The Quest For Who We Are: Modern Psychology and the Sacred

In-store location: Shelf 4.8

By Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, Fons Vitae Publishing, 183 Pages

“The state of optimal personality growth, regardless of time, place, and the degree of culture, shares the same characteristics. All people have adopted the same goal of experiencing final integration, and moreover, the methods they use are similar. The name makes no difference; it is the experience which is the same. Under this assumption, the concepts of East and West … vanish and have no validity in the mature state.” – A. Reza Arasteh

This book comprises four chapters as follows:

Chapter 1: In Search of the True Self addresses the confusion found in modern Western psychology today, and its failure to discern that we have a fundamental identity that is grounded in the transcendent. Mental health treatment these days fails to differentiate our ‘true self’ from an empirical ego or personality that has been severed from its spiritual roots. In the absence of a sacred orientation, how can the modern discipline provide enduring therapies and effective healing?

Chapter 2: Recovering the Eye of the Heart explores the necessity of restoring an innate spiritual faculty in us that is capable of a true apprehension of reality in all its depth—a compelling metaphysical vision that rejects the pernicious Cartesian bifurcation, which modern Western psychology has, in large part, adopted unwittingly. Due to the eclipse of this transpersonal way of knowing reality, we struggle to get to the heart of what mental health is, let alone diagnose or successfully treat maladies of the spirit.

Chapter 3: The Metaphysics of Human Diversity argues that modern Western psychology has adopted a ‘horizontal’ understanding of “self” and “other”; in other words, that it is devoid of a ‘vertical’ or transcendent dimension, without which the True Self will continue to elude the crippled methodology of contemporary psycho therapies.

Chapter 4: The Divided Self and Our Fractured Ecology delves into the precarious situation that prevails on this planet. It points out modern Western psychology’s inability to properly address the ecological crisis because of its desacralized and reductionistic outlook, which has severed our intimate connection to life in all of its rich panoply (corporeal, psychic, and spiritual). By turning to a “science of the soul” — found in each of the world’s great wisdom traditions — we can restore the sacred dimension that is critical to a healthy equilibrium between the self and its environment.