Spiritual Psychology: A Path to Our Transcendent Self

By Walter Kania Ph.D.

In today’s world there is a New Science and there is an Old Science. There is an Old Traditional form of Religion and there is a New form of Spirituality. There is Quantum Physics (the New Science), Epigenetics (the New Biology), an Old Psychology and a New Psychology (Spiritual or Transpersonal Psychology). Each of these New forms tell us of a world very different from that in which we have presumed to live. There are realms of reality and impacts on our genes, bodies, and behaviors never before understood. The messages that emerge in the Old and in the New are very different.
There is an Old Traditional Jesus that is tied to dogma, rules, rituals, notions of separation, and exoteric practices that neglect and distort the true message of Jesus. There is a New Jesus who is the Original Jesus that you find in his esoteric (inner) messages, like the Jesus you find in A Course In Miracles. This is a Jesus whose focus is on the heart and the psychology of human nature, the human mind, and on human behavior. His true message was on what is within, and it is one of transformation, and awakening to our Transcendent Self, our true inner nature.
People who have Spiritually Transformative Experiences discover that their bodies or their personalities are not who they are. They discover the essence of what it was that Jesus was teaching. Some of his teachings about our true inner nature or Transcendent Self include the following:
Our Source is a Loving Essence.
You are a powerful spiritual being living in a physical body.
You and your Consciousness are immortal and eternal.
There is a realm of reality beyond the material universe.
All that is visible comes from that which is invisible.
WALTER KANIA, Ph.D.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546271680

Walter Kania Ph.D.

Dr. Kania is a clinical and consulting Psychologisat. He holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University where he served as a University Pastor and Director of a United Campus Ministry. He also holds a three year graduate degree in theology from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. He has held faculty positions in the Department of Religion at Texas Christian University and in the Psychology departments of Bethany College, The Ohio State University, and Florida Gulf Coast University. He is ordained in the United Church of Christ (Congregational) and The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He is the author of “Healthy Religion,” “A Believable Bible,” “A Credible Christianity,” and “Spirituality Without Sin and Salvation.”

Book preview

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife Ann: life mate, soul mate, love of my life, inspiration, and intimate companion on the life-long journey and quest to deeper dimensions and higher consciousness, as we seek to celebrate the miracle of life and its mystery, and to see the world through Sacred Eyes.

It is also dedicated to my children, Regan, Lani, and Jill, their spouses, Cathy, Jeff, and Billy, and to my grandchildren, Jacob, Luke, Ethan, Adam, and Briana, all of whom are an unending source of joy, inspiration, and love!

SPIRITUAL

PSYCHOLOGY

A PATH TO OUR TRANSCENDENT SELF

Walter Kania, Ph.D.

A KEY TO A COURSE IN MIRACLES INSIGHTS

56197.png

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2018 Walter Kania, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/12/2019

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7166-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7167-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7168-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018914482

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1      INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2      PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NEED FOR A NEW PARADIGM FOR RELIGION

A New Paradigm

Shifting Paradigms

Unhealthy Religion

The Role Of Psychology

CHAPTER 3      THE OLD PARADIGM OF RELIGION

Traditional Christian Beliefs

The Old Time Religion

CHAPTER 4      THE DECLINE AND FALL OF OLD TIME RELIGION

The New Picture Of Religion

Surveys And Statistics

The Global Scale Of Irrelevance

The Jesus Seminar

CHAPTER 5      PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS IN RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

Psychology And Religion

View Of Human Nature

Self-Esteem

Dependency

Power, Control, And Authority

Psychology And Spirituality

Psychology, Spirituality, And Sacredness

Psychology And Unique Paths Of Spirituality

CHAPTER 6      HOW RELIGION USES AND AFFECTS THE BRAIN

CHAPTER 7      THE USE OF MIND CONTROL IN UNHEALTHY RELIGION

CHAPTER 8      UNDERSTANDING SPIRITUALITY

Search For A Definition

Defining Spirituality

A New American View

Separating Spirituality And Religion

CHAPTER 9      THE CASE FOR SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT SIN AND SALVATION*

CHAPTER 10    PSYCHOLOGY AND A POSITIVE PARADIGM OF SPIRITUALITY

The Impact Of Psychology

Human Nature

Humanism

CHAPTER 11    PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ESOTERIC JESUS

Psychology And Spiritual Sight

A Brief History Of Sin And Salvation

Life And Death

Beyond Sin And Salvation

Discarding Sin And Salvation

Sin And Salvation Be Gone – A New Jesus Enters

Jesus’ Teachings

The Humanist Jesus

Validation From Beyond

CHAPTER 12    RESCUING JESUS FROM DOGMATIC RELIGION

A New Spirituality

My Contentions

My Contentions Regarding Jesus And Christianity

Summary – A NEW SPIRITUALITY

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

According to the results of the Pew Research Center on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, by the Associated Press,¹ the number of Americans who don’t affiliate with a particular religion has grown to 56 million in recent years making the nones (a faith group of unaffiliated persons) the second largest faith group following evangelical Christians. Although 7 in 10 people in the U.S. identify with traditional Christianity, the number of Christians has declined as the segment of people with no religion has grown.

Between 2007 and 2014, Americans who described themselves as atheist, agnostic, or of no particular faith grew from 16% to nearly 23%. During that same period the number of Christians dropped from 78% to 71%. The number of evangelicals has dropped 1% in spite of the prominence of mega churches.

Could it be that people in the U.S. are not only becoming increasingly secular, but that they are weary of the old-time religion of Sin and Salvation and its failure to conform to the nature of the reality in which they now live? Could present day Americans be looking for a new paradigm for a faith experience? Could they indeed, be rejecting religion in preference for a path of spirituality? Could the knowledge of human behavior that is found in the field of psychology provide a new paradigm for the concept of human nature? Have we finally outgrown the imposed and concocted concept of original sin?

What does Psychology have to offer us in place of the negative and destructive views of humankind provided by religion? It offers us a new view of humanity and a positive view of human nature. It provides us with an unleashing of the enormous potential of the inner being, and an enlightened focus on human possibilities and levels of consciousness. What we know is that historical, traditional Christianity, and old-time religion in the U.S. has kept human potential and understanding stagnated and imprisoned in negative concepts.

The difference between the old paradigm of religion and the new paradigm of psychology and spirituality is this. Instead of: simply showing up in a location; singing a hymn; mouthing a dogma of belief; issuing prayers of supplication; humiliating who you are in deference to some amorphous creative agent; or saying prayers of adoration and worship to a sadistic entity in the Old Testament who in the New Testament requires blood sacrifice for having made you a mistake, you can now free yourself from such imposed and irrelevant institutional fabrication.

We know that it is important for people to identify with others, that we need and find comfort in relationships. We all thrive in a community of support, caring, and belonging. Such a group experience that is sometimes provided in a religion can address and meet a myriad of human needs. It can also create helpful and healthful ingredients to human life. But creating such a community does not require doctrine, dogma, negative beliefs about ones self, belief in a sadistic deity, or the subjection of one’s life to a national and ethnic deity that was created in the distant past.

The new paradigm of psychology and spirituality bypasses the negative and destructive elements of the ingredients of religion. The new paradigm celebrates the newborn and provides nurturance, love, and caring to facilitate the growth of positive self-esteem. This new paradigm acknowledges and can validate that most personal, relationship, and social problems stem from one’s profound sense of unworthiness, inadequacy, or damaged feelings of self-worth. This new paradigm in psychology and spirituality has a focus on one’s need to know and understand who they are. In the new paradigm one’s life journey is an inner journey. It is a journey of: learning to love ones self; feel good about who they are; and realize the connectedness of who we are; learning how our welfare is connected to the essence of who others are; and how our welfare is caught up in the welfare of others.

Harvey Cox in the interview Age of Spirit with Nathan Schneider said, People want to have access to the sacred without going through institutional and doctrinal scaffolding. They want a more direct experience of God and Spirit.² Diana Butler Bass in her book Christianity without Religion said, Traditional religion seems to be either intelligence on ice or, ignorance on fire!³

In the book The Perennial Wisdom by Aldous Huxley,⁴ the author states that:

1. There is an invisible, infinite intelligence.

2. That infinite intelligence is a part of who we are.

3. The purpose of every life is the discovery of that infinite essence, by whatever name we call it – Soul, Consciousness, the Holy, God, Higher Self, Collective Consciousness.

This would appear to be a basic statement concerning the nature of Spirituality. Dr. Eben Alexander,⁵ the neurosurgeon who had a phenomenal and mind-bending Near Death Experience speaks of Spirituality as a premise that humanity and all creation are composed not only of matter and energy, but of something immaterial, something invisible, something much grander and therefore something that transcends our present knowledge and understanding. He goes on to say that spirituality is about trying to understand an aspect of reality beyond that which we can perceive with our senses.

In order to proceed with intelligence in understanding the nature of Spirituality it would seem important to establish a historic truth. The nature of that truth is clear. That truth is that either the state or the church (religion) represents a struggle between two dominating parties who have sought power and control over individual behavior and the nature of the society that they sought to create. For the state to have power and control it resorts to force, police power, or military might. Lacking that resource the church (religion) resorts to creative imagination. It simply asserts that its power and authority arises from revelation and is therefore divine. It does this, of course, simply by decree and without evidence. The church (religion) makes primary use of psychological forces called fear, shame, and guilt. It insists on conformity of belief combined with the threat of eternal damnation.

Spiritual masters, mystics, and avatars like Buddha, Jesus, and the Dalai Lama, use neither the forces of the military, laws of the state, or the manipulations of fear, guilt, or shame. They call on the highest source in humanity called the Higher Self, or the Divine Within to relate to the most effective dimensions and dynamics of human behavior. It is called unconditional love, and compassion. In their scenarios there is no need for concepts and beliefs such as sin and salvation. Neither guilty actions, nor saving behaviors are needed in the presence of unconditional love. Spiritual masters, mystics, and avatars look to what is internal rather than to that which is external.

• What if the only thing from which you need to be saved is negative, destructive thoughts and beliefs about yourself and others?

• What if feeling good about who you are and liking yourself were the key to happiness and a positive society?

• What if your religion entrapped you in a system that actually interfered with your spiritual growth?

• What if the Source of all life and existence wants nothing of you except to have you learn and grow, and to enjoy the experience of life and living?

• What if spiritually had nothing to do with religion?

• What if your religion made use of fear to cause you to cling to its beliefs?

• What if there were no deity out there whose main job was to catch you doing things wrong and was eager to punish you for eternity if necessary?

• What if all of those fearful and negative things you were taught about divinity were mere nonsense and total fabrications?

• What if your religion was actually leading you to believe things that are not true?

• What if you had really been created whole and pure?

• What if the process of creating your physical body through sexual intercourse were a divinely ordained and biologically sanctioned process?

• What if the concepts of sin and salvation were nothing more than religious concepts designed by historic religious leaders to explain and control your beliefs and behaviors?

• What if your religion caused you to think of yourself as being less than wonderful?

• What if loving yourself was the most important attitude about yourself that you could hold?

• What if you were already a part of the Source from which all things come?

Anyone who is familiar with the history of religion, current biblical scholarship, or the genuine history of the Christian faith already knows that the Christian story is not a new story. The only people who seem not to know this fact of history are those who fraudulently promote or follow, and/or are misled by the fraudulent, uninformed, or un-evolved leadership of the traditional Christian religion.

To suggest that a Jewish person of the past from a small middle eastern tribe that demeaned gentiles is the only certified and critical vehicle or representative of a multifaceted mega-verse and its divine creator, smacks of the ultimate of arrogance, ignorance, or naivete’. And yet that is the exact status and theology of today’s cultural religion in the United States. (Christianity)

That religion (Christianity) begins with a written account of creation by a sadistic, punitive warrior god that appears to evolve as one reads on. Yet this divinity retains a remarkable desire for revenge, punishment, destruction, separation, and judgment. The worship of this divinity involves an entity with an enormous ego problem. It (the religion) has a deity with no power over or insight into its own behavior. The deity of this religion creates a creature in its own image (clearly a faulty and defective image according to the negative tradition). After the creature emerges from the creative process the creature is found to be defective. Rather than take responsibility for the creation of this defective product this deity blames the product for being defective.

Does this scenario begin to strike you as something not only absurd but also unbelievable? Check the statistics of church membership in the U.S. You will find an unbelievable percentage of Americans who follow this distorted logic.

As a psychologist, I know that psychology professors in the U.S. are the least religious of all university professors in the U.S.⁶ My own spiritual practice does include following: some of the universal teachings of the past avatars; the perennial philosophy that one may find in the Jesus story; and the practices of unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, and justice. My own spiritual practice does NOT include the negative baggage of sin, salvation, and blood sacrifice.

Spirituality has nothing to do with the practice of religion and it contains no ingredients of the theology of sin, salvation, and blood sacrifice. What we need is a new paradigm, a new way of seeing our journey in this world. It is not a journey of religion as lived in the U.S. today by a majority of people. It is a psycho-spiritual journey that honors the true meaning of religion in its finest and healthiest sense.

In the words of the mythologist, Joseph Campbell,⁷ the journey of the Hero is the task of slaying the dragon. The journey transforms the traveler (the Hero). The Hero slays the dragon, the monster of the status quo, and discovers a new perspective that is freeing, life-giving, and life-affirming. The new Hero of today is the Spiritual Intellect, the Modern day insights of Psychology, Quantum Physics, and the creation of a new paradigm for life and death.

Taking one’s journey is a way for the Hero to move out of the wasteland. What is the wasteland? The wasteland is all of the ailments of mankind. It includes the bondage that is provided by unhealthy religion. It is also the illnesses, diseases, depressions, losses, failures, negativities, meaningless pursuits, and addictions that run rampant in our culture.

Religion in today’s times harbors what is honored as divine truths that emerged in early times of the past. These presumed truths that were revealed in some magical way lack relevance or understanding in the midst of today’s world. What we need is not only a new paradigm but also a new journey to uncover truths in today’s world.

My book Spirituality Beyond Sin and Salvation, Psychology and The New Paradigm for Religion is a logical and necessary continuation and follow-up to my three previous books:

Healthy Religion

A Believable Bible

A Credible Christianity

All of these books are a combination of the latest secular and biblical research and the latest psychological research and insight of scholars. For some in traditional religion these books challenge their feelings of security, and are seen as an attack on their faith and religious practices. Such a response saddens me.

Everyone in life, with or without their awareness, is on a psychological and spiritual journey of mental and emotional development that normally coincides with their physical development. Everyone is also on a journey of spiritual evolution regarding the mysteries of life and the mysteries of the universe. In the scenario we call life we have many opportunities, challenges, experiences, and even confusions. Everyone seeks to make sense of life in some way. We often look outside of ourselves for answers. Religions are waiting with open arms to offer theirs, take you under their wings, and have you accept their answers and propositions without questions.

Everyone goes through the processes that call us to grow beyond where we are, but what often happens is that because of the answers of religion that we choose, we stagnate at some particular point of growth and evolution. If we stagnate in our journey we will experience a hardening and cementing at that place where our growth has stopped. Life is a journey and it is important to understand the road signs, the intersections, the stop lights, and the forks in the road that we encounter. Each of them call for us to make a decision. We must acknowledge their presence or suffer consequences of the action that we take. They can lock us in the place where we have stopped, or they can propel us forward into new dimensions of being.

It is helpful if we are able to see the reality of the various stages we go through in our journey of life. Whatever it is that we think and believe is the story that we are living out. The nature of this story we are living simply identifies the particular stage of our journey we are experiencing. To interpret any stage in which we find ourselves as a final stage or episode is a developmental and interpretive error. Stagnation is equivalent to a diagnosis of the developmental disease of the walking dead and an eventual literal death. We are like a water system. Any water system that fails to continue to flow eventually dries up and dies. (The Dead Sea has no outlet. All flow has stopped!)

Religion contains the possibility for either the disaster of stagnation and developmental disease and death, or for the power and potential of transformation, life at higher levels of consciousness, and spiritual evolution, wholeness, and connectedness.

People who subscribe to the traditional, ancient Christian notions of religion in the U. S. are normally and substantially good citizens, who are warm-hearted, caring, friendly, community-minded, and peace-loving people. Without realizing it, however, they may be caught up in an old and stagnated mythological paradigm of religion that no longer serves them in their developmental, psycho/spiritual journey. It no longer serves them and their community in the world of today. It may have served the world of yesterday. Although as comfortable and familiar as the old paradigm feels, it is no longer consistent with present day realities. It simply honors our parents and predecessors, and is now a meaningless tradition of the past.

These old tribal traditions are irrelevant to life in a pluralist culture and a multi-faceted world to which we are not yet accustomed. The dynamic messages of those paradigms of religions of the past may bring us some notions of truth that may have a universal ring to them, but they are clothed in a garb and language that no longer makes rational, intellectual, or emotional and spiritual sense. Staying parked in the world of the old-time religion, the serene and peaceful world of Mayberry RFD, may feel comfortable and secure because it is familiar and simple, but it is a world that we must realize no longer exists.

What we need is a new and positive paradigm of religion in our present age. My efforts are not designed to destroy positive religion, spiritual practices, experiences of faith, communities of caring, or personal practices and beliefs that empower and honor humanity. My efforts are simply to help ground them all on the bedrock of the truths of our world that have been uncovered and are available to us in our present day lives.

A new paradigm does not necessarily destroy the old paradigm. It simply builds on the past and enables us to move on to a higher level of consciousness. We can view the old-time religion as a booster rocket that propels us into a new world of experiences and consciousness as it did our astronauts who saw a new vision of earth as they moved above and beyond it.

There are ways and methods used by the old-time religion and paradigms of the past that are designed to keep us parked on the launching pad. This book will help us to disengage the tether that keeps us and the rocket of our life bound to the launching pad of our spiritual journey. It will free us to indeed soar to the literal as well as the metaphorical heavens of our universe.

Sin, Salvation, and blood sacrifice, and the psychological methods of mind and emotional control used by old-time religion are the tethers the must be cut to free us, and enable us to launch our spiritual journey!

PREFACE

According to an ancient Cherokee legend there was a young boy who was enamored by the rituals of his tribe. He was particularly impressed by and admired the drummers of his tribe. His father knew of his love of the drums. On an important occasion the young boy’s father gave him a gift of a beautiful, new, decorated drum. The new drum brought the young boy great joy, and he felt a new sense of identity with his new drum. He was ecstatic when he received it, and eagerly showed his new possession to his best friend. The best friend, impressed by the new drum, asked if he could play with the drum. But the young boy was in no mood to share