Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 13 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, CCMHC, NCC, CPRP, MHRS is a practicing psychotherapist who has worked for years in the field of mental health and social services. His focus is on comparative religion and the intersection between culture, spirituality, and psychology. His works include Paths That Lead to the Same Summit: An Annotated Guide to World Spirituality (2020), Dismantling Freud: Fake Therapy and the Psychoanalytic Worldview (2020), and Behaviorism: The Quandary of a Psychology without a Soul (2017). He edited the issue on Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy for Studies in Comparative Religion (2013), and his articles have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals. He lives on the Central Cost of California. His email contact is samuelbendeck@yahoo. com. Man is in this world already in heaven or hell. – Jakob Böhme (quoted in Hartmann 1891, 292) Samsara, the transmigration of life, takes place in one’s own mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes: this is a mystery of Eternity. – Maitrī Upanishad 6:24 The manifestations of mind outnumber the / myriads of dust-motes / In the infinite rays of sunlight. – Milarepa (1977, 97) The whole world of existence is imagination within imagination. – Ibn ‘Arabī (quoted in Izutsu 1984, 7) 1 Introduction While modern Western psychology has, occasionally, acknowledged the importance of the transpersonal realm and other dimensions of reality, it nevertheless remains afflicted by a reductionist Weltanschauung that thwarts its clinical efficacy and treatment modalities. We are reminded that “the materialistic consensus which undergirds practically all of current mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed [note: and that] current mainstream opinion in psychology must change” (Kelly et al. 2010, xiii, xiv). By contrast, holistic psychologies rooted in the spiritual traditions have fuller access to the realm of consciousness – in the multiplicity of its forms – along with their corresponding epistemological modes. Across the world’s religions, “Mind” is the source of all things because it exists prior to the created order and pervades all of reality. The life of the mind is often taken for granted and when a thought enters it, without fully realizing its power, we can find ourselves propelled into very confused and dark spaces. The basis of a thought’s validity is seldom considered any more. The notion that because thoughts arise, they must somehow reflect reality, is very deceptive and can in most cases be totally false. If a thought has no foundation in what is real, then what is the point of occupying our minds with it? Yet, our ordinary minds are disconnected from their centers, such that what is higher within them is lost to the onslaught of mental “white noise” that we all generate.
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