Welcome

to a map of psychological spirituality suitable
for modern times

The ideas on this site focus on the difficulties, crises and goals of spiritual development.

When a person treads the spiritual path, how can he/she know where he/she is on their journey? What landmarks are there that can tell them how far from or near to journey's end they are? Is he/she truly being guided by God, or is the soul doing most of the work?

Eastern traditions focus on landmarks of psychic development, as in the classical way of yoga meditation and contemplation (as expounded by Patanjali). However, what is needed for Westerners is a psychological classification of development. The difference is that psychic methods centre on mastering the mind, whilst psychological methods centre on mastering the emotions and feelings. In today's high-stress world, maturing one's emotional nature is more important than maturing the mental nature.

On this website I give my views on the psychological drama of spiritual growth.

I do not equate spirituality with religiosity.
A religious person can be spiritual, though a spiritual person does not have to be a religious one. I do not follow any religion. This has not prevented me from having many varied psychic and spiritual experiences, with a highlight of zen satori (but in mathematical form) in my early 20s.

The articles on this site are in nine sections.

The article on emotion has three parts to it, and features a basic model which allows me to define what an emotion is. Then I go on to describe the characteristics of emotions and how to identify them.

The article on abreaction has five parts to it. It features the role of anxiety, laws of the unconscious mind, and catharsis and suggestion. It explains the roles of resentment and bitterness, and the ways to resolve them using forgiveness and acceptance. The two abreactions that are featured here are those of guilt and pride. The abreactions of narcissism and jealousy are described in section 8.

These two articles can also be accessed from the introduction.

The introduction in section 1 gives an overview of each section.

Awareness

Stages

Psychological Metaphysics

Reincarnation

The Inward Life

Enlightenment

Causality or Karma

From the Old to the New

More Articles

References and Links

Note
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 and Booklist page for the address.

This site was put on the internet in Autumn 2002. It was off-line from late 2004 to March 2005, when it changed address. The old address was www.dawndreamer.co.uk. This site is now a sub-domain of my site for general philosophy, which is at www.modern-thinker.co.uk/

I am gradually updating the coding and the appearance of each article.

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.