hopes clearly enough for the lone traveler to navigate upward. Psychologists, therapists, and counselors make a profession of guiding their clients on interior paths, although they come from different schools, not always ones that recognize transcendence as a path and spiritual life as a reasonable goal. Pastors and priests take parishioners on spiritual journeys much more explicitly, although they typically do so more within traditional ways of expressing faith than ways that alert one to faith’s psychological dimensions, opportunities, and aspects.
Experience
Whether fortunately or unfortunately, I am neither a pastor nor a psychologist. I might write a better guide if I were both a pastor and psychologist. But then again, I might not. Formal education, of which I’ve had enough but not too much, has a way of trapping one within the field’s forms and constructs, when the path of transcendence is not bound by, and may not even be found through, fields and forms. I have great pastor friends and great psychologist friends. I’ve written several books with both those sets of friends. I have worked closely with both sets of friends in multiple professional roles and settings, while learning much from them and through them. My principal roles have been as a litigator of wrongful death, personal injury, divorce, and other lawsuits, as a lawyer forming and advising faith and nonprofit organizations, and as an educator, school dean, and school board president in schools from preschool to the professional school level. But my relevant experience has less to do with those external things and more to do with my own interior journey from enslavement by the world to freedom in the new birth and transcendence revealed and confirmed in the risen Christ. I have, in other words, zero authority to offer any guide other than what his Spirit inspires. Let your spirit be the judge.
Roadmap
Our journey together begins with some consideration of what the self is, this mysterious extension of the transcendent consciousness in which we live and move and have our being. It proceeds to the role of consciousness, nature of unconsciousness, and why we should overcome the latter to seek the former. Our journey then covers the territory of personal identity, these masks we wear as we engage one another. With that ground covered, we can examine how to know, diagnose, treat, heal, govern, protect, and express oneself. A useful journey would then address how to relate to and care for others, both within one’s family and in the broader community. The two concluding chapters look deeper into the nature of existence and the nature of being. Each chapter title should be clear enough to convey its broad subject, while the paragraph headings may help you maintain a focus on their major point. The guide has sufficient stops and even small detours along the way that you may find what you’re looking for in other subjects than those just mentioned. The guide attempts to make the journey progressive, one chapter building on another. But please forgive its plainly circuitous route. As a living transcendent entity, the self is not something one can address too mechanically.
Use
This guide is indeed not the same as assembly instructions. Consider reading it straight through, by all means. But pause and dwell wherever your spirit compels you. A long meditation on a single paragraph’s topic may be what your conscience needs to draw the point inward to where it can do its appointed work. Whenever your spirit whispers to you as you read, set aside the reading and listen. Whisper back in active imagination, having a dialogue with whatever or whoever is speaking to your spirit and conscience. Elaborate the topic you just read into something that connects with what you already know about yourself. But then extend that knowledge into its newer and higher realm. Take a transcendent stance, using your conscious mind to illuminate your own unconsciousness into a revelation of your transcendent self, the one through whom consciousness looks at the glory of creation. Take flight with each inspiration the Spirit gives you, heeding and holding onto the Spirit for your own revealing ride.
Obstacles
Let no one and nothing other than the Spirit’s own voice of reason, the words of our transcendent God, stand as an obstacle against your psychological and spiritual growth and maturation. The one place we are free is in the safe and holy spirit of transcendence. Our soul, mind, past, and future may all grip us, pulling us down from consciousness’s soaring flight and perfect freedom. But the grip of unconscious darkness is only an imagined grip. The Spirit of the transcendent one sets our deeper self free from everything that would keep us from him and from our eternal destiny. You face no obstacle but the darkness of your unconscious self, which awaits its illumination with a great transcendent light. May you see the light and welcome it into your mind and heart to do its work of carrying you aloft.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how free, full, whole, integrated, active, and resonant does your most inner self feel? Can you sense yourself, the one whom you have known since your earliest reflections, expressed in your thoughts, words, and actions? More so, can you sense a transcendent consciousness guiding your thoughts, words, and actions? Do you at least often feel your deliberate mind guiding your thoughts, words, and actions? Or are you most often completely out of control, guided only by impulses you don’t understand? Do you feel divided in your soul, if not at war with yourself then at least in frequent battles? If so, can you sense what the battles may be over, between what yearnings, plans, personalities, hopes, and directions? And are those battles enlivening you, giving you a creative energy from their tension, or are they instead depleting you, keeping you from moving forward on any perceived path? Have you from time to time found helpful psychological or spiritual guides? If so, how did they work well for you, for instance, as inspirations, models, confidantes, encouragers, or correctives? Do you have an active inner dialogue that you have engaged from time to time, not just a one-track mind but a mind open to listening to an inner voice and questioning yourself? Might you have had conversations with one whom you would consider to be the pure Spirit of the transcendent one?
Key Points
Your destiny is to free yourself of an unconscious darkness.
Your psyche organizes and directs your conscious activities.
Your spirit, the whole of your conscious reflection, is transcendent.
A spiritual guide can only speak into your soul, not direct it.
Education and experience are good, spiritual discernment better.
Begin with definition and structure before advancing to soul work.
Let this guide trigger your inner dialogue with the transcendent one.